God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (12 page)

Shellburn could still see the look on the managing
editor's face. "If Richard Shellburn wants to write with piss in
the snow," the old man had said to the M.E., "you keep him
in snow. As long as he writes here, you keep him in snow .... "

Shellburn began to think of the old man as the only
real newspaperman on the staff. He began to think the old man was his
friend. He went into his office later that week, though, and
Davenport thought he was the air-conditioner repairman.

He put a piece of yellow paper in the typewriter,
wrote his name in the corner, straightened the chair. Thinking of
piss in the snow, he went in the bathroom and took half a minute in
front of the urinal to work up about what you'd get wringing out a
sock. Shellburn's kidneys were in worse shape than his liver.

He went back into his office and sat in front of the
typewriter again. He rewound the tape recorder, and began to switch
it on and off writing down what he'd said on the way to work. He
called it "A Love Affair with the City."

It started out, "I have written the story of
this city for twenty years. Twenty years today . . ." and was
five hundred words deep when the Puerto Rican's voice came up at him
from the desk.

"You right. I think 1 fuck her last night. "
It intruded all over again, and Shellburn was almost two hours
writing the last three hundred words.

Just before he finished the phone rang. He picked it
up and a voice was shouting at him out of a crowded bar. "Mr.
Shellburn? No shit? You answer your owns phone?"

"What can I do for you, pal?" he said.
Usually Billy answered his phone. The man on the other end was
telling his friends to shut up, that he was talking to Richard
Shellburn.

"Hey look," he said, "I mean, we're
not important or nothin', but we thought you ought to know Leon
Hubbard was a tragedy, with his mother and all. It's a human interest
story. He come from the Pocket, and we thought maybe you could write
somethin' about him, how it was a tragedy the way he died."

"How did he die'?"

"Well, you know, it was common labor," the
man said. I don't know if it was malfeasance or not, but he wasn't
the kind of guy to walk around havin' shit fall on his head, I'll
testify to that in court. So will everybody else down here. We
thought maybe you could write somethin' up about it. You know, the
neighborhood takin' up a collection for his mother and all."

Shellburn said, "I'll see what I can do."

"You're a great man," the man said. "I
mean it. I wouldn't just fuckin' say that."

The man thanked him for another five minutes.

Shellburn hung up afterward and looked past William
Penn to the city that loved him. Then he finished the column and read
it over. Somehow it sounded familiar. But it was finished, and that
was what Richard Shellburn asked out of a column.

To be finished, and get
him away from the typewriter for another night.

* * *

When Mickey woke up, there was a family of Texans
cutting the parts off houseguests up on the screen, and five hundred
screaming colored people in the audience. He'd been dreaming, but it
took a while in the noise to remember what it was about. Turned Leaf.

She'd come into the stretch all by herself and the
crowd was screaming—and then something had happened. He could hear
it from the crowd, but he couldn't see what it was, and when he
opened his eyes they were cutting up houseguests in Texas. He wanted
to know what had happened to the horse, but the theater had filled up
while he'd slept, and it didn't seem like a good place to sleep
anymore. Once you started to think about going back after a dream it
was too late anyway. That's when it got away, when you were trying to
figure out how to get it back. That's how it all slipped away.

He sat up and stretched. The air in the theater was
warm and wet and smelled stale. It was two different smells when
people were sitting down in a place and when they were moving around.
Movie seats kept something from every ass that sat in them too. He
looked around to see how close the colored people were, he checked to
make sure his wallet was still in his back pocket. He started to get
up, then he thought of the situation with Leon and settled back into
the seat. There wasn't anything he wanted to do outside.

He watched Texas Chain Saw Massacre all the way
through, and then the first part of Halloween, which was about a
crazy man killing teenage girls. The girls had boyfriends and laughed
when they got laid. Mickey had seen a hundred movies where the girls
laughed when they got laid. He couldn't imagine it.

