That Friday morning (all but the oakleaves had fallen now, and the smell of November was distinct in the air, all but the scent of woodsmoke, which would only come with the month itself in Pennsylvania), Mickelsson slept late. A little before noon a knock came at the door. He lay waiting for whoever it was to go away, but the knock came again, and, changing his mind, he got up, put on his slippers and robe, and hurried down to answer. He was hung over from drinking while he worked on the house, the night before, and his arms, his back, and the backs of his legs ached from pushing too long and hard at his weight-lifting, just before he’d fallen into bed. As soon as he opened the door he saw that he’d been mistaken to come down. On his front porch stood two young men, wearing ties and long black coats. Their plain black, carefully polished shoes looked like government-issue, and both young men had their hair cut short, like marines. He clung to his first thought, that they were I.R.S. men, or maybe F.B.I. men come to speak with him of Mark, bring him some news or warning; but he knew all the while that that was wrong. There was something drab, even pitiful about them. They wore no gloves, and their faces, especially the noses and ears, were red from the cold. Their breath made steam.
The blond one said, “Mr. Mickelsson, we’re representing the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints. We understand you recently paid a visit to Salt Lake City—”
Whatever the young man said next Mickelsson didn’t hear. He stared, a confusion of emotions leaping up—horror, anger, morbid interest. It was true that he’d visited Salt Lake City, but it was three or four years ago, an aesthetics conference. How had they found out? Some student? Faculty member? Their network didn’t miss a trick, he’d give them that. Or was it possible that they used the line on everyone, since more often than not whoever they talked to would at one time or another have visited that exalted tourist trap? If the person they talked to happened not to have been there, no harm: the sober black foot was in the door. Did they have psychologists working for them, he wondered—people who figured out the angles of entrance, understood the insidious advantage of taking the prospect off guard, addressing him by name, seeming to know all about him, past and present? Did they have sales-pitch classes, conferences on seduction, persuasion, intimidation? It was a shocking idea, but they probably did, he decided. It was the 1980s; the world was on its last legs, Armageddon close at hand. No time for the messengers of God to be scrupulous or shy.
He realized that almost unconsciously he’d said “Yes,” nodding, admitting that he had once visited Salt Lake City, yes. Perhaps, the blond one said, he would like to know more about the Mormons. Again Mickelsson failed to react. He could have told them he knew a good deal about the Mormons. He’d had a student, some time ago, who’d broken away from the Mormon Church and had been hounded for months by their soft-spoken, black-suited squads. He’d had a colleague in California who’d been hounded in the same way for fifteen years. Mickelsson thought of the underwear he’d been told their women wore, marked with holy gibberish and never taken off, not even in the shower—a sin against life, if it was true, he would have told them—and once, in a motel somewhere, he’d read a ways into their incredibly dull bible, the adventures of the archangel Moron. He knew the good that could be claimed for their company—their music, mainly (according to Ellen, it was vastly overrated); also the fact that they were family people, unusually successful in business and agriculture, non-drinkers, non-smokers, statistically more healthy and longer-lived than any other group in America. He would even grant that sometimes, as individuals, they were apparently good people, no real fault but dullness. The daughter of a family of Mormons had been a babysitter for his children when they’d lived in California. Perhaps these two young men at his door, if Mickelsson got to know them, would seem to him as admirable as his California neighbors. In all fairness, he couldn’t condemn them for coming to him as missionaries. They all had to do it for a year of their lives, or so he’d been given to understand—always in twos, each for all practical purposes a spy on the other. Indeed, it was possible that they earnestly believed whatever foolishness it was they came with. Zeal and credulity were common among the young. Ecology, politics, animal rights … He thought of Alan Blassenheim and then of his own son, as pale as this pink-lipped young man now explaining to him the desperate condition of humanity—speaking not by rote, quite, but not altogether from the heart, either; prepared to be harshly interrupted and sent on his way. The dark-haired, red-nosed young man beside the blond one stood leaning slightly forward, looking at Mickelsson, listening to his partner with keen interest.
“Listen,” Mickelsson said, raising both hands, “I’m not interested in this.” He might have mentioned the cold they were letting into the house, but he said nothing, embarrassed at not inviting them in. Maybe that was why they wore no gloves or hats, part of the strategy worked out in Utah. Eastern States. Zone B.
“I realize you’re busy,” the blond one said, and gave him a smile as general and mechanical as the smile of an orphan, “but I’m sure if you could give us just three or four minutes—”
“I’m sorry, I really can’t,” Mickelsson said, and started to close the door.
Suddenly the one with black hair spoke up—the back-up man, the hard-sell. “Everyone’s busy,” he said and, smiling genially, cut the air with the side of his hand. “If we told you we could teach you a foolproof system for living to be a hundred, that might be different, right? Or if we told you we could make you a millionaire, no ifs or buts, no tricky fine print, you’d jump at it—anyway most people would!” He laughed, almost handsome. Mickelsson closed the door a few more inches, but the boy was no fool; he knew if Mickelsson had really meant to close it he’d have closed it. “You think I’m going to tell you that spiritual things are more important than earthly things like health and wealth. That’s what other faiths will tell you. But the way we look at it, the whole thing’s interrelated. You’ll understand what I mean, Professor. Aren’t you the author of Survival and Medical Morals?”
The hair on the back of Mickelsson’s neck stirred.
The boy went on quickly, smiling hard, no doubt sensing that he’d set off a wrong reaction, “Survival’s what we’re here to talk about, Professor.” Again he gave the air a slow, sideways chop. With the gesture, his craned-forward head moved like a snake’s. “Isn’t it possible that if people live as God intended them to live, they’re likely to live longer, much healthier lives? Let me quote you some statistics about the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day—”
“Wait a minute,” Mickelsson said, feeling his face flush, his right hand closing the lapel of his robe against the cold. “I know the statistics. I know the whole pitch. I already told you I’m not interested. Now good-day.”
The boy blinked, then nodded. After an instant he said, “Thank you. Good-day, sir.” He smiled in a way he apparently intended to seem friendly, but he didn’t quite make it. Sour grapes, scornful superiority crept in.
The blond one showed relief. “Thank you for your time, sir.”
Mickelsson closed the door.
The unpleasant aftertaste stayed with him for hours, like the indistinct memory of a nightmare. It was still at hand, coming over him in occasional flashes, when John Pearson drove up around four that afternoon, with the long-haired black dog in the seat beside him in his pickup. He got out stiffly, held the door for the dog, then closed the door and stood looking at the house. Some kind of object, a forked stick—a dowsing rod—dangled from his angular right hand. Mickelsson went out to meet him. “Hello,” he called as the old man approached.
