God's Pocket

by Pete Dexter

  The digital clock in the dashboard built a fragile 10:28 out of straight green lines. Cars were in the street, honking. It was dirty and busy, and he thought about the house in God’s Pocket where they wanted him to go. The place would be narrow and small and dark. The windows would be closed and the mother would be sitting in a dark dress on the couch, so he wouldn’t be able to see her until his eyes adjusted, and when she spoke it would be so soft he’d have to ask her what she’d said, over and over.

  There would be relatives around, big guys, and an argument. Old brothers against young brothers, maybe. Shellburn felt a line of sweat break out at his hairline, and he was suddenly weak. He started the car to get the air conditioning on, noticed his hands shaking.

  He pulled into the street and headed for Lombard Street, where he turned west and took it all the way to Twenty-fifth. He could go north on Twenty-fifth and be inside the house in three minutes. The clock said 10:50, and Shellburn stopped at Twenty-fifth Street, then went past it, crossed the river on the South Street Bridge and got on the Expressway South.

  He drove out past the refineries and the airport, and then got on I-95. He began to feel better. He took the Continental up to eighty—in that car you couldn’t tell eighty from forty—and put the radio on. He would take care of the house in God’s Pocket when he got back, or it would take care of itself.

  He hit a button and rolled the window down a few inches, and then turned the radio up to cover the noise. The radio had been set to WWDB-FM talk radio. Listeners called in to report their feelings about Mayor Green and abortions—speaking of the mayor—and capital punishment.

  The subject of the day, however, was a week-old wolf-pack killing, in which eight or ten black kids stomped an eighteen-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania to death on Chestnut Street at five o’clock in the afternoon to steal his wallet. Some of the callers were for it and some were against it. Six of them reported that most black crime was directed against other blacks, four callers said there wasn’t anything else for inner-city children to do and predicted a long, hot summer.

  On the other side, a lot of people wanted public executions, and there were stories about things that had happened to elderly parents. They said getting old made you a target in the city.

  Shellburn drove past Wilmington and found 213 South. The land changed, and the voices from the city faded and broke with static. A woman called in and began to cry. She was drunk, he thought. He wondered if she was as drunk as he was. The vodka was coming out of his skin now, and he turned the air conditioner off because the air on the sweat was chilling him.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman on the radio said, “I’m all alone.…” He closed his eyes and could see her, she was one of his people too. “But the thing I want to say …”

  The man who answered the calls and told the people what he thought said, “Madam, is it possible you have been imbibing this morning? You sound like you need to sleep it off.”

  “I’m not drunk,” the woman said, and Shellburn could see her straightening in her chair. “Please, what I wanted to say …” Shellburn crossed the little bridge over the Bohemia River, made a right turn over another, smaller bridge.

  “We’ve got people waiting, madam.…”

  “Let her finish,” Shellburn said. The man who answered the calls and told the people what he thought had read the week-old account of the wolf-pack killing from the Daily Times. That was how people got on the subject of public executions, and things that happened to their mothers, and the lack of job opportunities for inner-city youth, and how Frank Rizzo had tried to genocide them anyway. Genocide was a big word on the street this year. And in the middle of all the words on the street, it seemed to Shellburn that the man on the radio had somehow stumbled across the real thing—a drunk old woman who wanted to make her statement before she slid off into the other side, where she knew nobody would listen.

  The man on the radio was cutting her off. “Please,” she said again. The man on the radio sighed.

  “All right, madam, say it. We’ve got people waiting.”

  She gathered herself. “Thank you,” she said. “What I wanted to say …” Shellburn felt himself tense. “What I wanted to say was …” Then, “I can’t remember now.”

  Shellburn came to a dirt road that looked like a tunnel hidden in trees. He followed it up and down two hills, and then around a long left-hand turn. Then there was one more hill, and at the top of that the trees disappeared and the land opened up and it was like the first day of the world. He parked at the side of the road. From there, he could see the Bohemia, and the cove where it emptied into the Elk River and ran into the Chesapeake Bay. It was a quarter mile from the road to the water, a long, sloping meadow that ended in a hundred feet of thick trees. Beyond that was the cove, a mile and half around the lip.

  There were a few sails on the water, and beyond them, two or three miles, was another meadow like Shellburn’s on the other side. There were horses over there, sometimes cattle, and in the morning you could see deer on both sides.

  Shellburn got out of the car and walked fifty yards into the meadow. That was where the house was going to be. The ground rolled there and began its long, easy drop to the water. From there you could look out a window and watch the storms coming in over the water. Or you could watch the geese coming in, so thick sometimes they could have been a storm too.

  He’d bought the meadow two months before he’d married Stevey, and never told her. He’d been forty-five years old, and he’d had a picture of the place in his head a long time. The picture had a house in it, a family.

  At the time, of course, Stevey was planning a life around the impact their cultural juxtaposition would have on Center City society, it never came up that he had a picture in his head of her pregnant and isolated, living on a hill in Maryland overlooking the Chesapeake Bay.

