God's Pocket - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  He held onto himself as much as he could. "I can't remember now," he said.

  Mickey said, "I shouldn't of worried you about Jeanie."

  Bird began to breathe through his teeth again. "I'll find out about that for you," he said. "I swear to Jesus. I tried to cut your meat but the electric went off . . ."

  Mickey said, "You can't do nothin' about the electricity."

  Bird put his hand on Mickey's arm. "I'll find out about Leon for you," he said. He allowed his aunt to put an arm around his waist and walk him across the street toward their house. “I'll do that, Mick," he said. "You got my word."

  Mickey said, "Don't worry about Jeanie, she's a little funny in the head right now. It happens .... " He wanted to tell him to stay out of the business about Leon, but it mattered to him to say he would help. Mickey watched him follow the old woman into the house, and he thought it would be a long time before Bird could help anybody.

  Aunt Sophie tried to put him to bed, but Bird went into the bathroom instead. He brushed his teeth and changed shirts and spit on his shoes and wiped them off with a towel from a motel in Phoenix, Arizona. Where was Arizona? Who gave a fuck?

  That was more like it.

  He stood up straight and looked at himself in the mirror. He oiled his hair and tucked it in behind his ears, and he could feel it snug against his head, like a cap. Aunt Sophie knocked on the door with a water bottle. "You feelin' better, Arthur?"

  "Fine," he said. "I'm goin' out for a little while, Doll. Be back in a couple of hours."

  "Arthur," she said, "you oughta rest. You didn't look too good."

  He opened the door and showed her he was handsome again. She put her hands on her hips.

  "You looked worse,"' she admitted. She liked oily-haired men. He leaned over and kissed her cheek, and she squeezed the back of his arm. Bird went out the front door and found the new Cadillac parked against the curb. Nothing down, the first payment—$448—due June I5. They'd give him two weeks, so he'd have the car till July. If they came earlier, who gave a fuck? He got in and hit the buttons until all the windows were rolled down. He drove fifty miles an hour all the way to Snyder and his hair never moved. He made a right turn, then double-parked beside a heavier, darker Cadillac in front of Vinnie's Italian Bakery. He walked past the girl at the counter, feeling strong, and went right to the office and knocked on the door. Vinnie would be there, he was always there this time of day. If he wasn't, who gave a fuck about that either?

  Vinnie answered the door himself even though there were a couple of his nephews in the room with him to do that. He was pissed off at his nephews. He said, "Yeah?"

  Bird stepped inside. Vinnie had known Arthur Capezio forty years, but it wasn't friendly enough between them to come in uninvited. One of his nephews moved toward Arthur, but Vinnie shook his head. He didn't want nothin' from his nephews.

  “What is it?" he said.

  Bird sat down on .a chair beside the window where he could keep an eye on the Cadillac. He said, "Vinnie, I got a favor to ask."

  Vinnie said, "You don't mind if I sit down .... " Everybody had a favor to ask, nobody had time to show a little respect. Vinnie Ribbocini had been like Angelo's right hand, but since the new people started running things, that didn't count no more. Actually, they wasn't new. They'd always been there, but nobody noticed. They was muscle or go-fers mostly. Sons and nephews of men with brains and experience and balls, who'd used that to come into the business, but nobody ever took them serious. Angelo didn't—to him they was like children, in a hurry for everything, always pushin' to get into the shit business—and look what it got him. And now Vinnie's own nephews, tellin' him he ought to go along, that it looked bad 'cause he wouldn't kiss ass. The new people had discovered respect, and they was in a hurry for that too.

  "Lissen," he said to Bird, "I know things is dryin' up for you right now. You don't have to come pushin' in here like some fuckin' punk kid to tell me that. I'm in the middle of business here, where's your fuckin' manners?"

  Bird shook his head. "It ain't that, Vinnie."

  "And where's my fuckin' truck? I throw you a bone, you gonna keep my truck to show you appreciate it?"