“Hod-do,” Pearson said. He gestured to the dog without speaking, and at once it sat down beside the old man’s left boot and stared as if thoughtfully at Mickelsson.
“Fine weather we been having,” Mickelsson said.
Pearson seemed to consider the remark, glancing at the sky—gray, wintry clouds, yellow western light shooting under them, capping the mountains. “Had a little time on my hands,” he said. “Thought I’d try to rustle you up that water.”
“Good,” Mickelsson said. “Anything I can get you?”
“Gaht it all right here,” he said, and gave an impatient jerk to the dowsing rod. He looked up at the field behind Mickelsson’s house, then, after a moment, back at Mickelsson. “Everything going all right here?”
“Everything’s been fine,” Mickelsson said. He gestured toward the trash bags, scraps of lumber, and crumbled shards of sheetrock piled more or less neatly near the firewood. “Been trying to fix the place up a little,” he said. He was aware that his smile was less than modest. Anyone who glanced through the windows would be sure he’d had professionals in.
Pearson puckered his gray lips, not quite bothering to nod. Then, pointing to the woodpile: “I guess you know that wood ain’t seasoned.”
“Isn’t it?” Mickelsson said.
“Burn that stuff in your stove, you’ll wreck your chimley.” He walked over to the wood—the dog moved with him—and, reaching down with two fingers, twisted off a small branch from one of the logs. “Pure green,” he said. “Two months ago this stuff had birds in it.”
“I guess I didn’t realize,” Mickelsson said.
Pearson shook his head as if in wonder, one side of his mouth pulled back. “Better let me bring you down some seasoned,” he said. “Leave this just set here for a year or so.” He glanced at Mickelsson. “I guess you ain’t used to country livin.” He grinned.
“Not for a long, long time, anyway,” Mickelsson said.
“Wal,” Pearson said. He looked up at the field behind the house again, then down at the dowsing rod, getting ready to start. The dog sat watching him, waiting for some command.
Mickelsson asked, “You mind if I come along and watch?”
“Suit yourself,” the old man said.
They started up across the yard, past the overgrown garden, toward the field.
The old man walked with a look of concentration, his lips pressed together, the dowsing rod straight out in front of him, level with his pelvis, his thumbs aiming straight forward on top of the rod’s two arms. Occasionally the end of the rod dipped, but apparently not to the old man’s satisfaction. He walked with stiff, long steps, as if he were pacing something off. For all his concentration, he seemed to see nothing in the low weeds on the ground ahead of him but stepped awkwardly on small rocks, sticks, and ant-hills, adjusting his step without noticing. He walked straight across the field, parallel to the road, then, at the stone wall along Mickelsson’s north line, turned and set off at an angle, up toward the woods. At the top of the hill, almost in the woods, he stopped pacing and, after a moment, sat down on a stump to rest. The dog sniffed his boots, then trotted away, darting here and there, keeping them in sight, searching for birds or rabbits.
“Seems like the land’s gaht a spell on it,” Pearson said.
Mickelsson studied him, trying to make out whether or not he was joking, but the old man’s face showed nothing, staring out across the brightly painted valley in the direction of the viaduct. It seemed unlikely that he could see that far, with those blurry eyes. The river, under the gray sky, was silver and mirror smooth. Pearson turned his head to look at Mickelsson. “Funny you ain’t seen them ghosts yet.”
“I guess I’m not the type,” Mickelsson said.
The old man grinned, then turned away. “Everbody’s the type,” he said. “Most likely you see ’em and don’t notice.”
Again Mickelsson said nothing. It was queer, he thought—though not all that queer, at Mickelsson’s time of life—that in the classroom he stubbornly resisted ideas that made no sense, ideas half formed, unjustifiable, while here, standing in damp yellow leaves, he accepted John Pearson’s crazy opinions as if nothing could be more obvious or natural. Or was he kidding himself, talking of a classroom Mickelsson who no longer existed? When was the last time he’d insisted, in class, on his students getting anything right?
Pearson’s thought had drifted elsewhere. “Down there right acrost the road from your house,” he said, pointing, glancing for a moment at Mickelsson to see that he had his attention, “they use to have the Susquehanna ice-house. Pond was a whole lot bigger then. Use to skate there, when I was a boy—me and all my friends. Used the ice-house to warm up in. They had apples there too, crates and crates of ’em; keep ’em cold through the winter. Sometimes kept bodies there, for burying in the spring. That was supposed to be a secret. Summertime we’d bring a bunch of boards and nails and make a diving-board. All that land there growin up in woods use to be pasture then—smooth pasture except for some thistles and boulders, right down to the edge of the pond. Old brother and sister that use to live in your house had a cowbarn and a silo right by that pear tree. Maybe you can see the foundation, if your eyesight’s good. Burned down the same night the ice-house did. Drunken kids, likely; some of them rascals from up above the woods past my place. That was a long time after the murder and all. People use to come here from miles arownd just to swim in that pond.” Again he glanced at Mickelsson. “Sometimes the brother and sister would set on the porch and watch, though they’d never talk to you, never said a word, and nobody never said a word to them neither. Strange people, not right in their heads. I guess a little slow.”
“Sprague, you said their name was?” Mickelsson said.
“That’s right. Can’t quite recall their given names. I think the woman’s was somethin like—” He looked at the sky for a moment, then said, as if reading it, “Theodosia.”
Mickelsson raised his eyebrows.
“Yep. Some kind of religious name. All them old-timers had religious names. More strange religions in these pahrts than a man could shake a stick at.”
“I believe I’d heard that,” Mickelsson said. He remembered his visitors and asked, “Are there many Mormons left? I had a couple drop in on me this morning.”
Pearson’s look was rueful. “Not many, but people say they’re comin back. You see a lot more of ’em on the road, these days, and I hear they been dickerin for a big old house in Montrose”—he turned his head, one eyebrow raised, to examine Mickelsson—”Quackenbush place, up against the church, white house with pillars and a big round porch in front. Back in 1900 it was a bank, they say. Oldest house in Montrose. They won’t get it. Nobody likes to sell to ’em.”
Mickelsson nodded. “I’ve seen the place.”
Pearson looked down at the dowsing rod. After a minute he said, “Cryin shame.”
When it was clear that he wouldn’t continue unprodded, Mickelsson asked, “About the Mormons, you mean?”
