God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (15 page)

He and Jack Moran opened Leon's closet and looked
inside. "Jesus," Mickey said. "it looks like the
fuckin' men's shop at Strawbridge and Clothier." There were half
a dozen suits, ten or twelve sport coats, a yard of pants, arranged
dark to light. Eight pairs of shoes. Mickey had never owned anything
you cou1dn't put in a drawer, until he was going out with Jeanie.

Smilin' Jack was professional. He went through the
clothes, feeling the material, and pulled out a dark blue suit with
white lines so narrow you could hardly see them running up and down.
Coat and pants both. "I think this might be best," he said.

He held it up for Mickey to look at, but Mickey
couldn't get his eyes out of the closet. "You suppose all this
shit is hot?" he said. "I mean, where'd he get the money?"

Smilin' Jack sighed. He said, “Usually, it's best
not to question. You learn in my business not to question. When it's
gone, it's gone."

He put the suit on Leon's bed, then pulled a pair of
black shoes out and put them on the floor under it. He found a white
shirt with a starched collar and a dark red tie with blue stripes
running kitty-comer all the way down the front. Mickey picked up the
shirt and looked it over. It wasn't yellow, but it wasn't bad.

Jack Moran took the shirt and the suit off their
hangers and arranged them over his left arm, careful not to wrinkle
anything. He picked up the shoes in his right hand. "This should
be all we need," he said.

Mickey nodded. "That's all I can think off,"
he said. They went back down the stairs, through the living room.
Jeanie and the sisters were still on the couch. "I'm terribly
sorry," Jack said. Jeanie looked up in time to see what he was
carrying out.

Mickey opened the door for him because his hands were
full and watched him until he'd gone around the corner. When he went
back in, Jeanie seemed improved, like she might know who he was.
"Something happened to him," she said to Mickey. "Something
happened over at that hospital nobody has told us yet." She
looked at him carefully. "They didn't tell you something you
didn't tell me, Mickey . . . ?"

It was good to hear her say his name again. "They
didn't tell me nothin' but that something dropped and hit him on the
skull," he said. He went dry, hearing the word "skull"
come out of his mouth. She looked at him, reading him for a lie.
"Nothing," he said, “that's the whole thing."

"Something else happened out there," she
said. "It did."

And then she was quiet again. Mickey waited maybe ten
minutes—maybe ten months—and then checked his watch.

"Look," he said, "I got a little work
. . ." Nobody said anything, so Mickey stood up. Nobody said
anything, so he went to the door. "Be back in a little while,"
he said.

He opened the door to the garage and checked the meat
in the truck. It was nice and cold in there. The refrigeration unit
was a new kind, cost an extra $2,000, supposed to operate
indefinitely in the extremes of climate. Unit. He didn't like the way
that sounded as much as he did when he bought it.

He took the plug out of the wall and started the
truck. He let it warm up, feeling it shake, and then he turned on the
refrigerator in back—it ran off the generator—and backed out. The
alley was one-way. He was watching the direction traffic would come
from and almost backed over his sister-in-law Joyce.

The truck was just creeping, but it barked when he
stopped, and he could feel the load shift in back. Joyce stood still
in the alley—he thought it was Joyce—looking at him in a
different way than she'd been looking at him inside. Then she moved,
and he finished backing out and then headed over to the flower shop.

He parked in back and tried the garage door. It was
locked, and he hit it open-handed. The door was metal. He rattled it,
it rattled him back. He tried it again, but nobody came, so he walked
around to the front and tried the door there. He rang the door and
knocked on the glass. It was nine-thirty, and Bird never slept in.

A light was on in back where the old woman put
together her arrangements. He knocked harder, and a minute later
Sophie Capezio came out, slowly, checking who it was before she
cracked open the door. She'd been counting her money.

"Good morning," he said. She smiled at him
but kept the door cracked. "Is Bird in there?"

