God's Pocket

by Pete Dexter

  “Hey, buddy, how are you?” Arbuckle winced. His greatest fear was that his phone was bugged, and someday his friends would hear a newspaperman calling him buddy.

  “Look, I got a little accident here,” he said. “One fatal, one hospitalized. I thought you might be interested.” Arbuckle always called everything “little” when he talked to Brookie Sutherland.

  “Just a minute.” He heard him load his typewriter. “Okay, shoot.”

  Arbuckle cupped his hand over the receiver and read him the times and places off his accident report. “We don’t got a name on the DOA yet,” he said. “Wasn’t carrying no ID.”

  Brookie Sutherland said, “Is that it?”

  Arbuckle felt disappointed. He never knew what the Daily Times would like and what they wouldn’t. He thought for a minute, and then told him about the doctor who threw up. He started that by saying, “Well, there was one human interest story.…”

  Brookie Sutherland thanked the cop and hung up. There was a new girl on tryout, and they’d put her on Friday nights to see how she did. A timid-looking girl, always wore white blouses with a scarf around the neck, skirts that were too long. He wasn’t sure, but he thought she was pretty. You couldn’t tell about that until a girl had been around awhile and the office had a chance to form an opinion. “That dumb sonofabitch,” Brookie said, loud enough so she looked up from her desk.

  He smiled at her. “Cops,” he said. “I got one calling that wants to give me a human interest story about vomit.” Brookie Sutherland could see she didn’t understand. “I got the weirdest sources in the city,” he said.

  “It sounds like it,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she liked him or not. He thought he might ask her out for a drink after work.

  “Check with the medical examiner’s office,” he said, “and see if you can get me an ID on some guy who got killed in a traffic accident at Third and Fitzwater this afternoon, will you?”

  Then he put a fresh piece of paper in his typewriter and prepared a memo on Peter Byrne’s having blown a fatal-accident-in-South-Philadelphia story. He wrote, “Tried twice to reach Byrne, but per usual, he was out of office.” He hadn’t called, but he didn’t have to. Byrne was at Hammer’s Bar drinking with his buddies, the cops. To Brookie Sutherland, the way Peter Byrne got his stories was unprofessional.

  The memo was three paragraphs long, and he signed it at the end and then made two copies. One went to T. D., one to the managing editor. He kept the original for his own file on Peter Byrne.

  Half an hour later the new girl had the name. “It’s Leon Hubbard,” she said, “but it’s kind of strange …”

  Brookie Sutherland held up his hand and smiled. “The first thing you learn,” he said, “is that every accident is strange.”

  She said, “But this guy …”

  Brookie Sutherland stopped her again with his hand. “The news hole on Saturday is this big.” He made a bird’s beak with his thumb and first finger. “All we got room for on Saturday is the name, the time, the place. If he wanted space, he should of waited till Monday. Unless the President gets shot, there’s no room on Saturday.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “The guy wasn’t the President,” he said. She shook her head. “Then all we want is the name, the time, the place. Gimme two paragraphs, okay? And put the cop in. Charles Arbuckle, AID. You got to throw the bears a peanut to keep them interested.”

  “Okay,” she said, “two graphs.” But Brookie Sutherland wasn’t listening. She typed her code into the VDT machine, slugged the story HUBBARD, and began to write:

  ONE MAN WAS DEAD AND ANOTHER INJURED AFTER A BUS/TRUCK COLLISION YESTERDAY IN SOUTH PHILADELPHIA. ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION DIVISION OFFICER CHARLES ARBUCKLE, WHO INVESTIGATED THE ACCIDENT, IDENTIFIED THE DEAD MAN AS LEON HUBBARD, OF TWENTY-FIFTH STREET IN THE GOD’S POCKET SECTION OF THE CITY.

  POLICE SAID NO CHARGES HAVE BEEN FILED IN THE ACCIDENT.

  She finished the story, checked it for mistakes, and then pressed a key on the keyboard to file it in the system’s memory.

  The key she punched blinked on and off for about half a minute, and then a note came up on the screen. DUPLICATE SLUG. She looked over at the desk and thought about trying to tell Brookie Sutherland again, but she decided it might make him mad. She changed the slug to LEONH and this time the system took it.

