Read Online Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner - Free Book Online Page A

curtains, hospital-style drapes …) He would make changes, a number of them, but none of that especially occupied his mind as he walked through the house with Tim and the large, light-voiced woman, Dr. Bauer, the owner. She was pale and even taller than Mickelsson. She seemed to have accepted the fact of her height; she walked as if it were the rest of the world that was peculiar.
    He’d pretended to weigh things carefully, nodding, frowning, trying the upstairs faucets (not so good), but his decision had already been 90 per cent made when he’d stepped over the threshold. The inside, he found, struck the same mysterious chord in him. Once when he was seven or eight he’d been taken to the stark frame house in Minnesota where his mother had grown up. This was somehow like that, he thought, not that the houses were the same in color or shape or smell or any other physical detail that he could notice. …
    Light fell in tinted, dusty beams through the stained-glass panes of the arched door into the entryroom and draped itself over the bottom three stairs and around the newel post. When the owner stepped into the splay of light and her black, homely shoes turned as blue as barnflies, Mickelsson gave a little start and looked suddenly into her eyes. She smiled, no doubt puzzled, and glanced up at the shadows at the top of the stairs.
    When he stepped into Tim’s office to announce the verdict on his loan application, he found that Tim already knew. “Easy as pie, hay?” Tim said, rising behind his completely bare desk, stretching his muscular arms out wide in welcome, grinning from ear to ear. “O-kay! How abowt that!”
    â€œYou already heard,” Mickelsson said, grinning but accusing.
    â€œWell, you know these small towns,” Tim said, and laughed. “I guess all we have to do now is arrange for a meeting with the doc’s lawyer in Montrose.” He pronounced it Mont-rose. “Sign the papers,” he explained. “If you want to bring a lawyer of your own, that’s fine, or I guess you could both use the doc’s lawyer—” His eyes met Mickelsson’s, then skidded off.
    â€œThat’ll be all right,” Mickelsson said; and it would be, he knew. It was strange how safe he felt in Tim’s hands. Why not one same lawyer, in fact?—though Finney, when he heard, would howl. How long had it been since Mickelsson had been anywhere where trust was standard? He thought of his reviewers—those who disliked him—whining like band-saws, no more interested in truly representing his thought, not to mention understanding it, than in describing the aesthetics of bingo. Not that Mickelsson brooded often on reviews; more were favorable than not, in any case, though the reviews in the supposedly prestigious journals were always unrelentingly scornful, written by pedantic young men and women from “the best universities,” little pricks who intended to go far, come hell or high water. “In this thin yet surprisingly repetitive little tract …” “Without mentioning Ayn Rand, though his dependence falls little short of plagiarism …”
    â€œWell,” Tim said, and grinned again, “all right, I’ll arrange it.” The barely perceptible cloud over his mood had passed, some doubt removed. “You free Tuesdee?”
    Who was ever, in this sad, long-winded universe, free?
    â€œI can manage it, I think,” he said, and laughed.
    Instead of driving straight back to Binghamton, that afternoon, he drove out past the house again, then farther into the mountains, turning onto whatever road seemed to beckon. He drove lost for hours, breathing the zesty air in deep, passing high, sunlit meadows, lakes, wooded entrances to summer camps with Indian names or noble-hearted names, “Equity Camp,” “Camp Sky“—here and there a farm with tall blue silos and fields bounded by stone walls. In the