Mickelsson's Ghosts (75 page)

Back in Susquehanna, he tried Donnie Matthews' door again and found her still not at home. He stood thinking for a while, leaning on his cane, then went back down the stairs and, for all the cold, crossed the street to sit on the bench near the traffic light—today there was no one else there, thanks to the weather—and, tucking his leather-gloved hands into the armpits of his overcoat, turtling his mouth and chin inside his scarf, he settled himself to wait. Except for his forehead and ears, the tip of his nose and his feet, he was warm enough. If he got really uncomfortable he could go sit in the Chevy, parked at a meter not thirty feet away, turn on the motor and heater, and wait in comfort at least until the exhaust fumes got him, seeping through the floor. For now, this was his preference. Though Christmas lights—yellow, blue, green, red, white—drooped above Main Street, and there were lights in the stores, a few brave souls shopping, he felt, here on the icy bench, as if the frozen town had been abandoned to him.

He glanced to his left, across the street toward the Acme, at the sound of a child's crying, and saw the man he'd bought his Jeep from, Charles Lepatofsky, slipping and sliding across the pavement toward him, a large bag of groceries in his arm and mittened right hand, his left hand dragging along his red-faced, bundled-up daughter. Her name was Lily, Mickelsson remembered. It was odd that he should remember it, bad as he was with names. He couldn't have heard it more than three or four times. If she never spoke—so Lepatofsky had said—it was not because she lacked the throat for it. She was wailing as if her heart would break, large tears coursing down her cheeks. She caught her breath and paused for a moment when she saw Mickelsson, then returned, with renewed conviction, to her sorrow and indignation.

Lepatofsky apologized, nodding to him, “Poor baby hates the cold. But I couldn't just leave her up at the house.”

“Hard on kids, this weather,” Mickelsson said.

Lily slid her eyes toward him but went on with her heartbroken wailing.

Suddenly he got up from the bench, throwing a little wave to Lepatofsky, and half skated, half ran to the Chevy, where he opened the door, leaned in on one knee, and unfastened the troll-doll from the rear-view mirror. Triumphantly, he carried it back to where Lepatofsky and his daughter were just now climbing into their truck. “This is for
you,”
he said to Lily, handing her the doll.

She abruptly stopped crying—even Lepatofsky seemed surprised by that—and after an instant's hesitation took the doll in her two mittened hands.

“Can you say thank you?” Lepatofsky asked, bending toward her, smiling.

She shook her head.

“Lily don't talk,” he explained, glancing up at Mickelsson.

“I know.” Mickelsson stepped back from the truck, smiling and nodding, exorbitantly pleased with himself, then closed her door.

Lepatofsky waved, bobbing his head and calling “Thank, you!” Then the truck engine roared to life. Mickelsson waved good-bye until the truck was out of sight, then, still smiling, went back to his bench. As he sat down, his heart jumped. Donnie's light was on.

He had not been prepared for the temper he found her in. She refused absolutely to listen to reason, refused even to let him take her hand to comfort her—much less go to bed with her—and even as he shouted back at her, bellowing like a bull, towering over her, barely in control, he secretly felt the justice of her rage, even the justice of her blaming the whole thing on him. He'd been one of many; her stubborn claim that things stood otherwise was lunacy, an act of mad desperation and reptile cunning; but the fact that there had been others did not mitigate his guilt, any more than did her own claim, earlier, that she was “professional.” Her actions had not been, in the full sense, rational: in her youthful egoism and optimism, she hadn't really foreseen the consequences. He, an adult, a man of books and relatively wide experience, had no such excuse. If his use of her, his treatment of this living, feeling human being as pure physical object, was representative, not special, he was nonetheless personally to blame for it. Even as he raged at her, his large red fists clenched, pulled tight against his chest lest he hit her with them—telling her, in scorn of her extortionist dreams, that he was poor, maybe the poorest of her clients—his mind wheeled, hunting wildly for a way to pay her off, save both her and the child in her womb.
Foetus,
he reminded himself; but what he saw in his mind was his even-then-beloved Leslie emerging, all bloody, from Ellen's womb. “I haven't even got a fucking salary,” he shouted, “or anyway I won't have, not long enough to scrape up the two thousand dollars you think you need. Two thousand dollars!” He hit his forehead with the side of his right fist and spun away from her as if knocked almost off his feet by his own blow.

“You
do!”
she shouted. “What the hell are you saying?”

“I don't,” he said, and sucked in air, trying to calm himself. “The I.R.S. is garnishing all I earn.”

“Then get it somewhere else,” she said. “What do I care? Fuck it!”

