Stanley Elkin - George Mills

But George is suddenly embarrassed. It’s his sanity returning. Only Cornell still steams with madness. Waves of it seem to come off his head like distorted, illusory vapors in a road, like the transparent parts of flame. It is astonishing to Mills how all mood cancels itself, how satiety sours abandon and compromises everything. Is there anywhere an experience one can walk away from with a clear conscience? He understands practically nothing of Messenger’s complaints and confessions, though he knows enough to be troubled by their intimacy. He does not want Cornell for a friend. He does not want friends. It’s too late. He is the man to whom everything has happened that is going to happen. This is his grace.

“Could you help me turn him please, George?” Louise asks politely.

The old man is naked on the bed. The sheets and pillowslips, smeared with feces, are in a corner of the room with his soiled pajamas.

“Sure, Louise,” Mills says.

“Wait, I’ll help you,” Messenger says, and handles the man as if he were changing a tire.

“My husband and I can manage,” Louise says.

“What? Oh. Sure. I just thought I might be able to help. Say,” Cornell says, “did anyone think to make a phone call?”

“A phone call?”

“Well when something, you know, like this happens the authorities have to be notified. It’s just that they’re supposed to know. And I guess arrangements have to be made.”

“Oh. Right. Who do we call? You know who we call, Louise?”

“Dad was a member of the union, but I don’t know the number. He might have written it down somewhere.”

“I can look it up,” Cornell volunteers.

“It was the Barge and Shippers’ Union.”

“I can handle that. I can make that call.”

“It’s just that I’m upset. I don’t exactly feel like…”

“Well sure, of course not,” Cornell says. “You can’t be expected to. That’s why I suggested I do it myself. Of course you’re upset. Where does your father keep his phone book? Never mind, I see it.”

“This is very considerate,” Louise says.

“Hey,” Messenger says, “that’s why it’s important to have a neutral party around at a time like this.”

He dials. They wait silently as the phone rings at the other end.

“Hello? Hello, Judy? Cornell Messenger. Listen. That nice Mr. Mead died.”

“Where’s the deputy?” Laglichio asked in the inner city, in the ghetto, by the projects, in line of sight but out of earshot of twenty or so dangerous-looking blacks. “Did you call him?”

“Maybe he already went in to serve the papers.”

“You see a patrol car, George?”

“Hand them over. I’ll serve them myself.”

“Make a citizen’s arrest, will you, George? Going to serve Xeroxes on these people? Going to show them carbon copies, flat, smooth seals like a sketch of the sunrise? They don’t read, George, just rub the paper to feel if it’s embossed. They live by a Braille law in this neighborhood.

“I like my work,” Laglichio said. They were leaning against the truck’s front fender. Laglichio seemed a changed man this morning. Not, George thought, because of his high spirits or even his rusty patience. He seemed, Mills thought, interested, expansive. “Not all of us can be bombardiers,” Laglichio said, “or sit by the machine gun on the penitentiary watchtower. We can’t all be turnkeys, and the state ain’t juiced no one in donkey’s years. I like my work. I do. It’s only evicting folks, but it makes a difference. They remember you. Long after they’ve forgotten the landlord’s name, they still remember the guy who put them out on the fucking street. Where’s that deputy?”

“Let’s go in without the papers,” George Mills said. “Let’s kick the door down and throw everybody out.”

“Oh ho,” Laglichio said. “Without the papers. That’d be something. That’d be smooth sailing, wouldn’t it? Where’s that mother? They’re watching us. There must be a couple dozen dark-skinned people just watching our truck.”

A man in a dashiki came over. He wore a dull brass necklace and a tiger skin beret.

“How you doing, Chief?” Mills asked serenely from his state of grace.

“What’s this truck?” the man asked.

“This truck?” Mills said. “Supplies. You know — bandages, serums, shots for the kids, Bibles, some pamphlets on family planning for the women in your village. Just about what you’d expect.”

“I’m Bob,” the man said cheerfully. “I guess you ain’t feeling well. Healthy man don’t be talking to no ugly customer like this, show respect, know some cat in a beret jus’ got to be arm’. Well man feel in his bones a dude like me be holdin’ a bomb in the dashiki, a razor in the boot. Man got to have a hunch the blood is po- lit -ical. You got three seconds to the revolution, fuck!”

“I can’t lose,” Mills said mildly.

“You dig this clown?” Bob said to Laglichio. “Hold on, clown. I want the brothers to meet you.”

Mills showed him the eviction orders. “This man and I are establishment,” he explained. “These are official instruments of the United States of America. You can’t touch us.” Bob scanned them, tore the papers to bits.

“Boy, are you in Dutch!” Mills said.

“He that Laglichio?” Bob asked. “Say on that paper I rip Laglichio. No shit, he that Laglichio? For real now, you fellas the Laglichio boys?” Quietly the other observers had come up from their positions against the playground fence. “ ’Cause it don’t say nothin’ on the truck here. ’Cause the truck don’t say a word about what it do to the furnitures of my peoples.” He opened its rear doors. “Oh oh,” Bob moaned, “I look in here and I like to cry for the furnitures of my peoples. These drop cloths is filthy,” he said, and tore them to shreds. “And look these scrawny, itty bitty pads. Fuckin’ Kleenex. What kind of candy ass protection these give the furnitures of my peoples? Look all the sharp edges in here, man. It look like a open soup can.”

“Hey,” Laglichio said, “get down out of my truck.”

Bob was jumping up and down heavily in the empty truck. “They try to tell me, but I didn’ believe them. They say Mr. Laglichio’s shocks is shot. They say all he do he drive over the white line in the road and smash, there go the dishes of my peoples! He take a outright pothole an’ boom, my peoples’s paper plates be bust.”

“What’s going on, guys?” Laglichio asked amiably, and Bob sat down on the tailgate to tell him.

“We putting you to pasture, nipple drippings,” he said kindly. “The refugees got them a hot line now. Got them a Twenty-Four-Hour Self-Help Removal Service. Got a lovely Action Volunteer Cartage Platoon. Got a free, no rip-off, We-Hump-for-the-Brothers-and-Sisters Emergency Hauling Service. I’m official dispatcher for the revolution, and I’m tellin’ you, dick sweat, no authorization papers you be holdin’ now nor in future neither ain’t never gonna be serve.”

No one touched them. They dismantled Laglichio’s truck like soldiers breaking down a rifle, roustabouts pulling down a tent. It was at least as deliberate and controlled as Laglichio’s and Mills’s own scorched-earth procedures.

“What’d we do?” Mills mused aloud. “All we ever tried to do was help. Supplies. Vaccines and bandages, birth control, Bibles. See where it gets you? Our work here is finished,” he told Laglichio.

So it was that George Mills, in grace, out of harm’s way, beyond life’s reach, became unemployed.

He tried to reassure Louise.

“It’s not even October,” Mills said. “In a month or so we’ll have our first big snowfall. The caterpillars are fat and fuzzy. Trappers want their fur. Accu-Weather says it’s going to be the winter of the world. I can go on the plows. They can always use a guy like me on the salt trucks. When spring comes I can patch potholes. Don’t be downcast, Louise. Don’t be downcast, sweetheart. There’s a fortune to be made from other people’s bad weather.”