“Why are you here?” he asked. He pressed the heel of his right hand against the pain in his forehead.
Apparently he did not exist for her. Perhaps nothing existed as solidly as her emotion. He was tempted to reach out and touch her, not with his hand but with the record he held in it, which he’d been preparing to put on the changer—but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. At last, abruptly, on rubbery legs, he turned and walked back to the stereo, put the record on, flicked the switch, then walked heavily back—touching the walls, the furniture, the doorway—into the kitchen. It was nearly dark now, late twilight, black clouds moving swiftly across the valley. More snow was predicted. He went into the bathroom to find aspirin. Beethoven wailed and crashed behind him like ice-and-snow mountains falling in, meaningless noise, oddly off rhythm, he thought, hardly more ordered than the vacuum-cleaner noise, until it came to him that part of the sound was not from the record player but from outside, somewhere in the woods above his house: gunshots, three in quick succession, then after a moment a fourth. John Pearson hunting, no doubt. Expressing himself, like Beethoven? What did one hunt—except one’s own soul—at twilight, in deeply drifted woods?
He forgot about Tillson’s party, or rather chose not to remember it. The roads were clear, a single snow-packed lane between eight-foot-high banks, when, three nights later, he drove the Chevy down to Susquehanna for groceries. Those he’d gotten before had spoiled, left out on the counter. The town’s Christmas decorations had been up for weeks now—green, red, yellow, white and blue, reflected in the slush and the steely ice below, and on the dented metal of cars and high-bodied pickups with hydraulic plows. The lights and the tinny Christmas music coming from a second-story loudspeaker (Donnie’s window was dark) flooded him with unwelcome sentimental emotion. He had to sit for five minutes in the Jeep, regaining control. At last, conspicuous, as if every window were intently watching him, he walked across the street to the Acme to get what he needed. Everyone was talking about the murders—the fat man was only one. An old woman who lived in a trailer had been killed by her daughter, stabbed seven times, and a taxi driver had been found on Airport Road, north of Binghamton, shot in the head execution-style. Without a word the check-out girl gave Mickelsson his bounced check. It was all right; he’d cashed a check for a hundred dollars just that morning at the bank. Though he’d again weakened and sent money to Ellen, it would probably clear. Donnie’s absence was in one way, anyhow, a great burden lifted off. When he’d set the grocery bags on the seat beside him and was about to head back home, he abruptly changed his mind, got out again, slammed the door, and walked up the street toward Owen Thomas’s.
A man who looked like a Montana cowboy in winter came toward him with one hand raised, clenched to a fist inside its leather glove—perhaps a warning, perhaps a greeting. Mickelsson stopped in his tracks. The man had a wide hat much like Mickelsson’s, a big sheepskin coat, jeans, and heavy black boots. “Hay, Prafessor!” Though it was night, he wore dark glasses.
Yet Mickelsson’s heart calmed. The voice was Tim’s. “Hello!” Mickelsson said. “Long time no see!”
“Just tryin to keep owt of the way of killers,” Tim said and laughed, gently slapping Mickelsson’s shoulder.
“That’s something, isn’t it?” Mickelsson said, and felt his expression twist strangely. He remembered someone’s saying that Tim was homosexual. It seemed utterly improbable, but what could anyone know about anything? He thought of the motorcyclists Tim rode with and had a brief nightmare vision of the whole pack of them as killer homosexuals. He stopped himself in disgust. “It’s scary, the way the world’s going.” He covered his mouth with his hand.
“Isn’t that the dahrn truth!” Tim said, and laughed. “That’s something, though, that fat man. Sitting up there all this time with all that stash, useless to him as a waterproof ear on a prairie dog!”
“Ah?” Mickelsson said. The part about the fat man’s loot had not been in the paper.
“That’s what the murderers were after all right,” Tim said, happily grinning.
Murderers. Mickelsson’s heart jumped. “They took something, then, you think?”
“I guess the cops don’t know that, yet. Leave it to Tacky Tinklepaugh, they’ll never know. But I guess they gaht the Sheriff’s Department in on it now, and there’s a chance it’ll go right to the F.B.I. Possible the man robbed a bank, while back.”
