George Mills (52 page)

“You were with her for weeks. You saw her die, you watched her dress size come down.”

“Yes.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Your unpublished numbers.”

“Don’t tangle with me, Mills.
What did she tell you?
”

“Everything.”

“Horseshit.”

(And thought of Greatest Grandfather Mills.)

“Wait,” Claunch said, “don’t go. Please, Mills. Please, George.”

“Tell me what you want,” George Mills said. (Thinking: You can’t have it, there’s nothing left.) And didn’t wait for Claunch to reply, telling him instead what any of them—his forebears—would have told him, mollycoddling grief and concern, handling his anxiety like something armed, primed, talking him in off all his rich man’s window ledges—because much had been lost in the retelling, blurred in the father-to-son translations, distinction smudged as a ruin—seeing a thousand pairs of boots radiant in the hall, hearing even as he spoke them the rote and passionless lies, his ancient tribe’s ancient there-theres and now-nows, the primitive consolations—for bread, a nickel for a cup of coffee, a coin for a candy, a place to hide from the wind—worn-out as a witchdoctor’s gibberish. (And seeing for perhaps the first time in a thousand years something even more radiant and splendid than the cumulative shine on the cumulative boots. Glittering spectra beyond trust. Bright as belief. And thinking: Why, we could have
destroyed
them!)

“Was the pain ever more than she could handle?”

“Sometimes she’d take an extra aspirin.”

“Aspirin? Only aspirin?”

“Her belief comforted her.”

“Yes,” Claunch said, “there was that. She believed.”

(And Cornell to be mollified. Was something between them? Not his business. Nothing his business.)

“Tell me,” Claunch said softly, “did she curse me?”

“There was a kind of message.”

“Oh?” he said. “A message?”

“She didn’t want there to be hard feelings.”

“She told you she forgave me?” Claunch asked hopefully.

“No,” Mills said, and looked directly at the ambassadorlike man. “She told me she apologized.”

He passed a row of garages with their antique and classic automobiles. (He had noticed one or two at the church, three more at the cemetery. In the narrow roadway it had looked more like a rally than a burial.) And crossed past a middle-aged couple examining a restored 1933 Plymouth which Mills recognized as being exactly like Wickland’s old car in Florida, the one his father had driven to De Land on his errands. The man smiled and waved, and George nodded at him.

He did not have to be told where to go. Not instinct this time either, and certainly not grace and down from déjà vu and history. Not even imagination so much as a blueprint knowledge of its location, certain, sure as a housekeeper where things went. Knowing there’d be a toy station, population, elevation signs, a town’s given name high on the station nostalgic as a stand of trees or the iron horse itself. (It would bear the name of wood or game: Elmville. Deerfield.) Flowers would be planted around its platform, along its borders.

And started to climb a low knoll. And heard the train before he saw it. Not its comical whistle—certain of
this,
too: the outsize locomotive wail that would be hung about its neck like some apocalyptic joke—but its tinny chuff chuff as it pulled them along the banks and straightaways of its miniature routes. (Imagining Mrs. Glazer as a child, laughing hysterically, pissing her drawers, unable to help herself, seduced, ravished by motion.) Seeing it before he actually saw it (because despite reservation, protestation, all his low-grade weariness of their complicated, graceless lives, he had his Mills-given gift for the inventory of the rich, as intimate a knowledge of their safes, attics and basements as he had of his own clothes closet——precious treasure’s second sight).

At the top of the rise he spotted them in their luscious, bulldozed valley. Grant—who forebore to wear the engineer’s cap Mills saw stuffed in his pocket—sat behind a long locomotive on a sloping tender which served as a seat, his hands on controls which poked out of the rear of the engine like levers in a tavern game. Four topless passenger cars the dimensions of desks were pulled along at about fifteen miles an hour. The coaches’ only slightly scaled-down seats were plush, reversible, wide as rumble seat. George saw the heavy brass handles, tickets fluttering from them like bright feathers. Frames had been painted onto the wide safety glass that wrapped each car to give the illusion of windows. Milly sat primly alone in the last coach, his wife and Cornell facing each other in the second, their knees touching in the crowded quarters. Louise was the one who rode backward. Mary sat on a bench outside the station and glanced impatiently at her wrist watch and then up the line just as if she were waiting for a real train.