“They’re clubby,” Pearson said, and squinted. “There’s somethin unnatural abowt people all hangin together like that. The Baptists, now, they may be mean sons of bitches, but there’s no way they’re ever gonna take over the world. Too ornery. Can’t get along well enough to get organized. Even the Catholics, they don’t really make you nervous. Half the things they do in the world the Pope says they shouldn’t, but they go right ahead and do it anyways. You don’t have to worry about people like that, at least no more’n you’d worry about a common Presbyterian. But the Mormons, now—” He stared at the dowsing rod, lips compressed, trying to come up with exactly what he thought, and at last brought out, “Clubby.”
“Well, they’re healthy, you’ve got to admit that,” Mickelsson said, and grinned. “They live practically forever.”
“Yup.” Pearson nodded. He looked out over the valley for a minute, then turned to squint up at Mickelsson again. “You seen those churches the Mormons gaht?” he asked. “I saw a picture of the one down in Washington, D.C. Big white thing, looks like they built it for one of them science-fiction pictures. Bunch of white spires that go pokin up like fork-tines, golden angels on top blowin trumpets. I tell you, I don’t think I’d care to do business with a God wants a church like that. Wants to scare you and let you know your place—right under his boot. Those churches over in Europe, now—those cathedrals—they’re a whole different thing. They make you think of a God that’s mighty powerful, mighty impressive, but they let you know he’s gaht some human in him; there’s a chance if you talked to him he might know English. Same with the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, they let you know God’s gaht his human side; and the Baptist churches, hell, anybody that can do card-tricks could take over for that God. But the God that thought up the churches of the Mormons”—Pearson shook his head as if sorry he had to say it—“he must’ve come down here from Pluto.”
“Well, I imagine the Mormons do a great deal of good in the world,” Mickelsson said, glancing toward the woods.
“Sure they do. Same as ants and bees.” He leaned forward and, after a moment, stood up. “I suppose they’re all right,” he said. “Somebody thinks he knows how to get through this world alive, I take off my hat to’m.” He held out the dowsing rod, adjusting his grip, preparing to march down the mountain.
“I take it you’re neither a Mormon nor a Baptist,” Mickelsson said, smiling. “Or a Catholic or Presbyterian,” he added.
Pearson turned to stare at him. “I’m a witch,” he said. “They didn’t tell you that?”
Mickelsson stared, for the hundredth time uncertain whether or not he was having his leg pulled. “I guess I heard there were one or two of those around,” he said, carefully not giving Pearson the satisfaction of a questioning look.
Pearson nodded soberly, staring down at the forked stick in his hands. If he’d been teasing, the mood had now left him. “This country’s seen it all,” he sighed, and slightly shook his head. “I imagine it’s something to do with the darkness, the way the clouds are always there, or if they happen to break for a half a day it’s like a miracle.” He raised his head to look across the valley. “People joke about it having a spell on it, this country, specially fahrm people tryin to make somethin grow out of them rocks. But it does have, I always thought. Maybe gaht a whole lot of spells on it, layer on layer of ’em, clear back to the time of the Ice Age. Prehistoric animals, when they were driven owt, put a spell on it; Indians, when the white people came along, they put a spell on it. Then the Pennsylvania Dutch, then the railroad people, now the Polish and Italian dairy fahrmers … Course none of the spells do a thing, that’s the truth of it.” He narrowed his eyes to slits. “Mountains don’t care,” he said. “They’re like a old lean cow, they give you what they can, and if it ain’t enough they let you die and they forget you. Maybe dream you, once in a while, that’s my theory—bring you back for a minute, like the Spragues down there.”
“There’s more life in the place than you’d think, though,” Mickelsson said, falling in with the old man’s mood. “Every night around dusk the deer come out, great big herds of ’em. They stand up there grazing almost to the first morning light.”
“Yup,” Pearson said, “lotta deer, all right. Bear too, though you’ll never see ’em. Plenty of skunks, too—them you will see, owt crawling around your woodpile, lookin for bees and beetles. Coons, possums, thousand different species of birds …”
“Rattlesnakes,” Mickelsson said.
“Hob-goblins,” Pearson said.
They looked at each other as if reassessing. At last Pearson grinned and looked away.
It was dusk when Pearson finally found strong water, or claimed he had, right beside the garden fence. They marked the place with a stake and went into the kitchen to settle up. The dog stood just outside the door looking abused, and in brief consternation Mickelsson wondered if by country manners he should invite the dog in. Immediately he dismissed the thought. It was odd how in everything he did with the old man he felt foolish. A problem of the different languages they spoke, no doubt, every word and gesture half foreign. While he was writing the check, Pearson fingered the scraped place on the door.
“I see you scratched off the hex sign,” he said.
“Yes,” Mickelsson said. “You think it was a bad idea?”
Pearson shrugged. “It’s yore howse now.” He hung his rough hands on the bib of his overalls and looked into the livingroom. “You got a buckled floor,” he said. “I don’t recall seeing that before.”
“I’ve got to fix that, if I can figure out how,” Mickelsson said. “According to the doc, there’s a spring under the house.”
Pearson’s mouth dropped slowly open and he pointed at the floor as if imagining it was he who was having his leg pulled. “You gaht a spring,” he said slowly, “right under the howse?”
“That’s what I was told,” Mickelsson said.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Pearson said. He pointed toward the kitchen door and the darkness beyond. “You got a spring right there under the floor, and I spent half the afternoon owt there wandering around in the weeds with a stick. …”
“Jesus,” Mickelsson said, dawn breaking.
Pearson’s eyes widened, and then suddenly both of them were laughing. The old man’s normally gray face darkened and he laughed as if he could barely get his breath. Mickelsson leaned on the refrigerator, shaking.
“Jehoshaphat!” the old man said, clacking his false teeth.
Mickelsson bent over. He brought out, “Talk about city slickers!”
“Lord, I should charge you triple!” Pearson roared.
“I told you I’ve been away from the farm a long time!” Mickelsson said.
“Long time is right!” He drew back now, both of them getting their laughter into partial control. “Well,” Pearson said, “if it was anybody else I’d say you owed me a drink!”
“Good idea,” Mickelsson said, and, with one more whinny, wiping his eyes, went over to the cupboard for glasses.
They drank in the kitchen, Mickelsson unable to figure out whether or not it would be right to invite the old man into the livingroom. “Craziest thing I ever heard of,” the old man said, and they laughed again.
Sometime into their second drink, Mickelsson asked, “By the way, how’s your wife?”
“Etta Ruth died,” Pearson said. “Happened three weeks ago Wensdee.”
Mickelsson set down his glass. “I’m sorry.” To his horror he realized that his lips were still smiling.
Pearson waved it off, not meeting his eyes, his expression stern. “No need to be. She was sick with that cancer a long time.” Still looking stern, he stretched his lips in a grim, fake smile. “Spring right under the howse,” he said, “and old John Pearson out there stompin through the weeds! Lord Jehoshaphat, that’s a good one!”
