George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “Stop,” George said lamely.

  “It’s true,” Imolatty said. “It just bleeds into the sunshine. It’s like trying to show movies outdoors on a bright afternoon.”

  “Stop,” he said mechanically.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Mrs. Imolatty said.

  “Stop,” George told the woman.

  “Sylvia trying to drain off that yellow cast,” Imolatty said, “running it through her sifter like it was a cup of flour.”

  “My hands cramped,” she said.

  “ ‘You think it’s any paler now, Clement?’ ” Imolatty mocked his wife.

  “Well, you were the one thought that maybe if we washed it,” Mrs. Imolatty said. She looked at George. “You know what Mr. Imolatty did?” she said. “Just went and carried all five bushels and dumped them into the tub one at a time and filled it to the top with piping hot water every time he emptied a bushel, that’s all.”

  “Stop.”

  “Well, not piping hot every time he filled the tub. After the first two times the water was tepid. The fourth and fifth times it was outright cool.”

  “I thought if I let it soak a spell. We were kids,” Imolatty said.

  “What do kids know?” Mrs. Imolatty said.

  “Stop,” George said. “Stop. Stop. Stop.”

  “Not at all,” Imolatty said. “I’m telling you about ectoplasm. That’s what you want to know about, isn’t it? Because it isn’t all brick in the world, it isn’t all mortar or bulk or whatever it is that’s material reality’s equivalent of fundament, firmament. The heart has its atoms, too. Its monads and molecules, its units and particles. Soul has its nutshell grain of integer morsel. Instinct does, will. And ectoplasm is only the lovely ounce and pennyweight of God.

  “You’re not as smart as I thought, George,” Imolatty said. “You should have called me more often. My wife’s name is Sonia, not Sylvia. The Mortons constantly interrupted.”

  Imolatty turned away, moved to another part of the room to stand beside a neat mound of earth like a stack of cordwood. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is pure unprocessed primary. Me and Sonia thought you’d like to see what first-quality ectoplasm looks like before it’s been treated. This high-grade ore comes directly from ectoplasm mines in extreme northern Florida. You’re welcome to take a handful with you as a souvenir of your visit to the ectoplasm museum. We’re sorry that we have no bags for you to put it in, but you’ll find that it keeps just as well in your pocket or purse. This concludes our tour, folks. Sonia and me thank you very much. Sonia?”

  She flicked off the wall switch.

  “Stop!” George shouted. “Lie!” he screamed. “Cheat! Fake!” he called in the dark.

  He hadn’t seen his sister yet. Reverend Wickland hadn’t yet shown her to him, but at this time his relationship with their landlord was the most important thing in his life. Only Wickland (and his mother of course, though his mother’s silence the boy took for granted; she had, he supposed, nothing to say) did not bother to instruct him, all the others coming at him like coaches with a pupil of genius, one talented at piano, say, or blessed with a great, undeclared voice—George’s had only recently begun to change—their attitude—the coaches’, the mentors’—not only feigned but even the limits of their sternness fixed, established by custom and principle and the laws of cliché. Even George knew this, wondering at the seemingly boundless gift adults had for the servile vicarious and fawning reflexive. Without understanding such investment and at the same time peeved that his docile, silent mother hadn’t seemed to make it. Taking his case to Wickland.

  “They keep bothering me.”

  “Bothering you?”

  “Telling me stuff.”

  “They have a lot to say.”

  “They tell me about their powers. They like to talk about the stuff they have to fake.”

  “I see,” Wickland said.

  “In Milwaukee one time my dad took me to see wrestling. There was a wrestler who was crazy. He was big, a real mean ugly guy. The guy he wrestled was big too, but normal, you know? The mean guy wouldn’t fight fair. Everybody booed him. I booed him too. Sometimes the crazy guy would poke his fingers in the regular guy’s eyes or pull his hair or choke him. The referee didn’t always see this and that’s when we booed. My father said it was fake, that they rehearsed all this junk, that probably they were even friends. He said the crazy guy sent the normal guy birthday presents. One guy was supposed to act mean and the other decent, my father said. He said it’s all fixed, that they already know who’s going to win. He said the good guy would do something terrific just when it looked like he was in his worst trouble. Only he didn’t. The bad guy licked the good guy. My father said that that was fixed, too, that they did that to make it more exciting. The bad guy could have beat the good guy anyway. He was so much bigger than the normal guy even though the normal guy was big too. He could have licked him anyway. He didn’t have to pull hair or bite or choke or do any of that stuff.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It didn’t have to be fixed.”

