Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Buy it? I already got one just like it.”

“Buy it as an investment. I called the realtor. They’re asking twenty-three thousand. Offer fifteen five. They’ll counteroffer nineteen two. How long is it been vacant?”

“An old lady owned it. She died three or four months ago.”

“Sure,” he said, “I figured. The realtor told me about the old lady but tried to make out she just died. I figured four months. The yard’s too run down. Old people, they could be on their last legs, they could have cancer in one lung and ringworm in the other, but if it’s theirs and it’s paid for they’re still out there patching and scratching. Sure. It’s been on the market four months. Counter their counteroffer. You could nail it down for the address, seventeen seven. Sure,” he said, “ain’t nobody in the market for a house going to buy that house. It’s crying out for a captive audience. Buy it and list it with Welfare. They’ll give ninety-five a month toward the rent. We’re tapped into every homeless son of a bitch in St. Louis here. You could get a hundred fifty a month for it. Depending on your down payment you could clear fifty to seventy-five a month.”

“What down payment? Where would I get it?”

“Take out a second mortgage. Borrow on your equity.”

“We rent.”

“What do you pay down there? A hundred fifty? Am I in the ballpark?”

“A hundred and fifty,” Mills said.

“Sure,” Laglichio said, “I hit a fucking home run. Want me to guess your age and weight?”

Laglichio bought the house himself and asked George to collect his rents for him and to serve as his agent, calling the glaziers whenever a window was smashed. The neighbors were fiercely white, almost hillbilly — the Germans and Catholics and older residents called the newcomers hoosiers — but Laglichio rented only to blacks with small children. The neighbors terrorized them and they moved out quickly, sacrificing not only the month’s rent they had paid in advance but their security money as well. Laglichio realized fifteen to seventeen months’ rent in a normal year.

The hoosiers who lived on Mills’s block had dogged his life for years. They were a strange and ruthless lot, and George Mills feared them, people who had come north not merely or even necessarily from the South so much as from America. From the Illinois and Pennsylvania coal mines and the oilfields of Oklahoma and Texas, the mineral quarries of western Colorado and the timberlands of Minnesota and the Northwest, from the dirt farms of Arkansas and Georgia and the dairy farms of Wisconsin they had come north. There were shrimpers from Louisiana and men who’d raked the clam beds of Carolina’s outer banks. Farmers or fishermen, miners or loggers or drillers for oil, he thought of them as diggers, men of leverage like himself, who worked the planet as you’d worry knots in shoelace, string, prying gifts like tomb robbers, gloved men dislodging stone by stone all the scabs and seals of earth.

They had this in common — that their oceans and forests and hillsides and wells had played out, dried up, gone off. And this, that though they did not read much they believed it all, and believed, too, all they heard, as long as what they read and what they heard was what they already believed. They were not gullible, only devout, high priests of what they knew. Mills knew nothing.

They were armed, almost militial. They owned rifles but few handguns, hunting knives but few switchblades. There were tire irons in the family generations but when they murdered each other they killed like hunters.

Mills’s wife was one of them. Louise had come to St. Louis with her family in 1946 when her father had simply walked away from his farm in Tennessee after three successive years of devastating spring and summer floods. He had hired on with a barge company. “Any experience on the river?” the man who hired him had wanted to know.

“Shit,” his future father-in-law said, “ain’t I navigated my own farm these past three years? Sailed up and down them four hundred acres on every vessel from mule to chicken coop? Man, I been experiencing your river before it ever got to be your river. Since it was only just my own four-hundred-acre sea I been experiencing it.” The old farmer — he was fifty then, though he must have looked younger — signed on with Transamerica Barge Lines as a deckhand from just above St. Louis at Alton, Illinois, to Gretna, Louisiana, six hundred miles south. The round trip took three and a half weeks and he seemed to enjoy his new work. Only when he floated past Tennessee on the return trip did his real feelings come out. “We’re riding my corn now,” he’d tell his mates, indicating the Tennessee portion of the river. “We’re over my soybeans like a sunken treasure. We’re under way in my pasture. The fish down there are some of the best-fed fish in any river in the world.”

At his pilot’s urging he took the test for his seaman’s papers when he was almost sixty. It was as a favor to the pilot — he never studied for it. It was the first test he had taken since the spelling and arithmetic and name-the-state-capitals tests of his childhood and he failed because he did only those questions he didn’t know the answers to, leaving contemptuously blank all those to which he did, his notion being that if you knew a thing you knew it and it was only a sort of chickenshit prying to ask a man to identify pictures of knots he could tie in the dark and identify constellations whose whereabouts he could point to in broad daylight. He worked patiently — his was the last paper in — on the three or four questions which he had no knowledge of, hoping, or thinking it useful rather, to arrive at truth by pondering it. He received the lowest score ever given a man of his experience on the river and he asked if he could have the paper back. The chief — the tests were administered by the Coast Guard then — shrugged and thinking the old man wanted the paper expunged from his records, let him keep it. “Say,” the chief said, “you were the only one to get the part on navigable semicircles. And you did the best job on Maritime Law.” He put the exam in a tin box with his marriage license and Louise’s birth certificate and the now voided mortgage of what he still thought of as his underwater farm. He remained on the river another ten years, serving as cook for the last five of them, though his wife, Margaret — cooks were allowed to travel with their wives — helped with a lot of it.

“It was grand,” Mills’s mother-in-law told him once, “like being on one of those cruises rich people take. Only ours is longer, of course. Why, you’d have to be a queen or at least an heiress to have done all the voyaging we done.” When she drowned north of Memphis her husband asked to be put ashore. He never went back on the river. He refused, he said, to sail those nine or ten upriver trips a year which would take him over his wife’s grave. He dreamed of her in the flooded, overwhelmed corn, her bones and hair indistinguishable from the now shredded, colorless shucks and muddy fibers of his dissolved crops.

Mills himself had not been back to Cassadaga since he was twelve years old.

He wore the same high, cake-shaped baseball caps farmers wear, with their seed or fertilizer insignia like the country of origin of astronauts. His said “Lō-sex 52,” and he often wondered what that was. All the men in his neighborhood, landless as himself, wore such caps, the mysterious patches suggesting sponsored softball teams, leaguely weekends in the city parks. Louise purchased T-shirts for him in discount department stores — she bought all his clothes in such places — beer and soft drink logos blazoned across their front. He could have been a boy outfitted for school. The caps and T-shirts — he had a brass buckle stamped “John Deere”—and khaki trousers were like bits and pieces of mismatched uniform, so that he sometimes looked looterlike, a scavenger in summery battlefields. He still wore a mood ring.