by Pete Dexter
“How much do you need?” she said.
He shook his head. “I don’t need money. Little Eddie bought himself a truck as soon as Stretch hit the bus.” He looked at the ceiling again to tell her the next part.
“Anyway,” he said, “Leon was in the truck.”
“What?”
“Leon was with the truck,” he said, correcting himself. “He was in the back.”
“With the meat?”
“Take it easy,” he said. “I kept him separate, the meat never touched him. I took care of him, kept him clean.…” He wished now he’d turned off the light when she’d wanted him to. “Anyway,” he said.
“Stop saying anyway,” she said.
“Right. So Stretch ran into the bus, and the truck tipped over in the middle of the street.”
“No,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “And the back door flew open, and Leon fell out.” It wasn’t supposed to be coming out like this, and he could see she wasn’t understanding his side of it. It wasn’t about him at all. He said, “See, Jack Moran wouldn’t bury him until he had the cash.”
“He’s been riding around in the back of that truck all the time?” she said. “Mickey, he was just a baby.” He thought of the way Leon had looked at the medical examiner’s, like an angel.
“I didn’t want to mention it,” he said. “I knew it’d upset you.”
“Where is he now?” she said. She sat up like she was going to put on a coat and go pick him up. He saw that she would need a coat, that nightgown must of been made for the summer.
“He’s at Jack’s,” he said. “It’s all settled now. The cops picked him up, but Jack knew somebody at the morgue got him out in time for the funeral.”
She lay back down and turned away. “Turn off the light, Mickey,” she said. He turned off the light and sat on the edge of the bed waiting for her breathing to even out. He didn’t want to leave until she was asleep. He didn’t want to feel like he was running away.
He’d thought telling her what happened to Leon would make her see him. He sat in the dark, trying to remember how that was supposed to connect. He’d begun to wonder if she was asleep when she suddenly spoke to him again. “Do people know what happened?” she asked.
“Jack knows,” he said, “but I didn’t tell nobody in the neighborhood. Or your sisters …” Who did she mean?
“Jack Moran?” she said.
“Yeah, he had to know. But he ain’t anxious to have it all over the neighborhood that he threw Leon out the door because he didn’t have cash in hand to bury him. That makes him look bad.”
“Threw him out the door?” she said. He could have screwed a bolt through his forehead.
“Yeah, well, not exactly threw. He put him outside. I tried to get him back in, but Jack’d locked the doors. He’d been drinkin’, and you know how he gets when he’s like that.”
“Out on the street?” He reached over to pat her shoulder and stopped his hand just before it touched her, not knowing what she might do. He knew her better than this when he didn’t know her.
“He wasn’t there long,” he said. “Only a couple minutes before I found him, and then I got him right in the truck.” He waited a little bit, but Jeanie didn’t say anything else. After a while she picked up the pillow and put it over her head. He saw she didn’t want to talk and went back downstairs and fell asleep on the couch.
In the morning, Mickey couldn’t walk. The couch was a foot shorter than he was, so he’d slept with his legs bent about like a frog’s, at least that’s how they were when he woke up. He tried to straighten them out, and the shot of pain caught him up short before they’d moved an inch. He sat up on the couch and looked at his legs, expecting they’d be purple and hard. They looked like his legs. He rubbed them, up and down from his knees to his shorts, and every place he touched hurt, but not like it did when he tried to move them.
He thought of the way he would look at the funeral—the way he would look to Jeanie at the funeral—and pushed himself off the couch. His legs were still bent, but not as bad. He closed his eyes and straightened them. It took a minute, a minute and a half, and then before he opened his eyes, he lost his balance and stumbled.
He caught the fall, but his legs had moved a new way, and it felt like he was breaking guitar strings in there. He stood up straight again, this time the pain lost some of its edges. He didn’t know if it was because he was getting used to it, or because he’d done it before and the strings were already broke. Maybe that’s what getting used to something was, running out of strings to break.
