He slept till noon, then immediately, without eating (he stopped to eat less and less, these days), removing the telephone receiver from its hook, went back directly to his project. First he went down cellar to look at the bench—everything was as it should be—then he drove to Susquehanna to order tools. Owen Thomas had in stock a band-saw, slightly used, and a drill-press, new, also a belt-sander, a back-saw and picture-frame clamps. The rest he’d have to send for. By suppertime that night, Mickelsson’s new woodshop was whining and growling, spreading clouds of white dust. He imagined his father and uncle looking on, pulling at their chins—imagined them so clearly they were almost there, though they were not.
Neither was Rifkin there, though Mickelsson pretended to talk with him and the daydream was sometimes as vivid as daydreams of childhood.
Rifkin leaned against the workbench, crookedly smiling, his chin bunched up. “So what’s it all mean?”
“No meaning,” Mickelsson said, carefully lining a board for the saw-cut, a curve he knew to be a hair too tight for the saw. “I’m entering into mindless ritual. Just me and things.”
“Bullshit.”
“Very well, I’m making Christmas presents. One has one’s responsibilities. Ich soill! Ich soill! Possibly I’ll make something for Ellen and The Comedian.” Forcing the blade just a little, he managed the cut.
“I’ll bet.”
“You have no faith, Rifkin. That’s your problem.” He lined up the next cut.
“I have faith that if you keep drinking gin in the middle of the afternoon on an empty stomach, you’ll lop off your hand with that band-saw.”
“And you don’t believe in accidents.”
“Not the intentional kind.”
“Good point. I must be careful with the band-saw.” He drank, then sawed his mark.
With one finger, Rifkin pushed his glasses up his nose. “Why’d you buy the gun?”
“To kill myself, you think?” He made his eyes wide in mock-horror.
“Just asking. I notice you cry a lot.”
“I noticed it myself,” he said with exaggerated interest, tilting his head. “Sometimes I don’t even feel anything when I cry, I just happen to touch my face and—slippery! It’s vile.”
“You use that word a lot,” Rifkin said with distaste.
“I do.” He was suddenly wary. The imaginary Rifkin should not notice what he hadn’t noticed himself. He said, as if covering himself, “I must watch that.”
“Mickelsson, I like you,” Rifkin said, devious and saccharine. The finger with which he pointed was as stiff as the barrel of a pistol. “I’m just trying to help you. Why must you make it so difficult?”
Mickelsson’s hands leaped back, thinking on their own. The band-saw was screaming, the blade off its track. He was all right, but his heart was whamming and he was itchy all over, fear-sweat exploding through every pore. He reached down with a shaking left hand to turn the power off. Gradually he calmed himself.
“Doctor,” he began, loosening the thumbnuts that held the plastic shield, preparing to retrack the blade; but the word doctor stopped his mind, or redirected it. Looking down at his sawdusty hand, he was thinking of the large, pale woman who’d sold him his house. For an instant he was convinced that she’d sold the house and moved to Florida, where her brother was also a doctor, because she was dying. The whiteness was some terminal disease.
He was stilled, as if her death too, like the fat man’s and like Nugent’s, were his fault. Tears of self-pity washed down his cheeks. Christ, he thought, half praying.
He must make these presents for his children. Pull himself together.
Rifkin was there again. “Doesn’t it bother you that you’re doing nothing at all for your friend Jessie?” He pushed up his glasses. “I mean, there is the real world.”
“Well, Doctor,” Mickelsson whispered, and glanced nervously at the stairs, then took a deep breath, “there are senses in which these other things are real, too.”
To his distress and grief, brightly wrapped presents arrived from both his daughter and son. He was reminded to ship off the presents he’d made them. They would be late.
