by Pete Dexter
You do not steal home against Calamity Eisenhower with a twenty-run lead and hope it will be forgotten.
They’d shot the place up and then run down the stairs and out the door, and Calamity, who was last to leave, who could not get enough of the way it looked, Calamity had tripped on his own rabbit’s foot and rolled all the way down.
The captain at South Detectives found him there fifteen minutes later. The detectives from Central were back at Sixth District before they noticed somebody was missing.
They’d suspended Calamity for thirty days without pay and then assigned him to the radio room until his hip mended. When he could walk without a cane they stuck him in AID, where he spent his time sorting out how some kid got drunk and drowned trying to drive his car across a city reservoir.
It was a shameful misuse of talent, and the partner they’d given him, Chuck Arbuckle, was simply a mistake in conception. Eisenhower wondered sometimes how a sperm could swim all that way knowing that’s what he was going to turn into. They were taking the body from Holy Redeemer to the medical examiner’s office at Thirty-fourth and Civic Center, and Arbuckle was going over it again.
“It must of been the ape,” he said, meaning Peets. “He probably never tied that thing up like it was supposed to. The kid comes walking through, thinking of all the money he’s making, the thing moves and splat. We got to spend half the fuckin’ day cleaning up the mess.” Chuck Arbuckle did not like anybody under forty making more money than he did. He hated any doctor without gray hair.
Eisenhower looked across the van at him. Arbuckle said, “I ain’t saying it was his own fault, but you work around sloppy fuckers, you got to take it into consideration. You got to be aware of where trouble is coming from. Anything you do, the first rule is know where the problem is going to come from.”
Arbuckle was thirty-five years old. He’d investigated ninety-four fatal accidents in the last eighteen months, at great personal inconvenience. He got his name in the Daily Times once every two weeks. Eisenhower had been given Arbuckle in February, and in that time he’d noticed that Arbuckle never came away from a fatal accident without finding a lesson in it. It was Arbuckle’s order of things that people deserved what they got, and his job was to figure out why, after they got it.
Arbuckle thought that protected him.
Of course, if he wasn’t the way he was, Eisenhower thought, he’d of seen the foreman was lying. A fifteen-year-old kid would have seen that. In Eisenhower’s experience, when everybody lied it was usually best to leave it alone. Shit, it’s how religions got started. You could tell good people from the lies they told, and he’d liked Peets right away.
Arbuckle turned left off Market Street and went into the University of Pennsylvania area, then around to the back of the M.E.’s building where they accepted deliveries. A kid in hospital clothes was waiting at the door, smoking a cigarette. Arbuckle backed the van up and got out. The body was zipped into a plastic bag, and the kid unzipped it while Arbuckle read to him from the hospital’s certificate of death. “Male Caucasian, twenty-four years old, massive cerebral hemorrhaging …”
When he’d finished that, Arbuckle told him what happened. “The kid was walking by this crane and it came loose or something, and hit him in the back of the head.”
The kid said, “Yeah, well all I do is accept the body.”
Arbuckle shrugged. “It don’t matter to me, pal. Sometimes they like to know.” Another kid in hospital clothes came out of the building, and he and the first kid put Leon Hubbard’s body on a stretcher and wheeled him inside. The doors opened on weight, like at the Acme.
Arbuckle drove the van back to Center City over the Walnut Street Bridge and stopped at a phone booth outside Cavanaugh’s Bar. “You got that woman’s phone number?” he said.
Eisenhower looked through the papers until he found the number Peets had given them for the kid’s parents. “I thought somebody there was going to take care of it,” he said.
Arbuckle shook his head. “Naw, I said we’d do it.” He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to two. “This won’t take a second,” he said. Eisenhower sat in the van and listened. “Mrs. Hubbard?… Oh, I see, but you are the mother of Leon Hubbard, who worked on the construction crew at Holy Redeemer?… No, he’s not exactly in trouble, Mrs. Hubbard …”
Eisenhower cringed. There wasn’t another cop he knew of who liked talking to the relatives. Arbuckle told her about the crane, Eisenhower closed his eyes. He didn’t even know what Arbuckle was talking about, and he’d been there. “No,” Arbuckle was saying, “you’re not listening, ma’am. It didn’t fall on him, the thing on the end hit him in the head. No, I already told you …”
Five minutes later Arbuckle hung up and got back in the van. “That’s it,” he said.