She shook her head, worried. "Arthur ain't
feelin' good today, Mickey," she said. "He's just layin' in
bed, got his eyes open, you know? I says, 'Arthur, what you lookin'
at on the ceilin'?' He don't answer. It don't smell bad in there, and
I know he ain't been drinkin' last night anyway, 'cause he never went
out and Arthur don't drink alone."

Mickey said, "Maybe he's got the flu, you know?
There's some of that around." She shook her head.

"It's because of this terrible business started
with Mr. Bruno," she said. "He don't know what's going on.
Arthur don't have no faith, and I blame myself for that. He was up
there lookin' at the ceilin' all night, I know." She looked up
at Mickey for a minute then. "You want me to get him?" she
said. "I'll run across the street and tell him you're here. Take
his mind off the ceilin' awhile."

"He'll be down," Mickey said. "I'll
come back this afternoon, we'll do it then." She reached out
through the opening and touched him. It was an old freckled hand,
shaped like a squid, turned halfway blue. She smiled at him and
squeezed, and he would think back later, after the shooting, and
remember he was surprised at how strong she was.

He got back in the truck and then it dropped on him
that he didn't have anywhere to go again. He could go back and sit in
the living room with Jeanie's sisters, or he could go watch Smilin'
Jack drain Leon and discuss the lessons of the funeral business. "The
thing you learn is not to ask questions .... "

Mickey heard it again, thinking of how pitiful it
looked when you tried to change who you were.

He could have gone to a movie, but he couldn't leave
the truck in a lot, not with a load of meat. Especially that meat. He
could go to Thirteenth and Market and pick up a racing form, but he
wasn't sure he wanted to. He wondered if Leon had somehow died and
left him his ambition.

He sat in the driveway a couple more minutes, then
put the truck in reverse and, checking both ways for Joyce—Jesus,
he had to stop thinking this crazy shit—he backed out. There wasn't
anything to do, but that's what bars were for.

By ten o'clock, the Hollywood was half full. Most of
the Pocket had taken the day off because Leon had died. Women were
making hams and macaroni salads to bring to the house, and men were
sitting in bars drinking. When Mickey walked in, there were twelve or
fifteen people to shake hands with who hadn't been there the night
before. The jar with Leon's money was back on the bar, full of fives
and tens. McKenna was standing behind the bar, looking tired,
listening to Ray describe the research he'd done into his accident.
"The average settlement against a tavern in the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania is $62,475," he said.

Mickey found a seat and McKenna came down to look
tired in front of him. "You look worse than I do," McKenna
said. Old Petey Kearns was sitting in the next stool, his pants leg
rolled up around his knee to show the plastic leg. It was the color
of one of those dolls that shit in their pants.

When Petey Kearns drank, his artificial leg got hot.
It defied medical science. A couple shots and a couple of beers and
he'd have to roll up his pants leg to cool it off. There was a rule
on the wall—right below NO CHECKS and WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO
REFUSE SERVlCE—that Petey Kearns could not be served if he came in
with his pants leg rolled up. If he came in clean, though, he could
stay as long as he wanted. If he built his load at the Hollywood, he
was the Hollywood's problem. Petey Kearns was sitting in front of a
shot glass and a beer, reading the
Daily
Times
. The paper had been folded back to page
16, and passed up and down the bar. He made hen noises and sipped at
his beer. Then he looked up from the paper. "We ought to sue the
motherfuckers," he said. All up and down the bar people nodded.
Even Ray, except he was nodding at the lecture he was about to give.

"There are two basic components to a successful
libel suit," he said, straightening. "The first is you have
to be able to prove intent. You have to prove they intended to write
it. And the second is damage. You have to prove Leon was damaged by
the story, unless he was a public figure. If Leon was a public
figure, they could write anything they wanted about him."

McKenna looked like he'd just spent Christmas Eve
putting a tricycle together and ended up with an extra wheel. "Ray,"
he said, "it don't mean a fuckin' thing, because Leon wasn't no
public figure."

Ray dug in. "It's something everybody ought to
know," he said. "It might come in handy next time .... "
McKenna looked up and down the bar.

