by Pete Dexter
Shellburn said, “I’ll take care of it now.”
“I ain’t tellin’ you to go down there,” T. D. said. “I’m not sayin’ you ought to go.…” He looked at Billy, to make sure he’d witnessed that, and the look he got back reminded him of somebody a long time ago, in New York. Billy Deebol would need watching.
Billy pulled the ice away from his mouth to talk. Part of the lip followed it half an inch, and then unstuck itself and began to bleed. “Stay away from there, Richard,” he said. “They aren’t listening right now, and there’s too many of them to talk to anyway.”
Shellburn smiled at him. He seemed like such a kid. “They aren’t going to do anything to me,” he said.
Billy shook his head. “That ain’t the Germantown Woman’s Association you can make a speech to,” he said. “Who you are doesn’t count down there now.” He looked from Richard to T. D. Davis, and Davis saw that expression again, and thought of Jimmy White coming into his office with a chain saw.
“You probably ought not to go down there,” T. D. said. “Let it cool off.…” But Shellburn was already going out the door. He almost seemed happy.
Mickey was sitting in a booth with Ray when Shellburn came in. Ray was getting ready to pass out. The kids at the bar had beat up somebody from the newspaper earlier, they were still bragging about who did what. Mickey had moved over to the booth because he didn’t want to hear it.
Not that anybody was talking to him anyway. Ever since the funeral, things had changed. It was like he’d done something worse than anybody ever did before. Even McKenna wasn’t the same to him. Mickey spent most of his time at the bar, and slept on the couch or in the Monte Carlo. And Ray had started to make sense to him. In fact, it worried him that he might be going that way himself. He might of got comfortable with it, being an outcast.
Shellburn stopped at the door, looked around, squinting, and then found himself a stool somewhere near the middle of the room. The whole bar went quiet, and Mickey smiled at that. “Give me a beer,” Shellburn said.
McKenna put his arm on the bar and leaned toward the reporter. “Mr. Shellburn, nothin’ personal, but I think I better ask you to leave, for your own good.”
Shellburn looked left and right, then in back of him. Then he looked at the bartender and shrugged. “Schmidt’s,” he said. He had some balls, Mickey gave him that. More balls than the fighters and stompers of the Hollywood Bar.
Mickey had never appreciated Shellburn’s intentions with his wife, but he’d quit blaming him. It was like when the pipes froze and they came and dug up the street in front of your house. You don’t blame somebody for looking in your hole.
He knew by now that her idea of things was an Esther Williams movie. Million-Dollar Mermaid. She was the kind that could smile underwater. And she could be nice to you, and fuck you and marry you, but the camera was always rolling.
“What the fuck you writin’ about us in the paper for?” somebody said. “What’s it your bi’niss what we do?”
Somebody else said, “Who the fuck you callin’ guineas? You ain’t even from here, makin’ us look like assholes.…”
Then half the bar was shouting at Shellburn, but the ones next to him, the ones he could see, were quiet. It was always the scaredest ones that you had to watch. The kid sitting next to him at the bar—a fat kid with a wide pink-and-white face—got up, nodded at Shellburn, almost friendly, and walked out the door.
Mickey noticed Shellburn seemed to be turning gray. “I didn’t make you assholes,” Shellburn said to the bar. “I said the opposite.”
Mickey closed his eyes. Explaining was the worst thing you could do when it was all against you.
“We ain’t that simple,” one of them said, and then they all seemed to drink at once.
Shellburn looked at the bartender again. “Schmidt’s,” he said. McKenna sighed and gave him a beer. “Let’s everybody calm down,” he said.
“Fuck calm down,” one of them said. “What the fuck’s he doin’ down here now?” Shellburn sat over his beer, like it was none of his business. They all came off their stools then, and when Shellburn turned around to face them he was flushed and sweating. Mickey never saw anybody change colors so fast.
