George Mills (9 page)

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.

“Shit,” 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
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 chickenshit 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 ashore. 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 Cassadaga 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 “Lō-sex 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 brass 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 shit.”

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. “Lōsex 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, butted 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
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 glass to his hosts. “Who’s that, Sinmazine? Thanks, Sinmazine.” He drank off two glasses quickly, stood and walked the length of the bar. “Dacthal,” he chanted. “Dīpel.”

“George got caps on the brain,” Frank said.

“Lōsex 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 pass 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 hell 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 God.

Louise was naked on the floor of their bedroom. She opened her legs. She looked like a pair of sexual pliers. George watched neutrally as she performed—it was a performance—holding herself, plumping her breasts like pillows, licking her finger and touching it to her vagina like someone testing the pornographic 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 stitches. 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 ass. 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 classes, 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 masturbated 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 grassroots kid, was saved.

2

T
he 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 pronounced 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 God had done. God, 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.