  Bird explained. He said the electric went out so he couldn't unload it. "I got a favor to ask," he said again. Vinnie threw open his arms. "There was a problem down at Holy Redeemer," he said, "buildin' a new hospital or somethin', and this guy got killed. Leon Hubbard. Nice boy. And the boy's mother married a guy who works for me. A good guy, and his old lady's goin' crazy 'cause they ain't tellin' her what happened?

  "So what?"

  “So maybe you could send a couple guys over and find out. I don't mean do nothin', just to find out. Bounce somebody around a little bit so they'll talk to you."

  "Then what?" Vinnie said.

  "Then nothin'. Then I tell the guy, and he can tell his wife or do what he wants with it."

  Vinnie scratched the bottom part of his left ear. The bottom part was all he had left on that side. The truth was, he didn't know what was going to happen one day to the next, just like the old men he knew who been around forever, and walked around now talkin' about Angelo like he was still alive. Vinnie didn't particularly like Arthur—at the bottom he was weak—but he didn't have nothin' against him either. "And that's all?" he said. "There's no problem over there, just a couple of guys to push around?" It was straightforward and easy, the way things used to be.

  "That's it," Bird said.

  Vinnie shrugged. "When do I get my mick back?"

  * * *

  Peets knew Old Lucy wasn't coming to work, but he kept looking for him. That was how he first spotted the men across the street. There were two of them—Jews or Italians, he could never tell which was which—sitting in a black Thunderbird with a roof that looked like rippled water. The Thunderbird was parked on the side street in the no-parking zone at the end of the block, where buses stopped.

  Peets saw them about three-thirty, and then he noticed them again just before four. One had sunglasses and one of them didn't. Outside of that, you couldn't tell them apart. Peets didn't wonder what they were doing, he was thinking about Old Lucy and the seconds he'd sat in the cherry picker watching while Leon was flashing his razor in front of the old man's face. He thought about it, and he still didn't know why he hadn't moved when he could. It was like something you watched because you couldn't do nothing about it. Something that had to be played out because the time had come.

  He threw that out. In one way it had to happen, but it didn't have to be there, with Old Lucy. The old man came to work on time, he did his job. Peets owed him his nine dollars an hour, he owed him a place to do his work. He went over it again, how it had looked, trying to decide when he should of gotten off his ass and done something.

  At four o'clock he let the crew go, but Old Lucy was still on his mind. He cleaned up by himself. First the cement mixer, then he covered the cement sacks, then he covered the cinder block. Anything you didn't cover in the city was gone in the morning. He went to a pile of scaffolding they'd delivered that morning and stacked it. There was a reason to everything. When he couldn't find it, he stacked scaffolding or books or pennies, or he'd make beds the Marine way, or line up everything in the refrigerator by colors. And after he'd put order to something else, whatever he was trying to figure out seemed to fall into order too.

  He worked half an hour after the crew left, straightening up. And when there wasn't anything left to straighten, he began to shovel a load of sand out of the pickup, so he could use the truck in the morning. He was standing in the pickup bed when he heard the doors slam, almost together.

  The men came across the street, one of them walking straight to the truck and the other one going around the fence to the front of the hospital, and then coming toward him from behind. The one who had come straight looked around, in no hurry at all, like he was checking the work. "You the boss?” he said.

  Peets did not care for the question. He picked up a shovel of sand and tosse
d it in the pile near the man's feet. The man stepped back, checked his pants and shoes. Peets had only seen pants like that on television, on Spanish dancers. The other one was at the side of the truck.

  "I'm the only one here," Peets said.

  The one in back of him said, "That's a fact." Peets waited.

  "The thing is," said the one who had come straight, “somebody got kilt here yesterday, and there is some feeling that it didn't happen the way the cops said." Peets stared at the man and held onto the shovel. "We was wondering," he said, "if you was here when it happened.”

  Peets kept his eyes on the one in front and thought about the one in back. "This guy who got it, he was an important guy. He was important to important people, and they don't think it oughta happened at all, and then not to tell the truth . . ."

  Peets said, "He always said he was important," and threw another shovel of sand on the pile on the ground. The man moved back this time. He held out his hands.

  "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," he said.

