Free George Mills by Stanley Elkin Page A

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