by Pete Dexter
The old Korean who slept in the doorway had sent his family away when the Muslims burned him out. He’d moved out of his house, left everything his wife and children hadn’t taken, and put himself in the doorway of a boarded-up house, forty feet from the Muslims, where he intended to stay until they killed him. He’d worked the stand six days a week, cleared twenty-five, thirty dollars a day. He’d come to work afraid and left afraid, and even with the cops there he was afraid all the time in between. That was how Koreans was.
When they’d burned him out, though, they lost what they had over him. They called him a crazy motherfucker now. They said it in front of him, they laughed about it, and before long, Lucien knew, they would kill him.
And he knew the Korean didn’t have no plan for the way it would be. That was the part Lucien didn’t understand. In some little place in the back of their thoughts, the Muslims was scared of the old Korean too, but he wasn’t using it for nothing. He’d given up his family, and some morning they was going to find him laying in his doorway with a bullet in his head. It might be the middle of the morning before somebody noticed he wasn’t asleep.
And by afternoon it would be like he was never there at all.
Lucien got on the bus and found a window on the left side, where he could see the campus of Temple University. He liked watching girls on their way to college. He wondered what they must be teachin’ them in there. On the other side of the bus, you could see what had been some of the finest homes in the city. Somebody had done a lot of good work in North Philadelphia once. Minnie Devine said it was part of a white man’s plan to get all the city Negroes in one place, where they’d be handy for scientific experiments. He smiled at her, that she could keep it up so long.
Lucien never argued with Minnie Devine, but he knew nobody had built houses like those for anything but the houses themself. You couldn’t do that kind of work for hate. Twenty minutes later, though, at Washington Avenue, he could look east and see the Southwark Homes projects. Eight thousand people in fourteen stories. She was right that there was a plan—Southwark Homes couldn’t be no accident—but it wasn’t sneaky the way she thought. Most of the time, things was the way they looked. But Lucien never argued with Minnie Devine.
He got to the hospital a little after seven-thirty and squatted next to the cherry picker to wait for the boss. The ground was wet, but he wouldn’t of sat down anyway. Not before work. The cherry picker was a small crane they used to move steel rods or cement blocks, or anything else wasn’t in the right place. The more youngsters you had on a job, the more things wasn’t where you could use them. Lucien expected they would need two cherry pickers soon. Shit, the new boy with the razor could use one all to hisself.
Lucien never wanted to be boss, and sometimes he looked at Peets and wondered how he put up with somebody always gettin’ in the way of what he was tryin’ to leave behind. He thought work must be different for Peets, not as personal. For the youngsters, it wasn’t nothing at all.
The boom on the cherry picker was fifteen feet high. A steel cable dropped from both sides of the pulley and connected at the bottom at an eight-pound U-bolt. The bolt was tied to the boom with a thinner cable to keep it out of the way. Lucien had seen one like it swing into a man once, not even hard, and break his chest. You could walk into one and knock yourself out.
The foundation for the new wing ran east from the cherry picker eighty feet, then another sixty feet south, back to the main building. Lucien was laying cinder block when they quit Friday. He saw where he’d left off, and the work was as level as you could draw it. Things was what they looked like, good work looked like good work. There were a dozen empty beer bottles on the ground near the wall, and he’d picked them up by the time Peets climbed out of his pickup.
The ground was softer where he parked, and the old man heard Peets’ boots sinking into the mud and then sucking up what was underneath. He was naturally messy.
“Mornin’, Lucy,” Peets said.
“Peets.” He didn’t move, and Peets squatted down beside him. The old man could feel the heat from his body and hear his hinges creak. A couple of minutes passed and Peets looked at his watch. “Damn, it’s nobody wants to work today,” he said. There were nine men on the crew, and as of eight o’clock, seven of them were late. “It ain’t turned to daylight savings time again, has it?”
Lucien looked at him and smiled. Minnie Devine called it Daylights Scaring Time, and thought it was something a white man had invented to keep city Negroes lazy. She said they had no such thing in the country.
