by Pete Dexter
So he looked at his watch, then the sun, and then said they'd wasted half the morning already, standing around gabbing. They seemed glad to move, everybody but Gary Sample. "Did The cops get the nigger?" he stuttered.
Peets saw the boy was tougher than he was the day before. It was how you grew up—changing when things happened. He understood that, and he didn't mind. He walked through the others and stood in front of Gary Sample. He put his hand under the boy's jawline and lifted him up off his toes, all the way up out of Peets' shadow. The boy's weight rested on his cheeks, giving him bulldog eyes. He held onto Peets' arm below the wrist, supporting himself more than trying to get loose. By now the boy knew he couldn't get loose.
Peets brought the face closer. "You ain't grown enough to call that old man a nigger,” he said. And then he put him down. The kid Gary Sample held his jaw, working it up and down. The fingerprints on his cheeks turned from white to red, and, he blinked away the tears that Peets had squeezed out. Peets put a hand on Gary Sample's shoulder and looked at the rest of them. "Old Lucy'll be back when he's ready," he said. Gary Sample pulled away, and he let him go. He'd got the boy's attention, he didn't want his pride.
It was probably the best they'd worked, but Peets knew it wasn't anything permanent. He wouldn't of wanted it to be. They were scared, and if you couldn't see what you was doing, there wasn't no point. It cheated you to work because you were scared.
Sometime after ten, the police came back. It was the same two, Eisenhower and Arbuckle, and the big one took Peets over by the cherry picker to talk to him again. The little one, Arbuckle, walked around the construction site, touching things, asking what this or that was for. Arbuckle had soft, white-blue hands that he must of kept in mittens. A man got harder hands than that pulling on his wang.
"It's the mother,” Eisenhower said to Peets. "The mother thinks something happened."
Peets considered that. "What does she think?"
"She doesn't know," the cop said. "But I met her, and she'll have somebody to find out for her."
Peets said, "She got the police workin' for her?"
Eisenhower smiled. "No. If it was me, you'd know it. I just came out to let you know it ain't settled. Before it's over, she'll get somebody to help her." The cop looked around then, over to where Arbuckle was standing with Gary Sample. The kid was trying to talk.
Peets thought Eisenhower was watching them, but he said, "You missing somebody today besides Leon Hubbard?" The cop counted the men with his finger, twice, and then he said, "There were eight yesterday, not counting Leon Hubbard."
Peets didn't bother to count. Eisenhower closed his eyes, trying to remember. "Seems like there was an old man," he said. "He was sitting over against the wall."
Peets said, "That was Old Lucy. Some days he comes in, some days he don't. Does as much work either way. He's about a hundred years old, sickly. You know . . . weak." Peets was surprised how easy that story came out of his mouth. He'd heard of old women, though, who picked up Chevrolet Malibus when they'd fell on their sons in the yard, so you never knew what you could do until you had to do it.
Arbuckle was over by the cement mixer, still waiting on Gary Sample to get what he was trying to say out of his mouth. Peets saw it was out of his hands.
Eisenhower walked underneath the cherry picker and looked up at the beam. Then he looked at the ground, and then at the U-bolt fastened to the beam. He smiled up into the sun.
"Days like this," he said, "I got to drive around in that car with Arbuckle or sit in an office, I wish I was something else. I'd just as soon to come out here, for instance, and do my work and watch the nurses come by, not worry about anything .... " He looked at Peets. "You must go home and sleep like a baby."
"A baby," Peets said.
"I knew it. I go home and I think about everything that's happened. I go home and wonder if I did my job right." He and Peets were still looking at each other.
"You done your job right," Peets said. He was saying too much, but it was like the kid Gary Sample talking to the other cop. It was out of his hands.
"What I was saying," Eisenhower said, "the mother's got something. She can look at you a certain way and you could just stick a fork in your leg .... " They looked around to the construction site again. Arbuckle had given up waiting for the kid to quit stuttering and started back. When he got close, Eisenhower said, "How far down did you say this thing is going to go?" and he left Arbuckle by the cherry picker and walked to the end of the wall Old Lucy had laid.
Left alone, Arbuckle began measuring off distances.
