God's Pocket

by Pete Dexter

  She pounded on the door again and heard him move. “Mickey’s got to be to Bird’s place by eight, if you want a ride,” she said. She listened, he moved again. “Honey?”

  Leon Hubbard hated to be told anything. There was something about it that didn’t take him into account. He woke up with a hangover and a torn dick, smelling like Fat Pat’s bedroom, Jeanie kicking down the door telling him where Mickey had to be by what time. “All right,” he said.

  “Honey?”

  “I said all right.” He lifted the sheet to look at his dick. The tear ran half an inch, from the foreskin to the center of the mouth, and resembled a harelip. “Don’t ever pick up a cat like that,” she’d said. “He was just telling you the only way he could.…”

  Fat Pat lived over a little hoagie shop on Twenty-seventh Street in a two-room apartment. Anywhere from fourteen to twenty cats lived there too. “How come you don’t have these fuckers fixed, at least?” he’d said, more than once. Three of them were pregnant, and there had to be seven or eight males walking around all day, spraying every inch of the floors and the furniture, trying to stake out their territory over the scent of everybody else who’d sprayed there. She never let the cats out because they were wild and wouldn’t come back.

  It was a little God’s Pocket right inside her apartment.

  Fat Pat worked the Hunt Room of the Bellevue-Stratford, waiting tables. Nights she hung out at the Hollywood or the uptown, drinking vodka and 7-Up with cherries in it, waiting for Leon. She never ate the cherries, but she accumulated them in her glass to keep track of how many drinks she’d had, and late at night they got soft and petaled, and looked like an old corsage.

  Pat sat at the far end of the bar from Leon and never bothered him when he came by. She didn’t even speak to him unless he said something first. That’s the way Leon liked it.

  Sometimes, mostly on Fridays, he took her home. Not from the bar, though. He always met her outside. “I don’t need people knowin’ about my personal business,” he’d said once. “It’s the same principle as changin’ your patterns every day.”

  She’d heard him talking about her, though. At the Hollywood and the Uptown both.

  At her apartment, they’d go into the bedroom right away, because there weren’t as many cats in there. He’d take his clothes off, fold them and put them in the closet. Leon always took care of his clothes. Then he’d lie sideways across the bed, his head against the wall, and watch her blow him.

  Last night, one of the cats was watching too. Sitting on a little table with the pictures of Fat Pat’s dead brother Monte in a Navy uniform, half a foot out of reach, blinking the way cats do, like they’re changing lenses back there. It was on the table about five minutes, and then Leon felt a soft concussion and it was next to him on the bed. He picked the cat up by the tail, and then three or four things happened, he couldn’t say in exactly what order.

  The cat screamed. He saw the look of Fat Pat’s face and said, “No cat is comin’ near this dick.” Fat Pat had taken his penis out of her mouth to beg for the cat, and the cat had ripped a coma in the head of Leon’s dick.

  It hurt too bad to even look for his razor to cut the cat’s head off. He grabbed himself and rocked, back and forth, hissing, while Fat Pat told him that it was the only way the cat had to tell people not to pick it up by the tail. A couple minutes later he realized he still had his hard-on.

  There was nothing in his history to suggest the problem would ever develop, but there it was. Torn and bleeding, it would not fall. “We got to get it down to make it stop bleeding,” he said.

  Fat Pat said, “Try thinking about something else. Multiplication tables.” In the end, he had forced it inside his forty-five-dollar blue jeans and walked home with it pushing into his pants leg. It hurt him everywhere. It hurt so bad at home he didn’t even wash off the smell of Fat Pat’s bedroom. He took a couple of Percodan and got into bed, and gradually the pain drained back from his eyes and his chest and his stomach and gathered itself in the head of his penis, where it seemed to go to sleep with him.

  He got out of bed carefully now, not wanting to wake it up all at once.

