by Pete Dexter
“Yes?” It wasn’t that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She was pretty, but it took him a few seconds to see that.
“I’m Richard Shellburn, Daily Times.” She opened the door for him and smiled. He curled around that smile like he was paper on fire.
“Thank you very much for coming,” she said. He followed her into the living room, where two darker, older women were sitting on the couch, drinking hot chocolate. “You don’t know how good it is to talk to somebody that understands.…”
“I understand,” he said.
The women sized him up, heavy and suspicious. Jeanie Scarpato offered him a chair and then sat down near him on a footstool, hugging her knees, looking up. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, it was like he’d looked into her face and found a perfect fit. She looked like the other half of whatever piece he’d been broken off of.
She had eyes that were harmless and couldn’t make up their mind. And her hair was soft and touched the hollows of her cheeks and neck, and he could see the edges of her ears poking through farther back. And he wanted to touch the hollows too.
He cleared his throat. “I was very sorry to hear about your son,” he said. The bottom rim of her eyes went dewy and teared over. She wiped at the tears and he noticed her hands. Great hands, they just fit her.
“Thank you,” she said.
The women stood up and cleared the cups off the coffee table. The bigger one said, “We’ve got to go now, hon, run some errands.…” Showing themselves a little sweeter for the newspapers, and a minute later they both went out the front door.
She was talking, something about Leon. “It didn’t happen like they said, Mr. Shellburn. I know Leon, he was my boy.”
“I know,” he said, “I know.…”
She was looking down at her hands now, as still and white and fancy as Sunday gloves you might find in a trunk in the attic, and before Shellburn had realized he was doing it, he had reached down and picked them up, and was holding them against his cheek.
Richard Shellburn had knocked on the door in the middle of what was about to be a scene. Joyce had just said everybody had their crosses to bear, like Leon was already old news, and then there he was to save her. He looked older than she expected, but friendlier than his picture. “You don’t know how much good it does to talk to somebody that understands,” she’d said, for her sisters.
“We’re going to go home and do some errands,” Joyce said. She and Joanie waited, and when Jeanie didn’t answer, they left her there in the living room with Richard Shellburn. She noticed he was sweating. He smelled like he’d been drinking. “Something is wrong about what happened to Leon,” she started. “I don’t know how I know, but it didn’t happen like they said.” He was looking down, she was looking up. Vulnerable. He liked her.
“It isn’t money,” she said. “Ever since it happened, everybody says, sue the hospital, sue the construction company, but I need this cleared up for myself.” She stopped to see if he was following her. It was hard to say, but then he said, “I know, I know …” and then he got her hands. He’d held them against his cheek and closed his eyes. She waited him out, and in a minute he sighed and let go.
He took a note pad out of the inside pocket of his coat and found a soft-tip pen in another pocket, and asked about Leon. “What kind of a boy was he?” he said.
Jeanie was glad to see the note pad. There was a moment, while he was holding her hands against his cheek, that the thought had crossed her mind that it might only be somebody who looked like Richard Shellburn. And not even that much.
“He was mechanical,” she said. “Even though his father died when he was a month old, so he never had the kind of help in those things that most boys get. Do you have children, Mr. Shellburn?” She saw he was writing, and it made her feel satisfied, in a way, to think she would be down on paper someplace.
“No,” he said, “I’m not married.”
“Leon’s father was killed on duty,” she said. “He was a Philadelphia police officer, and we had been married eleven months. I didn’t know what I was going to do.…” She stopped herself. This was about Leon now. He was looking up at her, waiting. “Anyway,” she said, “I did what I could. He was always a sickly child, which was why he never got very big, the doctors said. There were big people on both sides of the family.…”
“I noticed your aunts,” he said.
She left them aunts. “Yes. Well, he was like other children, I suppose, except small for his age. And he never liked anybody else around the house, you know. My friends. He never brought any of his little friends by either, even when he got older. He had a girl friend, a lovely girl, but we never met her. She’s a flight attendant for U.S. Air.”
