God's Pocket

by Pete Dexter

For the first time since Mickey knew him, Ray didn’t have a thing to say. “What, did she go somewhere with him today?” Mickey said. “She’s got some idea that Leon got killed different than the cops said, that’s all. He’s just helpin’ her.”

  McKenna had heard some of that, and he was back down in front of them again. “What the fuck are you startin’ now, Ray?” he said.

  Ray pointed to his shot glass. “We were just talking,” he said.

  “I heard what you said,” McKenna said. He was staring at Ray, Ray was looking at his shot glass. “The fuckin’ funeral’s tomorrow afternoon, and you’re talkin’ shit like that.”

  “I didn’t say anything that everybody else in here didn’t say first,” Ray said, and he looked back at the bartender to see how far he wanted to take it. McKenna got Mickey another Schmidt’s out of the cooler.

  “Don’t listen to nothin’ he said, Mick,” McKenna said. Mickey picked up the beer and drank most of it. “Fuckin’ people talk about everything.” McKenna poured Ray another shot and one for himself and put another beer in front of Mickey. “Forget about it,” he said.

  Half an hour later, Ray threw down the shot and looked around. “You want to know the real reason I never left?” he said. He was drunk enough so some of the words were slurring now, and the thoughts slid into each other too. “The real reason?”

  Mickey stared at his hands. He was wishing Jeanie would get home. He wanted to be around her tonight, to see where it stood, but he didn’t want to go home and wait. He’d had enough of empty rooms.

  Ray reached over and took the shot McKenna had left for himself on the bar, putting his own shot glass where the full one had been. “The real reason,” he said, “is forgiveness.” Mickey looked up from his hands. “I want to be forgiven,” Ray said. One of his eyes had crossed, and the spit had collected in the corner of his mouth and was running down his chin.

  “Don’t worry about what you said,” Mickey said. “It’s just talk.”

  Ray shook his head. “You can’t forgive me,” he said. “You’re an intelligent man, but you don’t know anything here. I grew up with these people. They’ve seen me lying in puke and I’ve seen them lying in puke.”

  “I seen you lyin’ in puke, Ray,” Mickey said.

  Ray shook his head. “Everybody here has stolen something from somebody else. Or when they were kids they set somebody’s house on fire, or they ran away when they should have stayed and fought. They’ve stolen from each other and they’ve lent money to the people they took it from. You’re an intelligent man, but everybody here’s seen everybody else naked. They know who’s scared to fight and who cheats at cards and who slaps his kids around. And no matter what anybody does, we’re still here, and whatever we are is what we are.” His head was beginning to fall, a couple of inches at a time, and then he’d catch it.

  “And no matter what I am, they’ve got to forgive me, because I’m no worse than anybody else, I’m just different. The only thing they can’t forgive is leaving the neighborhood.” As he said that, Ray folded his arms on the bar, making himself a pillow, and then dropped his head, neck brace and all, from a foot above the bar, and went to sleep where he landed. He looked so peaceful.

  Mickey finished his beer, thinking about it. When McKenna came back and went through the formality of trying to wake Ray up, Mickey got another one, and then another one. About eleven o’clock he looked out the window and the lights in the house were on, and when he looked again at one, she had gone to bed. He thought about what Ray had said, and he wanted to be forgiven too. Not by the neighborhood—Ray was right, they didn’t know anything about each other, him and God’s Pocket—it was Jeanie he wanted to forgive him. He didn’t know what for.

  McKenna gave last call at two and turned on the lights, and for a minute everything stopped. Mickey saw that Ray was attached by a line of spit to a puddle he’d made on the bar. And he saw the rest of them too, frozen in the light. Pale, soft faces, missing teeth, mascara run all down the girls’ cheeks. A fat girl sitting six feet away—how long had she been there?—crying into a glass full of wilted cherries.

  People who would never leave God’s Pocket, who couldn’t. “Drink up,” McKenna said.

  Somebody yelled, “Yo, turn off the fuckin’ lights.”

