George Mills (11 page)

“Is this too heavy? Are you uncomfortable?”

“He’s feeling grand,” Mills said and stepped behind the wheelchair. “You know what a forklift is, Uncle?” The old man whimpered. “That’s it,” Mills said, “you got it. Why don’t you step out in the hall, Reverend, see if we’re going to clear that front door?”

Coule, walking backward, steadying the load as Mills pushed. They went toward the elevator as half a dozen blacks watched the strange procession. “Punch ‘Down,’ ” Mills instructed one of the blacks cheerfully. Two black men got into the elevator with them. “Sure,” Mills said, “come on, we’ll give you a ride. Whoo,” he said when the doors had closed, “stinks of piss, don’t it? You brothers got no patience. Stinks of piss, shit, barf and blood. I never been in no jungle, and likely you folks ain’t neither, but I’ll tell you something, I’d vouch you got the smell down. I reckon this is just how it stinks near some big kill. What was you wanting to talk to me about, Reverend?”

Coule glared at him. “I’m no whiskey priest,” he said, his voice at once strained and repressed, tight as a ventriloquist’s. “I’m no one defrocked. I’m clean-shaved. I don’t court the devil like some kid playing with fire. I am not tormented,” he said, his voice on the edge of rage. “My heart’s at the softball game. Someone brings potato salad. Someone brings chicken.”

“Sure,” Mills said. The old man whimpered. Mills hacked a ball of dark phlegm into a corner of the elevator. The blacks stared at him.

“You’re saved?” Coule demanded.

“Who you talking to, Reverend? You talking to me? The Uncle? These spades? We having a revival here in the elevator?”

“You know who I’m talking to. You’re saved?”

“Like money in the bank,” Mills said mildly.

The black men laughed. When the elevator opened on the ground floor there was a crowd in the lobby. Mills stood behind the wheelchair. He turned to one of the men. “Hold that door, will you, Kingfish? Ready, Uncle? Here we go.” He shoved the chair through the milling blacks and out the door toward the waiting truck.

He handed the last of the cartons up to Lewis and started to get into the truck on the passenger side. Coule touched his arm. Laglichio, who was already seated, leaned toward the minister. “We’re running late, Father. I need my man. Can you finish it up?”

“Something come up at church that Reverend Coule needed to tell me about. He’s about done.”

“At church,” Laglichio said. “I never knew he was so devout.”

“My boss,” Mills said when they’d stepped a few paces away from the truck, “gives two-week paid vacations but me and Louise usually don’t go nowhere. Louise’s dad still lives in the city. We drop over once in a while, take the old fellow out for a little drive. I got this ’63 Buick Special but wouldn’t trust it on no long——”

“How?”

“Pardon?”

“How were you saved?”

“That’s between me and the Lord,” George Mills said mildly.

“Don’t talk to me like that.
How?
”

“In my sleep,” Mills said. “Sure. In my sleep I think. What are you looking at? It’s the truth. In my sleep.”

“When?”

“I don’t remember when.”

“Are you baptized?”

“I don’t think so. Not that I recall.”

“Do you pray?”

“You mean on my knees? Like that?”

“Do you
pray?
”

“Of course not.”

“Have you renounced the devil?”

Mills laughed. “Jesus, Reverend, don’t talk like a fool. If there was a devil and he could work all that shit, would
you
renounce him?”

“Do you accept Christ?”

“Christ ain’t none of my business.”

“You don’t believe, do you? You don’t even believe in God.”

“No,” Mills said.

“Why did you say that to your wife? Why did you agree to see me? You’re not baptized, you don’t pray, church means nothing to you, you never accepted Christ, and don’t believe in God. You’re thick with sin.
Saved!
”

“Who says I ain’t?” Mills asked furiously. “You were there with me on that elevator. You saw me. You heard me. Who says I ain’t? I parted them niggers like the Red Sea. They never touched me. You know how they do people in these projects? They didn’t do
me.
They never will. Who
says
I ain’t saved?”

Coule had seen his eyes. They were nothing like the dead woman’s. There was no God panic in them. They weren’t bloodshot with love as her husband’s had been. They glittered with certainty. Coule would ask him if he would preach a sermon.

Louise bought a douche bag, stringent douches. She bought shaving soap, a lady’s discrete razor. She proceeded to cut the devil’s hair, shaving down there till she was bald as a baby.

