by Pete Dexter
The voice got louder, and then the door to the stairs opened and Jack was standing in the hallway, a yard away, red-faced, looking eight directions at once. "Mick," he said. "I didn't hear you come in."
"It's cause you were yellin' at your father,” he said.
Jack looked back up the stairway and shook his head. "I hope they put me outta my misery before that happens," he said. "How you been?"
"I been all right," Mickey said.
Jack said, "Lissen, I'm sorry about the misunderstanding. You know, I got problems too. Nobody realizes that. They think because you're a professional, you don't got problems."
"I realize you got problems," Mickey said.
"Hey, bygones are bygones, right? That's the whole principle of the business." He closed the door to upstairs, and that was bygones too. "C'mon in the office," he said. "You want a beer?"
Mickey shook his head. Smilin' Jack sat down at his desk and noticed Mickey's clothes. "What happened to you?" he said. "You okay?"
Mickey took the roll of hundred-dol1ar bills out of his pocket and counted sixty of them on the desk. It was dead quiet in the office. He pushed the money across the desk and left it for Jack Moran to pick up. He didn't want to hand it to him and touch his skin. In his whole life Mickey'd never disrespected old Daniel. "Six thousand," Mickey said. "That's for the mahogany box and the funeral and everything else, right?"
Smilin' Jack picked up the stack of bills and counted them, using a little sponge on his desk to wet his thumb. When he finished, he straightened up the stack. "Where is the deceased?" he said.
Mickey rubbed his elbow. “They got him at the morgue again," he said. He told them there'd been another accident. Smilin' Jack nodded like it was something happened all the time.
"When it rains it pours," he said.
"Yeah, well they got him down there, but they probably don't know who he is," Mickey said. "He wasn't carrying no identification? Jack scratched his head. Mickey said, "Can we still take care of it tomorrow? I want to get it over."
"I don't know," Jack said. "This never come up before. Let me call down there and find out." He reached for the phone, and Mickey stood up. "Sit down, I can tell you in a minute," Jack said.
"I'll give you a call tonight," Mickey said. He didn't want to be in the room when Jack called about Leon. He just wanted to get the boy in the ground. Even if Jeanie was gone, he wanted to get the boy buried. He wanted to be past Leon, so he could look up and not see him there waiting for him anymore.
* * *
The paramedic was a thirty-seven-year-old Vietnam veteran named Michael Cooper who took tranquilizers to get through the morning and sleeping pills to get through the night. He smoked a little dope to kill the time in between, which is what he'd been doing when the call came in to go to Third and Fitzwater. He'd gone over in the ambulance, hanging out the window to feel the wind pressing on his face. "I get off on the weather," he said to the driver.
The driver looked at him without answering.
"You take this shit too serious," he said to the driver, who was twenty-three years old. "When you been around it enough, you see it don't mean nothin'." The driver looked straight ahead.
"You weren't in Nam, were you?" Michael Cooper said. "No, you're too young. Man, when you've seen some dude's supposed to be running things eating cinnamon rolls next to a stack of bodies, you know you ain't supposed to take it serious."
The driver said, "I get sick to my fuckin' stomach, listenin' to this Nam shit. Nam-this, Nam-that, seem like every fuckin' time I turn around, there's some motherfucker tellin' me about Nam like there ain't nobody else ever done nothin'." He spit out his window.
Cooper smiled at him. "You got a lot of anger, bro," he said.
The driver said, "Fuck," and Cooper stuck his head back out the window and watched people on the street turning to look as they went past. Two blocks from the accident the traffic stopped dead. The driver pulled up onto the sidewalk and drove half a block farther, but there were cars parked there too, so Cooper got out and ran. The sidewalk seemed to float up to his feet.
By the time he got to the corner, the police were pushing back the crowd. One of the cops had a clipboard. Cooper asked him, "What we got, man?"
"Where the fuck have you guys been?" the cop said. The cop didn't wait for an answer. "There's one against the wall over there,"' he said, pointing to a thin black man sitting on the sidewalk, holding a cloth against his head, "and there's one on the street. I think he's dead."
Cooper walked through the accident, smelling the street, noticing the texture of the road, the patterns of the windows against the brick houses. He didn't look at the body until he was next to it, and then he only looked a little while.
