God's Pocket

by Pete Dexter

“How did he die?”

  “Well, you know, it was common labor,” the man said. “I don’t know if it was malfeasance or not, but he wasn’t the kind of guy to walk around havin’ shit fall on his head, I’ll testify to that in court. So will everybody else down here. We thought maybe you could write somethin’ up about it. You know, the neighborhood takin’ up a collection for his mother and all.”

  Shellburn said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You’re a great man,” the man said. “I mean it. I wouldn’t just fuckin’ say that.”

  The man thanked him for another five minutes.

  Shellburn hung up afterward and looked past William Penn to the city that loved him. Then he finished the column and read it over. Somehow it sounded familiar. But it was finished, and that was what Richard Shellburn asked out of a column.

  To be finished, and get him away from the typewriter for another night.

  When Mickey woke up, there was a family of Texans cutting the parts off houseguests up on the screen, and five hundred screaming colored people in the audience. He’d been dreaming, but it took a while in the noise to remember what it was about.

  Turned Leaf.

  She’d come into the stretch all by herself and the crowd was screaming, and then something had happened. He could hear it from the crowd, but he couldn’t see what it was, and when he opened his eyes they were cutting up houseguests in Texas.

  He wanted to know what had happened to the horse, but the theater had filled up while he’d slept, and it didn’t seem like a good place to sleep anymore. Once you started to think about going back after a dream it was too late anyway. That’s when it got away, when you were trying to figure out how to get it back.

  That’s how it all slipped away.

  He sat up and stretched. The air in the theater was warm and wet and smelled stale. It was two different smells when people were sitting down in a place and when they were moving around. Movie seats kept something from every ass that sat in them too. He looked around to see how close the colored people were, he checked to make sure his wallet was still in his back pocket. He started to get up, then he thought of the situation with Leon and settled back into the seat. There wasn’t anything he wanted to do outside.

  He watched Texas Chain Saw Massacre all the way through, and then the first part of Halloween, which was about a crazy man killing teenage girls. The girls had boyfriends and laughed when they got laid. Mickey had seen a hundred movies where the girls laughed when they got laid. He couldn’t imagine it.

  He walked out of the theater. It was dark outside, beginning to rain. In his whole life nobody had laughed while he was laying them. Could they have made that up in Hollywood and used it for fifty years if it never happened anyplace else?

  An old woman who’d painted her lips half an inch beyond where they stopped watched him from inside the ticket booth. She looked like a baby chicken in an incubator. He wondered who she painted herself up for. He wondered if she’d laughed when she was younger, while she was getting laid. She yawned while he watched her, her mouth turning into a tiny black hole. He could imagine a lizard coming out of there, but not the getting-laid kind of laughing.

  He’d asked an old trucker once how it was with his wife. The trucker had been married forty years, and Mickey had been about twenty-two then, and wondered what the man saw when he looked at his wife. It was at a truck stop outside of Canton, Ohio. He’d said, “I mean, does she still look like she did to you? Or does she look older, or …?”

  The old trucker had studied him across the table, making sure he wasn’t a wiseass, and then he’d told him. “When I look at my wife,” he’d said, “I see an old fuckin’ bag.”

  Mickey had smiled, tried to joke, but the old trucker had kept him right there. “You wonder what she sees when she looks at me, right?”

  Mickey had said, “No, I was just thinkin’…” The old trucker had held up his hand.

  “I don’t know what she sees,” he’d said. “I never asked her. But I don’t sit around the house in my undershorts no more, I can tell you that.”

  The old woman in the ticket booth was staring at him now like she was waiting for him to do something. He knew she would have been afraid to even glance at him on the street, but sitting there behind a pane of glass and a job, she looked at who she wanted. It was funny, the things that made people feel safe.

  He found the Monte Carlo in the parking lot and sat down behind the wheel, still tired. There was nothing he could think of to do, but he started the car and turned south on Seventeenth Street, just to see where it would go.

  It went to the Hollywood Bar.