"Like if one of us celebrities gets killed, we
can sue the motherfuckers?"

Ray said, "I'm just telling you the law. You can
interpret it any way you want to."

Petey Kearns finished the story and pushed the paper
away. There wasn't any point in reading more than you needed to, it
was asking for trouble. Like answering a pay phone. Mickey picked it
up to see what they'd written. He read the story twice. "You
can't sue them, Mick," Ray said. A kid was standing there too. A
fat kid named Dick. This was the first thing he ever said to Mickey:

"Don't listen to what this fucker says. He works
for the newspapers. They put it like that in the
Daily
Times
, everybody in the whole fuckin' city
sees it, thinks we're a bunch of jerk-offs down here. Walkin' around
fallin' off shit all the time. Then they go and say Leon was
twenty-two, it's on the record, and what really happened down here
don't count."

McKenna looked at Mickey. "You got time for a
beer?" he said.

Mickey said, "I got time to baptize China."
Half an hour later Charlie Kearns came by with another jar of money
to bury Leon. Charlie owned the Uptown and was not related to Petey
Kearns. It was how he introduced himself, "Charlie Kearns, no
relation to Petey .... " The jar he was carrying wasn't as big
as the one at the end of the bar, but then Leon did most of his
drinking at the Hollywood. Charlie bought Mickey a beer and told him
the Uptown was sorry for what happened.

McKenna took the jar behind the bar and began to
count. "Now in the case of personal injury," Ray said,
“it's a different legal question." McKenna looked up.

"I'm countin' money, Ray," he said. "You
know I don't like talk while I'm countin'.”

Mickey drank the beer and the bar went quiet so
McKenna could count. He saw they thought he'd come in for the money.
When McKenna finished he put the stack of money on the bar and said,
"Five forty-five."

Mickey shook hands with Charlie Kearns. Charlie said,
"You comin' by with some meat today, Mick, or you going to take
the cash to Florida and retire?"

When Charlie had left, McKenna took the jar off the
bar and counted the money in there too. McKenna was a slow counter
for somebody in the bar business, and it was quiet for a long time.
When he finished, he put the two stacks of money together, and then
took a hundred-dollar bill out of his own pocket and put it on top of
the stack from the Hollywood. "Fourteen hundred and forty, all
together," he said.

McKenna put a rubber band around the money and then
dropped it in a paper bag he kept behind the cash register. The bag
was where he kept cash overnight, it had been folded and unfolded a
hundred times, rolled and unrolled, and it was as soft as a piece of
cloth. He always hid it in the same place, everybody in the Pocket
knew where.

He handed the sack to Mickey, smiling in a sad way
like it was Leon's ashes. Mickey took the sack, but he didn't know
how you thank a bar. "Lemme have the bag back sometime,"
McKenna said. It was heavier than Mickey would have thought, about
like a wet hoagie. He took the bag and saw he couldn't stay in the
bar, that it was some kind of ceremony, and it was over.

He'd left the truck around the corner, where you
cou1dn't see it from the house. He put the bag of money under his
seat, up with the springs, and then drove home. As he was going in,
two cops were coming out.

A big one and a little one. Jeanie was thanking the
big one—his name tag said Eisenhower—and he was stumbling all
over himself getting out and smiling at her at the same time.

Mickey knew why Eisenhower was stumbling, he
remembered the way she'd looked to him at first. Still looked to him.
The little cop was younger and didn't seem interested.

"We'll be back to talk to you, Mrs. Scarpato,"
Eisenhower said. Then he noticed Mickey standing on the steps.

Jeanie said, "This is my husband."
Eisenhower shook his hand, trying to see how Mickey fit here with
her.

"Good," he said finally. Mickey got his
hand loose. “We're still investigating the accident,"
Eisenhower said, "and we'll be back to you when we've finished."
He turned for a last look at Jeanie. "We'll be in touch,"
he said, and she smiled at him in a way he'd think about that night.
Mickey knew the smile.