  McKenna went back to the wall and dimmed the lights. “Drink up,” he said again. And they did. They’d seen each other in the light once, and that was enough. They finished their drinks and left the bar in twos and threes, back to row houses and hangovers, and the mornings to get through.

  Mickey watched them leave, drunk as he’d been since he was a kid, and he knew in that moment exactly what Ray had been talking about, only he’d said forgiveness when he meant love.

  Mickey could see how you could get them mixed up.

  And he could see he’d never shown Jeanie enough of who he was. That’s why she thought everything was his fault. He finished the beer in front of him and helped McKenna get Ray over to a booth. They tried slapping him awake, but when McKenna pulled up his eyelids, all there was was white, so they dragged him across the floor and laid him out in the booth. It was a hard fact that nobody alive could wake up Ray when his eyeballs went white.

  He left his change on the bar for McKenna and crossed the street, and there was something moving around inside his head that turned out to be an idea. Tonight he was going to wake her up and let her see him. He didn’t trust himself to wait till morning. By morning, he’d pull back. He didn’t know what he would say, but he was going to give her something to forgive, or love.

  He went through the house and checked the garage even though there was nothing in it, and decided what he would tell her as he was walking up the stairs.

  Richard Shellburn had told her at ten-thirty in the morning that he loved her. He said, “Let me pick you up.”

  Jeanie said, “I’m not sure, Richard. There’s so much going on right now. The funeral, my husband …” It was the first time she called him Richard, she hadn’t known what to call him before.

  He said, “I love you.”

  She said, “Thank you.”

  “Let me pick you up,” he said. It didn’t seem to matter what she said, it never changed him.

  She said, “I could meet you somewhere.”

  “Bookbinders,” he said. She met him there for lunch, and the owner had come over to the table to shake hands with Richard and make sure the food was all right. It reminded her of New York, and the way things could have been all along. When Richard had introduced her, the owner had taken her hand and said, “You’re very beautiful to be with somebody like this ugly guy.” And they all laughed like it was funny, and she liked that.

  And after he’d brought them a drink and left, Richard looked at her and said, “He’s right.” And she was special again, the way she was supposed to be.

  They left her car in the parking lot and took the Continental to Rittenhouse Square. The doorman at the Barclay opened her door and helped her out, and a kid in a bow tie and a dark red jacket parked the car. She’d never been to the Barclay before. He held her arm at the elbow and took her into the bar. They had Scotch there, and then he ordered champagne when they got to the room. It was on the sixteenth floor. She looked out the window at Rittenhouse Square, and there were a hundred people down there walking dogs—nice, little ones you could pick up and put in your purse. He came up behind her with a glass of champagne, putting his arm around her to deliver it. When she took the glass, the hand moved to her stomach.

  “I love you,” he said. She was still looking out at the square, so it wasn’t as uncomfortable as if they’d been face to face. “From the minute I saw you,” he said, “I loved you.” It turned her cold.

  She knew that was how writers wrote, so in a way it didn’t surprise her that’s how they were in person, but it turned her cold. He kissed her on the back of the neck and she let him. If there was a place to stop in all this, it was gone. His hand moved up to her breast, and then back dow
n her stomach to her legs. She wished she was in the park, holding one of those dogs on a leash. One of the little ones that couldn’t pull you off your feet. He kissed her again, and it ran a shiver up the back of her head. He did have a nice touch.

  Then he moved between her and the window and said it again. “I love you.” She was looking at the floor, but he took her chin in his hand and brought her eyes up into his face. “I love you,” he said. If he was going to do something, why didn’t he just do it?

  She didn’t know why she didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t know why she began blinking tears. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He put his arms around her neck and held her next to his ear. She could feel his hand and his hair and the edge of the champagne glass. “It’s too much all at once,” he said.

  And that was true, and at the bottom it was all empty. When Tom died, it had been enough. The looks at the cemetery, the things she overheard. “So beautiful, and with that poor sick little baby …” It took his place. And there was a way people treated her afterward, there was always a consideration.

