God's Pocket - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  When he'd finished that, Arbuckle told him what happened. "The kid was walking by this crane and it came loose or something, and hit him in the back of the head."

  The kid said, "Yeah, well all I do is accept the body."

  Arbuckle shrugged. "It don't matter to me, pal. Sometimes they like to know." Another kid in hospital clothes came out of the building, and he and the first kid put Leon Hubbard's body on a stretcher and wheeled him inside. The doors opened on weight, like at the Acme.

  Arbuckle drove the van back to Center City over the Walnut Street Bridge and stopped at a phone booth outside Cavanaugh's Bar. "You got that woman's phone number?" he said.

  Eisenhower looked through the papers until he found the number Peets had given them for the kid's parents. "I thought somebody there was going to take care of it," he said.

  Arbuckle shook his head. "Naw, I said we'd do it." He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to two. "This won't take a second," he said. Eisenhower sat in the van and listened. "Mrs. Hubbard? . . . Oh, I see, but you are the mother of Leon Hubbard, who worked on the construction crew at Holy Redeemer? . . . No, he's not exactly in trouble, Mrs. Hubbard . . ."

  Eisenhower cringed. There wasn't another cop he knew of who liked talking to the relatives. Arbuckle told her about the crane, Eisenhower closed his eyes. He didn't even know what Arbuckle was talking about, and he'd been there. "No," Arbuckle was saying, "you're not listening, 'ma'am. It didn't fall on him, the thing on the end hit him in the head. No, I already told you . .·."

  Five minutes later Arbuckle hung up and got back in the van. "That's it," he said.

  Eisenhower said, "Wel1, Chuck, you never know."

  * * *

  Mickey sat on the bed with her until the sisters came. She watched him awhile, crying that way that didn't make any noise, then she stared at the ceiling, and the tears ran sideways into her hair. He never touched her, something told him not to touch her.

  Three years in Jeanie's house, in her neighborhood. It wasn't long enough to touch her now. It wasn't long enough to be part of this. The sisters came together. There were two of them, but it seemed like more. All lipsticked and dressed. One of them had five kids, the other one had a job at Pathmark. He could never remember which was which.

  He let them in the front door, and walked behind Joyce up the stairs to Jeanie's room. Joanie went into the- kitchen to fix coffee. Joyce was ten years older than Jeanie and looked like she could have been her mother. Joyce and Joanie both. She sat down where Mickey had been on the bed and Jeanie moved toward her, and they put their arms around each other and rocked back and forth.

  Mickey stood in the doorway, feeling like he shouldn't be watching. He remembered now, Joyce had the job at Pathmark. Her husband was a pressman at the Inquirer. She came over once a month to look at everything in the house and comment on how nice Jeanie's things were. How even with two incomes, they couldn't afford a Betamax. And Jeanie would ask if they were going to their place at the shore this summer, and Joyce would remind her it was only a house trailer, and they'd go at it like that for three hours, every month. Then Joyce would leave, and Jeanie would smile at him and shake her head, and say something about how it wasn't easy being the talented sister. He didn't know why, but after Joyce left, Mickey always got laid, so you could say Joyce was his favorite sister-in-law.

  Joanie brushed past him and came into the bedroom with a tray. A coffeepot, three cups and saucers, a sugar bowl, the box of donuts. She sat in the chair by the window and settled the tray at the foot of the bed. Joyce propped Jeanie up with pillows and got her to try the coffee. Jeanie shook off the donuts, but the sisters insisted. "You got to eat something," Joanie said.

  "She probably just ate lunch," Mickey said. Jeanie ate about two most afternoons. Nobody in the room seemed to hear him. Joanie held a napkin under the pastry and moved them together toward Jeanie's mouth. Jeanie took a small bite and began crying, real crying now. The kind you could hear out on the street.

  "He was only a baby," she said. "They said something fell on him .... " The sisters put down their coffee and held her again. Joyce looked over Jeanie's shoulder and caught Mickey's eye. He would have been just as welcome down in Society Hill knocking on doors asking to use the bathroom.

