“Then I told him the one about the whore and the rooster and I had him, really had him. He screamed, he howled, he doubled over with laughter. There were tears in his eyes, snot ran from his nose.
“ ‘Tell it again.’
“ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what’s the difference between a rooster and a whore?’
“ ‘I don’t know, Daddy. What?’ He was already laughing.
“ ‘The rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo. The whore says any cock’ll do.’
“ ‘One more time. The last. Please, Dad, I promise.’
“ ‘I’ve already told it twice.’
“ ‘Go ahead. Ask me.’
“ ‘What’s the difference, Harve, between a rooster and a whore?’
“ ‘I know, I know,’ he said. He was waving his hand.
“ ‘Harve?’ I called on him, Mills. I called on the kid.
“ ‘The whore say—’
“ ‘The rooster says, Harve.’
“ ‘The rooster says—’
“Mills, I was praying. I swear to you. Praying. I was holding my breath.
“ ‘—cock-a-doodle-doo. The whore says—’
“My mouth, my lips were moving. The way they move when you’re feeding a baby, the way you might breathe by the guy that they work on that they pull from the sea.
“ ‘—any cock’ll do!’
“I screamed, I howled, I doubled over with laughter. There were tears in my eyes, snot ran from my nose. The kid thought he was Bob Hope, the Three Stooges. I thought so myself. I praised his delivery. I made over his timing.
“ ‘Again,’ he said, ‘let me try it again.’
“I let him try it again. He was letter perfect.
“ ‘Letter perfect,’ I told him.
(“Because they’ve got to have confidence. Isn’t that what they say? Because they’ve got to have confidence, believe in themselves? Because they must be encouraged, ain’t that the drill?”)
There were tears in Messenger’s eyes now too. And now he was weeping openly. Snot ran from his nose.
“ ‘I want to tell a different one this time.’
“ ‘Go ahead, Harve.’ “
George Mills could barely understand him.
“ ‘Once more?’
“ ‘Not that one again. Tell another.’
“ ‘Please, Dad, I promise.’
“ ‘All right, but this is the last time.’
“ ‘Can I tell it again?’
“ ‘Harve, you promised.’
“ ‘Claude Balls,’ he snickered. ‘Mister Completely,’ he roared. ‘Do I have to go to sleep now?’
“ ‘Of course not,’ I said. But I got into bed. I turned off the bedlamp.
“I could hear him giggling. ‘Will you tell me more jokes, Dad?’ Harve asked in the dark. ‘Please?’
“ ‘Wouldn’t you rather watch television?’
“ ‘I’d rather tell jokes.’
“ ‘All right,’ I told him, and waited till he’d calmed down. ‘Knock knock,’ I said.
“ ‘Who’s there?’ Harve asked me.
“Shit, George, you pass on what you can.”
Again Mills had difficulty understanding him.
“I said it’s the confidence,” Messenger said. “I’m crying for the confidence, all that Special Olympics confidence, all that short-range, small-time, short-change, small-scale, short-lived, short-shrift, small-potato, small-beer fucking confidence. I’m weeping for the confidence.”
“Hi, Lulu,” Messenger said, pecking her cheek. He’d taken to kissing her when he greeted her, giving her hugs. Mills knew Cornell was attracted to his wife. He’d seen him negotiate proximity, caught him watch her do housework, wash windows, scrub the floors on her knees. He touched her arm when he spoke, he patted her shoulder. Mills knew he had some vagrant fix on her, that she popped into his head, that he speculated about her as he soaped himself in showers, as he jerked off in bed, as he came in his wife. The Louise of Messenger’s imaginings who might finally actually have had a thing or two to do with the real Louise. She may have appealed to him as a woman of great sexual reserves, the farmer’s grown daughter, the unsatisfied wife. There was much talk of needs. Women spoke openly on radio call-in shows of their sexuality, asking the experts, showing, even proclaiming, a side of their natures that had not been known. Mature women, ordinary women, the women you saw in supermarkets, the women you saw in discount department stores, the women you saw in the streets. Not theatrical beings, not movie stars, glamor girls, chippies in bars. Not great beauties whose beauty was only some cautionary flag of the genital — Mills had always had his theories — but housewives, mothers and matrons you’d have thought had calmed down. It was this sense of her energies, undepleted and compounding, that attracted Cornell. He could probably have had her. She probably would have let him, though he doubted she had. He was glad of his grace.
“The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” Messenger greeted George cheerfully. And Mills had forgotten whose turn it was, who was up for today. Because they might almost have been in his repertoire now, his bumper crop company, his cache of familiars. They could have been in the inventory, the muster, the record. Not forebears but precursors. Not that fat trousseau of antecedents, that thick portfolio of kin, but a sort of harbinger. They might have been Millses, but cousins, say, in-laws this or that many times removed. Grateful for the information he could take in with no view of ever having to render it. And if he asked questions, how they were making out, what they were up to, he asked with an expansive detachment, a loose, uncommitted laze. As you might question a barber or talk on a train. He wasn’t indifferent. He was just glad of his grace.
“Well,” Messenger said, dropping down on the sofa, “it’s gone, the car’s gone. I was over there yesterday, I drove by today. It’s gone. The little puddle of litter has been swept away. I think something’s up.”
“Max and Ruth,” George said. “The ones who live in that car.” They might have been Millses. He was that certain of whom Messenger was speaking.
“You know they take a paper?” Messenger said. “I don’t know how they got the guy to agree to deliver it, but they take the paper. They keep up.”
“Are you going to tell us about people who live in a car, Cornell?” Louise asked.
“Max and Ruth? I don’t know a thing about Max and Ruth. No one does. Max and Ruth are a mystery. All I know is their car’s gone. Something’s happening. I’d bet on it. They keep up.”
Two days later he was back. “He’s in disgrace,” Messenger said pleasantly from his unreachable enhancement, the fleeting grace that made him kin.
“Sam Glazer,” George Mills said.
“Look,” Cornell said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this stuff. I know George has an interest, that’s why I do it.”
“I’m interested, Cornell,” Louise said.
“No, I mean he has to make up his mind. Decide which way to go. It’s only rumors anyway. No one’s talking, least of all Sam. Even the Meals-on-Wheelers are in the dark about this one. It’s very hush-hush. You’d need a fucking clearance to get to the bottom of this thing. Actually, I wasn’t the first to notice the car was gone. Jenny Greener mentioned it last week. I was in the neighborhood so I checked it out. Hell, it’s all neighborhood anyway, ain’t it? Three or four blocks or the next county over. The way I figure it’s all neighborhood.”
Yes, Mills thought. Yes.
“Probably nothing will happen till the end of the term. But nobody’s talking. This is just, you know, dispatches, news from the front. Buzz and scuttlebutt. You’ll have to take it from there, George. You’d have to start from that premise.”