Shellburn was writing words on his pad, sometimes looking at the pad, sometimes looking at her. “Is this helping?” she said. He smiled at her, and she thought he might hold her hands again. He seemed so sad about it.
“And he went into the service, but he didn’t stay in long. They sent him to Korea, I know that, but he got discharged for his nerves.” He looked up. “That’s how I know something happened,” she said. “Leon wasn’t anybody to have things fall on his head. He used to check the street before he went out the door, he was always looking around behind him, over his head, getting up and looking out the window.”
Shellburn said, “He was a bricklayer, first class?”
“It was a month and a half,” she said, “I don’t know. But he was mechanical. He would have picked it up fast, if he wanted to. Anything Leon wanted to, he could pick it up fast.…
“He never finished school, though. With Leon, nothing was ever quite finished. Every time you thought you got close to understanding him, there was still something he held back. Do you know what I mean? You could never say this or that was Leon, not all the way.”
She was quiet for a minute, looking at Shellburn’s pad, wondering how it would all look written down. “Since he died,” she said, “I get the feeling I didn’t know him that well. It makes it lonelier, in a way, but things were beginning to straighten out. He had a lovely girl friend.…”
She saw Shellburn looking around the living room then, and then he spotted Leon’s picture on the table beside the sofa. It wasn’t the handsomest picture she had of him, but it was the one she liked to look at. He was sitting almost sideways from the camera, wearing a suit and a narrow black tie, smiling like he didn’t have a care in the world.
“That one makes his ears look bigger than they were,” she said. She stood up and brought him the picture. “There’s others around. He had nice, even features.” And saying that, she thought of her own.
He gave her the picture back. “Did he live here, with you?”
She said, “With me and my husband.” Then, “Would you like to see his room?” He followed her up the stairs. He walked heavier than he was, she thought, like he was tired. She opened the door to Leon’s room.
Shellburn said, “Did he have a cat?” She shook her head, and then she noticed the smell too.
“Leon didn’t care for animals,” she said. “Even when he was a little boy, he was always frightened of dogs and cats. I used to wish we could of lived in the country and had a few animals around so he could of gotten used to them. I think the country air would have been better for him. There’s so many his age that already died of cancer, from right here in the neighborhood. It must be the air from the refineries, but then, people have to have jobs.…”
She was about to repeat the whole argument over the refineries that was argued every time somebody from the Pocket got cancer, but then she noticed that Richard Shellburn had stopped whatever he was doing and was standing beside Leon’s unmade bed, staring at her. He’d completely changed channels.
“Mr. Shellburn?” she said. He didn’t move. He had the exact complexion of a moth, and he was tired and sad at the same time. Mostly he looked sad. “Mr. Shellburn?” She reached out and touched his arm, and he sat down on the bed. And then he
got her hands again, just like he had downstairs, and she let him have them. He looked so sad. He held her hands against his cheek, and began talking about a place by the water.
“I just came from there,” he said, “this afternoon. There’s a cove where the river empties into the bay, and a meadow above it. I’ve had it a long time, and nobody knows.”
She sat down on the bed next to him. He let go of one of her hands, held onto the other one. She wasn’t sure if this had something to do with Leon or not. “I go there at night sometimes,” he said. “I drink too much and wake up there in the morning, with the birds coming in and things growing everywhere you look.”
He was looking at her now to see if she was following his drift, and she gave him that too. “I know,” she said.
“You do, don’t you?” he said. And he let go of her hand and put his arms around her neck and pulled her into him. He was as soft as her sisters, and she could smell the alcohol in his skin. And it made her happy to sit there with him. Richard Shellburn, holding onto her for comfort. She had been with most kinds of men, but nobody ever acted like this. She didn’t expect many did.
