by Pete Dexter
Shellburn saw T. D. was coming to it now. “I been thinkin’ about it, hoss,” he said, “and the idea hit me that maybe we ought to bring in another columnist, you know, somebody to take the load off.” T. D. watched him. “I don’t mean like you, I was thinkin’ maybe we ought to get us a woman columnist anyway.”
Shellburn smiled at him.
“A lot of papers are doin’ it,” T. D. said. “Forty-five percent of our readership is women, and maybe we ought to give them something to read too. You know, from one of their own. Pussy diseases, rape clubs, like that. Even when you’re workin’, you don’t speak to our average female reader.”
“You going to run pussy disease on page 2?” Shellburn said.
T. D. shrugged. “It’s been done,” he said. “There’s that girl up in Boston does real well. We could run hers when you was sick, or we could take turns.”
Shellburn said, “Did you find one yet?”
T. D. shook his head. “It ain’t decided yet, hoss. I just thought I’d bring it up, you know, let you think it over.” He leaned closer now, making a show of looking at Shellburn’s face. “You sure you ain’t sick? You don’t look worth a shit.”
Shellburn said, “I never been better.”
“If you get sick, you ought to see somebody,” T. D. said. “Ain’t nobody gettin’ any younger, and you’ve had the heart problem already. I don’t want the Daily Times killin’ you. That’s partly why I was thinkin’ about this female thing.”
“Whatever you think,” Shellburn said.
“There’s one other thing,” he said. “If it was a drinkin’ problem …”
Shellburn shook his head. “No.”
“Well, if it was, you know, we sent people up to Live ‘n’ Grin before to dry out. We could do it for you too. If that’s what it turned out to be, it wouldn’t have to be no public announcement.”
“It’s just loose ends,” Shellburn said. He stood up, nodded at T. D., and headed out the door. When he got to Gertruda’s desk, he turned around and said, “I told you and told you, T. D., I don’t take it up the ass.”
T. D. Davis sat still for fifteen minutes, looking at the chair on the other side of his desk. People didn’t change, he knew that. Richard Shellburn was scared of dying and scared of having people find out where he lived and scared of losing his job. T. D. had seen him in the hospital after the heart attack, he’d gone in and talked to him for two minutes when he was scared back to his momma, and nothing Shellburn ever did would change that between them.
He sat and looked at the chair. Something had changed, though. He’d run it all by him, and Shellburn never blinked. Maybe he didn’t believe him. T. D. remembered Jimmy White then, and those two-hundred-mile-an-hour eyes coming into the office behind the chain saw.
It was a long time afterward that he figured out that Jimmy White hadn’t changed, he’d just never paid enough attention to who he was. He sat and looked at the empty chair and wondered if he’d paid enough attention to Richard Shellburn.
The first stop, Mickey had to make himself open it up. He parked in the alley behind the Two Street Tar and Feathers, a bar that didn’t do a lot of business with colored people, and he’d gotten out of the cab, walked around to the back of the truck, and just stood there with the garbage, looking at the handles that opened the back end up.
He’d waited there until a couple of kids came by carrying one of those forty-pound radios, and stood at the mouth of the alley watching him. White kids, walking around on a school day with a radio like that. Mickey said, “How come you’re not in school?”
The one holding the radio said, “We graduated.” He might of been eleven. The neighborhood didn’t need colored people, they was growing their own.
Mickey knew enough about kids not to tell them to go away. He said, “Lemme see your radio,” and began to walk toward them. When he was ten feet away, they ran. They stopped once, half a block away, and called him a motherfucker. Mickey went back to the truck and made himself swing one of the back doors open. Leon was right where he’d left him.
His arms were folded over his chest, and there was some dirt on his suit. His face looked as sweet as an angel, only nicked a few places. Mickey stepped over him getting into the back, trying not to look, and then stepped over him again getting out. He couldn’t get it out of his head that there was something left inside the body. He was carrying two ten-pound packages of steaks when he noticed the dirt on Leon’s suit again and, against his will, he got a picture of Jeanie coming across the body and seeing that he hadn’t even kept it clean. So he put the meat down and wiped at the trousers and coat. The dirt didn’t brush off, but it did seem to spread out, and after a couple of minutes the coat looked the same all over, and Mickey picked up his meat, got out and shut the door, and it was that same relief as when the doc is finished examining your prostate.