“I suppose they don’t know who killed him—who the murderers were?”
“Naht yet,” Tim said. “Course everybody really knows. But what can you do?” Tim’s smile drew back on one side, ironic.
He wondered if his eyes, staring into Tim’s, showed his fright. He still had no control of his mouth, and kept it covered.
Before he could think what to say, Tim slapped his shoulder again, about to step past him, and said cheerily, “Hay, gotta run, Prafessor. See ya!” And he was gone. Mickelsson half turned to look after him. He hadn’t quite realized how big Tim was, until this moment. Had he meant, by “murderers,” Mickelsson and Donnie? Had she talked to him, perhaps? Suddenly it seemed to Mickelsson that of course everyone must know who had killed the fat man. He remembered how he’d shouted, that night in Donnie’s apartment; the whole town must have heard it. Lowering his head, chewing his upper lip, he continued on his way to the hardware store.
The bell rang cheerily as he opened the front door, and Owen Thomas looked up from the cash-register and smiled, distant. “Merry Christmas,” he said. Mickelsson nodded and, as soon as possible, feigning interest in this and that, got his back turned to the man.
The store was full of light, as always—a good deal more light than usual: electric wreaths, painted-glass Santa Clauses, tree lights, blinking electric candles. Along with the usual tools, plastic trashcans, plumbing and electrical materials, and the rest, the aisles were now crowded with sleds, trikes, games, plastic dolls, stuffed animals, and, on the shelves along the sides, small appliances to tempt farm wives. Walter Cronkite was talking on the display TV. The sound was turned off.
“I hear you’ve done wonders up there,” Owen said.
“Who told you that?” Mickelsson asked with what he knew must sound like guilty sharpness. He smiled too late.
“Oh, you know”—Thomas grinned, more on one side than on the other, the center of his mouth drawing sideways—”people who make deliveries, maybe Wilcox, the man who fixes furnaces. … Nothing’s secret, little town like this.”
Mickelsson hastily turned away for fear that the blood was draining from his face too visibly. “Well, I keep busy,” he said. His eye fell on the gunrack—rifles, shotguns, pistols, the metal wonderfully solid, all business, the wooden stocks gleaming with soft, reflected light, red, yellow, green, blue.
“Thinking of doing some hunting?” Owen asked.
“They sure are beautiful things, aren’t they?” Mickelsson said. “I wonder whether it’s guilt or pride that makes people put all that devotion into making a gun?”
The storekeeper thought about it.
Mickelsson pointed to the lock on the case. “You got a key to that?”
“I better,” Owen said, and smiled.
He drove back slowly, still surprised at himself, thinking what fear disguised as indignation his ex-wife would feel if he were to walk into the house and hold out to her his purchase, challenge all her twisted, secret violence with the weapon’s stern wood and steel. But she wouldn’t be there, of course. Never again. For a moment, as when he’d first walked out, the realization that their parting was final gave Mickelsson a sharp pang, made the buildings on each side of the street high and dark. He thought of her parents, of whom he’d been fond—gentle, shy people, proud of their brilliant daughter, though troubled by her ways. “Shoot,” her father would say, smiling and blushing; it was all he could think of, whichever way the conversation turned. He owned a dry-goods store and wore a flag in his lapel. He and Ellen’s mother had married when they were eighteen and had lived happily ever after, good Method
ists. He’d been the captain of a bowling team. Mickelsson had gone with Ellen to watch him once and had been startled at the sight of him not dressed in a suit, wearing the peculiar purple jacket with gold lettering—he couldn’t now remember the name of the team. When Ellen’s father barbecued steaks, always well done, he wore an apron that said COME AND GET IT! The thought of Ellen’s parents made the grief worse than it might otherwise have been. Surely Ellen had been in some ways like them, salt of the earth, though at first glance there seemed no possible connection between Ellen and those two shy people. According to something in a letter Mickelsson had gotten from his daughter months ago, Ellen and her parents were no longer on good terms. He wished he could see them again, or write to them, at least.
But the wave of unhappiness passed more quickly than it would have done six months ago. One could outlive anything, he was beginning to see. What one would once have called unspeakable—he was thinking of the murder—could become just a private unpleasantness, like an ugly argument in the corner of a crowded, noisily cheerful room.