  “No,” Wickland said.

  “He could do the job. You could see he could do the job.”

  “Yes.”

  “I asked my father why they’d go to all that trouble. They had to rehearse. I mean why would the normal guy have to rehearse losing if he had to lose anyway? If just being shorter and fifty pounds lighter and, you know, normal, was all he ever needed to lose? Why did it have to be fixed?”

  “You should listen to your father.”

  “He said they did it to make it more exciting.”

  “You should listen to your father.”

  “He said it’s all fixed. That even the championship is fixed.”

  “I don’t follow wrestling,” Wickland said. “I’m certain he’s right. You should listen to your father.”

  “They believe in it and fix it, too,” George said.

  “You should listen to your father,” Wickland said.

  He did listen to him. To the long story of Greatest Grandfather Mills and his adventures in Europe, to the stories of subsequent Millses in the male, unbroken, centuries-long Mills line—the women shadowy figures, like his mother, like the woman he would one day marry—wondering why his father never spoke of his own life, if anything had ever happened to him worthy of even being related. He did listen to him. He listened to all of them——to Kinsley and Sunshine and Madam Grace Treasury and all of them, making a fourth at their seances, a silent partner at their consultations.

  He listened to all of them and watched Bennett Prettyman.

  He was the largest of Cassadaga’s large men, that meaty fraternity of flesh Mills would all his life associate with what seemed most rival to it. “I don’t know why,” Kinsley had once told him, “spirit runs so much to size and bulk. It would seem that the bigger someone is—the more space he takes up—the more room his soul would have. It could afford to stay home you’d think, and not go flying off to look for trouble somewheres else.” Wickland, too, had mentioned it. “Perhaps,” he’d said, “the radical nubbin requires something solid by way of atmosphere. Would man be man if he didn’t have a whole universe to rattle around in?”

  George Mills could not vouch for his soul or what Wickland called “the radical nubbin,” but he was prepared to swear that Bennett Prettyman did not rattle. Indeed, he made no noise at all, was quiet as photograph, silent as sky.

  “I’m a lullaby,” he said in that low, soft, almost timbreless, cooing, asibilant voice like that of a baby given vocabulary. “I don’t know how I do it. Shut your eyes. Listen. Here I come.” George was seated in Prettyman’s office, a large, square, lean-to-like room with a concrete floor like the floor of a garage. Prettyman was in his swivel chair at a roll top desk across the room from him. “Go on,” he said, “shut them. It heightens the effect.” The boy shut his eyes. “Are they shut?” he heard Prettyman ask.

  “Yes, sir,” George said.

  “Well open them,
” the man said. “How do you expect to see me in the dark?”

  Prettyman was standing inside George’s spread knees. “You ain’t no Indian boy,” Prettyman said. “Indian boys’ hearing is honed by the dark. You never heard me come up. I was already standing here when I asked if your eyes were shut. Well, sure,” he said, “you figure there must be rubber casters on my chair. Go look for yourself if that’s what you think.”

  “That’s not what I think,” George said.

  “Go on, satisfy yourself. Sit right down in it. There ain’t any trick, but a doubting Tom always got to test for himself if the knots is loose or the handcuffs is real.”

  George got up and crossed the room, conscious of the hooflike claps his shoes made on the cement. He pulled the chair out from the desk. Its wooden legs scraped the hard flooring. He sat and the chair creaked.

  “Haw!” Prettyman exploded gruffly. He was standing behind the startled boy’s left shoulder.

  “I didn’t hear you,” George said.