The next stop was four blocks deeper into South Philadelphia, and there was no alley. He double-parked in front of the bar and climbed in and out without looking at Leon’s face. It wasn’t like a load of meat, but he thought he was getting used to it.
Mickey made six regular stops, put a little over $250 in his pocket, and then he started across the bridge to Jersey to talk to a couple of restaurants about the sides of beef.
He was halfway across when WFIL, country in the city, left off on Hank Williams, Jr., for a news bulletin. He reached for the button to find another station—there was enough news around without going out of your way looking for it—when he heard it was the flower shop.
“Details are still sketchy,” the lady said, “but police are investigating two killings in a Philadelphia flower shop this morning that are believed to be mob-related. The two men were apparently killed in what was described by neighbors as a wild shootout about six-thirty this morning in the God’s Pocket section of the city. Dead are Salvatore Cappi, forty-four, of Snyder Avenue in South Philadelphia, and William Tolli, twenty-four, of the Northeast. According to police, both men had been associates of local organized crime, belonging to the faction formerly headed by Phillip ‘Chicken Man’ Testa, who was killed last year in a bomb blast at his home. Police are talking to the owner of the shop—seventy-four-year-old Sophia Capezio—and her son, Arthur ‘Bird’ Capezio, fifty, who, according to police, is also a known associate of organized crime, but no arrest warrants have yet been issued.…”
Then the woman read the same history of Philadelphia’s organized crime violence that they always read after somebody got shot, told who got found in a garbage sack and who got shot in his car and who got found with his dick and a wad of twenty-dollar bills in his mouth. Only they never mentioned it was a dick, they always said he’d been mutilated. Mickey heard the woman say mutilated and wondered if she knew what that meant.
He didn’t think so. He thought somebody wrote it for her and she read it. He couldn’t imagine a woman talking about something like that if she knew what it was.
He felt sad about Bird. As soon as he heard God’s Pocket, he knew Bird was dead. Even if he got two of them this time—he wondered how that was possible, the way he’d been lately—they’d be coming for him. He thought about the $30,000 Bird made at Keystone, and how he’d said he was taking Aunt Sophie to Florida. But there wasn’t anywhere in Florida for him now. Or if there was, Bird would never find it.
Mickey moved the tuner over to 1060, looking for KYW all-news radio. He knew a bartender in Queen’s Village who sat around all day listening to KYW, the same news over and over. Twice a month he broke out in hives. He found the station just as they were finishing up the story. “… The seventy-four-year-old woman, who police say fired the fatal shots, has not been charged.”
Well, it was a fucked-up world. He thought of Aunt Sophie and how strong her hands were for an old woman, and was sadder than he had been for Bird. She and Bird might get out of the city, but that was putting it off. It seemed like all any of them could do now—himself included—was put it off. It was an accident where they a
ll were, but that wasn’t nothing anybody wanted to hear. He wished he could tell that to Jeanie. Just say, “Lookit, if Leon doesn’t get killed, none of this shit would of happened.”
He wished he could tell her it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t look the same to her anymore. Somehow, though, the more it went on, the more it was his fault.
He drove past Camden into Cherry Hill to a place he knew just off the highway. The guys that owned it were brothers. One you couldn’t talk to, the other one you could. The brothers never talked to each other.
The brother you could talk to was named Nicholas, and he worked from noon to six. The brother you couldn’t talk to was Stanley, and he came in at seven o’clock at night, when they opened for dinner, and ran things until closing. They left an hour between shifts, so they wouldn’t have to look at each other. The place was called Brothers.
