God's Pocket - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

Mickey said, '“Hey, Nick, you got a minute?"

  Nicholas took his time, deciding. "I'm here," he said. "What do you want?" When the brothers divided up the business, they decided Stanley ought to run things at night, when the customers came in, because he had the clothes for it. Nicholas, though, had the personality.

  "I got some meat," Mickey said. "I thought maybe you could use some meat."

  Nicholas shook his head. "No," he said. "How much you got?”

  "Seven sides, Kansas choice beef."

  Nicholas shook his head. "No," he said. He was still standing on the other side of the door. "How much you want?"

  Mickey shrugged. "A thousand," he said. "I ain't got time to fuck around with this." Nicholas opened the door and came out. "You got it with you?" he said.

  "Yeah. Lemme get you a side to take a look."

  Nicholas said, "I can look at it in the truck."

  "I got some other shit in there," Mickey said. Nicholas gave him a long look.

  "I don't care what you got in your truck," he said. "I don't see nothin' but meat when I'm lookin' at meat."

  Mickey said, "Let me pull one down and show it to you."

  "Fuck it," Nicholas said. "I don't think I want in this." He started back into the restaurant and Mickey stopped him.

  "All right," he said, "take a look. It's good beef but the thing is . . ."

  "I don't see nothin' but what I'm lookin' at," Nicholas said.

  "Anything else is your own business. I don't want to see it, I don't want to know about it."

  Mickey opened the door to the back end of the truck. He climbed in and then he turned around and gave Nicholas a hand up. The truck dropped under the new weight, and then the fat man was standing right next to him and Mickey couldn't hear him breathing.

  His air came out all at once. "Look," Mickey said, "I'm just doin' a guy a favor. Don't pay no attention to that, it's nothing."

  Nicholas said, "It's a fuckin' body." He leaned over and touched a leg, then moved up and touched the hand. "It's cold," he said.

  "It's a refrigerated truck," Mickey said. "What do you think?" He knew he'd made a mistake. "What do you say, Nick?

  Can you take this off my hands, or what?" It was dark in the truck, but Mickey could see his face change. "The meat," he said. "I'm talkin' about the meat. Forget that."

  The fat man touched the lapels of Leon's suit. "It's a cheap suit," he said. "What happened to him?"

  "He died," Mickey said. "It's just doin' somebody a favor."

  "What kind of a favor is that?" he said. "You takin' him out for some fresh air?" The fat man was touching Leon's shirt now. "I don't like this/' he said. Then he stood up, without looking at the meat, and climbed out of the truck, sitting down first and then dropping the few inches to the ground. Mickey got down behind him.

  "You can't go carryin' a stiff around in the back of a truck," Nicholas said. "You put me in a bad position. Because of you, I'm an assessory now."

  Mickey said, "You ain't nothin' because you didn't see nothin' but the meat back there. It's dark in there, and all you did was look at the meat before you bought it."

  Nicholas shook his head. "No," he said. "I ain't takin' that kind of meat. Who knows what sickness it could of got, ridin' back there with a human body?”

  "Nicholas," he said, "the body's clean. It got cleaned up before I put it back there."

  The fat man shook his head. "No," he said. "Shit, I'm already an assessory if I don't call the cops. They find the body back there and trace the meat, the first thing you know, the papers will be sayin' we're fuckin' cannibals over here. Can you see my point? You see what that kind of shit does to business?"

  He shook his head, walking away from the truck. "No," he said, "if you was to give me the beet, I still don't need that kind of trouble."

  Mickey said, "All right. You was the one who wanted to see what was back there."

  "I didn't want to see that," he said. He wiped the hand he'd touched Leon with against his pants, then smelled it. "I didn't . want to see it, I didn't see it. I don't know nothin' about it, and you didn't come by today and knock on the door."

  Mickey nodded. "There's one thing," he said. "You was the one who got back in there, nobody made you, and a couple off weeks go by and nothin' happens, I don't want to go into my stops and hear stories."