He drove home past Christmas-lighted windows, the huge gloomy-towered old Catholic church with its doors and windows all aglow, full of people no doubt, then darker streets, the tall, bare trees around the hospital. In all this time he hadn’t spoken a word to Tom Garret. The thought made him draw in his head in the darkness of the car.
He hunched his shoulders and drew his head in more. He must do something to put order back into his life. With a start he remembered that he must think of something to buy his children for Christmas. How many days had he left? He frowned, blinking sudden tears back, leaning toward the windshield, and gradually realized that it was useless to try to work out what the date might be, he couldn’t concentrate. His hands pressed into the steeringwheel. Monday. Some Monday before Christmas. He clamped his lips together and tasted salt. Angrily, with his thumb and one finger, his hand spread wide, he wiped his eyes. His daughter and son would be at home with their mother in Providence for Christmas, he brooded, momentarily forgetting that his son had disappeared. He saw dark hallways, leaded windows, candlelight reflected on old, cracked paintings. Providence was a social place, and no one more sociable than Ellen and the children. He imagined them laughing and singing, arms around the shoulders of their friends, their mother—rolling down the car windows, calling out to strangers, students skulking across lawns: “Merry Christmas!” He imagined the dead fat man stumbling toward them calling out for help. “Mercy!” he would moan, blackness in his mouth. Mickelsson shook his head, driving the crazy image back to darkness.
He remembered that Mark would not be there, would be God knew where.
He bent still farther toward the windshield, discomfort in his chest. He could see his partly bared teeth in the windshield, his glistening eyes. Wince of a killer. Poor super-ape, programmed to love and forget! Whole generations came and went on the earth, and—because, once they’d settled in, made a place for themselves, they never left home, never wandered lost from the valleys they’d chosen or inherited from their fathers—they, those former, safe generations, had never learned the truth: that all this mighty turmoil of the heart is illusion: love of kin, the home dirt, the hymns of one’s particular sect. … Once, Peter Mickelsson’s heart had leaped at sight of the dusty wheat-yellow hills of California, just as years before that it had leaped at the fairyland green or, in winter, the shadow-dappled white of Wisconsin. But he’d moved one or two (three, four) times too often, and now when his business took him to places where his heart had once leaped—if you could call this nonsense he lived by a business—he was in and out like the Fuller Brush man, Wham bam thank you ma’am, indifferent as he’d be to Daytona Beach or Hackensack. Interesting that the meaning of life, genetically implanted, should be so dispiritingly simple, a certain slope of land, a particular sunlight, the sixth physical sense, the sense of belonging. Even he, for all his travels, was not fully immune—no one was, of course—feeling his idiot heart warm, after only these few months, as his car nosed into the fold of the mountains and, winding up the steep, dark Susquehanna Valley, warm more as he climbed the still flank of his own pile of earth. Yet he could leave, he knew; never bat an eye. He could forget all these people, just like that, become fond again of strangers and leave them too. O Love, let us be true to one another until Tuesday!
His face froze in another wince, dripping tears, partly anger at the brain’s endless posturing. Shameless, sentimental bullshit. That was what community was for, to tell the visionary madman “Come off it!” John the Baptist bawling in the wilderness. Cassandra blubbering by the sea.
So the young moved out from their fathers’ houses to new places—Utah, Southern France—and put down roots, sucked in air, fell in love with the scent of coalsmoke or sassafras, whatever; and so long as they remained there in the new land Jehovah had set aside for them, all was well with them, they knew who they were, what they were there for. In other words knew nothing; questioned nothing, learned nothing. Such was the program. Flight from the nest, new nest-building, then steadiness, the old heart mellowing into loam to feed the trees of the great-greatgrandchildren’s nests. The world had been meaningful by inspection then, because no one but the sad-eyed, lamenting Jews had been constrained to move endlessly from place to place, from home to alienating consciousness; tear up again and again those roots they’d so thirstily put down, forget names and faces betrayed, betraying. … Alas, the fidelity the heart required was no longer among the world’s possibilities. Now all people were Jews. How many would survive the new, universal holocaust? Not Mickelsson, he feared—thinking the same instant, Self-pity! Weeping. (Clear vision was the hermit’s hope. Sentimentality the risk. For hermit, read crowd-pressed modern man.) He thought, in contrast, of his father, dying in the hospital, surrounded by friends, tubes in his arms and nose.