Christmas Eve came, and then Christmas Day. Surely never in his life had he experienced anything so painful. He lay in bed as if hoping he might somehow sleep through it, but his mind teemed with memories, each one more painful than the last—Leslie and Mark as children, up at the crack of dawn, running into the master bedroom to show what treasures they’d found in their stockings; the dark, pagan service—as it had seemed to Mickelsson—at the cavernous stone church in Heidelberg where not one note of the Christmas music was familiar; Christmases of his childhood, a brightly painted sled his father and Uncle Edgar had made for him once, had built right before his eyes, telling him it was for “a poor child who wouldn’t get anything if someone didn’t make something for him,” which had made Mickelsson jealous, though he’d hid his feelings bravely, never guessing the child was himself. Oh, cruel holiday! Infinitely more terrible lie than Santa Claus! Day of agonizing human love, awful promise that God would be equally loving and—against all odds, against all reason—would ultimately make everything all right. He got up, simply to be moving, distract his mind from the sound of his own heartbeat, looking out at the world through a wash of tears that gave every stick of furniture, every tree outside, a prism halo. He wanted to call Jessie, Ellen, his children. He would have been grateful even to hear the voice of his successor with Ellen, The Comedian. “Christ!” he moaned, burying his face in his hands; and then, to himself: “Asshole! Get hold of yourself!” Though he knew better, he turned on the radio. Every sound that came over it, even the stupidly pious sermons from the fundamentalist station in Montrose, flooded his heart with love and remorse. Handel’s Messiah made him sit down on the floor and clench his fists, bang them on the carpet like Achilles in his tent, and sob. Redemption, resurrection … what ghastly, unspeakable lies, if they were lies! He, Peter Mickelsson, was the frozen, buried world, and the deep snow that buried him and would never be melted was his murder of the fat man, that and much, much more: his swinish misuse of Donnie Matthews, his failure to love his wife as she’d deserved, his betrayal of Jessie—sins, failures, death-stink blossoming on every hand! At last the need to cry left him, though not the sorrow. He made himself a lunch of lettuce and baloney sandwiches, and drank a beer.
In the middle of the afternoon, like some kind of joke miracle, the two red-headed, extremely dirty-faced boys from Stearns’ Texaco appeared at his back door. He’d called them two days ago to come up and jump-start his Jeep and see what was wrong with it. They’d been too buried in work to come, they said now, but Christmas Day was always light. “You work on Christmas?” he asked. They shook their heads, grinning, looking at the ground. “Man, we’re always there!”
Mickelsson put on his coat, gloves, and boots, and went out with them to look at the long-dead iron monster. He couldn’t tell whether it was the cold or his pleasure in seeing someone that made tears well up in his eyes again, but the world was once more blurry, edged with light.
They found the battery was shot. They could sell him a new one—a cheap piece of junk, but serviceable, they assured him—for twenty-four dollars. After a moment’s reflection—his mind still unfocussed—Mickelsson agreed, and the boys went back to the station and then reappeared a short while later and put in a battery bright as a child’s toy, white plastic sides and a yellow plastic cover with red caps. They started up the Jeep and listened for a while, standing there in the dazzling sun- and snow-light—such brightness that Mickelsson had to shade his eyes and squint—the two young men saying nothing, one red-head holding the door open, bending his ear over the steer ingwheel, head turned sideways, as if listening for some infinitely soft whisper of complaint, the other standing by the left front fender, hands in coatpockets, smiling at the hood. Under the disguise of dirt they were remarkably handsome. They had mysteriously twinkling, potentially dangerous light blue Scotch-Irish
eyes, the pupils just now mere pinpoints. The boy leaning in to listen called to Mickelsson, “Does it always run this haht?”
“I don’t know,” Mickelsson said, tensing his brow with concentration and hiding the tremble of his lips behind his hand. He moved close to the window in the open door to look in at the dial. Though the Jeep had been running for only a couple of minutes, the temperature needle was already near the red.
“Could be the thermahstaht’s stuck,” the boy beside the fender said, and gave a little laugh. He didn’t sound as if he thought it would be that easy.
“Smell that?” the boy at the steeringwheel said. When he smiled, his wide mouth tipped up suddenly at the corners.
Mickelsson nodded. The smell was familiar; a musty, burning smell. He realized only now that it was trouble.