  “It’s in there,” she said. Sutherland looked up and smiled.

  “Good,” he said. “See? There isn’t really much to do Friday night, unless they shoot the President. Hey, why don’t we have a drink after work?”

  She looked at him like she didn’t understand. “I’m married,” she said.

  He smiled and turned red. “Oh. I didn’t mean like that. I just meant as colleagues.…” And then he was looking through some papers on his desk, still smiling and still red, and she knew he’d never be nice to her again as long as she was there.

  Mickey called Smilin’ Jack right at five o’clock from a phone booth in Center City. He didn’t want to see Jeanie until he could tell her about the funeral, one way or the other.

  “Jack,” he said, “it’s Mickey.”

  “Hey, Mick, how are you?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. He left it there for the undertaker to pick up.

  “I called down to the medical examiner,” Jack said. “It’s lucky there’s a guy I know down there. I told him what happened, that you was just bringin’ the body over for me when the accident happened, and he took care of the red tape.” Mickey waited. “So we do it tomorrow,” Jack said. “Tomorrow afternoon, I got somethin’ else in the morning.”

  “What time?”

  “Three o’clock? It ain’t going to be nothin’ fancy. Just a nice, quiet little service here. Dignified. Some flowers, we got a minister will say a few things over the casket, cost you a fifty. And then we’ll all drive out to Edgewood in Delaware County and bury him there. That sound all right?”

  “That’s it?”

  “Right. The same way we was going to do it before. The details don’t make much difference in the long run, as long as you get him in the ground dignified.”

  “I paid for the mahogany box, Jack.”

  “Right, right. I didn’t mean nothin’ was different. I just meant, you know, in the excitement a lot of the details don’t get noticed.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And Mick,” he said, “I want to apologize for what happened, you know? I mean, it don’t do nobody any good to have it all over the neighborhood.”

  Mickey hung up and called home. The phone rang eight times and nobody answered. He wondered if she was with the newspaper reporter again.

  Eisenhower woke up at seven in the morning, thinking of his brother diving off the roof of the Holiday Inn. It felt like he’d been dreaming about it every night since it happened. Even when he was working, it was off somewhere in the back of his mind, working too. Even when he was having himself a piece of ass, it was working. Especially when he was having himself a piece of ass.

  He’d quit drinking the night it happened. He knew without trying it wouldn’t be any fun without How-Awful! And that’s what Calamity Eisenhower had always gotten drunk for. Fun. His brother was different.

  Sober, they were the same. How-Awful! was crazy, Calamity was crazy, and anything mean they did was never on purpose. But from the first night they’d sat out under the bleachers at Franklin Field, twenty-five years ago, drinking a half-pint of vodka each, the juice had always dropped his brother’s pitch. What did they call that—a minor key? It was in the pitch, it was in his eyes.

  And all the crazy-ass, crying-funny things they’d done drunk together, that sad key was always there in How-Awful! And the older they got, the more it showed. But he never let it settle inside him and turn him ugly. He’d shoot up a bar, or drive a car into the Delaware River, but he never let it take him over. It was inside him, though, and for as long as Calamity lived he’d never believe his brother didn’t know the swimming pool in
Arizona was empty.

  He lay in bed a few minutes, trying to bury himself in the pillow, but once he’d started thinking about Arizona he knew it was all over for sleep. His leg was bothering him anyway.

  He got out of bed and put on a pair of shorts and a sweat shirt and tennis shoes. He brushed his teeth and splashed some water on his face and then walked into his living room, where an eighty-pound Everlast heavy bag was hanging from a beam in the ceiling. He wrapped his hands carefully and put them inside a pair of eight-ounce gloves and beat on the bag for twenty straight minutes.

  Until he was sweating and tired and he’d quit thinking about his leg. He slipped off the gloves and untied the wraps and hung them in the bathroom. Hand wraps smelled worse than anything in sports. He pulled some cheese and ham out of the refrigerator and put them into a hamburger bun, and sat down at the kitchen table to eat breakfast. Then he realized he didn’t have anything to read, so he limped downstairs and across the street and bought a Saturday Daily Times.