Mickey rang the bell in front, and Nicholas came to the door. He was short and bald and fat, and anytime you got near him you could hear him breathing. Mickey knew him from Garden State. Bird introduced him one afternoon and told him how he and his brother worked their business.
Mickey said, “Hey, Nick, you got a minute?”
Nicholas took his time, deciding. “I’m here,” he said. “What do you want?” When the brothers divided up the business, they decided Stanley ought to run things at night, when the customers came in, because he had the clothes for it. Nicholas, though, had the personality.
“I got some meat,” Mickey said. “I thought maybe you could use some meat.”
Nicholas shook his head. “No,” he said. “How much you got?”
“Seven sides, Kansas choice beef.”
Nicholas shook his head. “No,” he said. He was still standing on the other side of the door. “How much you want?”
Mickey shrugged. “A thousand,” he said. “I ain’t got time to fuck around with this.” Nicholas opened the door and came out.
“You got it with you?” he said.
“Yeah. Lemme get you a side to take a look.”
Nicholas said, “I can look at it in the truck.”
“I got some other shit in there,” Mickey said. Nicholas gave him a long look.
“I don’t care what you got in your truck,” he said. “I don’t see nothin’ but meat when I’m lookin’ at meat.”
Mickey said, “Let me pull one down and show it to you.”
“Fuck it,” Nicholas said. “I don’t think I want in this.” He started back into the restaurant and Mickey stopped him.
“All right,” he said, “take a look. It’s good beef, but the thing is …”
“I don’t see nothin’ but what I’m lookin’ at,” Nicholas said. “Anything else is your own business. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to know about it.” Mickey opened the door to the back end of the truck. He climbed in and then he turned around and gave Nicholas a hand up. The truck dropped under the new weight, and then the fat man was standing right next to him and Mickey couldn’t hear him breathing.
His air came out all at once. “Look,” Mickey said, “I’m just doin’ a guy a favor. Don’t pay no attention to that, it’s nothing.”
Nicholas said, “It’s a fuckin’ body.” He leaned over and touched a leg, then moved up and touched the hand. “It’s cold,” he said.
“It’s a refrigerated truck,” Mickey said. “What do you think?” He knew he’d made a mistake. “What do you say, Nick? Can you take this off my hands, or what?” It was dark in the truck, but Mickey could see his face change. “The meat,” he said. “I’m talkin’ about the meat. Forget that.”
The fat man touched the lapels of Leon’s suit. “It’s a cheap suit,” he said. “What happened to him?”
“He died,” Mickey said. “It’s just doin’ somebody a favor.” “What kind of a favor is that?” he said. “You takin’ him out for some fresh air?” The fat man was touching Leon’s shirt now. “I don’t like this,” he said. Then he stood up, without looking at the meat, and climbed out of the truck, sitting down first and then dropping the few inches to the ground. Mickey got down behind him.
“You can’t go carryin’ a stiff around in the back of a truck,” Nicholas said. “You put me in a bad position. Because of you, I’m an assessory now.”
Mickey said, “You ain’t nothin’ because you didn’t see nothin’ but the meat back there. It’s dark in there, and all you did was look at the meat before you bought it.”
Nicholas shook his head. “No,” he said. “I ain’t takin’ that kind of meat. Who knows what sickness it could of got, ridin’ back there with a human body?”
“Nicholas,” he said, “the body’s clean. It got cleaned up before I put it back there.”
The fat man shook his head. “No,” he said. “Shit, I’m already an assessory if I don’t call the cops. They find the body back there and trace the meat, the first thing you know, the papers will be sayin’ we’re fuckin’ cannibals over here. Can you see my point? You see what that kind of shit does to business?” He shook his head, walking away from the truck. “No,” he said, “if you was to give me the beef, I still don’t need that kind of trouble.”
Mickey said, “All right. You was the one who wanted to see what was back there.”
“I didn’t want to see that,” he said. He wiped the hand he’d touched Leon with against his pants, then smelled it. “I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t see it. I don’t know nothin’ about it, and you didn’t come by today and knock on the door.”