That night, though he hadn’t arranged ahead, as she liked for him to do, he went down to see Donnie. When he knocked on her door she called brightly, from a distance, probably the bedroom, “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” he said.
When she spoke again the brightness that had been in her voice was gone. “I can’t come to the door, I’m taking a bath,” she called.
He was almost certain he heard male laughter. He stood motionless for a moment, his head angled toward the door, his right ear almost against the panel. It was odd, these games they’d begun to play. It was the money, no doubt. To Donnie, he was a goldmine: even if she wasn’t overcharging him, he was one hell of a regular; and so, even though it visibly annoyed her that old Mickelsson was always there, like God—annoyed her that he should spy on her, feel jealous of her, run on and on about his worries concerning her, her seeming lack of all normal connections (parents, young friends), her seeming indifference to the well-known dangers of her shady profession—she played along, ministered to his soul’s prissiness as she would minister, if the profit seemed sufficient, to any other of her customers’ kinks (he’d found bite marks on her shoulder one night—broken skin, ugly swelling, such a mess that he’d begged her to go see a doctor, which of course she’d refused to do), so that now, because it was Mickelsson calling to her, she claimed, like some maiden of the suburbs, to be taking a bath. No wonder the pustuled, crooked-toothed, hairy beast beside or on top of her laughed! Shamelessly, absurdly, Mickelsson went along with his own side of the stupid pretense. “How long will you be?”
Murmured consultation. Perhaps they purposely made themselves heard, to mock him, to let him know no one was fooled, neither there in Donnie Matthews’ big, dingy apartment nor anywhere else in Susquehanna.
“Make it an hour,” she called.
“OK, good,” he said, nodding formally, actually reaching, in the dim, filthy hallway, for the brim of his hat. “Ten o’clock.” He turned, scowling angrily, gripped the cane by the shank, just below the head, and started down the stairs.
The streets of Susquehanna were quiet, unusually empty. After the last few days’ heavy storms—rain that had torn away most of the leaves, transforming the mountains from riotous color to the ominous slate gray of high, rolling waves in some sombre Winslow Homer—the weather had turned cold, so cold that tonight bits of ice shone like quartz in the darkness of asphalt and brick underfoot, on the walls of buildings, on the electric and telephone lines draped across the street, stretching away like a staff without notes toward the dully glowing iron bridge, the perfect blackness of the river below. He turned in that direction, deciding against the tavern up the hill, source of the only sound he could hear in all the town, or the only sound except the dull clunk that reached his ear each time the traffic-signal turned from red to green. People were laughing, back there in the tavern, and the jukebox was playing, so far away, all of it, it might have been sounds from his childhood.
At the bridge he turned left, moving toward the unlit, broad, flat span that had once been Susquehanna’s famous depot, engine-repair station, and restaurant. The sign, up above his head, dimly lit by stars—COMING SOON! SUSQUEHANNA PLAZA!—was cracked and chipped, getting hard to read, like the rusty old sign one saw on the way in from Highway 81, VACATION IN THE ENDLESS MOUNTAINS. As he looked up at the sign, his eyes, without willing it, made a sudden shift to the stars beyond, the dusty white light of the Milky Way. Something bright, diamond-like, moved slowly across the sky from west to east, maybe an airplane without the usual lights, more likely some Russian or American satellite, Telstar, or whatever: odd that he no longer had any idea what was up there. He remembered—he hadn’t thought of it in years—what excitement everyone had felt in the beginning, in the days of Sputnik I and Sputnik II, the martyred dogs, the great American end-over-end flopper: days of miracle!—the arrival of Christ in Glory could not have been more astonishing than the passage of those sparks across the heavens, one of them mournfully blinking on and off. They would stand in their yards, in suburbs and small towns or in the stillness of farm pastures all over America, looking up like sheep, empty hands hanging down beside their pockets; here and there some father with a child in his arms would point up, whispering in awe, “See, Timmy?” or “See, Mark? See?” and the child would gaze solemnly at the finger.
“The heavens declare the glory of God,” Mickelsson’s grandfather would intone dryly, and Mickelsson’s father would sit beaming in his pew, far more convinced than the old man in the pulpit that it was so, though Mickelsson’s father would not definitely acknowledge God’s existence. “Could be,” he would say, when pressed, “could be.” He believed in cats around the milkcan cover on the cowbarn floor, where he sploshed warm, new milk; believed in pines—he’d planted thousands of them—Canadian geese, slow-swaying Holsteins moving up a lane, heavy old Belgians pulling the log-sled. … Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, if Mickelsson had no highschool football game, the whole family would drive to the state hospital to visit his uncle, who’d gone crazy in the war. “Shell-shock,” the family said, and everyone would nod sympathetically; but somehow Mickelsson had known the first time his grandmother said it that for some reason she was not telling the truth. It was not until many years later that he’d learned what had really happened. “Poor dear,” his mother said, “it’s a shame he couldn’t have died right there! What a burden to carry all the rest of your life!”
From the moment they passed through the high iron gates of the hospital grounds, nothing was real: time slowed down, shapes took on an extraordinary sharpness and a seeming weightlessness, or every shape but his uncle, who stood in his bathrobe and pajamas, unkempt, hollow-eyed, as firmly centered and infinitely heavy, though small of stature, as some innocent, terrifying image in a nightmare. Though he was thin, his whiskered flesh sagged on his face (that was the effect of some drug he had to take, Mickelsson’s father said), and his hair was bristly, littered with something scaley, dandruff-like, though apparently it was not dandruff. But none of that had been as troublesome to look at as his eyes.
“Well,” Mickelsson’s father would say as they drove home again, “I thought Edgar looked better, this time.” “Did you?” his mother would say, giving him a glance. “Well,” his father would say, as if it didn’t much matter, really; eventually all would be well, that was the nature of things. Optimistic fatalist.
Mickelsson found himself standing in perfect darkness, in the pitch-dark shade of an abutment that rose steeply to give its heavy rock support to what was now empty air, below it the vast flat landfill floor that was once to have been the plaza. A perfect landing place for UFOs, he thought, and for a moment his memory entertained images from the final scenes of Close Encounters. In the blackness a few feet below him, invisible water lapped at the gravel, stone, and trash he stood on. For all the cold, the river had a smell, a fetidness like human bad breath. Across the flat, still river the black mountainside was beautiful with yellow houselights and cold white streetlights. The lights of a truck came slowly down the street, parallel to the river, then vanished behind trees and buildings. He half remembered, then brushed from his mind, the trucks he’d seen driving with their lights off. Maybe he’d dreamed the whole thing. A drunken nightmare.