He touched the hands and the skin on the cheek. The cheek was smooth and cold, and there was powder on his fingers where he'd touched it. Cooper walked away from the body and threw up into the drain on the comer. He'd seen dead people, stacks of them, but he never went to funerals. You saw them like that, dressed up and drained and filled and-powdered, you had to consider it. If you didn't walk away from it when it happened, you were stuck with it.
"You'll get used to it." It was the cop again, snuck up behind him, smiling. ARBUCKLE the name tag said. "The first few, it bothered me too," he said. "I never threw up like you did, but it takes a while."
Cooper's eyes watered and his nose stung. "He's dead, right?" the cop said. "I thought he was dead, but it ain't official until you say it."
"He's dead," Cooper said. And then he walked over to the black man sitting against the wall to look at his head.
Arbuckle stood near the vomit, waiting for somebody to show it to. Somebody who was a cop. Too bad Eisenhower took the day off, he'd of loved it. A kid doctor who couldn't stand to see nobody dead. He thought Eisenhower would have loved it, but with him you could never be sure. He wasn't always what the stories about him said. Arbuckle never said it, but he was glad they'd put through Eisenl1ower's transfer back to detectives. He hoped his new partner would be somebody you could count on to be one way.
He waited by the vomit awhile, and when nobody came by he went back into the crowd to look for witnesses again. It took an hour to clean up the mess. Wreckers, ambulances, sweeping the glass. The doctor had gone into a bar halfway down the block. Arbuckle made a note of that, but there wasn't much else to write down. Nobody would admit they'd seen it.
He stayed until the truck was towed, asking questions and drawing pictures that showed where it was and where the bus was, and where the body was lying in the street. He thought · about drawing a little pool of vomit, but you couldn't count on everybody having a sense of humor.
When it was finished, Arbuckle went back to the station house and made a phone call to the city room of the Daily Times and asked for assistant city editor Brookie Sutherland. Brookie Sutherland had told him anytime he had something to give him a call.
Arbuckle didn't know why Brookie Sutherland liked to talk to him personally, but whenever he called with something, Sutherland put his name in the paper. The regular police reporter never did that. "This is Arbuck1e," he said when Brookie Sutherland picked up the phone.
"Hey, buddy, how are you?" Arbuckle winced. His greatest fear was that his phone was bugged, and someday his friends would hear a newspaperman calling him buddy.
"Look, I got a little accident here," he said. "One fatal, one hospitalized. I thought you might be interested." Arbuckle always called everything "little" when he talked to Brookie Sutherland.
“Just a minute.” He heard him load his typewriter. "Okay, shoot."
Arbuckle cupped his hand over the receiver and read him the times and places off his accident report. "We don't got a name on the DOA yet," he said. "Wasn't carrying no ID."
Brookie Sutherland said, "Is that it?"
Arbuckle felt disappointed. He never knew what the Daily Times would like and what they wouldn't. He thought for a minute, and then told him about the doctor who threw up. He star
ted that by saying, "Well, there was one human interest story. . . ."
* * *
Brookie Sutherland thanked the cop and hung up. There was a new girl on tryout, and they'd put her on Friday nights to see how she did. A timid-looking girl, always wore white blouses with a scarf around the neck, skirts that were too long. He wasn't sure, but he thought she was pretty. You couldn't tell about that until a girl had been around awhile and the office had a chance to form an opinion. "That dumb sonofabitch," Brookie said, loud enough so she looked up from her desk.
He smiled at her. "Cops," he said. "I got one calling that wants to give me a human interest story about vomit." Brookie Sutherland could see she didn't understand. "I got the weirdest sources in the city," he said.
"It sounds like it," she said. He couldn't tell if she liked him or not. He thought he might ask her out for a drink after work.
"Check with the medical examiner's office," he said, "and see if you-can get me an ID on some guy who got killed in a traffic accident at Third and Fitzwater this afternoon, will you?"