It was quiet upstairs. He moved from the couch to a chair to the table with the telephone, keeping most of his weight on his arms. The table was next to the staircase, and he used both hands on the banister to pull himself up. At the top of the stairs, he found out he could walk without hurting himself if he kept his steps six inches long.
He went into the bathroom that way and filled the tub with hot water. He got in, butt first, and then pulled his legs in after him. He lay in the tub while it filled, squeezing his legs, working the elbow, trying to remember how much walking you have to do at a funeral.
The water was up over his chest before he realized he had to stand up to turn it off. He tried it with his toes, but that was new guitar strings breaking all over again. He put a hand on each side of the tub and pushed up, and as he did that the phone rang. She picked it up as he got his feet under him, and when he turned off the water he could hear her talking.
It was one of the sisters, he could tell from her voice. “I’m all right,” she said, “how are you?” There was a pause. “Are you sure?” There was another pause, this one was longer. “I wasn’t trying to say you couldn’t read.… No, I’m just tired. I’ve carried it all alone.… Of course you and Joanie helped, I didn’t mean you didn’t help, but there’s things you can’t know about until it happens.…”
He eased himself back into the tub while she said goodbye, and the phone rang again before he’d found a comfortable position. This time he couldn’t hear what she said. She must have moved, he thought. Then he thought of Richard Shellburn and the muscles in his legs tensed, and he hadn’t run out of strings to break yet.
A minute later she opened the bathroom door and looked at him. “Everybody knows,” she said.
“What?” he said.
“It was in the Daily Times,” she said. “About the accident. Only they said Leon got killed again.”
He said, “Why’d they say that?”
She shook her head. “Everybody in the neighborhood, my sisters, everybody that’s coming to the funeral is going to know.”
“It ain’t so bad, Jeanie,” he said. “We didn’t do nothin’ bad. It’s nothin’ to be ashamed of, runnin’ into a money problem.”
“I have to live in this neighborhood,” she said. And the way she said that, he didn’t. She went downstairs then, and when he got dressed and went down there too, she came back up. They passed in the living room without a word.
He thought of McKenna’s stories about his fights with his wife, but that was always over getting drunk or staying out all night. McKenna had something he’d done to get her over, and when his wife was over it, it was all right again. Mickey was trying to get Jeanie over who he was.
He thought of the newspaper reporter again and tried to see where he came into it. Mickey knew from the last five days how it was when all you had for ambition was for time to pass, but Shellburn had been doing it a long time. He thought maybe that’s what getting old alone did to you. He thought maybe he’d find out for himself before it was over.
Of course, Jeanie liked famous things—she talked about New York City, and the whole place sounded like the inside of a store window—but he didn’t know how she could look at Shellburn and not see he was losing ground every day, that he might as well of had lung cancer. And that all he wanted from her was comfort while it ended.
It turned out three o’clock was too late for a funeral. If
you had it at nine or ten in the morning, people got out of bed, put on their neckties and had to hurry to get there on time. Three o’clock, though, meant they got out of bed in the morning, put on their neckties and then had five or six hours of Saturday to kill before the service.
It wasn’t that funerals didn’t call for drinking, but the time for that was the night before, or later, after it was over. Or both. You could grieve with a hangover, probably better than you could sober, but nothing that came out of a bottle was any good before they started saying the words. It made things come up that might of been left alone.
They had the service in the viewing room. By the time Mickey and Jeanie came in, a few minutes before three, every chair in the place had somebody sitting in it, except for the front row, which was saved for members of the family. He held her at the elbow as they walked down the aisle, in front of her sisters and their husbands, her eyes fastened ahead on the closed coffin sitting underneath the cross. Mickey thought of the old woman in the organdy dress that had been there the night he slapped Smilin’ Jack, he thought that most of the people in the room would end up in that same spot. Not for their funerals—the funerals would be at church—but this is where they’d get primed.
The room had that same stale smell as the Hollywood. It never occurred to him before that the smell belonged to the people as much as the bar.
