by Pete Dexter
At the house, Mickey had wanted to talk, but she’d gone upstairs, into the bathroom, and stared at her face in the mirror. Stared a long time, until it felt like a trance. It was like that at the graveyard too, standing beside the coffin. Time didn’t come into it anymore. After a while, she washed her face, and then she began putting on makeup again, slowly, without a plan. She put it on that way to see what she would be when it was finished.
Sometime later the phone rang, eight or nine times. Mickey must have gone out. She picked it up and waited.
“Jeanie?”
“Hello,” she said. It was Richard Shellburn.
“Is it finished?”
She said, “Why does everybody want it to be finished? He was mine, not anybody else’s.”
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow,” he said. “We can have lunch and talk. If you want to, we could take a drive out to the place.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“That’s the reason to do it,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.”
“No,” she said. “Not yet.” Not ever, she thought.
“Let’s go to the place,” he said. “It’ll do you good, just to be out in the fresh air.”
“It’s not my place,” she said.
“It will be,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.” She let the line go quiet for a minute. “You don’t have a place of your own,” he said.
“I know it,” she said. He was saying something else when she hung up. Then she went back to the mirror and darkened her lips and lightened her cheeks, and after a few minutes it came to her that she didn’t know what she looked like anymore.
She closed her eyes to clear her head and saw the casket. Sitting under the tent at the cemetery, and she saw herself standing next to it. She saw the black dress and her hair, but she couldn’t see her face. She could see Leon’s though, she could see him awake, curled over on his side somewhere in the box. Awake and blinking. It was a beautiful casket, but it was too big for him.
And when she opened her eyes and saw herself in the mirror, she was surprised—for the half-second she could see it—how bad this had hurt her. She thought it must be like a car accident, when you couldn’t tell for yourself how bad you were hurt. Your body lied to you at first, you had to wait and see.
Then she couldn’t even remember where she’d seen the damage in her face. She studied herself a long time and then washed off the makeup, and began her face over again, without a plan, to see if it would be happy again when she finished.
DEAD ISSUES
Sunday afternoon Old Lucy thought they’d finally come to get him. He was sitting in his chair by the window, looking out across the street when he heard the police cars. Minnie Devine was at church. The noise they made wasn’t a siren anymore, it was a panic noise.
It started out a long ways away, and then got closer, like a heart attack. There was two of them, then three, maybe more. Lucien was glad Minnie wasn’t here to see it, he’d worried her enough, not eating. He came to the table, but he couldn’t eat. He felt too tired.
He thought maybe he ought to get dressed, but he guessed they’d tell him what to wear. The noise got louder, until it seemed to be coming from the kitchen. He felt himself trembling. He’d never been in jail before, never even been in the hospital. “Well, boy,” he said out loud, “it’s all comin’ to settle now.”
In the week since he’d killed Leon Hubbard, Lucien had come to think of the boy and himself in it together. The last couple of days, he’d found himself talking to him, guiding him through what was happening. He felt friendly toward him, and when he thought of him that way it took the pressure off what he’d did.
He got up out of the chair, feeling heavy and tired, and pulled his jacket off the hat tree. He thought it would be cold where they’d put him. He put the jacket on and stepped out the front door, wearing his slippers. He didn’t want them coming into Minnie’s house to get him.
He stepped outside, and one of the police cars came around the corner, making that panicky sound that seemed to match his heart. He thought they’d made a mistake when they went past him, but there was another car right behind, and it went past too. And then a third one. And then the children from the neighborhood was all running and skating toward Broad Street, where the police had finally stopped.
It came to him that it was the Korean. The Muslims had finally settled with him. He sat down on the steps and waited. The children would be back soon and tell him what happened. It was likely they shot him in the night.
The Korean would have been asleep in the doorway, they wouldn’t of even had to get out of the car, just slow down, roll down the window, and shoot. The Korean might never of even woke up. That’s the way Koreans was.
He shook his head, thinking about it. There was things that God meant to happen, he believed that. But there was also things wasn’t decided until they came around, and the Korean had gave up his family and his house to wait for them. He thought again that the Muslims probably come for him at night. That’s the way they was.
He wondered how long the Korean had been sitting there before somebody noticed he was dead, and how many people noticed it before somebody called the police. It didn’t make no sense, sittin’ there waitin’ for them to kill him. It didn’t make no sense that the Korean didn’t have a plan of his own. Everybody dies, he thought, it’s all settled in the end, but it’s no sense in waitin’ for them to come by in the night.
A few minutes later, one of the children came back from the Korean’s direction. She was a wild girl, never paid no attention to her mother. Lucien knew everybody in the neighborhood from listening to Minnie over the last week. Thirteen, fourteen years old, she already been pregnant. “Clorese,” he said, “what all them police doin’?”
She had a pinch of chewing tobacco under her lip and a scar from her nose to her ear, and she looked him over like he was For Sale. “They offed one of them Ko-reans,” she said.
“When they did it?” he said.
“I mind my own bi’niss,” she said.
“That’s what I heard,” he said. She shrugged and began to walk away. “The police be askin’ questions?” he said. He wondered what he’d say if the police asked him.