Eisenhower said, “Well, Chuck, you never know.”
Mickey sat on the bed with her until the sisters came. She watched him awhile, crying that way that didn’t make any noise, then she stared at the ceiling, and the tears ran sideways into her hair. He never touched her, something told him not to touch her.
Three years in Jeanie’s house, in her neighborhood. It wasn’t long enough to touch her now. It wasn’t long enough to be part of this. The sisters came together. There were two of them, but it seemed like more. All lipsticked and dressed. One of them had five kids, the other one had a job at Pathmark. He could never remember which was which.
He let them in the front door, and walked behind Joyce up the stairs to Jeanie’s room. Joanie went into the kitchen to fix coffee. Joyce was ten years older than Jeanie and looked like she could have been her mother. Joyce and Joanie both. She sat down where Mickey had been on the bed and Jeanie moved toward her, and they put their arms around each other and rocked back and forth.
Mickey stood in the doorway, feeling like he shouldn’t be watching. He remembered now, Joyce had the job at Pathmark. Her husband was a pressman at the Inquirer. She came over once a month to look at everything in the house and comment on how nice Jeanie’s things were. How even with two incomes, they couldn’t afford a Betamax. And Jeanie would ask if they were going to their place at the shore this summer, and Joyce would remind her it was only a house trailer, and they’d go at it like that for three hours, every month. Then Joyce would leave, and Jeanie would smile at him and shake her head, and say something about how it wasn’t easy being the talented sister. He didn’t know why, but after Joyce left, Mickey always got laid, so you could say Joyce was his favorite sister-in-law.
Joanie brushed past him and came into the bedroom with a tray. A coffeepot, three cups and saucers, a sugar bowl, the box of donuts. She sat in the chair by the window and settled the tray at the foot of the bed. Joyce propped Jeanie up with pillows and got her to try the coffee. Jeanie shook off the donuts, but the sisters insisted. “You got to eat something,” Joanie said.
“She probably just ate lunch,” Mickey said. Jeanie ate about two most afternoons. Nobody in the room seemed to hear him. Joanie held a napkin under the pastry and moved them together toward Jeanie’s mouth. Jeanie took a small bite and began crying, real crying now. The kind you could hear out on the street.
“He was only a baby,” she said. “They said something fell on him.…” The sisters put down their coffee and held her again. Joyce looked over Jeanie’s shoulder and caught Mickey’s eye. He would have been just as welcome down in Society Hill knocking on doors asking to use the bathroom.
The phone rang. Mickey picked it up and moved out of the room to talk. The cord on it, you could take it to the john, except there was already one in there. “Mr. Hubbard?” It was the medical examiner’s office, saying they needed somebody to come over and look at Leon. He told the sisters he had to go, and what he had to do. He didn’t know how to say it, so he just said it. That brought Jeanie around, and she wanted to come too.
“You don’t want to see him now,” Mickey said. And she didn’t. And neither did he.
A lot of it, he figured, depended
on what had fallen on him. He took the Monte Carlo over the South Street Bridge, looking at the Schuylkill River, the trees, kids on bicycles. He was in no hurry to get to Leon, no hurry to get home. If it was a hammer, Leon probably wouldn’t look too bad. That’s what he was hoping for, a hammer, so it wouldn’t look bad. Christ, don’t let it be one of those radios.…
Jeanie would want to know what he looked like, she would want to hold on.
He parked in a lot and walked a block to the M.E.’s office. A doctor took Mickey back into the building to a window cut into a wall. The window was two-foot square, it could of been the complaint department at Sears, except it wasn’t bulletproof. On the other side of the window was an empty stretcher with a pillow at one end. The imprint of somebody’s head was still in the pillow. The doctor shrugged and picked up the telephone.
