God's Pocket

by Pete Dexter

  Mickey was watching Stretch bebopping in the window of his truck and didn’t notice the woman and her furniture until he was almost on top of her. He hit a chair, missed a chair, jumped over a television set. Then he had to step on a bed, to keep from falling, and on the other side of it there was a sofa with cigarette burns in the cushions. He stepped on that too, and the woman began to cry “Stop” over and over. He didn’t know who she meant, but he knew how she felt.

  Jumping the television set killed half of what he had left. He thought of Jeanie and what was in the back of the truck, and pushed himself up the street. He thought of Stretch going into a parking lot somewhere and opening it up. The woman with the furniture was still crying.

  He moved into the street. There was less to run into there. His lungs seemed to be cramping up. They wouldn’t hold what they would before, anyway. He wondered if he had that glazed look yet that he’d seen on joggers.

  The streets went by. Reed, Wharton, Federal. There was a stoplight at Washington, and that’s where Stretch saw him. He’d glanced into the outside mirror, and then he’d turned around and looked out the window. Mickey was soaked with sweat, his eyes were burning, his hands were balled into fists. He wanted to tell him, “I ain’t mad, I’m runnin’,” but Stretch ran the red light to get away.

  Mickey passed the bus and crossed Washington. The people inside looked down at him, smiling. It took seventy-five cents and a window seat to look down on him then, but it could of been anybody else. It was just a matter of when it was your turn. He was closed off now from the noises of the street, all he could hear was his own noises. And they sounded like a choir, singing, “On the road again …” Just those words, over and over. He could not make them sing the rest of the song.

  Stretch stopped at Carpenter and put his head out the window again. He was in back of a tow truck now, and Mickey closed the distance again. At Christian he was a half a block away, at Catherine a hundred yards. When the truck stopped at Fitzwater, he could almost touch it. The street began to sway. Mickey saw Stretch blowing the horn at the tow truck, looking back like he was cornered. Not panicked, just beat and ready to give up. Then the tow truck moved and Mickey stumbled.

  He didn’t try to stop the fall, he’d lost the feeling in his legs anyway. He covered his head with his arms and rolled. The street was softer than it looked. He hit something hard—there was a crash and a shattering sound, almost like glass breaking—and then he stopped.

  He didn’t try to move, he didn’t even open his eyes. He lay in the street, and the voices were singing “Oh, Jeanie …” over and over, instead of “On the road again.”

  A minute passed, nobody came. He opened his eyes and saw that he was lying against a tire. The traffic had stopped. He sat up, looking around. The tire was bald and it belonged to an old Ford station wagon. He grabbed a door handle and pulled himself up. His legs were trembling, he still couldn’t breathe and he felt sick to his stomach.

  There was a kid in the station wagon, sitting in a car seat in the back. He was a cute kid, four or five years old, blond. He looked at Mickey for half a minute and began to scream.

  Someplace else there was screaming too. The knees of his pants were torn and he’d scraped the skin off his elbow, the same one he’d separated falling over Leon. Alive, Leon was a pain in the ass; dead, he was killing him. There was another scream up ahead.

  Mickey stood up straight enough to see over the traffic, which was stopped now. He’d thought at first they’d stopped for him, but when he saw he wasn’t run over or dying, he knew that didn’t make sense. He saw his truck then. It took a minute to recognize it because he’d never looked at it from underneath before. It was lying on its side on Fitzwater Street. People were closing in on it from all over. The back was caved in and there was a bus stopped near it on the sidewalk, pointed almost the same direction. The corner of the bus where the side met the front was folded in on itself and flat. One of the truck tires was still moving.

  He took a step and almost fell. His legs were on their own. He tried again, holding onto parked cars, and made his way fifty or sixty feet closer to the accident.

  He was that far when he saw the back door of the truck had come open in the accident. People were passing him from behind, trying to get closer. He moved a step at a time. Sides of beef were scattered all over the street. People were dragging them into their houses, trying to get them into their cars. There was a fist-fight starting over by the bus. “This is my motherfuckin’ meat,” one of them said. The other one said, “I got here the same time as you,” and threw a right hand from nine feet away.

