God's Pocket - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  Shellburn barely noticed. He was getting sleepy now. If he didn't fuck this graduate of Temple University Sportswriters' School in the next ten minutes, it wouldn't happen in eternity. "As a boy I wanted to shave things," he said.

  She pulled on his dick and smiled. "You're kinky?" And then she bent over without being asked and put old Yahama in her mouth. He couldn't feel it at all, but there wasn't much else she could be doing down there. There was a cool sensation when she came up for air. "You had a lot of those screwdrivers," she said.

  "Eighteen," he said. "But you drank two of them. That's why I can't get it up. You drank two of my screwdrivers."

  "Relax," she said, “tell me about shaving . . ." and she began rubbing him again.

  "If that relaxes any more," he said, meaning his dick, "we got a problem with brain death." She giggled and looked back toward his typewriter.

  "Do you work every morning?" she said. "ls there a time you do it, or do you wait for an inspiration?"

  “"The family had two dogs," he said. "A mongrel and a sheepdog. I was never allowed near the sheepdog with a razor."

  She looked around the room. "It doesn't look like there's much here to inspire a writer." He looked around with her. The place was empty, but he couldn't think of anything he wanted to put in it. It was a place to sleep. Shellburn could sleep anywhere there was a television on. There was nothing he saw outside that belonged there with him. No painting, no furniture, no plant. As a matter of fact, he was thinking of getting rid of the table.

  He had moved to this place after his separation, and what was in the room was what he'd brought with him. That was six years ago in September, and all he'd added were two locks on the door. The woman he'd married was twenty years younger than he was. Stevey. Her father owned fumiture stores in Camden and North Philly, where he sold bedroom suites to blacks and Puerto Ricans who couldn't afford them and who, on an average, would make two payments and quit. Then her father would hire other blacks and Puerto Ricans to repossess the bedroom suites and he would sell them again. Her father was a rich man and a big employer of minority Americans. He had a letter thanking him from President Richard Nixon. He resented having them, around all the time, though, and used his money to keep his daughter as far away from that part of the world as he could. So Shellburn's wife had grown up in private schools, taking dance lessons and violin lessons and tennis lessons and art lessons. She had gone to the Moore School of Art, and some of the 'teachers there thought she had a talent.

  Then she'd gone to Paris and learned to resent America. That was the kind of woman Shellburn had married. He'd met her at some women's club where he'd given a talk. He was getting $500 then. She liked him right away, and thought they made an interesting couple—this great, rough-talking, common man's writer, who spoke better to the city than any man alive, and the young artist, who would paint things that spoke to no one but herself. She liked the cultural juxtaposition. Those were the words she used, "cultural juxtaposition."

  He smiled, thinking of her motives. He could smile at her, but he never asked himself who would marry somebody like that.

  The freelancer from Temple was encouraged by the smile. She got closer to Shellburn and pecked at his cheek and pulled at his dick. "Tell me something about writing," she said. "Tell me a trick."

  Shellburn shook his head, and the motion staggered him. "It's like shaving," he said. "You bleed worse than it hurts."

  Shellburn's marriage had lasted sixteen months, counting the time in the lawyer's offices. It had taken her three months for it to set in that she really had married beneath herself and the juxtaposition lost its novelty about a week after that. Shellburn hadn't done anything to save it, and that had brought out the violent edge of cultural juxtaposition.

  He was used to watching things happen, and he watched this. "Do whatever you want to," he'd said, and she'd thrown a mason jar at his head. She'd bought forty of them for drinking glasses—five different sizes, eight glasses each size—and before the papers were signed she broke everything but the little juice glasses, which would bounce off the walls with impunity. Shellburn liked the little glasses for their toughness, but she took them with her when they split up.

  She took the glasses and the silverware and every stick of furniture in the house. She got the Audi and the rugs and the Nautilus machine she'd bought him for their first Christmas together. She took everything and then sold it and went to Europe, back to Paris to forget. She would have taken the television, but to sell that somebody would've had to know she had one.