Peets said, “Could be it’s just us today.”
Lucien said, “Could be we get somethin’ done.” They stood up together and walked over to pull the plastic cover off the cement. The sacks were eighty pounds, and the old man handled them like nothing. Peets primed the Wisconsin that ran the mixer, and it caught on the third try. It was whisperized, according to the law. Peets missed the old noise, but times changed, and being the job was next to a hospital, it was probably to the best.
The old man tore open a cement bag and poured it into a wheelbarrow. Peets shoveled. Lucien had worked for bosses who cheated, even on little jobs, or were lazy, which came to the same thing. Some of them mixed it two to one. He’d also worked for bosses that didn’t use half the steel they was supposed to. Peets kept it honest. Three sand, two cement, one lime. He wouldn’t be coming past in no Mark VI in five years, but he wouldn’t have to wonder if his wall was still there either. Lucien didn’t believe in leaving things unsettled. If you did, they never let you rest.
Lucien got the hose and watered the mix. He added by eye, but it was never soupy and it was never hard. When his cement came out the mixer, it would stand up three inches on a trowel.
The sun was up, and Peets and the old man worked fifteen minutes before a caved-in station wagon with five men from the crew stopped on the sidewalk and emptied out. Peets didn’t say so, but he was sorry to see them come. The job was twenty days behind now, and there’d be more wet weather next month, but working alone with the old shine, he was happy. He would of been glad to haul blocks and mix cement for him all day. With just him and Old Lucy, he didn’t have to tell nobody to leave the damn nurses alone, or argue over some damn union rule he never heard of. He didn’t have to think any way but practical.
He gave his shovel to the boy Gary Sample and put Old Lucy back on the wall where he was laying block Friday.
Mickey was two blocks from Holy Redeemer when the kid said he had to go back. He told him, “Leon, I got to be somewhere. You got me ten minutes late already.”
“Listen,” he said, “I forgot my medicine.”
“What medicine?”
“The medicine the doctor gave me. I can’t go to work without that shit, Mickey. If you can’t go back, let me out here and I’ll walk.” He looked over and the kid was sweating.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Nothin’,” he said. “I just can’t go to work without my medicine. Jeanie didn’t tell you about that?”
Jeanie. Mickey pulled the truck into an alley, found a cross street and took the kid home. Then at the house the kid said, “Not here, drive up half a block.”
He stopped half a block from the house. Leon dropped out of the truck. He hit the sidewalk crouched, looking all around him, and then ran to the house, zigzagging in and out of garbage cans. Monday was garbage day on Twenty-fifth Street. Mickey didn’t let himself think about what Leon must be like at work, or what kind of an asshole that made him with Bird.
Seven seconds after he’d gone through the front door, Leon was in the window on the second floor, checking the street. Then he was back out on the sidewalk running toward the truck. Jeanie’s head came out the door and watched him all the way back. Mickey waved, but she must not have seen it.
The kid got in and slammed the door. “See? I told you I’d run.” Mickey thought there must be some conversation going on all the time in Leon’s head that he thought he was ha
ving out loud. “Didn’t take no time at all,” he said.
It had taken long enough, though, so a City of Philadelphia sanitation truck had turned left off Lombard and got in front of them and was moving half a mile an hour down Twenty-fifth now while three democrats strolled back and forth across the street, picking up garbage cans, dumping half the shit inside into the truck, the other half into the street. At the end of the block, the driver got out, and all four of them went into the Uptown to shake the place down for a ten and a drink.
There was a half a block of cars lined up behind Mickey by then, most of them blowing their horns or shouting, but none of it had much conviction. Nobody hurries the City of Philadelphia. Mickey looked at his watch. “Eight-fifteen in the morning,” he said. “They ought to be ashamed of themself.”
“I seen a guy get thrown into the back of one of them once,” Leon said, to pass the time. Mickey looked over and the kid was smiling in a way that Mickey almost believed him. That was the trouble with Leon. You could never be sure he was completely full of shit. There was a way he committed himself to it. “You ever seen that, Mickey? They throw the guy in the back and then mash him into all the other shit back there.”