  He put the paper next to the sandwich and opened a carton of milk. He turned the first couple of pages, looking for something he wanted to read, and was about to turn the newspaper over and look at the sports section when he noticed the story, down in the corner of page 6. At first he thought it was some kind of mistake the paper made, running an old story twice, and then he thought it might of been two Leon Hubbards.

  But not on Twenty-fifth Street in the Pocket, it wasn’t. He read it again, a traffic accident at Third and Fitzwater. AID Officer Charles Arbuckle.

  He’d underestimated him. The body was dead five days, and Arbuckle had called the newspaper and told them he had a traffic victim. He decided not to think about how Leon Hubbard got to Third and Fitzwater, he’d save that for later. For now, he just concentrated on Chuck Arbuckle and his phone calls to the Daily Times. “You poor, dumb fuck,” he said.

  And then he began to laugh, out loud, a way he couldn’t stop if he wanted to. Crazy-ass, crying-funny laughing, until his chest hurt, until all he could think of was what a shame it was that How-Awful! wasn’t there to see it too. Crying-funny laughing.

  It was almost over now. That was the first thing Mickey thought when he hung up on Smilin’ Jack, that this time tomorrow he could rest. And after the phone rang eight times at his house, he hung up and thought it again.

  He took two hours to walk back to the Pocket, stopping in every bar on the way. When he got there his house was dark, and he’d had enough of empty rooms.

  His legs were feeling better, he wouldn’t have minded walking another hour or two, but there wasn’t anyplace to go. He thought about checking Bird’s place, but he didn’t want to look at that now. He stood on the sidewalk outside the house for a minute, thinking it over, and then he crossed the street and went into the Hollywood.

  McKenna was behind the bar, running up and down, killing an argument that would not stay dead at one end of the bar, pouring straight shots and beer to forty or fifty people. Some of the customers he was nice to, and some of them he had to keep in line. Mickey wondered how he kept it straight from night to night, who was who. At the end where the argument was, everybody was drunk and staking claims, and jumping claims. In a while they’d get mad and punch holes in the bathroom wall. It was possible they’d punch each other.

  Mickey went to the end away from the argument, away from the kids. McKenna brought him a Schmidt’s and a glass, and even though he was in a hurry he took the time to ask about the funeral.

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” Mickey said, “if you wouldn’t mind lettin’ people know.”

  “That’s good,” McKenna said. “Saturday’s a good day.”

  “It’s just a small service, up at Jack’s.” McKenna nodded. Mickey felt somebody wedge into the spot next to him, hurting his elbow, and then he smelled something wet and awful. He turned to look, and it was Ray and his neck brace.

  McKenna held his nose. “Awful, ain’t it?”

  Ray spit on the floor, stepped on the spot like he was putting out a cigarette. “I can’t take this off,” he said to Mickey. “If I take this off, I could aggravate the injury.”

  Mickey sucked on his beer. “Don’t want to do that,” he said.

  “It doesn’t smell bad,” Ray told him. “Can you smell it? It’s medicinal, like a hospital, McKenna wants me to take it off because of his criminal liability.…”

  McKenna said, “It’s a medicinal smell, like you cut off your fuckin’ lizard for a necklace.”

  Ray said, “Mickey doesn’t think it’s so bad.”

  “How do you know that?” McKenna said.

  “He’s still standing here, isn’t he?”

  McKenna said, “Yeah, but he’s grievin’. You can’t expect him to smell right.” McKenna reached into the box and brought out another Schimdt’s. Then he went to the other end of the bar to kill the argument again.

  Ray leaned closer to Mickey. “A shame about the boy,” he said. He shook his head. The brace was stained at the edge where it met his neck. Mickey nodded, pulling away. There was a whole class of people that couldn’t talk to you when they were drinking without putting their mouth right up next to your face.

  “The whole neighborhood was sorry,” Ray said. He was spitting too. “But there’s no way anyone can entirely sympathize with you. It’s like being black. You can feel for them, but you can’t ever really understand what it is.”