He guided her down to the front seats, five feet from the box, and they sat down just as the minister came out and began to talk about Leon. He said he didn’t know him, but the Lord did. And the Lord had His reasons.
Mickey looked straight ahead and Jeanie buried her face in a handkerchief. He felt her shaking but he didn’t know what to do about it. She hadn’t spoken to him since that morning in the bathtub.
Once or twice, the minister stopped and looked toward the back of the room, where people were coming in from the bathroom across the hall. He’d never been in God’s Pocket before, but he seemed to know he was losing his hold and hurried the last part. Then he hurried off the podium and stood with Mickey and Jeanie and Smilin’ Jack on the front steps of the funeral parlor, shaking hands with the people who had come to say goodbye to Leon. He even shook hands in a hurry.
The people shook hands with Jeanie first, the ladies kissed her on the cheek, then they shook hands with the minister, and then with Smilin’ Jack, and then with Mickey. The ladies told Jeanie they were sorry for her troubles—Mickey could hear himself included as part of them—and they told Smilin’ Jack and the minister it was a very good service. Ray said it was the best since Caveman Rafferty’s—a local middleweight who was beaten to death one Saturday afternoon twelve years ago on national television. Caveman was born and raised in the Pocket, and it was still common knowledge that there were five people in the neighborhood who could beat him in a fight. It was an argument who they were, but there were five of them. Everybody agreed on that.
Nobody had much to say to Mickey. Some of the kids from the Hollywood and the Uptown even stared at him, like there might be trouble later. Everybody’d read the Daily Times, or heard about it. Mickey stared back. Whatever happened between him and Jeanie, it wasn’t going to be a bunch of kids from the bar that caused it.
It didn’t turn out to be the kids that made the trouble anyway. Mickey and Jeanie and Jack and the minister had been shaking hands out on the funeral parlor steps about ten minutes, the casket had come out and been loaded into Jack’s eleven-year-old Cadillac hearse, and then Mole Ferrell had stepped out of the door, looking lost. Mole had been sitting near the front, so he was one of the last in line at the bathroom after the minister had finished. He came out, rolling and dizzy, and shook hands with Jeanie and Mickey. He smelled stronger than anybody but Ray. “Leon was always a good boy,” he told them. “I remember when he had his paper route.…”
Mickey hadn’t known Leon ever had a paper route. He thought he must of fucked it up terrible or Jeanie would of told him about it. She was always looking to mention his good points, up to and including dressing himself, and when things got slow—as they tended to do when you were looking for Leon’s good points—she could sit in front of the television news, listening to all the crimes the colored people had done to each other in North Philadelphia that night, and count it to his side that he hadn’t shot who they had.
She’d shake her head and say, “Can you imagine how you’d feel if your child did something like that?”
“A lot of paper boys just throw the paper any which way,” Mole Ferrell was saying, “but Leon always put it in the door. He was a good boy.” As Mole Ferrell spoke, his eyes went big and out of focus, and he seemed to be seeing it again. Mole had been hit in the head a lot and was famous for moving around in time.
He glanced at Jack as he talked, and then looked at him again. Jack was smiling his funeral director’s smile, and when Mole Ferrell looked at him, he remembered the night when Jack smiled that smile and then sucker-punched him. Or maybe it was that night again.
Whichever, one minute Mole was looking at Jeanie, saying how important it was to know your Daily Times would be in the same place every morning, and the next minute he screamed, “All right, motherfucker,” and hit Jack Moran dead in the middle of the face. The punch came halfway across the entranceway to the funeral parlor and knocked Jack off the steps. Mole Ferrell was big and slow and did not struggle when the minister grabbed him around the waist. “Please, sir,” the minister said, “remember where you are.” Of course, it was the minister who’d never been in God’s Pocket before.
Smilin’ Jack lay flat on the ground for a few seconds, and then he sat up, covering his nose with his hand. Blood leaked through the fingers. He sat up and stared at Mole Ferrell, who was still wearing the minister around his waist, staring back.
