by John Gardner
He sighed and for a moment put his hand over his face.
He looked at the pink that showed through the banker’s hair and remembered his father’s annual trips to the bank in Wausau—twenty miles away, the nearest big town—for fertilizer and seed money. He remembered how his father would sit, oddly shrunken, by the loan-officer’s desk, his straw hat on his knees, on his face white splotches that would later turn out to be skin cancer. Mickelsson, ten or twelve, would be sitting outside the railing, nothing to play with but the worn-smooth chair-arms and his plastic-rimmed glasses. The loan man in Wausau (by now long dead) had been almost an albino. He’d had a large, white jaw and a long, straight nose with prominent, flared pink nostrils. The pale lashes around his bulging eyes were like silk. Mickelsson, in his childhood, had frequently met the man in nightmares.
Well, so Mickelsson had been less than forthcoming, as politicians say. But the president, loan-officer, and sometime head-teller of the small Susquehanna bank, County National, asked no questions or anyway none that would make trouble; he and his committee apparently took Mickelsson’s optimistic estimate of wages and “probable additional income” in gentlemanly stride. No doubt they were accustomed, in this depressed, backwoods area, to loan applications more poetic than factual. (Or was it, conceivably, that the man had read Mickelsson’s articles for popular magazines—on the arms race, the ethical implications of test-tube babies, et cetera—and had never entertained the possibility that a man of such good sense might throw prudence to the wind?) No matter, no point worrying, for the moment. Look on the bright side: he’d taken the old Kierkegaardian leap. (Needless to say, he would not seriously appeal to the authority of that righteous, crackpot Dane.)
The banker glanced up, and Mickelsson instantly broke off his furtive gesturing. The banker was silver-haired, silver-moustached, a boyish, ruddy man with dimples in his cheeks. On his glass desktop he had a sign in loopy, girlish script, with a flower, Thank You for Not Smoking. He pushed a sheaf of papers across the desk for Mickelsson’s signature. “Well, everything looks OK,” he said; and Mickelsson, taking his word for it, drew off his useless bifocals and hastily signed. He carefully dotted the i and crossed the t. Then they shook hands, both half rising from their chairs, reaching across the desk, grinning like conspirators. Mickelsson was half tempted to open a checking account, in token of his gratitude, but resisted. Bounced checks would stretch the poetry thin.
“Well, Professor,” the banker said, drawing his hand back across the desk and standing up the rest of the way, “welcome to Seskehenna.”
“Thank you,” Mickelsson said, also standing up, towering above the man, mentally noting the local pronunciation. He toyed with his hat, his smile locked firmly in place.
“Any time we can be of service,” the banker said, hanging his fingers from the top of his vest, “just drop by.”
“I will.” He backed toward the door, grinning and bowing. “Gratitude is hatred in a mask.” F. Nietzsche. “Gratitude to a fellow mortal is excrement.” Luther.
“Anybody told you the history of that house?” the banker asked, smiling. When Mickelsson looked blank, pausing in his retreat, his eyebrows raised with exaggerated interest, the banker continued, “Lot of legends about that old house. I’m not up on ’em, myself—if there’s two things on earth I can never remember it’s history and jokes. But you should talk to the neighbors. You’ll find it interesting, I’m sure.”
“I’ll do that,” Mickelsson said. “Well, thanks for everything. It’s been a pleasure to do business with you!” He smiled again, bowing one last time, and, after an instant’s hesitation, put his hat on, setting it in place with both hands, then cocking it.
The banker smiled a touch too thoughtfully, as if Mickelsson, leaving, had gotten some small detail wrong, had perhaps started with the incorrect foot, or had failed to put his chair back exactly where he’d found it. One sensed, all the same, that the banker would do everything he could to make things easy. Small-town solidarity. Yes-siree-bob. They needed each other. Outside the unwashed glass front door with its black and silver lettering, around behind the pillar where his new friend the silver-haired banker couldn’t see him, Mickelsson hunched his shoulders and lit a cigarette. He glanced once at the bench-loungers sizing him up from across the street—four men, two women; they might have been sitting there, observing events around the town’s one traffic light, for years. Mickelsson sent them a stiff little salute. No one seemed to notice. Then he moved hurriedly, perhaps a little furtively, to the real-estate office next door.
