God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (19 page)

The one in front called him off. “Whatta you want
to do this for?" he asked Peets. "We didn't insult you,
right?" And while he said that, the other one climbed into the
truck bed behind Peets and pushed him once in the back.

"Let's go somewhere we can talk," he said.

Peets turned around and stood over the man that
wanted to talk. He felt the back of the truck drop when the other one
got on behind him. The one who had pushed him threw the hand with the
artificial knuckles at Peets' face, and caught the top of his
forehead. When Peets looked, there was a piece of wrinkled—up skin
hanging from the metal. The one behind him put an arm around his neck
and tried to choke him. Peets kept his eyes on the one with the
knuckles. His head burned, and the one trying to choke him said, "Hit
him, Ronnie. Fuckin' hit him."

Peets felt an old calm settle in, he noticed the
blood dropping around his boots—not a lot of it, about like the
drops you get right before a heavy rain. He noticed a man across the
street watching. The one with the knuckles had a peculiar look on his
face, but he steadied himself and turned to throw another punch.
Peets reached out and smothered his hand, and then found his face,
and then, with the same broad motion you might use to shape an eye
cavity in clay, he pushed into the corner of the socket and took the
man's left eye out. The man screamed again, a truer scream, than when
Peets had called him a Jew. He grabbed for the eye and bent over,
trying to somehow take it all back, and now it was sprinkling blood
around his feet too.

And the calm passed and something was loose in Peets.

The man holding his neck had froze, Peets guessed
he'd seen the eyeball. Peets reached behind him and grabbed the waist
of the man's pants. It wasn't easy because they were tight. The only
sounds were the traffic and Peets' own breathing. He caught another
look at the man across the street. He was sitting on a fire hydrant
now, watching.

Peets pulled the one in back off his feet. He felt
him give up the hold on his neck. He turned back to him then,
thinking again that it was Old Lucy they were after, and picked him
up by the jaw and the pants and held him over his head. The man's
hand found Peets' face, and Peets bit his thumb. He'd spent years in
a dojo, he could fight judo or karate, even box a little, but in the
end it always came down to biting fingers.

Fighting was fighting. Twelve years of bowing and
walking around wrapped in a tablecloth and you still ended up biting
fingers. He threw the body now, from the bed of the truck to the
ground. One of the legs attached to it hit the rear gate of the
truck, twisted and came to rest bridged to the little pile of sand
Peets had shoveled out of the truck.

The leg looked broken, but Peets jumped down and made
sure. Then he looked across the street at the man on the fire
hydrant. The man looked back. He stood up, slowly, nodded, clapped
five or six times and then headed east down the street.

Philadelphia.

3
A
Meadow in the City

Shellburn brought her home from the Pen and Pencil
Club. He only went there when he needed somebody to take home.
Sometime after one in the morning, somebody would come in. A
photographer sometimes, or a copy editor. Somebody. He'd been
drinking vodka and orange juice all night long. She came in with a
couple of people he didn't like—he didn't like anybody that came
into a bar laughing—and stood next to him. Shellburn never drank
sitting down. "You're Richard Shellburn," she said. He
thought she might be a city hall reporter for one of the radio
stations.

"Yes, I am," he said.

"I thought you'd look older."

"I thought you would too," he said. She
smiled at him and laughed, and didn't have an idea what he was
talking about.

"Can I buy you a drink?" she said. He told
her it was screwdrivers and she made a face. A Cute face. She looked
about twenty-two to Shellburn, which meant she was probably thirty.

"I can't stand vodka." she said, and moved
away from the men she'd come in with.

Shellburn nodded. "You might just as well shoot
it into your veins," he said.

"Why is that?" she said. He shrugged. "Oh,
you mean you might just as well put it in your veins .... " She
was standing closer to him now. She was wearing a Temple University
sweat shirt and blue jeans with the word "Chic" written
over the back pocket. Oh, yes, she'd shown him her ass.

"Do you go to Temple University?" he said.
He killed the screwdriver in his hand and took another one. There was
a line of them on the bar. Shellburn bought them six at a time
because the bartender got busy this time of night, and because he
liked the way it sounded, ordering half a dozen.

"I graduated," she said, "in
journalism. I'm freelance now, sports mostly .... " He looked at
her closer. “SPORTS,” she said. Then, "You don't approve of
women in the locker room?"

He thought about that half a minute, and then he
said, "Who was Yahama Bahama?" She smiled and leaned
against his leg. She picked up one of his screwdrivers and finished
it before she put it down. He guessed it was how the women's movement
bought you a drink.

"Is that a name for your penis?" she said.
"Jesus, everybody's got a name for their penis .... "

They finished the vodka and orange juice and he took
her back to his apartment. She didn't believe him when he told her
Yahama Bahama had been a middleweight fighter. She sat next to him in
the car with one arm in back of his shoulder, and the other one
draped across his stomach so her hand rested in his lap. She was a
pretty girl, but she wasn't troubled enough to be much of a piece of
ass.

He parked the car on the sidewalk in front of his
building, and before they got out she pushed her hand up into the
crotch of his pants, and then kissed him on the cheek. It seemed like
a misunderstanding.

He lived on the second floor, behind a steel door
that unlocked in three places. The windows looked out across the
Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey, and the view was the first
thing she noticed. Then she went to the only table in the place, and
sat down on the chair in front of it—the only chair in the
place—and looked at the old typewriter sitting on the table. "So
this is where you do it," she said. Her fingers touched the
keys, but she didn't press any of them.

The apartment had three main rooms and two of them
were empty. The room they were in had the table and the chair and the
typewriter and a mattress in the corner. There was a phone on the
floor next to the mattress, and a black-and-white television set on a
bookshelf in the corner. "Sometimes I do it there," he
said.