  Nicholas held up his hands. "You think I'm going to tell this?"

  He took the meat two other places in Jersey, but nobody wanted to see it. The place he knew in Moorestown, the man said, "I don't want nothin' to do with anything that don't come with receipts. I don't know who nobody is anymore." He drove from there to Berlin, and in Berlin they wouldn't even talk to him. By the time he got to Berlin, he knew it wasn't going to work.

  All the way there and back, the story about the shootout at the flower shop was on the news. First they had the two guys dead, then they had one of them dead and one of them critical, and then they said Aunt Sophie had been hospitalized, and then they said there was two dead and Aunt Sophie was in police custody. They kept breaking into the show to say what they'd said before was wrong.

  Finally he turned the radio off. It didn't matter where they had Bird and Aunt Sophie. For some people, there wasn't anyplace to go. He decided he'd sell the truck tomorrow, he knew a place in South Philly where they'd buy it. He wouldn't get what it was worth, but there'd be enough to put Leon in the ground. He thought he might go back to work for Dow Chemical, or he might catch on with Mayflower.

  He thought about truck-stop whores and truck-stop coffee.

  Drinking eight cups of it, listening to the same shit he'd heard the day, before, and the day before that; staying there because it was cold outside, or because sometimes you get tired of being alone in the cab. Or spooked. At night, you could forget where you were going, or why you were going there, or what you were pulling. Sometimes at night, you started to feel like there wasn't nothing connecting you to nothing else.

  He remembered, for the fiftieth time that day, how she'd looked at the newspaper reporter when they'd come down from Leon's room. He wasn't nothing special. Mickey could see that, but she couldn't. People who were famous looked different to her. They shined. She'd told him that after she'd seen Tim McCarver buying clothes on Chestnut Street. She said he wasn't as big as she'd expected, but once she saw who it was he seemed to shine, like there was more light on him than anybody else.

  Mickey had said, "Who is Tim McCarver?" It turned out he played baseball. For a while after that, she watched the Phillies' games on television. And anybody who'd come in, she'd tell them about seeing Tim McCa1ver buying clothes on Chestnut Street.

  "At first," she'd say, "you wouldn't notice him, because he isn't as big as you think, but then he smiled and you've never seen nicer features, and he just seemed to . . . shine all over. He's much handsomer in person .... "

  Every time she told it, he got better, which Mickey guessed had something to do with how famous people got famous in the first place. Richard Shellburn, of course, wasn't any Tim McCarver to look at. He was soft and sick-looking, and depressed. Mickey knew enough about Jeanie to guess she'd turned it around, though, made it into something artistic. He thought about Shellburn and was surprised to feel himself getting mad.

  He'd took it for granted from the beginning that there wasn't any reason Jeanie picked him to marry. And for the last four days, watching her turn away, he took it for granted there wasn't any reason for that either. At least if there was, it was decided apart from anything he did. It'd seared him and worried him and had him thinking shit that grown men don't think, but it didn't make him mad. It was like getting mad at the weather.

  But now he thought about it, why couldn't Shellburn stay in Center City to hunt pussy? There was every kind of woman in the world in Center City, and somebody famous could find one of his own. What was he doing, coming into his house to take what he had?

  Of course, it wasn't really his house. He'd moved in with Jeanie and the kid. Maybe tha
t's how Leon had seen him, somebody coming in to take what was his.

  He drove the White Horse Pike all the way from Berlin back to Philly, content to stop at the lights and watch the afternoon traffic. He began to look at it different. It was only four days since Leon died, in a couple of weeks who could say what would happen? And if she ran off with the reporter, he might find somebody else. He'd got confidence living with her. Not enough to know what to say, like in a bar when there was two hundred hard dicks walking around trying to pick up women, but if he met somebody, maybe at a party . . . He thought of how that might go, but he was doing Jeanie all over again.

  There was a hitchhiker on the highway just past the entrance to the high-speed line. She was young and round-faced, homely as an Idaho potato, and she had a guitar. Mickey pulled the truck into the right lane and then off the road. He looked in his rearview mirror, and when she didn't move he backed up to where she was.