  It was the most people Mickey had ever seen in the bar on a Monday night, except for the year the Mummers’ Parade fell on a Monday. There was a lot of them, but there wasn’t much noise. When Mickey walked in the door it got even quieter. He stood still and they stood still, and then Eleanore came from the back and put her old arms around him. “He was a good youngster,” she said, and then folded up and fell into his arms. He was surprised at how light she was, there wasn’t anything left to her at all. He held her until McKenna came around from behind the bar and took her off. Eleanore’s eyes rolled up into her head, and she went off to sleep smiling.

  And then everybody in the bar was buying Mickey drinks. Some of them he’d never seen in there before, most of them he’d never talked to. Kids. But they watched him, and who he was talking to, and when it was their turn they came over and brought him a beer and told him Leon was what the neighborhood stood for.

  “Leon didn’t take no shit,” a kid said. “I was a father, that’s what I’d want my kid to be like.”

  “And he was a volunteer,” another one said. “He saved some people in a fire. I know that for a fact, he saved a bunch of people.”

  They said what they’d planned to say and then left as soon as they could, like hospital visits. Mickey shook hands and took the drinks and listened to all the good things people said about Leon and themselves. “All he ever wanted was to work at his job, be let alone,” a man told him. “Leon never bothered nobody in his life. He was just like everybody else in here.”

  Mickey worked his way to the end of the bar where McKenna was standing, trying to settle an argument. “I seen the medals,” somebody was saying. “He was decorated for valor for killin’ I don’t know how many gooks.”

  A man named Ray, who was fifteen years older than Mickey, shook his head no. Ray had worked in the wire room at the Bulletin for thirty years, until it folded, and it was a known fact in God’s Pocket that he had a photographic memory and could remember everything that had ever happened. That, and he knew things nobody else knew. If you asked him what time it was the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, he’d close his eyes a minute and then ask what ship you were talking about. Then he’d say, “The Arizona? The first bomb hit her at eight-eleven a.m., and she sunk fifty-five minutes later in thirty-two feet of water with forty-six men still on board.” How the fuck you going to argue with that?

  Nobody ever caught him making a mistake, except about the Phillies, and ever since that happened Ray wouldn’t talk sports. Now he was shaking his head no. “I remember when Leon left,” he said. “It was June 26, 1976. They weren’t sending anybody to Vietnam in 1976.”

  “I seen the medals.…”

  Ray spilled beer on his coat, shook his head no. McKenna held up his hands. “Maybe it was another year,” he said. “I think I heard him talk about Vietnam once or twice myself.”

  Ray was still shaking his head. The man he was arguing with said, “Then where’d he get them medals? They don’t just give you medals for nothin’ in the Army. You got to see action to get the kind of medals Leon had.…”

  Mickey slipped past Ray, not wanting to get into it, and found a place at the bar in front of McKenna. “A lot of people been askin’ for you, Mick,” he said.

  Mickey shrugged. “I went to a movie.”

  McKenna smiled. “I know,” he said. “The day
my mother died, you know what I did?” Mickey looked at him. “Yeah,” McKenna said, “I went out and banged a Locust Street whore, came home at one o’clock in the morning, and they’re all there waitin’ for me. It was the Christians and lions all over again.”

  “On the day your mother died?”

  McKenna nodded. “Cancer. Everybody thought I’d gone and got drunk out of grief, you know? They were right I felt bad, but that’s not why you get drunk and bang a thirty-dollar whore. You do that ’cause you’ve got to do somethin’.…” He opened a fresh beer and put it on the bar for Mickey, then poured himself a shot of Ancient Age bourbon, and touched the shot glass to the neck of the beer bottle. “All I’m sayin’,” McKenna said, “is that afterward I felt bad, what I’d done. All I’m sayin’ is that you ain’t the only one ever went to the movies when somethin’ happened.”

  Mickey said, “Yeah, but I went to the movies.…”

  McKenna smiled at him. “Whatever, Mick. What fuckin’ difference does it make anyway?” Mickey saw that was true, and felt like he’d got out from under the load, and when the weight came off he noticed himself getting drunk.

