by Pete Dexter
The policeman said, “Do you have reason to believe your son has been harmed in some way?”
“This is Mrs. Scarpato,” she said. “You talked to me Monday, on the telephone, and told me that my son Leon had been killed in a construction accident.”
“Oh, the dead son. You should of said so. I thought it was somebody else. You know, we get a lot of calls come through AID and it helps if the complainant identifies themself.”
She said, “Is Mr. Eisenhower coming in?”
He said, “Officer Eisenhower has been reassigned back to detectives.”
She said, “Could you tell me if he had my son taken somewhere for tests?”
“Tests?” he said.
“To tell how he died,” she said. She heard her voice shaking. “There was some question of how my son died.…”
“Well, I don’t think he would of took him anywhere,” he said. She could just see him looking under his desk. “If it was a homicide, the M.E. might still have him, but we don’t take the bodies, ma’am. We’re the investigative arm, and if there was some reason to take a body somewhere for tests, I can assure you Officer Eisenhower would of told me.”
She left her number for Eisenhower and hung up the phone. It was inside her, ugly as dried blood, and she was afraid of it. She thought it must have been there every day of her life, a plug in some smooth surface inside her, and then Leon had died and pulled it loose, and let the light in behind it. In the light, all the familiar footings inside her turned out to be ledges. In the light, she could see the long drops, and it made her afraid even to breathe.
“Mickey seemed different this morning,” Joyce was saying. “Like he was sorry now for how he acted.” She fit the last piece of waffle into her mouth. “They’re always sorry when it’s too late.” She put her fork across the plate and put the plate in the sink and ran cold water over it.
When she turned away from the sink, she saw Jeanie was getting ready to cry. “You’ve got to get used to it,” she said.
“You don’t know what it is,” Jeanie said.
Her sister said, “You’re not the only one ever had something happened. At least it was a good, clean thing. He didn’t get cancer and suffer all summer, like some of them from this neighborhood. Think how terrible that would of been.”
Jeanie said, “I don’t need to borrow grief from nobody.” And then Joyce was putting on her coat, and deserting her too.
A NEWSPAPER ROMANCE
They came for Arthur early in the morning. Sophie recognized one of them from Monday morning. He was the man who had gone with Arthur and Mickey to steal the truck in New Jersey. He was wearing a very smart coat, although it would have looked better with a tie.
It was her habit to cut a carnation for Arthur’s friends when they came to visit, but there was something about this man—even Monday there had been something—that you didn’t want to pin a flower on him. He was quiet, but he wasn’t shy. She liked shy men, now that she was older, but she hadn’t ever liked men without manners.
It was Thursday morning, before the children started walking past the window on their way to school. The schools made the boys wear ties and the girls all had uniforms, different colors for different schools. She liked watching them on the way to school, except the ones who smoked. She did not think girls ought to be smoking cigarettes in Catholic school uniforms.
They came in, the man from Monday morning and another man, who was younger—just a baby, really—and bigger. She liked his haircut. She admired the size of their shoulders and backs and arms. They had been watching the shop, she knew because they came in right after Arthur. He was normal again when he came in, his hair combed nice, and he’d put on a nice smell. She thought any woman would be lucky to have Arthur when he was normal. He’d leaned over the counter to kiss her, and then gone into the back to take care of his business. He’d said, “Get your suntan lotion packed, Sophie, we’re goin’ to Disney World.”
Nobody could make her smile like Arthur. He was in back two minutes when they came for him. The one from Monday morning came in first and looked from side to side, paying as much attention to her as the flower arrangements. The younger one came in behind and locked the front door. “Where is he?” said the one from Monday morning.
The younger one pulled the shade over the long window that ran the length of the door, and she stared at them in the darkened room and understood they were going to kill Arthur.
The one from Monday morning walked around the counter and knocked seventy corsage boxes off a card table in back. “You ought to be ashamed,” she said. “This is how you do your business? Scaring old women?”
He pushed her out of the way and looked behind the curtain that hid the cashbox under the counter. “You going to steal my money too?” she said. “You going to do your filth and steal twenty dollars from an old woman too? Like the niggers?” Aunt Sophie did not think the men needed to know there was $30,000 in there.
The one from Monday morning said, “He’s in back,” and came around the counter. The younger one had already taken the gun out of his belt, and now the one from Monday morning took his out too. It was a fancy gun with a wooden handle and a barrel that was so long and black it seemed a second behind the rest when he brought it around. He didn’t need a barrel like that to kill Arthur.
The younger one said, “You want me to go around to the back?” The other one thought it over.
“Yeah,” he said, “he can’t run, but what the fuck? Take the back to make sure.”
The old woman spoke to the one who was still a baby. She said, “You’re so young, why would you want to hurt an old woman and her nephew?” He put the gun back in his pants and unbuttoned his coat. “Arthur takes care of me,” she said. “If you hurt him, you might as well kill me too. Without him, who’s going to take care of me?”
The young one went out the front door. She watched until the shade had stopped moving. “He’s so young for this business,” she said.
The man from Monday morning looked at her, for the first time. “If I was you, I’d shut my mouth,” he said. “We can leave as much behind as we want to here.”