“Could we have the, uh …”—he looked at his clipboard—“the L. Hubbard crypt please?” There was an impatience in that voice that had taken a while to build, but when the doctor hung up he was calm and easygoing. He took Mickey by the arm and turned him away from the window. “It’ll be just a moment, Mr. Hubbard,” he said.
“Scarpato,” Mickey said. “I’m the stepfather.” When the doctor turned him back around, Leon was there. It took Mickey a second to be sure—it was the first time he’d ever seen him relaxed—but it was Leon. They’d propped his head up to make him look comfortable, and they’d put a blue curtain over his body, so all you could see was the head and part of the chest.
A circle of blood had crusted inside the ear, and some hair was gone from the back of his head, but he looked good.
“It don’t look like he’s even hurt,” Mickey said.
The doctor looked at his clipboard. “The fracture is in back of the head,” he said. He patted himself on the back of the head, to show Mickey where that was. Mickey looked at Leon again. Leon without all that crazy shit floating around in his head, it was just a kid, a skinny kid. Dark hair, skinny neck. It didn’t look very substantial to already be a whole life.
His nose was straight and rounded at the end, just like Jeanie’s. And he had her cheekbones. There wasn’t anything complicated about it now. The shoulders were hollowed out, no muscle to speak of. Women’s shoulders, bird wings. That was what it was. Without all that crazy shit floating around in his head, he looked like an angel.
Mickey saw that that was what Leon must of looked like to Jeanie every day of his life.
“Mr. Hubbard?”
“Scarpato,” he said. He wanted that straight. “I’m not a blood relation.” Mickey signed the papers out in front.
“We can release the body anytime after ten tomorrow morning,” the doctor said. “There hasn’t been any request for a postmortem, unless the family …” Mickey thought about it, shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think they’d want anybody cutting up the body.” He walked back out into fresh air and didn’t know where to go. He bought a hot dog and a Daily Times and sat down on the hood of the Monte Carlo to look at the entries at Keystone. He studied them a minute, then turned to the back of the paper. They ran horses at Keystone in worse shape than Leon. There were worse tracks as far as horses went, but he’d never been to a worse track. Keystone reminded you of prefab housing. He checked the Phillies score, which he didn’t care about, and then he checked Richard Shellburn. “Thomas Haskin lived a quiet life, in a quiet neighborhood. He and his wife and his dog, Hoppy. The wife is gone now, perhaps the neighborhood is too.…” Jeanie loved that shit. Everybody did.
Richard Shellburn was the most famous newspaper columnist in Philadelphia. He was famous for his drinking and for getting pissed off at the government and for standing up for the little guy. People said he used to be a little guy himself and never forgot where he came from.
And he wrote things that made old women cry and things that made street people laugh. With Richard Shellburn, there was always somebody to get pissed off at. Some mornings, Mickey would be delivering and every bar he went into they’d ask him did he read Richard Shellburn yet. When he hadn’t, they’d stick the Daily Times in his face and tell him what Richard Shellburn had said while he read it. “That’s exactly what everybody’s thinkin’,” they’d say. “He’s the only guy knows what it’s like out here.”
Mickey didn’t know why writing down exactly what everybody was thinking was any better than thinking it in the first place. He never said that, though, to anybody. In the neighborhoods you got along by getting along. You might hate the 76ers and get away with it if you lived in South Philly all your life, but nobody wanted to hear that shit from the outside.
Nobody really wanted to hear from the outside at all. If you didn’t like the way things was, that’s what they had Delaware County for. Move there.
Center City was different. You could come and go in Center City, but the neighborhoods belonged to the people who lived there. At least the strong ones did. Tasker, Whitman, Fishtown, Two Street, God’s Pocket. Outsiders walked around those neighborhoods, they stayed out of their bars.
Mickey had heard the coloreds were the same way, but he doubted it. You could get yourself shot or your head split open in North Philadelphia or anyplace west of the Schuylkill, but out there it wasn’t a community project.
There were people in Fishtown and Whitman and the Pocket who never left. Who would as soon get on a bus for Center City as a bus for Cuba, who married each other’s sisters and knew each other’s business. There weren’t many, but they were the hardest cases when an outsider came in.
