God's Pocket - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  Mickey left the truck on the street where he could see it and went in. "Hey, Mick," Eddie said, "you come to sell me your truck?" Whenever somebody bought a new car, Little Eddie would try to buy it from them for four hundred dollars. That was one of the ways he was humorous. He'd seen Mickey's truck the week he bought it, at a bar where he was making a delivery.

  "Lemme buy that truck off you," he'd said. "What's somethin' like that worth?"

  The truck was $19,000, but Mickey didn't tell him. "I'll give you four hundred, right now," he'd said, and the whole bar laughed. Every time he saw Mickey after that, he asked about the truck. He'd say, "You takin' care of my truck?" Every single time.

  Mickey looked around the office now, smiling. "Yeah,” he said. "I need to get rid of it."

  Little Eddie's face changed. "What's wrong with it?" he said.

  "Nothin'. It's a temporary financial problem." Eddie stood halfway up and looked past Mickey to the street.

  "What'd you-pay for that?" he said. Mickey pulled out the bill of sale. Eddie whistled. "They seen you comin', didn't they?"

  Mickey didn't mind. "What can you do?" he said.

  Little Eddie shook his head and looked troubled. He lit a cigarette and said, "I don't know where I'd get rid of somethin' like that, Mick. It's specialized, and what I got here is a young couples/singles—oriented operation."

  Mickey shrugged. Everybody he knew, they changed when they did business. Bird had told him once that it didn't mean nothing, it's what business was. Mickey never saw why you couldn't be one way all the time. If you changed, then something was wrong one place or the other, maybe both.

  "What can you do?'? he said.

  Little Eddie looked out the window again. "There's nothin' wrong with it?"

  "It's got eight thousand miles," Mickey said. "I changed the oil twice already, kept it in the garage. Here, start it." He handed Little Eddie his keys, three pounds of them, holding onto the one that would start the truck. Little Eddie got out of his chair and went to the door. He had a layer of loose fat like a bear that was always a little behind whatever he did. He called the colored man, who was running an electric buffer over a six-year-old Camaro. His name was Stretch.

  Eddie watched him put the buffer down and start toward the office. "That is the slowest nigger God ever put on the face of the earth," he said. "Sometimes I think he made the rest of them faster than us to make up for him." Mickey didn't like the way Little Eddie said "nigger." Some people could say it careless, like it was just a word—which it was—and some people made it an insult.

  "He can start it," Mickey said, "but I don't want him takin' it out." Something crossed Little Eddie's face. "I got some stuff in the back," Mickey said.

  Little Eddie gave the keys to Stretch, talked to him a minute, and then closed the door. He sat back down behind his desk. Mickey saw his chair was a couch somebody had sawed in half. "I'll tell you the truth," Eddie said, "this is a motherfucker, this business. Sometimes I wonder what the fuck am I doin' here.

  The nigger's makin' more money than me, and he can't keep up. The cars look like shit. The kids come in, they know I ain't going to get into any fuckin' car for a test ride, so they say they want to see this car or that car, and you got to let them look, right? How are you going to sell somethin' if you don't let nobody see it?"

  “So you give them the keys and they're gone for half the day, and when they bring it back it's got French fries and beer cans all over the floor, they burned half the oil out of the engine. You know what I mean here? Somebody's always tryin' to get over on you."

  Outside, the colored man started the truck.

  Little Eddie opened a desk drawer and found his truck book. "What's that, an eighty-two'?” he said.

  "Yeah, it's six months o1d." Little Eddie ran his finger down a list of trucks.

  "I had this idea," Eddie said, "to open up at night. Maybe seven, eight o'clock, after the sun goes down. Cars look better when the sun goes down. You don't have to keep tellin' the nigger he missed this or that, 'cause most of it you can't see at night anyway. What do you think?"

  Mickey said, "What's the book say?"