She said, “He’s hardly more than a baby.”
The man from Monday morning said, “You keep that in mind, old woman.” He looked at his watch, giving the other one time to get in back. “You just keep that in mind.”
She saw he was getting ready to go into the back for Arthur now. “He never hurt you,” she said. “He ain’t in nobody’s way. He’ll do anything you want. Please, Arthur ain’t no trouble, you don’t have to do this.…”
The man from Monday looked at his watch again. It hadn’t been very long, it couldn’t be time yet. He pointed the gun at the old woman’s face, but she never thought he meant to shoot her. “Remember what I said, missus. We’re comin’ back out this way in a minute.”
She crossed herself, and he saw she was leaving it up to God. He turned his back, satisfied with that, and stepped toward the door to the meat locker. She saw him take the safety off, and noticed how relaxed he held the gun, like it was part of his hand.
And she reached through the curtain and found her own gun—a fifty-year-old revolver her husband had given her the first year they were married. It had never been fired. The man from Monday morning was at the door now, and she pointed the gun at the back of his head. The gun must have been about his age, and it seemed to her that it must have been there all that time, waiting for him. Like God had made one, and then the other to correct the mistake.
She held the gun in both hands and pulled at the trigger. Her husband had taught her to shoot, but it was a long, long time ago, she couldn’t even remember where they went to practice, so she just pulled. It wasn’t up to her anyway. It was moving by itself now, after all those quiet years, to meet him.
The noise when it went off shattered the glass door to the refrigerated box where she kept her roses. She thought it was the noise. The man from Monday morning turned around—he was ten
feet from the roses—and his gun was coming back for her. She knew it was him, even though he didn’t look the same. His eyes were bigger, for one thing. She wished she’d been wearing her glasses when they’d come in, and she wished the gun wasn’t so loud.
Her ears were ringing. She couldn’t hear herself shout to Arthur to run for his life.
The man from Monday morning must have thought she was talking to him because his gun stopped, and he took a step sideways, like he was going for the front door.
She jerked the trigger again, and the second shot caught him in the neck, right below the chin. She was sure. It threw him back into the wall, and she had to remind herself now who it was, because he didn’t look anything like he had. And then he fired his own gun and blew out the other door to the flower box. She’d have to get the roses out of there right away.
Then Arthur came through the door, wacko again. He stopped in the doorway and saw the man on the floor, and the blood sprayed all over the wall. And she thought from his face that he was going to lecture her that this was no way to run the business.
But he said, “Sophie, I swear I never thought it would come to nothin’ like this,” and then he began to shake. She took his hand and moved him out of the way.
“Just a minute, Arthur,” she said. And then the door slammed open again and the young one came through with his big shoulders and his nice haircut and his baby face, and she shot him in the nose. The noise hung in the air with the smoke. “This one is so young,” she said to Arthur. “Barely a baby.”
But Arthur didn’t seem to hear her. He was shaking and buggy-eyed, and then he went over and began to kick the man from Monday morning in the face. Screaming, “This is my family! You fuckin’ hear me? My family. You fuck … you fuck … you fuck …” And every time he said that word, which she did not like used in her shop, he kicked the man in the face again. He did that until he was out of breath and sweating and his pants was all messed up with blood where he’d missed with his shoe.
When he quieted down, she said, “Go change your pants, Arthur. The police is coming.”
He said, “I swear to Christ, Sophie, I didn’t know nothin’ like this was going to happen.” He shook his head, looking at the mess on the floor, and she took him by the hand again and led him out the front door.
“Go change your pants,” she said. “You got blood all over them, and the police is coming. You don’t want nobody takin’ pictures of you like that.” But he stood in the doorway, looking back at the floor, shaking. She could feel it in his hand, and when she touched the back of his neck, she could feel it there too.
“Arthur,” she said, “we ain’t got time to go wacko. Not now.” And she pushed him gently out the door and watched him to make sure he could still find the house. Then she picked up the phone and called the operator, and asked her to call the police and tell them two men had just tried to rob her flower shop. And then she went into the closet and found her broom and a dustpan, and began sweeping up the pieces of glass.
The phone woke him up again Thursday morning, and he focused on it with one eye, as evil as he could make it, but it wouldn’t stop. It rang seventeen times before he picked it up. Gertruda. “Mr. Davis wants to see you, Richard,” she said.
Shellburn said, “I can’t get my other eye open.”
He’d gone from Leon Hubbard’s house to a bar in Center City where, at eleven o’clock, he’d called the paper to say he wouldn’t be writing for Thursday. He said he had some loose ends to tie up. He’d forgotten that and called again at two, and said he had the flu.
Gertruda said, “Mr. Davis wants to see you at ten-thirty. He was sure that’s what time he wanted to see you.”
Shellburn said, “Did it sound sexual?”
“Ten-thirty,” she said, and hung up. He lay back in the pillow and closed his eye and thought about Jeanie Scarpato. When he’d been younger, Shellburn thought he understood temporary insanity. He would read those words together and think of the things he had done and the lies he had told, trying to get into somebody’s pants. He knew what it was to give himself up for twenty minutes of a woman’s time.
