Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

up until suddenly, before you were quite aware of why, you were seized, sniffing your glass, by an urge to retch. He would get to the reservoir eventually—replace the old pipes, put an iron mesh on the overflow. For now it would do. With luck, he thought … and let the thought trail off. He’d managed this much; had risen out of his despair and bought a house. He would manage the rest. What the doctor brought about by faith—the smiling expectation that made mountains tip their cloud-hats and move—Mickelsson would manage by will.

“I beg your pahrdon?” the doctor said, smiling.

“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing.” He felt his cheeks redden.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to interrupt!” She laughed. “I talk to myself all the time. It helps you keep your mind on things, don’t you think so?”

When she’d put the reservoir lid back on—lifting it easily with mannish strength, Mickelsson doing almost nothing to help, bending down just an instant too late and grabbing with only one hand at the slimy edge, ineffectually, standing off balance—the doctor said, “Keep an eye out for rattlesnakes when you come up here. They won’t bother you, as a rule. But I always like to see them first.” She laughed again. Her face was round and bright.

He glanced at her eyes to see if there were any trace of irony behind the laughter. There was not. She was smiling sociably now, gazing over at a burned place on the hillside, as matter-of-fact as when she’d told him the sump pump would have to be replaced. (He noticed now two more gray patches where the grass had been burnt off, maybe the work of ordinary fire, maybe that of lime or acid—perhaps something to do with killing woodchucks or discouraging some troublesome weed.) Standing level with him on the mountain’s slope, the doctor was taller than he was by several inches. She stood with her arms folded, her fingers on the soft flesh just above the red, wrinkled elbows. Her hair and eyes were full of sunlight. He looked around at the tall grass, the sun-filled creepers and lacy ferns, the trunks of ash trees, maples, oaks, and one very large old cherry tree, dead, above the reservoir clearing. How one was supposed to see a snake in all this he had no idea, but that too he let pass.

“Yes,” he said, and turned to look out across the valley. He would never get over it that he’d stumbled onto such a view—in fact owned it, St. Augustine and his ilk to the contrary: the Susquehanna River wandering grandly, at royal leisure, toward the dark, decayed town out of sight around the bend; beyond the river more mountains, dark green, then blue; in the sky, two hawks. It was all like a richly glazed Romantic painting, luminous and wonderfully old, invaded here and there by shadows and—ah yes—snakes. He’d been told several times now that Susquehanna was famous for rattlesnakes. If August was dry, they came down off the mountain onto the streets of the town, heading for the river. The people simply stepped aside for them, it was said, though some of the snakes could be six feet long. He’d been no more frightened than were the people of the town (if the stories were true), though those who’d told him had intended him to be. Except in zoos, Mickelsson had never seen a rattlesnake. The idea that they were here, all around him in the woods, was interesting, faintly disquieting, nothing more. But no, that was not quite right, he corrected himself. He was pleased that there were snakes. He’d looked at a house, about a month ago, in a town called Jackson, a few miles south of Susquehanna, where a day or two earlier two large trees beside the road had been torn out by the roots by a twister. It was that, he’d realized when he thought about it, that had led him to consider buying the place. He knew the theory—Nietzsche, Sorel, Karl Jaspers when he spoke of “the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath“—that the human spirit comes alive in the proximity of danger, or perhaps one might better say, with Sartre, the presence of temptation—the temptation to sink back into Nature: bestiality and death. No doubt there was truth in it. If so, rattlesnakes were better than twisters: they were always there, steady-hearted, dependable; unlike wind, they had a certain dim intelligence or, to be precise, had almost no intelligence but were nonetheless alive: struck out from their cover of lacy ferns with murderous volition and no thought of the future. This much was sure: the snakes, like the hexes on the barns, were “something.” The fact of their existence, their indifferently deadly otherness, brought on a shudder of consciousness, a spasm of sharp awareness that one was alive. (Fancy talk; he’d readily admit it. Nevertheless, he was pleased that there were rattlesnakes.)

The doctor had turned just after he did to look out across the valley. She stood for a moment, her arms still folded, as if lost in thought, basking in the view—gazing at the railroad far in the distance, the famous stone viaduct built, according to the sign he’d seen beside the road, in 1847—then bent her head as if making some decision, and started down the path. She sang out, not turning, “The first time I saw one, I thought I’d have a stroke!” As she said it, she made a gesture with her right hand: fist clenched, knuckles forward, she moved her arm out slowly to the right of her, so exactly like a snake that his heart skipped.

“Scary things,” he said, probably too softly for her to hear. Mickelsson drew his pipe out and patted his pockets for matches, then, finding none—he’d left them, along with his hat, in the car—followed her carefully down the slippery shale path, trying to think what more he ought to ask her. Nothing came to him.

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