  “I was with you every step of the way,” Bennett Prettyman said. “And don’t think I walked tippy toe or under cover of your footsteps either, or that I’m wearing crepe soles or maybe sponge or velvet. That’s an idea lots of them get. Lay it to rest, lay it to rest.” He tugged at his pants pleats and exposed dark, hard bluchers. “See?” he said. “Heavy-duty work shoes. Course, that don’t prove nothing. I could still be standing on top of powder puffs. You think? You think so?” He raised his shoes, exposing the soles for George’s inspection. They were cleated. “Haw!” he barked. “I suppose you want to touch them to feel if they’re metal. Here, I’ll save you the trouble.” He stamped his left foot on the ground heavily and pulled it shrilly across the cement floor. When Prettyman stepped back, George could see the ten-inch slash the big man had made in the concrete. “Haw,” he laughed, and leaned toward the boy, his face red and his huge shoulders shaking, silently breathless. “But something important as conversion is worth more than a few flashy card tricks, ain’t it? You don’t give your heart just cause the fella fooled you with the green pea and the walnut shell. Open that top drawer.”

  George pulled at the drawer. “It’s locked,” he said.

  “It ain’t locked. I don’t lock it.”

  He tried again but couldn’t budge it. “It’s stuck,” he said.

  “Here, let me,” Prettyman said. George watched as he came noiselessly from where he’d been standing. Though Prettyman walked as other men did, it was as if he moved on air. When the man was almost beside him he suddenly stumbled and fell. He made no sound when he hit the floor. “I’m that tree in that forest when no one is by,” he said. “Help me up,” he said. “I’m too big for these pratfalls.”

  “You’re bleeding,” George said.

  “Yeah? Am I?” he said, and raised a finger to his lips. “Hush. Hush then and listen.”

  George could just make out a faint sloshing sound, like soda splashing into a glass.

  “I ain’t got you yet, do I?” Prettyman said. “You’re some tough customer. I thought I asked you to help me up.” The boy took hold of the big man’s suit coat and helped him stand. “That’s seersucker. My clothes don’t crinkle. That drawer still stuck?” He pulled on it with all his heavy force. The boy knew how he operated now, not how he did it, but the pattern, something of his magician’s preemptive sequences. He knew there would be no sound as the drawer came suddenly unstuck. He even anticipated the noiseless crash Prettyman would make as he was thrown off balance against the wall, the drawer still in his hands.

  “Haw,” Prettyman said, watching him narrowly. “Haw?” It was a question. It was like the cocked, sidelong glance of an animal who has just fetched or performed unbidden some difficult trick. The boy had the power now. The coached and lectured, instructed, explanationed boy did. He looked blankly as he could at Bennett Prettyman, still off balance and clumsied uncomfortably against the wall by his hunched shoulders. Prettyman held the drawer out to him. It was filled with nails, wax paper, gravel, marbles, broken glass, sandpaper, cellophane and a small brass bell.

  “Haw,” Prettyman said softly, “haw.”

  George Mills started to cry.

  “You ain’t crying ’cause you’re scared,” Prettyman said. “You’re crying ’cause you think I tricked you.”

  “I don’t,” George said.

  “You don’t?” Prettyman said. “Then you ought to,” he said softly. He was being scolded, shouted at in that strange, unamplified, timbreless, infant’s voice. “What is it if it ain’t tricks? Look at me. Look at me. You can’t hear me, look at me.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Don’t sass me. Don’t you be fresh.

  “Because I don’t know how them other folks do it, the ones that claim to fly and the ones that have the dead over to supper like they was cousins from out of town. Prophets better than the newspapers or wire services who fix where the spring earthquake in China will be and know which movie stars will come to grief and what will happen to the presidents. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how they touch her handkerchief and know where the little girl’s body is buried, or tip off the cops where the kidnapper is. (There’s men on that chain gang that your daddy laid off—did you know this?—there’s men on that chain gang who’d still be at home if it wasn’t for clues that a crystal ball give.) I don’t know how they do it, the ones that know the future from arithmetic or give you your character from the salt in the sea. Hell, I don’t even know how the fella at the fair does it, how he can tell you your weight before you step on the scale.

