“I have to tell you something,” George Mills said.
Television had taught him. Edward R. Murrow had shown him their living rooms and studies, the long, set-tabled dining rooms of the famous. Commercials had given him an idea of the all-electric kitchens of the median-incomed, the tile-floor-and-microwave-oven-blessed, their digital-fired radios waking them to music. He knew the lawns of the middle class, their power mowers leaning like sporting goods against their cyclone fences, their chemical logs like delivered newspapers, their upright mailboxes like tin bread.
“I used to want,” he’d told Laglichio’s driver, “to live in a tract house and hear airplanes over my head. I wanted hammocks between my trees and a pool you assemble like a toy.”
They had four hundred dollars in savings.
“I’m poor,” he’d said. “In a couple of years I’ll have my silver wedding anniversary. I’m white as a president and poor as a stone.”
“They give to the niggers.”
“Nah,” he’d said, “the niggers got less than I got. I’m just poor. You’re a kid, you’re still young, you’ll be in the teamsters one day. You know what it means to be poor in this country? I take it personally. I’ve been poor all my life. I’ve always been poor and so have my people—Millses go back to the First Crusade—and I don’t understand being poor. We’ve always been respectable and always been poor. Like some disease only Jews get, or women in mountainous country.”
“You got a car. You got a house.”
“A ’63 Buick Special. A bungalow.”
He worked for Laglichio, carrying the furniture and possessions of the evicted.
Usually they had no place to go. Laglichio had a warehouse. The furniture was taken there. Laglichio charged eight dollars a day for storage. Anything not called for in sixty days was Laglichio’s to dispose of. It turned up in resale shops, was sold off for junk or in lots at “estate” sales. The newer stuff, appliances, stereos, the TV’s, went into hock. Laglichio had a contract with the city. He got a hundred and fifty dollars for each move, half of which was paid by a municipal agency, half by the evicted tenant. Laglichio demanded payment up front. It was rare that a tenant had the cash, and Laglichio refused to put anything into his truck until the owner signed a release assigning his property to Laglichio should he be unable to repay all of Laglichio’s claims against him—the seventy-five dollars he owed for the move, the eight-dollar-a-day storage fee—after the sixty-day grace period. He worked with sheriff’s deputies. He had the protection of the police at each eviction. He paid Mills one hundred and eighty dollars a week.
“You’re free to make a new start now,” Mills might explain to one of these dispossessed folks. “Look at it that way.” Sometimes he would be sitting outlandishly on the very sofa he had just carried down into the street when he said this.
“New start? To do which? Sleep in the street?”
“Nah,” he’d say. “Without all this——this hardware.” He indicated the intermingled rooms of furniture exposed on the pavement, a kitchen range beside a bed, a recliner in front of an open refrigerator, tall standing lamps next to nightstands or potted in washtubs.
“Shit.”
“I mean it. Footloose. Fancy-free. Not tied down by possessions.” He
did
mean it. He hated his own things, their chintz and walnut weight. But of course he understood their tears and arguments and nodded amiably when they disagreed. “I’m Laglichio’s nice guy,” he’d confide. “I understand. I’m poor myself. I’m Laglichio’s public relations.”
“Get your ass out my sofa.”
“But legally, you see, it isn’t your sofa. It’s Laglichio’s sofa till you pay him for moving it for you out into the street. But it’s okay. I’ll get up. Don’t get sore.”
“Is there some trouble here?”
“No, deputy. Don’t bother yourself. The lady’s a little upset’s all there’s to it.” And he might wink, sometimes at the cop, sometimes at the woman.
“How this happen?” the woman cried. “How this come to be?”
“Poor folks,” Mills said philosophically.
“What you talkin’ poor folks, white folks?”
“Oh no,” he’d say courteously, interested as always in the mystery, the special oddness of his life. “You must understand. It’s difficult to fail in America.”
“Yeah? I never had no trouble. None
my
people ever found it so tough. Look at Rodney. He be young. He be my youngest. All this exciting to him. He think he gonna live and play outside here on the pavement an’ I never have to call him. Why, this be sweet to Rodney. Ignorant. Ignorant and dreamful. But soon’s he get his size it don’t be no hardship to fail.”
“My people do awful things to your people, but even so it’s hard, it’s hard to fail. Simple animal patience will take you immense distances. Bag in the National, horse the carts in the parking lot. Make stock boy. In a couple of years you’ll trim lettuce, in a couple more you’ll be doing the produce like flower arrangements. No no, lady. Success is downhill all the way. You put in your time, you wait your turn. Not me, not any Mills ever. A thousand years of stall and standstill passed on like a baton.”
“How this cost me money?”
“No no. Nothing I say costs people money.”
Laglichio appeared in the doorway and signaled Mills toward him.
“Did she sign?”
“No.”
“Then what were you shooting the shit about? Here, give me the papers.” Laglichio returned with the executed forms. “I told her the papers proved it was her furniture. That’s all you got to say. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Sure,” Mills said.
