George Mills Part 8

The convicts were actually chained at the legs, the chains drawn so close the men were almost shoulder to shoulder like men on parade. They took small steps like Chinese house servants or young girls in heels. With their backs to them, the thick white and black horizontals of their uniforms seemed a single broad fabric like a wide flag flapping. They looked like staves on sheet music.

George and his mother followed his father to the guard on the bench.

"How do you do?" his father said.

"Are there real bullets in that?" George Mills asked.

"They're sh.e.l.ls, son. Bullets is in handguns."

"My boy never saw a chain gang," his father said. "We're from up North."

"Up North they lock folks up," the guard said. "Here they get to go outdoors."

"What did these men do?" his father said.

"All different things," the guard said. "Murders and armed robberies. Rapes. Different things."

"Murders," his son said. "Gee, they're not even very big."

"Size got nothing to do with it, son. Big men can get what they want without killing people."

"See what can happen, George?" Mills said. "See what they do to you if you grow up wild? Officer, would you mind if we had a word with these men?" His father winked at the guard.

The guard looked at George and returned his father's wink. His mother said nothing.

"These sh.e.l.ls is real, son," he said, and tapped the chamber of his rifle. "They call 'em sh.e.l.ls 'cause they're so big. They're bigger than bullets. You get hit with a sh.e.l.l you never get better. You go along with your dad. You listen to what these cons tell you." The man stood up and blew two shrill blasts on a whistle that hung from his neck. The convicts stopped where they were and came to a sort of attention. "Gary and Henry," he called out to the other two guards, "these folks is from up North and got a little boy with them who don't always mind." He accompanied Mills and his son to the rank of convicts.

"Tell the kid how old you was when you come to us, Frizzer," the man said.

Before Frizzer could answer, George's father did an astonishing thing. He took his hat from his head and held it in his hands in exactly the att.i.tude of supplication George had seen hobos employ when they came to his mother's door in Milwaukee. Status seemed instantly altered, perspective did, his father exchanging actual inches and pounds with the prisoner. There was something religious, even pious about the gesture. It startled George, it startled them all, the prisoners literally moved, forced back, their chains sc.r.a.ping in a sharp, brief, metallic skirl.

"It's true what your captain says. We're Northerners. Hard times forced us south. There's no work up there no more. We come for the sunshine. To catch fish from the water. My boy ain't had no nourishment in two days. His ma is pregnant. If you got some candy, the sugar in gum...If you could let them drink off the last sweetness in those soda bottles you picked up from the ground. If you could--"

"Wait a minute, hey," the guard said who had told them about the sh.e.l.ls.

"If you saved something from your lunch--"

"Hold on there. What--"

"My boy ain't had nothing in his mouth these two days, my wife's been hungry three. Flowers we eat, the crusts from peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwiches from other folks' picnics in the public parks."

"Now just a golden G.o.dd.a.m.n min--"

"I guess I don't need this fruit," the convict Frizzer said, and produced an orange from where it had been stored in his blouse.

"Me neither," said another con and handed over a second orange, placing it beside Frizzer's in his father's upturned hat.

"I ain't hungry," said a third man, handing his orange to the boy.

"What the h.e.l.l! h.e.l.l!" the guard shouted.

"Thank you," his father said. "G.o.d bless you. G.o.d bless you, men. G.o.d bless you," his father said, still like the hobo, dispensing love's holy wampum, and hurried his wife and son from the square. They disappeared up a street.

"But we all had sandwiches and milk two hours ago," George said.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," his father said. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" He was furious, his size restored, not magnified, compact as a middleweight, coiled, latent with force and uppercut, like the clever laborer he was who took weight's measure, gravity's marksman.

"What is it? What's wrong?" his mother said.

"Working conditions!" his father roared. "The compet.i.tion!" He turned and, as hard as he could, threw the two oranges he still carried back in the direction of the square. "The way they organize the labor around here! Evidently they got to arrest and chain you before they let you work in their parks or pick their oranges. Apparently you first got to kill a man, then arm-rob and rape him before they let you into their union! We might as well stay and get a good night's rest before we start back home in the morning."

It was getting on toward dusk. There were cars parked in the street now, two and sometimes three cars in each of the driveways, giving the town or neighborhood or whatever it was a vaguely prosperous look.

