God's Pocket

by Pete Dexter

  The day Judge Kalquist looked at Shellburn and made his remark about adolescent was the day Shellburn started his investigation of Kalquist. He put his man Billy on it, looking through Kalquist’s trial records. Billy had said, “What is it we’re looking for again?”

  “Anything,” he’d said.

  “How do we know there’s anything there?”

  Richard Shellburn had said, “Judges are lawyers, Billy.” Sitting in the courtroom now, Shellburn knew what Kalquist’s house cost, where his daughters went to college, sentences he’d given everybody with money who ever got convicted in his court. That wasn’t why Shellburn was there, though. Billy would take care of that. Shellburn wanted to know how it was when Pirate John Bonalini got shot in the head. He was fifty-three years old and had never been in a fistfight in his life, but violence held something for Richard Shellburn.

  “What happened,” the prosecutor asked, “when his wife got down the stairs?”

  “By then, the Pirate was gettin’ heavier, you know? Like when I grabbed him, he was sort of stunned but he was still standin’ up, talkin’, but as she come down the stairs he got heavier to hold. He got so heavy that finally I let him go, and he sunk to the floor.”

  “He sunk to the floor,” the prosecutor said.

  “Yessir.”

  “And what did his wife do?”

  “She sunk to the floor also,” he said. “She was, you know, real upset. And me and Eddie ran out, he went one way up the street, I went the other, and I run into the cop car. Oh, yeah, Eddie wanted to cap her too, but I just wanted to get out of there.…”

  Shellburn had almost died once, three years ago driving home from a lecture he’d given to a bunch of women for $1,200. First he’d thrown up, and then it grabbed the middle of his chest, like everything there had seized up, and then it shot into his jaw. He’d stopped his car and opened his door, and somebody had found him there, half in and half out, and they’d called an ambulance.

  He woke up in Jefferson Hospital, and the doctor told him he’d almost died. “I remember,” he’d said.

  But there was something else too, that he couldn’t remember. For a while that night he couldn’t breathe, and once he’d stopped fighting, it wasn’t so bad. It was like boarding up the windows, the things that happened. The house got dark inside, smaller at first, then bigger, and then he seemed to fill it.

  And there was something else, the hum of it, that started moving away from him even before he woke up. Away, or back inside.

  And then the doctor was telling him he’d almost died, and then his boss from the paper—T. D. Davis—was standing there, and Shellburn was shaking and couldn’t talk. There had been something sad in that humming. “Pull yourself together,” T. D. Davis had said.

  Davis didn’t know it, of course, but that’s what boarding up all the windows had been about.

  Charlie Piscoli said, “No, it wasn’t me that capped him. I never capped nobody in my life. The worst I ever done was scare somebody.”

  Judge Kalquist looked at his watch, and then at the prosecutor. “Do you anticipate your questioning of this witness is going to take much longer?”

  “Yessir,” the prosecutor said. “It could go on for quite a while.”

  The judge considered his watch again, blew some air into his cheeks, held it a minute, and then let it go. “It’s three-thirty,” he said finally, as if that was something none of them had ever run into before, “and I think I’ll stop us here, and we’ll get a fresh start early in the morning.”

  It was all right with Shellburn, he had to go to work anyway.

  “I love this city,” he said, “not the sights, the city. I loved her last night, and I love her this morning, before she brushes her teeth, knowing she snores.” He was forcing his voice so the tape recorder on the seat next to him would pick it up.

  “I am used to the feel of her beside me. I know her warmth and her coolness. She has forgiven me, and I have forgiven her, and I am used to the feel of her beside me.…”

  A carload of Puerto Ricans was sitting next to him at the light on the corner of Fifteenth and Callowhill. By the time Shellburn noticed them, they’d heard it, and the ones at the windows were smiling.