“You askin’ all the questions,” she said. “All they doin’ is cleanin’ him up off the sidewalk.” She shrugged. “He didn’t give no fuck if he died. They’s some people around like that.” Lucien saw that she meant him. “I mind my own bi’niss,” she said.
He sat on the steps, and in fifteen or twenty minutes an ambulance came around the corner, screaming like there was something left to do, and it stopped up where the police cars was. There was still a crowd, but it didn’t have a bloody spirit. He could tell that from where he was. It was just a Korean.
He thought of the boy again, and the way the blade had felt up under his chin. He worked his whole life, nobody ever tried to take nothin’ away from him before. At least they never tried where he couldn’t get around it. So he’d picked up the pipe, and the feeling when he’d hit him had went all the way down to his shoulder, solid as a bag of cement. “It wasn’t all your fault, boy,” he said. “You was takin’ more than you knew.”
He looked down the street, trying to see if Channel 6 had the Action Cam live on the scene, but it was too far to tell. He saw them carrying something from the street to the ambulance, though. He guessed it was the Korean. Then the ambulance left, and the people hung around the spot.
They was still there when Minnie Devine come back from church. She was wearing a light blue hat with webbing that come down over her face. “How was the services?” he said.
She said, “Reverend asked for you, said was you sick.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said you was out of sorts.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said Jesus was good for that.” She noticed then he was sitting outside in his slippers. “Lucien, what come over you now?”
“I heard the noise,”
he said, “and there wasn’t no time to get dressed.” She made a face, but she didn’t say anything. He looked back down the street, where she had come from. “Did you see the police carry him off?”
“I seen it,” she said. “I couldn’t do nothin’ but seen it, all the children they got runnin’ around blockin’ things up. Nobody goin’ to church no more.…” She looked at him.
“They must of finally shot him in the night,” Lucien said. It wasn’t like him to think so much about other people’s business. He guessed that’s what happened when you quit work and didn’t have no business of your own.
She shook her head. “Ain’t nobody shot that Korean,” she said. She started up the steps past him, but he reached out and touched her hand. She saw he didn’t understand. “They didn’t do nothin’ to him,” she said. “He died by hisself.”
She went past him into the house, hung up her coat and hat, and put her church Bible away in the drawer where she kept it. She went into the kitchen and began to fix a chicken for dinner. “He just died by hisself?” he said, close behind her.
The voice startled her, but she answered without turning around. “All by hisself,” she said. “I believe that’s what he wanted.”
“They ain’t nobody wants to die sittin’ in a doorway,” he said.
“Then what else was he doin’ there, Lucien?” she said. And when he didn’t answer, she went back to fixing the chicken.
Shellburn sat dead still.
She’d hung up on him. She’d said the place in Maryland wasn’t hers, he’d said it could be, and he’d felt her moving away then, even before she’d hung up. The more he thought about it, the worse it seemed. He went over it again, getting so lost in it that when the phone rang he thought he was saved. Only it wasn’t Jeanie. “Richard? It’s Billy.”
Shellburn sighed.
“Is it a bad time? I can get back to you later.” Billy was always worried that it was the wrong time. The boy must have been born premature. “I got a call from T. D. is why I’m calling you.”
“What’d he want?” Shellburn said.
“You,” he said. “He wanted to know if you’d seen the Daily Times.”
“I’ve seen it every day for twenty years,” Shellburn said. “It’s beautiful, tell him.”
“It’s the God’s Pocket thing,” Billy said. “We got your construction worker dying again. Tuesday we wrote he was killed on a construction job and today we got him dying in a traffic accident at Third and Fitzwater. He says you could of prevented the whole thing.…”
Shellburn said, “He’s trying to blame me?” He shook his head in the empty room.
“The way he sounded, he was getting heat from somewhere,” Billy said. “And you know if he’s getting heat, he’s going to hand it to somebody else. They already fired some girl only been there a week.”
Shellburn said, “That sounds right.”
“What he said was, the neighborhood’s losing its faith in the Daily Times,” Billy said.
Shellburn laughed out loud. “Fuck, what does it say?” Billy Deebol read it to him and waited.
“You want me to read it again?” he said. Shellburn hadn’t said anything, he was putting it together with Jeanie on the phone.
“Once is enough,” he said.
“T. D. wanted you to call him,” Billy said. “He says he wants you to go out there and straighten it out, like you were supposed to do.”
“Fuck T. D.,” Shellburn said, and saying that, a column began to come to him, in a shape. He bought a paper at the bar where he ate dinner—four beers and an egg sandwich—and then he drove over to the office. The whole place was empty on Saturday night, quiet. He sat down in front of his typewriter and thought of ways to start it. Thinking of Jeanie reading it, thinking of T. D. reading it. He was breaking his hardest rule: you don’t let anybody else into it. If you did, it always showed. The only person you could imagine reading it was yourself, and if it didn’t make you cringe, then you could go ahead and write it.
