by Pete Dexter
He’d work late off the clock, he’d come in early, he’d answer phones or take dictation, just to stay in New York, just to stay where he was. Jimmy White didn’t have a friend on the paper, although the ladies who knew about his daughter said they felt sorry.
And then his daughter had run away, and showed up in Los Angeles a month later with every kind of venereal disease there was back then. And Jimmy White began to miss work, two and three days every week. And the sports department didn’t run right when he was gone.
T. D. threatened him four times, and then he saw it was hopeless—that he wasn’t afraid anymore—and he fired him, figuring he might be worth something as an example.
Jimmy White walked out of the office without a word. The Guild went to arbitration to get him his job back, but one afternoon a week later, Jimmy White came back to the office and took his case off the books. T. D.’s secretary—she was one of the ladies who felt sorry about Jimmy White’s daughter—had looked up that afternoon and there he was, standing in front of her desk holding what she thought was a cello case.
“Why, Jimmy,” she said. “How are you?”
He pointed at the door behind her. “I need to see Mr. Davis,” he said.
The secretary smiled. “I’m sorry, Jimmy,” she said. He smiled back and put the cello case on her desk. It opened in two places, she remembered that later for the police. Two clicks, and then he pried open the lid and brought out a brand-new eighteen-inch, 3.4-horsepower Craftsman chain saw. He played with the choke a minute, flipped the switch to ON and pulled the starter cord.
The chain saw was freshly turned and sharpened, and caught on the second pull. It made a noise that startled the secretary and hurt her ears, and she wore cotton in them for six months.
T. D. was sitting at his desk when he heard the saw, and without knowing it was a chain saw, he knew it was serious. Then his door opened and Jimmy White came in, holding a bright-red chain saw in front of a pair of two-hundred-mile-an-hour eyes, and T. D. tried to move one way, and then the other way, and both ways Jimmy White moved with him. He pushed himself back in his chair, back away from the desk and the saw, and Jimmy White kept coming, a step at a time, racing the machine, watching him.
Jimmy White brought the chain saw over the desk, pointing it at T. D.’s face, and then, a foot away, he revved it again, dropped the point, and cut the desk exactly in half.
T. D. knew not to try to move. Jimmy White finished the cut and the desk dropped in on itself, the pictures of Ellen and the boys slid onto the floor, along with a photograph of T. D. standing with Jackie Robinson, which was cut in half and irreplaceable. There were also pencils, files and fourteen kinds of vitamins, a couple of bottles of non-aspirin and a little plastic bottle of Man-Tan. The secretary insisted on helping him clean up, and she found that.
Jimmy White finished and turned the chain saw off, still looking into T. D.’s face, and then he walked out, smiled at the secretary while he put the saw back in the case. “Goodbye, Marion,” he said.
“Have a nice day,” she said.
T. D. heard that from behind his door. As soon as Jimmy White was gone, T. D. called the police, and then he called a meeting of the sports staff to announce that nothing that had happened there that afternoon was to be discussed outside the office, and anybody who discussed it inside the office would be fired too. He didn’t understand timing then, that there were things you couldn’t force.
The story broke in the Daily News the following day, on page 3, along with a picture of Jimmy White and his chain saw, and a paragraph about how T. D. had threatened to fire anybody who talked about it.
The caption under the picture of White was: DESK KILLER: “I’D DO IT AGAIN.” After the Daily News ran the story, the Times ran it, and the Post. Then New York Magazine got ahold of Jimmy White and got him to talk about his daughter and his job, and then the television stations picked up on the story, and every time Jimmy White was interviewed he got a little better.
And while Jimmy White was becoming a city’s hero, T. D. Davis had no comment. A spokesman for the paper would say only that a complaint had been filed with the police, and it was inappropriate to discuss it.
Jimmy White got job offers from the Post and the News, along with donations, cards and an offer to go into partnership with a chain saw dealer. There also were about a hundred calls from people who wanted to hire him to saw their boss’s desk in half.
