God's Pocket - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  Then Arthur came through the door, wacko again. He stopped in the doorway and saw the man on the floor, and the blood sprayed all over the wall. And she thought from his face that he was going to lecture her that this was no way to run the business.

  But he said, "Sophie, I swear I never thought it would come to nothin' like this," and then he began to shake. She took his hand and moved him out of the way.

  "Just a minute, Arthur," she said. And then the door slammed open again and the young one came through with his big shoulders and his nice haircut and his baby face, and she shot him in the nose. The noise hung in the air with the smoke. "This one is so young," she said to Arthur. "Barely a baby."

  But Arthur didn't seem to hear her. He was shaking and buggy-eyed, and then he went over and began to kick the man from Monday morning in the face. Screaming, "This is my family! You fuckin' hear me? My family. You fuck . . . you fuck . . .you fuck . . ." And every time he said that word, which she did not like used in her shop, he kicked the man in the face again. He did that until he was out of breath and sweating and his pants was all messed up with blood where he'd missed with his shoe. When he quieted down, she said, "Go change your pants, Arthur. The police is coming."

  He said, "I swear to Christ, Sophie, I didn't know nothin' like this was going to happen." He shook his head, looking at the mess on the floor, and she took him by the hand again and led him out the front door.

  "Go change your pants," she said. “You got blood all over them, and the police is coming.

  You don't want nobody takin' pictures of you like that." But he stood in the doorway, looking back at the floor, shaking. She could feel it in his hand, and when she touched the back of his neck, she could feel it there too.

  "Arthur," she said, "we ain't got time to go wacko. Not now." And she pushed him gently out the door and watched him to make sure he could still find the house. Then she picked up the phone and called the operator, and asked her to call the police and tell them two men had just tried to rob her flower shop. And then she went into the closet and found her broom and a dustpan, and began sweeping up the pieces of glass.

  * * *

  The phone woke him up again Thursday morning, and he focused on it with one eye, as evil as he could make it, but it wouldn't stop. It rang seventeen times before he picked it up. Gertruda. "Mr. Davis wants to see you, Richard," she said.

  Shellburn said, "I can't get my other eye open."

  He'd gone from Leon Hubbard's house to a bar in Center City where, at eleven o'clock, he'd called the paper to say he wouldn't be writing for Thursday. He said he had some loose ends to tie up. He'd forgotten that and called again at two, and said he had the flu.

  Gertruda said, "Mr. Davis wants to see you at ten-thirty. He was sure that's what time he wanted to see you."

  Shellburn said, "Did it sound sexual?"

  "Ten-thirty," she said, and hung up. He lay back in the pillow and closed his eye and thought about Jeanie Scarpato. When he'd been younger, Shellburn thought he understood temporary insanity. He would read those words together and think of the things he had done and the lies he had told, trying to get into somebody's pants. He knew what it was to give himself up for twenty minutes of a woman's time.

  Twenty minutes. And then in the mornings he'd wake up with a woman he didn't know, and try to explain to her who he really was. And that was even crazier than the rest of it because, even if he could have done that, nobody wanted to hear it then. And he would read how a garbage man had gone home and shot his wife and her mother and two neighbors, and he thought he understood how the garbage man might have felt, standing in front of a judge and jury trying to explain that it wasn't really him who'd done that, trying to explain who he really was.

  Shellburn thought he understood that much of it, but he never understood the shooting. He wondered if that came up out of the same hole as going pussy-crazy. He followed those cases all the way through trial, looking for similarities.

  Shortly after his marriage, he quit going pussy-crazy. He didn't give it up, but he quit giving himself up. He thought about Jeanie Scarpato again and what had happened at her house it wasn't like pussy-crazy, but there was something in that bedroom he wanted that bad.

  He reached over his head for another pillow, thinking of the way she looked, and hugged it against his chest. It was soft and cool and fit him perfectly. Was it that easy?

  He lay like that for an hour, and then his thoughts moved from God's Pocket to T. D. Davis and he got up, feeling better than he expected to, and took a shower. He stood under the water, wondering if T. D. Davis wanted him to write better or to quit. He didn't know if T. D. liked having him around.