  He didn’t know how long he’d had the picture, he thought it must have been there a long time before he knew what it was—like that feeling you’ve forgotten something—because when he saw it, he recognized it. He’d bought twenty-one acres for $85,000, everything he had, and instead of worrying about the money—Shellburn always worried about money—he took the perfect fit of the price and his bank account for a sign.

  And he’d never even told her. They were married in a 230-year-old church and moved into a townhouse in Society Hill, where the front door was four feet from the street, and where she watered one skinny-ass little tree growing out of a hole in the sidewalk next to a fire hydrant.

  And when it was over a few months later—over except for the lawyers—he would get himself drunk and lonely at some Center City bar and wake up in the morning, parked where he was now. He wouldn’t remember driving down, and he’d sit there in the early sun, watching the water birds come in like storms.

  He walked farther into the meadow, watching where he put his feet. There were holes in the ground, covered with dried grass, and there were rabbit nests.

  He’d thought about selling the property. A year after he’d bought it a developer had offered him $140,000, and he knew then he ought to take the money before he wrapped himself around a truck some night trying to get there. He knew he ought to take the money because he’d never build a house there. He’d gone past that turn.

  He didn’t sell the meadow. Not for $140,000, not for the quarter million they’d offered him last year. Not after the marriage ended, not after he’d nearly died in the hospital.

  He had a picture in his head, and in the picture he was safe all the time.

  He came to the bottom of the meadow, and climbed over a barbed-wire fence that separated it from the woods. A long time ago the land had been a cow pasture. He began to sweat again, and he felt shaky and sick and poisoned. He stopped for a moment and it passed.

  The last hundred feet to the water was grown over with thick underbrush, and everything that grew there had thorns or stickers and was four times as wiry as it looked. Shellburn walked carefully, lif
ting his feet straight up and down, pushing the briers down and away with his hands, then stepping on them to get past. The briers rose with his feet and then clung to his pants legs and made tearing sounds as he made his way through. When that happened, something in him always wanted to run.

  But he was slow and steady, and pointed for the water. Then he ducked under the lower branches of an oak tree and was there. The tree was 150 years old, so thick you couldn’t get your arms around it. You might as well try to hug your house. The mouth of the tree took the last six feet of ground before the bank dropped down to the beach. Shellburn used a branch to ease himself down onto the round, gray rocks that were the floor there. Then he looked back at the bank where the tide had eaten the ground from underneath the old oak and had left half its root system hanging in the air.

  The tree was tilted about thirty degrees toward the water, holding on. Shellburn hadn’t noticed it until after the heart attack, when he was thirty degrees toward the water himself.

  He admired the tree until his breathing got easier. The wind off the water was cool, and he walked north until the beach changed from rocks to sand, and then found a place to sit where the bank fit his back and held his head, and it was no work or pain to look out over his cove. He closed his eyes and the picture was still there—he could feel it the same way he could feel the cove—and for a long time what he was and what he might have been were as close as Shellburn could ever get them.

  And it was late afternoon before he knocked on Jeanie Scarpato’s door in God’s Pocket.

  Mickey got up early while the house was still quiet. He didn’t want her to see him in Leon’s bed again. When he’d cleaned up and gone downstairs, though, Jeanie and her sisters were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and working over a new box of donuts. There was a beer can on the sink, where he’d left it when he’d come in last night. He’d had maybe a six-pack to help him sleep.

  He walked in there with the beer can and the sisters and patted Jeanie on the shoulder. She reached up and touched his hand, for just a second, and then let her hand fall back into her lap. Like it was a pain there that came and went before it mattered.

  “You all right this morning, Jeanie? You sleep all right?”

  The sisters gave each other the now-famous look over the table. “Jeanie?”

  “It just seems like it’s been so long,” she said. He could barely hear her. “Like it happened two years ago and it’s still going on.”

  “It’ll start going fast again,” he said. “As soon as it’s taken care of and we did what we could.” And it was like saying it to an empty room. It sounded like that too, like he was telling it to himself, so he’d believe it.

  He looked at the curve of her head, and how the hair seemed to get blonder where it touched her skin, and for the first time he thought he might not be able to get her back. Not even after the sisters moved out and Leon was in the ground. And then for a few seconds, he couldn’t breathe.

  He took the truck around to half a dozen regular stops and only got rid of half of the meat that Bird’s nephew had cut before the electricity went out. If he didn’t find somebody with a restaurant, he was going to lose most of it. He’d have to get rid of it before it went bad, one way or the other. Anywhere meat went bad, it never smelled the same. He should of been pissed at Bird—anybody with eyes could see he couldn’t handle that kind of a load—but when he thought about Bird, all he could see was the old woman leading him home. He’d keep the meat seven days if the truck stayed cold. Seven days, and then he’d take it over to the Women’s S.P.C.A. Or maybe he’d find somebody in Jersey.

  He made his stops and then he went to the bank, and began thinking about the horse. There was $868 in his account. He took it in fifties, all except what couldn’t go into fifties. The teller’s name was Miss Olby, and she was plainly inconvenienced.

  Back in the truck, he reached up under the seat and found McKenna’s bag. He put the fifties on top of the money from the Hollywood and the Uptown, and it wouldn’t fit into his pocket. He went back.