  Downstairs, Mickey was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. Jeanie was sitting on the other side of the table, eating chocolate donuts and reading Richard Shellburn’s column in the newspaper. “Listen to this, Mickey. The old man had eyes as sad as the dog’s. He looked into the empty rooms where he and his wife had lived their lives, quiet lives, and wondered what had happened to his neighborhood, that children would come into the house and beat up an old man for his money. “At least they didn’t hurt Hoppy,” he said.’ Isn’t that sad?”

  Mickey watched her pour sugar into her coffee and use that to wash down a donut. “I don’t know how you eat that shit,” he said. “You get sugar diabetes, they’re going to cut off your feet.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “You ought to eat something too. You can’t go to work with nothing in your stomach.”

  He shook his head. He could never eat on a day he had to steal a truck, not until after it was done. He looked at his watch. Seven-thirty. “Is Leon going to get out of bed, or what?”

  “I heard him moving,” she said. “He’ll be down.”

  He looked at his watch again, but he didn’t say anything else. He didn’t know much about women, but he knew enough to stay out of the line between Jeanie and her son. The kid was there first, and that counted. No matter what Leon did, Mickey didn’t have any opinion on it.

  Before they’d gotten married, Jeanie had mentioned from time to time that Leon had been his whole life without a father figure, and she was glad there would be somebody now to show him how to be strong. Leon had been to Byberry twice Mickey knew of, for observation. She would somehow drop his emotional problems into a conversation, and Mickey would somehow ignore it.

  A month or two into the marriage, Jeanie gave up on it and settled for Mickey getting him a job. Which looked easier than being a father figure. He asked around and found him a spot bartending four nights a week on Two Street. Leon lasted three weeks. Mickey went down to try to straighten it out.

  “Listen,” the man said, “I expect him to steal. Everybody steals, that’s what a job is for, but he don’t have enough respect to keep it reasonable. He comes in the first night and grabs thirty. I got people workin’ for me for five years don’t take thirty. Plus, I come into my own place and he stands there lookin’ at me like he wants to cut my head off.”

  When Mickey got home he told Jeanie he didn’t know what had gone wrong. And after that, when she asked him to find Leon another job, he’d always tell her nobody was hiring. He’d tell her it was the economy.

  Which was all right with Leon. At least it had been for three years. Jeanie gave him money for clothes and a place to stay and let him use the Monte Carlo when he had a date. Her insurance was fourteen hundred dollars, letting him use the Monte Carlo. “A nice girl will be good for him,” she said.

  But they never saw his dates, even Cheryl. Leon said Cheryl was a flight attendant for U.S. Air and lived in the Northeast, which Mickey recognized for the classiest thing Leon could make up. But he never said it, and Jeanie kept giving the kid forty, fifty every Friday night to take her out, and Mickey never said a word.

  Then, about six weeks ago, Leon had decided he wanted a job again. “Not some bar,” he’d said, “a real job. You know, a trade or somethin’.” He’d told that to Jeanie.

  She’d gone to Mickey like this: “It was him, this time. It wasn’t me, it was him. Can’t you talk to somebody downtown? Please, Mickey, talk to somebody for him.” She went through it again, how the kid had grown up without a father figure, and finally time and maturity must have turned him around.

  Mickey knew it was something else, but he didn’t know what. He did know by then that nothing would turn the kid around but a chance to run over you twice.

  “He’s always been good with his hands,” she said. “You know how old he w
as when he took the locks off upstairs.…” And he’d given in. The next time he’d seen Bird down at the flower shop he asked if he could find something for the kid. Bird was eating a cold cheese steak.

  He’d known Bird a long time, since he was still hauling poison for Dow Chemical. They’d drunk beer together and bet the ponies together, and they were friends except for business, which Bird kept separate. Mickey bought his meat from Bird, and once in a while he took a truck for him. But even when he did that—it was never more than two or three a year—it was straight cash, never a percentage.

  When he’d asked about Leon, Bird had stopped eating, a piece of onion hanging from the corner of his mouth where he had to know it was there, and looked at him like it was somebody else. “You sure you want to ask that?”