“I came down here because somebody hit my friend in the face with a beer bottle,” Shellburn said. “It’s a misunderstanding.…” Then the door opened and the fat kid with the pink-and-white face came back in, carrying a bat. He came in and stopped by the door, and then a dozen more of them came in. Some of them had crowbars, and some of them had reinforcement steel off construction sites. They’d put tape around the bottom for handles. They stood at the end of the bar and waited, and before long there were at least twenty. Bats, crowbars, steel. Babies, most of them not old enough to drink, all watching each other to see what to do.
“This is my city,” Shellburn said.
“The motherfucker come down here to get fucked up,” the fat kid said. He was holding the bat in both hands, close enough to the door to be the first one out in case Shellburn was carrying. Mickey saw Shellburn trying to find who it was talking, trying to find somebody to talk to him. It was the wrong time for that.
The others moved closer and Shellburn turned to McKenna. Mickey saw the look on McKenna’s face then, like Shellburn wasn’t even there. “Take it outside, Dick,” he said to the fat boy.
The fat boy said, “He come down here, McKenna. It’s his own fault. He come down here to get fucked up.”
Shellburn stood up, the ones closest to him moved away. “I came down here because somebody got hurt,” he said.
“Fuck him up,” the fat boy said.
Mickey looked across the table at Ray, whose head was beginning to drop. “What the fuck?” he said. “Over something he wrote?”
Ray shook his head. “Nothing to do with it,” he said, and then he crossed his arms for a pillow and went to sleep.
McKenna didn’t want to see it either. When Mickey looked again, Shellburn was trying to tell him something was wrong. “I’m sick,” he said, and, shiny with sweat, he bent at the waist and choked. A thin line of yellow spit was all that came out. McKenna walked away.
The fat boy said, “Ain’t as sick as you going to get.”
McKenna pointed at him. “Take it outside,” he said again, and then three or four of them had Shellburn by the back of the collar and they pulled him outside. Mickey saw Shellburn’s eyes were closed and that he didn’t fight it. Ray began to snore.
Mickey got out of the booth, and on the way out he looked at McKenna and said, “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
“You ain’t from here,” he said.
He went through the door and pushed through the circle around Shellburn. Nobody pushed back. What it came to, he thought, was they’d had a reporter to beat up earlier and the ones that missed out wanted this one.
He found Shellburn in the middle of the circle. His eyes were still shut tight and he seemed to have some kind of spasms. The kid holding onto his collar let go and backed away. “What the fuck?” Mickey said. “What are you going to do out here, thirty of you against one old man? For somethin’ in the newspaper?”
“It ain’t your fuckin’ business, Mickey,” one of them said. “You ain’t from here either, so stay the fuck out of it.” It was the fat boy talking, but Mickey couldn’t find his face.
“I don’t give a fuck,” Mickey said. “Not this …” He moved a step toward them, they moved back. He turned back toward Shellburn to tell him to get in his car and leave, but when the reporter opened his eyes, Mickey could see something was wrong, that he was losing track of it. And then Shellburn smiled at him and said, “It’s all light and dark.” Still trying to explain.
Something in that spooked Mickey, but before he could ask Shellburn what he was talking about, the reporter was falling backwards, into the window of the bar. The glass held and Shellburn fell to the sidewalk, and once he was down, there wasn’t anything that could help him.
One of th
em kicked him in the head, and when Mickey pushed him away the others went at him with the bats and iron. Four or five times he pulled them away from the reporter, but as soon as he stopped one, somebody else took his place working on Shellburn’s head. They hit him fifty or sixty times before Mickey gave up.
He left them out there with what they’d done and went back in the bar. McKenna shook his head. “I’m closed,” he said.
Mickey walked back to the booth where Ray was sleeping and sat down. He finished his beer, wondering what it was worth, belonging somewhere, if it ended up like this. He thought it must of been worth something, or he wouldn’t of felt so bad leaving it.
By the time he got back outside, the street was as empty as three o’clock in the morning. A wedge of light went from the window to the sidewalk, Shellburn was under that, lying against the wall, something dark on the ground beneath a rainbow, painted a long time ago across the window of the Hollywood Bar.
