by Pete Dexter
Leon had spent a lot of time getting dressed, but Mickey never noticed that he had more clothes than anybody else. Mickey didn’t particularly notice clothes at all, except Jeanie’s. The first time he’d looked into her closet he’d got a hard-on. Some of her dresses, they smelled like she was still in them.
He and Jack Moran opened Leon’s closet and looked inside. “Jesus,” Mickey said, “it looks like the fuckin’ men’s shop at Strawbridge and Clothier.” There were half a dozen suits, ten or twelve sport coats, a yard of pants, arranged dark to light. Eight pairs of shoes. Mickey had never owned anything you couldn’t put in a drawer, until he was going out with Jeanie.
Smilin’ Jack was professional. He went through the clothes, feeling the material, and pulled out a dark blue suit with white lines so narrow you could hardly see them running up and down. Coat and pants both. “I think this might be best,” he said.
He held it up for Mickey to look at, but Mickey couldn’t get his eyes out of the closet. “You suppose all this shit is hot?” he said. “I mean, where’d he get the money?”
Smilin’ Jack sighed. He said, “Usually, it’s best not to question. You learn in my business not to question. When it’s gone, it’s gone.”
He put the suit on Leon’s bed, then pulled a pair of black shoes out and put them on the floor under it. He found a white shirt with a starched collar and a dark red tie with blue stripes running kitty-corner all the way down the front. Mickey picked up the shirt and looked it over. It wasn’t yellow, but it wasn’t bad.
Jack Moran took the shirt and the suit off their hangers and arranged them over his left arm, careful not to wrinkle anything. He picked up the shoes in his right hand. “This should be all we need,” he said.
Mickey nodded. “That’s all I can think of,” he said. They went back down the stairs, through the living room. Jeanie and the sisters were still on the couch. “I’m terribly sorry,” Jack said. Jeanie looked up in time to see what he was carrying out.
Mickey opened the door for him because his hands were full and watched him until he’d gone around the corner. When he went back in, Jeanie seemed improved, like she might know who he was. “Something happened to him,” she said to Mickey. “Something happened over at that hospital nobody has told us yet.” She looked at him carefully. “They didn’t tell you something you didn’t tell me, Mickey …?”
It was good to hear her say his name again. “They didn’t tell me nothin’ but that something dropped and hit him on the skull,” he said. He went dry, hearing the word “skull” come out of his mouth. She looked at him, reading him for a lie. “Nothing,” he said, “that’s the whole thing.”
“Something else happened out there,” she said. “It did.” And then she was quiet again. Mickey waited maybe ten minutes—maybe ten months—and then checked his watch.
“Look,” he said, “I got a little work …” Nobody said anything, so Mickey stood up. Nobody said anything, so he went to the door. “Be back in a little while,” he said.
He opened the door to the garage and checked the meat in the truck. It was nice and cold in there. The refrigeration unit was a new kind, cost an extra $2,000, supposed to operate indefinitely in the extremes of climate. Unit. He didn’t like the way that sounded as much as he did when he bought it.
He took the plug out of the wall and started the truck. He let it warm up, feeling it shake, and then he turned on the refrigerator in back—it ran off the generator—and backed out. The alley was one-way. He was watching the direction traffic would come from and almost backed over his sister-in-law Joyce.
The truck was just creeping, but it barked when he stopped, and he could feel the load shift in back. Joyce stood still in the alley—he thought it was Joyce—looking at him in a different way than she’d been looking at him inside. Then she moved, and he finished backing out and then headed over to the flower shop.
He parked in back and tried the garage door. It was locked, and he hit it open-handed. The door was metal. He rattled it, it rattled him back. He tried it again, but nobody came, so he walked around to the front and tried the door there. He rang the door and knocked on the glass. It was nine-thirty, and Bird never slept in.
A light was on in back where the old woman put together her arrangements. He knocked harder, and a minute later Sophie Capezio came out, slowly, checking who it was before she cracked open the door. She’d been counting her money.
“Good morning,” he said. She smiled at him but kept the door cracked. “Is Bird in there?”