The man on Channel 11 said, “Jimmy White has somehow touched a chord in this city.”
It took half a month for the story to die down, and by then T. D.’s paper had decided not to prosecute Jimmy White. Then it decided to offer him his job back.
And then T. D. came in one morning and his secretary told him that the editor wanted to see him, and fifteen minutes later he was cleaning out his desk.
And nothing had come up since that he didn’t consider the timing.
The phone started ringing at eight-thirty. There were six calls from God’s Pocket about a two-paragraph story on page 16 that a construction worker had been killed on the job at Holy Redeemer Hospital. T. D. always answered his own phone calls.
“You got it all fucked up,” the first one said. “Leon didn’t slip on nothin’ and fall, they ain’t even workin’ in the air over there. They’re layin’ cinder block. Where was there to fall? And you fucked it up how old he was too. He wasn’t twenty-two, he was twenty-four, twenty-five years old. I went to school a year behind him. No way he was going to get careless and slip.…”
T. D. thanked him and all the others, and promised to look into it. He picked up the paper and read the story again.
“A 22-year-old construction worker was killed yesterday when he apparently slipped and fell to his death at Holy Redeemer Hospital.
“Leon Hubbard, 22, of 25th Street in God’s Pocket, was taken to the hospital’s emergency room but, according to police, he was dead on arrival.”
Between calls, T. D. had Brookie Sutherland find out who’d written the story. “I’ll have it for you in two minutes,” he said. T. D. looked at his feet and thought about the people who had called. For most of them, it was the only personal contact with the newspaper they’d ever have. They were tough, ignorant people, but he’d heard something in their voices—every one of them—when they’d realized who they were talking to. A long time after Leon Hubbard was forgotten, they’d remember T. D. Davis had spoken to them personally on the telephone.
That’s the way neighborhood people were.
Old Satchell, the morning bartender, was in bed with his liver problem, so McKenna was left shorthanded again, and had to open up himself. The Hollywood opened at seven every morning but Sunday, and did half its business before noon. Post-office workers, the night shift at the refineries—oil and sugar—those people came out of work when the sun was coming up. They walked outside, tired, when the rest of the city was just getting started, and it felt like they’d borrowed time against the day, and most of them would never get used to that. Some of them said they liked it, but when they had days off they slept at night like everybody else.
The crowd at the Hollywood had lasted right up to closing time, and McKenna had gone home without sweeping up or washing the glasses. He’d put the jar with the money to bury Leon in the refrigerator with the microwave cheeseburgers that nobody but strangers ever ate, emptied the cash register, and locked the door. McKenna was tired at two-thirty, and he was tired four hours later when he came in to get the place ready.
And it was no shot of sudden energy to see Ray standing outside of the front door in a neck brace and that green sport coat he always wore, waiting for him to open. “Don’t you ever sleep, Ray?” he said. “Fuck yes,” he said, answering his own question, “you sleep in the bar all the time.”
Ray grabbed the side of his neck brace and described the route the pain was taking through his body. He said if he weren’t the kind of man he was, he could sue the Hollywood for everything it had.
“Now
,” McKenna said, “do it now.…” He walked past him, through the door, and closed it in Ray’s face. “Open at seven,” he said, and Ray put his hands and his nose flat against the glass to wait, so every time McKenna looked up he saw Ray stuck there like some kind of homeless bug, and finally he unlocked the door and said Ray could wait inside if he wouldn’t talk about his neck while McKenna was trying to count the money.
And while he was holding the door for him, a woman’s voice screamed from somewhere across the street.
McKenna said, “What the fuck, at this time in the morning?”
Ray squinted. “It’s labor pains,” he said. He looked at his pocket watch. “I’d say they had about half an hour to get her to a hospital.…”
The drug that the doctor had given Jeanie lasted until six in the morning. She woke up then and pulled away from Joyce, smoothly, not to wake her up, and slipped into the bathroom. Her sister was snoring softly, and she closed the door behind her. The medicine left her heavy-headed, and she brushed her teeth slowly, looking at herself in the mirror, thinking she didn’t look old enough to have a twenty-four-year-old son. Wondering if what had happened to him would show on her face. She’d heard of that, women turning old overnight. She didn’t think she was that type.