  “You right,” one of them said. “I think I fuck her last night too.” He waited in the window, his chin on his hands, smiling. Shellburn had nothing against Puerto Ricans, some of his best columns came out of their neighborhoods. The cops would go in to settle a domestic argument, the Rican would hit a cop, and then they’d call for backup cops because nobody in his right mind is going to shoot a Rican in a Rican neighborhood without a way out. And maybe the Puerto Rican would have a machete, and before they carried him out of there in a plastic bag, six or seven of the cops would go to the hospital.

  And Shellburn would write yes, they were a spirited and proud people, but surely there was some way for eight grown, trained men to handle one out-of-work, drunk and depressed Puerto Rican without shooting him eleven times. He would write about the Puerto Rican’s neighborhood. Burned-out houses, wine bottles, rats, naked children. He would suggest giving Juan Diaz a job instead of shooting him eleven times. Sometimes it won him a Keystone Press Award.

  He didn’t write about the Puerto Ricans often enough to piss off South Philadelphia, or even often enough to piss off the police. Sometime in the week after they killed the Puerto Rican, the cops would do something right, and he’d do a column about that. Billy would turn something up, or Shellburn, if he had to, could build a column around, say, a cop walking around a wino instead of kicking him. He’d call it “The Loneliest Job” or “Down Any Alley.” It worked out because he had a sense of balance.

  The Puerto Ricans were still looking at him. “I hope she don’t have no type of herpes,” the one in the window said. “I am used to the feel of her, you know?”

  The light changed and Shellburn turned right. The Puerto Ricans went straight, headed into North Philadelphia, and the one who had talked to him sat in the window with his chin on his hands and watched him until the fence around the newspaper’s parking lot took Shellburn out of his view.

  He had nothing against Puerto Ricans, but that one deserved it. Shellburn had paid $14,000 for the Continental, and it was the safest place he had in the city.

  He turned the tape recorder off and pointed the Continental into the company parking lot. There was a space with R. SHELLBURN printed across the cement curb in front of it, or there should have been.

  It was the third parking space from the shack where the guard sat. He checked himself. There was E. V. Davenport’s space, and T. D. Davis’s space, and then R. Shellburn. Davenport was the owner of the paper and the chain, and came in only on Thursdays for a meeting with his editors. He sat at the head of a long, shiny table and directed a review of the past week’s papers. The secretaries served tiny sandwiches and radishes cut to resemble flowers. E. V. was in his eighties and interested in style. Last week, for example, he’d outlawed contractions, and memos to that effect went up all over the building.

  T. D. Davis ran the paper day to day and had been editor nine years. His Volvo was parked in its space, but the space next to it, R. Shellburn, was gone. There was a hole where it had been. Six or seven feet wide, at least that deep. Shellburn honked twice and the guard came out of the shack. His name tag said FLOYD. Shellburn couldn’t remember if he knew him or not.

  “Somebody stole my parking place,” Shellburn said. Floyd looked at it a minute and shook his head.

  “I sure didn’t see nobody come in, Mr. Shellburn,” he said. “I had to go up to the garage ’bout twenty minutes ago, they must of come in then.”

  Shellburn said, “What are they going to put in there?”

  The old guard looked again, shook his head. “Maybe you best park over in Mr. Davenport’s place,” he said. “Mr. Davenport don’t come in on Mondays.”

  “It looks like a fucking grave,” Shellburn said.

  “Yessir,” the guard said. “Probabl
y somebody who don’t know no better.”

  Shellburn sighed. “I’ll tell you, Floyd, it’s harder than that to get rid of us. They keep bringing in the replacements, the New Journalists, waves of them, kids out of every dip-shit little paper in the chain, and they come in with their own rules, and they wash in and they wash out, and you and I are still here.” He’d decided he knew the guard.

  Floyd shook his head. “We sure as hell still here, Mr. Shellburn,” he said.

  Shellburn got out of the Continental and looked in the hole. “What if somebody stepped into that in the night?”

  Floyd looked in the hole with him. “T. D. Davis hisself could of got out his car and broke his ass,” he said.