  "I don't get it," said the girl from Temple. Her hand was still on his penis but it had stopped moving. He looked down at his stomach and his penis and her hand. Stevey would have wanted to paint it, a still life, and it would have come out looking like Venetian blinds. "Why do you have to bleed?" the girl from Temple said.

  Shellburn had a brief thought that he was paralyzed, but he moved his legs and saw he was only numb.

  "I think you ought to get a word processor," the girl was saying. He closed his eyes and time drifted, and then Stevey and the freelancer from Temple University had each other's voices, and when he woke up, Stevey had caught him in the cheek with a mason jar and was saying. "Oh, no, you don't." Only it was the girl from Temple.

  She had taken off her panties, he could see that. She had also pulled his head up out of his pillow and he was staring now at her crotch, about half a foot away. He realized she had slapped him awake and she was sitting on his chest.

  "I have needs too," she said.

  "A talking cunt," he said, "oh, no . . ."

  She rode up his chest, and Shellburn let her push his face into her pubic hair. "There," she said, “that's better .... " And Shellburn smiled and went to sleep.

  Shellburn could sleep anywhere there was a television on.

  * * *

  The phone rang just as Donahue introduced his first pervert, so it was a few minutes after nine o'clock. The freelancer from Temple was sleeping on the side of the mattress near the wall, but the phone didn't wake her up. He studied the line of her back a minute and then picked up the receiver.

  "Richard'?" It was Gertruda, calling for T. D. Davis. T. D. answered his own phone, but he never made his own calls. Gertruda put Shellburn on hold, and he studied the girl next to him on the mattress. He pulled the sheet down with his toe to look at her ass. He realized he was still drunk.

  "Richard, good morning," T. D. said. He always sounded surprised to get you on the phone. "What you doin'?"

  Shellburn said, "I'm lying here with a jaybird-naked-ass girl graduate of the Temple University- School of Journalism."

  "Good. How was she'?"

  "If you let me off the phone, I'll try to find out for you," Shellburn said. T. D. laughed, the girl reached down in her sleep and pulled the sheet back up over her bottom. Shellburn did not take either of those things for a good sign.

  "Richard," T. D. said,"'I need a favor. We ran a story yesterday, some boy killed on a construction job, and somehow we got it all dicked up. I'm finding out now who. But the thing is, you know, this boy was a veteran and supported his mother. I think she's crippled or something, and he was one of those unofficial neighborhood leaders we count on in this city .... "

  Shellburn held the phone away from his ear and looked at it. T. D.'s voice got farther away, like Shellburn had gone into a coma. He waited until it stopped and put the phone back against his ear. "You follow me, Richard?"

  Shellburn said, "She's got my dick in her mouth, T. D. Is this important?"

  "What I was thinking," T. D. said, “was that instead of sending one of these damn kids down there and get it wrong again, why don't I ask Richard Shellburn to head over there and write me a column about this boy? Get it done right."

  Shellburn said, “Because he's getting blown."

  "Be good for you to stretch your legs anyway," T. D. said. Shellburn looked at his legs. Bone-thin, almost hairless. Old man legs. "I had a couple things I had to look at to
day," he said.

  He didn't want to find out about Leon Hubbard, he already knew. He could sit down right now at the table and write it in twenty minutes, off what Davis had just told him. "I could send Billy over there, I guess .... "

  T. D. said, "Maybe you could go yourself. You know, get some of that description in there. Bibles, pictures of the dead boy, grieving mother. Things only Richard Shellburn would see."

  He picked up a sock off the floor and put it in his mouth. "I can't talk now, T. D. I'm eatin' pussy." And then he broke the connection with his finger.

  He looked again at the girl on the mattress. She was stirring, now that he thought about it she was probably already awake. Shellburn called Billy for the address and phone number of Leon Hubbard's widowed mother.