She said, "Sometime could I watch you write a
column?"

"Sometime," he said. He turned on the
television set and took her away from his table. He didn't like
people touching his typewriter. He didn't like touching it himself.
She went with him to the mattress and unbuttoned his shirt. She
didn't seem to notice his body, which was white and moley and had
inverted nipples. It was nothing like the bodies she saw in the
locker room, he knew that.

And as he thought that, it began to come to him who
this girl was. She'd spent two weeks in the Phillies' locker room, if
he remembered it right, and then written a story for Velvet magazine
describing the different sizes and shapes of every penis on the
starting rotation. She unbuckled his belt, pinching his skin there,
and then unfastened his pants. He sat on the mattress, thinking of
the players' wives who had formed a barricade in front of the locker
room to keep her out and said on television that nobody was going to
see their husbands' private parts but them and Danny Ozark.

The sports reporter was smiling.

She pulled his pants down around his knees, then
fought his shoes off and pulled the pants over his feet. He was
wearing sky-blue, leafy underpants that were two feet long. He
wondered if she had ever seen Jim Palmer, who was a pitcher for the
Baltimore Orioles, in his underwear. Jim Palmer posed in underwear
for Newsweek magazine.

She took the pants back to the table and folded them
over the back of the chair, and then put her own clothes on top of
his. She was wearing a pair of red panties under the jeans—panties
the size of the ones Jim Palmer wore in Newsweek magazine—and
nothing under the sweat shirt. She was slim, and tan for early May.
And she had high-beam tits.

She folded into the mattress and reached into his
shorts for his poor, drunk dick. She found it, smiled—whatever it
was behind that smile, he didn't like it—and began to rub it up and
down, absently, while she looked at the typewriter.

"Could you always write?" she said. "I
mean, did you always want to be a writer?" He pictured her
asking Pete Rose if he always wanted to be a baseball player. She let
go of his dick and cupped his balls. "Hmmmm?"

Shellburn barely noticed. He was getting sleepy now.
If he didn't fuck this graduate of Temple University Sportswriters'
School in the next ten minutes, it wouldn't happen in eternity. "As
a boy I wanted to shave things," he said.

She pulled on his dick and smiled. "You're
kinky?" And then she bent over without being asked and put old
Yahama in her mouth. He couldn't feel it at all, but there wasn't
much else she could be doing down there. There was a cool sensation
when she came up for air. "You had a lot of those screwdrivers,"
she said.

"Eighteen," he said. "But you drank
two of them. That's why I can't get it up. You drank two of my
screwdrivers."

"Relax," she said, “tell me about shaving
. . ." and she began rubbing him again.

"If that relaxes any more," he said,
meaning his dick, "we got a problem with brain death." She
giggled and looked back toward his typewriter.

"Do you work every morning?" she said. "ls
there a time you do it, or do you wait for an inspiration?"

“
"The family had two dogs," he said. "A
mongrel and a sheepdog. I was never allowed near the sheepdog with a
razor."

She looked around the room. "It doesn't look
like there's much here to inspire a writer." He looked around
with her. The place was empty, but he couldn't think of anything he
wanted to put in it. It was a place to sleep. Shellburn could sleep
anywhere there was a television on. There was nothing he saw outside
that belonged there with him. No painting, no furniture, no plant. As
a matter of fact, he was thinking of getting rid of the table.

He had moved to this place after his separation, and
what was in the room was what he'd brought with him. That was six
years ago in September, and all he'd added were two locks on the
door. The woman he'd married was twenty years younger than he was.
Stevey. Her father owned fumiture stores in Camden and North Philly,
where he sold bedroom suites to blacks and Puerto Ricans who couldn't
afford them and who, on an average, would make two payments and quit.
Then her father would hire other blacks and Puerto Ricans to
repossess the bedroom suites and he would sell them again. Her father
was a rich man and a big employer of minority Americans. He had a
letter thanking him from President Richard Nixon. He resented having
them, around all the time, though, and used his money to keep his
daughter as far away from that part of the world as he could. So
Shellburn's wife had grown up in private schools, taking dance
lessons and violin lessons and tennis lessons and art lessons. She
had gone to the Moore School of Art, and some of the 'teachers there
thought she had a talent.

Then she'd gone to Paris and learned to resent
America. That was the kind of woman Shellburn had married. He'd met
her at some women's club where he'd given a talk. He was getting $500
then. She liked him right away, and thought they made an interesting
couple—this great, rough-talking, common man's writer, who spoke
better to the city than any man alive, and the young artist, who
would paint things that spoke to no one but herself. She liked the
cultural juxtaposition. Those were the words she used, "cultural
juxtaposition."

He smiled, thinking of her motives. He could smile at
her, but he never asked himself who would marry somebody like that.

The freelancer from Temple was encouraged by the
smile. She got closer to Shellburn and pecked at his cheek and pulled
at his dick. "Tell me something about writing," she said.
"Tell me a trick."

Shellburn shook his head, and the motion staggered
him. "It's like shaving," he said. "You bleed worse
than it hurts."

Shellburn's marriage had lasted sixteen months,
counting the time in the lawyer's offices. It had taken her three
months for it to set in that she really had married beneath herself
and the juxtaposition lost its novelty about a week after that.
Shellburn hadn't done anything to save it, and that had brought out
the violent edge of cultural juxtaposition.

He was used to watching things happen, and he watched
this. "Do whatever you want to," he'd said, and she'd
thrown a mason jar at his head. She'd bought forty of them for
drinking glasses—five different sizes, eight glasses each size—and
before the papers were signed she broke everything but the little
juice glasses, which would bounce off the walls with impunity.
Shellburn liked the little glasses for their toughness, but she took
them with her when they split up.