Eisenhower said, "In the neighborhood, they say the guy the mother is married to is connected. Mickey Scarpato, which I never heard of`, so he ain't anybody that matters. But if it's true, that's where your problem might come from. The woman's got his balls in the blender, I could see that. You can't tell what anybody'll do with his balls in the blender."
Back at the cherry picker, Arbuckle was standing with his back to Gary Sample, who had followed him over and was still trying to tell him something. "Fuckin' write it down or something," he said, and left him again.
"Is it possible?" Eisenhower said. "That that fuckin' thing could actually kill somebody?"
Peets just looked at him. He needed some time to think about Eisenhower. "Because if it is," the cop said, "let's give it a little while and see if it likes Arbuckle."
* * *
Mickey sat through lunch, waiting for a sign that she was getting tired of her sisters. They were all eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches, drinking Pepsi-Cola. One of the sisters was standing behind him, by the oven, where she could check on the tollhouse cookies. A bell went off inside the oven, and when the sister opened the door, the heat singed the hair on the back of his neck.
She put the cookie sheet on the table and the other sister put one of the cookies in her mouth whole. Three hundred and seventy-five degrees was nothing to that mouth. "Ummmm," she said. "Jeanie, taste how good . . ." Jeanie took one of the cookies and put an edge in her teeth. "What's that smell?" said the sister with the cookie in her mouth.
She wrinkled her nose and looked around. The other sister wrinkled her nose and looked around too. You could see they were sisters. "It smells like a dead mouse," one said.
While they looked around the kitchen for dead animals, Mickey ran a hand over the back of his head and smelled his fingers. It was a little like a dead mouse, and it was a little like cat shit. They weren't the kind of smells that just washed off.
He drove back over to the flower shop. Bird had come down out of his bedroom and was in back, watching two butchers boning and cutting the load of meat they'd taken in New Jersey. He was dressed in a clean yellow shirt. His neck fit the collar like a hard-on in an innertube. Mickey always wondered if Bird used to be bigger.
"Mickey," he said, "Aunt Sophie said you was over. Should of woke me up, pal. It's the old Bird again." The butchers looked up from their saws, nodded and went back to work. Bird crossed the room and shook Mickey's hand. He was smiling like the old Bird, only there'd never been that kind of old Bird, at least that Mickey knew of. He wished he could see an old picture.
"I thought if the electricity was back, you could cut some of the meat we threw in the truck," Mickey said.
"No problem, Mick. Lissen, I appreciate you helpin' me out, takin' it instead of the trump. We'll get this shit all straightened out, don't worry .... " He hugged Mickey's shoulder.
"You talk to your people?" Mickey said. Bird shook his head.
"I didn't talk to nobody," he said. "I ain't going to. Fuck it, I may get out of the business, you know? Fuck, I may get out of the city." He looked down at his sleeve and then pulled Mickey's arm up next to his, so they could compare yellows. “Hey, lookit, queers. You remember when they said you was queer if you wore yellow on Tuesday? Back in school?"
Mickey shook his head. "Queer if you wore yellow? That's the most fucked-up thing I heard all day." Bird laughed and hugged him again. It wasn't l
ike him to hug so much.
"I forgot, Mick," he said. "You ain't from around here. You missed a lot of great shit."
Mickey said, "You really thinkin' about gettin' out?"
Bird winked at him, and he'd never done that before. "You can't tell," he said. "You can never tell what the Bird will do."
Then he called one of the butchers over and introduced him to Mickey. Mickey guessed he was fifteen years old. "Say hello to Bird's main man," he said to the butcher. And then to Mickey: "This is my nephew Tony."
Tony nodded, and Mickey nodded back. Bird hugged the kid's head, a sullen cold-looking kid, and Mickey watched to see if Bird had picked up any bloodstains on the yellow shirt. "He don't talk much," Bird said, "but this little fucker can cut meat."
Then he called his other butcher, who was colored. Mickey knew Bird had one working for him, but he didn't expect to be introduced. Mickey shook hands with him too. He went back to work, the nephew stayed.
Bird said, "Tony, take the meat out of Mick's truck and cut it for him, all right? Do a nice job, don't sneeze on it or nothin', okay?" Bird laughed and squeezed.