Mickey didn’t say a word, and Leon didn’t read nothing into it. “I knew the guy they did that to,” he said. Mickey checked his watch. They’d been inside the Uptown four minutes. The kid had been sweating out his eyeballs fifteen minutes ago, now he was cold.
“He was cute,” Leon said. “Asshole bet K.C. against the Phillies the whole series. A grand, a grand, two grand. The series ended, he owed five, and he didn’t have no idea where he was going to get his hands on something like that.
“That’s what he told Skully. You know Skully, what a nice guy he is, but the people he works for ain’t nice. And a couple nights after the parade they had for the team, a couple guys come by and take this guy right out in the street, in front of his family and everybody. Just then a garbage truck was comin’ by, and they just threw him in there instead of breakin’ his legs themselves. It was sort of like progress. Like computers, they throw this guy in back so they don’t have to do all the work. Wasn’t as noisy, either. One of them gets in the cab, the niggers go into a bar. But the guy had claustrophobia, see, and nobody knew it. So when they pulled him out of there, he wasn’t just broke up a little bit, you know what I mean? He was suffocated.”
The garbage men came out of the Uptown and started down Twenty-fifth Street. Mickey made a left through an alley. “He panicked,” Leon said, “or he’d of been all right. You panic sometimes, that’s all she wrote.”
“How come you’re always talkin’ that shit, Leon?” Mickey said. He looked over at him again and wished he’d kept his mouth shut. “I mean, it’s the first thing in the morning.…”
“You think it’s shit?” the kid said. “You think it’s shit? Say it, you think it’s shit.”
Mickey stopped the truck and waited. “Leon, I don’t need this now.” If it came to that, he’d decided to choke him enough to change the amount of air his brain was getting and figure out a way later to explain it to Jeanie without saying Leon was crazy. Then, while he watched, it changed again. Leon smiled at him, began to nod.
“I know you done your share, Mickey,” he said. “I know you been there.” They rode the rest of the way to Holy Redeemer without talking. Then the kid climbed out of the truck and said, “Thanks, Mickey. Hey, I really appreciate everything,” and slammed the door.
Mickey drove back into the Pocket, thinking what a crazy fuck the kid was and how someway Jeanie would eventually tie him into that, turned left for seven blocks thinking the same thing, and then he saw Bird sitting in a new yellow Cadillac outside the flower shop. Mickey liked the color. There was another man in the front seat Mickey had never seen before, and the life and times of Leon Hubbard was old business.
He left his truck running in back of the Cadillac and walked up to Bird’s window. It was twenty minutes to nine. “Another five minutes, we was going to leave without you, Mick,” he said.
Mickey said, “Lemme put the truck in back. I still got meat back there.”
“You can put it in there, but it ain’t going to do nothin’ for your meat,” Bird said. “We ain’t had electric since six o’clock last night.” Mickey looked around the street. All the ladies were sitting on their steps instead of watching Phil Donahue. The man he hadn’t seen before didn’t say anything.
“Then what you going to do with the load?” Mickey said.
“What the fuck you think we’re doin’ in here, Mick?” Bird said. “Talkin’ about the power windows?” There was an edge to Bird that wasn’t his natural edge. It was like he was afraid to get mad. Mickey didn’t know if it was because he was late, or if it was the man in the front seat. There wasn’t no reason it took three people to steal a truck. Either way, he’d explain later, when it didn’t make him look weak.
He took the truck around the block and pulled into the garage behind the flower shop, which had two stalls, both of them with twenty-foot clearances. He shut the door on the truck and himself, then got a flashlight from under the front seat and walked through the cooler. The place had once been a warehouse for the school district.
From what he could see, it was about half full. The light and the sides of beef made changing shadows—dog heads, monsters, nightmare shit—always changing, always moving. He had the sudden thought that something must be walking around inside Leon’s head with a flashlight.