He started down the slope, his eyes on the single and sometimes double set of tracks which merged and seemed to cover each other like stripes on a barber pole. When he was halfway down the hill Louise spotted him and waved. She called to the engineer and Grant sounded the whistle, bass as a boat’s, and rang the bell, his face obscured in the plume of steam which feathered back from the stack.

George came to a siding next to some signals and switches and waited for the train to pass. He smiled—instinct again, or reflex—at Milly. Messenger grinned and shouted something to him which he couldn’t make out, and when the train had gone by he crossed the tracks and passed through the thin verisimilitude of tiny trees which masked the passengers’ vision from their toy environment, and walked directly across the carefully landscaped oval to the station.

He sat next to Mary, who seemed subdued now, all interest lost, if she’d ever had any, in the elaborate rig.

“That train ain’t going in your direction?”

“I never ride the day my mother is buried.”

“Oh,” Mills said.

“I bet they don’t stop,” she said. “Your wife and that Cornell character have been going round and round just forever. Not a thought for poor old Grant who has to catch all that steam in his face.”

“The steam is hot?”

“Well no, it isn’t hot exactly but it’s not very pleasant. It’s just especially horrible when you’ve just had your hair done, even if you’re sitting well back in the cars like Milly.”

“I see.”

She shifted about to face him. “But it’s all right at night if there’s interesting guests and we all get inside and Grant puts the roofs on the coaches. Then one can have air conditioning in summer or electric heaters in winter. Then it’s
very
cozy. Very especially if it’s a boy-girl party. There’s lots more track that runs through those woods yonder. Then it can be better than a sleigh or hayride. Then it’s just like the tunnel of love.”

The train came by without slowing and an enhanced Messenger stood up in the coach, his hands braced on top of the glass. “The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” He was laughing.

“If you want a ride you have to flag the train,” Mary said.

“That’s all right,” Mills said.

“There’s a toilet inside the station if you have to go. There’s a potbelly stove.”

“I know,” Mills said. “There’s a map of the line behind glass. There’s travel posters and old waiting room benches.”

Mary looked at him curiously. “Did Grandfather tell you?”

“No.”

“My mom?”

“Is Grant nice?”

“Very nice. He’s worked for the family years. We’re all very polite to Grant.”

“Is Grant his first name or his last name?”

“You’d have to ask Milly.”

“Where’s the flag?”

“Over there,” she said, “but you can use your handkerchief or raise your hand as if you were hailing a cab.”

“You do it,” Mills said.

“No,” she said, “it’s stupid.”

“Does Grant ever get to go for a ride?”

“He’s riding now.”

“I mean in the cars. I mean in the coaches.”

Messenger, grinning, helped Louise down from the train when it pulled in. It’s her big day, Mills thought.

“Can my husband have a ride?” Louise asked.

“I’m all right,” George said.

“Just once or twice around,” she said. “You can’t tell from here but there’s a tiny model city where the train makes its first turn. It’s very unique.”

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Cornell Messenger whispered.

“Miss Claunch said that maybe we could bring Daddy’s Meals-on-Wheels friends out for a ride someday,” Louise said. “It’s really amazing. You ought to try it, George.”

“There’s not much water in the boiler,” Grant said. “I’d have to fill it and fire it up again.”

“Oh yeah?” George said. “You’d have to go to all that trouble? For me? Oh yeah?”

And suddenly—Mills didn’t know how—the two of them were bristling about each other, hackled as rivals dithered and suspicious over pawed ground, cautious, their glands giving off signal, tooth-and-claw stuff.

Mills asked if Grant were Grant’s first name or last.

Grant wondered if George was the same George who’d taken Mrs. Glazer to Mexico to die.

“That’s right,” Mills said. “She asked for me.”

“Specifically asked for you?”

“Specifically. That’s right.”

“She was very ill.”

“Bereft,” Mills shot back. “Bereft of folks to count on.”

“Hey,” Messenger said. “Hey, come on.”

“Leave me alone,” George said.

Milly was crying. Mary, sedate on the bench, looked from her sister to the others. Louise announced that if they were driving back to the city she had better stop in at the station first. Grant walked to his tender and started to climb aboard. Mills followed him.

