God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (13 page)

He dropped the keys on the steps, picked them up and
was going through them again when the door opened. The light washed
out over the steps, and one of the sisters was standing in the middle
of it, an eclipse. It was hard to see which one it was. He stared up
into the light and at the dark and unhappy form in the middle of it.
"Hey, Joanie," he said, finally, "what are you doin'
up?"

She made a noise and turned back into the house.
"Joyce?"

He followed her in, locked the door behind him. "It's
the dogdamnest thing how I can't remember which one of you is which,"
he said. She walked to the couch, where there was a blanket and a
pillow, and rubbed her eyes. "What time is it?" she said.

"Closing time," Mickey said. "What
difference does it make, anyway?"

She looked at him hard, and he saw that he hadn't
said that as well as McKenna had. “You been out drinking? Tonight,
you been drinking?" She made a face and lay down on the couch,
and covered her eyes. The front of her hair was wrapped around three
pink curlers the size of a pig's leg. She covered her eyes with her
arm, but she didn't go to sleep. Mickey shrugged and headed toward
the stairs. "Don't go in Jeanie's room," the sister said.
"The doctor had to come twice to give her medicine, and he said
she needed a good night's sleep."

He said, "I thought maybe she'd want somebody .
. ."

"Joyce is up there with her," the sister
said. Mickey looked at her a minute, figuring out who that made her,
but she never took her arm off her face. He was straight and sure
climbing the stairs, somehow feeling her watching him. He reminded
himself to stop thinking of spooky shit tomorrow.

He went into the bathroom and closed the door. He
dropped some paper in the toilet to cover the noise and then urinated
against the bowl above it. He brushed his teeth, he looked at himself
in the mirror. She'd said, "You been drinking, tonight?" He
wondered how bad that was.

He cracked the door into the bedroom and saw Jeanie's
hair on a pillow. Her face was buried into her sister's shoulder, and
as he stood in the doorway looking down he suddenly realized this
sister was awake too, lying there in the dark watching him. He closed
the door an inch at a time, turned the light out in the bathroom, and
went into Leon's room to sleep. The bed was narrow and cool, and the
springs yawned when he lay down. There was a smell to it too. It took
him a minute to figure out what it was.

Cats.

* * *

T. D. Davis was the handsomest man in the entire
Davenport chain of newspapers, he may have been the handsomest man in
Philadelphia. He had an affected Southern accent, gray hair and a
boy's face and spent seventy minutes a day at the Philadelphia
Athletic Club, running on a treadmill. T. D. Davis did not like to
jog outside.

No woman on the staff of the
Daily
Times
had ever worked for anybody even close
to being as handsome as T. D., or as courtly, and it was the nature
of T. D. Davis that once a woman had been on the staff a year, she
would no longer dream about handsome men. After a year, cute was all
any of them could go. It was the same thing as a kid who gets sick on
vodka or gin, and never likes the taste again.

T. D. came into the office Tuesday morning at
eight-fifteen, passing under a five-foot sign that he'd hung at the
entrance to the newsroom. It said: THE REPORTER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT
PERSON IN THIS ROOM.

It used to say THE REPORTER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT MAN
IN THIS ROOM, but T. D. changed it when one of the women reporters
complained. Times changed, T. D. changed with them.

He walked under the sign, past the city desk, and
said good morning to Brookie Sutherland. Sutherland was an assistant
city editor, brought in six months ago from one of the chain's papers
in Florida. He smiled at T. D. and asked after his family.

"Ellen's just tine," Davis said. "Y'all
have to come out for dinner sometime." T. D. Davis said that a
couple of times a month, but Brookie Sutherland never actually got
asked out to the Main Line for dinner. Brookie Sutherland thought he
was T. D.'s friend.