  "I might be able to get rid of it for you," he said. "I'd have to make a couple of calls, you know. If it's all right, I might get you seven and a half, eight .... ” He shook his head. "It's a bad time of year. Business stinks in spring, Mick. Everybody's thinkin' about pussy. I'm tellin' you the truth."

  Outside, Stretch was revving the engine. Mickey was sitting with his back to the window, watching Little Eddie, so he didn't see it when the truck pulled out in front of a SEPTA bus and started north up Third Street. Little Eddie was talking about doing his business at night again, and suddenly Mickey noticed the sound of the engine was gone. He turned in his chair to see if Stretch was finished.

  Little Eddie said, "He's just takin' it around the block once, make sure everything works." Mickey was on his feet, moving toward the door. "Hey, he'll be back in a minute .... "

  He ran out the door and looked up Third Street. The truck was a block ahead, stopped in front of the bus. Little Eddie came out of the office. He said, "I can't buy no truck without takin' it out for a drive, Mickey. You know that .... "

  Mickey started after it. It'd been fifteen or twenty years since he ran anywhere but to keep something from falling, and then only if there was somebody underneath it. Running hadn't felt dignified ever since he started working for himself, and he'd started that when he was a boy. It was something he'd never thought about much, and then one year every time you looked out the window, there was some guy forty-seven years old, in new sneakers and a faggot-colored headband, moving up the street half a mile an hour with this glazed look on his face.

  Mickey Scarpato was never swept up in the jogging craze. Jeanie, back when it was all right to talk to him, had said once that he was scared to be trendy.

  He hadn't run for fifteen or twenty years, and he'd forgot what it was like. Toward the end of the first block it began to come back to him. There was a jolt every time his foot hit the cement. It went right to his head. His arms were tight and uncomfortable and every five steps there was something to get out of the way of. A school kid, a dog, a garbage can. There were uneven places in the sidewalk.

  He was closing in on the truck. It was still sitting at the stop sign, in front of the bus, but just as he got there the traffic began to move again, and then he was running in a cloud of diesel smoke, and the truck was out a block in front of him again. He could see the bus driver's face in his mirror, smiling. He must of thought Mickey was trying to get on.

  He kept running, dodging kids and garbage cans, people watching him from their steps. The jolts when his feet hit the cement had changed. They weren't getting to his head now, they all stopped in his chest. Two blocks, and it already hurt to breathe.

  The truck was still a block ahead of him. Stretch had his arm hanging straight down from the window, and Mickey could see his head moving up and down with the radio. A block farther—between Tasket and Moore—they were throwing a family out into the street. A woman was crying, holding a five- or six-year-old child, and two men were putting her furniture on the sidewalk, trying not to look at her as they worked.

  Mickey was watching Stretch bebopping in the window of his truck and didn't notice the woman and her furniture until he was almost on top of her. He hit a chair, missed a chair, jumped over a television set. Then he had to step on a bed, to keep from falling, and on the other side of it there was a sofa with cigarette burns in the cushions. He stepped on that too, and the woman began to cry "Stop" over and over. He didn't know who she meant, but he knew how she felt.

  Jumping the television set killed half of what he had left. He thought of Jeanie and what was in the back of the truck, and pushed himself up the street. He thought of Stretch going into a parking lot somewhere and opening it up. The woman with the furniture was still crying.

  He moved into the street. There was less to run into there. His lungs see
med to be cramping up. They wouldn't hold what they would before, anyway. He wondered if he had that glazed look yet that he'd seen on joggers.

  The streets went by. Reed, Wharton, Federal. There was a stoplight at Washington, and that's where Stretch saw him. He'd glanced into the outside mirror, and then he'd turned around and looked out the window. Mickey was soaked with sweat, his eyes were burning, his hands were balled into lists. He wanted to tell him, "I ain't mad, I'm runnin'," but Stretch ran the red light to get away.

  Mickey passed the bus and crossed Washington. The people inside looked down at him, smiling. It took seventy-five cents and a window seat to look down on him then, but it could of been anybody else. It was just a matter of when it was your turn. He was closed off now from the noises of the street, all he could hear was his own noises. And they sounded like a choir, singing, "On the road again . . ." Just those words, over and over. He could not make them sing the rest of the song.