  He wrote the phone number in the dust on the floor beside the mattress. He found a crayon in the bathroom—how long had that been there?—and copied the numbers onto a piece of typing paper. The freelancer from Temple University got off the mattress and stormed past him into the bathroom. He thought she was mad, but then he heard her throwing up. Then she opened the door six inches and asked for her purse.

  He passed it through the crack. A little later the toilet flushed, the water went on and on and a couple of times the toilet flushed again. He heard her open his medicine cabinet. There wasn't anything in there but pills. Valium, aspirin, shit from when he was sick. There were pills six years old in there.

  A minute later the medicine cabinet shut and she came out wearing a towel and some lipstick. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek but didn't grab his peter—now there was a word he hadn't thought of in a while—and she fell back into the mattress and smiled.

  "Come back to bed," she said. He looked at her breasts and her butt and her legs and her mouth with the fresh lipstick. She had all the parts you could ask for, but something was missing for Shellburn. Once you could fuck somebody, then you were left with whether you wanted to. Shellburn remembered when those two things went together.

  "I've got to be somewhere," he said.

  "Can I come along?"

  "Not this time."

  "Remember, you promised I could watch you write a column."

  "Sometime," he said. And he thought, Right after I suck off a German shepherd on Broad Street. He took a shower, shaved and put on clean clothes. When he came out she was still lying on the mattress. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing in steady, deep sighs that blew her hair where it crossed in front of her mouth He looked at her and thought of how empty her life was.

  He opened the door quietly and let himself out, and he was half into the hallway when she said something that reached out like two-inch fingernails and grabbed his stomach from the inside. She said, "You know, I was just thinking what a really terrific magazine piece you'd make .... "

  * * *

  Shellburn got into the Continental and lay his head against the adjustable steering wheel. She was still up there, in his apartment, probably making notes. All he'd said was, "Lock up when you leave," and then he'd closed the door before she could sit up and get a look at him.

  The digital clock in the dashboard built a fragile 10:28 out of straight green lines. Cars were in the street, honking. It was dirty and busy, and he thought about the house in God's Pocket where they wanted him to go. The place would be narrow and small and dark. The windows would be closed and the mother would be sitting in a dark dress on the couch, so he wouldn't be able to see her until his eyes adjusted, and when she spoke it would be so soft he'd have to ask her what she'd said, over and over.

  There would be relatives around, big guys, and an argument. Old brothers against young brothers, maybe. Shellburn felt a line of sweat break out at his hairline, and he was suddenly weak. He started the car to get the air conditioning on, noticed his hands shaking.

  He pulled into the street and headed for Lombard Street, where he turned west and took it all the way to Twenty-fifth. He could go north on Twenty-fifth and be inside the house in three minutes. The clock said 10:50, and Shellburn stopped at Twenty-fifth Street, then went past it, crossed the river on the South Street Bridge and got on the Expressway South.

  He drove out past the refineries and the airport, and then got on I-95. He began to feel better. He took the Continental up to eighty—in that car you couldn't tell eighty from forty—and put the radio on. He would take care of the house in God's Pocket when he got back, or it would take care of itself

  He hit a button and rolled the window down a few inches, and then turned the radio up to cover the noise. The radio had been set to WWDB-FM talk radio. Listeners called in to report their feelings about Mayor Green and abortions—speaking of the mayor—and capital punishment.

  The subject of the day, however, was a week-old wolf-pack killing, in which eight or ten black kids stomped an eighteen-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania to death on . Chestnut Street at five o'clock in the afternoon to steal his wallet. Some of the callers were for it and some were against it. Six of them reported that most black crime was directed against other blacks, four callers said there wasn't anything else for inner-city children to do and predicted a long, hot summer.

  On the other side, a lot of people wanted public executions, and there were stories about things that had happened to elderly parents. They said getting old made you a target in the city.