The unfortunate thing about the mentally ill, he thought, imagining he was speaking to Rifkin, is that they’re vile.
Rifkin shrugged. “Who’s not vile?”
He left the dark, outer houses of Susquehanna behind him—in the windows, the flickering blue light of TV sets, all sweet sorrowing America’s opiate, even Susquehanna’s, though not his, up on the mountain, where one could only get the sound and where even that, what one could get of it, was blurry, like a confusion of sea-nymph voices in a cave. Just as well that he should be denied even television’s comfort. Having abandoned his friends, his wife, even himself, he was one of the world’s new beings, not fit to survive, but sufficiently clear-headed to tell the tale. He looked over at the shotgun, the barrel just a shadow now, standing upright, silhouetted against the window, like a narrow hitch-hiker.
He began to drive faster, more recklessly than usual, sliding on icy corners, still wiping his eyes from time to time. Barrelling around a corner not far from where the doctor had nearly hit him all those weeks ago, his headlights lit up—black against the sugar-crystal whiteness of snow—two hatless, long-coated young men climbing a snowbank to get out of his way. They teetered precariously, flailing their arms, much too high on the bank to be in danger, though they apparently didn’t know it. Their invasion of his territory made anger flash. Mickelsson rolled down the window and shouted as he shot past, “Wo kein Kläger ist, wer wird da richten?” It was a stupid, adolescent thing to do. Crazy. If he were drunk, perhaps … Poor devils! But he was smiling, pleased with himself. He did no harm; they had each other—as poor dying Miss Minton had had the principal, the School Board, the parental conspiracy of silence. They had behind them, these two souls in black, the whole shadowy army of Mormon, a drab, sober-minded community stretching to the ends of the earth, from Susquehanna to darkest Peru. God bless community, never mind what—the Century Club, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Mickelsson and his ugly cat. He shook his head and saw his reflection in the windshield shake its head.
When he was inside his house and had closed the door, he stood for a long time with his legs planted in one place like pillars, the s
hotgun cradled in his arm, his eyes gazing around balefully, trying to think where he should put the gun. He had no mantel—there was only the woodstove—and he was reluctant to put it in some closet, out of sight. From the couch, the sickly, angry gray and white cat watched him carefully. No doubt the old bastard knew about guns. Yet he did not leave.
At last, as a temporary measure, Mickelsson leaned the shotgun against the wall by the door, next to the flowerstand holding Jessie’s gloves. Then he went into the kitchen, switched on the light, opened the refrigerator door, and for a long time—he had no idea how long—stood gazing in, cold air pouring over him.
He was roused from his reverie by a whine of trucks passing on the road in front of his house. He ran to the front door and looked out. They were driving without headlights. “Call the police!” he told himself. But he was more afraid of the police than of the trucks. He wiped perspiration from his forehead.
Late that night, in his damp, stone-walled cellar—all the lights upstairs turned out, the cat asleep on the rug near the stove—Mickelsson built a workbench, eight feet long and solid as a rock, with a deep drawer below and cupboards above for stains, glue, and tung oil, and a large space of bare wall for peg-board, which he meant to buy tomorrow. (Slink into town, dart back again …) He made the bench with meticulous care, measuring, levelling, fitting, bevelling. He’d definitely decided now to make things; he wasn’t sure what. Boxes, coffins, windowboxes, wheelbarrows … He’d get himself a band-saw, table-saw, drill-press, and belt-sander, possibly a lathe. Thomas would not press for payment. It didn’t matter what he made, as long as it was more or less useless, and craftily done. He sawed and hammered, puffing at his pipe, sweating, filling every pore with dust. He pegged and glued every carefully fitted joint and rabbet, and, while the glue dried, tied the whole thing drum-tight with fishline. When he plucked the taut nylon holding the deep pine drawer together, it rang like the string of a guitar. When he finished, swept up, and went upstairs to take a bath, once more soothe his aching muscles, there was watery light above the mountains to the east.