Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Get your ass out my sofa.”

“But legally, you see, it isn’t your sofa. It’s Laglichio’s sofa till you pay him for moving it for you out into the street. But it’s okay. I’ll get up. Don’t get sore.”

“Is there some trouble here?”

“No, deputy. Don’t bother yourself. The lady’s a little upset’s all there’s to it.” And he might wink, sometimes at the cop, sometimes at the woman.

“How this happen?” the woman cried. “How this come to be?”

“Poor folks,” Mills said philosophically.

“What you talkin’ poor folks, white folks?”

“Oh no,” he’d say courteously, interested as always in the mystery, the special oddness of his life. “You must understand. It’s difficult to fail in America.”

“Yeah? I never had no trouble. None my people ever found it so tough. Look at Rodney. He be young. He be my youngest. All this exciting to him. He think he gonna live and play outside here on the pavement an’ I never have to call him. Why, this be sweet to Rodney. Ignorant. Ignorant and dreamful. But soon’s he get his size it don’t be no hardship to fail.”

“My people do awful things to your people, but even so it’s hard, it’s hard to fail. Simple animal patience will take you immense distances. Bag in the National, horse the carts in the parking lot. Make stock boy. In a couple of years you’ll trim lettuce, in a couple more you’ll be doing the produce like flower arrangements. No no, lady. Success is downhill all the way. You put in your time, you wait your turn. Not me, not any Mills ever. A thousand years of stall and standstill passed on like a baton.”

“How this cost me money?”

“No no. Nothing I say costs people money.”

Laglichio appeared in the doorway and signaled Mills toward him.

“Did she sign?”

“No.”

“Then what were you shooting the shit about? Here, give me the papers.” Laglichio returned with the executed forms. “I told her the papers proved it was her furniture. That’s all you got to say. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Sure,” Mills said.

“You know something, George?” Laglichio said. “You ain’t strong. You don’t lift high. You’re what now? Fifty? Fifty something? You ain’t got the muscle for this. What am I going to do with you, George? You ain’t got the beef for this business. And any white man who can’t get a nigger to sign a binding legal paper probably ain’t got the brains for it neither. Put the shit in the truck and let’s get out of here.”

He wasn’t strong. At best he was a student of leverage, knowledgeable about angles, overhangs, the sharp switchbacks in stairways. He was very efficient, scholarly as a geologist about floor plans, layouts, seeing them in his head, someone with an actual gift for anticipating and defying tight squeezes, lubricant as a harbor pilot. Not mechanically inclined but centrifugally, centripetally, careful as a cripple. And the furniture of the poor was light, something inflated and cut corner about it that reduced weight and turned it to size. He wore the quilted protective pads of long-distance furniture removers and affected their wide leather belts and heavy work shoes and gave the impression, his body robed in its gray green upholstery, of someone dressed in mats, drop cloth. He thought he looked rather like a horse.

Laglichio would not fire him. Mills was not union. Often laid off but rarely fired, he was a worker in trades that jerked to the whims of the economy, a stumbling Dow-Jones of a man. It was this that had brought him to Laglichio in the first place. He worked in unemployment-related industries.

Mills and Lewis, the driver, had started to load the truck. The child was crying while his mother painted a bleak picture of homelessness and bedlessness, table and chairlessness, an empty landscape of helpless exile.

“Where we sleep, Mama?”

“Ask that white man where we sleep.”

“Where we eat?”

“You ask them white men.”

“Where we go to the toilet?”

“We just have to hold it in.”

Rodney clutched his teddy bear, its nap so worn it seemed hairless, a denuded embryo, and howled.

Laglichio nudged Mills. George sighed and picked up a carton of broken toys he’d packed. He hesitated for a moment and tried to hand the carton off to Lewis. Laglichio shook his head and, using only his jaw, indicated Mills’s elaborate route, past the couch, by the lamps, through the randomly placed chairs.

“What’s that you’re carrying, George?” Laglichio called in a loud voice.

“Toys,” Mills mumbled.

“Toys?” Laglichio called out. “Toys you say?”

“I’m fixing to load them on the truck,” he recited.

“Toys? Boys’ toys?”

“They’re toys,” Mills said. “That’s all I know.”

Laglichio came up to where Mills was standing amid a small crowd of neighbors who had begun to gather. “Are those your toys, sonny?” Laglichio asked the boy. “Show him,” he commanded George. Mills put the carton down and undid the cardboard cross-hatching. “Are those them?” Laglichio asked the kid kindly. The child nodded. “You give him back his playthings,” he demanded. “You give this boy back his bunnies and switchblades.” The little boy looked at Mills suspiciously. “What’s your name, kiddo?” Laglichio asked. “What’s his name?” he asked the woman.

“It’s Rodney,” Mills said. Laglichio glared at the furniture mover.

“Go ahead, angelbabes,” Laglichio said, “take them back.”

Rodney looked away from the dead balls, broken cars and ruined, incomplete board games to his mother. The woman nodded her head wearily and the boy took the box.

“All right,” Laglichio said, “my men got their work to do.” He glanced at the deputy, a black man who shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

“Folks in trouble want their privacy,” he said softly. “Don’t shame her,” he said, working the crowd until there wasn’t a soul left to witness.

“Hotshot,” Laglichio said to Mills in the truck. “Big guy hotshot. ‘Rodney.’ You almost blew it for the kid, you know that? I had a mind to keep that shit for spare parts. Donate them to Goodwill Industries and take the tax write-off. Don’t you understand yet,” Laglichio lectured him, though he was fifteen years Mills’s junior, “what I do? It’s orchestrated. It’s a fucking dance what I do. On eggshells. You’re always bitching to me and Lewis here about how poor you are. This is because you don’t think. The subtleties escape you. You don’t have a clue what goes on.”

“I have a clue,” Mills muttered.

“Yeah? Do you? Yeah? There were riots before I took over. Riots. You think a lousy deputy could do diddly with that kind of shit coming down? They had them. Blacker than the boys I use. The city gives me seventy-five bucks. You think that’s a rip-off? It’s no rip-off. I save the taxpayer a dozen times that much just in the blood that ain’t spilled, that don’t have to be replaced by transfusions.”

He understood. He loved the shoptalk of the go-getters, loved to hear wealth’s side of things. And Laglichio enjoyed giving his tips, took pleasure not only in the boasts but in sharing his secrets, outrageously touting them, daring Mills with proposition, low down, the goods, his insider’s inside jobs and word in the ear.

Once, Mills’s car wouldn’t start, the battery dead, and Laglichio had to come with Lewis to pick him up in the truck. Mills was waiting when they drove up but he’d forgotten his lunch and had to go back into the house to get it. Laglichio couldn’t have been waiting for him more than two minutes.

“I noted this morning,” Laglichio told him later, “seventeen seven got a For Sale sign up.” Seventeen seven was the bungalow next to Mills’s. It seemed, if only because it was unoccupied — the owner, a woman in her eighties, had died a few months earlier — even shabbier than his own. “You buy that house, George.”