Mickey nodded. “There’s one thing,” he said. “You was the one who got back in there, nobody made you, and a couple of weeks go by and nothin’ happens, I don’t want to go into my stops and hear stories.”
Nicholas held up his hands. “You think I’m going to tell this?”
He took the meat two other places in Jersey, but nobody wanted to see it. The place he knew in Moorestown, the man said, “I don’t want nothin’ to do with anything that don’t come with receipts. I don’t know who nobody is anymore.” He drove from there to Berlin, and in Berlin they wouldn’t even talk to him. By the time he got to Berlin, he knew it wasn’t going to work.
All the way there and back, the story about the shootout at the flower shop was on the news. First they had the two guys dead, then they had one of them dead and one of them critical, and then they said Aunt Sophie had been hospitalized, and then they said there was two dead and Aunt Sophie was in police custody. They kept breaking into the show to say what they’d said before was wrong.
Finally he turned the radio off. It didn’t matter where they had Bird and Aunt Sophie. For some people, there wasn’t anyplace to go. He decided he’d sell the truck tomorrow, he knew a place in South Philly where they’d buy it. He wouldn’t get what it was worth, but there’d be enough to put Leon in the ground. He thought he might go back to work for Dow Chemical, or he might catch on with Mayflower.
He thought about truck-stop whores and truck-stop coffee. Drinking eight cups of it, listening to the same shit he’d heard the day before, and the day before that; staying there because it was cold outside, or because sometimes you get tired of being alone in the cab. Or spooked. At night, you could forget where you were going, or why you were going there, or what you were pulling. Sometimes at night, you started to feel like there wasn’t nothing connecting you to nothing else.
He remembered, for the fiftieth time that day, how she’d looked at the newspaper reporter when they’d come down from Leon’s room. He wasn’t nothing special. Mickey could see that, but she couldn’t. People who were famous looked different to her. They shined. She’d told him that after she’d seen Tim McCarver buying clothes on Chestnut Street. She said he wasn’t as big as she’d expected, but once she saw who it was he seemed to shine, like there was more light on him than anybody else.
Mickey had said, “Who is Tim McCarver?” It turned out he played baseball. For a while after that, she watched the Phillies’ games on television. And anybody who’d come in, she’d
tell them about seeing Tim McCarver buying clothes on Chestnut Street.
“At first,” she’d say, “you wouldn’t notice him, because he isn’t as big as you think, but then he smiled and you’ve never seen nicer features, and he just seemed to … shine all over. He’s much handsomer in person.…”
Every time she told it, he got better, which Mickey guessed had something to do with how famous people got famous in the first place. Richard Shellburn, of course, wasn’t any Tim McCarver to look at. He was soft and sick-looking, and depressed. Mickey knew enough about Jeanie to guess she’d turned it around, though, made it into something artistic. He thought about Shellburn and was surprised to feel himself getting mad.
He’d took it for granted from the beginning that there wasn’t any reason Jeanie picked him to marry. And for the last four days, watching her turn away, he took it for granted there wasn’t any reason for that either. At least if there was, it was decided apart from anything he did. It’d scared him and worried him and had him thinking shit that grown men don’t think, but it didn’t make him mad. It was like getting mad at the weather.
But now he thought about it, why couldn’t Shellburn stay in Center City to hunt pussy? There was every kind of woman in the world in Center City, and somebody famous could find one of his own. What was he doing, coming into his house to take what he had?
Of course, it wasn’t really his house. He’d moved in with Jeanie and the kid. Maybe that’s how Leon had seen him, somebody coming in to take what was his.
He drove the White Horse Pike all the way from Berlin back to Philly, content to stop at the lights and watch the afternoon traffic. He began to look at it different. It was only four days since Leon died, in a couple of weeks who could say what would happen? And if she ran off with the reporter, he might find somebody else. He’d got confidence living with her. Not enough to know what to say, like in a bar when there was two hundred hard dicks walking around trying to pick up women, but if he met somebody, maybe at a party … He thought of how that might go, but he was doing Jeanie all over again.