She shook her head, worried. “Arthur ain’t feelin’ good today, Mickey,” she said. “He’s just layin’ in bed, got his eyes open, you know? I says, ‘Arthur, what you lookin’ at on the ceilin’?’ He don’t answer. It don’t smell bad in there, and I know he ain’t been drinkin’ last night anyway, ’cause he never went out and Arthur don’t drink alone.”
Mickey said, “Maybe he’s got the flu, you know? There’s some of that around.” She shook her head.
“It’s because of this terrible business started with Mr. Bruno,” she said. “He don’t know what’s going on. Arthur don’t have no faith, and I blame myself for that. He was up there lookin’ at the ceilin’ all night, I know.” She looked up at Mickey for a minute then. “You want me to get him?” she said. “I’ll run across the street and tell him you’re here. Take his mind off the ceilin’ awhile.”
“He’ll be down,” Mickey said. “I’ll come back this afternoon, we’ll do it then.” She reached out through the opening and touched him. It was an old freckled hand, shaped like a squid, turned halfway blue. She smiled at him and squeezed, and he would think back later, after the shooting, and remember he was surprised at how strong she was.
He got back in the truck and then it dropped on him that he didn’t have anywhere to go again. He could go back and sit in the living room with Jeanie’s sisters, or he could go watch Smilin’ Jack drain Leon and discuss the lessons of the funeral business.
“The thing you learn is not to ask questions.…”
Mickey heard it again, thinking of how pitiful it looked when you tried to change who you were.
He could have gone to a movie, but he couldn’t leave the truck in a lot, not with a load of meat. Especially that meat. He could go to Thirteenth and Market and pick up a racing form, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He wondered if Leon had somehow died and left him his ambition.
He sat in the driveway a couple more minutes, then put the truck in reverse and, checking both ways for Joyce—Jesus, he had to stop thinking this crazy shit—he backed out. There wasn’t anything to do, but that’s what bars were for.
By ten o’clock, the Hollywood was half full. Most of the Pocket had taken the day off because Leon had died. Women were making hams and macaroni salads to bring to the house, and men were sitting in bars drinking. When Mickey walked in, there were twelve or fifteen people to shake hands with who hadn’t been there the night before. The jar with Leon’s money was back on the bar, full of fives and tens. McKenna was standing behind the bar, looking tired, listening to Ray describe the research he’d done into his accident. “The average settlement against a tavern in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is $62,475,” he said.
Mickey found a seat and McKenna came down to look tired in front of him. “You look worse than I do,” McKenna said. Old Petey Kearns was sitting in the next stool, his pants leg rolled up around his knee to show the plastic leg. It was the color of one of those dolls that shit in their pants.
When Petey Kearns drank, his artificial leg got hot. It defied medical science. A couple shots and a couple of beers and he’d have to roll up his pants leg to cool it off. There was a rule on the wall—right below NO CHECKS and WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE—that Petey Kearns could not be served if he came in with his pants leg rolled up. If he came in clean, though, he could stay as long as he wanted. If he built his load at the Hollywood, he was the Hollywood’s problem.
Petey Kearns was sitting i
n front of a shot glass and a beer, reading the Daily Times. The paper had been folded back to page 16, and passed up and down the bar. He made hen noises and sipped at his beer. Then he looked up from the paper. “We ought to sue the motherfuckers,” he said. All up and down the bar people nodded. Even Ray, except he was nodding at the lecture he was about to give.
“There are two basic components to a successful libel suit,” he said, straightening. “The first is you have to be able to prove intent. You have to prove they intended to write it. And the second is damage. You have to prove Leon was damaged by the story, unless he was a public figure. If Leon was a public figure, they could write anything they wanted about him.”
McKenna looked like he’d just spent Christmas Eve putting a tricycle together and ended up with an extra wheel. “Ray,” he said, “it don’t mean a fuckin’ thing, because Leon wasn’t no public figure.”
Ray dug in. “It’s something everybody ought to know,” he said. “It might come in handy next time.…” McKenna looked up and down the bar.