He walked out of the theater. It was dark outside,
beginning to rain. In his whole life nobody had laughed while he was
laying them. Could they have made that up in Hollywood and used it
for fifty years if it never happened anyplace else?

An old woman who'd painted her lips half an inch
beyond where they stopped watched him from inside the ticket booth.
She looked like a baby chicken in an incubator. He wondered who she
painted herself up for. He wondered if she'd laughed when she was
younger, while she was getting laid. She yawned while he watched her,
her mouth turning into a tiny black hole. He could imagine a lizard
coming out of there, but not the getting laid kind of laughing.

He'd asked an old trucker once how it was with his
wife. The trucker had been married forty years, and Mickey had been
about twenty-two then, and wondered what the man saw when he looked
at his wife. It was at a truck stop outside of Canton, Ohio. He'd
said, "I mean, does she still look like she did to you? Or does
she look older, or . . . ?"

The old trucker had studied him across the table,
making sure he wasn't a wiseass, and then he'd told him. "When I
look at my wife," he'd said, "I see an old fuckin' bag."

Mickey had smiled, tried to joke, but the old trucker
had kept him right there. "You wonder what she sees when she
looks at me, right?"

Mickey had said, "No, I was just thinkin' . . ."
The old trucker had held up his hand.

"I don't know what she sees," he'd said. "I
never asked her. But I don't sit around the house in my undershorts
no more, I can tell you that."

The old woman in the ticket booth was staring at him
now like she was waiting for him to do something. He knew she would
have been afraid to even glance at him on the street, but sitting
there behind a pane of glass and a job, she looked at who she wanted.
It was funny, the things that made people feel safe. He found the
Monte Carlo in the parking lot and sat down behind the wheel, still
tired. There was nothing he could think of to do, but he started the
car and turned south on Seventeenth Street, just to see where it
would go.

It went to the Hollywood Bar.

It was the most people Mickey had ever seen in the
bar on a Monday night, except for the year the Mummers' Parade fell
on a Monday. There was a lot of them, but there wasn't much noise.
When Mickey walked in the door it got even quieter. He stood still
and they stood still, and then Eleanore came from the back and put
her old arms around him. "He was a good youngster," she
said, and then folded up and fell into his arms. He was surprised at
how light she was, there wasn't anything left to her at all. He held
her until McKenna came around from behind the bar and took her off.
Eleanore's eyes rolled up into her head, and she went off to sleep
smiling.

And then everybody in the bar was buying Mickey
drinks. Some of them he'd never seen in there before, most of them
he'd never talked to. Kids. But they watched him, and who he was
talking to, and when it was their turn they came over and brought him
a beer and told him Leon was what the neighborhood stood for.

"Leon didn't take no shit," a kid said. "I
was a father, that's what I'd want my kid to be like."

"And he was a volunteer," another one said.
"He saved some people in a fire. I know that for a fact, he
saved a bunch of people."

They said what they'd planned to say and then left as
soon as they could, like hospital visits. Mickey shook hands and took
the drinks and listened to all the good things people said about Leon
and themselves. "All he ever wanted was to work at his job, be
let alone," a man told him. "Leon never bothered nobody in
his life. He was just like everybody else in here."

Mickey worked his way to the end of the bar where
McKenna was standing, trying to settle an argument. “I seen the
medals," somebody was saying. “He was decorated for valor for
killin' I don't know how many gooks."

A man named Ray, who was fifteen years older than
Mickey, shook his head no. Ray had worked in the wire room at the
Bulletin for thirty years, until it folded, and it was a known fact
in God's Pocket that he had a photographic memory and could remember
everything that had ever happened. That, and he knew things nobody
else knew. If you asked him what time it was the Japs hit Pearl
Harbor, he'd close his eyes a minute and then ask what ship you were
talking about. Then he'd say, “The Arizona? The first bomb hit her
at eight-eleven a.m., and she sunk fifty-five minutes later in
thirty-two feet of water with forty-six men still on board." How
the fuck you going to argue with him. Nobody ever caught him making a
mistake, except about the Phillies, and ever since that happened Ray
wouldn't talk sports. Now he was shaking his head no. "I
remember when Leon left," he said. "It was June 26, 1976.
They weren't sending anybody to Vietnam in l976."