  Stretch stopped at Carpenter and put his head out the window again. He was in back of a tow truck now, and Mickey closed the distance again. At Christian he was a half a block away, at Catherine a hundred yards; When the truck stopped at Fitzwater, he could almost touch it. The street began to sway. Mickey saw Stretch blowing the horn at the tow truck, looking back like he was cornered. Not panicked, just beat and ready to give up. Then the tow truck moved and Mickey stumbled.

  He didn't try to stop the fall, he'd lost the feeling in his legs anyway. He covered his head with his arms and rolled. The street was softer than it looked. He hit something hard—there was a crash and a shattering sound,. almost like glass breaking—and then he stopped.

  He didn't try to move, he didn't even open his eyes. He lay in the street, and the voices were singing "Oh, Jeanie . . ." over and over, instead of "On the road again."

  A minute passed, nobody came. He opened his eyes and saw that he was lying against a tire. The traffic had stopped. He sat up, looking around. The tire was bald and it belonged to an old Ford station wagon. He grabbed a door handle and pulled himself up. His legs were trembling, he still couldn't breathe and he felt sick to his stomach.

  There was a kid in the station wagon, sitting in a car seat in the back. He was a cute kid, four or five years old, blond. He looked at Mickey for half a minute and began to scream.

  Someplace else there was screaming too. The knees of his pants were torn and he'd scraped the skin oil` his elbow, the same one he'd separated falling over Leon. Alive, Leon was a pain in the ass; dead, he was killing him. There was another scream up ahead.

  Mickey stood up straight enough to see over the traffic, which was stopped now. He'd thought at first they'd stopped for him, but when he saw he wasn't run over or dying, he knew that didn't make sense. He saw his truck then. It took a minute to recognize it because he'd never looked at it from underneath before. It was lying on its side on Fitzwater Street. People were closing in on it from all over. The back was caved in and there was a bus stopped near it on the sidewalk, pointed almost the same direction. The corner of the bus where the side met the front was folded in on itself and flat. One of the truck tires was still moving.

  He took a step and almost fell. His legs were on their own. He tried again, holding onto parked cars, and made his way fifty or sixty feet closer to the accident.

  He was that far when he saw the back door of the truck had come open in the accident. People were passing him from behind, trying to get closer. He moved a step at a time. Sides of beef were scattered all over the street. People were dragging them into their houses, trying to get them into their cars. There was a fist fight starting over by the bus. "This is my motherfuckin' meat," one of them said. The other one said, "I got here the same time as you," and threw a right hand from nine feet away.

  Mickey watched them circle each other, and the meat, neither one of them letting the other one get closer to it. They threw jabs and right hands, but they never got close enough to land.

  "Motherfucker, you're going to get killed," one of them said.

  Mickey felt himself coming back. His breathing smoothed out, it looked like he wasn't going to throw up. He heard sirens, a long way off and honking from the direction he had come. He hit the front of his thighs, trying to get them to stop shaking.

  He took a few more steps forward, until he was standing in the intersection. From there, he could see all of it. He could see fights starting in two other places, he could see old Stretch sitting against a wall across the street, bleeding from the head, staring at a circle of people—mostly kids—right in front of him. The screaming was coming from there.

  Mickey took a step, and just then a girl who had been standing in the circle broke out, covering her mouth with her hand, and ran up the sidewalk. The circle broke and then mended, but in the second that took, Mickey saw what was inside it.

  One of them said, “Where the fuck did he think he was, in a suit like that?"

  It took the police about fifteen minutes to come, and by the time they did the only meat on the street was Leon. They came in three cars and pushed people away from the body, and then one of them, a little one with a clipboard, walked around the circle of people, asking if anybody had seen which vehicle had hit the victim, or knew who he was. He looked like one of the cops come by to see Jeanie.

