by Pete Dexter
She tucked it into her pants and then began to fix her face. A little lipstick, some color for her cheeks. It wasn't anything artificial she did with makeup. She didn't use it to cover anything up, she let it bring her out. It had been like that as long as she could remember.
When she came out, Shellburn was still sitting cross-legged on the bed. "Is it all right if I turn on the lights?" she said. She heard what might have been a laugh.
"No, leave them off," he said.
"Are you mad?"
“I love you," he said.
"I can take a cab back to my car," she said.
"All right." He sounded calm to her, and for a second she wondered if it was all just trying to get himself a piece of ass. She put a knee and a hand on the bed and kissed him on the cheek.
One of the bottles rolled over her fingers.
"Call me," she said. All the way down the hall, she wondered why she'd said that. She thought she might of felt sorry for him. The doorman looked at her different than he had when she'd been with Richard Shellburn, it was like they were both the same now. He got her a cab, though, and held the door. When she climbed in he said, "There you go."
“Thank you," she said.
"Another day, another dollar," he said, and he closed the door before she could be sure what he meant. The cab smelled like somebody lived in it, and she told the driver she wanted to go to Bookbinders. A block from the hotel the driver suddenly turned around and said, "I don't change nothin' bigger than a ten."
"All right.”
"I had this fare when I first come on,” he said, “tried to give me a hundred. You believe that, a hundred?" She smiled but she didn't answer. She had problems of her own.
Mickey wasn't at home. She let herself in and got out of her clothes and into a robe. She was still cold from the hotel room, and she made a cup of hot chocolate, thinking of herself floating someplace between Mickey and Richard, waiting for one or the other to do something to save her and Leon. It felt like everybody she'd ever known had missed the point.
Did Richard Shellburn think she was the kind to walk into a hotel room, with Leon still waiting to be buried, and tell him she loved him too? All in all, she'd rather of been raped.
She thought of Mickey throwing off the sheets, tearing her nightgown, pinning her to the bed. Yes, she'd seen him pick up the air conditioner, as high as his head, and fit it into the wall. She saw him lift up the back end of Mole Ferrell's Toyota when the jack slipped and it fell on him—you could of understood it if it had been Mole Ferrell that got killed on the job, he was born for injury. But Mickey had never picked her up, he was afraid to be forceful.
And afraid to be soft. He didn't have a nice touch, like Richard. She finished the hot chocolate and went upstairs and lay on top of the bed. She imagined Mickey coming up the stairs. She got back up and put on a yellow nightgown—trying for a few seconds to remember if she'd ever heard of anybody else who only liked one co1or—and then she stood in front of the mirror half an hour, moving the part in her hair, lightening her eyes and then brushing mascara into her lashes until they looked too heavy to open.
When she'd finished, the effect was a fifteen-year-old girl trying to look thirty. It wasn't anything she made up, it was inside her and she'd just let it come out. She lay in bed two hours, waiting for him to come home. About two o'clock she heard the noises on the street and knew McKenna was closing. Mickey must have been the last one out, though, because it was another fifteen or twenty minutes before she heard him downstairs.
She spread her hair out over the pillow and pulled the bedding down so that he would see the curve of her waist to her hip under the sheet. She heard him coming up the stairs and closed her eyes, and waited for him to look into the room and see she was helpless.
She could tell from his steps that he was drunk. Sober, he was as light on his feet as Leon. He climbed the stairs, not even trying to be quiet. She lay with her hair spread over the pillow and her eyes closed. He came down the hall and stopped in the doorway.
She heard his breathing, and then he was moving again, toward the bed, and a step before he got to her she opened her eyes and jumped. "Oh, Mickey," she said. "It's you .... "
He sat down next to her on the bed. Her eyes got bigger.
"What are you . . ." She let that die. "Oh, no," she said, "no. . ."
He reached over and touched her arm. It wasn't rough and it wasn't gentle. He said, "Jeanie, we got to talk."