She put her hand down, as much for balance as anything else, and it rested on his leg, just above the knee. She smelled the alcohol and cats, and then they were lying back, and he was showing her the fall of the land by the water with his hand. “The house was going to be on the hill,” he said, “where you could wake up in the morning and see the whole picture.”
“I know,” she said.
“I was just there this morning,” he said. And then he held her a long time, lying on Leon’s bed, and didn’t say anything else. She felt him relax, and then sometime later she felt him pull himself together. Little movements in his shoulders and arms. Not muscles. He didn’t have muscles the way Mickey did, and he didn’t rub her with his dick or try to get his hands up under her skirt or in her blouse. He had an erection, she could see that, but he never tried anything. She thought it was part of how sad he was.
They’d been on the bed half an hour when she felt him moving, and then he sat up and blew air out of his mouth and felt his whiskers, and seemed to forget for a moment that she was there. It happened suddenly, and the skin where she had been against him felt cool and empty. She sat up and put one of her hands on his leg again. “You seem so sad,” she said.
He blew again and stood up. His notebook was on the floor next to the bed, and he picked that up and began looking at the pages on top, flipping back through five or six of them. “I don’t know what I can do yet,” he said, like it was all connected to Leon after all. And then she heard the front door open downstairs, and Mickey walking into the house.
He called up the stairs. “Jeanie?” he said. “You up there?”
Richard Shellburn ran a hand through his hair and straightened his shirt. She walked to the top of the stairs and looked down. Mickey was filthy. “I’m up here with Richard Shellburn,” she said.
She surprised herself, how natural that sounded.
Bird left the Cadillac outside the front window of the flower shop and walked in with his long, thin arm around Mickey’s neck, and dropped all the money in his pockets on the counter, beside Aunt Sophie’s eyeglasses. She’d left them there while she boxed corsages. The schools were having their dances this weekend, and it was busy.
She looked at the money, then she looked at Mickey to see if Bird had stuck up a Purolator truck to get it. Mickey smiled at her and pulled himself loose from Bird. “He go wacko?” she said.
Bird pulled the old lady toward him and kissed her head and her cheeks and her nose, leaving wet marks everywhere he went.
“Sometimes it works,” Mickey told her.
Bird said, “I tried to get Mick to come with me on this horse, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“Nobody listens to crazy men,” she said.
Bird hugged her again and said, “But they oughta. You listen to some of those old bums walkin’ around on the street, talking to themself. They get like that, they can see somethin’.” He picked up some of the money and held it in front of the old woman’s face. “What do you see?” he said.
“That’s very nice,” she said.
“We’re goin’ to Florida,” Bird said. “We’re going to get out of here while all these people are fightin’ each other over who does business. We’ll get suntans.”
“You going to leave your business, Arthur?” she said.
“We’ll let Tony run it,” he said. “I don’t care.…”
“You be better off giving it to the nigger,” she said. “Tony don’t care about the business.”
“Then we’ll give it to the nigger,” he said. The old woman began to smile. Arthur could be so funny.…
Mickey had to see Smilin’ Jack. It was getting dark, and he didn’t want to do it after Jack started to drink. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, but Bird stopped him on the way back to the warehouse.
He stopped him and shook his hand, and embarrassed him. “You always got a place,” he said. “No matter what happens, you always got a place to stay. You’re like my own family.”
The old woman told Arthur to pick up his money off the counter so she could finish her work, and then she walked Mickey back through the flowers to the door that led to the warehouse. She kissed him on the cheek and said, “You looked after Arthur good, Mickey. That’s a nice boy, not to let him do nothin’ crazy.”
She turned on the lights in the warehouse and he walked through the meat cooler, and then out past the truck Bird hadn’t given back, and got in his own truck. He didn’t bother to check the load, it wasn’t going to be his truck long enough to worry about.