  While he said that, the other one fit his lingers into a set of artificial knuckles. He closed the fist, opened it, closed it again. The knuckles stuck out maybe a quarter inch. The one in front of Peets said, "What's it going to be, home boy?"

  It was rush hour now. There was blocked intersections and bus smoke and a steady line of nurses and assorted white uniforms coming out of Holy Redeemer Hospital. And nobody looking. Peets had a sudden vision of these two going to visit Old Lucy. He said, "It happened the way I said to the police, and you Jew boys can do it any damn way you want—hard or easy—and it don't matter to me."

  The one behind him screamed, "Jew boys!" and punched the side of the truck with the artificial knuckles.

  The one in front called him off. “Whatta you want to do this for?" he asked Peets. "We didn't insult you, right?" And while he said that, the other one climbed into the truck bed behind Peets and pushed him once in the back.

  "Let's go somewhere we can talk," he said.

  Peets turned around and stood over the man that wanted to talk. He felt the back of the truck drop when the other one got on behind him. The one who had pushed him threw the hand with the artificial knuckles at Peets' face, and caught the top of his forehead. When Peets looked, there was a piece of wrinkled—up skin hanging from the metal. The one behind him put an arm around his neck and tried to choke him. Peets kept his eyes on the one with the knuckles. His head burned, and the one trying to choke him said, "Hit him, Ronnie. Fuckin' hit him."

  Peets felt an old calm settle in, he noticed the blood dropping around his boots—not a lot of it, about like the drops you get right before a heavy rain. He noticed a man across the street watching. The one with the knuckles had a peculiar look on his face, but he steadied himself and turned to throw another punch. Peets reached out and smothered his hand, and then found his face, and then, with the same broad motion you might use to shape an eye cavity in clay, he pushed into the corner of the socket and took the man's left eye out. The man screamed again, a truer scream, than when Peets had called him a Jew. He grabbed for the eye and bent over, trying to somehow take it all back, and now it was sprinkling blood around his feet too.

  And the calm passed and something was loose in Peets.

  The man holding his neck had froze, Peets guessed he'd seen the eyeball. Peets reached behind him and grabbed the waist of the man's pants. It wasn't easy because they were tight. The only sounds were the traffic and Peets' own breathing. He caught another look at the man across the street. He was sitting on a fire hydrant now, watching.

  Peets pulled the one in back off his feet. He felt him give up the hold on his neck. He turned back to him then, thinking again that it was Old Lucy they were after, and picked him up by the jaw and the pants and held him over his head. The man's hand found Peets' face, and Peets bit his thumb. He'd spent years in a dojo, he could fight judo or karate, even box a little, but in the end it always came down to biting fingers.

  Fighting was fighting. Twelve years of bowing and walking around wrapped in a tablecloth and you still ended up biting fingers. He threw the body now, from the bed of the truck to the ground. One of the legs attached to it hit the rear gate of the truck, twisted and came to rest bridged to the little pile of sand Peets had shoveled out of the truck.

  The leg looked broken, but Peets jumped down and made sure. Then he looked across the street at the man on the fire hydrant. The man looked back. He stood up, slowly, nodded, clapped five or six times and then headed east down the street.

  Philadelphia.

  3

  A Meadow in the City

  Shellburn brought her home from the Pen and Pencil Club. He only went there when he needed somebody to take home. Sometime after one in the morning, somebody would come in. A photographer sometimes, or a copy editor. Somebody. He'd been drinking vodka and orange juice all night long. She came in with a couple of people he didn't like—he didn't like anybody that came into a bar laughing—and stood next to him. Shellburn never drank sitting down. "You're Richard Shellburn," she said. He thought she might be a city hall reporter for one of the radio stations.

  "Yes, I am," he said.

  "I thought you'd look older."

  "I thought you would too," he said. She smiled at him and laughed, and didn't have an idea what he was talking about.

  "Can I buy you a drink?" she said. He told her it was screwdrivers and she made a face. A Cute face. She looked about twenty-two to Shellburn, which meant she was probably thirty.