She closed her eyes. "Oh, no,” she said. He noticed the fear had gone out of her voice and thought that at least was a start.
"I got to tell you what happened today," he said. She closed her eyes. "Don't go to s1eep," he said. "We got to talk."
"It's late," she said. He turned on the light next to the bed, and it hurt her eyes. "In the morning," she said.
He shook his head. "In the morning I'll change my mind," he said, "and this whole fuckin' thing will be right where it was."
She said, "At least turn off the light."
"I got to see you when I say it," he said, "so I can tell how you're takin' it." He looked at his hands a couple of minutes and then he began to say things. "This morning I took the truck down to sell it."
She looked at him. "Why'd you do that?"
"I didn't have the money to bury Leon," he said. "I had the money, but it wasn't enough to do it right. Fuck, what do I know about it? The only family I had was Daniel, and there wasn't nobody else there to worry about when I buried him, so I just did it." She was looking at him now suspicious, like she expected it all along. He decided not to mention Turned Leaf.
"Anyway," he said, "I took the truck down to Little Eddie's, but the guy he's got workin' for him took it out and wrecked it. He hit a bus, I don't know how bad the guy's hurt, but they took him to the hospital." He stopped and looked at the ceiling. "His name is Stretch," he said.
She didn't say anything, but she was paying attention. At least she knew he was there. "Anyway, see, Bird's been havin' troubles of his own, and now he's out of business. You see what I'm ta1kin' about? The truck don't matter, let me put your mind to rest about that." He wasn't telling it right. It was supposed to be about him.
"How much do you need?" she said.
He shook his head. "I don't need money. Little Eddie bought himself a truck as soon as Stretch hit the bus." He looked at the ceiling again to tell her the next part.
"Anyway," he said, "Leon was in the truck."
"What?"
"Leon was with the truck," he said, correcting himself. “He was in the back."
“With the meat?"
"Take it easy," he said. "I kept him separate, the meat never touched him. I took care of him, kept him clean .... " He wished now he'd turned off the light when she'd wanted him to. "Anyway," he said.
"Stop saying anyway," she said.
"Right. So Stretch ran into the bus, and the truck tipped over in the middle of the street."
"No," she said.
"Yeah,” he said. "And the back door flew open, and Leon fell out." It wasn't supposed to be coming out like this, and he could see she wasn't understanding his side of it. It wasn't about him at all. He said, "See, Jack Moran wouldn't bury him until he had the cash."
"He's been riding around in the back of that truck all the time?" she said. "Mickey, he was just a baby." He thought of the way Leon had looked at the medical examiner's, like an angel.
"I didn't want to mention it," he said. "I knew it'd upset you."
"Where is he now?" she said. She sat up like she was going to put on a coat and go pick him up. He saw that she would need a coat, that nightgown must of been made for the summer.
"He's at Jack's," he said. “It's all settled now. The cops picked him up, but Jack knew somebody at the morgue.
She lay back down and turned away. "turn off the light, Mickey," she said. He turned off the light and sat on the edge of the bed waiting for her breathing to even out. He didn't want to leave until she was asleep. He didn't want
to feel like he was running away.
He'd thought telling her what happened to Leon would make her see him. He sat in the dark, trying to remember how that was supposed to connect. He'd begun to wonder if she was asleep when she suddenly spoke to him again. "Do people know what happened?" she asked.
"Jack knows," he said, "but I didn't tell nobody in the neighborhood. Or your sisters . . ." Who did she mean?
"Jack Moran?" she said.
"Yeah, he had to know. But he ain't anxious to have it all over the neighborhood that he threw Leon out the door because he didn't have cash in hand to bury him. That makes him look bad."
"Threw him out the door?" she said. He could have screwed a bolt through his forehead.
"Yeah, well, not exactly threw. He put him outside. I tried to get him back in, but Jack'd locked the doors. He'd been drinkin', and you know how he gets when he's like that."