  Mickey watched them circle each other, and the meat, neither one of them letting the other one get closer to it. They threw jabs and right hands, but they never got close enough to land. “Motherfucker, you’re going to get killed,” one of them said.

  Mickey felt himself coming back. His breathing smoothed out, it looked like he wasn’t going to throw up. He heard sirens, a long way off, and honking from the direction he had come. He hit the front of his thighs, trying to get them to stop shaking.

  He took a few more steps forward, until he was standing in the intersection. From there, he could see all of it. He could see fights starting in two other places, he could see old Stretch sitting against a wall across the street, bleeding from the head, staring at a circle of people—mostly kids—right in front of him. The screaming was coming from there.

  Mickey took a step, and just then a girl who had been standing in the circle broke out, covering her mouth with her hand, and ran up the sidewalk. The circle broke and then mended, but in the second that took, Mickey saw what was inside it.

  One of them said, “Where the fuck did he think he was, in a suit like that?”

  It took the police about fifteen minutes to come, and by the time they did the only meat left on the street was Leon. They came in three cars and pushed people away from the body, and then one of them, a little one with a clipboard, walked around the circle of people, asking if anybody had seen which vehicle had hit the victim, or knew who he was. He looked like one of the cops come by to see Jeanie.

  Nobody knew nobody that wore clothes like that. The bus driver said he wasn’t talking to nobody until he’d talked to his union rep, and Stretch was too dazed to talk. The little cop looked around and then walked right to the corner where Mickey was standing, until he was close enough so Mickey could read his name tag. ARBUCKLE. He looked like an Arbuckle.

  The police put a blanket over the body, but nobody moved it, even after the wagon showed up. The blanket was blue and yellow, and Mickey could see the words “Bull’s-eye” sewed into one side. A horse blanket. He thought of Jeanie again, finding out all the places that body had been, and then he turned around and walked the mile and a half back to Little Eddie’s Automotive Emporium.

  Little Eddie knew trouble when he saw it. He was sitting outside on a Mustang, watching Mickey come the last block, smiling like he had a mouth full of broken glass. Mickey sat down next to him on the car.

  “Where’s the truck?” Little Eddie said.

  “Wrecked,” Mickey said.

  Little Eddie nodded. “Where’s Stretch?”

  “Hospital, I guess.”

  Little Eddie gave him the broken-glass smile again, thinking maybe Mickey had put him there. “That’s the last one I ever hire,” he said. Then, “You got insurance?” Mickey stared at him. “Use my phone, if you want to call the company.”

  Mickey looked at his elbow. It was a mess. “I told you,” he said, “you could start it, but I said don’t take it nowhere.”

  Little Eddie put out his hands. “Look, what can I do? In this business, everybody in the world’s tryin’ to get over on you. I got to try before I buy.…”

  “You said seven and a half,” Mickey said. “Let’s go inside, I’ll sign over the title.”

  “I can’t buy somethin’ wrecked,” Little Eddie said. “I’d like to help you out, Mickey, but I got a business to run, w
hat’s left of one.”

  Mickey said. “You already bought it.” He stood up and started for the office. Little Eddie followed him, breathing hard, sweating. Mickey signed over the title. “You better make it eight,” he said. “You said seven and a half or eight, and you’re probably going to get eleven, twelve out of your insurance.”

  “That takes a long time,” Eddie said. “Time is money. I got to put out seven and a half for two, three months, that costs me.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a checkbook.

  “Eight,” Mickey said.

  “Plus, the insurance company is going to raise up my rates,” Little Eddie said. “You know you don’t get over on the insurance company. They’ll get their seven and a half back out of me, and Christ knows what they’ll want for Stretch.”

  Mickey stared at him. “Seven and a half?” Little Eddie said.

  Mickey said, “I don’t care,” and Little Eddie wrote the numbers. He handed him the check and put the title back in the drawer with the checkbook.