The neon light was still on in the window at Moran’s Funeral Home. Mickey found Jack in the viewing room, leaning against a dark pink casket and its contents, an old woman wearing a fluffy sort of dress that just missed matching the color of the box. Jack had loosened his tie and his shoelaces and was drinking a can of Rolling Rock, and he hadn’t heard the front door when Mickey came in.
“Jack?”
He jumped away from the casket and spilled the beer down the front of his suit. “Jesus, God,” he said, “you scared the piss outta me.” He wiped at the beer, then noticed some of it had spilled over the woman in the box. He forgot about himself and took care of her. He wiped at it with his hand and then blew on it and then wiped at it with the handkerchief from his suit coat pocket. “You think this is going to stain?” he said.
Mickey looked at the woman closer. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“This shit’s organdy,” Jack said. “Fuckin’ water stains organdy.…” Mickey waited while Jack worked on the dress. “You want to know the way this business is?” he said. “Right now, if the family walked in here, they’d think I was feelin’ her up.” Jack stood back and took another drink of the beer. “You suppose people are going to smell this shit on her?”
Mickey shrugged. “At an Irish funeral?” Jack thought it over and calmed down. He looked at the spots on the woman’s dress from different angles, then he got down into the casket and blew on it again.
Mickey was waiting for the right moment to bring up the problem with Leon’s funeral, but he saw there wasn’t going to be one. “Jack,” he said, “I got a problem with the money.”
Smilin’ Jack stopped blowing on the old woman’s chest and came out of the casket as stiff as the old woman herself. He turned around and picked up his beer, which he’d put on the rim of the casket while he blew on her. “That’s too bad,” he said.
“It’s nothin’ permanent,” Mickey said. “I was thinkin’, if we could have the service, I could pay you in a couple weeks, a month tops. If I don’t have it by then, I’d sell the truck. You know, it was just a bad time for it to happen.”
Smilin’ Jack finished the beer. “How come it’s a bad time?” he said. “How much money you got?”
“Seven hundred.”
Smilin’ Jack threw the empty can into the wall over the c
asket. “What about the fuckin’ money from the Hollywood?” he said. “There was more than seven hundred they collected there.”
Mickey said, “Things happen. You’ll get your money, but I got to have this funeral on time, and it’s got to be right. The mahogany box, everything. Jeanie’s all fucked up over this.”
Jack said, “That’s nothin’ to me. It’s your fuckin’ woman and your fuckin’ body unless I get paid.” He was shouting.
Mickey closed his eyes. “Don’t get hysterical,” he said. “You ain’t an old woman, and I don’t want my business on the street.”
“You ain’t got no fuckin’ business,” Jack said. He was still shouting. “What you got is somethin’ on the side, right? No, you bet a game. That’s it, you bet a fuckin’ game.…”
“What I did is nothin’ to do with you,” Mickey said. “What you got to worry about is makin’ sure everything is right on Saturday. You’ll get your money.” He stood up and moved closer to him. Smilin’ Jack relaxed and smiled the smile that sucker-punched Mole Ferrell.
“Sure, Mick,” he said. Mickey saw Jack was going to hit him. He wondered how many beers he’d had, fixing up the old woman in the casket. “Sure,” he said.
Mickey said, “Jack, put it out of your head.…”
Which Smilin’ Jack took to mean Mickey was scared. He said, “What? What are you talkin’ about?” He smiled again, then focused on Mickey’s nose and then aimed a right hand that the old woman in the box would have ducked. Smilin’ Jack followed the fist, stumbled, the word “motherfucker” stumbling out too, and Mickey grabbed his collar underneath his ear and kept him from falling. Then he straightened him up and slapped him across the face, harder than he meant to.
“This ain’t the time to panic,” he said. “You’ll get paid in two weeks, a month at the outside.” He held him and said, “You understand me, Jack?”
Jack’s face was red and his eyes were watering and surprised. He shook his head. “Jesus,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Me and the old man ain’t been gettin’ along, I don’t know. Hey, let me get us a beer.”