She washed her face, slapping her cheeks to get some color, and then, without thinking about it, she began to put on her makeup. A base, then a little blush in the cheeks. A natural shade of lipstick over a colorless base, eye liner, then shadow over one eye. She was about to dust the other eye when she noticed the door to Leon’s room. It was closed, but not all the way. She stepped away from the mirror and pushed, and the door opened a foot, a foot and a half, and she stood still, afraid to go any farther or touch the door again, and then she saw him lying in the bed, and for just a little while she thought it was Leon.
The scream woke Mickey up first. He was closest, and it was aimed at him. She was standing in the doorway to the bathroom, looking at him, screaming. It took him a second or two to figure out where he was.
Then there was a sister behind her, looking scared and angry, and then he heard the other one running up the stairs. She came in out of breath, carrying a tennis racket so old it could have been a snowshoe, looking side to side for somebody to swing at. They turned Jeanie around so she wouldn’t have to look at him, and that seemed to calm her down. “It’s all right,” one of them said, “it’s all right now.”
Mickey sat up in bed, keeping himself covered with the sheet. The only thing he had on was a pair of shorts, and he didn’t want Joyce and Joanie seeing him in his underwear. “It must of been the light,” Jeanie said. “I got up and looked in Leon’s room, and I thought it was him. I looked in there and I thought it was Leon in his bed.…”
The sisters led her out of the doorway. Mickey was still sitting in bed with a floating head and a sheet that smelled like cat shit wrapped around his waist. When they closed the door he got up and put on the pants he had left on the floor.
She couldn’t point to a particular time when she began to think that Leon hadn’t died the way the police said he did. When the thought came to her organized, though, so she could recognize it, it was half an hour later over breakfast.
Joyce had fixed waffles and opened up a fresh box of powdered donuts, which she and Joanie used to move the pieces of waffle around in half an inch of maple syrup, the way other people use toast to push eggs. Jeanie sat between them, poking at her food, thinking like a slide projector. She’d stare at the sink, hearing everything—Joyce and Joanie were talking, Mickey was moving around in the bathroom upstairs—but she’d stay frozen on the sink until gradually she’d remember Leon there, remember how he’d bent over it one night to eat dinner. And a few minutes later she’d find herself staring at the refrigerator, or the grease spot on the wall where he rested his head. It was like being in the same place at two different times.
She saw him nervous, and in a hurry, and she saw him one day in the street when he’d suddenly dropped behind a car to hide. And then, while she was sitting at the table with her sisters, it came to her, in words, that Leon didn’t just let something drop on his head and kill him.
And when it came to her, she realized she’d known it all the time. “What’s wrong, honey?” Joyce said. Both of them had stopped eating waffles and were looking at her face.
“Something’s happened to Leon,” Jeanie said. Joyce put her fork down and covered Jeanie’s hands with her own.
“I know, baby, I know.”
She shook her head. “I mean something else happened. They didn’t tell the truth.” The sisters looked at each other across the table.
Joanie said, “Why don’t you eat something, hon? You need to eat.…”
Mickey was in no hurry to get downstairs. He shaved, showered, brushed his teeth, shaved again. He spent ten minutes in his closet, deciding between three yellow shirts. He dressed slowly, fitting the ball and heel of each foot into the pockets of the socks, tucking in his shirt so it was smooth down the front, hanging his keys from two or three places on his belt to see where they looked best.
Downstairs the sisters were talking in the kitchen. He couldn’t make out the words. He looked out the window, and an old one-legged man named Petey Kearns who was dying of cancer was crossing the street, favoring his plastic leg, headed for the Hollywood.
He was two-thirds of the way there when the bus blew past, honking, and when he turned to see what was after him, he fell. Mickey watched him slowly get his legs under him, push up with his hands and arms, and finally, life and death, he stood up.