  “Tell you the truth,” he said, “you had me for eight, Mick, if you wanted to be a prick about it.…”

  Mickey got a bus to Broad Street and cashed the check. He took it all in hundreds, The teller looked him over, torn and bloody, and made him wait while she called Little Eddie. She put the phone back in the cradle and handed it over, seventy-five one-hundred-dollar bills. Against her better judgment.

  He caught a cab back to the Pocket. Cab rates in Philly stayed even with Locust Street pussy. One went up, the other went up. The chances of catching a social disease was about the same too. On the way there he squeezed his legs, trying to get some feeling back into them. The trouble wasn’t that they didn’t have any feeling when he squeezed them, though, it was that they went numb when he used them. “Fuck it,” he said.

  The cabdriver turned around. “The Pocket, right?” he said. The cab let him out in front of Moran’s Funeral Home, the bill was seven dollars. “I can’t take no hundred,” the driver said.

  “It just come out of the bank,” Mickey said.

  The driver shook his head. “I don’t have that kinda change. The fuckin’ places I drive to, they ain’t even sent in missionaries yet.”

  Mickey went through his pockets and found a ten. “Keep it,” he said. He crawled out of the cab on dead legs and walked through the gate to see Smilin’ Jack.

  The waiting room was empty again. Mickey walked into the back, past the viewing room and the display room and the office. He heard yelling upstairs. “This is my fuckin’ business now. You had yours.…” Then, “What the fuck do you want?”

  The voice got louder, and then the door to the stairs opened and Jack was standing in the hallway, a yard away, red-faced, looking eight directions at once. “Mick,” he said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “It’s cause you were yellin’ at your father,” he said.

  Jack looked back up the stairway and shook his head. “I hope they put me outta my misery before that happens,” he said. “How you been?”

  “I been all right,” Mickey said.

  Jack said, “Lissen, I’m sorry about the misunderstanding. You know, I got problems too. Nobody realizes that. They think because you’re a professional, you don’t got problems.”

  “I realize you got problems,” Mickey said.

  “Hey, bygones are bygones, right? That’s the whole principle of the business.” He closed the door to upstairs, and that was bygones too. “C’mon in the office,” he said. “You want a beer?”

  Mickey shook his head. Smilin’ Jack sat down at his desk and noticed Mickey’s clothes. “What happened to you?” he said. “You okay?”

  Mickey took the roll of hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket and counted sixty of them on the desk. It was dead quiet in the office. He pushed the money across the desk and left it for Jack Moran to pick up. He didn’t want to hand it to him and touch his skin. In his whole life Mickey’d never disrespected old Daniel. “Six thousand,” Mickey said. “That’s for the mahogany box and the funeral and everything else, right?”

  Smilin’ Jack picked up the stack of bills and counted them, using a little sponge on his desk to wet his thumb. When he finished, he straightened up the stack. “Where is the deceased?” he said.

  Mickey rubbed his elbow. “They got him at the morgue again,” he said. He told them there’d been another accident. Smilin’ Jack nodded like it was something happened all the time.

  “When it rains it pours,” he said.

  “Yeah, well they got him down there, but they probably don’t know who he is,” Mickey said. “He wasn’t carrying no identification.” Jack scratched his head. Mickey said, “Can we still take care of it tomorrow? I want to get it over.”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “This never come up before. Let me call down there and find out.” He reached for the phone, and Mickey stood up. “Sit down, I can tell you in a minute,” Jack said.

  “I’ll give you a call tonight,” Mickey said. He didn’t want to be in the room when Jack called about Leon. He just wanted to get the boy in the ground. Even if Jeanie was gone, he wanted to get the boy buried. He wanted to be past Leon, so he could look up and not see him there waiting for him anymore.

  The paramedic was a thirty-seven-year-old Vietnam veteran named Michael Cooper who took tranquilizers to get through the morning and sleeping pills to get through the night. He smoked a little dope to kill the time in between, which is what he’d been doing when the call came in to go to Third and Fitzwater. He’d gone over in the ambulance, hanging out the window to feel the wind pressing on his face. “I get off on the weather,” he said to the driver.