  “So you better start thinking is it a trick, and wondering what it means if it ain’t. We’re in big trouble if it ain’t, kid, cause the universe won’t be through with us even after we’re quits with it. Forget God. God ain’t in it. Forget God and Satan, too. We got enough to worry about just from the folks in Cassadaga. Between them and our widows we stand to be horsed around the afterworld from now till the cows come home. So you better hope it is a trick, cause if it ain’t, if it ain’t, ain’t no one ever lived who’ll know a minute’s peace or get a good night’s sleep!

  “And I’m telling you all this for nothing. I can afford to ’cause I do a single. I can’t use you, I don’t need you. Them others are after your ass. They got some idea that one kid is worth two red Indians or nigger slaves. They——”

  “That’s why?” George said.

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s why they tell me this stuff?”

  “Sure that’s why. Didn’t Kinsley already make you an offer? Sure it’s why. Didn’t you already know that? Didn’t they tell you? Then the joke’s on them, ain’t it? You got even less extrasensories than them phony injuns and old Pullman porters they work with now. But you think about it. Because if they ain’t fakes then maybe you got a calling, vocation, a proper apostolate. Death is the only legitimate work for a man if there isn’t any. It stands to reason. Death is just good business if there ain’t no death.”

  Prettyman stopped talking, closed his eyes. George rose to go. “So I don’t know,” the big man said. George sat back. “I don’t know how they do it. I don’t even know how I do it. Gift or trick?

  “How did I come by my mute body or ever get to be this soft-shoe dance of a man? Because the voice is put on, trained. I do the voice like bel canto. A lot of the rest of it’s real.

  “I’ve always been big. I’ve always been graceful. My pop thought I was stealthy, a kid like a cat burglar. And one time he slapped me and it didn’t make noise. Or if it did, then the noise was in his fingers, in his palm. I hadn’t learned to control it then. (So some of it’s trick. What ain’t gift is trick.) I wasn’t this athlete of silence then. I hadn’t learned all there was about balance, even keel, equilibrium. I couldn’t deadlock the marbles or stalemate the stones. I hadn’t learned to walk on eggshells. I do that. I walk on eggshells at my sessions. (They aren’t seances, I don’t draw the curtains or turn out the lights. The eggshell stunt kills
them, stops the show cold. Come by sometime, you’ll see. Well, you have to give them something, after all. You have to give them something you don’t show them their dead or put their voices in your mouth like fruit. Come by. Come by sometimes. Bring your lovely mother if you can tear her away from the others. But don’t build up her expectations. Tell her it’s just a show.) I hadn’t discovered how to control it, maneuver my muscles like so many lead toy soldiers or send my weight through my body as if it was blood. Lift my pinkie.”

  He removed a marble from the drawer and placed it on top of the desk. He put his little finger on the marble. “Go on,” he said. “Try to lift it.”

  “My mother?”

  Prettyman folded his hands. “Never mind,” he said, “you wouldn’t be able to anyway. I transfer all my weight to the first joint of my little finger.”

  “My mother?”

  “She goes to the seances. To see your sister. She even came to me once. She’s quite a beautiful woman, isn’t she? She would have given me money. A very sweet woman, very beautiful. You’re quite the lucky young man. I told her I couldn’t.”

  He stood abruptly and walked over to a pail that had been set down in a corner of the room. He scattered sand from the pail onto the cement floor. “Hey, d’ya ever see this one?” he asked him. “I got to give them something. Hell, the dead don’t talk to me.”

  He had begun to dance on the coarse sand which lay on the cement like one of those portable floors used by roller skating acts in close quarters. He tapped on it soundlessly in his big cleated bluchers. He closed his eyes, speaking as he danced in that soft, frictionless voice which was like that of a baby.

  “If Mom asks you,” he said, “tell her that death is only pieces of life. Why shouldn’t I come and go there so long as I make no noise?”

  He stopped. “Slide up that roll top, will you, George? It ain’t locked. It ain’t even stuck. There’s a gun inside, but don’t touch it, it’s loaded.”

  But he didn’t, wouldn’t. He thanked Mr. Prettyman and said he had to be going. He didn’t want not to hear the report when the gun went off.