George Mills Part 4

"I noted this morning," Laglichio told him later, "seventeen seven got a For Sale sign up." Seventeen seven was the bungalow next to Mills's. It seemed, if only because it was unoccupied-the owner, a woman in her eighties, had died a few months earlier-even shabbier than his own. "You buy that house, George."

"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 n.o.body in the market for a house going to buy that 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 b.i.t.c.h 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." 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 f.u.c.king 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.

"s.h.i.t," 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 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." 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 chickens.h.i.t 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 ash.o.r.e. 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 Ca.s.sadaga 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 "L-s.e.x 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 bra.s.s 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.

But nursed the mystery of the caps, bringing it up only once, in a tavern where he sometimes went to watch NFL games on an immense television screen.

"You eat a lot of that Bladex, Frank?" he asked an old barber on the stool next to his. "What's that stuff?"

"It's chemicals. It's some chemical s.h.i.t."

Mills had had three or four beers. He was not a good drinker. He did not get mean or aggressive. Alcohol did not loosen his tongue or alter his mood. Rather it pitched him deeper into himself, consolidating his temper, intensifying it, pledging it for hours afterward to the mood in which he had started and which persisted to the point of actual drunkenness. He had entered the tavern feeling a bit silly.

"Look there," he told Frank, "Al Amstrod's wearing Simplot Feeds. I've seen Dekalb Corn and International Harvester and Pioneer Hybrids and Cygon 2-E. Seeds and pesticides, weed killer and all the rolling stock of Agriculture. It's America's breadbasket in here. What'd the Russkies give for your wheat?"

"Now you're talking," Frank the barber said.

"I am," George Mills said. He took off his cap and studied it. "Ls.e.x 52," he said. "You suppose that's what makes the bacon lean? You think it has half-life?"

"Half-life?"

"That it cancers the breakfast, outrages the toast?"

"Now you're talking."

"Where do we get these caps? Where do they come from? I don't see them in stores."

"George," the bartender said, "could you hold it down a little? The boys can't hear the game."

"Tell the boys we're the reds, they're the greens."

[Because he was too old to fight, too old to be fought. Because he did not work beside them in their plants, because he earned less than they did, because he didn't moonlight or ump slow pitch. Because he was not a regular there, only George, a fellow from the neighborhood. Because there was something askew about his life, something impaired, that didn't add up. He had his immunity. This an advantage to him, something on the house. He called women in their thirties and early forties "young lady," "miss," men almost his own age "young man." Not flattering them, not even courteous, simply acknowledging his seniority, a reflexive formality that floated like weather from his kempt fragility, his own unvictorious heart's special pleading like a white flag waved from a stick. He felt he could have crossed against the lights during rush hours or asked directions and been taken where he wanted to go. He felt he could have defied picket lines, hitched rides, b.u.t.ted into line or copped feels. People he hadn't met would make allowances for him as if he lived within an aura of handicap like someone sightless or a man with a cane. "I'm a Golden Ager," he had told ticket sellers in the wickets of movie theaters, "I forgot my card." And they called him "sir" and gave him the discount.

Louise was horrified. "Why do you do that? I'm I'm no Golden Ager. I'm barely in my forties." no Golden Ager. I'm barely in my forties."

"It's all right," he said, "you're with me." He could not have explained what he meant.]

"About our caps," he said, addressing the men in the bar.

"Give that guy a beer," a man said and laid down a dollar.

"Here," another said, laying a dollar beside the dollar the first man had put down, "give him a pitcher."

George raised his gla.s.s to his hosts. "Who's that, Sinmazine? Thanks, Sinmazine." He drank off two gla.s.ses quickly, stood and walked the length of the bar. "Dacthal," he chanted. "Dpel."

"George got caps on the brain," Frank said.

"Ls.e.x 52 to Treflan 624," George said. "Come in Treflan 624."

Some of the men examined their caps.

"Breaker, breaker, good buddy," Treflan 624 said amiably.

Mills winked at him. "Take off your patch you could pa.s.s for a golfer." He took in the men sitting around the bar. "I see," he said, "tennis stars, fishermen, long-ball hitters, pros." He stared at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. "I look," he said, "like an old caddy."

"Aw, George," said one of the two or three men who knew his name.

"Does anyone know where he lives?"

"Over on Wyoming, I think. A couple blocks."

"It's halftime. Come on, I'll give you a hand."

The two men stood on either side of him and carefully arranged his arms about their shoulders.

All the way home Mills asked himself, "You see? You see what I mean?"

They were hoosiers, men he feared. Though he was no stranger to violence. Having lived in its zodiacal houses and along its cusps, having done his time-a stint in Korea, his job with Laglichio, other jobs-beneath its sullen influence, the loony yaws of vicious free fall, all the per second per second demonics of love and rage. (Not hate. He hated nothing, no one.) His wife had walked out on him once for another man. And had a feel for the soap opera condition-where he got his notions of dream houses, interior decoration-and imagination for the off-post trailer court one, all gothic, vulnerable, propinquitous nesting. Something disastrous and screwy-roofed about his character which drew the lightning and beckoned the tornado. It was as if he lived near the sites of drive-ins or along the gulfs and coasts, all the high-wind districts of being.