“You know something, George?” Laglichio said. “You ain’t strong. You don’t lift high. You’re what now? Fifty? Fifty something? You ain’t got the muscle for this. What am I going to do with you, George? You ain’t got the beef for this business. And any white man who can’t get a nigger to sign a binding legal paper probably ain’t got the brains for it neither. Put the shit in the truck and let’s get out of here.”
He wasn’t strong. At best he was a student of leverage, knowledgeable about angles, overhangs, the sharp switchbacks in stairways. He was very efficient, scholarly as a geologist about floor plans, layouts, seeing them in his head, someone with an actual gift for anticipating and defying tight squeezes, lubricant as a harbor pilot. Not mechanically inclined but centrifugally, centripetally, careful as a cripple. And the furniture of the poor was light, something inflated and cut corner about it that reduced weight and turned it to size. He wore the quilted protective pads of long-distance furniture removers and affected their wide leather belts and heavy work shoes and gave the impression, his body robed in its gray green upholstery, of someone dressed in mats, drop cloth. He thought he looked rather like a horse.
Laglichio would not fire him. Mills was not union. Often laid off but rarely fired, he was a worker in trades that jerked to the whims of the economy, a stumbling Dow-Jones of a man. It was this that had brought him to Laglichio in the first place. He worked in unemployment-related industries.
Mills and Lewis, the driver, had started to load the truck. The child was crying while his mother painted a bleak picture of homelessness and bedlessness, table and chairlessness, an empty landscape of helpless exile.
“Where we sleep, Mama?”
“Ask that white man where we sleep.”
“Where we eat?”
“You ask them white men.”
“Where we go to the toilet?”
“We just have to hold it in.”
Rodney clutched his teddy bear, its nap so worn it seemed hairless, a denuded embryo, and howled.
Laglichio nudged Mills. George sighed and picked up a carton of broken toys he’d packed. He hesitated for a moment and tried to hand the carton off to Lewis. Laglichio shook his head and, using only his jaw, indicated Mills’s elaborate route, past the couch, by the lamps, through the randomly placed chairs.
“What’s that you’re carrying, George?” Laglichio called in a loud voice.
“Toys,” Mills mumbled.
“Toys?” Laglichio called out. “Toys you say?”
“I’m fixing to load them on the truck,” he recited.
“Toys? Boys’ toys?”
“They’re toys,” Mills said. “That’s all I know.”
Laglichio came up to where Mills was standing amid a small crowd of neighbors who had begun to gather. “Are those your toys, sonny?” Laglichio asked the boy. “Show him,” he commanded George. Mills put the carton down and undid the cardboard cross-hatching. “Are those them?” Laglichio asked the kid kindly. The child nodded. “You give him back his playthings,” he demanded. “You give this boy back his bunnies and switchblades.” The little boy looked at Mills suspiciously. “What’s your name, kiddo?” Laglichio asked. “What’s his name?” he asked the woman.
“It’s Rodney,” Mills said. Laglichio glared at the furniture mover.
“Go ahead, angelbabes,” Laglichio said, “take them back.”
Rodney looked away from the dead balls, broken cars and ruined, incomplete board games to his mother. The woman nodded her head wearily and the boy took the box.
“All right,” Laglichio said, “my men got their work to do.” He glanced at the deputy, a black man who shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.
“Folks in trouble want their privacy,” he said softly. “Don’t shame her,” he said, working the crowd until there wasn’t a soul left to witness.
“Hotshot,” Laglichio said to Mills in the truck. “Big guy hotshot. ‘Rodney.’ You almost blew it for the kid, you know that? I had a mind to keep that shit for spare parts. Donate them to Goodwill Industries and take the tax write-off. Don’t you understand yet,” Laglichio lectured him, though he was fifteen years Mills’s junior, “what I do? It’s orchestrated. It’s a fucking dance what I do. On eggshells. You’re always bitching to me and Lewis here about how poor you are. This is because you don’t think. The subtleties escape you. You don’t have a clue what goes on.”
“I have a clue,” Mills muttered.
“Yeah? Do you? Yeah? There were
riots
before I took over.
Riots.
You think a lousy deputy could do diddly with that kind of shit coming down? They had them. Blacker than the boys I use. The city gives me seventy-five bucks. You think that’s a rip-off? It’s no rip-off. I save the taxpayer a dozen times that much just in the blood that ain’t spilled, that don’t have to be replaced by transfusions.”
He understood. He loved the shoptalk of the go-getters, loved to hear wealth’s side of things. And Laglichio enjoyed giving his tips, took pleasure not only in the boasts but in sharing his secrets, outrageously touting them, daring Mills with proposition, low down, the goods, his insider’s inside jobs and word in the ear.
Once, Mills’s car wouldn’t start, the battery dead, and Laglichio had to come with Lewis to pick him up in the truck. Mills was waiting when they drove up but he’d forgotten his lunch and had to go back into the house to get it. Laglichio couldn’t have been waiting for him more than two minutes.
“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 nobody in the market for a house going to buy
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 bitch 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 fucking 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.