He breathed deeply, clearing his head. How many times in fifty years, he asked himself, self-consciously, trying to pull back his earlier, sweeter mood, how many times did a man stand pondering in the night beside some river, remembering former nights, former rivers, counting up his losses? A man was never more alone, he thought, than when standing by himself looking at the lights of a community across a river, or across a lake, or from the deck of a ship. Had he thought exactly that same thought before, in exactly those same words, perhaps years ago? No, it came to him, he’d read them, or something like them: James Boswell looking at the stars before going up to his latest mistress. What a life! He turned to look up, ruefully, at the lights of Susquehanna.
And what if, for once, he, Mickelsson, were not to go up to his mistress? What if he were to take one small step toward bringing his life into control—reassert his dignity? It was community that kept one well and sane; that was the message of the book Michael Nugent had forced on him. Community was what he’d lost, leaving Providence, and what he’d fled, leaving Binghamton, and what called to him now in the form of yellow lights rising straight up the black wedge of mountain, lifting toward the lesser, gentler darkness of sky and embedded, icy stars.
He moved, frowning with thought, out of the shadow of the abutment onto the wide, gouged-out plaza site. His foolish infatuation was the heart and symbol of all that was wrong with him, his increasingly desperate embrace of chaos. It was she that made a clown of him, in Michael Nugent’s sense, the imitation lover who gallantly allowed the whole town to laugh at him—anything for love!—middle-aged Mickelsson dressed up in ascot and threadbare formal coat for his teen-ager lady of the dark chipped tooth. Had he indeed gone mad, he asked himself. “Love for the unlovable.” Surely it was not true that he was one of those! Though he’d almost not dared to think about it, Jessica Stark had shown by certain signs that she was not entirely indifferent to him, there was at least a faint chance. Gail Edelman, dropping her gaze when he glanced at her, smiling at him with a hint of special interest when he politely passed the time of day with her—neither he nor she showing by any word or sign that they remembered the night of his drunken visit. … It was of course not real love that he felt for Donnie Matthews but some irrational need, some sickness. Rifkin would know. (He had not yet mentioned the matter to Rifkin.) It was his firm persuasion, as an ethicist—or almost firm—that one could choose right conduct, will the higher man’s self-mastery, if one would, in spite of the witless heart’s wail.
He stopped walking, standing in the middle, now, of the gouged-out desolation. It was true, he saw with sudden clarity: he must not go to her! His children and ex-wife had need of his money, the money he was squandering, these days, on Donnie Matthews. He stood with his hands pushed deep in his overcoat pockets, his shadow, thrown by the street-lamps above, stretching across the bulldozed span of gravel and bits of ice-speckled brick. It was decided, he would not go. He would walk back to the Jeep and drive home. Relief flooded through him. There was hope for him yet, then! Slowly, somewhat against his will, he drew his left hand from his pocket and raised it toward his face for a look at his watch.
Ten o’clock! Panic rushed up into his chest and all his wisdom melted. “Shit,” he whispered, and began to walk with quick strides back in the direction of the bridge. It was surprisingly far away. After a moment he began to run. He began to breathe hard, then cough as he ran—too much smoking—but he continued to run.
When he was inside her apartment, the door closed and locked behind him, he shook his overcoat loose and let it fall to the floor, Donnie Matthews staring at him with eyes full of alarm. He stood cocked forward like a maniac, breathing in gasps and rubbing his chest with his clenched right fist.
“Peter, you shouldn’t have run,” she said, “you knew I’d wait for you!”
She wore a white, Greek-looking dress and the amber beads he’d bought for her, no shoes on her small, perfect feet. Her skin shone, lightly perspiring from her recent bath; her hair was still slightly wet. She put her arms around him and pressed the side of her face to his chest, pushing his fist away, taking its place, moving her cheek against him hard, massaging him. “Peter, poor, crazy, crazy Peter,” she murmured. He wrapped his arms around her, clinging for dear life. Her left hand moved to his erection, then unzipped his fly, freeing his straining penis. His heart whammed still harder. Unquestionably, she’d be the death of him. She slid down on his body, sinking to her knees, and took him in her mouth. He straightened up, arching his back, still gasping for breath. When he began to thrust, she rose, lifted the skirt of her dress—she had nothing underneath—and climbed up onto him, helping him in with one hand. Tears ran down his face. How many men’s sperm did that warm cave contain? That was Peter Mickelsson’s community: a thousand dark, writhing lives, unfulfilled, unfulfillable. He came, her legs froze around him, and—this time, anyway—he did not die.
As she put up with other things, she put up with his talk. Lying on his back beside her, early in the morning, after sleeping for hours without moving even a finger, like a dead man—one arm under her head now, the other thrown across his eyes—he told of old Pearson’s visit, then of the visit of the Mormons.
“Strange people,” she said, and opened her eyes for a moment as if thinking something unpleasant.
“Why so?” he asked, then lowered his wrist to his eyes again.
“I don’t know. How can they believe that stuff? I mean, it’s all a lot of bullshit, but with those other religions you can see how people might be taken in, because the weird stuff all happened so long ago. But Joseph Smith! People around here actually knew him—knew what an asshole he was. My own great-great-grandfather had dealings with him, or so my grandfather used to say. Said he was tricky as a snake.”
“You had a grandfather?”
“Most people do. He lived in Lanesboro when there were still Indians around, except the Indians lived in Red Rock. There used to be this Indian that would come into town once a year, or maybe twice, I forget—he didn’t live with the others, in Red Rock, he lived in the woods. He’d go to Mireiders’ Store—it wasn’t Mireiders’ then—and he’d make a big pile of all the things he needed, and he’d find owt how much it came to and then he’d walk back into the woods and he’d come back owt the next day and pay his bill in gold coins. My grandfather had a dream one time, that the Indian dug the coins owt of a bank up by the viaduct. He always meant to go look there and see if the dream was true, but he never got around to it, and when he died he’d never showed anybody where it was.”
“Do you have parents?” Mickelsson asked.
She was silent for a while. At last she said, “The Mormons always play like they’re stupid and sweet, but really they’re mean sons of bitches, or anyway most of ’em are. I guess even the sweet ones have to know what the other ones are doing, and I guess if they put up with it they’re naht so sweet either.”
He smiled, still with his eyes closed, hidden under his arm. “What do they do, these mean ones?”
“Torture people. Harris them.”
“Harass.”
“Well, however you say it.”
“How do you know they harass people?”
