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

clamped tightly on the brim of his hat, holding it down firmly—not really to protect it from gusts, one might have thought, but as if, freed of the pressure of his hat, his head might explode—his steps quick and heavy, stamping out small lives, his short, stubby pipe or sometimes cigarette sending up smoke-clouds, flags of his own mortality, in quick, white puffs. His hair was unkempt and red, as his father’s had been and as his son’s was yet, his own now ominously graying in tight iron curls at the temples and neck. He walked faster and faster, his shadow stretching and shrinking under streetlamps, until he thought he might have a heart attack; and then at last the fit would pass.

He found his well-being, if one could call it that, increasingly dependent on these late-night walks. Not that even his walks were exactly carefree. Sometimes large dogs would come out at him; or the hulking silhouettes of teen-aged boys, gathered on some porch, would suddenly fall silent as he passed. He’d taken to carrying a heavy walking-stick he’d picked up at one of Binghamton’s innumerable antique stores. It was intended only for self-defense—or less than self-defense, mere symbolic protection—though it had also aesthetic and social functions useful to Mickelsson just now. It was an article from the age of well-made objects, the age when possessions were adornments of a life presumed-until-proven-otherwise to be noble and worthwhile. That presumption had, for Mickelsson, lost force, though it was, when one came right down to it, the whole basis of his ethical theory, every word he’d written through all those ruinous years. Lately he’d come to be increasingly cynical, increasingly impressed by accident: chance virtue, chance wickedness, at best the magpie gatherings of emotivism. He’d paid too little attention to deep-down meanness—the right wing shaking its Jesus-loving, eager-to-kill, fat fists over “the horror of abortion”—all those hundreds of thousands of poor dead babies—the left wing sweating with pious indignation over all those poor dead mothers. “Atheists! Antichrists!” one side screamed. “Motherfuckers! Assholes! Baptist shit-heads!” the other screamed back. A noble debate. He did not doubt that human beings had the equipment to make relatively unbestial choices, but he doubted more and more that they would ever get around to it or that, in the final analysis, it mattered. If Life had become for him less the grand thing he’d once supposed it, the so-called Life of the Mind—of which he’d once written so glowingly—now fared even worse with him, seemed to him, in fact, a joke. Mind. God help us! The country was gearing up to make its stupendous intellectual choice between Reagan and Carter, or possibly Ted Kennedy. The newspapers had long since moved their tear-jerker stories of starving Cambodians back to page 22, making room for new horrors. Mainly Iran and the hostages. (Every gas station had its picture of Uncle Sam looking stern, however futilely, and its emptily ferocious legend “Let my people go!”) Carter became thinner of voice every day, Reagan—in his dyed hair and make-up—more jokey. In such a world Mickelsson’s walking-stick, with its smooth, dark, glowing wood, silver-tipped, and its heavy silver handle in the shape of the head of a lioness, was comforting, a steadying force; or so he would tell himself, holding the cane to the light, admiring it one more time, up in his kitchen, or swinging it jauntily, firmly grasping the head as he walked dark streets, his broad hat cocked.

One night, passing down a narrow, shabby, poorly lit street where he’d seldom walked before—dull houses, each with its enclosed or open or long-ago-screened-in, full-width porch, its light over the door (turned off by this hour), its one large or two small windows, its rusty porch-glider, fridge, potted plants—Mickelsson suddenly froze in his tracks, the hair on the back of his neck rising. Right in front of him on the sidewalk, barring his path, stood a large, pitchdark chunk of shadow—a dog, he realized after an instant: a black Doberman, or perhaps a Great Dane. It simply stood there, head level with Mickelsson’s waist, not growling but firmly blocking passage. Seconds fell away. Mickelsson could see no one to call to, no movement anywhere, though from somewhere not far off came the tinny noise of a TV.

Now the dog did begin to growl: a low, uncertain rumble. Carefully, making no sudden movements, Mickelsson shifted the cane to both hands and raised it like a bat. And then, an instant before he knew he would do it, quick as a snake, he brought down the cane with all his might, aiming for the animal’s head. To his surprise—then horror—the dog did not leap back with the predictable lightning quickness of its kind, nor did it, as Mickelsson had expected, lunge forward to bite him. It simply went down the way cows had gone down at slaughtering time, when his father hit them between the horns with the eight-pound maul. Perhaps the dog was old, half blind, half deaf. In any case, down it went, almost without a sound—no snarl, just the crack of the canehead striking home, then the huff of escaping breath as the body struck the sidewalk. Mickelsson stared, the TV’s rootless harmonics suddenly loud in his ears. It was too dark to see well, but he sensed, if he did not see, the death tremor. He turned left and right, looking around in alarm at the nearby porches and windows. Miraculously, no one seemed to have witnessed the thing. He moved the tip of the cane toward the animal, thinking of poking it to make sure it was dead, but then resisted the impulse. He raised the cane, thinking of hurling it away into the shrubbery, but again changed his mind, imagining the dog leaping up at him as soon as he was weaponless. He looked around one last time—still no one—then tucked the cane under his arm and fled.

Back in his apartment, with the door bolted, Mickelsson cleaned