Then he put a fresh piece of paper in his typewriter and prepared a memo on Peter Byrne's having blown a fatal accident-in-South-Philadelphia story. He wrote, "Tried twice to reach Byrne, but per usual, he was out of office." He hadn't called, but he didn't have to. Byrne was at Hammer's Bar drinking with his buddies, the cops. To Brookie Sutherland, the way Peter Byrne got his stories was unprofessional.
The memo was three paragraphs long, and he signed it at the end and then made two copies. One went to T. D., one to the managing editor. He kept the original for his own file on Peter Byrne.
Half an hour later the new girl had the name. "It's Leon Hubbard," she said, "but it's kind of strange . . ."
Brookie Sutherland held up his hand and smiled. "The first thing you leam," he said, "is that every accident is strange."
She said, “But this guy . . ."
Brookie Sutherland stopped her again with his hand. "The news hole on Saturday is this big." He made a bird's beak with his thumb and first finger. "All we got room for on Saturday is the name, the time, the place. If he wanted space, he should of waited till Monday. Unless the President gets shot, there's no room on Saturday."
"All right," she said.
"The guy wasn't the President," he said. She shook her head. "Then all we want is the name, the time, the place. Gimme two paragraphs, okay? And put the cop in. Charles Arbuckle, AID. You got to throw the bears a peanut to keep them interested."
"Okay," she said, "two graphs." `But Brookie Sutherland wasn't listening. She typed her code into the VDT machine, slugged the story HUBBARD, and began to write:
ONE MAN WAS DEAD AND ANOTHER INJURED AFTER A BUS/TRUCK COLLISION YESTERDAY IN SOUTH PHILADELPHIA. ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION DIVISION OFFICER CHARLES ARBUCKLE, WHO INVESTIGATED THE ACCIDENT, IDIENTIFIED TI-IE DEAD MAN AS LEON HUBBARD, OF TWENTY-FIFTH STREET IN TIIE GOD'S POCKET SECTION OF THE CITY.
POLICE SAID NO CHARGES HAVE BEEN FILED IN THE ACCIDENT.
She finished the story, checked it for mistakes, and then pressed a key on the keyboard to file it in the system's memory. The key she punched blinked on and off for about half a minute, and then a note came up on the screen. DUPLICATE SLUG.
She looked over at the desk and thought about trying to tell Brookie Sutherland again, but she decided it might make him mad. She changed the slug to LEON H and this time the system
took it.
"It's in there," she said. Sutherland looked up and smiled.
"Good," he said. "See? There isn't really much to do Friday night, unless they shoot the President. Hey, why don't we have a drink after work?"
She looked at him like she didn't understand. "I'm married," she said.
He smiled and turned red. "Oh. I didn't mean like that. I just meant as colleagues .... " And then he was looking through some papers on his desk, still smiling and still red, and she knew he'd never be nice to her again as long as she was there.
* * *
Mickey called Smilin' Jack right at five o'clock from a phone booth in Center City. He didn't want to see Jeanie until he could tell her about the funeral, one way or the other.
"Jack," he said, "it's Mickey."
"Hey, Mick, how are you'?”
"I'm fine," he said. He left it there for the undertaker to pick up.
"I called down to the medical examiner,” Jack said. "It's lucky there's a guy I know down there. I told him what happened, that you was just bringin' the body over for me when the accident happened, and he took care of the red tape." Mickey waited. "So we do it tomorrow," Jack said. "Tomorrow afternoon, I got somethin' else in the morning."
"What time?"
"Three o'clock? It ain't going to be nothin' fancy. Just a nice, quiet little service here. Dignified. Some flowers, we got a minister will say a few things over the casket, cost you a fifty. And then we'll all drive out to Edgewood in Delaware County and bury him there. That sound all right?"
"That's it?"
"Right. The same way we was going to do it before. The details don't make much difference in the long run, as long as you get him in the ground dignified."
“I paid for the mahogany box, Jack.”
"Right, right. I didn't mean nothin' was different. I just meant, you know, in the excitement a lot of the details don't get noticed."
"Okay," he said. `
"And Mick," he said, "I want to apologize for what happened, you know? I mean, it don't do nobody any good to have it all over the neighborhood."
Mickey hung up and called home. The phone rang eight times and nobody answered. He wondered if she was with the newspaper reporter. again.
