Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Under the circumstances,” Paula said, “I’m not certain congratulations are entirely in order.”

“Oh yes,” Judith said, “of course they are. I’m going to Heaven and Sam’s going to the Administration Building.”

She seemed actually gay, her jaundice a kind of radiance. She was gay, even her crazy close-order drill less irritating than it could have been. There was a sort of warmth and comradeship in their edgy intimacy. There was a kind of truth in truth, Cornell thought. “How do you know you’re going to Heaven?” he asked.

“My rector thinks so, all the church ladies do. Besides,” she said, “the Bible tells me so.” She grinned. “Well,” she said, “if you can’t put your friends through it, what good are they anyway? I’ve put you people through it this afternoon. You’re good sports. Once in a while you weren’t even humoring me. You deserve a reward.”

“I couldn’t touch another malted,” Messenger said.

“No,” she said, “no more malteds. You know,” she said, “these are still the good times. No one’s ever paid this much attention to me. Not even when I was mad. But now, in the springtime of my death, when the pain is still manageable and discomfort’s only the mildest death duty, easily paid, easily confused with convalescence even; now, when my weight is down and I look as I used to as a girl, better really, for I was crazed then and had on me the stretch marks of my terror, now it’s all easy and there are hold buttons on my telephones and people bring us their covered chafing dishes and best recipes all made up and ready to go like take-out or room service and there’s nothing to do but visit with my girls when they come in all tan from the club, scrubbed as princesses, and I’ve time and inclination to answer all their questions, posing others that they dare not ask, stuffing them like French geese with hope and love, it’s not so bad.

“I’ve no recriminations, none at all.

“But dying’s like the marathon, I think. There’s no way to go the distance till you’ve gone it. And sooner or later you hit the wall and whimper if you cannot scream. I seem a saint and so far think I am one.

“Listen, everyone. I make this pledge to you. There will be no trips to Mexico for Laetrile, and I’ll never call out for any other of those fast-food fixes of the hopeful doomed. Neither will I be wired to any of those medical busy-boxes to extend for one damned minute what only a fool would call my life. If Jesus wants me He can have me. To tell you the truth, He can probably use me.

“Now, Cornell, I want a favor.”

“Of course, Judith,” Messenger said, “if there’s anything I can do.”

“I want you to take over my Meals-on-Wheels route.”

Because he knew Coule’s type. Recognized retrospectively the solid, bulldog centers of gravity of his kind, his big-bodied, full-bellied, hard-handed, heavy-hammed, iron-armed, thick-throated, barrel-chested lineman likenesses and congeners. Not overgrown, like giants, say, such men did not, or so it seemed to Mills, even possess glands, lacking not a pituitary so much as the space for one, mass not a function of secretions, of body-buried wells of the cellular juices splashed and splattered indiscriminately throughout the skeletal sluices of their frames, nothing endocrinic, hormonal, for there could have been no more room for these, or for organs either, than there was for glands, their insides pure prime meat, human steak all the way through, gristled perhaps and marbled possibly and certainly scaffolded with bone, but nothing liquid to account for size, and even their blood only for coloring, flesh tones, flush; their pee and excrement, too, merely variants of their blood’s limited palette, affected by the air perhaps, the light, like exposed film. So nothing leviathan in their genes — he’d seen their parents, their brothers and sisters like the law of averages — their physical displacement a kind of decision, the ukase of their boom town wills, their realtor reality. And many were realtors, or at least landlords. It would have been difficult not to be in the Florida of the thirties, even though this wasn’t Miami or even Tampa or Jacksonville, even though it wasn’t anywhere oceaned, beached, or even, particularly, mild.

It was Cassadaga, and except for the fact that George knew they had come south, that he and his mother and father had changed their lives and been translated to a state called Florida — he had no memory of how they’d gotten there, probably some of the way by bus, some by hitchhiking — where his father meant to pick oranges, become a migrant worker, it could have been not Milwaukee, since Milwaukee was a city of some size and Cassadaga was barely a town, but some residential neighborhood in Milwaukee. Stucco might never have been invented or Florida so new it had not yet become indigenous there, its properties undiscovered, it no more occurring to the other Easterners and Midwesterners to mix cement and sand and hydrated lime to make their homes than to build them out of thatch. So the houses were wooden as the trees, the ordinary oaks and elms and maples of any Iowa or Wisconsin yard or street. And perhaps that’s why he had no memory of how they’d gotten there (he’d seen no sea, no gulls or beach), because the landscape was the same he’d lived in all his nontropical, Tropic of Cancer life, along the bland, unrainy seasoned peel of earth with its gray and temperate gifts of the to-scale regular.

He did not even know where the oranges would be, could be. There were no groves near Cassadaga, nothing citrus in the odor of the wind. He’d seen more fruit in Milwaukee. And no palm trees except for the one by the bench in the town’s small square, its tall stem and leaves like an immense shredded umbrella.

“That’s a tree?” he’d asked.

“Hell,” his father said, “I don’t know if it’s even wood.”

He pointed to its sky-high shells, shaggy, brown as bowel, clustered as cannonball or the cabbages in produce bins. “Are the oranges inside those things?”

“If they are you don’t pick oranges, you climb them.”

Because this is where they’d been dropped, the young men who’d given them the ride — it was their journey he couldn’t recall, not their arrival — driving on toward Daytona Beach. “Looks nice and homey,” one of them said. “You should be able to get a room here. Tomorrow you can walk the few yards to where the groves begin.”

They had no luggage to speak of, only the single suitcase between them which contained not all their clothes but all the clothes which they still had, which they had not sold along with their furniture and dishes and odds and ends in order to get a nest egg together, a stake, to make the trip. Anyway, they had all the clothes which they believed they would need in the hot new climate to which they believed they had come — socks, the three changes of boys’ and men’s and women’s underwear, the two sets of overalls and denim workshirts, the two cotton dresses. They had not even brought handkerchiefs because they thought they had come to a place where no one caught cold. They had not brought anything dressy for Sundays. They were not religious and so wouldn’t need anything for church. For Sundays and holidays there were the three brand new bathing suits in the brand new valise. The only other things in the grip were a change of sheets and pillowslips and a large box of laundry powder. They were ready to make their new life, traveling light as any three people could who had excised not only fall and winter from their lives but the very idea of temperature.

And so if Cassadaga looked homey — and it did — they looked, save for the single clue of the single suitcase, already at home.