"Out on the street?" He reached over to pat her shoulder and stopped his hand just before it touched her, not knowing what she might do. He knew her better than this when he didn't know her.
"He wasn't there long," he said. "On1y a couple minutes before I found him, and then l got him right in the truck.” He waited a little bit, but Jeanie didn't say anything else. After a while she picked up the pillow and put it over her head. He saw she didn't want to talk and went back downstairs and fell asleep on the couch.
* * *
In the morning, Mickey couldn't walk. The couch was a foot shorter than he was, so he'd slept with his legs bent about like a frog's, at least that's how they were when he woke up. He tried to straighten them out, and the shot of pain caught him up short before they'd moved an inch. He sat up on the couch and looked at his legs, expecting they'd be purple and hard. They looked like his legs. He rubbed them, up and down from his knees to his shorts, and every place he touched hurt, but not like it did when he tried to move them.
He thought of the way he would look at the funeral—the way he would look to Jeanie at the funeral—and pushed himself off the couch. His legs were still bent, but not as bad. He closed his eyes and straightened them. It took a minute, a minute and a half and then before he opened his eyes, he lost his balance and stumbled.
He caught the fall, but his legs had moved a new way, and it felt like he was breaking guitar strings in there. He stood up straight again, this time the pain lost some of its edges. He didn't know if it was because he was getting used to it, or because he'd done it before and the strings were already broke. Maybe that's what getting used to something was, running out of strings to break.
It was quiet upstairs. He moved from the couch to a chair to the table with the telephone, keeping most of his weight on his arms. The table was next to the staircase, and he used both hands on the banister to pull himself up. At the top of the stairs, he found out he could walk without hurting himself if he kept his steps six inches long.
He went into the bathroom that way and filled the tub with hot water. He got in, butt first, and then pulled his legs in after him. He lay in the tub while it filled, squeezing his legs, working the elbow, trying to remember how much walking you have to do at a funeral.
The water was up over his chest before he realized he had to stand up to turn it off. He tried it with his toes, but that was new guitar strings breaking all over again. He put a hand on each side of the tub and pushed up, and as he did that the phone rang. She picked it up as he got his feet under him, and when he turned off the water he could hear her talking.
It was one of the sisters, he could tell from her voice. "I'm all right," she said, "how are you?" There was a pause, "Are you sure?” There was another pause, this one was longer. "I wasn't trying to say you couldn't read .... No, I'm just tired. I've carried it all alone .... Of course you and Joanie helped, I didn't mean you didn't help, but there's things you can't know about until it happens. .. ."
He eased himself back into the tub while she said goodbye, and the phone rang again before he'd found a comfortable position. This time he couldn't hear what she said. She must have moved, he thought. Then he thought of Richard Shellburn and the muscles in his legs tensed, and he hadn't run out of strings to break yet.
A minute later she opened the bathroom door and looked at him. "Everybody knows," she said.
"What?" he said.
"It was in the Daily Times," she said. "About the accident. Only they said Leon got killed again."
He said, "Why'd they say that?"
She shook her head. "Everybody in the neighborhood, my sisters, everybody that's coming to the funeral is going to know."
"It ain't so bad, Jeanie," he said. "We didn't do nothin' bad. It's nothin' to be ashamed off runnin' into a money problem."
"I have to live in this neighborhood," she said. And the way she said that, he didn't. She went downstairs then, and when he got dressed and went down there too, she came back up. They passed in the living room without a word.
He thought of McKenna's stories about his fights with his wife, but that was always over getting drunk or staying out all night. McKenna had something he'd done to get her over, and when his wife was over it, it was all right again. Mickey was trying to get Jeanie over who he was.
He thought of the newspaper reporter again and tried to see where he came into it. Mickey knew from the last five days how it was when all you had for ambition was for time to pass, but Shellburn had been doing it a long time. He thought maybe that's what getting old alone did to you. He thought maybe he'd find out for himself before it was over.