  Shellburn thought it over. “I guess it isn’t hurting anything there,” he said.

  Shellburn’s office was a desk, a chair, a phone and a typewriter. Four hundred square feet with a view of City Hall. He could look out his window and see an oxidized statue of William Penn, anytime he wanted to. There was no carpet on the floor, no pictures, no awards or plaques in gratitude from the Fraternal Order of Police. When it came up, he would say that the only picture he needed was the one out his window.

  William Penn stood on top of City Hall—by law the tallest building in the city—and beyond that was Center City, and beyond that South Philadelphia. History aside, it seemed to him South Philadelphia was where the city started. When he looked at a map, he could see how something must have tipped over there and spilled out in two giant stains, the northeast and northwest parts of the city. The source was South Philly. When it came up, he would say he could look out his window and see the people he wrote for.

  It didn’t come up much, because Shellburn didn’t encourage casual visitors. In his office or his home, for the same reason.

  He sat down in front of a small pile of letters, and began throwing them away. He threw away all the press releases, without opening them. He threw away the Guild notices, the interoffice communications about changes in the VDT system. He threw away letters from Golda and Irene and Henry and Dora, which he recognized from the handwriting. Arthritic, jagged script, it looked like cracked glass. He threw away their letters because he knew what they would say, not because he didn’t appreciate them. They were proof of what he was in the city.

  That left the real mail. Eleven letters, all of them from women, thanking him for some column he’d written in the last couple of weeks, complimenting him on his courage for writing it. People always thought it took courage to write columns. He read the last line or two of each of the letters and tossed them into the wastebasket too.

  He remembered a woman in a purple hat with a piece of net hanging from it onto her face. She’d stood up during the question-and-answer period Saturday night—he couldn’t remember what group it was, but it was the regular $700—and asked if he really read all his mail. Personally.

  “When I stop listening to the people,” he’d said, “then they ought to stop listening to me.” Richard Shellburn had been writing his column at the Daily Times exactly twenty years, and he’d been saying that a long time. Back when he’d started it, it may have even been true.

  He was twenty years into it now, and the people hadn’t said anything he wanted to listen to for at least half that long. And he hadn’t said anything he wanted to listen to in that time either. He picked up the phone and called Billy.

  Billy Deebol was his legman. He’d grown up in the Northeast, and he’d grown up wanting to work for the Daily Times. Shellburn often told people that he didn’t care if Billy never went to Columbia to learn New Journalism, he cared something about the city, which was more than you could say for all the kids they brought in on their way to the Washington Post or the New York Times. Or on their way to other Davenport newspapers, to be city editors.

  If you weren’t enough of an asshole for that yet, Philadelphia was where the chain brought you to learn.

  Billy answered the phone on the second ring. He always answered on the second ring, he was an absolutely reliable kid. Kid. Billy Deebol was thirty-seven years old and two-thirds bald, and he had a wife and six kids of his own.

  Billy had less imagination than the door to the office, but in a strange kind of way he understood what went into Shellburn’s writing. He knew what kind of detail worked and what didn’t, he knew what would fit into eight hundred words. It was funny he’d never thought of writing a column himself. And he hadn’t, Shellburn would have seen it.

  When Richard Shellburn wrote about rats and burned-out shells and naked children in North Philadelphia, it was Billy who went out and saw it. And he was the one who talked to grieving widows and mothers, and he was the one who went over the things that had happened every day in the city and told Shellburn what was out there.

  And the one who typed Shellburn’s copy into the computer system. Shellburn knew he cleaned it up—like when he wrote drunk—but he didn’t know how much. Shellburn never read the paper.

  And Billy never wanted anything for it except to be paid, and to be allowed to do it again. The thing Shellburn liked best about Billy was that he didn’t want anything else. “Billy, my boy,” he said, “what’s going on in the City of Brotherly Love?”