When Bird had finished squeezing him, the nephew climbed in Mickey's truck. It shook as the boy moved the meat to the door. Then he jumped out, put one of the sides of beef over his shoulder, and carried it to his table. "Fourteen years old," Bird said, “strong as a fuckin' bull. Kid's twice as strong as we was .... "
Mickey smiled. By the time he was fourteen years old, he could work all day, with anybody. His old man had won a twenty-dollar bill once in Waycross, Georgia, betting he could lift a fat man off the floor of a truck stop there. He could still see the fat man's face and remember his name. Giachetti. He weighed 480 pounds and lay with his arms against his sides, flat and wet, not to offer any handholds, and Mickey had grabbed him behind the neck and by the belt and got him off the door any way. The fat man cried from one end of the diner to the other that he'd been cheated, like there was official rules to picking fat people up, and in the end he'd thrown the twenty on the door and left. It was the first time somebody hated him because of what he was, and it stuck with him. He thought of Jeanie's sisters then. The way things was going, it was a miracle Giachetti hadn't showed up at the house with a suitcase, to move in until the funeral.
Bird's nephew sharpened a knife. The blade was a foot and a half long, and flashed in the light. The light came from two bulbs hanging cockeyed over the table from black cords that had been taped six or seven places. Now that he looked, Mickey saw one of them was wrapped in Band-Aids. When the knife was sharpened, the nephew began to cut. He never considered the meat, he just cut. He had a quick, practiced motion—you could almost see Leon with his razor—and a look on his face that he'd seen everything on the planet. If he'd opened up a cow's ass and found pearls, his eyes would have stayed the way they were—flat as a foot of snow.
Bird sat down in a school desk built for somebody four foot tall. The warehouse had been leased to the school district before Bird and Sophie, and there was all kinds of shit around that they'd left. For instance, there was a box of books on South America Mickey sometimes noticed on the way in. He'd of taken one of those home to read, except right on the cover it said "Seventh to Ninth Grades." He already did more explaining than he cared to, and he wasn't about to open that can of worms.
Bird sat with his arms on the little desk, his elbows hanging over the sides touching his knees, which were even with the top. He pointed to another desk the same size and told Mickey to have a seat. Mickey shook his head. "I'd need a fuckin' corkscrew to get out," he said.
There were four boxes of advanced algebra books stacked against a support beam, and Mickey took one down and sat on it. He'd picked a book out of those boxes once, thought at first it might of been about Germany. Nobody had to worry about him bringing home no advanced algebra.
"I ain't going to worry about no more shit, Mick," Bird said. "I made up my mind. It's going to be like the old Bird, doin' business." Mickey didn't know what business he was talking about. Bird laughed. "You think I'm crazy? The mind is a powerful tool, Mick. I found out the secret. I'm goin' back to the way I was, I ain't nervous now .... "
Mickey said, "Bird, you was always nervous."
"The secret," he said, tapping his head, "the secret is I don't give a fuck. That horse is going to come in tomorrow, and if they don't want me doin' business in Philly, I'll go somewheres else and do business. They don't own the world, Mick. Fuck, they don't even own Miami. Somebody else owns that. Sophie's friends all moved down there anyway."
Bird was bouncing his feet on his toes, holding onto the desk top, like the teacher wouldn't let him go piss.
"This horse is a nice horse," Mickey said, "and she's in with a bunch of shit, but it's still a horse, Bird. Little bitty ankles, ugly teeth, shits in balls . . ."
"She's a lock," Bird said.
"There ain't nothin' that weighs half a ton with little bitty ankles that's a lock," Mickey said. Bird winked at him again, like it was a joke between them. His nephew had finished with the first side of beef. He'd packed it in cardboard boxes, carried them back to the truck. The colored boy was faster, and he was working on the meat they'd taken off the semi.
“You don't understand," Bird said. "I don't give a fuck. Just like that horse don't give a fuck. She don't know and I don't care, that's what makes it a lock." He looked at Mickey again. "You don't see it, Mick?"