The heavy-set, thick-shouldered boy outside went around the front and opened the hood, then poked his head and upper body in under it, disappearing. “Shut her ahff a minute, Perry,” he called.
The engine shut off with a tubercular chuff-chuff-chuff. The boy on the engine fiddled with things, then called, “Stahrt her up again.”
The motor started up and sounded good for a moment, then worse than before. Smoke came up. The boy in front waved at his brother, a slow, graceful movement like the flying motion of an eagle’s wing, and the one at the steeringwheel turned off the engine and, after a moment, came away, closing the door. They both stood with their hands in their pockets, elbows out, looking in at the engine like graveside mourners.
Mickelsson leaned nearer. Though he knew nothing about motors, even he could see that this one was peculiar. What he noticed first was a spring that didn’t look like an auto part—possibly a spring from some farmer’s screen door. Then he noticed that a hose coming from the radiator was held on to the thing it hooked to by a piece of coat-hanger wire. One could still see the question-mark-shaped hook for the closet rod. Where a number of wires came together, there was a blackened clothespin. It was that—the clothespin—that made his heart sink.
“Think you can fix ’er, Jim?” the younger one asked. When he smiled, the perfect white teeth transformed him to a child.
The older one, Jim, lowered the hood and said, “We can tow her in if you want.”
Mickelsson pulled his glove off to hunt through his pockets for a Di-Gel. “How much do you think it will cost to fix?”
“You got water in your oil,” the older one said. “Could mean you need a new engine. If that’s what it is, and if we can find an old junker, we could hold it to five, six hunnerd dahllers.”
“Jesus,” Mickelsson said, and bit his lip. “If you don’t mind waiting,” he said then, and looked shrewdly at the older boy, then at his brother.
“We’re in no hurry,” the older one said. “We got all the time in the world.” He smiled and shrugged.
“In that case …” Mickelsson said. “God knows I need the Jeep. If it’s all right with you …” He got out his billfold. In the bill compartment he had fifteen dollars. “Will this cover towing?”
“Keep the ten,” the older boy said, putting the five in the pocket of his shirt. “Merry Christmas!” He gave Mickelsson a bow and raised his right hand as if to shade his eyes, smiling, forming a soft salute that might have been Chinese.
So Christmas came and went. Mickelsson saw no one, went nowhere, except for his furtive runs to the hardware store or post office, though he did talk briefly with Jessie on the phone. She called, ostensibly, to ask if she’d left her gloves. Neither of them mentioned Jessie’s trouble with her department. He knew that it was up to him to bring it up. She was no doubt hurt that he’d still done nothing to help, but he knew her pride. If he didn’t feel like helping, the hell with him. He didn’t like himself for keeping silent on the matter, but he kept silent. New Year’s came and went (Mickelsson spent New Year’s Eve at home, not even drinking, but only because he’d forgotten what night it was) and still he kept himself busy in the cellar, all his lights off upstairs, and put off driving in to Binghamton.
Though he thought of it again and again—looking over at the gun, or picking it up to feel the heft of it, run his fingers along the stock, the cool, blue barrel—he did not go hunting. The cat no longer showed nervousness when Mickelsson picked up the shotgun. He seemed a little more wearied, if anything. What the ghosts thought, Mickelsson couldn’t tell. He could avoid both the cat and the ghosts by working down in the woodshop, where neither showed their faces. He kept the phone off the hook. The cellar became crowded with his, so to speak, works.
The first night he didn’t leave the phone off the hook, hoping he might hear from his son or daughter—they always called late—he got a call from Edie Bryant. “Isn’t it wonderful about the hostages?” she said. He couldn’t tell whether or not her voice had a hint of irony. It seemed there was a possibility of a breakthrough while Carter was still in office. Then Edie got down to what she’d really called about.
She was just sick, she said, about what those people were doing to Jessie, and to tell the truth she was very very cross with Mickelsson. “You’re the only person that can help her, you know,” she said. “Phil says so too, and he ought to know, with all his experience in administration. That Blickstein makes me so mad ah could just spit!”