"I seen the medals .... "

Ray spilled beer on his coat, shook his head no.
McKenna held up his hands. "Maybe it was another year," he
said. "I think I heard him talk about Vietnam once or twice
myself."

Ray was still shaking his head. The man he was
arguing with said, "Then where'd he get them medals? They don't
just give you medals for nothin' in the Army. You got to see action
to get the kind of medals Leon had .... "

Mickey slipped past Ray, not wanting to get into it,
and found a place at the bar in front of McKenna. "A lot of
people been askin' for you, Mick," he said.

Mickey shrugged. "I went to a movie."

McKenna smiled. "I know," he said. "The
day my mother died, you know what I did?"

Mickey looked at him. "Yeah," McKenna said,
"I went out and banged a Locust Street whore, came home at one
o'clock in the morning, and they're all there waitin' for me. It was
the Christians and lions all over again."

"On the day your mother died?"

McKenna nodded. "Cancer. Everybody thought I'd
gone and got drunk out of grief you know? They were right I felt bad,
but that's not why you get drunk and bang a thirty-dollar whore. You
do that 'cause you've got to do somethin' . . ." He opened a
fresh beer and put it on the bar for Mickey, then poured himself a
shot of Ancient Age bourbon, and touched the shot glass to the neck
of the beer bottle. "All I'm sayin'," McKenna said, "is
that afterward I felt bad, what I'd done. All I'm sayin' is that you
ain't the only one ever went to the movies when somethin' happened."

Mickey said, "Yeah, but I went to the movies
.... "

McKenna smiled at him. "Whatever, Mick. What
fuckin' difference does it make anyway?" Mickey saw that was
true, and felt like he'd got out from under the load, and when the
weight came off he noticed himself getting drunk.

The bar seemed to get drunk with him. Drunk and loud,
and then old Ray tried to punch somebody in the face over the dates
of America's involvement in Vietnam, and fell down and hurt his back.
Everybody walked over him on the way to the bathrooms, and he lay on
the floor talking about the lawsuit he could file against the
Hollywood if he was that kind of person to do it.

And for a couple of hours everybody shut up about
Leon, which suited Mickey, and people threw money into the jar by the
window to bury him. Once Mickey glanced over to the other end of the
bar and noticed a fat girl sitting over a drink with cherries in it,
crying. There were people all around her, but he could see she was
alone. When he looked again, just before closing time, she was gone.

He left the car where it was—double-parked in from
of the Hollywood—and walked down the street and back up the alley
to the garage. The night was dead still, and the sound of the bar was
still in his ears, along with the sound of his feet on the cement. He
wondered who the fat girl with the cherries in her drink was. It
seemed to him that she was the only one that wasn't part of the
ceremony.

It seemed to him he was thinking about a lot of
spooky shit lately that he wasn't used to thinking about. He made a
promise to go back to thinking regular shit tomorrow. He checked the
truck before he went into the house. The refrigeration unit was
plugged in, the meat was all in place, balanced over the axle. He
stood there a minute, wondering where they'd put Leon for the night,
and it was the first time since it had happened that he'd felt sorry.
Then he closed the truck and the garage, and a light went on in the
kitchen.

He went to the back door and began going through his
keys, looking for the one to the door. Mickey kept thirty-five or
forty keys on a ring that hung off his belt. He didn't know exactly
how many there were, but he could look at them and tell you what
every one of them was for. There were keys from old cars, old trucks,
old apartments. Mickey never threw his keys away. The truth was, he'd
always tried to keep things from changing.