  Nobody knew nobody that wore clothes like that. The bus driver said he wasn't talking to nobody until he'd talked to his union rep, and Stretch was too dazed to talk. The little cop looked around and then walked right to the corner where Mickey was standing, until he was close enough so Mickey could read his name tag. ARBUCKLE. He looked like an Arbuckle.

  The police put a blanket over the body, but nobody moved it, even after the wagon showed up. The blanket was blue and yellow, and Mickey could see the words "Bull's-eye" sewed into one side. A horse blanket. He thought of Jeanie again, finding out all the places that body had been, and then he turned around and walked the mile and a half back to Little Eddie's Automotive Emporium.

  * * *

  Little Eddie knew trouble when he saw it. He was sitting outside on a Mustang, watching Mickey come the last block, smiling like he had a mouth full of broken glass. Mickey sat down next to him on the car.

  "Where's the truck?" Little Eddie said.

  "Wrecked," Mickey said.

  Little Eddie nodded. "Where's Stretch?"

  "Hospital, I guess."

  Little Eddie gave him the broken-glass smile again, thinking maybe Mickey had put him there. "That's the last one I ever hire," he said. Then, "You got insurance?" Mickey stared at him. "Use my phone, if you want to call the company."

  Mickey looked at his elbow. It was a mess. "I told you," he said, "you could start it, but I said don't take it nowhere."

  Little Eddie put out his hands. "Look, what can I do? In this business, everybody in the world's tryin' to get over on you. I got to try before I buy .... "

  "You said seven and a half." Mickey said. “Let's go inside, I'll sign over the title."

  "I can't buy somethin' wrecked," Little Eddie said. "I'd like to help you out, Mickey, but I got a business to run, what's left of one."

  Mickey said. "You already bought it." He stood up and started for the office. Little Eddie followed him, breathing hard, sweating. Mickey signed over the title. "You better make it eight," he said. "You said seven and a half or eight, and you're probably going to get eleven, twelve out of your insurance."

  "That takes a long time," Eddie said. "Time is money. I got to put out seven and a half for two, three months, that costs me."

  He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out at checkbook.

  "Eight," Mickey said.

  "Plus, the insurance company is going to raise up my rates," Little Eddie said. "You know you don't get over on the insurance company. They'll get their seven and a half back out of me, and Christ knows what they'll want for Stretch."

  Mickey stared at him. "Seven and a half?" Little Eddie said.

  Mickey said, "I don't care," and
Little Eddie wrote the numbers. He handed him the check and put the title back in the drawer with the checkbook.

  "Tell you the truth," he said, “you had me for eight, Mick, if you wanted to be a prick about it .... "

  Mickey got a bus to Broad Street and cashed the check. He took it all in hundreds, The teller looked him over, torn and bloody, and made him wait while she called Little Eddie. She put the phone back in the cradle and handed it over, seventy-five one-hundred-dollar bills. Against her better judgment.

  He caught a cab back to the Pocket. Cab rates in Philly stayed even with Locust Street pussy. One went up, the other went up. The chances of catching a social disease was about the same too. On the way there he squeezed his legs, trying to get some feeling back into them. The trouble wasn't that they didn't have any feeling when he squeezed them, though, it was that they went numb when he used them. "Fuck it," he said.

  The cabdriver turned around. "The Pocket, right?" he said.

  The cab let him out in front of Moran's Funeral Home, the bill was seven dollars. "I can't take no hundred," the driver said.

  "It just come out of the bank," Mickey said.

  The driver shook his head. "I don't have that kinda change. The fuckin' places I drive to, they ain't even sent in missionaries yet."

  Mickey went through his pockets and found a ten. “I keep it," he said. He crawled out of the cab on dead legs and walked through the gate to see Smilin' Jack.

  The waiting room was empty again. Mickey walked into the back, past the viewing room and the display room and the office. He heard yelling upstairs. "This is my fuckin' business now. You had yours .... " Then, "What the fuck do you want'?"