The police came by early the next morning, and the three mornings after that. One named Eisenhower had been there before, after Leon died. He took Mickey outside and said, “I heard you were the one that knocked him down.”
Mickey said, “Where’d you hear that?”
Eisenhower shrugged. “If I was you, I could understand that, knocking him down. I know you didn’t have nothing to do with kicking his head in. That’s kids.”
“McKenna tell you it was me?” Eisenhower shrugged again. It had to be McKenna, of course. He was the only one talked to the police, because they could shut him down. And the name he’d given up was Mickey’s, because he wasn’t from the neighborhood.
“Well,” Mickey said, “I don’t know nothin’ about it.”
Eisenhower said, “Sooner or later, somebody’s going to tell it, give everybody up. That’s the way the place is.”
“Yes it is,” Mickey said.
“When it happens, it’ll rain shit in God’s Pocket. That wasn’t some bum got beat to death in the middle of the street, it was Richard Shellburn. We got the Daily Times, the New York Times, CBS, ABC, UPI and Jesus knows who else calling every day, wanting to know what’s happening about Richard Shellburn. He ain’t going to go away.”
The second time Eisenhower came, Mickey noticed Jeanie looking at him. The next morning, he saw Eisenhower was looking back. He heard her tell him, “My first husband was a police officer.”
Later that day, a couple of the neighborhood kids stopped him in the street. He didn’t know if they had been at the Hollywood that night or not. “Yo, Mick,” one of them said, “we want you to know we ‘preciate you not talkin’ to the cops. You stood up, like you was part of the Pocket.”
“Don’t include me in nothin’ about the Pocket,” he said. He walked through them, and when he was about a block past, he heard them back there, shouting.
“Yo, Mick. Who’s fuckin’ your wife now?”
Four days after Shellburn got killed, Mickey walked into the house and found Eisenhower sitting next to her on the couch, drinking hot chocolate. The cop jumped when he came in the door, Jeanie never even looked to see who it was. “I just dropped over to tell you it turned out Shellburn had a heart attack,” Eisenhower said, “would of died anyway. I don’t know if that changes things.…”
Mickey said, “It don’t have nothin’ to do with me either way.”
The next morning he packed his things and caught the Amtrak for Palatka, Florida. He was surprised it all fit in the same two cloth bags he’d brought it in with when he moved in. It seemed like being married and living in a house, somehow there ought to of been more.
Peets heard the news about Richard Shellburn on the truck radio. It was a little after six o’clock in the morning, and he was already at work. He couldn’t sleep in the morning since his wife left.
He didn’t know why it bothered him in the morning, he went to sleep easy enough at night, but sometime around four-thirty or five he’d miss her weight—or her heat, or something—there on the other side of the bed, and that would wake him up.
He should of gone to the hospital after the fight, he knew it then. Something depended on her thinking he couldn’t get hurt, and the one with the knuckles had half scalped him. But he’d tied his shirt around his head like a cleaning lady and gone home, thinking there was some things you couldn’t hide. “Dear God, Peets,” she’d said. And he knew just from the sound of it that things had changed.
She’d taken him to her hospital to get his lid sewed back on, she’d made him dinner afterward. And the next day when he got home, she’d left him a note with a phone number, in case he couldn’t find his socks. “I need some time to get over this,” it said.
So he woke up early and made breakfast and then he went to work an hour and a half early. There wasn’t much to do until the others showed up, but it was comfortable there, and it wasn’t comfortable at home. Sometimes he’d pick up the beer bottles somebody was leaving there every night, more often he’d just sit in his truck and listen to the morning news.
This morning the news was that Richard Shellburn’d had a heart attack the night they found him lying on the sidewalk with his head beat in. A spokesman for the district attorney’s office said, “The development of this new evidence, of course, immeasurably complicates the potential prosecution.”
Peets shook his head. “It’s a lot of that going around,” he said. The radio repeated the story every eight minutes, but they’d been picking over Shellburn’s bones all week. In between, they gave the weather and the helicopter traffic report.