"Look at them," his father said, pointing to the houses, which had now turned on their porch lights, "they're blind pigs. Or cat-houses. This must be where they apprentice their farmhands. What's that piano music?"

"Organ," his wife said.

When he was calmer he jabbed the doorbell of the first carless, unlighted house they came to.

"Reverend?" his father said to the large, powerfully built man who opened the door for them, the hearty, glandless and even organless type George would remember all his life (though he didn't know this yet and saw only a big old man who looked even bigger in the dark, loose flowing robe he wore like a dress, only not like a dress any woman would wear, and suddenly recalled the prisoners' strange garb, thinking, So it isn't the land or trees or animals or even the houses that's weird down here, it's the clothes; thinking, There ain't nothing in Mama's suitcase like anything they wear in Florida, Mama packed all wrong). "Reverend," his father said again. "Joe sent me, Reverend. My wife figures you have a spare room, but I figure it's more like a back room, so you can bring me and her a couple of beers and the boy a Coca-Cola."

"Why don't you set your case down?" the big man said. George had never heard a voice like it. Vocal cords could not have produced such clear, resonant sound, only hard, unflexed, lenient muscle. "Your boy's tired. He's falling asleep on his feet."

"We're all tired, Reverend," his father said. "Or maybe I should call you Foreman."

"Foreman?"

"Well, it's just that I've seen your work detail or day shift or whatever you call those chained, shotgun-trained fellows down by the square. I figured the bosses would have to have somewhere to sleep nights, too. Where they could rest their bodies and put down their rifles and jackboots. It would be pretty uncomfortable, fitting all them gun-toting foremen and overseers on just that one bitty bench. Ain't this the hotel?"

The man seemed bewildered. He turned to George. "Where have you come from?"

"Milwaukee," George said.

"Was it your brother or sister you lost?"

George looked to his father for help.

"Hey, you, watch it," his father said angrily.

"Which was it, Mother," the big man asked, "your son or your daughter?"

"I miscarried some years ago," his mother said. "A little girl." Her eyes were red.

"Had you named her yet? They're easier to locate if they had a name."

"She was born dead," his mother said.

"Of course," the man said, "but often a name's been picked out. Even if there were only one or two you were merely favoring. Were you going to call the child after a relative? Were you thinking of giving her your name?"

"Come on, Nancy," George Mills said. "We've made a mistake."

"Nancy," the man said sweetly. "She'd have been Nancy."

"Let's go." He picked up the suitcase and turned to leave.

"I preferred Janet," his mother said softly.

"Yes," he said. "Janet's a fine name."

"Let's go," Mills said, "let's just go. go." But his wife was weeping now, his son had begun to sob. "Ah, for Christ's sake," his father said, setting the suitcase down again.

He was not crying for the stillborn sister whom he had seen only briefly in a blur of swaddling and whose name he had just heard for the first time, and not for his mother whose grief seemed to trigger his own, nor even for his suddenly confused, uncomfortable father. He wept as children in fairy tales did. It wasn't even grief. It was fear. How could he ever have supposed that there was no difference between where they were and where they'd come from? They were lost, all of them. They were missing persons.

He had little moral imagination. His sense of evil was circ.u.mscribed by his ideas about the wicked, what they could do to you, the harm in villains. Only the monstrous and disfigured. Not murderers and holdup men but murderers and holdup men hobbled and joined at the ankles--some chain reaction of the irrational. Even their uniforms-the guards' as well as the convicts'-suggesting action in multiples, armies of bad men, familied, for all he knew actually related, blooded. (This would have been in the days of the Dillingers and Babyface Nelsons and Capones and others, gangs, clans, tribes, confederated in wickedness and villainy like the red savages he read about in books.) The town, the community itself, presented just such a face to him, its east-west axes like its north-south ones, the configuration of each block like that of its neighbor. All the churches-he knew they were churches now-advertised on the gla.s.s-encased h.o.a.rding and reverends-he knew there were reverends, men and maybe even women, too, like the dark-robed fellow who spoke of his dead sister, the two-year-buried little girl-in all the rectories, vicarages, and parsonages like the one they stood in.

"I said let's go," his father said. "I said let's get out of here."

"Before I've shown you your daughter?" the big man said. "Before I've brought her back to speak to you?"

His father was holding the door open. "George?" he said. "Nancy?"

"Can't we just see her first, George?" his wife said.