Of course, Jeanie liked famous things—she talked about New York City, and the whole place sounded like the inside of a store window—but he didn't know how she could look at Shellburn and not see he was losing ground every day, that he might as well of had lung cancer. And that all he wanted from her was comfort while it ended.
* * *
It turned out three o'clock was too late for a funeral. If you had it at nine or ten in the morning, people got out of bed, put on their neckties and had to hurry to get there on time. Three o'clock, though, meant they got out of bed in the morning, put on their neckties and then had five or six hours of Saturday to kill before the service.
It wasn't that funerals didn't call for drinking, but the time for that was the night before, or later, after it was over. Or both. You could grieve with a hangover, probably better than you could sober, but nothing that came out of a bottle was any good before they started saying the words. It made things come up that might of been left alone.
They had the service in the viewing room. By the time Mickey and Jeanie came in, a few minutes before three, every chair in the place had somebody sitting in it, except for the front row, which was saved for members of the family. He held her at the elbow as they walked down the aisle, in front of her sisters and their husbands, her eyes fastened ahead on the closed coffin sitting underneath the cross. Mickey thought of the old woman in the organdy dress that had been there the night he slapped Smilin' Jack, he thought that most of the people in the room would end up in that same spot. Not for their funerals—the fimerals would be at church—but this is where they'd get primed.
The room had that same stale smell as the Hollywood. It never occurred to him before that the smell belonged to the people as much as the bar.
He guided her down to the front seats, five feet from the box, and they sat down just as the minister came out and began to talk about Leon. He said he didn't know him, but the Lord did. And the Lord had His reasons.
Mickey looked straight ahead and Jeanie buried her face in a handkerchief He felt her shaking but he .didn't know what to do about it. She hadn't spoken to him since that morning in the bathtub.
Once or twice, the minister stopped and looked toward the back of the room, where people were coming in from the bathroom across the hall. He'd never been in God's Pocket before, but he seemed to know he was losing his hold and hurried the last part. Then he hurried off the podium and stood with Mickey and Jeanie and Smilin' Jack on the front
steps of the funeral parlor, shaking hands with the people who had come to say goodbye to Leon. He even shook hands in a hurry.
The people shook hands with Jeanie first, the ladies kissed her on the cheek, then they shook hands with the minister, and then with Smilin' Jack, and then with Mickey. The ladies told Jeanie they were sorry for her troubles—Mickey could hear himself included as part of them—and they told Smilin' Jack and the minister it was a very good service. Ray said it was the best since Caveman Rafferty's—a local middleweight who was beaten to death one Saturday afternoon twelve years ago on national television. Caveman was born and raised in the Pocket, and it was still common knowledge that there were five people in the neighborhood who could beat him in a fight. It was an argument who they were, but there were five of them. Everybody agreed on that.
Nobody had much to say to Mickey. Some of the kids from the Hollywood and the Uptown even stared at him, like there might be trouble later. Everybody'd read the Daily Times, or heard about it. Mickey stared back. Whatever happened between him and Jeanie, it wasn't going to be a bunch of kids from the bar that caused it.
It didn't turn out to be the kids that made the trouble anyway. Mickey and Jeanie and Jack and the minister had been shaking hands out on the funeral parlor steps about ten minutes, the casket had come out and been loaded into Jack's eleven-year-old Cadillac hearse, and then Mole Ferrell had stepped out of the door, looking lost. Mole had been sitting near the front, so he was one of the last in line at the bathroom after the minister had finished. He came out, rolling and dizzy, and shook hands with Jeanie and Mickey. He smelled stronger than anybody but Ray. “Leon was always a good boy," he told them. "I remember when he had his paper route .... "
Mickey hadn't known Leon ever had a paper route. He thought he must of fucked it up terrible or Jeanie would of told him about it. She was always looking to mention his good points, up to and including dressing himself and when things got slow—as they tended to do when you were looking for Leon's good points—she could sit in front of the television news, listening to all the crimes the colored people had done to each other in North Philadelphia that night, and count it to his side that he hadn't shot who they had.