“I know, don’t worry.” She spoke petulantly, as if she didn’t know, in fact.
Mickelsson drifted toward sleep for a moment, then drifted back up into consciousness, thinking of the shabby, pitiful Mormons at his door. “They’re a strange people,” he said. “We all work from premises we can’t fully defend, but the Mormons are true, deep-down absurdists.”
“Mmm,” she said; then, after a moment: “What do you mean?”
He turned his face to hers, then rolled over toward her, conscious of how huge he was, in comparison to her—how wasted, gross. No doubt that had to do with his heart’s choice of her: since he paid her, it need not concern him that he was old and fat. He stroked the side of her forehead and cheek with the fingertips of his right hand. She stopped him, holding the hand in hers. “What do you mean, ‘absurdists’?”
“They’re people that know that nothing makes sense, the whole universe is crazy, or so they claim, but they go right on acting as if things make sense.” He drew his hand free of hers and touched her face again. Could it be true, as Ellen claimed, that all women hate to be touched? He said, “The Mormons start with this insane, made-up history—Jesus Christ coming to someplace like Peru, where he meets not only Indians but also white people who look exactly like Charlton Heston playing Moses—and out of this craziness they make a huge, rich church, complete with army and police, or anyway so people will tell you out in Utah; they make a whole new style of architecture, new theory of the universe, new system of family relationships. … It’s an amazing accomplishment, when you think about it. They’ve stepped out of normal time and space, and so far as you can tell, most of ’em aren’t even aware of the fact.”
“All religions are like that,” she said. Again she stopped his hand.
“I don’t know. The Mormons seem pretty special. Anyhow, they take care of each other. There’s something to be said for that.”
“I’d just as soon take care of myself,” she said, and closed her eyes.
He drew his hand back and lay still, looking at her eyelashes, the faint suggestion of veins in her forehead, feeling gloom rise in him, recalling to him its cause, that soon he must leave her.
It was true, Mickelsson thought: she really would just as soon take care of herself. A true, natural feminist—unless perhaps she’d gotten her ideas from TV. All at once he thought he understood something. She would talk with him for hours as if with interest, sometimes closely watching his face as he answered some question she’d put to him, exactly as she would do if she cared about his opinion, that is, loved him; yet she insisted, over and over, that she did not love him—liked him, certainly; liked everyone, why not?—but love: no; never. She’s wrong, he thought, and felt his heart lift. She’s lying to herself, from her fear of entrapment. How she could love him—how anyone could love him—was a question he did not feel up to this morning; but suddenly he was absolutely sure that she did indeed love him. In the crisp morning light, the cracked paint on the window sash was like writing, like some form of Arabic. His eyes moved on to the wallpaper, dark gray and green on a base so yellowed it looked scorched. The tight wallpaper design looked as though it, too, might be writing. He looked at the pattern of veins in her chest and thought—not quite seriously but seriously playing with the possibility—that at any instant, if in some way his mind-set could be minutely shifted, she too would be language, all mysteries revealed.
“I have to go,” he said.
She nodded, still with her eyes closed. “I’m glad you came.”
He eased up onto the side of the bed, reached down for his socks, and put them on, then got into his undershorts and shirt.
She asked, half sitting up, “Peter, could you hand me that plastic pill thing on the dresser?”
He did. It was a pink plastic, numbered birth-control-pill dispenser. She thanked him, got out a pill, then whispered, “Shit.”
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I forgot my damn pill yesterday,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll just take two today. It’s all right. Don’t look so panicky!” She laughed, delighted by the no doubt old-maidish look of horror on his face. “It’s all right, believe me. It’s happened before. Don’t worry about ole Donnie, kiddo! She’s strictly professional!”
“Christ, I hope so,” he said. He put on his shoes.
She lay back, moving over into the middle of the bed, now that he was out of it, and spread her legs wide. She smiled, not enough to let the broken tooth show. “Think of me,” she said, then pursed her lips as if to kiss the air.
“Don’t worry,” he said gloomily, cinching his belt. He turned his back to her, his heart growing heavier, darker by the moment, as much with guilt and self-revulsion as with sorrow; he counted out the money and slipped one corner of the stack of bills under the base of the elf lamp on her dresser; then he picked up his hat, cane, and overcoat in the livingroom, fixed the nightlatch so the door would lock behind him, and let himself out.
He hardly noticed when someone on the stairway said, “Morning, Professor.” But then it came through to him, and he stopped, looking down the third-floor hallway in the direction of the two black-coated young men. At the fat man’s door they stopped walking and, looking back, saw him watching them. The dark-haired one smiled and nodded a second greeting while the blond one reached toward the fat man’s door and knocked. Needless to feel alarm at being caught coming out of her apartment, he saw now. They wouldn’t tell. In all probability those poor shabby innocents didn’t even know what kind of business she ran. (Do them good, he thought; one night with Donnie Matthews. Both of them together, so they could spy on each other, keep up the ole support system.)
He heard the fat man’s voice, then the door opening on its chain. Odd that he would open it at all, Mickelsson thought. No doubt after a time one grew lax. He put his left hand on the bannister, his right holding the cane by its silver head, and started down.
Around eleven that morning he was roused from desperately needed sleep by the jangling of the phone. He got up, shaking his head, rubbing his eyes, clearing his throat to get his voice operational, crossed to the phone on the bedroom wall and answered. When he heard the voice at the other end, he at first thought someone must be playing a prank on him. The voice was absurdly nasalized and flattened, almost exactly the voice of Bugs Bunny, but the accent was desperately low-class Italian, too extreme by many degrees to be real, and the words the voice spoke were so comically mad—or such was Mickelsson’s first impression—so unprompted, simultaneously hysterical and bellicose, reminiscent of the long-ago radio-days wackos who lived on Allen’s Alley, that he smiled as he listened, trying to think who would do this to him, until little by little the smile decayed and he understood that the maniac on the line was serious.
“Professor Mickelsson?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Ernest diSapio, that’s right diSapio as in ‘sap,’ but don’t count on it; I’m with the Internal Revenue Service, Scranton office, and I have here on my desk a letter allegedly written by you to this office on October twelfth. You claim in this letter that the I.R.S. has been harassing and bird-dogging you, according to your presumption because you dint pay your taxes in seventy-nine or even file them properly as the law prescribes. I wunt go around making charges of that nature if I was in your position, Professor, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m now calling you to tell you two things, which the first is, we don’t bird-dog, we don’t need to, because the power is with us as you will see if you keep vilating federal law and trying to play cat and mouse with the Service, in fact we dint even know you was in the area and no longer in Binghamton, New York, until your letter let it slip. And which the second is, I have now been personally assigned to your case and I strongly advise you to cooperate in the fullest.”