  Shellburn drove past Wilmington and found 213 South. The land changed, and the voices from the city faded and broke with static. A woman called in and began to cry. She was drunk, he thought. He wondered if she was as drunk as he was. The vodka was coming out of his skin now, and he turned the air conditioner off because the air on the sweat was chilling him.

  "I'm sorry," the woman on the radio said, "I'm all alone .... " He closed his eyes and could see her, she was one of his people too. "But the thing I want to say . . ."

  The man who answered the calls and told the people what he thought said, "Madam, is it possible you have been imbibing this morning? You sound like you need to sleep it of£"

  “I'm not drunk," the woman said, and Shellburn could see her straightening in her chair. "Please, what I wanted to say . . ."

  Shellburn crossed the little bridge over the Bohemia River, made a right t turn over another, smaller bridge.

  "We've got people waiting, madam .... "

  "Let her finish,” Shellburn said. The man who answered the calls and told the people what he thought had read the week-old account of the wolf-pack killing from the Daily Times. That was how people got on the subject of public executions, and things that happened to their mothers, and the lack of job opportunities for inner-city youth, and how Frank Rizzo had tried to genocide them anyway. Genocide was a big word on the street this year. And in the middle of all the words on the street, it seemed to Shellburn that the man on the radio had somehow stumbled across the real thing—a drunk old woman who wanted to make her statement before she slid off into the other side, where she knew nobody would listen.

  The man on the radio was cutting her off. "Please," she said again. The man on the radio sighed.

  "All right, madam, say it. We've got people waiting."

  She gathered herself. "Thank you," she said. "What I wanted to say . ..." Shellburn felt himself tense. "What I wanted to say was . . ." Then, "I can't remember now."

  Shellburn came to a dirt road that looked like a tunnel hidden in trees. He followed it up and down two hills, and then around a long left-hand turn. Then there was one more hill, and at the top of that the trees disappeared and the land opened up and it was like the first day of the world. He parked at the side of the road. From there, he could see the Bohemia, and the cove where it emptied into the Elk River and ran into the Chesapeake Bay. It was a quarter mile from the road to the water, a long, sloping meadow that ended in a hundred feet of thick trees. Beyond that was the cove, a mile and half around the lip.

  There were a few sails on the water, and beyond them, two or three miles, was another meadow like Shel
lburn's on the other side. There were horses over there, sometimes cattle, and in the morning you could see deer on both sides.

  Shellburn got out of the car and walked fifty yards into the meadow. That was where the house was going to be. The ground rolled there and began its long, easy drop to the water. From there you could look out a window and watch the storms coming in over the water. Or you could watch the geese coming in, so thick sometimes they could have been a storm too.

  He'd bought the meadow two months before he'd married Stevey, and never told her. He'd been forty-live years old, and he'd had a picture of the place in his head a long time. The picture had a house in it, a family. At the time, of course, Stevey was planning a life around. the impact their cultural juxtaposition would have on Center City society, it never came up that he had a picture in his head of her pregnant and isolated, living on a hill in Maryland overlooking the Chesapeake Bay.

  He didn't know how long he'd had the picture, he thought it must have been there a long time before he knew what it was like that feeling you've forgotten something—because when he saw it, he recognized it. He'd bought twenty-One acres for $85,000, everything he had, and instead of worrying about the money—Shellburn always worried about money—he took the perfect fit of the price and his bank account for a sign. And he'd never even told her. They were married in a 230-year-old church and moved into a townhouse in Society Hill, where the front door was four feet from the street, and where she watered one skinny ass little tree growing out of a hole in the sidewalk next to a fire hydrant.

  And when it was over a few months later—over except for the lawyers—he would get himself drunk and lonely at some Center City bar and wake up in the morning, parked where he was now. He wouldn't remember driving down, and he'd sit there in the early sun, watching the water birds come in like storms.

  He walked farther into the meadow, watching where he put his feet. There were holes in the ground, covered with dried grass, and there were rabbit nests.