Davis went into his office and shut the door. He hung
his coat in the closet and sat down behind his desk. There were
pictures of his wife and his three children on his desk, a
proclamation from the Chamber of Commerce on the wall, thanking him
for his service to the business community. There was a picture of T.
D. shaking hands with Mayor Bill Green, and a picture of him shaking
hands with A. J. Foyt, and pictures with Sammy Snead, Jimmy Hoffa and
Lyndon Johnson. Finally, there was a picture of T. D. standing with
Jackie Robinson, but it had been tom in half and taped together.

If you looked at the pictures in the right sequence,
you couldn't help noticing T. D. was getting handsomer all the time.
A yellow interoffice envelope was sitting in the middle of the desk.
Someone had been in there, somebody besides Gertruda, who brought him
his mail at nine o'clock every morning. He didn't like anybody in his
office but Gertruda, who was seventy-seven years old and didn't care
about anything he kept in his desk. The envelope was from Brookie
Sutherland. There was a copy of this morning's Shellburn column and a
copy of his anniversary column two years before. Brookie Sutherland
had used red ink to underline all the places where the columns were
the same, then added it up at the bottom.

"T. D.—," the note said, "3l
sentences almost the same, six sentences EXACTLY the same, plus
similar mood. Staff aware of similarities, as you will recall from
memo of last week, when anonymous person or persons went through
Shellburn column on dead mummer and underlined the word OLD 52 times,
out of 800-word column.

"Have also done some talking, as per your
suggestion, on prospects of having Peter Byrne followed, to the
purpose of gathering info, cud be used to fire him. Still think that,
under circumstances, it is the way we shud go—Brookie."

Peter Byrne was the
Daily
Times
' afternoon-shift police reporter, who
liked cops better than editors.

T. D. Davis took off his shoes and put his feet on
his desk. He took the two columns that Sutherland had left for him
and read them over, but it wasn't time to hit Richard Shellburn. He'd
stopped going out into the street years ago, and that skinny
kid—Billy somebody?—had been doing all his legwork, probably
writing some of his copy, but it wasn't his time yet.

Shellburn was still Shellburn, the man who cared
about the common man. He'd spent twenty years getting to be that.
Partly writing, mostly just being there on page 2 every day. Brookie
Sutherland didn't understand it but Shellburn could go senile
tomorrow and write that same column every day for a year and get away
with it.

Richard Shellburn was the only man on the staff T. D.
Davis couldn't fuck with. At least not yet. T. D. was always thinking
about the timing of things.

Before he'd come to Philadelphia, T. D. had worked in
New l York, where he'd learned what timing could do to you. He was a
sports editor there, and he had one reporter named Jimmy White that
he bent in this way or that just to see if it was possible.

Jimmy White had a sixteen-year-old daughter who was
the kind of retarded you didn't notice until she talked, and somehow
that made him scared to death of losing what he had, and scared of
being out of town, and anytime T. D. asked for something more out of
him, Jimmy White found a way to give it to him. He'd work late off
the clock, he'd come in early, he'd answer phones or take dictation,
just to stay in New York, just to stay where he was. Jimmy White
didn't have a friend on the paper, although the ladies who knew about
his daughter said they felt sorry.

And then his daughter had run away, and showed up in
Los Angeles a month later with every kind of venereal disease there
was back then. And Jimmy White began to miss work, two and three days
every week. And the sports department didn't run right when he was
gone.

T. D. threatened him four times, and then he saw it
was hopeless—that he wasn't afraid anymore—and he fired him,
figuring he might be worth something as an example.

Jimmy White walked out of the office without a word.
The Guild went to arbitration to get him his job back, but one
afternoon a week later, Jimmy White came back to the office and took
his case off the books. T. D.'s secretary—she was one of the ladies
who felt sorry about Jimmy White's daughter—had looked up that
afternoon and there he was, standing in front of her desk holding
what she thought was a cello case.

"Why, Jimmy," she said. "How are you?"

He pointed at the door behind her. "I need to
see Mr. Davis," he said.

