“George got caps on the brain,” Frank said.
“Lōsex 52 to Treflan 624,” George said. “Come in Treflan 624.”
Some of the men examined their caps.
“Breaker, breaker, good buddy,” Treflan 624 said amiably.
Mills winked at him. “Take off your patch you could pass for a golfer.” He took in the men sitting around the bar. “I see,” he said, “tennis stars, fishermen, long-ball hitters, pros.” He stared at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “I look,” he said, “like an old caddy.”
“Aw, George,” said one of the two or three men who knew his name.
“Does anyone know where he lives?”
“Over on Wyoming, I think. A couple blocks.”
“It’s halftime. Come on, I’ll give you a hand.”
The two men stood on either side of him and carefully arranged his arms about their shoulders.
All the way home Mills asked himself, “You see? You see what I mean?”
They were hoosiers, men he feared. Though he was no stranger to violence. Having lived in its zodiacal houses and along its cusps, having done his time — a stint in Korea, his job with Laglichio, other jobs — beneath its sullen influence, the loony yaws of vicious free fall, all the per second per second demonics of love and rage. (Not hate. He hated nothing, no one.) His wife had walked out on him once for another man. And had a feel for the soap opera condition — where he got his notions of dream houses, interior decoration — and imagination for the off-post trailer court one, all gothic, vulnerable, propinquitous nesting. Something disastrous and screwy-roofed about his character which drew the lightning and beckoned the tornado. It was as if he lived near the sites of drive-ins or along the gulfs and coasts, all the high-wind districts of being.
But now these dangerous men who humored him home were protecting him, shielding him. He believed they would do so forever, that it was over, that what had happened to him was done with and that now he could coast to his cancer or whatever else that would finally get him. He believed, that is, that he was free to die. A year or so past fifty, he was as prepared for death as someone with his will drawn up or all his plans carried out. Everything that was melodrama in his life was behind him. The rest he could handle.
And just about then, a few days before or behind the day the two hoosiers helped him home, somewhere in there, he was born again, saved.
He didn’t know what hit him. He didn’t go to church. He didn’t listen to evangelists on the radio. Nothing was healed in him. His back still hurt like hell from the time he had picked up a television funny. He didn’t proselytize or counsel his neighbors. He talked as he always had. He behaved no differently. Not to his wife, not to the dispossessed whose furniture he helped Laglichio legally steal. Finally, he did not believe in God.
Louise was naked on the floor of their bedroom. She opened her legs. She looked like a pair of sexual pliers. George watched neutrally as she performed — it was a performance — holding herself, plumping her breasts like pillows, licking her finger and touching it to her vagina like someone testing the pornographic weather, roughly tousling her pubic hair, arching toward him, hands along her thighs, just her head, shoulders and feet touching the rug, her open crotch like dropped stitches. She was moaning in some whiskey register and calling his name, though it could have been mankind she summoned.
“I’m wet, George,” she told him huskily, “I’m just so wet.”
“Get to bed, Louise,” Mills said.
“I changed the sheets today,” she said.
“You also vacuumed. Get to bed.”
She rolled over on her belly and worked the muscles in her ass. Her cheek against the floor, she pouted directions at him. “Come in from behind, I’ll give you a ride.” On her side she rotated her body for him. George sat at the foot of the bed and watched her. She could have been a late-model automobile on a revolving platform in an airport. “Do you love me, George? Do you like my body?” He did. Louise was a jogger. An exercise of the middle classes, Mills thought she ran above her station but in middle age she still had a grand body. She lay on her back again and raised her arms. Mills saw the thick black tufts of her underarms. He got down beside her and patiently masturbated his wife till she screamed. Individual hairs stuck to her forehead and cheeks. He brushed them back into place with his fingers.
“You didn’t do anything,” Louise said.
“No.”
“It’s psychological.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think I’m attractive.”
“You’re very attractive.”
“Then why didn’t you get hard?”
“I tried to tell you.”
“What, that you’re religious? I’m religious.”
“I’m saved,” Mills said quietly.
He was saved, lifted from life. In a state of grace. Mills in weightlessness, desire, will and soul idling like a car at a stoplight. George Mills, yeomanized a thousand years, Blue Collar George like a priest at a time clock, Odd Job George, Lunchpail Mills, the grassroots kid, was saved.
2
The Reverend Raymond Coule was minister of the Virginia Avenue Baptist Church. He was a large, heavy man in his early forties who wore leisure suits, double knits, checkered sports coats, Sansabelt trousers. Bright ties flared against his dark rayon shirts. Carnations twinkled in his lapels. There were big rings on his hands.
For many years he had had a nationally syndicated television ministry in Ohio and been famous as a healer. He specialized in children with hearing problems, women with nervous disorders, men with bad hearts. Then something happened. He lost his tax exemption, but that wasn’t it. He had become involved in a malpractice suit. On national television he had pronounced a woman cured of her cancer. This was rather a reversal of normal procedure. Always before, the people he had healed, preening their miracles, volunteered their own testimony. All Coule had to do when the ushers had preselected members of the audience — congregation — to appear with him on that portion of the program — service — given over to their witness, was to ask them questions. He rarely remembered the men and women he had touched, was as curious and surprised as his viewers to hear them, months and even years after a campaign in Roanoke or Macon or Wheeling, remind him of what God had done. God, not Coule. Coule was simply Christ’s instrument. Coule stressed the point, seeming modest, almost shy as he made his disclaimers. He interrupted harshly and became severe whenever someone who’d been healed momentarily forgot the facts and attributed the miracle to Coule himself. He would scold the offender and fly into a rage, a rage that seemed incongruent with his floorwalker presence, this fact alone seeming to lift his anger out of the range of rage and turn it into something like actual wrath.
“I,” he might shriek, “I healed you? I couldn’t cure ham! Jesus healed you, brother, and don’t you forget it! Unless you remember that and make your thank-you’s out to Him you’d better get out your bathrobes and bedclothes all over again because you might just be headed into a relapse! Didn’t no Raymond Coule ever heal you, didn’t no Reverend Raymond Coule put your spine well! That bill goes to Jesus! And you better remit, friend, cause old Jesus He don’t dun, He just forecloses!”
And for all that Reverend Coule felt genuine anger at these moments, the offending party was as joyous as the congregation, flushing not with embarrassment but with what Coule himself took to be health, a shine like a smug fitness. Then the born-again sick man might deliver himself of a jumpy, gleeful litany, a before-and-after catalogue of deadly symptom, marred X-rays, the peculiar Rorschach shapes of his particular defilement, a tumor like a tiny trowel, a hairline crack along the bone like an ancient river in Texas or bad handwriting in a Slavic tongue. Blood chemistries invoked in real and absolute numbers, the names of drugs flushed down the toilet. The circumstances of their attendance, what they had said, what Coule had said, the doctors amazed, the new X-rays bland and undisturbed by disease as a landscape painting.