* * *
Eisenhower woke up at seven in the morning, thinking of his brother diving off the roof of the Holiday Inn. It felt like he'd been dreaming about it every night since it happened. Even when he was working, it was off somewhere in the back of his mind, working too. Even when he was having himself a piece of ass, it was working. Especially when he was having himself a piece of ass.
He'd quit drinking the night it happened. He knew without trying it wouldn't be any fun without How-Awful! And that's what Calamity Eisenhower had always gotten drunk for. Fun. His brother was different.
Sober, they were the same. How-Awful! was crazy, Ca1amity was crazy, and anything mean they did was never on purpose. But from the first night they'd sat out under the bleachers at Franklin Field, twenty-five years ago, drinking a half-pint of vodka each, the juice had always dropped his brother's pitch. What did they call that—a minor key? It was in the pitch, it was in his eyes.
And all the crazy-ass, crying-funny things they'd done drunk together, that sad key was always there in How-Awful! And the older they got, the more it showed. But he never let it settle inside him and turn him ugly. He'd shoot up a bar, or drive a car into the Delaware River, but he never let it take him over. It was inside him, though, and for as long as Calamity lived he'd never believe his brother didn't know the swimming pool in Arizona was empty.
He lay in bed a few minutes, trying to bury himself in the pillow, but once he'd started thinking about Arizona he knew it was all over for sleep. His leg was bothering him anyway.
He got out of bed and put on a pair of shorts and a sweat shirt and tennis shoes. He brushed his teeth and splashed some water on his face and then walked into his living room, where an eighty-pound Everlast heavy bag was hanging from a beam in the ceiling. He wrapped his hands carefully and put them inside a pair of eight-ounce gloves and beat on the bag for twenty straight minutes.
Until he was sweating and tired and he'd quit thinking about his leg. He slipped off the gloves and untied the wraps and hung them in the bathroom. Hand wraps smelled worse than anything in sports. He pulled some cheese and ham out of the refrigerator and put them into a hamburger bun, and sat down at the kitchen table to eat breakfast. Then he realized he didn't have anything to read, so he limped downstairs and across the street and bought a Saturday Daily Times.
&n
bsp; He put the paper next to the sandwich and opened a carton of milk. He turned the first couple of pages, looking for something he wanted to read, and was about to turn the newspaper over and look at the sports section when he noticed the story, down in the comer of page 6. At first he thought it was some kind of mistake the paper made, running an old story twice, and then he thought it might of been two Leon Hubbards.
But not on Twenty-fifth Street in the Pocket, it wasn't. He read it again, a traffic accident at, Third and Fitzwater. AID Officer Charles Arbuckle.
He'd underestimated him. The body was dead five days, and Arbuckle had called the newspaper and told them he had a traffic victim. He decided not to think about how Leon Hubbard got to Third and Fitzwater, he'd save that for later. For now, he just concentrated on Chuck Arbuckle and his phone calls to the Daily Times. "You poor, dumb fuck," he said.
And then he began to laugh, out loud, a way he couldn't stop if he wanted to. Crazy-ass, crying-funny laughing, until his chest hurt, until all he could think of was what a shame it was that How-Awful! wasn't there to see it too. Crying-funny laughing.
* * *
It was almost over now. That was the first thing Mickey thought when he hung up on Smilin' Jack, that this time tomorrow he could rest. And after the phone rang eight times at his house, he hung up and thought it again.
He took two hours to walk back to the Pocket, stopping in every bar on the way. When he got there his house was dark, and he'd had enough of empty rooms.
His legs were feeling better, he wouldn't have minded walking another hour or two, but there wasn't anyplace to go. He thought about checking Bird's place, but he didn't want to look at that now. He stood on the sidewalk outside the house for a minute, thinking it over , and then he crossed the street and went into the Hollywood.
McKenna was behind the bar, running up and down, killing an argument that would not stay dead at one end of the bar, pouring straight shots and beer to forty or fifty people. Some of the customers he was nice to, and some of them he had to keep in line. Mickey wondered how he kept it straight from night to night, who was who. At the end where the argument was, everybody was drunk and staking claims, and jumping claims. In a while they'd get mad and punch holes in the bathroom wall. It was possible they'd punch each other.