 
The Secretary smiled. "I'm sorry, Jimmy,"
she said. He smiled back and put the cello case on her desk. It
opened in two places, she remembered that later for the police. Two
clicks, and then he pried open the lid and brought out a brand-new
eighteen-inch, 3.4-horsepower Craftsman chain saw. He played with the
choke a minute, flipped the switch to ON and pulled the starter cord.

The chain saw was freshly turned and sharpened, and
caught on the second pull. It made a noise that startled the
secretary and hurt her ears, and she wore cotton in them for six
months.

T. D. was sitting at his desk when he heard the saw,
and without knowing it was a chain saw, he knew it was serious. Then
his door opened and Jimmy White came in, holding a bright-red chain
saw in front of a pair of two-hundred-mile-an-hour eyes, and T. D.
tried to move one way, and then the other way, and both ways Jimmy
White moved with him. He pushed himself back in his chair, back away
from the desk and the saw, and Jimmy White kept coming, a step at a
time, racing the machine, watching him.

Jimmy White brought the chain saw over the desk,
pointing it at T. D.'s face, and then, a foot away, he revved it
again, dropped the point, and cut the desk exactly in half.

T. D. knew not to try to move. Jimmy White finished
the cut and the desk dropped in on itself, the pictures of Ellen and
the boys slid onto the floor, along with a photograph of T. D.
standing with Jackie Robinson, which was cut in half and
irreplaceable. There were also pencils, files and fourteen kinds of
vitamins, a couple of bottles of non-aspirin and a little plastic
bottle of Man-Tan. The secretary insisted on helping him clean up,
and she found that.

Jimmy White finished and turned the chain saw off
still looking into T. D.'s face, and then he walked out, smiled at
the secretary while he put the saw back in the case. "Goodbye,
Marion," he said.

"Have a nice day," she said.

T. D. heard that from behind his door. As soon as
Jimmy White was gone, T. D. called the police, and then he called a
meeting of the sports staff to announce that nothing that had
happened there that afternoon was to be discussed outside the office,
and anybody who discussed it inside the office would be fired too. He
didn't understand timing then, that there were things you couldn't
force.

The story broke in the
Daily
News
the following day, on page 3, along with
a picture of Jimmy White and his chain saw, and a paragraph about how
T. D. had threatened to fire anybody who talked about it.

The caption under the picture of White was: DESK
KILLER: I'D DO IT AGAIN. After the
Daily News
ran the story, the
Times
ran it, and the
Post
.
Then
New York Magazine
got hold of Jimmy White and got him to talk about his daughter and
his job, and then the television stations picked up on the story, and
every time Jimmy White was interviewed he got a little better.

And while Jimmy White was becoming a city's hero, T.
D. Davis had no comment. A spokesman for the paper would say only
that a complaint had been filed with the police, and it was
inappropriate to discuss it.

Jimmy White got job offers from the
Post
and the
News
, along
with donations, cards and an offer to go into partnership with a
chain saw dealer. There also were about a hundred calls from people
who wanted to hire him to saw their boss's desk in half.

The man on Channel 11 said, "Jimmy White has
somehow touched a chord in this city."

It took half a month for the story to die down, and
by then T. D.'s paper had decided not to prosecute Jimmy White. Then
it decided to offer him his job back.

And then T. D. came in one morning and his secretary
told him that the editor wanted to see him, and fifteen minutes later
he was cleaning out his desk.

And nothing had come up
since that he didn't consider the timing.

* * *

The phone started ringing at eight-thirty. There were
six calls from God's Pocket about a two-paragraph story on page l6
that a construction worker had been killed on the job at Holy
Redeemer Hospital. T. D. always answered his own phone calls. "You
got it all fucked up," the first one said. "Leon didn't
slip on nothin' and fall, they ain't even workin' in the air over
there. They're layin' cinder block. Where was there to fall? And you
fucked it up how old he was too. He wasn't twenty-two, he was
twenty-four, twenty-five years old. I went to school a year behind
him. No way he was going to get careless and slip .... "