  “It’s a funny thing, Richard,” he said. “Nothing. Nobody killed in three days, nobody important got mugged. There wasn’t even a parade, all weekend long.” Shellburn hated parades and often wrote about them.

  “Nothing?” Shellburn let himself sound disappointed. There was nobody who wouldn’t get lazy if you let them. He didn’t tell him he’d already written half a column for Tuesday, on the subject of his twentieth anniversary at the Daily Times. The phone was quiet for a few seconds. Shellburn said, “Death takes a holiday, huh?”

  “Well,” Billy said, “almost. I mean, there was an accident this morning down at Holy Redeemer. Twenty-four-year-old construction worker named Leon Hubbard was hit by a crane or something.”

  “White or black?”

  “From the address, it has to be white,” Billy said. “Yeah, it’s God’s Pocket.” He waited while Shellburn thought it over.

  “Is it any good?”

  Billy said, “Not that I saw. The guy’s a union bricklayer, lived with his mother. Unless you want to do something with the hospital end, you know, irony or something.”

  “No. The mother crippled? Did he support her?”

  Billy said, “I could run over there tomorrow and take a look if you want me to. I could go over there tonight if you’re hung up for a column.…”

  Shellburn let the line go quiet again. “No,” he said finally, “I’ll scare something up. By tomorrow, they’ll be something better. Don’t worry about it, my boy.”

  “You sure? I could run over there.”

  “Don’t bother. The mother’s probably asleep anyway.” He looked at his watch. Quarter to six. “Take the night off.”

  Billy said, “I’ll make another check with the police before I put you in the system.…”

  Shellburn said, “Whatever you think. I’ll be here.” He hung up and moved over in front of his typewriter. It was an old Royal that weighed as much as a watermelon. Nothing fancy, nothing electric. It was the same typewriter he’d had for twelve years. The rest of the staff of the Daily Times had gone to VDT machines four years ago. The New Journalists sent their words into a computer. Shellburn had refused to learn.

  He’d fought with a managing editor over that, gone all the way to Davenport. T. D. Davis had refused to hear the argument, Shellburn being a city institution and the managing editor being the man who was supposed to deal with him then. T. D. Davis had a chain of command, and he lived by it, although eventually he took over Richard Shellburn himself.

  Shellburn could still see the look on the managing editor’s face. “If Richard Shellburn wants to write with piss in the snow,” the old man had said to the M.E., “you keep him in snow. As long as he writes here, you keep him in snow.…”

  Shellburn began to think of the old man as th
e only real newspaperman on the staff. He began to think the old man was his friend. He went into his office later that week, though, and Davenport thought he was the air-conditioner repairman.

  He put a piece of yellow paper in the typewriter, wrote his name in the corner, straightened the chair. Thinking of piss in the snow, he went in the bathroom and took half a minute in front of the urinal to work up about what you’d get wringing out a sock. Shellburn’s kidneys were in worse shape than his liver.

  He went back into his office and sat in front of the typewriter again. He rewound the tape recorder, and began to switch it on and off, writing down what he’d said on the way to work. He called it “A Love Affair with the City.”

  It started out, “I have written the story of this city for twenty years. Twenty years today …” and was five hundred words deep when the Puerto Rican’s voice came up at him from the desk. “You right. I think I fuck her last night.” It intruded all over again, and Shellburn was almost two hours writing the last three hundred words.

  Just before he finished the phone rang. He picked it up and a voice was shouting at him out of a crowded bar. “Mr. Shellburn? No shit? You answer your own phone?”

  “What can I do for you, pal?” he said. Usually Billy answered his phone. The man on the other end was telling his friends to shut up, that he was talking to Richard Shellburn.

  “Hey look,” he said, “I mean, we’re not important or nothin’, but we thought you ought to know Leon Hubbard was a tragedy, with his mother and all. It’s a human interest story. He come from the Pocket, and we thought maybe you could write somethin’ about him, how it was a tragedy the way he died.”