“Who is this?” Mickelsson asked.
“My name as I said earlier is Ernest diSapio, and I’m an agent with the Internal Revenue Service, Scranton office, P.O. Box 496, Scranton, Pennsylvania.”
“Wait a minute,” Mickelsson said. Tentatively, he smiled.
“I would like you to be here in my office between nine and eleven on Monday morning, November seventeenth, with a fully documented account of—”
“Hey, hold on,” Mickelsson said, his anger rising now. “I don’t know if this call is a joke or not, but I teach on Mondays, and I have no intention—”
“I can show you pretty quickly that this is no joke. I have the power to swear out a warrant for your arrest. If I was you, Professor—”
“Listen, Mr. Sapio or whoever you are, I don’t know why you’re taking this tone with me, but I assure you I don’t like it. It may be that all you ever deal with is criminals, in which case I’m sorry for you, but I am not a criminal, and I must ask you to keep a civil tongue in your head.” He was trembling a little. In a minute he’d be shouting.
“You’re not a criminal, I’m glad to hear it. In that case I’m sure you will have no objection to meeting me in this office between nine and eleven on November seventeenth. The address—”
“Slow down, God damn it!” Mickelsson shouted. “As I’ve told you already, I teach on Mondays. Besides that, I have no information to give you, everything I have is with my lawyer, you’ll have to talk with him.”
“Mr. Mickelsson, I don’t want to play games with you. In my book you’re a skip: you moved from Binghamton, New York, without sending us notification; in 1977 you filed but neglected to pay your taxes, and in both seventy-eight and seventy-nine you filed late and again have not paid. Now you may have explanations for all the above, but since you dint see fit to give them in your letter of complaint to this office, and since your attitude is clearly hostile to the work of this office—”
“However that may be,” Mickelsson said, controlling himself, suddenly aware that the maniac really might have the power he claimed, “I cannot give you the information you want; you’ll have to talk to my lawyer. I’ll give you his name and phone number.”
There was a pause. At last diSapio said, “Very well. Let me have ’em.”
He gave the man Jake Finney’s name and number.
“All right, Professor Mickelsson,” diSapio said, “I’ll be back in touch. If I was you I’d get a lawyer in Pennsylvania. You’re gonna need it.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you.” Just before diSapio hung up, Mickelsson remembered and said: “One more thing. You say the I.R.S. has not been spying on me? I’m sorry to bother you, and I’m certainly sorry to have accused you falsely, if I have—I don’t blame you for being cross, I suppose—but there’s been someone, so to speak, keeping tabs on me, one of those dark green unmarked cars. …”
“Not us, Professor. According to my records you’re separated from your wife. Maybe she’s put a private dick on you.”
“That’s not her style,” Mickelsson said, mostly to himself.
“Sorry I can’t help you,” diSapio said. Suddenly his voice was friendly, amused. With the change in tone he seemed to Mickelsson more than ever the voice of the Reich: savage, primordial, merciless.
“Well, thanks.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
That afternoon when he tried to work on his blockbuster book, he found his mind was cement. Not only could he not write, he could see no value in anything he’d written. He remembered how pleased he’d been by some of the pages stacked beside the typewriter, but reading them over now, trying to give them every benefit of the doubt, he thought he must simply have been insane. It was, when one thought about it soberly, the stupidest project imaginable—a blockbuster philosophy book! He turned off the electric typewriter—all the time he’d spent looking at his finished pages, he’d allowed it to hum to him—then stood up and raised the sheaf of papers in his hand, about to throw them in the wastebasket. At the last moment he changed his mind: perhaps another day they wouldn’t seem so bad, would at least seem revisable. He put them bade beside the typewriter, face down. He would work a little more on the house.
That night he began on the hardest of the jobs he’d set himself, the transformation of the crooked, unheated workroom into what would be, eventually, his diningroom. It had seemed an almost impossible job all those afternoons and nights when he’d stood looking in at it, sipping a drink, thinking about what had to be done. There was a double sink to be taken out; a workbench; crude, cheaply stained pine cupboards and shelves; wallpaper and one stretch of panelling to be torn away, then linoleum flooring and the waterstained false ceiling. But once he’d put his gloves on and begun to tear into it with the wreckingbar—his pipe and a glass of gin for company, on the portable radio some newscaster talking about Reagan’s vast support in Texas and his “undisclosed plan” for freeing the hostages—the work of demolition went more quickly than he would have thought possible. The shelves and cupboards had been carelessly put up and came out easily. The sink was not much harder, and the panelling came off in three fierce yanks. The fiberboard ceiling panels broke away like cake, and, climbing once more onto his rickety chair, he began on the wallpapered plaster and lath. By four in the morning, when he was on his third glass of gin and the ceiling was half down, his neck and shoulders numb from his exertion, he began to make discoveries. (He’d turned off the staticky radio long since.) At the far end of the room every second beam was missing, and those that remained were support-braced and blackened by fire. Even more interesting was the fact that here, as nowhere else in the house, the nails were square. It was the oldest section, then, as he’d suspected. Probably this room and the attic above it were all there had been of the house for a good many years. No wonder it had gone through so many wallpapers, so many changes of function.
He worked in a kind of dream, almost a trance, the room so full of dust that he could barely see. He wore a mask over his nose and mouth, goggles over his eyes. His pipe and the glass of gin on the floor in the corner of the room he’d covered with his handkerchief. From time to time he stopped to replace the filter in the mask and clean the goggles, but increasingly it became an idle gesture: even with the door open, propped against the woodpile, the turbulent dust and floating wallpaper chips made the room so dark and murky it was like working at the bottom of the sea.