“Like if one of us celebrities gets killed, we can sue the motherfuckers.”
Ray said, “I’m just telling you the law. You can interpret it any way you want to.” Petey Kearns finished the story and pushed the paper away. There wasn’t any point in reading more than you needed to, it was asking for trouble. Like answering a pay phone. Mickey picked it up to see what they’d written.
He read the story twice. “You can’t sue them, Mick,” Ray said. A kid was standing there too. A fat kid named Dick. This was the first thing he ever said to Mickey:
“Don’t listen to what this fucker says. He works for the newspapers. They put it like that in the Daily Times, everybody in the whole fuckin’ city sees it, thinks we’re a bunch of jerk-offs down here. Walkin’ around fallin’ off shit all the time. Then they go and say Leon was twenty-two, it’s on the record, and what really happened down here don’t count.”
McKenna looked at Mickey. “You got time for a beer?” he said.
Mickey said, “I got time to baptize China.” Half an hour later Charlie Kearns came by with another jar of money to bury Leon. Charlie owned the Uptown and was not related to Petey Kearns. It was how he introduced himself, “Charlie Kearns, no relation to Petey.…” The jar he was carrying wasn’t as big as the one at the end of the bar, but then Leon did most of his drinking at the Hollywood. Charlie bought Mickey a beer and told him the Uptown was sorry for what happened.
McKenna took the jar behind the bar and began to count. “Now in the case of personal injury,” Ray said, “it’s a different legal question.” McKenna looked up.
“I’m countin’ money, Ray,” he said. “You know I don’t like talk while I’m countin’.”
Mickey drank the beer and the bar went quiet so McKenna could count. He saw they thought he’d come in for the money. When McKenna finished he put the stack of money on the bar and said, “Five forty-five.”
Mickey shook hands with Charlie Kearns. Charlie said, “You comin’ by with some meat today, Mick, or you going to take the cash to Florida and retire?”
When Charlie had left, McKenna took the jar off the bar and counted the money in there too. McKenna was a slow counter for somebody in the bar business, and it was quiet for a long time. When he finished, he put the two stacks of money together, and then took a hundred-dollar bill out of his own pocket and put it on top of the stack from the Hollywood. “Fourteen hundred and forty, all together,” he said.
McKenna put a rubber band around the money and then dropped it in a paper bag he kept behind the cash register. The bag was where he kept cash overnight, it had been folded and unfolded a hundred times, rolled and unrolled, and it was as soft as a piece of cloth. He always hid it in the same place, everybody in the Pocket knew where.
He handed the sack to Mickey, smiling in a sad way like it was Leon’s ashes. Mickey took the sack, but he didn’t know how you thank a bar. “Lemme have the bag back sometime,” McKenna said. It was heavier than Mickey would have thought, about like a wet hoagie. He took the bag and saw he couldn’t stay in the bar, that it was some kind of ceremony, and it was over.
He’d left the truck around the corner, where you couldn’t see it from the house. He put the bag of money under his seat, up with the springs, and then drove home. As he was going in, two cops were coming out.
A big one and a little one. Jeanie was thanking the big one—his name tag said EISENHOWER—and he was stumbling all over himself getting out and smiling at her at the same time. Mickey knew why Eisenhower was stumbling, he remembered the way she’d looked to him at first. Still looked to him.
The little cop was younger and didn’t seem interested. “We’ll be back to talk to you, Mrs. Scarpato,” Eisenhower said. Then he noticed Mickey standing on the steps.
Jeanie said, “This is my husband.” Eisenhower shook his hand, trying to see how Mickey fit here with her.
“Good,” he said finally. Mickey got his hand loose. “We’re still investigating the accident,” Eisenhower said, “and we’ll be back to you when we’ve finished.” He turned for a last look at Jeanie. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, and she smiled at him in a way he’d think about that night. Mickey knew the smile.
He shut the door on the police and sat down on the chair he always sat on. It was warm from one of the cops. “What’d they say?” One of the sisters appeared from the kitchen—or the ceiling or someplace—and stood next to her.