About quarter to seven, the C bus stopped at the corner, and Old Lucy got off.
Peets was looking in his rearview mirror at the time, checking skirts, more out of habit than anything, and he turned around in his seat to be sure. The old man stepped off the bus and walked slowly into the site. He put his lunch pail against the wall where he ate and then crouched dead still near the cherry picker to wait.
Peets left him alone fifteen minutes. If the old man didn’t want some time alone, he wouldn’t of come an hour early. Finally, though, he turned off the radio and got out of the truck. He slammed the door so the old man would know he was there.
Old Lucy stayed where he was. He didn’t turn his head or stand up. Peets crouched down beside him. “Mornin’, Lucy,” he said.
“Peets.”
“Radio says we got a good day to work.” Old Lucy didn’t say anything. “You been all right?” Peets said. “I thought of comin’ over to your place, but, you know, you don’t want to go buttin’ in.”
“I got it settled,” the old man said.
Peets nodded. “Sometimes it can take a while,” he said.
“Took that boy his whole life,” Lucy said. Peets let that alone, and after a while the old man said, “But it do settle. Ain’t nothin’ so bad or so good you can do that it don’t settle, and in the end you became what you been.” He was looking down the wall he’d started, at the work that had been done since he left. It was the most Peets had ever heard him say at one time.
Peets started to put his arm around Lucy’s shoulder, but he patted him once on the back instead. “I’m glad you come back,” he said. He said it and then he pulled away from it. “I mean, lookit that wall. I can’t get no work done here alone, Lucy.”
“I can see that,” Lucy said. Then he looked at Peets and didn’t try to hide what the settling had done to him. “I might be old now,” he said.
Peets stood up on bad hinges. He said, “I might be headed that way myself.” And in a few minutes they walked over and uncovered the cement bags, so they could get back to building the new wing of Holy Redeemer Hospital.
Mickey woke up, and the air was warm and still, and it smelled like the glue they used to stick the place together. Bird had bought the mobile home used, for $12,000, and he and Sophie paid the man forty dollars a month for the space in the lot. Most of the spaces were sixty dollars, but theirs was on the far end, away from the recreation center and the site of the proposed swimming
pool. One side of the mobile home backed up to the woods, and every morning after Sophie and her new friends had finished worrying over tornadoes and their flowers, she and Bird went back into the trees and practiced shooting the pistol.
It was Bird who insisted on it. He’d set up bottles and cans in a clearing back there, and they’d take turns shooting. “I don’t say nothin’,” he’d tell Mickey, “ ’cause I don’t want to scare her, but, you know, they’re comin’. And we got to be ready, right?” Then he’d ask if it was all right to go practice now. Mickey would say it was all right.
And Bird would smile and take her out into the woods, and she smiled and went with him, and they depended on Mickey like he was their father.
The mobile home had three bedrooms. Mickey’s was in the back, the air conditioner was in front, and it was that still, warm air that woke him up every morning. Sometimes he woke up thinking about Jeanie, and sometimes, like this morning, it was the reporter. What had he said? “It’s all light and dark”?
He got out of bed with a headache and listened. He heard them outside. He put on a pair of pants and went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Bird had put tape around the handles of all the toothbrushes and written each of their names on the tape. “Yo, Mick,” he’d said. “I got an idea. What if I write everybody’s names on their toothbrush? Would that be all right?”
Sometimes they walked into the woods together, past the clearing scattered with broken glass and shell casings, all the way to the river. It was wide and muddy and slow, and it flowed north. “See, what’d I tell you, Mick?” Bird had said. “See, what d’ya think?”
It took a while to get used to how Bird and Sophie was away from Philly. They clung to him like something that floated after the boat sank. He didn’t pull away from it, though. He guessed his own boat had sank too.
He brushed his hair and laid his toothbrush next to Sophie’s on the sink. Then he went back in his room and found the yellow alligator T-shirt Mickey and Sophie gave him the first night he was there. He put it on and went out the door. “Watch your step,” Sophie said.