3

T
he griefs were leaking. Everyone was watching the telethon and the griefs were leaking. Everyone was giving to the telethon and sympathy was pouring. There was lump in the throat like heavy hail. Everyone was watching and giving to the telethon and the griefs were big business. The Helbrose toteboard could barely keep up. The griefs were pandemic. There was a perspiration of griefs, tears like a sad grease. He watched the telethon from his bed and was catching the griefs, coming down with the griefs, contaged, indisposed with sentiment.

Cornell Messenger watched the telethon almost every year. He had been with Jerry for seven or eight telethons now. He knew when Lewis would take off his bowtie, he knew when he would cry. I know when I will, Messenger thought.

It was astonishing how much money was being raised. He was positive all the other channels were dark. It was Labor Day weekend, but he was certain that even those off on picnics had seen some of it, that almost everyone had been touched, that this year’s campaign would beat all the others. He expected Frank Sinatra to bring Dean Martin on the show any minute now. He expected everyone to forgive his enemies, that there would be no enemies left. We are in armistice, Messenger thought. Truce is legion, all hearts reconciled in the warm bathwater of the griefs.

During the cutaway to the local station he watched the children swarm in the shopping center. They told their names to the Weather Lady and emptied their jars and oatmeal boxes and coffee cans of cash into great plastic fishbowls.

The sums were staggering. Two grand from the firemen in Red Bud, Illinois. Who challenged the firefighters of Mascoutah and Belleville and Alton and Edwardsville. This local challenged that local, waitresses and cab drivers challenged other waitresses and cab drivers to turn over their tips. He suspected that whores were turning tricks for muscular dystrophy.

He saw what was happening in the bi-state area and multiplied that by what must be going on in the rest of the country. They would probably make it—the twenty-five million Ed McMahon had predicted the telethon would take in. But there were only a few hours left. Would MD be licked in the poster kid’s lifetime?

Messenger didn’t know what he thought of Jerry Lewis. He suspected he was pretty thin-skinned, that he took seriously his critics’ charges that he’d made his fortune mimicking crippled children, that for him the telethon was only a sort of furious penance. It was as if—watch this now, this is tricky, he thought—the Juggler of Our Lady, miming the prelapsarian absence of ordinary gravity, had come true, as everything was always coming true, the most current event incipient in the ancient, sleazy biologic sprawl. Something like that.

I guess he’s okay, Messenger thought. If only he would stop referring to them as
his
kids. He doesn’t have to do that. Maybe he doesn’t know.

Jerry sweats griefs. His mood swings are terrific. He
toomels
and scolds, goes from the most calculated sincerity to the most abandoned woe. A guy who says he’s the head of the Las Vegas sanitation workers presents him with a check for twenty-seven thousand bucks and he thanks him, crying. Then, sober again, he
davvens
his own introduction. The lights go down and when the spotlight finds him he’s on a stool, singing “Seeing My Kids.” It’s a wonderful song, powerful and sad. The music’s better than the lyrics but that’s all right. The griefs are in it. The griefs are stunning, wonderful, thrilling. I’m sold, Messenger thought, and called for a kid to fetch his wallet from downstairs.

He’ll phone in his pledge in front of the kid who brings his wallet up first, reading the numbers off his Master Card. He is setting an example. The example is that no one must ever be turned down.

He is surprised. He’s been watching the telethon for almost nine hours now, and in all that time the St. Louis number has been superimposed on the bottom of the screen, alternating with the numbers of other communities in the bi-state area, but he still doesn’t know it and has to wait until the roster of towns completes itself and the St. Louis number comes back on. He cannot read the number on the screen and calls from across the room to ask the kid to do it, first telling the thirteen-year-old boy what to look for.

“S?” Harve says uncertainly, “T? L?”

“No, Harve, the number. You’re spelling St. Louis. The number’s what we want here. Jeanne, help him.”

His kid sister whispers the number to him and Harve brokenly begins to relay it back to Messenger, checking the numbers she gives him against those he can find on the screen. Then the number goes off and Harve calls out numbers indiscriminately. He gives Messenger an Illinois exchange.

“Damn it, Jeanne,
you
give me the number.”

The delay has cost muscular dystrophy ten bucks. Grief leaks through Messenger’s inconvenience. A cure for this scourge will forever be ten dollars behind itself.