But now these dangerous men who humored him home were protecting him, shielding him. He believed they would do so forever, that it was over, that what had happened to him was done with and that now he could coast to his cancer or whatever else that would finally get him. He believed, that is, that he was free to die. A year or so past fifty, he was as prepared for death as someone with his will drawn up or all his plans carried out. Everything that was melodrama in his life was behind him. The rest he could handle.

And just about then, a few days before or behind the day the two hoosiers helped him home, somewhere in there, he was born again, saved.

He didn't know what hit him. He didn't go to church. He didn't listen to evangelists on the radio. Nothing was healed in him. His back still hurt like h.e.l.l from the time he had picked up a television funny. He didn't proselytize or counsel his neighbors. He talked as he always had. He behaved no differently. Not to his wife, not to the dispossessed whose furniture he helped Laglichio legally steal. Finally, he did not believe in G.o.d.

Louise was naked on the floor of their bedroom. She opened her legs. She looked like a pair of s.e.xual pliers. George watched neutrally as she performed-it was a performance-holding herself, plumping her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like pillows, licking her finger and touching it to her v.a.g.i.n.a like someone testing the p.o.r.nographic weather, roughly tousling her pubic hair, arching toward him, hands along her thighs, just her head, shoulders and feet touching the rug, her open crotch like dropped st.i.tches. She was moaning in some whiskey register and calling his name, though it could have been mankind she summoned.

"I'm wet, George," she told him huskily, "I'm just so wet."

"Get to bed, Louise," Mills said.

"I changed the sheets today," she said.

"You also vacuumed. Get to bed."

She rolled over on her belly and worked the muscles in her a.s.s. Her cheek against the floor, she pouted directions at him. "Come in from behind, I'll give you a ride." On her side she rotated her body for him. George sat at the foot of the bed and watched her. She could have been a late-model automobile on a revolving platform in an airport. "Do you love me, George? Do you like my body?" He did. Louise was a jogger. An exercise of the middle cla.s.ses, Mills thought she ran above her station but in middle age she still had a grand body. She lay on her back again and raised her arms. Mills saw the thick black tufts of her underarms. He got down beside her and patiently m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed his wife till she screamed. Individual hairs stuck to her forehead and cheeks. He brushed them back into place with his fingers.

"You didn't do anything," Louise said.

"No."

"It's psychological."

"No," he said, "I don't think so."

"You don't think I'm attractive."

"You're very attractive."

"Then why didn't you get hard?"

"I tried to tell you."

"What, that you're religious? I'm religious."

"I'm saved," Mills said quietly.

He was saved, lifted from life. In a state of grace. Mills in weightlessness, desire, will and soul idling like a car at a stoplight. George Mills, yeomanized a thousand years, Blue Collar George like a priest at a time clock, Odd Job George, Lunchpail Mills, the gra.s.sroots kid, was saved.

2.

The Reverend Raymond Coule was minister of the Virginia Avenue Baptist Church. He was a large, heavy man in his early forties who wore leisure suits, double knits, checkered sports coats, Sansabelt trousers. Bright ties flared against his dark rayon shirts. Carnations twinkled in his lapels. There were big rings on his hands.

For many years he had had a nationally syndicated television ministry in Ohio and been famous as a healer. He specialized in children with hearing problems, women with nervous disorders, men with bad hearts. Then something happened. He lost his tax exemption, but that wasn't it. He had become involved in a malpractice suit. On national television he had p.r.o.nounced a woman cured of her cancer. This was rather a reversal of normal procedure. Always before, the people he had healed, preening their miracles, volunteered their own testimony. All Coule had to do when the ushers had preselected members of the audience-congregation-to appear with him on that portion of the program-service-given over to their witness, was to ask them questions. He rarely remembered the men and women he had touched, was as curious and surprised as his viewers to hear them, months and even years after a campaign in Roanoke or Macon or Wheeling, remind him of what G.o.d had done. G.o.d, not Coule. Coule was simply Christ's instrument. Coule stressed the point, seeming modest, almost shy as he made his disclaimers. He interrupted harshly and became severe whenever someone who'd been healed momentarily forgot the facts and attributed the miracle to Coule himself. He would scold the offender and fly into a rage, a rage that seemed incongruent with his floorwalker presence, this fact alone seeming to lift his anger out of the range of rage and turn it into something like actual wrath.