"Can we?" his son asked. He had an idea she was somewhere in the house, the old man keeping her for them like shoes brought in for repair.

"Go on," the man told them gently. "I'm sorry," he said to his father. "It's near dark. If you leave now you can walk back to the highway while there's still some light left."

"How do you know one of those cars parked outside isn't mine?"

"You have no automobile."

"Sure we do. It's parked a few houses down."

"You have no machine," the old man said.

"You hear that, Nancy?" his father said shrewdly. "That's the man you'd let show you the child we lost. An old woman who ain't got nothing better to do than hide out behind his curtains and spy on folks."

"If you had an auto you'd have locked that suitcase in it."

"All right, Reverend," his father relented, "I guess you got me there. There's no car. But here's where I got you. We ain't got any money for your medicine show. We've put a little by for milk and bread and a buck or so for a clean kip once in a while till we get settled, but we failed to set anything aside for apparitions or haunt house card tricks, so unless you work free like those orange picker murderers, you might just as well lift the charm or spell off Nancy and the kid and let us all get going."

"A dollar?" the man said.

"Sure," his father said, "if you start acting like a proper landlord and just keep the tables from rapping so we can get some sleep. If the ouija boards are all put away and the sheets are fresh. I'll give you a dollar. What do you say, old Merlin?"

"Stay the night. I won't charge you."

"Here's your buck," his father said.

"I won't charge you."

"You ain't my uncle," his father said, pressing money into the man's hand.

"I invited you," he said.

"And I'm obliged to you," his father said, "but near as I can tell you're just some working stiff like me and George too will be someday if we can only just get him the proper sleep every so often. Don't worry about the money. You'd have taken that, and more too, I guess, if only we'd agreed to look into that crystal ball of yours."

"You think I'm a fake," the big man said, slipping the dollar his father had given him into a pocket in his robe.

"Well," his father said mildly, "at least a rotten businessman. I see lots more cars parked in front of them other congregations."

The big man made their bed up for them in what they did not know yet was the master bedroom. Then he went downstairs to his dimly lighted parlor, waiting, they supposed, for someone else to come to his door. Later, George Mills heard his heavy step on the stairs when he came up again to make up his cot and lie down in the small spare bedroom down the hall.

In fact, the loose dark robe was a sort of dressing gown, not Wickland's working clothes at all. These, like those of most of the psychics, parapsychologists, clairvoyants, and occultists in Ca.s.sadaga, were ordinary business suits, the customary browns and grays and faintly baggy wool garments of traveling salesmen or reporters, say--vested, fobbed, long and thickly flied. He was given to brightly colored sleeve garters. Otherwise his clothing was sober, the color of fedoras or suits in snapshots. Nor was there much in the way of paraphernalia about the house, little of the gear George or his parents might have expected. Though they were to see this stuff too, plenty of it, during their long sojourn in the queer town, George, before Wickland found other uses for him, a sort of errand boy, as the only kid in town a community a.s.set, his services on call, available to everyone, all of them, like the Fire Department they did not have or the doctor they did not need.

Meanwhile his father found work, underbidding the prison officials for the contract on the town's small square and streets. He did other things too of course, driving one or another of the spiritualists' cars the fifteen miles into De Land each day-where the circus had its winter quarters-to pick up their mail at the PO boxes they rented there, mailing the parcels and pamphlets they sent out, the letters and phonograph records with their special messages from the dead, to almost all of the forty-eight states. And working in the darkrooms, taught to develop the blurred photographs he was told were auras, bringing out the burning images of spirit photography in sharp detail so that he became almost a technician, driving with their copy all the way to the Orlando printers and, after a while, choosing the stock, selecting the font, sometimes even suggesting the layouts, the color of the boards, a sort of agent ombudsman who d.i.c.kered with the printers about the proper discount when mistakes were made, the proofreading off or the bundles mismanaged. And a kind of constable too, without the powers of arrest of course, but a sort of agent for the town here too, like a volunteer in a tourist booth, actually wearing a badge with a four-digit number on it, like a code stamped on a tin can, and from time to time getting actually physical, servicing the town the way a bouncer might vigilante a bar or roadhouse, though these occasions were rare, the grief-stricken and mentally ill being by and large a docile lot, wonderful folks to do business with.