  Bird had a famous temper and balanced that against a melancholy that left him weighing his life against his expectations, to measure what he was against a standard that would change with how bad he felt at the time. Any kind of crisis would set him off—a flat tire, a bad day at Keystone, money moving some direction it wasn’t supposed to—and it always ended the same way. He’d go from mad to sad, and decide he’d wasted his potential. Bird had to stay pissed off to keep from being weak.

  “If it was just me, Mick,” he said, “I’d just fuckin’ do it. I’d pick up the phone just because I know you, that’s how much I think of you. You got a nice thing here the way it is, you know? A nice truck, a nice business, you don’t got to ask anybody for nothin’. A lot of these assholes around here don’t appreciate what a blessing that is. A lot of these assholes don’t appreciate when you start askin’ for shit you don’t have, you start givin’ away the shit you got.”

  He was still looking at Mickey like there was something about him left to figure out. “I know what I’m talkin’ about,” he said. “I got shit goin’ down right now, I can’t even find out where it’s comin’ from.”

  Mickey said, “Yeah, well, I didn’t mean to put you into awkward positions.”

  Bird held up his hands. A piece of meat slipped out of the roll. “Nothin’s awkward. Like I said, if it was just me, I’d do it. But for somethin’ like this, I got to ask somebody to make a phone call. For somethin’ like this, they’re going to say, ‘For what?’ You unnerstand? Nothin’ is for nothin’.”

  Mickey nodded.

  “You still want me to do somethin’?”

  He thought of Jeanie, he put the kid out of his mind. “Yeah, see what you can do.” Bird finished the sandwich, blew his nose in the wax paper, and a couple of days later they’d called from the union hall for Leon to go down there and sign the papers to be a bricklayer, first class.

  He’d sold something for that, and he didn’t even know what it was yet, and the second week the kid was already showing up late for work, telling Jeanie some shit about changing routines. Now he was holding up Mickey’s work too. Mickey heard the shower go on upstairs. It was twenty minutes to eight. Jeanie said, “You ought to eat something,” and then they heard him scream.

  The shower went off and it was quiet. “Did you use all the hot water?” she said.

  Leon stood in the shower, holding his mouth and his dick. When he could trust himself, he let go of his mouth. Then he opened the other hand, a crease at a time, making a little stretcher for it. He caught a reflection of himself in the mirror then. He could have been looking through his change for a dime.

  The tear didn’t look as bad as it was, and for once he was glad. Usually he didn’t mind looking bad, like after a fight. But this nobody else was going to see. Nobody is scared of you because you got a torn dick anyway.

  He got out of the shower, dressed and took another Percodan. He thought it over and took two black beauties too, to keep his edge. He got dressed and began to feel the black ones right away. He dropped six more of them into his back pocket, with the razor. He smiled. There was nothing he carried in there that was good for anybody else.

  He pulled the razor out, smooth and fast and quiet, and held it open-bladed in the empty room. He wished there was a way for them to see into his pocket, they’d see what he was and call all this shit off. He folded the razor and put it on the window ledge while he checked the street, and then he went downstairs.

  Mickey was already outside, sitting in the truck. Jeanie was standing at the bottom of the stairs with that look she had. She was his mother, so he loved her, but if he ever got sick enough to do one of those family jobs you read about out in Kansas or Michigan, she was the first one to go. She didn’t know that, though. She was always looking up into his eyes like she was now, trying to find something out. She thought she could push in there with him and sometimes, in a way, she could.

  But what she didn’t know was that he could hide things from her, and that he could look into her too. He did that now and saw she’d been fucking Mickey again. If she was supposed to be his mother, what was she doing fucking Mickey in the next room?

  “The shower turn cold, hon?”

  He couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t make everything that went on in the bathroom her business. She’d caught him in there once with a pair of her panties, and the next day she’d taken all the locks off the doors. Never said a word, just backed out of the bathroom and the next day the locks were gone.

  A long time later, he’d caught her telling her sister Joyce about the locks, saying he was the one who took them off. She’d winked at him, like it was something they’d agreed on. And she’d told that story to so many people he finally saw she was telling it to him. That’s what they did to you when you let them make agreements you never agreed to.