“They were very nice,” Jeanie said. “They said they’d go back and talk to the men at the hospital.” He looked at her, she looked at her hands. “Something happened,” she said.
“What happened?” Mickey said.
“Something they didn’t tell us,” she said. And suddenly she was staring right at him, like he was in her way.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know, but I know.”
Lucien had been late getting home from work. It didn’t spoil supper—she’d fixed him a ham and green pea soup—but when he came in he wasn’t hungry.
He’d come to the table, but he didn’t eat, not like he’d done no day’s work. He pushed the ham and potatoes around his plate, run his spoon through the thick soup, never got none of it in his mouth. He was smiling at her too. He’d sit there runnin’ his spoon through his soup like he’d lost a tooth in it, smiling at her with that kind smile.
“Lucien, you comin’ down with something?” she said. He’d shook his head.
“I’m healthy, I just ain’t hungry.” She’d asked him then if he’d ate his lunch, and she could see from his face that he didn’t. All he’d said, though, was, “Things was real busy today.” And then he’d smiled that way at her again.
The last time she’d saw such a smile his mother just died. She was ninety-seven, and they wasn’t nearly enough power left in her motor to make things work all at once, so sometimes she did her thinkin’ and sometimes she did her talkin’, but it wasn’t never at the same time.
Lucien had stayed close to her until the day she died, and it had hurt him bad when she died, and he’d walked around the house for a week giving Minnie Devine those kind, killer smiles.
She was afraid now, like she was then, but she did what she could. She got up half an hour before the sun to make him breakfast. She took the fat off a pork roast and then cut the meat into squares. Then she cut the fat into squares too, and then ran them together through the grinder. She put the skins to soak in a pan, added vinegar to soften them up. She put the bowl of ground meat on one side of the kitchen counter and the bowl of skins on the other, and stood between them reading her Bible.
“Dear Jesus,” she said, with her hand touching His picture, “don’t let this be nothin’, please.” She stood at the counter half an hour, but she couldn’t find nothing in the book aimed at what was going on this particular morning. She went over the familiar comforts, but she thought there must be something in there closer to what was going on. She couldn’t find it.
She added salt to the pork, then black pepper, then a couple of cloves of garlic and some coriander. She measured by eye. Finally she crushed part of a red pepper she found in the icebox and put that in the meat too. She worked the meat through her fingers, talking to Jesus until the muscles in her forearms started to hurt her, and she kept at it, looking at the ceiling now, until her muscles cramped, and when it hurt enough, she knew Jesus was listening.
She ran the meat back through the grinder, a little bit at a time. It went in at the top and came out into the skins she fit over the funnel on the side. She stuffed a couple inches of meat into the skins, careful not to split them or get air pockets, and then twisted them twice—always the same direction—and then ground a couple more inches of meat into them, making links. When she’d finished, there were three long pieces of sausage with six links in each one. She put two of them in the icebox and cut the third one into pieces and put them over a low fire on the stove.
It would be good for Lucien, waking up smelling homemade sausage. “Maybe he was just tired,” she said to Jesus. “He’s sixty-nine year old, maybe he just get tired like everybody else.…” It didn’t feel like Jesus was paying attention.
She heard Lucien moving around in the bedroom and put biscuits in the oven. She chopped the potatoes he hadn’t ate last night and put them in a pan to fry. She heard him dressing, and when he started down the stairs she put four eggs in with the sausage, shook in a handful of water to make it steam, and then covered the pan.
It seemed to take him a long time to get down the stairs, like he was hurt and leading down with the same foot. “Please, Jesus,” she said, “don’t let this be nothin’….”
He smiled at her across the kitchen table. He was wearing his robe and slippers, and he kept one hand on the chair and one hand on the table when he’d sat down, like he’d just let go of a walker. There was white whiskers on his chin. She took the eggs off the fire and slid two of them onto a plate, with most of the sausage and potatoes, and four biscuits. She put the plate in front of him, and he smiled at that too.