In less than three months the spiritualists, though to use the term was to paint with too broad a brush, there being as much difference between a clairvoyant and clairaudient as there was between a holy roller and a bishop, wondered how they had ever gotten along without him. Bill J. Pierce, a Spirit Photographer who'd been photographing auras for over fifty years, said Mills had been sent to them.

He made enough to pay Wickland for their room and board. He made more in fact than he'd ever made in his life and was actually able to bank a part of his earnings. He forgot all about orange picking as soon as he returned to the h.o.a.rding at the entrance to the small square, studying the board, reading the rubrics he had at first only glanced at, a.s.suming it to be the town's directory of churches, knowing only now where he was, what the fine-sounding t.i.tles, the "Doctors" and "Reverends" and "Professors" with their long tail of high-toned initials, really meant.

It was not no-man's-land but one of those places like Hollywood or Broadway, or Reno, say, or somewhere offsh.o.r.e, beyond what was still the twelve-mile limit, where gambling ships dropped anchor and the high rollers had to take into account not just ordinary house odds but the pitch and yaw of the salon, too. It was a district, as Covent Garden was a district, as the Reeperbahn was, given over to a singleminded commerce not with no real reason for it to be, but with no real reason for it to be there, or none that anyone understood, not even Pierce, the aura photographer of fifty years. It was evidently famous-Mills checked off the license plates; more were from out of state than from Florida-as something is famous only after you discover you have a need for it, as when you take up tennis or golf and find out that there are magazines that advertise not only racquets and clubs, but devices for restringing racquets, bulk catgut-like b.a.l.l.s of twine, tees specially designed to stand straight in sandy earth. (Or if you need an abortionist, his father thought, and discover all the abortionists are within a two block area a quarter mile from the Milwaukee Zoo.)

So Ca.s.sadaga was famous. At least twenty pages of Hartmann's Directory of Psychic Science and Spiritualism Hartmann's Directory of Psychic Science and Spiritualism were given over to its closely printed ads. It was famous for its occult hardware, the arcane merchandise which Mills toted into the De Land post office--tiny heart-shaped planchettes and ouija boards like odd altars or artists' palettes, pocket breath controllers, aura charts, the rich colors painted on linen and attached to rollers like window shades, Aurospecs, seance trumpets, gazing crystals, spirit restraints, prisms, joss sticks, tarot cards, exorcism salts, sheet music, lullabies for the infant dead, marches for soldiers fallen in battle, witch waltzes. There were dictionaries of magic words, Seals of Solomon, mock-ups of left- and right-handed palms, telekinetic dice, outdoor seance furniture, occult recipes, three-dimensional models of the human soul, wands and charms, bells, books, candles--all Sorcery's fee faw fum, all Belief's hocus pocus dominocus. were given over to its closely printed ads. It was famous for its occult hardware, the arcane merchandise which Mills toted into the De Land post office--tiny heart-shaped planchettes and ouija boards like odd altars or artists' palettes, pocket breath controllers, aura charts, the rich colors painted on linen and attached to rollers like window shades, Aurospecs, seance trumpets, gazing crystals, spirit restraints, prisms, joss sticks, tarot cards, exorcism salts, sheet music, lullabies for the infant dead, marches for soldiers fallen in battle, witch waltzes. There were dictionaries of magic words, Seals of Solomon, mock-ups of left- and right-handed palms, telekinetic dice, outdoor seance furniture, occult recipes, three-dimensional models of the human soul, wands and charms, bells, books, candles--all Sorcery's fee faw fum, all Belief's hocus pocus dominocus.

And this just a sideline, though he didn't know that yet, though his son found out first and even tried to tell him about it, to warn the father not to be taken in when he sometimes boasted that for the first time in a thousand years the Millses had risen above their station and gotten into crime, escaping if only briefly and if only through the odd historical accident of the Depression, that old curse on all fallen men that they must labor by the sweat of their brow and the clench of their muscles locked as fists just to eke out a measly subsistence which had to be pledged daily, renewed daily, like prayer or exercise.

"What do you mean a thousand years?" George asked.

"A thousand years. It's a figure of speech."

"We've been poor a thousand years?"

"Did I say that? We're with the crooks now, that's all. This is the age of busted law, sonny boy. We're on the side of the corrupt for once. Watch our smoke."

"But we're not. They're not."

"Not much."

"They believe in it."