  Fuck it. He tried to walk past her but she caught his arm. “Leon? You want something to eat in the truck? You can’t go to work with nothing in your stomach, hon.”

  He pulled away when she tried to kiss him. He didn’t want to smell Mickey on her, he didn’t want her to smell Fat Pat’s bedroom on him. “Well,” she said, “you certainly got up on the right side of the bed.” He looked at her a minute, trying to see what she meant by that.

  He reached the front door and turned the handle. He felt her touch his arm again. “What’s the matter, baby?” she said, flirting now. “Cat got your tongue?” He pulled the door open just as the sun broke through the clouds, and for one second he went blind in the sun and thought he’d been shot.

  He was halfway to the truck before what she’d said sunk in. “Cat got your tongue?” What the fuck had she meant by that? He was so pissed off, they were nearly at Holy Redeemer before he noticed he’d left the razor at home.

  Lucien Edwards, Jr., was married to a religious woman. She kept a Bible in her kitchen and prayed while she cooked and cleaned for the destruction of the white race.

  She was a good wife and a good cook, and sometimes she’d start dinner in the middle of the morning. Lucien would walk through her kitchen on Saturday or Sunday and find her bent over her work, sweating, reminding God how, when things had got out of hand, he’d smote the oldest-born child in every house in Egypt.

  “They makin’ prisoners and slaves of your people again, Lord.” She would say that like she knew she was nagging and she was sorry it had to be done. “You warned them, time and again, to let your people alone, but ain’t no white people payin’ attention to nothin’ but Pres’dent Riggin. I know what you got in mind for him, Lord. Oh, you know they need a lesson.…”

  Her name was Minnie Devine Johnson Edwards, and she told God she loved him night and day, and never spoke that way to her husband. She expected he ought to know by now.

  She got up every morning at six o’clock to fix Lucien his lunch. Two sandwiches, an apple, a piece of homemade candy. She laid them out in a symmetrical way in his lunch box, snug, so nothing moved. Then she would close the box and open it once, to see that nothing was creased. She didn’t want him looking at no unmade bed of a lunch after he’d been starin’ into Satan’s eyes all morning.

  “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of m
ine enemies.… Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”

  She handed him his lunch at the door and watched him walk down Lehigh Avenue toward Broad, where he caught the C bus for work. From behind, if he had his hat on like he did this morning, you would of thought he was thirty-five years old. In fact, he was nearly twice that, but there was nothing lame or old in his step.

  Lucien had gone bald early, but she hadn’t cared. His body was still hard, like a young man. She wondered at the way time seemed to pass him by. He never even wore out his shoes like other people did, and there wasn’t a day of his life he went to work against his will.

  Lucien crossed Fifteenth Street, nodded to an old Korean he knew who slept in a doorway there, ignored the Muslims that had taken the Korean’s newsstand away half a year ago.

  The Korean was there six years when the Muslims decided to take the corner. They’d warned him and cussed him, and finally they’d burned him out. At eleven o’clock on a warm Sunday morning in November, two of them got out of a customized black van with a red fist holding a lightning bolt painted on the side, poured a gallon of gasoline over the little wood building, and lit it with a match. The heat melted the custom paint job.

  Three hours later, two different Muslims came by and swept up the ashes, and by Monday afternoon they’d built their own stand, and there wasn’t nothing to put into yourself that you couldn’t buy there but pork.

  Botany 500 had its plant on the corner, so twelve hours a day there were cops around to protect the workers from the neighborhood. The Koreans showed up in the morning right after the cops. They sold Bibles or umbrellas or soft pretzels, and they were gone at night before the police left, and after the fire they never talked to the one who’d moved into the doorway.

  The Muslims let it out they did not want the motherfuckers in their neighborhood—the ones who said that were sometimes from Newark—and Lucien knew what they wanted from the neighborhood wasn’t just money. They wanted to bleed it. They called out to him, “Hey, old brother …” They called him that bullshit, but he knew what they were.