Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Look here,” his father said. He was standing by an immense glass-enclosed hoarding at the entrance to the square. “It’s the church directory. Just look at them all. Did you ever see so many? Maybe it ain’t even Florida. Maybe we hitchhiked all the way to Rome.”

“I don’t see any churches,” his mother told his father. “Seems in a town as tiny and churchy as this one you’d be able to spot at least one spire. Wouldn’t you think so, George?”

“Maybe there’s an ordinance against them. Maybe they only run the crosses up on Sundays, like flags on the Fourth of July.”

“Oh, George,” his mother said.

“Well,” his father said, “we didn’t come all this way to sightsee. And tomorrow we got to look for work. I think our best bet is to find somewhere we can get a place to sleep. You tired, George?”

“Yes, sir,” George said.

They walked through the little town. Mills remembered it yet. It was a paradigm of neighborhood, not a town but a constituency, not a place but a vicinity, homogeneous as graveyard or forest or a field of wheat. There were no stores or gas stations, no public buildings, neither school nor library nor jailhouse — whatever of municipality or commonwealth, canton, arrondissement, deme or nome, whatever of government itself centripetalized in the bench in the small square. There were no churches.

“I think it must be one of those suburbs,” his father said.

“What of?” said his mother.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Maybe the highway.”

They passed several blocks of neat frame houses, not identical but all lawned, porched and porch-swing’d. Many had gardens, some narrow driveways that led to tiny garages that looked like scaled-down versions of the houses themselves.

They walked up a side street, turned south at the corner, went down that street and entered another side street. They turned at another corner. It was the same everywhere they walked. (He was carrying the suitcase now. It was that light.)

They came out of the town and were in open country.

“I think those houses must be the main crop around here.”

“Oh, George,” his mother said.

“Look there,” his father said. He pointed to the open country. “They must already have harvested that part.”

“Oh, George,” his mother said. “You tired, honey?” she asked Mills.

“A little I guess,” he said.

“Here. Give me that.” She took the suitcase from him. “We better turn back, George. The kid’s falling off his feet.”

“Suits me,” his father said, “but I didn’t see signs for lodging, no folks either, if it comes to that.”

“We’ll just knock and ask if they have a room. Some of these houses must be where the ministers live.”

(George had seen the owners’ shingles nailed to their front doors like addresses or planted in their yards like For Sale signs, the saw-toothed, varnished boards suggestive of resorts, fishing lodges, summer camps, things Indian, rustic, though the names on them were almost defiantly white.)

“That’s what I was thinking,” his father said. “Give me the case. We’ll just go back into town and ask if we can be put up for the night in some spare room of the parsonage. I don’t expect they’d charge travelers and strangers too much if they at least looked like Christians.”

“I don’t remember how to say grace,” his mother said.

“You can remember how to say amen,” his father said. “Just fold your hands and try to look like you don’t deserve what they feed you.”

His father was not a bitter man. Like all the George Millses before him, he had known subsistence but rarely hardship, treading subsistence like deep water but never really frightened, comfortable enough in his own dubious element as steeplejacks or foretopmen in theirs. So the Depression was no real setback for him. Indeed, it had presented possibilities to him, an opening of options. He had all the skills of the unskilled, chopping, digging, fetching, a hewer and drawer of a man, not strong so much as knowledgeable about weight, knowing weight’s hidden handholds the way a diamond cutter might know the directions and cleavage points of a gem merely by glancing at it. So it would not have been correct to say that the Depression had changed their lives or even that they had come south to seek their fortune. It would never have occurred to Mills that fortune could actually be sought. Fortune, if it had been his birthright ever to have more than he could use, would have sought him, it, She, Fortune, in his father’s view, being a sort of custom tailor of the goddesses, like talent perhaps, who did all the really hard work. “I promise you we’ll never starve,” his father had told him once, “we’ll never even go hungry. We won’t freeze for want of shelter or die for lack of medicine. We’re only low. We ain’t down.” So if they came to Florida to find employment it was because his father understood that there were chores in Florida too, that the menial was pretty much evenly distributed throughout the world, that Florida had its weight as well as Milwaukee — he’d shoveled coal there, been a janitor, collected garbage — its tasks and chores, odd jobs, stints, and shifts. “Our kind,” he assured his son, “could find nigger work in Paradise. What, you think it isn’t dirty here just because the sun is shining?”

So it was only a change of scene he’d wanted. And hadn’t gotten yet. “Maybe we aren’t close enough yet, maybe we’re still too high up the slope of the world. Maybe we have to be where all you have to do is just nudge a stone with your shoe and it rolls all the way downhill to the equator. But whatever, I don’t see no parrots in this neighborhood. I ain’t spotted any alligators.” (Because they’d been in Florida better than a day now, crossing from Dothan, Alabama, into Marianna, Florida, passing Tallahassee and Gainesville and Ocala and De Land, all of which could have been Northern towns except for the souvenirs in the gas stations and grocery stores — the toy ’gators and candies in the shape of oranges and grapefruits, the rubber tomahawks and Seminole jewelry, drinking glasses with scenes of St. Petersburg, Miami, Florida’s keys, fishing tackle with deep-sea, heavy-duty line — where they bought his father’s cigarettes and his mother the makings, the dry cereals and packaged breads and luncheon meats and quarts of milk, for their meals. There were suntan lotions on the drugstore shelves, cheap sunglasses on pasteboard cards. This is where his mother had bought their three new swimsuits. “It stands to reason,” she’d said before they’d ever left Wisconsin, “bathing trunks have to be cheaper down there.” And picked out the swimsuits in the first town they came to after they crossed the state line. “Sure,” his father had said, still good-humored, “maybe we should never have got George that cloth alligator when we were still up North. I think we made a mistake there. That stands to reason too. A cloth souvenir toy doll lizard should cost a lot less money in some grocery store near the swamps where there ain’t no call for pretend alligators because there’s the real thing snapping at your toes no further off than the distance of your own height.”) But still good mooded, the absence of physical evidence that they were there still within the acceptable limits of credulity. It was only late summer. They would have to wait months yet before they would get the benefit of the hot winter weather, before they would have any reason to wonder where the snow was, where the ice. His father’s mild complaint about the whereabouts of the strange birds and animals only the teasing echo of his own kid questions and alerted suspicions. He was obviously enjoying himself, the twelve-hundred-mile journey they had already come itself a vacation. He was having a good time, his temper was sweet, he was feeling fine, even the queer, beachless, ungoverned and, for all they knew, spare-roomless town a pleasant curiosity. His father, all of them, were happy.