  The phone rang. Mickey picked it up and moved out of the room to talk. The cord on it, you could take it to the john, except there was already one in there. "Mr. Hubbard?” It was the medical examiner's office, saying they needed somebody to come over and look at Leon. He told the sisters he had to go, and what he had to do. He didn't know how to say it, so he just said it. That brought Jeanie around, and she wanted to come too.

  "You don't want to see him now," Mickey said. And she didn't. And neither did he.

  A lot of it, he figured, depended on what had fallen on him. He took the Monte Carlo over the South Street Bridge, looking at the Schuylkill River, the trees, kids on bicycles. He was in no j hurry to get to Leon, no hurry to get home. If it was a hammer, Leon probably wouldn't look too bad. That's what he was hoping for, a hammer, so it wouldn't look bad. Christ, don't let it be one of those radios ....

  Jeanie would want to know what he looked like, she would want to hold on.

  He parked in a lot and walked a block to the M.E.'s office. A doctor took Mickey back into the building to a window cut into a wall. The window was two-foot square, it could of been the complaint department at Sears, except it wasn't bulletproof. On the other side of the window was an empty stretcher with a pillow at one end. The imprint of somebody's head was still in the pillow. The doctor shrugged and picked up the telephone.

  "Could we have the, uh . . ."—he looked at his clipboard—"the L. Hubbard crypt please?" There was an impatience in that voice that had taken a while to build, but when the doctor hung up he was calm and easygoing. He took Mickey by the arm and turned him away from the window. "It'll be just a moment, Mr. Hubbard," he said.

  "Scarpato," Mickey said. "I'm the stepfather." When the doctor turned him back around, Leon was there. It took Mickey a second to be sure—it was the first time he'd ever seen him relaxed—but it was Leon. They'd propped his head up to make him look comfortable, and they'd put a blue curtain over his body, so all you could see was the head and part of the chest.

  A circle of blood had crusted inside the ear, and some hair was gone from the back of his head, but he looked good.

  "It don't look like he's even hurt," Mickey said.

  The doctor looked at his clipboard. "The fracture is in back of the head," he said. He patted himself on the back of the head, to show Mickey where that was. Mickey looked at Leon again. Leon without all that crazy shit floating around in his head, it was just a kid, a skinny kid. Dark hair, skinny neck. It didn't look very substantial to already be a whole life.

  His nose was straight and rounded. at the end, just like Jeanie's. And he had her cheekbones. There wasn't anything complicated about it now. The shoulders were hollowed out, no muscle to speak of Women's shoulders, bird wings. That was what it was. Without all that crazy shit floating around in his head, he looked like an angel.

  Mickey saw that that was what Leon must of looked like to Jeanie every day of his life.

  "Mr. Hubbard?"

  "Scarpato," he said. He wanted that straight. "I'm not a blood relation." Mickey signed the papers out in front.

  ` "We can release the body anytime after ten tomorrow morning," the doctor said. "There hasn't been any request for a postmortem, unless the family . . ." Mickey thought about it,

  shook his head.

  "I don't think so," he said. "I don't think they'd want anybody cutting up the body." He walked back out into fresh air and didn't know where to go. He bought a hot dog and a Daily Times and sat down on the hood of the Monte Carlo to look at the entries at Keystone. He studied them a minute, then turned to the back of the paper. They ran horses at Keystone in worse shape than Leon. There were worse tracks as far as horses went, but he'd never been to a worse track. Keystone re
minded you of prefab housing. He checked the Phillies score, which he didn't care about, and then he checked Richard Shellburn. "Thomas Haskin lived a quiet life, in a quiet neighborhood. He and his wife and his dog, Hoppy. The wife is gone now, perhaps the neighborhood is too .... " Jeanie loved that shit. Everybody did.

  Richard Shellburn was the most famous newspaper columnist in Philadelphia. He was famous for his drinking and for getting pissed off at the government and for standing up for the little guy. People said he used to be a little guy himself and never forgot where he came from.

  And he wrote things that made old women cry and things that made street people laugh. With Richard Shellburn, there was always somebody to get pissed off at. Some mornings, Mickey would be delivering and every bar he went into they'd ask him did he read Richard Shellburn yet. When he hadn't, they'd stick the Daily Times in his face and tell him what Richard Shellburn had said while he read it. "That's exactly what everybody's thinkin'," they'd say. "He's the only guy knows what it's like out here."