  The bar seemed to get drunk with him. Drunk and loud, and then old Ray tried to punch somebody in the face over the dates of America’s involvement in Vietnam, and fell down and hurt his back. Everybody walked over him on the way to the bathrooms, and he lay on the floor talking about the lawsuit he could file against the Hollywood if he was that kind of person to do it.

  And for a couple of hours everybody shut up about Leon, which suited Mickey, and people threw money into the jar by the window to bury him. Once Mickey glanced over to the other end of the bar and noticed a fat girl sitting over a drink with cherries in it, crying. There were people all around her, but he could see she was alone. When he looked again, just before closing time, she was gone.

  He left the car where it was—double-parked in front of the Hollywood— and walked down the street and back up the alley to the garage. The night was dead still, and the sound of the bar was still in his ears, along with the sound of his feet on the cement. He wondered who the fat girl with the cherries in her drink was. It seemed to him that she was the only one that wasn’t part of the ceremony.

  It seemed to him he was thinking about a lot of spooky shit lately that he wasn’t used to thinking about. He made a promise to go back to thinking regular shit tomorrow. He checked the truck before he went into the house. The refrigeration unit was plugged in, the meat was all in place, balanced over the axle. He stood there a minute, wondering where they’d put Leon for the night, and it was the first time since it had happened that he’d felt sorry. Then he closed the truck and the garage, and a light went on in the kitchen.

  He went to the back door and began going through his keys, looking for the one to the door. Mickey kept thirty-five or forty keys on a ring that hung off his belt. He didn’t know exactly how many there were, but he could look at them and tell you what every one of them was for. There were keys from old cars, old trucks, old apartments. Mickey never threw his keys away. The truth was, he’d always tried to keep things from changing.

  He dropped the keys on the steps, picked them up and was going through them again when the door opened. The light washed out over the steps, and one of the sisters was standing in the middle of it, an eclipse. It was hard to see which one it was. He stared up into the light and at the dark and unhappy form in the middle of it. “Hey, Joanie,” he said, finally, “what are you doin’ up?”

  She made a noise and turned back into the house. “Joyce?” He followed her in, locked the door behind him. “It’s the dog-damnest thing how I can’t remember which one of you is which,” he said. She walked to the couch, where there was a blanket and a pillow, and rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?” she said.

  “Closing time,” Mickey said. “What difference does it make, anyway?”

  She looked at him hard, and he saw that he hadn’t said that as well as McKenna had. “You been out drinking? Tonight, you been drinking?” She made a face and lay down on the couch, and covered her eyes. The front of her hair was wrapped around three pink curlers the size of a pig’s leg. She covered her eyes with her arm, but she didn’t go to sleep. Mickey shrugged and headed toward the stairs. “Don’t go in Jeanie’s room,” the sister said. “The doctor had to come twice to give her medicine, and he said she needed a good night’s sleep.”

  He said, “I thought maybe she’d want somebody …”

  “Joyce is up there with her,” the sister said. Mickey looked at her a minute, figuring out who that made her, but she never took her arm off her face. He was straight and sure climbing the stairs, somehow feeling her watching him. He reminded himself to stop thinking of spooky shit tomorrow.

  He went into the bathroom and closed the door. He dropped some paper in the toilet to cover the noise and then urinated against the bowl above it. He brushed his teeth, he looked at himself in the mirror. She’d said, “You been drinking, tonight?” He wondered how bad that was.

  He cracked the door into the bedroom and saw Jeanie’s hair on a pillow. Her face was buried into her sister’s shoulder, and as he stood in the doorway looking down he suddenly realized this sister was awake too, lying there in the dark watching him. He closed the door an inch at a time, turned the light out in the bathroom, and went into Leon’s room to sleep. The bed was narrow and cool, and the springs yawned when he lay down. There was a smell to it too. It took him a minute to figure out what it was. Cats.

  T. D. Davis was the handsomest man in the entire Davenport chain of newspapers, he may have been the handsomest man in Philadelphia. He had an affected Southern accent, gray hair and a boy’s face and spent seventy minutes a day at the Philadelphia Athletic Club, running on a treadmill. T. D. Davis did not like to jog outside.