Downstairs somebody was crying. Petey Kearns, Mickey said to himself, you want to walk good for a couple of days? Be me, I’ll be you.… He watched Petey Kearns go into the Hollywood, he watched a kid that couldn’t light his cigarette, he watched the trucks and the cops and the deliveries until there wasn’t anything left to watch, until he realized the sisters would be wondering if he was up there playing with himself.
No hurry to get downstairs at all.
He went to the top of the stairwell and started down. He thought of the way he’d scared Jeanie that morning and coughed so they’d know he was there. Nobody can blame you for coughing.
As he reached the bottom, the talk stopped in the kitchen. He walked in, and the sisters and Jeanie were sitting together at the table with dirty dishes and an open box of powdered donuts. “Morning,” he said.
The sisters didn’t answer. Jeanie said, “Hello,” all the color washed out of her voice. He poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it over the sink. “Jack Moran said he’d be over this morning,” Mickey said. Jeanie just looked at him. “He thought maybe it’d be easier talking about the arrangements over here.…”
At the word “arrangements,” Jeanie began to shake. The sisters moved over her, putting themselves between her and Mickey. “Maybe you’d feel better in the living room,” one of them said. They left him there, Jeanie keeping out of range as she went past in case he tried to touch her. For half a minute Mickey thought he was going to throw up in the sink. He got his stomach settled and followed them into the other room and sat down in a chair by the window. The three of them were on the couch, Jeanie in the middle. It was a tight fit—the couch was made for two people—and the sisters’ butts seemed to be climbing the arms.
He noticed Jeanie had put on her makeup. Her hair was brushed down and back, and the sun lay in it on her shoulder. It wasn’t his. For a little while, he was back to nothing.
Jack Moran came by forty-five minutes later, wearing a black suit and black loafers and black socks. At first, Mickey saw him coming up the sidewalk and thought it was a foreigner. When he opened the door, Jack Moran’s hand was already there, waiting to be shook. He came in, making nervous bows with his head, like a foreigner, and then he went to Jeanie and took her in his arms and held her.
He’d gone to her, but she’d gone to him too. Mickey watched her holding on to him—shit, she barely knew Jack Moran—saw how na
turally she’d gone to him. He wished they’d hurry up and let each other go. The day was two hours old and moving along like a tour through the art museum.
“We were so sorry to hear,” Jack said to Jeanie. “It was such a waste.…” He half let go of her then, held her by her shoulders and looked into her face. “You wonder about God’s plan.” The makeup over his black eye looked an inch thick. “I’ve brought some things we can look at,” he said. “So you can decide what you’d like.…”
So Jeanie and the sisters sat back down on the couch, and Smilin’ Jack kneeled in front of them, like he was fitting them for shoes. He opened his briefcase and began showing the pictures of the different units he had available to bury Leon in. The units he had pictures of were mostly topped with some sort of flowers or plants, and there was a cross beyond and behind each one.
It was hard to tell which unit Jeanie liked. She sat on the couch, holding a sister in each hand, and stared at each picture as Jack Moran held it in front of her. He looked up at her for some sign one way or the other. She sat still, almost without blinking, while he went through all the pictures, and she didn’t say anything or move anything, and when he had shown her what he had, he smiled, turned around to Mickey and said, “I think she likes the mahogany.”
He handed the picture of the mahogany unit to Mickey, who remembered it from the day before, sitting in the display room with a $5,995 price tag on it. That included a funeral, of course.
Then Jeanie was looking at him too, like there was still hope for Leon, and he was holding the picture of the mahogany box, and then he was nodding. “Sure,” he said, “sure. If that’s what Jeanie wants.”
Jack Moran took the picture back, put it in with the others, and fit them all back in the briefcase. “Now,” he said, “did you have a particular suit in mind for the service?” Jeanie began to shake again and the sisters threw him looks that promised revenge. Mickey suddenly felt like he’d just got out of the dentist’s chair. He took Jack upstairs to Leon’s room to look in the closet.