  Mickey didn't know why writing down exactly what everybody was thinking was any better than thinking it in the first place. He never said that, though, to anybody. In the neighborhoods you got along by getting along. You might hate the 76ers and get away with it if you lived in South Philly all your life, but nobody wanted to hear that shit from the outside.

  Nobody really wanted to hear from the outside at all. If you didn't like the way things was, that's what they had Delaware County for. Move there.

  Center City was different. You could come and go in Center City, but the neighborhoods belonged to the people who lived there. At least the strong ones did. Tasker, Whitman, Fishtown, Two Street, God's Pocket. Outsiders walked around those neighborhoods, they stayed out of their bars.

  Mickey had heard the coloreds were the same way, but he doubted it. You could get yourself shot or your head split open in North Philadelphia or anyplace west of the Schuylkill, but out there it wasn't a community project.

  There were people in Fishtown and Whitman and the Pocket who never left. Who would as soon get on a bus for Center City as a bus for Cuba, who married each other's sisters and knew each other's business. There weren't many, but they were the hardest cases when an outsider came in.

  Jeanie's family had been like that. She'd told him her father had never seen her dance because the dance school wasn't in the Pocket. Her sisters had married boys from the neighborhood and settled into the houses of their parents. Joyce took a bus to Pathmark and a month at the shore every year. Joanie was the oldest and never left.

  Or maybe it was the other way around.

  Jeanie had married two outsiders—him and Leon's father before him—but she'd never moved out of her house. Only when she was a kid and thought there was something for her in New York, and everybody in the Pocket knew what that had led to. It was a story mothers told to scare their daughters. And as much as her sisters, Jeanie was part of God's Pocket.

  Mickey finished the hot dog and wrapped the Daily Times around the napkin and threw it all in the trash. He gave the old man running the parking lot a buck tip and headed back across the Schuylkill. Once, he thought about Leon. Eight or ten times, he thought about the sisters in his bedroom. Jeanie's bedroom.

  He pulled into the alley that led to the garage in back of the house, looked at the second floor and knew they were still there. He had to see Smilin' Jack about the arrangements, but there was plenty of time for that. Jack would be over to the funeral parlor all night. Either there or at the Uptown. Mickey walked to the end of the alley, and then back up the street to the front door of his house. Then he crossed the street to the Hollywood. Out of habit, he checked in the window for Leon.

  McKenna stood up as soon as he came in, walked to the end of the bar and shook Mickey's hand. "We're real sorry, Mick," he said. "Leon was a good boy."

  There were six other people in the bar, and they all nodded. Mickey sat down at the end near the window and McKenna gave him a Schmidt's and, out of the occasion, a glass.

  The other people in the bar were old, and remembered Leon from a long time ago. They came in at the same time every afternoon, they sat in their same seats, drinking the same drinks. They argued or they kept to themselves, and at suppertime they'd go home and the kids and the working people would take their places.

  A woman named Eleanore said, “It don't make sense to me. How come nobody else got kilt, if it was an accident?" The man next to her shut his eyes. "Somebody ought to do somethin'," Eleanore said. "The youth is our hope for the future."

  She killed a small glass of beer, stood up and stumbled. She steadied herself and walked to the bathroom. On the way, she dropped a dollar into a five-gallon jug at the other end of the bar. "We're collectin' to bury Leon," McKenna said. Mickey took a long pull off the beer, McKenna leaned closer.

  "I keep hearin' different things," he said.

  Mickey shook his head. "I don't know. I think somethin' dropped on him at the job. I haven't talked to the cops yet." He sighed. "I suppose I'l1 have to."

  McKenna said, "Well, you know, you're going to have to put Jeanie's mind to rest. You know women .... "

  He picked a beer out of the cooler and put it in front of Mickey. "You want me to do that for you, Mick? I could call them like as a friend of the family and tell you what they said."

  Even McKenna wasn't going to leave him alone. Mickey felt like going home and sleeping, except nobody was going to be doing any sleeping in that house for a while.