In his mind he saw her standing stiff with rage in the center of the room behind him. She was still in the scratchy-looking pleated bright red wool dress she'd been out shopping in—with her sister, she said. Her coat and scarf were thrown over the back of the overstuffed chair, and on the cushion and on the carpet in front of the chair, cheaply wrapped Christmas presents spilled out of paper shopping bags. On her forehead she'd put some kind of skin-colored putty—except that it wasn't the color of her skin—trying to hide pimples. If her pregnancy showed, it was not in her belly but in the dullness of her hair, the dark blue shadows under her eyes.

“Somewhere else,” he sneered. He thought of Jessie and angrily batted the thought from his mind. Something down in the street caught his attention, though at the moment he wasn't quite conscious of what it was that he was seeing. An old gray car, perhaps from the late fifties or early sixties, had pulled up beside the curb in front of Thomas's Hardware. The car-door opened, and after a minute, slowly, with great difficulty, the fat man from the apartment downstairs squeezed himself out, closed the door behind him, and went around the front of the car to the sidewalk, out of Mickelsson's view. He did not have on, today, the police hat but instead a gray, long-out-of-fashion fedora. Mickelsson leaned forward and was able to see him again, standing at the parking meter now, putting a coin in. Then the man turned and, moving tentatively—no doubt because of the near-blindness Mickelsson had noticed down in the hallway that day—again passed out of Mickelsson's view, entering Thomas's store. The man's apartment, it occurred to him, would be empty.

Mickelsson closed his eyes, shocked by the thought that had come to him. He heard Donnie's abuse blazing like fire behind him, but he registered not a word of it, his mind replaying with a feeling of great dread the movements of the man he'd just seen getting out of the car, directly below him, closing the car-door, the top of his hat moving toward the car for a moment as, presumably, he looked in, maybe checking to see that he hadn't left his keys; then the hat, the wide shoulders of the coat, the long, dark scarf moving around the front of the car toward the curb. …

He turned to her, breaking in on her crackling stream of dragon-fire. “Suppose I
could
get you money somewhere,” he said, jerking up both hands to silence her. “How much would it take to convince you to have the baby, put it up for adoption?”

“Fuck
you,”
she snapped. “It's my goddamn
life!”
Then she stopped herself, seeing something in his look, and she seemed visibly to shrink, becoming cunning all at once, then relaxing her face, beginning to dissemble. “It would take more than you could ever get, believe me,” she said.

“How much?” he asked, and moved a step toward her.

She looked away from his eyes, afraid of him, saw her cigarettes on the chair beside the bedroom door, and abruptly went for one. Her hands shook as she picked at the pack and at last drew one out. Her eyes fled here and there, looking for matches.

Mickelsson took a pack from his pocket, opened them, and moved closer to her, lighting one and holding it toward her, at arm's length. She leaned toward the light, afraid to meet his eyes, poked the end of the cigarette into the flame and sucked hard, then sharply drew back.

“You're crazy,” she said, letting out smoke and holding the cigarette away from her in a gesture queerly elegant, touching.

“There's a place in Binghamton,” he said, dropping the matchbook back into his pocket. “For five thousand dollars they'll handle everything—all perfectly legal. I checked. How much more would you require, for yourself?” He listened to the odd note of pompousness that had entered his speech, as if it were someone else that was saying these things.

“I'm
afraid,”
she said. “Can't you fucking understand that? I'm scared to fucking
death.”

He waited until she looked at him, then said, “But for money—for
enough
money …” The foetus would be better off dead; what chance did it have? Anyway, there was no justice or decency under heaven. They'd all be better off dead—he, Donnie, Jessie. … He pulled back from the thought in revulsion.

“I don't know,” she said, and snapped her head around sideways, away from him, then dragged, shaking, at the cigarette. “Ten thousand dahllars?” She laughed, brittle as glass, edging toward hysteria.

“OK,” he said, and nodded. “We'll see.” He felt himself absolutely still, like Gibraltar, and at the same time felt himself rushing toward some dark shore.

Again she looked at him, really scared now, thinking twenty things at once—thinking, among other things, that maybe she hadn't asked for enough. “What are you going to do?” she asked. She raised her hand as if to stop him as he pushed by, heading for the door, then changed her mind. “Hay,” she said, dancing along beside him, “hay, where are you going?”

“Tell you later,” he said.

As he tried to pull her door closed behind him, she held it against him, looking out at him through the eight-inch-wide opening, white as a ghost. “Pete, where are you
going?”
She whispered it, as if she knew.