The salesman was a young man of thirty or so, named Tim Booker, a grinning country boy with a face shaped like an apple, thinning brown hair, big farmboy muscles. Wherever the sun had touched him he was coppery brown. He dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket, yellow T-shirt (FISHER STOVES, it said), blue jeans, scuffed brown leather boots. From the moment he’d met him Mickelsson had been hard put not to like him. He seemed obviously honest, blessed with the heartiness and dependable gentleness Mickelsson had associated since childhood with dairy farmers—people like his father, whose survival, not to mention their peace of mind, depended on a gift for dealing patiently with big stupid animals inclined to push fences down, hide in the woods at calving time, grow moody around strangers, occasionally butt or kick. He’d of course been predisposed to like the young man. Tim had been his first real introduction to the character of the people who’d be his neighbors if he managed to get the Bauer place. From the outset the signs had been promising. Even Tim’s accent was a pleasure, or anyway interesting, a sort of key to the place—a set of clues, if Mickelsson could figure them out, to the ungraspable phantom meaning he’d felt up at the house. The secret of wholeness, perhaps, if he was lucky. His cracked-up life’s second chance.
Though he’d seen the world—had been a paramedic in Vietnam, he said—Tim had, in purer form than any of the others Mickelsson had talked to, what Mickelsson was coming to recognize as the standard old-time voice of Susquehanna: the flat, sweet yokel sound of rural New York State, richly shaped r’s designed to make up for all the lost r’s of New England (“car” was cah-urr, by some magic compressed to one syllable), and overlaid on that, the Scots’ short ow sound and bitten-off t’s, the accent that distinguished the northern tier of Pennsylvania, as in (Tim slapping the pockets of his jeans) “If I can find my dahrn keys I’ll drive you owt.”
After Mickelsson’s experience with the real-estate people of Binghamton, Tim’s directness was like ozone. “She’ll come down,” he’d said, ritching back happily on his chair. “She needs to get moved owt of it, and you’re the best chance she’s gaht.” He laughed, lifting his dimpled chin. “I’d say a fair price for both of you’d be fifty thowsand dahllers.”
Mickelsson leaned forward, startled. Her asking price was seventy. “You think so?”
“Well,” Tim said, smiling more widely, throwing his arms out, “it can’t hurt to ask.” Grinning head tipped, arms reaching wide, he was a startling, happy-child parody of the crucifixion.
As they’d driven up to the farmstead that first time, Tim had talked about his life and pleasures as if no one could help but find them interesting—as indeed Peter Mickelsson did, listening to Tim with a touch of envy, wondering with momentary morbid excitement whether he too ought to have a motorcycle. (He’d had one long ago, in his farmboy and college days; an Indian.) Tim had a blond Harley-Davidson, he said; a hog, fully equipped; more lights than a 747. He didn’t ride it much, mostly just pahlished it. Mickelsson grinned and nodded, sucking at his recalcitrant pipe. Though Tim had never had much to do with boats—he couldn’t swim, he said—he’d just bought a hardly used trimaran. All these lakes hereabouts, just laying there, it seemed sort of un-American not to pollute them. He lightly hit the steeringwheel as he laughed, head tossed sideways. He also owned a camper in which he’d taken trips to places as far away as Arizona, camping his way across the country with his wife and child. Whether the child was a boy or gi
rl Mickelsson never learned. Tim spoke of him or her as “the kid.”
“What do you teach up at the cahllege?” Tim asked. He spoke with his head thrown forward and laid over on the side, like a motorcycle rider glancing back.
“Philosophy,” Mickelsson said.
He looked impressed. “Philahsaphy! That’s something I never got into too much. Plato’s cave and like that?”
“Something like that,” Mickelsson said, and gave a nod.
Tim laughed, swung his head, and hit the steeringwheel again. He was looking down into the valley to the left of them now, driving without a glance at the road but driving well. “I took an English course down at Lehigh Cahllege where we read some philahsaphy. It was hard going, but it was interesting. Aristahtle?”
“That’s one of the people we treat.” He nodded again, a barely perceptible movement, like a boxer’s feint.
“Is that what you mostly do?—study the old-timers? Or do you make up philahsaphy on your own?” Now he turned back, his head still leaning toward the window, to look at Mickelsson.
“We do a little of both, most of us.” He was beginning to feel it was time to change the subject.
But Tim was interested. “You write about things like what’s really owt there?” He took his left hand from the steeringwheel to wave generally at the world.