  Jeanie Scarpato depended on that consideration, and accepted it naturally in a way that made it pleasurable to offer.

  On the day Leon died, there was no time to think of him at all. For that day, it was only the loss, the neighbors coming by with hams and salads, her sisters’ shoulders. But somewhere in the time since, she had come to the bottom of it, and at the bottom it was empty.

  She’d tried to turn them away from her toward what happened to Leon, to tell them he hadn’t died in an accident, but it wasn’t set up for that. They listened, and then they patted her hand or her shoulder, or they hugged her, or told her it would be all right.

  And it wasn’t set up for her to refuse that, because empty as it was, it’s the way it had always been, and she couldn’t give it up.

  She stayed in Richard Shellburn’s arms five minutes without moving. Then he let go of her and got them both another glass of champagne. She took it like medicine.

  The room was quiet. Even with both of them there the air never seemed to move. That’s how you could tell an expensive hotel. “I don’t think I belong here either,” she said. She sat down on a small couch facing the bed and wiped at her eyes. He sat down on the bed and watched her.

  “You want to take care of Leon first,” he said. “And your husband.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Everything happened at once, Mickey’s somebody different.…” She felt him staring at her.

  He stood up and walked to the window. “It’s not the right time,” he said. He stood there awhile and then he said, “It’s better than a dog sneezing in your ass, though.”

  She smiled at that and put her head against the arm of the sofa. She felt tired and a little dizzy. He said, “Why don’t you lie on the bed?”

  She said, “I’ve got to leave soon.” He pulled the champagne bottle out of the ice bucket and walked back to the window. He seemed ordinary to her now. She closed her eyes, and a little later she heard him talking on the phone. A few minutes after that, somebody came to the door with more champagne. She wasn’t asleep and she wasn’t awake, nothing was all the way anymore.

  When she opened her eyes again, the room was dark. She was thirsty and cold. “What time is it?” she said. He was in the room, she knew he was in the room.

  He said, “You were tired.” She sat up and looked around. He was over on the bed, sitting cross-legged in the dark, staring at her. There were two empty bottles of champagne on the bed with him, and he took a drink out of another one in his hand.

  She went into the bathroom and turned on all the switches on the wall. Light, sunlamp, a fan. She brushed her hair and washed out her mouth with a little bottle of Lavoris the hotel left with the soap and shampoo. Her shirt looked like she’d pulled it out from under the front seat of the car.

  She tucked it into her pants and then began to fix her face. A little lipstick, some color for her cheeks. It wasn’t anything artificial she did with makeup. She didn’t use it to cover anything up, she let it bring her out. It had been like that as long as she could remember.

  When she came out, Shellburn was still sitting cross-legged on the bed. “Is it all right if I turn on the lights?” she said. She heard what might have been a laugh.

  “No, leave them off,” he said.

  “Are you mad?”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I can take a cab back to my car,” she said.

  “All right.” He sounded calm to her, and for a second she wondered if it was all just trying to get himself a piece of ass. She put a knee and a hand on the bed and kissed him on the cheek. One of the bottles rolled over her fingers.

  “Call me,” she said. All the way down the hall, she wondered why she’d said that. She thought she might of felt sorry for him. The doorman looked at her different than he had when she’d been with Richard Shellburn, it was like they were both the same now. He got her a cab, though, and held the door. When she climbed in he said, “There you go.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Another day, another dollar,” he said, and he closed the door before she could be sure what he meant. The cab smelled like somebody lived in it, and she told the driver she wanted to go to Bookbinders. A block from the hotel the driver suddenly turned around and said, “I don’t change nothin’ bigger than a ten.”

  “All right.”

  “I had this fare when I first come on,” he said, “tried to give me a hundred. You believe that, a hundred?” She smiled but she didn’t answer. She had problems of her own.