"I," he might shriek, "I healed you? I couldn't cure ham! Jesus healed you, brother, and don't you forget it! Unless you remember that and make your thank-you's out to healed you? I couldn't cure ham! Jesus healed you, brother, and don't you forget it! Unless you remember that and make your thank-you's out to Him Him you'd better get out your bathrobes and bedclothes all over again because you might just be headed into a relapse! Didn't no Raymond Coule ever heal you, didn't no Reverend Raymond Coule put your spine well! That bill goes to Jesus! And you better remit, friend, cause old Jesus He don't dun, He just forecloses!" you'd better get out your bathrobes and bedclothes all over again because you might just be headed into a relapse! Didn't no Raymond Coule ever heal you, didn't no Reverend Raymond Coule put your spine well! That bill goes to Jesus! And you better remit, friend, cause old Jesus He don't dun, He just forecloses!"

And for all that Reverend Coule felt genuine anger at these moments, the offending party was as joyous as the congregation, flushing not with embarra.s.sment but with what Coule himself took to be health, a shine like a smug fitness. Then the born-again sick man might deliver himself of a jumpy, gleeful litany, a before-and-after catalogue of deadly symptom, marred X-rays, the peculiar Rorschach shapes of his particular defilement, a tumor like a tiny trowel, a hairline crack along the bone like an ancient river in Texas or bad handwriting in a Slavic tongue. Blood chemistries invoked in real and absolute numbers, the names of drugs flushed down the toilet. The circ.u.mstances of their attendance, what they had said, what Coule had said, the doctors amazed, the new X-rays bland and undisturbed by disease as a landscape painting.

But once, during the healing, that portion of the show when Coule touched the supplicants on camera, a woman was helped forward by her husband. The woman, a girl really, years younger than her husband, who was about Coule's age, stood mutely before the minister. "What is it?" Coule asked. The husband could not control himself. His grief was almost shameful, a sort of shame, that is. He blubbered incoherently. His nose ran. Coule was embarra.s.sed. He was embarra.s.sed by the man's love for the woman, which he somehow knew had never been reciprocated, just as he also knew that the husband was unaware of this. He turned to the woman. "What is it?" he asked her. She shrugged helplessly. "What is it, dear?" Still she wouldn't answer, and though the man tried to speak for her he was tongue-tied by grief and love. Somehow he managed to mutter that his wife was going to die. "What do you mean she's going to die?" Coule said, and then, just for a moment, it was as if he was scolding one of the carelessly faithful who had rendered unto Coule what was properly G.o.d's. He began to scold. "Don't you know that there's no death?" he shouted, not at the woman but at the man. "Don't you know Christ did away with death? Don't you know--"

"I have a tumor," the woman said. "They took my biopsy. It's bad cancer."

"Where?" Coule demanded.

"Here," she said. She pointed to her stomach.

He had a feeling about this woman.

"There? You mean there?" He clutched the woman's arm and drew her to him and pressed his palm hard against her belly. "There?" he shouted. "There?" The woman screamed in pain. "What are you shouting for? It's not malignant. It never was. They made a mistake. Stop your shrieking. You're healthy. You don't have any more cancer than I do. Hush. Hush, I tell you. Praise Jesus and honor this man who was so worried about you."

The woman looked at him. She was frightened, but for the first time she seemed to realize what he was saying. "I'm healed?" she said. "I'm not dying?"

"Don't Christ work on the Sabbath even though it's His day?"

"I'm not going to die?"

"Not of any cancer," Coule said.

The fright hadn't left her eyes but Coule saw that it had changed. It was the fear of G.o.d. The real thing. It was the first time Coule had ever seen it but he recognized it at once. It was terror, dread, G.o.d panic. "Take her home, Mister," he told the husband. "You go along with him, Mrs."

The woman was dead within three months. She had believed him, had refused to return to her doctors even when the pain became worse. Her husband had tried to reason with her but it was the Lord she feared now, not death. The doctors claimed that the cancer had been caught in time, that it had been operable, that with the operation and a course of chemotherapy the chances of saving her were better than seventy-two percent.

The husband wanted to sue Coule's mission and threatened to sue all the television stations that carried his program.

The case never came to trial. Coule's lawyers had persuaded the husband's lawyers that faith itself would be on trial, that they could never win, that the dead woman's religious belief, regardless of who had originally inspired it and however naive the actions it prompted her to take, were forever beyond the jurisdiction of any court in the land. Obtaining a judgment would be tantamount to convicting G.o.d. The man was poor, the case extraordinarily complicated. They would be working on a contingency fee. They talked the husband into dropping the case.

Coule gave up the mission. The television stations refused to carry his programs, but he'd made his decision before he learned this. When he left Ohio the only thing he took with him was his flamboyant wardrobe. He gave the campaign's immense profits to charities and for a period of years gave up preaching entirely. He had known better. What he'd said he'd said for the husband, not because of his grief but because of all that unrequited love.

Nor was it the fear of lawsuits that caused him to give up his mission. He knew better there, too. It was her eyes, the holy panic, the fear of the Lord he saw in them, a fear more contagious than any disease at which he'd ever made pa.s.ses with his ring-fingered hands.

It was Coule Louise went to when Mills told her he was saved.