  Her hair was tied into an old-fashioned ponytail, and she watched until he had stopped before she moved toward the truck. To be that skinny, she had to be using a needle. She opened the door but didn't try to get in. "How far you going?" she said.

  He said, "Phi1adelphia."

  She nodded, looking over the truck like she was thinking of buying it. She had two earrings on each side, and the holes she'd drilled to hold them were red and infected-looking. Her fingernails were bit to hell, and the skin that puffed up over the top looked infected too.

  "What part of Philly?" she said.

  "South Philly," he said. "Where you goin'?"

  "I don't know," she said. "New York."

  He said, "Well, I can take you as far as Philly. You might catch a ride up 295, but I ain't got all day." Mickey didn't like people driving by thinking he was trying to pick up this skinny girl.

  She looked at the cab and then she looked at him. She said, "I think I'll wait for somebody goin' farther than Philly." And then, before he could say anything else—not that he had anything else to say—he slammed the door and walked back to the place she had been before and stuck out her thumb.

  He wondered what it was about him she didn't like. It wasn't the truck, if she didn't like trucks she wouldn't of opened the door. He watched the mirror for a breakin the traffic; embarrassed, wanting to get away from her. The traffic was steady, though, and he sat there two minutes. Once she turned around, and when she saw he was still there she picked her guitar up and walked twenty yards farther away.

  There wouldn't be nothing after Jeanie but what he paid for. The front door was locked when he got home, and he went through his keys twice before he found the right one, thinking somewhere in the back of his head that she'd taken it away. The house was empty, he closed the door and stepped in. He turned on the television and walked from the living room to the kitchen and got himself a Schmidt's and a cheese sandwich. The place was all right while he moved, but as soon as he stood still it felt like he'd broke in.

  On the television they were showing pictures of the flower shop. There was a pool of blood just outside the door, broken glass. They brought the bodies out in green bags. Then they showed old pictures of Angelo Bruno, open-mouthed against the car window after they'd shot the back of his head off. And then Chickie Narducci, lying in the street next to his Buick, hit seven times and not even covered with a blanket, just lying out there while the kids and neighbors and reporters stood on the sidewalk and looked. And then they showed a snapshot of Chicken Man Testa, and then the front of his house after they blew it up.

  Television loved blood on the sidewalk. The people that decided what went on the air, they were the same ones who'd stand out in the cold for an hour and a half looking at Chickie Narducci's body.

  Mickey sat down. He put his sandwich in his lap and drank the beer. On the news, they said Aunt Sophie had been released and was not expected to be charged.

  He took the phone off the table and put it in his lap, next to the sandwich, and called Smilin' Jack. Jack said, "Moran's Funeral Home," in that voice he used for business.

  "Jack, this is Mickey."

  "Oh'?"

  “Can we still do it Saturday? I'll have the money by tomorrow."

  Jack Moran said, "How you going to get the money'?"

  "That's my business,” he said. "I'm askin' if you can still do it Saturday. The mahogany box, everything."

  "I got to have the money twenty-four hours in advance," he said.

  Mickey said, “All right, I'll drop Leon off tonight .... "

  "No," he said, "l don't want to see none of you again until after l see the money. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

  "I never fooled you," Mickey said.

  “You come into my place and slapped me around," he said.

  "You try to get over on me like I was some jerk-off. What the fuck did you expect?"

  "Tomorrow afternoon," Mickey said. "One o'clock, maybe two," and he hung up. Then he ate his sandwich and waited for Jeanie to come home, so he could tell her it was going to be all right.

  * * *

  He had called at noon and said they needed to talk. "Have you found something out?" she said. He said yes, but the way he said it, she knew it wasn't about Leon.

  "I'll pick you up," he said. And she said yes.