Jeanie’s family had been like that. She’d told him her father had never seen her dance because the dance school wasn’t in the Pocket. Her sisters had married boys from the neighborhood and settled into the houses of their parents. Joyce took a bus to Pathmark and a month at the shore every year. Joanie was the oldest and never left.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
Jeanie had married two outsiders—him and Leon’s father before him—but she’d never moved out of her house. Only when she was a kid and thought there was something for her in New York, and everybody in the Pocket knew what that had led to. It was a story mothers told to scare their daughters. And as much as her sisters, Jeanie was part of God’s Pocket.
Mickey finished the hot dog and wrapped the Daily Times around the napkin and threw it all in the trash. He gave the old man running the parking lot a buck tip and headed back across the Schuylkill. Once, he thought about Leon. Eight or ten times, he thought about the sisters in his bedroom. Jeanie’s bedroom.
He pulled into the alley that led to the garage in back of the house, looked at the second floor and knew they were still there. He had to see Smilin’ Jack about the arrangements, but there was plenty of time for that. Jack would be over to the funeral parlor all night. Either there or at the Uptown. Mickey walked to the end of the alley, and then back up the street to the front door of his house. Then he crossed the street to the Hollywood. Out of habit, he checked in the window for Leon.
McKenna stood up as soon as he came in, walked to the end of the bar and shook Mickey’s hand. “We’re real sorry, Mick,” he said. “Leon was a good boy.”
There were six other people in the bar, and they all nodded. Mickey sat down at the end near the window and McKenna gave him a Schmidt’s and, out of the occasion, a glass.
The other people in the bar were old, and remembered Leon from a long time ago. They came in at the same time every afternoon, they sat in their same seats, drinking the same drinks. They argued or they kept to themselves, and at suppertime they’d go home and the kids and the working people would take their places.
A woman named Eleanore said, “It don’t make sense to me. How come nobody else got kilt, if it was an accident?” The man next to her shut his eyes. “Somebody ought to do somethin’,” Eleanore said. “The youth is our hope for the future.”
She killed a small glass of beer, stood up and stumbled. She steadied herself and walked
to the bathroom. On the way, she dropped a dollar into a five-gallon jug at the other end of the bar. “We’re collectin’ to bury Leon,” McKenna said. Mickey took a long pull off the beer, McKenna leaned closer.
“I keep hearin’ different things,” he said.
Mickey shook his head. “I don’t know. I think somethin’ dropped on him at the job. I haven’t talked to the cops yet.” He sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to.”
McKenna said, “Well, you know, you’re going to have to put Jeanie’s mind to rest. You know women.…”
He picked a beer out of the cooler and put it in front of Mickey. “You want me to do that for you, Mick? I could call them like as a friend of the family and tell you what they said.” Even McKenna wasn’t going to leave him alone. Mickey felt like going home and sleeping, except nobody was going to be doing any sleeping in that house for a while.
“Naw, it’s all right,” he said. “I better do it. I’ll do it after I see Smilin’ Jack about the arrangements.”
“Saturday’s best,” McKenna said. “Saturday’s always a good day for a funeral. You know, more people can come and nobody’s got to get up and work the next day.” Mickey finished the first beer and half of the second. Eleanore came out of the john and walked past her seat over to Mickey’s end of the bar. She shook his hand and said how sorry she was. “He was always such a nice youngster,” she said. “Tell Jeanie that for me.”
Then she said the same thing eleven more times and McKenna tried to help him out. “Eleanore, go sit down,” he said. She ignored him and stood, boozy and sweet, looking into Mickey’s face. He saw that she was starting to cry. “For Christ’s sake,” McKenna said, “you didn’t even know him.”
She turned on him. “That is a damnable lie. I know all our youngsters.…” She looked back at Mickey. “I knew him,” she said. “And he was a nice youngster. He never broke into nobody’s house in the neighborhood.”
McKenna said, “Eleanore, you going to sit down, or do I pour out your drink?” She looked at him, still holding onto Mickey’s hand. Tears began to run down her old, cracked cheeks. “This is important,” she said.