  "Naw, it's all right," he said. "I better do it. I'l1 do it after I see Smi1in' Jack about the arrangements."

  "Saturday's best," McKenna said. "Saturday's always a good day for a funeral. You know, more people can come and nobody's got to get up and work the next day." Mickey finished the first beer and half of the second. Eleanore came out of the john and walked past her seat over to Mickey's end of the bar.

  She shook his hand and said how sorry she was. “He was always such a nice youngster," she said. "Tell Jeanie that for me."

  Then she said the same thing eleven more times and McKenna tried to help him out. "Eleanore, go sit down," he said. She ignored him and stood, boozy and sweet, looking into Mickey's face. He saw that she was starting to cry. "For Christ's sake," McKenna said, "you didn't even know him."

  She turned on him. "That is a damnable lie. I know all our youngsters .... " She looked back at Mickey, “I knew him,” she said. "And he was a nice youngster. He never broke into nobody's house in the neighborhood?

  McKenna said, "Eleanore, you going to sit down, or do I pour out your drink?" She looked at him, still holding onto Mickey's hand. Tears began to run down her old, cracked cheeks. "This is important," she said.

  McKenna said, "I mean it today, Eleanore, I'm throwin' your drink out and flaggin' you for the rest of the week."

  "There's something I need to tell Mickey," 'she said.

  McKenna looked at the ceiling. She fastened in on Mickey's eyes and squeezed his hand. "He was a nice youngster," she said.

  McKenna said, “Al1 right, you told him. Now go back to I your seat and drink your drink or I'm cuttin' you off."

  She looked at McKenna and said, "You can't cut off the truth." And then she went back to her seat.

  McKenna shook his head. "This neighborhood," he said, "even the old ladies are hard dicks. You want another one?"

  "Yes," Mickey said.

  McKenna said, "That's the spirit. You sure you don't want me to call the cops for you?" `

  Mickey drank a six-pack at the Hollywood, and on the way home he saw Dr. Booras going into his house. He followed him through the open door and ran into Joanie, who had a no-account husband of her own and knew what he'd been up to. She stood in the path to the stairs, folded arms under folded breasts. "The doctor's going to give her a shot," she said. “He said it would be best if she got some rest."

  Something was cooking in the kitchen, maybe ham. He tried to walk around her, but Joanie moved in his way. "The doctor th
inks she should rest," she said.

  "I'll just use the bathroom," he said, and she let him past.

  While he was up there, he heard Joyce talking to Dr. Booras. "My sister and me will stay a couple of days," she said. "She'll need support?

  Dr. Booras said that was a good idea. "It never hurts to have the extra support," he said. "This is the worst kind of shock a woman can have."

  Mickey wondered if Jeanie was lying on the bed listening or if she was already asleep. He went back downstairs without looking in. Joanie had put herself by the door and was accepting a macaroni salad from one of the neighbor women. The phone rang and she picked that up and handed the macaroni salad to him. "Who?"

  She retrieved the salad and gave him the phone, and a warning look. Then she went into the kitchen, but there wasn't a g sound in there, so she was listening.

  "Mick? It's Bird."

  "Yeah. You get your electricity back?"

  "Right, right. It come on right after you left. Is somethin' wrong? Jeanie don't sound good."

  "That was her sister," Mickey said. "We had an accident with Leon."

  "What, he got his dick caught in somebody's cash register?"

  Mickey had told him about the job at the bar before he asked for the one laying brick.

  “No, the real thing," he said. Joanie came out of the kitchen and sat down on the sofa. Mickey moved a few steps away from her, up the stairs. "Somethin' happened at work, some kind of accident, and he's dead."

  Bird said, "No shit. What was it?"

  "I don't know yet. Somethin' . . ."

  “You want me to find out? I could do that for you, Mick."

  "No, let's just see what happens."

  Bird said, "Some strange shit's goin' around. Everywhere. I ask but, you know, it ain't on my level or somethin'. This, though, I could find out about this."

  "Let me talk to the cops first," Mickey said. "Just see what happens, if it settles down." He didn't want any more obligations on account of Leon, even if he was dead. "Bird?" The line had gone quiet.