“It’s hot,” he said. “Those cars are air-conditioned. You didn’t turn it on for my wife.”

“I’d have had to put the roofs up.”

“You should have! She just had her hair done. Now it’s all unkempt from the steam.”

“It was unkempt when she got on board.”

“Don’t you talk about my wife that way.” But Grant had already started the train up. George backed away from the steam shooting out from the pistons. “I’m talking to you. Where are you going? Someone is talking to you!”

Grant turned around and smiled. “Who?”

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Messenger said behind him.

“What? What do you want?”

“Let’s go down a ways. I don’t want anyone to overhear.”

“I’ve got to get back to the city.”

“Hey fellow, come on, will you? I lit up again in the station. I’m so stoned you could make a citizen’s arrest. Why do I do this? Do I do this for fun? It’s the griefs, Mills. I owe it to my problems. It’s medicine for the griefs.”

“I don’t care about your problems.”

“Sure, if you did you’d get stoned too.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got my own troubles,” George said, turning away.

“What, a saved, tucked-in guy like you? All snuggy snug and living the lap robe, deck chair life?”

“Louise told you that on the train.”

“Who? Oh. Lulu? Nah. The mischief maker told me.”

“Mrs. Glazer?”

“Long distance. She was dying. She reached out and touched someone. Cancerous bitch.”

“Come if you’re coming. I’m going back.”

“Wait,” Cornell said, and his voice was unenhanced. “Does
Mahesvaram
mean anything to you?”

When George turned back to look at him Cornell was standing on the tracks, all the fingers of his left hand stuffed into his mouth. “It’s that word she gave you,” he said quietly, “it was her mantra.”

Messenger seemed as if he were going to collapse, and Mills rushed to support him.

“Watch out!” Grant shouted. “You’re standing on the third rail!”

The two men leaped away from each other, tripping over the outside track. Grant roared. “Geez, that’s the oldest one in the book,” the engineer wheezed. “I used to get Judith with that one. Same as I got her kids. A third rail on a
steam
engine?”

“What else?” Cornell hissed, recovering, grasping the sleeve of Mills’s suit coat. “Did she tell you about my kid?”

“Not now,” George said, and pulled away. “You go on. I have to talk to that guy.” He turned toward the engineer, already addressing him while he was still several yards away. “What’s your problem, Grant?”

“Oh,
my
problem.”

“This morning I was your dead mistress’s pallbearer. The family knows the use I’ve been to them. I mean the girls, I mean the sisters-in-law, I mean the aunt. I mean Mr. Glazer and the Claunches, Jr. and Sr. both. If I were to mention your rudeness to me, or the people in my party…”

Grant was laughing, applauding his speech. “Hear hear,” he said. “Har har.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Do you play cards?” Grant asked suddenly.

“What?”

“Cards. Card games. Do you know how to play card games?”

“Yes,” Mills said, “sure.”

“How many games?”

“What are you talking about?”

“How many card games do you know how to play? Gin? Do you know gin?”

“I play gin.”

“Call rummy? Michigan rummy?”

“Michigan rummy.”

“Pinochle? Bridge?”

“I never learned bridge.”

“You never learned.”

“So?”

“You never learned. You don’t know call rummy. Or a dozen games I could mention you’ve never heard of. The poker variations. Sure,
you
play cards. You never learned. You know who taught me bridge? Judith. Judith did. I was her bridge partner.”

“You’re crazy,” Mills said.

“What do you think my father did? For a living? How did he support us?”

“How would I know?”

“Guess.”

“I don’t know. He worked for the Claunches. He was in service. I don’t know. You’re the gardener’s boy.”

They were at the station.

“My father was a pharmacist. He owned a drugstore.”

“Guess what?” Louise said, coming out of the train station. She was laughing.

“My daughter programs computers and my son has three shoestores in Kansas City,” the servant said.

“That john’s no bigger than a child’s potty,” Louise said. “The toilet paper’s no wider than a reel of tape. It’s scale. Everything’s scale.”

He opened the door of his Buick Special and was about to get in—Louise was already in the back, Cornell in front—when someone called to him. “Hold on a moment would you?” It was the man who had waved to him, the one who’d been admiring the classic cars when Mills had passed the garages on his way to find Louise.