The truest thing in the world was that you showed who you were writing a column. He said that at his lectures, and they always took that to mean politics or how you feel about the death penalty. Which had nothing to do with it. There were as many dick shrivelers that wanted to ban nuclear sites and love the brother as there were that wanted to bomb Russia. It was almost incidental, what you had for issues. But how you saw things, how physical things went into your eyes and what your brain took and what it threw back, that told who you were.
“Until the coming of New Journalism,” he wrote, “you only got to die once in this city, even if you came from God’s Pocket.” He read that over a couple of times, then changed “coming” to “advent.”
“There was a time,” he wrote, “when a 24-year-old working man could die once, have the event noticed in his local newspaper and then move on to his reward, without the complications of an additional death.” He read it back, out loud, and decided the tone was right. You had to hard-boil dying, unless it was a cat.
“On Saturday, the Daily Times changed all that. We had help, of course. Someplace in this city is a policeman who cannot tell an accident victim from a five-day-old corpse, someplace there is a SEPTA bus driver who doesn’t stop for red lights. Everywhere, in fact, there are SEPTA bus drivers who don’t stop for red lights.
“But it took the Daily Times to turn what happened to Leon Hubbard into a multiple death. And to turn his death into a nightmare for all the people from God’s Pocket who loved him.
“For his mother, his friends, his co-workers.” Shellburn thought about throwing Mickey Scarpato in there, and then decided against it.
“The first death, according to police, happened when part of a crane came loose and hit Leon Hubbard in the back of the head. The Daily Times reported that incident on page 16 of last Tuesday’s editions in a two-paragraph story.
“It was reported incorrectly but then, Leon Hubbard wasn’t important. If he had been, surely one of the New Journalists would have written at some length about what Leon Hubbard had for breakfast, what he was about the moment it happened.”
Shellburn stopped again and thought about T. D. Davis.
“There are people at the Daily Times who aren’t going to like this,” he wrote. “Some of them are the New Journalists themselves, who dislike facts, and some of them, I suppose, are the people who brought the New Journalists to Philadelphia from places like Florida. It would be hard for me to care less what they like.
“There isn’t a New Journalist in this city worth a hair on Leon Hubbard’s head or of any man who works for a living who knows what it is to get up every morning and sweat for his money.
“Leon Hubbard lived in a row house on 25th Street in God’s Pocket—small, dirty-faced, neat as a pin inside. And Leon Hubbard was like the other working people in God’s Pocket. Dirty-faced, uneducated, neat as a pin inside.”
Shellburn read it again, weighing T. D. Davis and Jeanie Scarpato in the sentences.
“The workingmen of God’s Pocket are simple men. They work, they follow the Phillies and the Eagles, they marry and have children who inhabit the Pocket, often in the homes of their mothers and fathers. They drink at the Hollywood Bar or the Uptown Bar, small, dirty-faced little places deep in the city, and they argue there about things they don’t understand. Politics, race, religion.
“But they understand their lives—as much as anyone can—and their deaths. And in the end they die, like everybody else, leaving their families and their houses and their legends. Sometimes they die old, but more often it’s a heart attack at 52, or cirrhosis at 47, or cancer. The refineries where they work poison them, and poison their children. And sometimes, like Leon Hubbard, they die at 24, when part of a crane comes loose and caves in the back of their head.
“And there is a dignity in that. A dirty-faced dignity that the New Journalists will never understand. Because they have never been dirty-faced, they have never had to work for a living. The air they breathed growi
ng up didn’t have poison in it, their fathers didn’t die from bad livers or hearts at 50 years old. Their fathers put them through journalism school.
“Of course, I have no idea what they teach in journalism school these days, but it’s not the lessons of God’s Pocket. And so maybe it’s not their fault—the New Journalists’—that a death in that world doesn’t matter to them. That a 24-year-old man who supported his mother and his neighborhood is dead.
“And maybe it isn’t their fault that it matters so little that they get the age wrong, or miss the street where the dirty-faced little house was. Maybe, it isn’t their fault that they care so little they can report the same man dying two different times in the same week.
“But it’s someone’s fault. Someone gave the New Journalists their VDT machines, someone brought them to Philadelphia, someone gave them the space in this newspaper to write. Someone armed them and turned them loose, and the victims pile up quietly all over Philadelphia, and in the forgotten editions of this newspaper.
“And the victims sit quietly in God’s Pocket and a hundred other neighborhoods like it in this city, and they take it. They are afraid and ignorant. They are being used like guinea pigs in an experiment in child journalism, and none of them is doing a thing about it.”
“None of them cares enough to come down here and shake somebody by the throat, none of them cares enough to say, ‘You can’t insult me.’ Leon Hubbard might have done that, I don’t know. But I know we owe him an apology, and all the people who knew him and loved him and worked with him. And I know that if we stop listening to Leon Hubbard’s story, and all the stories like it in the neighborhoods of this city, eventually the neighborhoods will stop listening to ours.”
Shellburn typed a “-30-” at the bottom of the page, and then put his feet up on the desk to read what he had written. He smiled, thinking of the phone calls Monday morning, thinking of the crybaby New Journalists writing their defenses in columns that they would submit for the Op-Ed page, and that would never be run. He thought of Jeanie Scarpato and stopped smiling.