  Mickey wasn’t at home. She let herself in and got out of her clothes and into a robe. She was still cold from the hotel room, and she made a cup of hot chocolate, thinking of herself floating someplace between Mickey and Richard, waiting for one or the other to do something to save her and Leon. It felt like everybody she’d ever known had missed the point.

  Did Richard Shellburn think she was the kind to walk into a hotel room, with Leon still waiting to be buried, and tell him she loved him too? All in all, she’d rather of been raped.

  She thought of Mickey throwing off the sheets, tearing her nightgown, pinning her to the bed. Yes, she’d seen him pick up the air conditioner, as high as his head, and fit it into the wall. She saw him lift up the back end of Mole Ferrell’s Toyota when the jack slipped and it fell on him—you could of understood it if it had been Mole Ferrell that got killed on the job, he was born for injury. But Mickey had never picked her up, he was afraid to be forceful.

  And afraid to be soft. He didn’t have a nice touch, like Richard. She finished the hot chocolate and went upstairs and lay on top of the bed. She imagined Mickey coming up the stairs. She got back up and put on a yellow nightgown—trying for a few seconds to remember if she’d ever heard of anybody else who only liked one color—and then she stood in front of the mirror half an hour, moving the part in her hair, lightening her eyes and then brushing mascara into her lashes until they looked too heavy to open.

  When she’d finished, the effect was a fifteen-year-old girl trying to look thirty. It wasn’t anything she made up, it was inside her and she’d just let it come out. She lay in bed two hours, waiting for him to come home. About two o’clock she heard the noises on the street and knew McKenna was closing. Mickey must have been the last one out, though, because it was another fifteen or twenty minutes before she heard him downstairs.

  She spread her hair out over the pillow and pulled the bedding down so that he would see the curve of her waist to her hip under the sheet. She heard him coming up the stairs and closed her eyes, and waited for him to look into the room and see she was helpless.

  She could tell from his steps that he was drunk. Sober, he was as light on his feet as Leon. He climbed the stairs, not even trying to be quiet. She lay with her hair spread over the pillow and her eyes closed. He came down the hall and stopped in the doorway.

  She heard his breathi
ng, and then he was moving again, toward the bed, and a step before he got to her she opened her eyes and jumped. “Oh, Mickey,” she said. “It’s you.…”

  He sat down next to her on the bed. Her eyes got bigger. “What are you …” She let that die. “Oh, no,” she said, “no …”

  He reached over and touched her arm. It wasn’t rough and it wasn’t gentle. He said, “Jeanie, we got to talk.”

  She closed her eyes. “Oh, no,” she said. He noticed the fear had gone out of her voice and thought that at least was a start.

  “I got to tell you what happened today,” he said. She closed her eyes. “Don’t go to sleep,” he said. “We got to talk.”

  “It’s late,” she said. He turned on the light next to the bed, and it hurt her eyes. “In the morning,” she said.

  He shook his head. “In the morning I’ll change my mind,” he said, “and this whole fuckin’ thing will be right where it was.”

  She said, “At least turn off the light.”

  “I got to see you when I say it,” he said, “so I can tell how you’re takin’ it.” He looked at his hands a couple of minutes and then he began to say things. “This morning I took the truck down to sell it.”

  She looked at him. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t have the money to bury Leon,” he said. “I had the money, but it wasn’t enough to do it right. Fuck, what do I know about it? The only family I had was Daniel, and there wasn’t nobody else there to worry about when I buried him, so I just did it.” She was looking at him now suspicious, like she expected it all along. He decided not to mention Turned Leaf.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I took the truck down to Little Eddie’s, but the guy he’s got workin’ for him took it out and wrecked it. He hit a bus, I don’t know how bad the guy’s hurt, but they took him to the hospital.” He stopped and looked at the ceiling. “His name is Stretch,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything, but she was paying attention. At least she knew he was there. “Anyway, see, Bird’s been havin’ troubles of his own, and now he’s out of business. You see what I’m talkin’ about? The truck don’t matter, let me put your mind to rest about that.” He wasn’t telling it right. It was supposed to be about him.