  The driver looked at him without answering.

  “You take this shit too serious,” he said to the driver, who was twenty-three years old. “When you been around it enough, you see it don’t mean nothin’.” The driver looked straight ahead. “You weren’t in Nam, were you?” Michael Cooper said. “No, you’re too young. Man, when you’ve seen some dude’s supposed to be running things eating cinnamon rolls next to a stack of bodies, you know you ain’t supposed to take it serious.”

  The driver said, “I get sick to my fuckin’ stomach, listenin’ to this Nam shit. Nam-this, Nam-that, seem like every fuckin’ time I turn around, there’s some motherfucker tellin’ me about Nam like there ain’t nobody else ever done nothin’.” He spit out his window.

  Cooper smiled at him. “You got a lot of anger, bro,” he said.

  The driver said, “Fuck,” and Cooper stuck his head back out the window and watched people on the street turning to look as they went past. Two blocks from the accident the traffic stopped dead. The driver pulled up onto the sidewalk and drove half a block farther, but there were cars parked there too, so Cooper got out and ran. The sidewalk seemed to float up to his feet.

  By the time he got to the corner, the police were pushing back the crowd. One of the cops had a clipboard. Cooper asked him, “What we got, man?”

  “Where the fuck have you guys been?” the cop said. The cop didn’t wait for an answer. “There’s one against the wall over there,” he said, pointing to a thin black man sitting on the sidewalk, holding a cloth against his head, “and there’s one on the street. I think he’s dead.”

  Cooper walked through the accident, smelling the street, noticing the texture of the road, the patterns of the windows against the brick houses. He didn’t look at the body until he was next to it, and then he only looked a little while.

  He touched the hands and the skin on the cheek. The cheek was smooth and cold, and there was powder on his fingers where he’d touched it. Cooper walked away from the body and threw up into the drain on the corner. He’d seen dead people, stacks of them, but he never went to funerals. You saw them like that, dressed up and drained and filled and powdered, you had to consider it. If you didn’t walk away from it when it happened, you were stuck with it.

  “You’ll get used to it.” It was the cop again, sn
uck up behind him, smiling. ARBUCKLE the name tag said. “The first few, it bothered me too,” he said. “I never threw up like you did, but it takes a while.”

  Cooper’s eyes watered and his nose stung. “He’s dead, right?” the cop said. “I thought he was dead, but it ain’t official until you say it.”

  “He’s dead,” Cooper said. And then he walked over to the black man sitting against the wall to look at his head.

  Arbuckle stood near the vomit, waiting for somebody to show it to. Somebody who was a cop. Too bad Eisenhower took the day off, he’d of loved it. A kid doctor who couldn’t stand to see nobody dead. He thought Eisenhower would have loved it, but with him you could never be sure. He wasn’t always what the stories about him said. Arbuckle never said it, but he was glad they’d put through Eisenhower’s transfer back to detectives. He hoped his new partner would be somebody you could count on to be one way.

  He waited by the vomit awhile, and when nobody came by he went back into the crowd to look for witnesses again. It took an hour to clean up the mess. Wreckers, ambulances, sweeping the glass. The doctor had gone into a bar halfway down the block. Arbuckle made a note of that, but there wasn’t much else to write down. Nobody would admit they’d seen it.

  He stayed until the truck was towed, asking questions and drawing pictures that showed where it was and where the bus was, and where the body was lying in the street. He thought about drawing a little pool of vomit, but you couldn’t count on everybody having a sense of humor.

  When it was finished, Arbuckle went back to the station house and made a phone call to the city room of the Daily Times and asked for assistant city editor Brookie Sutherland. Brookie Sutherland had told him anytime he had something to give him a call.

  Arbuckle didn’t know why Brookie Sutherland liked to talk to him personally, but whenever he called with something, Sutherland put his name in the paper. The regular police reporter never did that. “This is Arbuckle,” he said when Brookie Sutherland picked up the phone.