  The woman on the other side of him yelled to McKenna. “Ray’s talkin’ about the niggers again.” Ray was the only person in God’s Pocket who liked colored people, and every time he opened his mouth about them in the Hollywood it was trouble. McKenna left the argument and came back to Mickey’s end of the bar.

  He put a finger in Ray’s face and said, “I told you before, no talkin’ about niggers.”

  Ray ran his hands over the neck brace, reminding him. “It’s a free country,” he said. “We still have the First Amendment. Some of the people in here tonight fought for freedom of speech.”

  McKenna leaned closer. “If you bring patriotic into it, you’re flagged,” he said. “You start talkin’ about niggers and America in here tonight, I swear you won’t get another drink till winter. You understand?”

  For an answer, Ray pointed to his shot glass, which McKenna filled with Old Hickory, locally brewed bourbon whiskey. Ray put his fingers around it and picked up where he’d been. A long time ago Ray had got used to being told to shut up. “What I was saying was, nobody can feel what you feel. They didn’t live with the boy, they can’t know what it’s like.”

  Mickey said, “That’s the truth.”

  “And they didn’t live with Jeanie. They look at it from the outside and say this or that, but it’s just talk.”

  Mickey looked at him. “What’s just talk?”

  Ray shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, because they aren’t there. They don’t live in your house, they haven’t walked a mile in your shoes.”

  Mickey said, “Every fuckin’ time you begin to say somethin’, Ray, you throw in somethin’ like walkin’ in other people’s shoes. That’s why everybody thinks you’re full of shit.”

  “It doesn’t matter what everybody thinks,” Ray said. “I was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. Do you see anybody else educated in this bar?” Ray looked down the bar, then in back of him. “There’s nobody here who went further than twelfth grade,” he said.

  “Not me,” Mickey said. “I quit when I was fourteen.”

  Ray nodded his head. “But you’re an intelligent man,” he said.

  “What are they sayin’?”

  Ray said, “Nothing. It’s nothing. Everybody in this neighborhood quit thinking at the end of the Korean War. The ones that didn’t quit thinking got out.” Mickey started to say something but Ray stopped him. “You want to know why I didn’t get out,” he said. “The truth is, I don’t know. Maybe I like being the only educated man in the Hollywood Bar. Maybe …”

  “What I want to know,” Mickey said, “i
s what everybody’s sayin’ about this.”

  Ray shook his head. “To what purpose? They can’t understand, it’s like trying to understand being black.…” He’d dropped his voice to say that last part.

  Mickey said, “Because I wanna know. Because how somethin’ looks to everybody else is sometimes how it really looks.”

  “There are no absolutes,” Ray said.

  Mickey found himself leaning into Ray’s face to talk, ignoring the smell. “Have you ever noticed them old sayings?” he said. “Like, It takes one to know one, and, It’s the early bird that gets the worm? And, Nothin’ is for nothin’?”

  Ray nodded. “Clichés,” he said. “They have replaced thought.”

  Mickey said, “Yeah, well, everybody says things like that, but when you sit down and think about it, they’re always true. That’s why everybody says them. Lemme tell you another one. Whistlin’ past the graveyard. You ever think about that, what it really is?”

  “The average American has substituted cliches for thought,” Ray said.

  Mickey pulled away from Ray’s face and drank the second Schmidt’s. “Tell me what they’re sayin’ about me and Jeanie,” he said.

  Ray closed his eyes, putting it together. He drank the shot of whiskey he’d been holding and tugged at his neck brace. “That she’s fucking Richard Shellburn,” he said. “And she’s got you sleeping on the couch.”

  “She ain’t fuckin’ Richard Shellburn,” he said.

  Ray shrugged. “It’s not what I think,” he said, “it’s what they’re saying.” Mickey looked around the bar to see who it was looking in his windows at night.

  “She ain’t fuckin’ nobody,” he said again.

  He’d seen the way she looked at him, but she wouldn’t do that. He would of felt it, just being around her. Of course, he hadn’t been around her. Not since the morning Leon had got himself killed. “She ain’t,” he said.