Twenty minutes. And then in the mornings he’d wake up with a woman he didn’t know, and try to explain to her who he really was. And that was even crazier than the rest of it because, even if he could have done that, nobody wanted to hear it then.
And he would read how a garbage man had gone home and shot his wife and her mother and two neighbors, and he thought he understood how the garbage man might have felt, standing in front of a judge and jury trying to explain that it wasn’t really him who’d done that, trying to explain who he really was.
Shellburn thought he understood that much of it, but he never understood the shooting. He wondered if that came up out of the same hole as going pussy-crazy. He followed those cases all the way through trial, looking for similarities.
Shortly after his marriage, he quit going pussy-crazy. He didn’t give it up, but he quit giving himself up. He thought about Jeanie Scarpato again and what had happened at her house. It wasn’t like pussy-crazy, but there was something in that bedroom he wanted that bad.
He reached over his head for another pillow, thinking of the way she looked, and hugged it against his chest. It was soft and cool and fit him perfectly. Was it that easy?
He lay like that for an hour, and then his thoughts moved from God’s Pocket to T. D. Davis and he got up, feeling better than he expected to, and took a shower. He stood under the water, wondering if T. D. Davis wanted him to write better or to quit. He didn’t know if T. D. liked having him around.
For twenty years Shellburn had made his reputation reading strangers. He could walk into a neighborhood bar or a hospital room for half an hour and know who everybody was. Some of it, of course, was experience. Cops lied to you, firemen told you the truth. Lawyers were always full of shit. But there was more to it than that. Shellburn could pick up what people were to each other, and the balances that connected them, and that was where he looked to see who they were.
He was good at that in a bar full of strangers, but the older he got, the more he realized he couldn’t do it with the people he knew.
The closer Shellburn got to anybody, the less he could read them. He didn’t know, for instance, if Billy Deebol liked him or pretended to, or what Gertruda was thinking when she called him in the morning for T. D. Or what T. D. wanted from him. Shellburn had made his reputation reading people he didn’t know, and he kept it to himself that he couldn’t read the ones he did know. There was nobody close enough to tell that to anyway.
Maybe Jeanie Scarpato.
He dried himself in front of a steamed mirror and wrapped himself up to the armpits in the towel before he cleared a patch of the mirror to take a look. His eyes were red and he needed a shave, but Shellburn thought his color was better. He’d been gray a lot lately.
He came out of the bathroom, trailing water footprints, thinking about calling her. It was just ten o’clock, though, and he decided to wait. He wasn’t sure what to say yet, anyway. He dressed sitting on the mattress. Socks, shirt and pants. He had to lie down to get the pants on. He was still sweating from the shower, and the clothes stuck to his skin.
He stood up and went to the table where he’d thrown his pants over the typewriter when he’d come in last night. He got his wallet out of the back pocket, some folding money out of the front pocket. The change fell on the floor, quarters and dimes scattered over the room in a way that might have resembled the beginning of the universe. It wasn’t ten o’clock in the morning, and he’d already discovered the big bang. The only question that mattered then was when the cleaning lady came in and swept it all up.
“Yes, I am still drunk,” he said out loud.
He pulled into the office parking lot right at ten-thirty. The elevator was slow, so he was ten minutes late walking into T. D. Davis’s office. He wasn’t worried about the ten minutes, he wasn’t worried about Davis. He was only slightly worried about
Jeanie Scarpato’s husband. He’d watched them together for two minutes, and that was more time than he’d needed. She looked right through him, and he looked at her like there was nothing else in the room.
A long ways down the road, he would feel bad about Mickey Scarpato.
He knocked once on the door before he went in. T. D. Davis was sitting beneath the torn picture of himself and Jackie Robinson. He had a copy of the Daily Times on the desk in front of him, opened to page 2.
Shellburn sat down without being invited to and looked across the desk. T. D. sighed. “I thought you was headin’ over to God’s Pocket,” he said, “write us a column about that boy got killed in the accident.”
“It needs more time,” Shellburn said.
T. D. said, “I didn’t see your column on page 2 today. I opened the paper and we got some goddamn picture of this girl had her teeth wired together in Omaha to lose weight.” Shellburn waited. “That ain’t my idea of what our readers want to see on page 2 of the newspaper, Richard.” Shellburn leaned forward to look at the girl in Omaha. She was smiling.
“Not over breakfast,” he said.
“Have you been feelin’ all right?” Davis said. “I looked at page 2 today and started to think there’s been a lot of days you been missin’. Our readers count on you. They buy the paper for it, some of them, and then they turn to page 2 and see this fat girl in Nebraska smiling at them with a bunch of scum and shit stuck to her teeth.” T. D. looked at the picture again.
“So I had Brookie look back over the last year, and you know, you missed forty-two days, not countin’ vacations, Christmas and personal leave. I heard that and thought I better ask if you been feelin’ all right, because if you haven’t, then we got to get you to a doctor.”
Shellburn said, “It just needs a little more time. There’s some loose ends to tie up.”
T. D. cut him off. “It’s a daily job,” he said. “Every day, 365 days a year. There ain’t nothin’ matters less than what you did yesterday.”
