Stanley Elkin: George Mills

“Come on, let’s go then,” Guillalume said.

“I’m staying,” Mills said.

“What? Here? ”

“I don’t wish on no one the injury of my life.”

“What are you talking about?”

Mills explained, sulking, and Guillalume laughed. “Well, that’s a good one all right,” he said, “but it comes a little late after what you told me on the journey. Unless you were lying of course — or boasting.”

“What I told you?”

“In the ripe times, when we cruised geography, when we lay in our sweet, wine-stained straw and listened to the music and watched the girls dance. Not one as pretty as your own, you said. The damage is done. Your son will have been born by now. The generations are unleashed. Get back on your horse.”

But he didn’t. He simply walked off deeper into the forest. He could hear Guillalume call, “Mills? Mills! I’m still your master.”

“I don’t think you’ve jurisdiction in Horseland,” he shouted back.

“Mills? Mills? I have something to tell you. Mills? We’re not lost!” The stableboy turned around. All he could see was the green armor of the woods. And then Guillalume appeared in a green archway he’d made by pushing back two thin saplings. “We’re not lost,” he said again.

“I am.”

“Oh, I don’t know where we are, I don’t claim that, but we’re not lost. Being lost is the inability to find the place you want to be. I’m going to tell you something. I knew the turn-off.”

“What?”

“I knew the turn-off. You were in the lead. I didn’t signal. I let you miss it.”

“But why?”

“You must promise never to tell anyone.”

“Who would I tell?”

“Promise.”

“There’s no one to tell. There’s only barbarians around and I don’t speak Asshole.” Guillalume looked at him. “All right. I promise.”

“They sent us to fight in a holy war. We would both probably have been killed. That’s why I let you go on when we came to the turn-off. Let’s be barbarians, Mills. They don’t have younger sons. Perhaps they don’t even have stableboys.”

This was ten centuries ago. Greatest Grandfather Mills wasn’t born yesterday. His master may well not have had jurisdiction in the — to them — lawless land not to which they’d come but to which they’d been translated by the footloose, fancy-free horses. There were no typewriters then, no room at which an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards in infinite time might have knocked out Hamlet, but, in a way, the just two horses in the just seven months had done just that — not Hamlet, of course, but Adventure, Adventure itself, bringing them through the random, compassless, ever swerving obliquity of tenuously joined place and across the stumbled, almost drunken vaulting of nameless — to them nameless — duchies and borders and diminishing jurisdictions to this — the at last ragged, corey chaos of alien earth. What else was Adventure if it was not only not knowing where one was but where one could be, not only not knowing where one’s next meal was coming from but even what color it was likely to be?

Mills understood this, as he’d understood, was way ahead of, Guillalume’s heartbreaking explanation of fixed men, of the mysteriously gravid and landlocked quality in them that forbade all yeasty rise and usurpation and that put even self-improvement perhaps and the transmigration of privilege certainly — he was not convinced so much that Guillalume was his master as that someone was — out of the question. It was only this — that someone was — that kept him from slicing Guillalume’s throat. Let him rave in his precious italics. (Let’s be barbarians, Mills! Oh do let’s!) He had Guillalume’s younger son number. And even understood what was behind the let’s-be-barbarians crap: the principle of bought time — the sly, unspoken notion that at any moment death could elevate him, like the man who wins the pools, the death of brothers, Guillalume’s long-shot hope. Whereas for him, for his lot, death would merely hammer him — them — more deeply into place, delivering as it would mere heirloom, his father’s — got from his father who got them from his — nasty tools of the Horseshit trade.

Of course he would go with him. It was only for a bit of a sulk that he’d wandered off into the woods within woods where Guillalume had found him.

So he knew his life and, dimly, the lives of his progeny, knew that all men are the founders of their lines, was reconciled, however uneasily, to what seemed to him his excellent educated guess about his fate — to be first among little guys, little men: God’s blue collar worker. To serve, to travel for others; to see much of the world without in the least knowing what stood behind whatever had been left outside, up front, there for all his furlough’d, shore-leave’d fellows — the waterfront bars and strange hoosegows and chief points of interest, all its — the world’s — Tours Eiffel and Empire State Buildings, all its Chinatowns and interesting cathedrals, the capital sights of the capital cities, the velvet ropes around rooms open to the public in palaces, congresses, parliaments in session, a subliminal taste of the foreign for Mills and his kind who would, as Mills had just missed doing, be sent off to fight in foreign lands, serve overseas, living for years at a time perhaps in the trenches and foxholes of French or Indo-Chinese or Korean earth itself, or cooped up in Japanese and German and Holy Roman Empire and Hanseatic prison camps, internment a certainty, and some even to be buried there or, missing in action, never found, but never, no matter the duration, to learn the language or the customs — not even a gawker race of unwelcome men, history’s not even peeping Toms.

But Guillalume had blown it, finessed an entire crusade simply because he wanted to be alive if a brother should die. And of course he would go with him, play the fellow, be for him Guillalume’s very own my Mills, obeying all the reasonable orders, and if there was to be affection why it would probably be Mills himself who would mete it out, serving it up as he might Guillalume’s dinner. No harm done. It was adventure he was after — he’d only just learned this — and Guillalume was the key, holding as he did all the credentials, for Guillalume was the founder of his race, too, though, unlike Mills, he didn’t know that yet. And what a race it would be! Generation after generation of subalterns, of second lieutenants, ROTC boys whose gleaming bars and Brasso’d buttons and shining boots would make them, for all they knew the languages, superior targets. Guillalume’s rod and his staff, they comforted him. Better, they shielded him. For Mills instinctively understood the percentages, blood’s and politics’ unfavorable odds, advantage to the house. He pitied his master and followed the damn fool out of the woods, even taking the saplings from him and pushing them still further apart, allowing the younger son — he could have been Mills’s younger son — to pass through first.

He stepped through himself and the saplings sprang back into place, the woods immediately disappearing behind them. But the horses were gone. They could just make out the tail of Guillalume’s horse closing like a curtain over its own asshole exactly as the Chinese fan of forest closed behind the horses themselves.

This was almost a thousand years ago. Horses did not have names. Guillalume and Mills brayed fatuously after them into the brackish air.

“Guillalume’s horse,” Mills shouted.

“Mills’s steed,” cried Guillalume. “Guillalume’s and Mills’s animals!”

But they were gone. Mills and Guillalume ran toward the hole in the forest into which the horses had disappeared. “You, horses! Come back!” Guillalume commanded. “Return to your riders!”