  "I can't stand vodka." she said, and moved away from the men she'd come in with.

  Shellburn nodded. "You might just as well shoot it into your veins," he said.

  "Why is that?" she said. He shrugged. "Oh, you mean you might just as well put it in your veins .... " She was standing closer to him now. She was wearing a Temple University sweat shirt and blue jeans with the word "Chic" written over the back pocket. Oh, yes, she'd shown him her ass.

  "Do you go to Temple University?" he said. He killed the screwdriver in his hand and took another one. There was a line of them on the bar. Shellburn bought them six at a time because the bartender got busy this time of night, and because he liked the way it sounded, ordering half a dozen.

  "I graduated," she said, "in journalism. I'm freelance now, sports mostly .... " He looked at her closer. “SPORTS,” she said. Then, "You don't approve of women in the locker room?"

  He thought about that half a minute, and then he said, "Who was Yahama Bahama?" She smiled and leaned against his leg. She picked up one of his screwdrivers and finished it before she put it down. He guessed it was how the women's movement bought you a drink.

  "Is that a name for your penis?" she said. "Jesus, everybody's got a name for their penis .... "

  They finished the vodka and orange juice and he took her back to his apartment. She didn't believe him when he told her Yahama Bahama had been a middleweight fighter. She sat next to him in the car with one arm in back of his shoulder, and the other one draped across his stomach so her hand rested in his lap. She was a pretty girl, but she wasn't troubled enough to be much of a piece of ass.

  He parked the car on the sidewalk in front of his building, and before they got out she pushed her hand up into the crotch of his pants, and then kissed him on the cheek. It seemed like a misunderstanding.

  He lived on the second floor, behind a steel door that unlocked in three places. The windows looked out across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey, and the view was the first thing she noticed. Then she went to the only table in the place, and sat down on the chair in front of it—the only chair in the place—and looked at the old typewriter sitting on the table. "So this is where you do it," she said. Her fingers touched the keys, but she didn't press any of them.

  The apartment had three main rooms and two of them were empty. The room they were in had the table and the chair and the typewriter and a mattress in the corner. There was a phone on the floor next to the mattress, and a
black-and-white television set on a bookshelf in the corner. "Sometimes I do it there," he said.

  She said, "Sometime could I watch you write a column?"

  "Sometime," he said. He turned on the television set and took her away from his table. He didn't like people touching his typewriter. He didn't like touching it himself. She went with him to the mattress and unbuttoned his shirt. She didn't seem to notice his body, which was white and moley and had inverted nipples. It was nothing like the bodies she saw in the locker room, he knew that.

  And as he thought that, it began to come to him who this girl was. She'd spent two weeks in the Phillies' locker room, if he remembered it right, and then written a story for Velvet magazine describing the different sizes and shapes of every penis on the starting rotation. She unbuckled his belt, pinching his skin there, and then unfastened his pants. He sat on the mattress, thinking of the players' wives who had formed a barricade in front of the locker room to keep her out and said on television that nobody was going to see their husbands' private parts but them and Danny Ozark.

  The sports reporter was smiling.

  She pulled his pants down around his knees, then fought his shoes off and pulled the pants over his feet. He was wearing sky-blue, leafy underpants that were two feet long. He wondered if she had ever seen Jim Palmer, who was a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, in his underwear. Jim Palmer posed in underwear for Newsweek magazine.

  She took the pants back to the table and folded them over the back of the chair, and then put her own clothes on top of his. She was wearing a pair of red panties under the jeans—panties the size of the ones Jim Palmer wore in Newsweek magazine—and nothing under the sweat shirt. She was slim, and tan for early May. And she had high-beam tits.

  She folded into the mattress and reached into his shorts for his poor, drunk dick. She found it, smiled—whatever it was behind that smile, he didn't like it—and began to rub it up and down, absently, while she looked at the typewriter.

  "Could you always write?" she said. "I mean, did you always want to be a writer?" He pictured her asking Pete Rose if he always wanted to be a baseball player. She let go of his dick and cupped his balls. "Hmmmm?"