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.
They were armed, almost militial. They owned rifles but few handguns, hunting knives but few switchblades. There were tire irons in the family generations but when they murdered each other they killed like hunters.