Mickey shook his head. "What are you going to do if she don't run? What if they scratch her?" But he could see Bird wasn't hearing him. Hell, maybe he wasn't hearing Bird.
"The reason I'm tellin' you," Bird said, "is you're my man, Mick. You helped me out, and now I'm tryin' to help you, mentally. But if you don't wanna lissen, it's on you. I can see things so clear, you know? Like you wonder how you didn't see them before.”
Mickey nodded toward the semi they'd stolen. “They're going to want their truck back," he said. "At least take them the truck."
"Yeah, you got to settle accounts," Bird said. "But my friends come first. When we get straightened out in Miami, you always got a place, Mick. You know, if you got to disappear for a while. Right now . . ." He shrugged and looked around the warehouse. "All I can do right now is hide you here. They can't touch us, Mick." And he began to laugh again.
Mickey had heard that Indians were afraid to kill white men if they were crazy, but he didn't think the people who were running things now were. "You can't see it," Bird said. "Mick, I swear on my mother's grave, it's so clear .... "
As he said that, the band saws stopped and the lights went out. For five seconds the place was dead still and solitary black. Then Mickey could hear Bird breathing through his teeth. Tony and the colored boy hadn't moved, like they were waiting for the people who ran things now to come in with flashlights and shotguns. Bird was breathing louder. Mickey couldn't see his face, but he knew it was awful. Ever since he'd walked into his house yesterday and found Jeanie crying, he'd been knowing shit.
He got up off the box. Nobody said a word. A door opened toward the front, and there was a flashlight. "Arthur?" she said. "Arthur, the electric went out again .... "
Bird's breathing got choppy. "We're over here, Mrs. Capezio," Mickey said.
“Is that you, Mickey? I didn't know you was here."
"Yeah, we're all over here in the dark. Right, Bird'?" Bird didn't say anything. So he said, "We're all over here," again, and the old woman found them with the light.
"It's the whole block," she said, coming toward them.
"Same as before. Arthur?" He didn't answer.
Tony the nephew said, "Hey, how long is it going to be? I can't do nothin over here without light."
"You hush," the old woman said and came the rest of the way to Mickey and Bird. When she put the flashlight on Bird's face, Mickey saw it was frozen. She said, "You hush," softer now. She handed the flashlight to Mickey and pulled Bird's head into the lap of her dress, and patted the back of his head. It was still dark, s
o Mickey didn't have to find something to do with his eyes.
In about five minutes the old woman said, "You hush," again, and Bird did. His breathing smoothed out, and a minute later he stood up, smoothing his hair, wiping at his forehead with the backs of his hands. "Jesus, Mick, I don't know," he said.
"It's nothin'," Mickey said. "Nobody knows what they're doin'. Get yourself a beer. I gotta go back tothe house, see about the funeral, but I'll come back and drink one with you."
"The funeral?" Bird said. "Shit, I forgot. My brains ain't payin' attention to me. How's Jeanie doin'?"
"She's with her sisters," Mickey said.
"That's good," Bird said. "You don't appreciate your family, then somethin' like this happens, right? She takin' it all right, though?"
Bird seemed normal again. He wasn't frozen up and he wasn't hugging anybody. He seemed like somebody you could talk to. "Actual1y, she's got some idea somethin' else happened out there," Mickey said. "I don't know where it come from, but there it is."
"Let's get outta here," Bird said. He took the flashlight from Mickey and led them all out into the flower shop. Aunt Sophie, Mickey and Tony. The colored boy said he'd as soon wait in there. They walked through the shop and out the front door, and it wasn't until they were outside that Mickey got a look at Bird's face.
He made up a rule of life: don't ever say somethin's normal until you can see their face.
If Bird's eyeballs had puckered and whistled "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," he couldn't of looked crazier than he did then. Shaking and scared and pissed and worried all at the same time, and no focus to any of it. He held onto himself as much as he could and said, "I'll be okay in a minute. I just got to remember how to get back."
Mrs. Capezio took his sleeve. "Where you want to go, Arthur?" she said.
He talked to himself. “I don't give a fuck, I don't give a fuck .... " She looked at him and frowned. "You got a nice home, Arthur," she said. "You got no reason to talk like that."