  For twenty years Shellburn had made his reputation reading strangers. He could walk into a neighborhood bar or a hospital room for half an hour and know who everybody was. Some of it, of course, was experience. Cops lied to you, firemen told you the truth. Lawyers were always full of shit. But there was more to it than that. Shellburn could pick up what people were to each other, and the balances that connected them, and that was where he looked to see who they were.

  He was good at that in a bar full of strangers, but the older he got, the more he realized he couldn't do it with the people he knew.

  The closer Shellburn got to anybody, the less he could read them. He didn't know, for instance, if Billy Deebol liked him or pretended to, or what Genruda was thinking when she called him in the morning for T. D. Or what T. D. wanted from him.

  Shellburn had made his reputation reading people he didn't know, and he kept it to himself that he couldn't read the ones he did know. There was nobody close enough to tell that to anyway. Maybe Jeanie Scarpato.

  He dried himself in front of a steamed mirror and wrapped himself up to the armpits in the towel before he cleared a patch of the mirror to take a look. His eyes were red and he needed a shave, but Shellburn thought his color was better. He'd been gray a lot lately.

  He came out of the bathroom, trailing water footprints, thinking about calling her. It was just ten o'clock, though, and he decided to wait. He wasn't sure what to say yet, anyway. He dressed sitting on the mattress. Socks, shirt and pants. He had to lie down to get the pants on. He was still sweating from the shower, and the clothes stuck to his skin.

  He stood up and went to the table where he'd thrown his pants over the typewriter when he'd come in last night. He got his wallet out of the back pocket, some folding money out of the front pocket. The change fell on the floor, quarters and dimes scattered over the room in a way that might have resembled the beginning of the universe. It wasn't ten o'clock in the morning, and he'd already discovered the big bang. The only question that mattered then was when the cleaning lady came in and swept it all up.

  "Yes, I am still drunk," he said out loud.

  He pulled into the office parking lot right at ten-thirty. The elevator was slow, so he was ten minutes late walking into T. D. Davis's office. He wasn't worried about the ten minutes, he wasn't worried about Davis. He was only slightly worried about Jeanie Scarpato's husband. He'd watched them together for two minutes, and that was more time than he'd needed. She looked right through him, and he looked at her like there was nothing else in the room.

  A long ways down the road, he would feel bad about Mickey Scarpato.

  He knocked once on the door before he went in. T. D. Davis was sitting beneath the torn picture of himself and Jackie Robinson. He had a copy of the Daily Times on the desk in front of him, opened to page 2.

  Shellburn sat down without being invited to and looked across the desk. T. D. sighed. "I thought you was headin' over to God's Pocket," he said, "write us a column about that boy got killed in the accident."

  "It needs more time," Shellburn said.

  T. D. said, "I didn't see your column on page 2 today. I opened the paper and we got some goddamn picture of this girl had her teeth wired together in Omaha to lose weight." Shellburn waited. "That ain't my idea of what our readers want to see [ on page 2 of th
e newspaper, Richard." Shellburn leaned forward to look at the girl in Omaha. She was smiling.

  "Not over breakfast," he said.

  "Have you been feelin' all 1ight?" Davis said. “I looked at page 2 today and started to think there's been a lot of days you been missin'. Our readers count on you. They buy the paper for it, some of them, and then they turn to page 2 and see this fat girl in Nebraska smiling at them with a bunch of scum and shit stuck to her teeth." T. D. looked at the picture again.

  "So I had Brookie look back over the last year, and you know, you missed forty-two days, not countin' vacations, Christmas and personal leave. I heard that and thought I better ask if you been feelin' all right, because if you haven't, then we got to get you to a doctor."

  Shellburn said, "It just needs a little more time. There's some loose ends to tie up."

  T. D. cut him off "It's a daily job," he said. "Every day, 365 days a year. There ain't nothin' matters less than what you did yesterday."

  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, boss. 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."

  "lf 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 kil1in' 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 h
ow 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 bands 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 all 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.