  No woman on the staff of the Daily Times had ever worked for anybody even close to being as handsome as T. D., or as courtly, and it was the nature of T. D. Davis that once a woman had been on the staff a year, she would no longer dream about handsome men. After a year, cute was all any of them could go. It was the same thing as a kid who gets sick on vodka or gin, and never likes the taste again.

  T. D. came into the office Tuesday morning at eight-fifteen, passing under a five-foot sign that he’d hung at the entrance to the newsroom. It said: THE REPORTER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THIS ROOM.

  It used to say THE REPORTER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT MAN IN THIS ROOM, but T. D. changed it when one of the women reporters complained. Times changed, T. D. changed with them.

  He walked under the sign, past the city desk, and said good morning to Brookie Sutherland. Sutherland was an assistant city editor, brought in six months ago from one of the chain’s papers in Florida. He smiled at T. D. and asked after his family.

  “Ellen’s just fine,” Davis said. “Y’all have to come out for dinner sometime.” T. D. Davis said that a couple of times a month, but Brookie Sutherland never actually got asked out to the Main Line for dinner. Brookie Sutherland thought he was T. D.’s friend.

  Davis went into his office and shut the door. He hung his coat in the closet and sat down behind his desk. There were pictures of his wife and his three children on his desk, a proclamation from the Chamber of Commerce on the wall, thanking him for his service to the business community. There was a picture of T. D. shaking hands with Mayor Bill Green, and a picture of him shaking hands with A. J. Foyt, and pictures with Sammy Snead, Jimmy Hoffa and Lyndon Johnson. Finally, there was a picture of T. D. standing with Jackie Robinson, but it had been torn in half and taped together.

  If you looked at the pictures in the right sequence, you couldn’t help noticing T. D. was getting handsomer all the time.

  A yellow interoffice envelope was sitting in the middle of the desk. Someone had been in there, somebody besides Gertruda, who brought him his mail at nine o’clock every morning. He didn’t like anybody in his office but Gertruda, who was seventy-seven years old and didn’t care about
anything he kept in his desk. The envelope was from Brookie Sutherland. There was a copy of this morning’s Shellburn column and a copy of his anniversary column two years before. Brookie Sutherland had used red ink to underline all the places where the columns were the same, then added it up at the bottom.

  “T. D.—,” the note said, “31 sentences almost the same, six sentences EXACTLY the same, plus similar mood. Staff aware of similarities, as you will recall from memo of last week, when anonymous person or persons went through Shellburn column on dead mummer and underlined the word OLD 52 times, out of 800-word column.

  “Have also done some talking, as per your suggestion, on prospects of having Peter Byrne followed, to the purpose of gathering info, cud be used to fire him. Still think that, under circumstances, it is the way we shud go.—Brookie.”

  Peter Byrne was the Daily Times’ afternoon-shift police reporter, who liked cops better than editors.

  T. D. Davis took off his shoes and put his feet on his desk. He took the two columns that Sutherland had left for him and read them over, but it wasn’t time to hit Richard Shellburn. He’d stopped going out into the street years ago, and that skinny kid—Billy somebody?—had been doing all his legwork, probably writing some of his copy, but it wasn’t his time yet.

  Shellburn was still Shellburn, the man who cared about the common man. He’d spent twenty years getting to be that. Partly writing, mostly just being there on page 2 every day. Brookie Sutherland didn’t understand it but Shellburn could go senile tomorrow and write that same column every day for a year and get away with it.

  Richard Shellburn was the only man on the staff T. D. Davis couldn’t fuck with. At least not yet. T. D. was always thinking about the timing of things.

  Before he’d come to Philadelphia, T. D. had worked in New York, where he’d learned what timing could do to you. He was a sports editor there, and he had one reporter named Jimmy White that he bent in this way or that just to see if it was possible.

  Jimmy White had a sixteen-year-old daughter who was the kind of retarded you didn’t notice until she talked, and somehow that made him scared to death of losing what he had, and scared of being out of town, and anytime T. D. asked for something more out of him, Jimmy White found a way to give it to him.