Bird kept the meat from Argentina and Australia separate from the Kansas Beef Association stuff, which was for the best people he knew. Bird’s thinking was that the only steak in the world better than Kansas Beef Association was from Japan, and nobody knew about it. “The way the Japs do business,” he said, “they got a lot of cars, you know about their cars. They got a lot of cameras, you know about their cameras. They got maybe twelve acres in the whole country that ain’t got no cities on it, though, so you don’t know that they got beef. They know what they’re runnin’ over there.”
The cooler felt warmer than it usually did, but the way you’d notice the electricity was off was the dampness in the air. Nothing cold could get warm without getting sloppy. Not meat, not air, not anybody you know. The cooler seemed bigger without the lights. At the far end were two band saws, where the cutters and boners usually worked, and beyond them was a door that led into a smaller cooler, where they kept the flowers. If it was Mickey’s, he’d just as soon been in the flower business. For one thing, with flowers you didn’t have all those fucking hooks hanging out of the ceiling.
He stepped out of the flower cooler and said hello to Mrs. Capezio, who ran the shop and was Bird’s mother’s sister. The name was the same because the sisters had married cousins. “Everybody look so worried this morning, Mickey,” she said. “I tell Arthur he got to relax. What’s going to happen is going to happen, it’s planned a long time ago. All you can do is have faith in the electric company, right? He don’t listen to me, though. You talk to him when you see him, Mickey, he listens to you.”
She picked a pink carnation off a funeral arrangement sitting on the counter, broke the stem and pinned it to the outside of his jacket. Her old hands shook, and it took a long time. “Ever since all the terrible business with Mr. Bruno,” she said, “Arthur don’t know what’s going on no more.”
He walked outside and got into the back seat of the Cadillac, behind the man he didn’t know. Bird was saying, “I think sometimes I got a prick for a brain and a brain for a prick. I mean, I could of got into a nice, comfortable little bar twenty-four years ago, had it paid off by now. I could of got into the movin’ business with my brother Tommy. I tell him, ‘I wisht I was in a business where the worst thing can happen is a hernia.’ Sometimes I think I might still do that.…”
He was asking the man something, the man wasn’t hearing it. “My brother Tommy,” Bird said, “he looks at me like I’m crazy. He says, ‘Lookit all the money you’re makin’. Lookit a
ll the pussy.’ He don’t know. I tell him, ‘Sure, there’s pussy in the meat business, but anybody goes into a business for the fuckin’ don’t enjoy it. It’s like you lost your taste buds but you still get hungry. How is that worth it?’ ”
Bird looked into the rearview mirror. Mickey hoped it wasn’t for an answer. “My aunt give you that flower? What’d she tell you?”
“She said you had to have faith in the electric company,” he said.
The man next to Bird looked at his watch. “C’mon, let’s go,” he said. Bird started the Cadillac and drove north on Twenty-fourth Street.
Bird was smiling. “That old woman is somethin’, ain’t she, Mick?”
“A very nice woman,” he said.
“She don’t look like it,” Bird said, “but she knows what she’s runnin’ there. Did you know that flower shop’s makin’ money? She don’t have to do nothin’ but sit on her ass like everybody else, watch ‘All My Children’ all fuckin’ day, but she keeps it runnin’. She’s in there right now, worryin’ what the electric’s doin’ to her flowers.”
“What happened to it?” Mickey said.
Bird shrugged. “They don’t know,” he said. “I noticed it always happens right after the democrats get their welfare checks, though.” Bird always called them democrats. “They get the juice runnin’, Jesus knows what they can think of to fuck things up. They come down in civil rights buses from North Philly to do it.…” Bird took a right on Race Street and took it all the way to the Ben Franklin Bridge. The right-hand lane was closed down because they were painting that side of the bridge.
Bird said, “I heard they never stop paintin’ this fucker. You heard of that, Sally?” The man next to him didn’t answer. “They start at one end, and the air in Camden is so bad, and it takes so fuckin’ long to get to the other end, that by then it’s all peelin’ and they got to go back and start all over again.”