  The bank had velvet ropes in the lobby, with the idea that you were supposed to stand in line between the ropes until it was your turn to see a teller. The way you knew when a teller was available was that she would turn on a light over her cage. Which is all to say it was not Mickey’s idea to go back to Miss Olby to turn the rest of the money into fifties too. But when he got to the front of the line, her light went on and he put the stacked bills in front of her and asked for twenty-eight more fifty-dollar bills.

  He had seen people take house floods better. She sighed, she checked her drawer, and then she had to get up off her stool, and go clear to the next cage for more fifties. “Usually we don’t do this,” she said.

  He wondered if it was some kind of sign he should leave the money alone, that something would go wrong at Keystone. He decided it couldn’t be, though. If you waited for a friendly bank teller to get your money out, the banks would have it forever.

  He found Bird dressed in a suit with somebody else’s shoulders, sitting behind the wheel of the yellow Cadillac in front of the flower shop. Mickey parked the truck inside and said hello to Aunt Sophie, who picked him a carnation off the counter and asked him to keep an eye on Bird.

  Bird had the car running and the air conditioner on. The windows were open, the radio was playing, and he was sitting there in the middle of it, staring at the racing form. Mickey slid into the front seat and looked to see what keeping an eye on him was going to take. “How you doin’?” he said.

  Bird handed the form to Mickey, dropped the car into gear and drove sixty miles an hour down South Street, slamming over potholes. Mickey put his eyes behind the racing form so he wouldn’t have to see it coming when they died.

  Bird got on I-95 at Girard and drove up through North Philadelphia, and then out past the Northeast. To get an idea how big Philadelphia was, all you had to do was go to the Northeast and try to find a street sign. Going to the Northeast was like going to the hospital, you forget all the little things they do to you, you forget how slow time moves until you’re there again.

  The road was six lanes—three each way—divided by a concrete wall. Bird slowed down to forty miles an hour and drove all the way to the Street Road exit in the general area of the middle lane. About halfway there he said, “I took care of that matter for you, Mickey.”

  Mickey looked at him, waited. “You remember,” Bird said, “that matter at Holy Redeemer with Leon.”

  “I remember.”

  “Right. I got some people lookin’ into that right now. I ought to have somethin’ for you to tell Jeanie by the time we go home, if you want.” He gave Mickey a smile straight from Byberry.

  Bird did the driveway into Keystone at sixty miles an hour. He threw the Cadillac into Park still going around thirty and stopped one yard short of a kid in a red vest and a black tie who, with the confidence of youth, obviously thought he was in control of the valet parking traffic. The Cadillac would have stopped on top of the boy, but in the end he’d run. The car made the last noise you hear before somebody you live with tosses their cookies. Bird got out, handed the kid in the red vest a five-dollar bill and then bought a program, all in one thought. “Be careful of it,” Bird said to the kid, “it’s new.”

  They took the escalator up to the reserved seats, which Bird paid for. Then Bird bought a couple of large beers in paper cups and they sat down to wait. It was a wait Mickey wouldn’t have minded at another track. At another track he would have gone down to the paddock and looked at horses or trainers, sometimes you could see something that would tell you what was going on inside the horse. That was the only kind of spooky shit Mickey didn’t mind thinking. Something about Keystone, though, made you hate to move.

  Bird spread the racing form over the seats in front of him and studied the seventh race. The two women sitting in those seats turned around and looked at Mickey in a way he was getting used to. Bird read the racing form the same way rich kids arrang
ed cocaine in lines on their mirrors, scared shitless that something was going to blow away from him.

  “It’s the same as it was last night,” Mickey said. Bird didn’t hear him. His finger was following a race that the only other New York horse in the race had run a year ago, as a two-year-old. Mickey had seen the race and thrown it out. He was the kind of handicapper who could throw a race out and not think about it again. Bird wasn’t.

  “I don’t like this other filly, Mick,” he said. He slid the form over to Mickey, keeping his finger on the race that worried him. “She’s come down a long ways in class.”

  Mickey said, “Yes, she did.”

  Bird went over it again, that race and a couple of others. The filly hadn’t run in half a year. “I don’t like her,” he said again. “She’d got a decent workout last week.…”

  Mickey shrugged. “Put her on the bottom of an exacta,” he said. He opened his own form and looked over the fifth race. Then he got up, bet a ten on a fourteen-year-old horse named Lexington Park, got a couple more beers and watched the race on a television set. He’d bet the same ten dollars on the same horse in Chicago a long time ago, and he’d won then and he almost won now. This time, though, the favorite got him in the last couple of strides.

  Mickey sat down beside Bird. “That’s somethin’, you know it?” he said. Bird looked up from his racing form and the seventh race.

  “What?”

  “That old horse went out and almost stole that race,” Mickey said. He pointed out to the track, where they were bringing the old gelding back, his neck and mouth foaming. You could see the heat coming off his back. Bird looked for half a second, then put his nose back in the seventh race.

  “This horse,” he said finally, “this horse can beat Turned Leaf.”

  Mickey said, “Your nerves are eatin’ your brain, Bird. Lookit, you got a couple beers sittin’ on the floor. Drink a beer, relax, give yourself a chance.…”