Free George Mills by Stanley Elkin Page B

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