“When I knock,” he said quietly, “open the door for me. Otherwise I'll break it off its hinges.”
Macho, macho.
Self-hatred stoked the fire of his anger higher. This time when he pulled at the door, she did not resist. It slammed shut.

He had a momentary impression, as he stood leaning on the silver-headed cane, his head near the fat man's door, that there was someone inside. It seemed unlikely in the extreme. Mickelsson had no very clear idea how long he'd stood arguing with Donnie, quizzing her—bullying her—between the time he'd seen the fat man get out of his car and now. But logic suggested (and for all the frantic rush of his heartbeat, his mind seemed to be working with unusual clarity) that since the man had put money in the meter before entering Thomas's, he couldn't possibly, in this brief span of time—surely not more than five minutes or so—have gotten back to his car, driven it to its garage, wherever that was, and made it back here to his apartment before Mickelsson. Softly, with the head of his cane, Mickelsson knocked. He waited—probably just a second or two, though it seemed forever—then tried the doorknob. It was locked, of course. He looked up and down the hallway—no one in sight—stepped back across the hallway, then threw himself with all his weight and might against the door. It gave, with a splintering sound like an explosion, then snagged for an instant, caught by the chainlatch. The instant he felt that snag, he knew he was in terrible trouble: impossible as it might seem, the man was certainly inside. He tried to stop, reverse himself, but there was now no going back; he was thrown into the room by the momentum of his rush. They stood facing one another in the room's yellowed dimness, clutter all around them, two huge animals squared off, each more frightened than the other. They stood braced, staring at one another for an eternity, Mickelsson's heart striking wildly at the root of his throat, stealing his breath; and then the fat man moved, lunging toward a dresser, jerking a drawer open and drawing out a gun. Mickelsson stood motionless, trapped in a nightmare, but now the fat man's mouth opened, round as a fish-mouth, showing blackness within, and he bent a little, as if cringing in shame, and slammed the fist that held the gun toward his own chest, clutching himself, his mouth still open, eyes narrowing to slits, squeezing out tears. Though Mickelsson's mind wheeled, one thought came through clearly, as if someone else were thinking it:
he's having a heart attack.
“The broken heart,” he remembered, and felt, along with his own heart's pain, a vast surge of pity. Still the fat man hadn't gotten his breath. Judging from the look on his face, the pain was unspeakable, so violent that it blasted from his mind all thought of Mickelsson. Seconds passed—minutes, for all Mickelsson knew. Again and again Mickelsson told himself that he must shout for help, and never mind the consequences to himself—no one knew the arguments better than he—but each time, he did nothing, mentally begging the man to die quickly, lose that expression of pain and, worse, bottomless, childlike disappointment. At last the fat man's knees buckled, a strained, babyish cry came from his throat—a cry to Mickelsson for help—and, turning toward the bed, trying to reach it but too far away, he tumbled like a load of stones onto the carpet. Mickelsson bent down for a look at the eyes. They squeezed shut, dripping tears, then weakly fell open and were still. He cringed away, clutching his stomach, and, leaving the man as he was, hurried to the door. There he stopped, dizzy with fear and confusion. Clumsily, he ran back to the chest beside the chair facing the television. The glass refrigerator tray was there, but no sign of the money. He stood stupefied, swaying in disbelief, then hurried back to the door and closed it. He stood for a moment breathing in heavy gulps, hands over his ears, trying to think. He wouldn't remember clearly, afterward, how he hunted through the room, pulling out drawers, throwing the mattress from the bed, emptying the wardrobe. In one corner stood a Kero-Sun space-heater, not working. He lifted it from its place, moving it aside, and saw, behind it, an old ratty sweater. He almost left it there, then on second thought picked it up and found, tucked inside it, a large, aluminum-foil-wrapped bundle. Even before he tore the foil off, he knew this was it. It occurred to him only now to wonder how much time had elapsed, and whether anyone had passed outside the door. Tentatively, as if it might be filled with electricity, he touched the bank-banded money. It was miraculous that, in all this junk, he should find it. With steady fingers he dropped some of the money-packets into the pockets of his overcoat, the rest into his suitcoat. Then, unsteadily, numb all over, he straightened up and moved toward the door. The fat man lay on his side, knees bent, eyes partly open. He had holes in his shoes. Mickelsson moved past him, then paused. Suppose he wasn't dead. Suppose, against all odds, someone should wander in and find him, even now save his life. He looked in horror at the silver, lioness-headed cane and imagined it flashing down, sinking into the fat man's temple. “Holy God in Heaven,” he whispered, fully understanding at last that, though not with the cane, he had murdered the man. He moved in a kind of dream toward the door.