Jeanie had stopped crying. Mickey noticed that, and when Jack moved his hand, he noticed that his nose had been moved an inch off center. “This man is drunk,” said the minister.
Mole looked down at the top of Jack’s head, then at Mickey, then at Jeanie. Changing gears. “He always left it right in the door,” Mole said. “Leon was a good boy.”
Then he said, “Father, I got to go.” He pried himself out of the minister’s arms, shook hands with Mickey again, and then walked through the little white gate and headed back down the street toward the Hollywood.
Smilin’ Jack’s housekeeper had heard the noise and came out the door just as Mole Ferrell was leaving. Jack was still on the ground, and he’d thrown his head back, trying to get the bleeding to stop. She knelt next to him and began wiping at his face with her apron. “Mr. Moran,” she said, “what is happened to you now?”
Jack let himself be cleaned up. She handled his face gently, shaking her head like he was her own child, and when most of the blood was gone, she ran her finger along the bridge of his nose until she found the place where the cartilage separated. “Oh, dear,” she said, “you all busted up, ain’t you?”
Smilin’ Jack didn’t answer. When she took her finger off his nose, he stood up, still looking at the sky, and headed back into the funeral parlor. The housekeeper tried to take his arm but he pulled away. Mickey opened the door for him and Jack walked in, bleeding. Jack closed the door behind him, in his housekeeper’s face. She seemed to notice the blood on her hands then, and they all waited on the front steps and didn’t know what to do. Fifteen or twenty people were standing on the sidewalk when it happened, and they hadn’t moved either.
“Dear Jesus,” the housekeeper said, “three o’clock Saturday ain’t the time for no funeral.” She folded her arms to hide her hands. The coffin was in the hearse, the hearse was still running. They stood on the steps and waited.
In a few minutes they heard Jack upstairs, arguing with the old man. They stood on the steps in their best clothes and listened. Mickey said, “You want to go back to the house and wait?” Jeanie didn’t answer him. She was looking over at the hearse now.
Upstairs it got louder. Mickey wished he had somebody to tal
k to. The housekeeper smiled at him, a sweet old gold-tooth smile full of apologies. It was her family, and it wasn’t. “He shouldn’t talk that way to his father,” Mickey said, looking up there.
The old woman shook her head. “It don’t matter,” she said. “The old gentleman, he don’t hear none of it. He just sit there in the wheelchair.”
Mickey looked at her to make sure he’d understood. “The old man’s deaf?”
She smiled at him and shook her head. “He don’t know morning from night,” she said.
It was getting dark before they got back from the cemetery. They’d waited at the funeral home an hour, and then Jack Moran had come out wearing a clean shirt. He’d stuffed cotton into both sides of his nose, but he hadn’t changed suits, and Jeanie saw the bloodstains in the material.
He’d come out looking angry and gone to the hearse without apologizing. She and Mickey and the minister got into the Cadillac behind it, and her sisters followed that in Joanie’s Ford wagon. At the grave they put the coffin under a tent, and the minister read from the Bible. “To everything there is a season.…”
She had to admit it was a beautiful coffin.
Mickey looked straight ahead, the sisters stood together, apart from the others. Jack Moran’s nose was bleeding again. She saw they were all tired of Leon now, they wanted to get it over. She thought she wanted to get it over too, but when the service had ended, she couldn’t leave him there alone. The minister had tried to talk to her. “There’s nothing more you can do now, Jeanie,” he’d said.
“A few minutes,” she’d said. And she’d stood out there under the tent for an hour, because she couldn’t stand to leave him alone. Finally Mickey had come close to her, touched her arm.
“They’re closin’ the cemetery,” he’d said.
And she’d pulled away from him, and walked alone back to the Cadillac. She didn’t want to be near him, or her sisters. She didn’t want to be near anybody she knew. She turned to the window and stared outside the whole trip back.