He would not remember later what thoughts came as he worked. After painting, sanding, making various fairly extensive repairs to the other rooms, he was used to the way the mind drifted freely when the body was engaged; but never before tonight had it been quite like this. It was not just the gin, the heavy darkness of dust through which he moved, wandering half lost in a room only fourteen by twenty—though both the gin and the dustcloud no doubt had their part in it. Lath and plaster, breaking away from the beams, opened squares of darkness like revelations. He stared deep into them but could see nothing, neither attic roof nor sky. With each tear-away of plaster and lath, dirt fell down into the room as from a shovel (he thought of Freddy Rogers’ stone falls), struck the floor with a thud, and billowed upward again, pushing up like smoke all around him. In his mind he saw the dog floating through weeds like a black swan on a lake, and saw Pearson marching along the mountain with his dowsing rod, his whole soul and body intent on the discovery theoretically impossible for him to make. Witchcraft drifted into Mickelsson’s mind and seemed to him normal, not surprising: he imagined Pearson bent over a table where there were gloves, perhaps fingernails, speaking the name of the person they belonged to, drawing her toward him through the night. He tried to think where he’d gotten that image—something he’d seen, or possibly something someone had told him. But nothing came. Pearson had been joking, no doubt; so Mickelsson had by now convinced himself. A “waterwitch,” maybe; not really a witch. Yet in the dark, dust-filled room it seemed clear that no joke was ever wholly or solely a joke, not even what Rogers had called the “kidding around” of the universe. Whatever it occurred to one to say—anyone—was at some level true. At any rate, this much seemed sure: that Pearson was at one with the world in a way Peter Mickelsson was not. He knew without looking where the dog had gone off to, knew even what was happening under the ground. He thought of Pearson’s words, “Most likely you see ’em and just don’t notice.” It was a theory that Mickelsson had encountered before, that psychic insights are for the most part trivial: a vague intrusion of someone else’s personality, foreknowledge of a speed-trap, or that a letter of no real importance will be waiting in one’s mailbox. His grandfather, after the arrival of his gift, had for the most part had visions as clear and detailed as applecrates on a hayrack, but there were times all he got was hunches, like the hunches of a blind man.
He found himself imagining—staring into the dust—the outlines of a shabby woodstove at the far end of the room, a gaunt, middle-aged woman in a gray dress bending down beside it, reaching toward a wood-box. In her right hand she had a wadded-up hankie. Had she been crying, perhaps? That was how the fire would have started, yes. A woman full of troubles, no longer alert, an unsafe old stove … He could know a good deal about the house, if he let himself. Long before the doomed brother and sister had lived there, there had to have been other generations, people who’d grown old in the house when it was only a one- or two-room saltbox. He thought about what kind of man would have built the place—cleared the trees, dug the foundation, notched the cornerbeams and nailed up the walls. Perhaps a young settler not even in his twenties, proud of himself, joyful in his freedom from dull New England parents, or parents back in Germany—a young man with a blond young wife as charged with animal vitality as he was, a big-smiled, big-bosomed, strong-legged young woman he fucked every night till the roof shook. He imagined it so vividly his genitals tingled; meanwhile the unhappy woman in gray—some long-forgotten cousin or aunt, perhaps, or some Wisconsin neighbor—stood at a dark, thick table, kneading bread. Her hands moved with an odd ferocity, as if driven by inner violence. He could smell the bread-dough, sweet and yeasty. The woman’s head was bowed, her black hair rolled up and pinned. Between the two narrow cords at the back of her neck lay a dark, deep valley.
Then for a while he seemed to think nothing at all, simply watched the wreckingbar stab deep beneath the plaster and lath and pry them free. Once he barked his knuckles and swore; yet in a way he was pleased, remembering his father’s hands, and his uncle’s. Once, reaching down for what he thought to be a large scrap of wallpaper, he discovered with a start—as if the wallpaper had magically changed in his hand—the picture of Jesus looking sadly toward Heaven, a beautiful young man with no hope for humanity or himself. He thought of his son’s look of sorrowful detachment as he rode in the Marin Riding Show, winning prize after prize, a born athlete—his sister clapping wildly and shouting herself voiceless, Mickelsson beaming, his weight-lifter arms folded on his wide chest. “Son, I can’t tell you how proud we are!” Mickelsson had said as they drove home. His son had said, “Thanks,” and without another word had turned to stare out the window. “Did I say something wrong?” Mickelsson had asked his wife. She’d smiled, her large teeth brilliant, as always, and had said nothing. His only consolation was that Leslie too seemed baffled, her expression as thoughtful as a cat’s. And now, as if there were some connection, Mickelsson’s thought drifted to the un-beautiful, earnest young Mormons pressing through the world with red noses and ears—like ants, like bees, as Pearson had said—urging their gospel of safety in numbers, organized conspiracy against death and the Devil, Utah’s vast army of locked-together minds. They would prevail, no question about it. They, with their plain, shabby clothes, their dull eyes, were the Future, the terrible survivors. They were good with computers, wonderful at business administration; no unruly habits.
While he was thinking this—concerned, really, about his own situation, and even that not quite consciously, his attention unfocused, only dimly aware of why the Mormons so bothered him in his present mood—a man adrift between yellow-lighted worlds like a dustcloud mindlessly wandering in space, toying with the possibility of collapsing into a planet—Mickelsson thought he heard a woman’s voice say, angrily but desperately hiding her anger, “I’m not well, I guess,” and then another voice answering with a grunt. Surprised, Mickelsson turned his head, straining to pierce the room’s dimness, but there was nothing; a dream-voice, some old memory. He shook his head as if to wake himself, then sucked in breath and stabbed hard into the plaster and lath, prying away a great hunk above the door into the livingroom. “Dad?” someone said, making Mickelsson jump. But no; another dream. As the wall-section fell he heard a clink such as coins might make, or old brass jewelry. He got down off the chair, stepping clumsily because his legs were overtired, and bent down to sort with his gloved hand through the trash on the floor. After a moment, he found something and raised it toward his goggles to study it more closely: an old-fashioned wooden cheesebox with a sliding top. He forced the top open; then, removing the glove from his right hand, still holding the box up close to his goggles, poked inside with two fingers. The box was full of keys.
Mickelsson carried the box into the livingroom, carefully closing the door of the dust-filled workroom behind him. Slipping off his goggles and mask, he bent by the lamp in the corner to inspect his find more closely. It was evident at a glance that whatever doors, gates, trunks, or boxes the keys had once opened, whatever treasures or keepsakes they had guarded—whatever hands had turned those keys or reached in for the keepsakes—had long since vanished from the earth.
That instant a crash came from the cellar, right under his feet. He strode to the cellar door, determined this time to catch the damn thing, whatever it might be. He opened the door, switched the light on, and thudded on wobbly legs down the steep, narrow steps, almost falling in his haste. He stopped at the bottom and looked carefully all around. Mouldy, crooked beams, the filthy oil furnace, shelves crammed with rusted, mouldering paint cans—all he had left from the mountains of junk that had lain here when he came … He could see no sign of an intruder. The shadows seemed to peer back at him, like children in hiding, but nothing moved. Was it possible, he wondered, that rattlesnakes could come into a cellar and, in its warmth, stay awake through the winter? Not likely. He would get a book from the library, try to find out. Probably it was rats. Carefully, step by step, he went back up to the kitchen, watching and listening all the way. In his gloved left hand he held an old rusted key, the teeth blurred away to nothing. He imagined he smelled freshly baked cake. Then the scent was gone.