  Jeanie stood in front of the closet half an hour, pulling things out, putting them back. She took a skirt and two blouses with her into the bathroom and hung them from the towel rack, where she could look at them and make up her mind while she was in the tub. One of the blouses was a flat red, the other one was white. When she got out, the white one went back in the closet. She put on her makeup slowly, considering her eyes and the color of her skin as if she was seeing it all for the first time. She put perfume under her arms and in the creases beneath her breasts. She dressed and touched the line of her blouse from the side of her breast to her waist. It was the right blouse. He knocked on the door just as she got downstairs.

  Richard Shellburn was moving better than he had last night. His hair was combed and his shirt was ironed. He didn't look as sad with his hair combed. He started the car and said, "Do you know who T. D. Davis is?"

  She'd thought it was something to do with Leon at first. "T. D. Davis is the kind that never comes right at you," he said. "When he wants you to know something bad, he goes around the edges and leaves you to find it in the middle."

  She waited then for him to tell her something bad about Leon, but then he was talking about rape clubs and lady columnists. They'd driven out past the airport before she figured out that he was talking about somebody at the newspaper.

  Twenty minutes later they were out of the airport traffic and riding south on I-95. He was still talking to her like she worked at the Daily Times and knew the people he knew. And something else too. He was talking like there was already something between them, like he'd decided to just skip two months. She didn't know that she liked that.

  "Where are we going'?" she said. He smiled at her then and reached across the seat to touch her hand. He had a soft hand, wet and heavy. She guessed it didn't make much difference what his hand felt like, because she put her other hand on top of his and squeezed. She was trusting something, she didn't know exactly what. Her sisters had moved out of the house now, Mickey might as well be on Easter Island.

  "I wanted to show you the place," he said.

  Half an hour later, they went past a sign that said Maryland welcomed safe drivers. He hadn't moved his hand an inch. They were on a two-lane road now, following a green tractor at fifteen miles an hour around curves and up and down hills. She had no idea what direction they were pointed.

  "When I was little," she said, "my father used to take us to the shore in August. I never knew how he found his way, and I used to think if it wasn't for him, we'd never get back." She looked out the window. Cows, weeds, daisies. Brick farmhouses. "It all looks the same, doesn't it?" she said. "If you woke up out here alone, you'd never get back."

  Shellburn moved his hand then,
back to the steering wheel. "You wouldn't want to," he said.

  They came to a bridge. The tractor crossed it and went straight. Shellburn turned right, onto a little dirt road on the other side. They rode beside a river for a few hundred yards. There were sailboats on the water and people sitting in them wearing sweaters and white hats. Jeanie thought of herself in a sailboat, then the trees got between them and the river and she thought about waking up lost in the country.

  Shellburn covered her hand again. "A1most there," he said.

  She suddenly felt happy, and she wanted to tell him something true. It didn't matter what.

  She said, "When you told me about this, I didn't know if it was real." He looked at her, but he didn't move his hand. "I thought it might of been something you made up. I mean, sometimes I still pretend I'm a dancer. I went to New York to study when I was younger, and sometimes I pretend I stayed there and got famous, and that's where I am."

  Which was all a lie, except about wondering if the place was real. Jeanie Scarpato only pretended things that could happen, like her sisters dying. He put his arm around her shoulder then and pulled her closer. She fit herself into his side.

  They went around more curves and then over one last hill, and then she saw the place he'd told her about. There were sailboats out on the water here too. It was all the way he'd said it, but she'd liked it better when it was a story.

  "It's beautiful," she said.

  He sat there with his arm around her looking out the window. Then he got out of the car. "C'mon," he said, "I'll show you where we'll put the house."`

  At least two months, he'd skipped. But she took his hand and slid over his seat, and came legs first out of the Continental. He took a blanket out of the trunk, then a straw basket. The price tag was still on the basket. She took his arm and went with him toward the water. The ground was soft, and the grass was deeper than it looked, and tougher. It caught at her feet, and once she stumbled. He walked beside her, limping and smiling, and by the time they'd gone fifty yards he'd broken a sweat.

  Then he stopped, moved a few yards to the left, and pointed out over the trees and water.