“Well, in a sense—” Still with the grin locked on, he got out his cigarettes.
“Boy, that’s interesting stuff, that’s all I can say,” Tim said, and shook his head. “You ever work on ghosts, or people that can see into the future and that?”
Mickelsson hesitated. “Some philosophers work on such things,” he said at last. “William James, more recently people like C. D. Broad. As for myself …”
“The world’s a weird place, when you think abowt it,” Tim said. Though he was still smiling, he was watching Mickelsson closely. Now Mickelsson had his matches out. He lit the cigarette.
Shale bluffs rose up on each side of them, large locust trees arching across the gap. Then they came out into the hazy sunlight again, and they could see the Bauer place above them, rising sharp-gabled against the mountain. The hexes on the barns, squarely lit, looked oddly grim today, more recently painted than the walls they adorned, yet more ancient nonetheless, archaic as runes.
Mickelsson would hardly remember, later, his inspection of the house that first time he’d gone up with Tim. Everything in it had been better than he’d hoped for—the rooms larger, the views from every window more surprising. If the decor was not to his taste, he’d hardly noticed. In any event, most of it would go when the owner moved. (Pressed-board bookshelves, Swiss-dotted 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!”
“You already heard,” Mickelsson said, grinning but accusing.
“Well, 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.
“That’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 …”
“Well,” 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?
“I 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 end he accidentally circled back into Susquehanna—or rather, as it seemed, came upon one more pretty little village which suddenly, as he crested a hill, turned into a place much larger than he’d thought it, a town of brick streets plunging hell-bent down a steep mountainside toward a wide, solemn river—now broad, now narrow tree-lined streets following a series of deep, shady ravines with hurrying dark water and ferns in their basins, and above, glum old poverty-battered houses propped up on stilts or slate-gray, water-seeping walls, occasional small stores, steep lawns that old men or old women mowed by playing out and hauling back ropes they’d attached to their lawn-mower handles. He wasn’t aware that he was back in Susquehanna till he came upon the traffic light and the bank sign, COUNTY NATIONAL, and, in computer lights, 62°, then 7:13. On the watchers’ bench tonight there were only two old women, one of them eating an ice-cream cone. He thought of stopping off for supper at the town’s one restaurant, or anyway the only one he’d found so far; but inertia and the shabbiness of the place kept him going. He would take in his new world a little at a time. Beside the curbs, up on the sidewalks, and in the Acme Supermarket parking lot, there were big-tired pickup trucks with airbrush flames pouring up, circus-yellow and -red, from the engines and, on the cabs’ back windows, sleazy Western landscapes: elk and bear, leaping fish, mountain lakes. He turned in to the rough stone underpass that led onto the long iron bridge, green as algae, spanning the river.
Driving on the crooked road that followed the Susquehanna—not hurrying, getting the feel of the walled-in, shadowy valley, giving himself time to admire the blood-red sunset lighting up the tops of mountains and the undersides of clouds—feeling himself pleasantly alone in the world, everything around him serene, asleep—he came upon a stretch of road where cars
were parked bumper to bumper on both shoulders: cars of every description and make—new Cadillacs and Lincolns, neatly kept seven- or eight-year-old Plymouths, Hondas and Saabs, Volkswagens, beat-up campers. (He did not notice until later that the license plates were all from far away.) It seemed to him the strangest thing in the world—here, miles from nowhere, all these cars. He drove for a mile or so between these hedges of tightly parked vehicles, their roofs and windows lighted by the sunset—beyond them, on the left side, the broad, still river moving silently past weighed-down willowtrees and mountains. Then he saw that the road ahead of him was blocked: taillights in the right lane, parking-lights in the left. He pulled up behind the taillights—it turned out to be a panel truck with several cars ahead of it—and after a moment switched off his engine. At first there seemed no one around. Then he saw the red glow of cigarettes over among the trees beyond the cars on the left-side shoulder. He got out, shut the car-door behind him, pressed his hat on more firmly, and, shoulders hunched, went to find out what was wrong.
In the grove of flowering locusts beside the road there were dark silhouettes of men and women, people standing with their backs to him, now and then saying a word or two, occasionally laughing, looking down, where the trees parted, at the still, burning river. “What’s up?” Mickelsson was about to ask, but then drew in a sharp breath instead and, without thinking, took off his hat and bent forward.