The announcer is complaining that less than half the phones are ringing, that Kansas City, with less population, has already pledged forty thousand dollars more than St. Louis. Not that it’s a contest, he says, the important thing is to get the job done, but he won’t put his jacket on until we go over the top. It doesn’t make any difference what happens nationally, we don’t meet our goal he won’t wear his jacket. He’s referring to a spectacularly loud jacket he wears only during MD campaigns. Messenger, who’s been with the telethon years, wants to see him put it on. It’s a dumb ploy. Messenger knows this. So unprofessional that just by itself it explains why he’s in St. Louis and Ed McMahon is out there in Vegas with Jerry and Frank and Dean, but no form of Show Business is alien to him and Messenger hopes he gets to see the announcer put on his sports coat.

His grown son picks up an extension. “Get off,” Messenger says, “I’m making a call.”

“This will take a minute.”

“So will this. Get off.”

“Jesus.”

Why don’t they answer? He carries the phone as far as it will reach and sits down on the bed. It’s true. Most of the volunteers have nothing to do. They know the camera is on them, and those who aren’t actually speaking to callers try to look busy. They stare at the phones, make notes on pieces of paper. His son picks up the phone again, replaces it fiercely.

“Do you want to break the damn thing?” Messenger shouts. “What’s wrong with you?”

There are three banks of telephones, eight volunteers in each bank. Though he’s never seen one, they remind him of a grand jury. The phone has rung perhaps twenty times.

“Jeanne, did you give me the right number?”

“727-2700.”

It’s on the screen. Messenger hangs up and dials again. This time someone answers on the third ring.

“The bitch gave you the wrong number,” Harve says.

“I did
not,
” Jeanne says.

“That’s baloney-o. That’s shit,” Harve says.

“
Please,
” Messenger says.

He says his name to the volunteer and gives his address. Speaking slowly and clearly, he reads the dozen or so numbers off his charge card. He volunteers its expiration date, his voice low with dignity and reserve, the voice of a man with eleven months to go on his Master Card.

“Are you going to give them three million dollars, Daddy?” Harve asks. Messenger frowns at him.

“What do you want to pledge, sir?”

“Twenty dollars,” he says, splitting the difference between anger and conscience.

“Challenge your friends,” his daughter says. “Challenge the English department. Challenge everyone left-handed. Make her wave, Daddy.”

What the hell, he asks if she will wave to his daughter and, remarkably, from the very center of the volunteers, a hand actually shoots up.

“Ooh,” Jeanne says, “she’s pretty.”

“Dumbshit thinks she can see us,” Harve says. “Can she, Daddy?”

“Are you almost through?” his other son asks on the extension. “Mike wants me to find out when the movie starts.”

“Goddamn it,” Messenger roars into the phone.

“Will the little boys walk now?” Harve asks. “Will they run and read?”

“Tell your brother I’m off the phone.”

Harve hangs back. “What if there’s a fire? How would the crippled children excape from a fire?”

“Escape, Harve,” Messenger says.

“
Ex
cape,” Harve says.

“There’s not going to be any fire. Stop thinking about fire.” The griefs were all about. The griefs were leaking. Harve’s third-degree-burned by them.

“They should take all the money and get the cripples fire stingishers.”

“Cut it out. Stop with the fucking fire shit.”

“They should.”

“Do what I tell you!”

His son leaves the bedroom, his fine blond hair suddenly incendiary as it catches the light from the window.

The horror, the horror, he thinks absently.

Once he’s phoned in his pledge he loses interest. It’s what always happens, but he takes a last look at the telethon before he dresses. The entertainers sweated griefs and plugged records. It was all right. Messenger forgave them. This was only the world.

Of course they’d reach their goal, Messenger thought. Everybody was watching the telethon. Besides, the fix was in. Eleventh-hour operetta was ready to put them over the top. Soft drink, ballpoint pen, timepiece, fast food, twenty-four-hour Mom and Pop shops, roller skating and dancing school cartels were already in the wings. An afflicted airlines executive and a backyard carnival representative stood by. Why, his own kids had dropped three or four bucks at a neighbor kid’s carnival two months before. Then what was the telethon for anyway? TV time that Messenger’s twenty bucks and the fifty or sixty the kids had raised and the perhaps half-dozen million or so of other private grievers all across the country might not even cover, make up? What
was
it for?