by Pete Dexter
The first step out was a yard down, and they always told each other to be careful. Mickey even noticed himself saying it. She and Bird were sitting in lawn chairs on the little piece of grass that went with the trailer lot. Sophie was in the shade, holding a water can over her flowers. Bird had taken off his shirt and put his face into a three-sided sun reflector. He said good morning without opening his eyes. Mickey smiled at them. There was some people shouldn’t take off their shirts in public.
Sophie said, “You want some breakfast, Mickey?”
He shook his head. “I can’t even think about food, this time of the morning,” he said.
Bird folded the sun reflector and sat up, sweating. He looked at his watch awhile. “We better go practice,” he said. “You want to come along, Mick?”
“I think I’ll just read the paper.”
“You don’t mind if we go?”
“No, it’s all right,” he said. “Just be careful.”
Aunt Sophie picked up a big straw purse off the table and looked inside. Then she reached in and got the gun, and then a box of shells. “Lemme carry those for you,” Bird said, and she gave him the shells. She leaned over and kissed Mickey on the cheek and then the two of them walked off into the woods. She carried the gun behind her back, the way young girls in the movies carried their hands when they flirted. Bird waded through the weeds like a sunburned heron. Sometimes, when Sophie was with her new girl friends, Mickey and Bird talked. “We got to be ready, when they come,” Bird would say.
Mickey never knew what to tell him. They might come and they might not. In the old days, you wouldn’t of had to wonder. “Bird,” he’d said, “I can’t live off you and Sophie forever. I got to get a job, start somethin’….”
“You’ll be here when they come,” Bird said. “You’ll know what to do.”
He sat down in the chair Bird and Sophie had bought for him and picked up the Gainesville Sun. It was different from the Daily Times, calmer. He wondered what he would do if they came. It wouldn’t make much difference, of course, they wouldn’t come in stupid like at the flower shop. If they came at all.
He’d give it another month, or two.
It was quiet awhile, and then he heard the shots a long ways off, spaced minutes apart, breaking the quiet Florida morning like unexpected reminders of the people he’d loved.
They were out there in the woods most of an hour, Bird and Sophie, shooting at bottles.
FEBRUARY 5, 1983
TIMBER LAKE
CECIL, NEW JERSEY
For T. C. Tollefson
(1917–1978)
Now there was a teacher …
About the Author
PETE DEXTER comes from South Dakota and has worked for newspapers for eleven years, the last seven as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. His work also appears regularly in leading magazines, including a monthly column in Esquire and other work in Playboy. He is a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens with his wife, Dian, and their daughter, Casey. God’s Pocket is his first book.