“It’s as bad as that?” he asked.
“Peetuh, if you’d just drive in here and talk to some people—talk to the president himself, if you have to. Even if you weren’t some famous philosopher, you could make ’em sit up and notice. They’re afraid of you. Phil says the same thing. They think you’re crazy, you know. They’re afraid you might punch ’em right in their little ole mouths. I tell you, I’d approve. Do ’em a world of good, that’s my opinion! Sometimes it’s the only way to get folks’ attention.”
Mickelsson laughed.
“And you should phone up Jessica,” Edie said. “It’s not right that woman havin to go it all alone.”
“I imagine it’s hard for her, all right.” He wondered how Edie had learned that he wasn’t keeping in touch with Jessie.
“You call her now, hear? And get in that ole Jeep and get right down here and do some talkin. Isn’t it just like ’em, pullin a stunt like this at vacation time when nobody’s around?”
When she paused, waiting, Mickelsson said, “I doubt that they’ll get away with it.”
“Well, they’ll sure as hell try,” she snapped. Then, after a moment: “You promise me you’ll phone up Jessie?”
There was no way out. “I’ll do it right away,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Listen now, you come on by and visit sometime?”
“I will.”
After Edie Bryant’s call he fixed himself a large martini and began drinking it, too fast, pacing back and forth in the livingroom. Outside the windows it was pitch black.
There could be no doubt that his failure to help Jessie was objectively wrong. It had no doubt been quite innocently that Edie had learned he was out of touch with Jessie; something Phil or Tillson had said, perhaps, about his failing to pull his weight; or some innocent question to Jessie: “How’s Peetuh, deah?” “I haven’t heard from him in weeks.”
Yet the materially irrelevant suspicion kept nagging him: the age-old conniving of women, Edie and Jessie in indignant tête-à-tête; Jessie proud and injured, showing perhaps more feeling for him than she meant to, and Edie rising to it, determined to fix things, drag the straggler back into the fold. Jessie bursting into tears, perhaps. (The imagined scene grew cloudy. He couldn’t picture her bursting into tears, though he could imagine anger.) Surely a man had a right to withdraw, shutter up his windows, bar his door—especially such a man as he was, unwittingly a destroyer—and to hell with the eternal soft conspiracy of womanhood!
He fixed himself another large martini. The problem was not that he didn’t understand what was wrong but that he understood too well. He had isolated himself, partly by accident, partly by intent, and now all that was normal, reasonable, un
thought-out. …
“Just call her,” he broke in on himself. “Just pick up the fucking goddamn phone.”
Her phone rang and rang. He did not notice that it was now almost midnight. He had a fleeting thought—a flash of irritation—of the medieval courtly lover, poor miserable worm crying out in secret for miraculous grace. There was a difference, of course. The courtly lover, in his pitiful way, suffered for his lady, secretly served her with all his heart and mind. What they had in common, he and the goof with the lute, was despair.
“Hello?” she said, husky with sleep.
Now, suddenly, he did realize what time it was.
“Jessie?” he said. “It’s me. Mickelsson.”
“Oh,” she said, then after a moment, “Jesus. What time is it? Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry to call so late. To tell the truth, I didn’t realize …” Jessie said nothing.
“I got a call from Edie Bryant,” he said. “She tells me—”
She said, “Edie?”
He said, “I’ve written a couple of letters. I’m sorry I was out of touch.” His glass was empty, and the phone cord was too short for him to get to the bottle. “Can you hang on a minute?” he asked. “I’m sorry … I’m sorry. …”
“Listen,” she said, “Jesus, Pete—”
“Just one second,” he said. “Hang on.”
He couldn’t find the gin, though he knew it was there. He took the Scotch bottle instead and sploshed half a glass over the fragments of martini ice.
“I’ve written a couple of letters,” he said. “I have an appointment with the president tomorrow morning. We’re not going to let them get away with this!”