God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (2 page)

"She goes in there and locks the door; 'I'm very
happy for you.' She don't even give you the satisfaction of sayin'
you're full of shit. And she takes the money. Right, Mick? Two
hundret dollars, and she don't talk to you anyway?"

Mickey only liked McKenna's stories when Leon wasn't
around to look at him. He didn't mind being brought into them—it
made him less of an outsider—but not with Leon sitting there
grinning at him like they were two buddies, just fucked the same
whore.

Mickey had only lived in the Pocket since he'd been
married. Most of the neighborhood was nice to him because they were
afraid of him, but McKenna liked him from the day they met. He
thought it could of been because they were about the same age, or it
could of been because Jeanie still had her looks. She could dress up
and fix her hair so beautiful it still surprised him that she wanted
him around.

The truth was, he was forty-five years old and Jeanie
was the only woman who had wanted him around, unless it was for
money, or doing somebody else a favor.

That night she'd taken him home from Judge Lourdy's
party, he'd made her happy. She'd moaned and perspired and said
"cock" and "balls" and "dick" into his
ear. And she was a biter. She'd said, "Oh, you're so good."
He'd lived forty-one years to that point, in Fort Lauderdale,
Florida, and everywhere else, and nobody ever said anything like that
to him before.

As he'd started to come, he almost bit her too. He'd
gotten scared, though, and put his lips over his teeth and closed his
mouth over the skin on her neck. He'd been afraid of leaving marks,
and she'd know he didn't belong there.

She'd come then. Closed her eyes and tightened and
hissed and pulled the hair on his back. So she'd noticed it. Once a
whore in Hollywood, Florida, had called him an ape.

Afterward, he pulled back a few inches to look at
,Jeanie's face. He wanted to see for himself that it wasn't a trick,
She was quiet and smiling, except there was something going on. And
neither of them moved for what seemed like half an hour, and by the
time he'd looked away, Mickey Scarpato understood he didn't even have
a guess what it was, and never would.

He rolled away from Jeanie now and looked at the
clock. Seven-twenty. "Leon goin' to work today?" he said.

She seemed to come back from somewhere else. "I
didn't hear him come in last night," she said. She sat up and
put on the black robe with the map of Vietnam on the back. Leon had
given her that for Christmas, bought it from some colored vendor on
Chestnut Street. It was so thin you could see her nipples through it.
He'd given it to her and winked at Mickey when she'd taken it out of
the box. He'd got the box at Bamberger's.

The house was narrow and cold. Two bedrooms, one
bath, four Touch Tone Princess telephones. She closed the bathroom
door behind her, and he heard water running. Then he heard her knock
on the door to Leon's room. The bathroom separated the bedrooms and
had doors leading into both of them, and another door leading into
the hall. Leon had taken all the locks off when he was eleven. Jeanie
told that story like he'd taught himself to read.

"Leon," she said, "it's time for work,
honey." She sounded tired, he didn't make any sound at all. She
knocked on the door again, and a few seconds later she came back into
the bedroom with Mickey. He stood up into his pants. She said, “He
must of been out late."

He said, "I got to be down to Bird's by eight
o'clock, if he wants a ride." She went back and knocked harder.
She didn't want Leon to lose another job. On the average, it took
three years to get him another one.

In the series of misfortunes that had been Jeanie
Scarpato's life, the greatest tragedy had been Tom Hubbard. She had
married him after she quit New York. He was the opposite of dance
school. She'd married him and lost him, all in eleven months. Shot
dead outside a regular Thursday-night crap game in South
Philadelphia. Leon Hubbard was the issue of that marriage. He was
what Tom Hubbard had left her. Leon and the house and a little over
$44,000 she found, mostly in hundreds, in a shoe box out in the
garage. Her sisters knew she had something—always remarking about
her widow's pension—but she never told them what.

She could close her eyes and still see the way she
had looked at the cemetery, holding the folded flag off Tom's coffin,
crying, her soft blond hair moving against the front of the black
dress. The wind was perfect.

She pounded on the door again and heard him move.

"Mickey's got to be
to Bird's place by eight, if you want a ride," she said. She
listened, he moved again. "Honey?"

* * *

Leon Hubbard hated to be told anything. There was
something about it that didn't take him into account. He woke up with
a hangover and a torn dick, smelling like Fat Pat's bedroom, Jeanie
kicking down the door telling him where Mickey had to be by what
time. "All right," he said.

"Honey?"

"I said all right." He lifted the sheet to
look at his dick. The tear ran half an inch, from the foreskin to the
center of the mouth, and resembled a harelip. "Don't ever pick
up a cat like that, " she'd said. "He was just telling you
the only way he could . . ."

Fat Pat lived over a little hoagie shop on
Twenty-seventh Street in a two-room apartment. Anywhere from fourteen
to twenty cats lived there too. "How come you don't have these 
fuckers fixed, at least?" he'd said, more than once. Three of
them were pregnant, and there had to be seven or eight males walking
around all day, spraying every inch of the floors and the furniture,
trying to stake out their territory over the scent of everybody else
who'd sprayed there. She never let the cats out because they were
wild and wouldn't come back.

It was a little God's Pocket right inside her
apartment. Fat Pat worked the Hunt Room of the Bellevue-Stratford,
waiting tables. Nights she hung out at the Hollywood or the Uptown,
drinking vodka and 7-Up with cherries in it, waiting for Leon. She
never ate the cherries, but she accumulated them in her glass to keep
track of how many drinks she'd had, and late at night they got soft
and petaled, and looked like an old corsage.

Pat sat at the far end of the bar from Leon and never
bothered him when he came by. She didn't even speak to him unless he
said something first. That's the way Leon liked it. Sometimes, mostly
on Fridays, he took her home. Not from the bar, though. He always met
her outside. "I don't need people knowin' about my personal
business," he'd said once. "It's the same principle as
changin' your patterns every day."

She'd heard him talking about her, though. At the
Hollywood and the Uptown both.

At her apartment, they'd go into the bedroom right
away, because there weren't as many cats in there. He'd take his
clothes off, fold them and put them in the closet. Leon always took
care of his clothes. Then he'd lie sideways across the bed, his head
against the wall, and watch her blow him.

Last night, one of the cats was watching too. Sitting
on a little table with the pictures of Fat Pat's dead brother Monte
in a Navy uniform, half a foot out of reach, blinking the way cats
do, like they're changing lenses back there. It was on the table
about five minutes, and then Leon felt a soft concussion and it was
next to him on the bed. He picked the cat up by the tail, and then
three or four things happened, he couldn't say in exactly what order.

The cat screamed. He saw the look of Fat Pat's face
and said, "No cat is comin' near this dick." Fat Pat had
taken his penis out of her mouth to beg for the cat, and the cat had
ripped a coma in the head of Leon's dick.

It hurt too bad to even look for his razor to cut the
cat's head off. He grabbed himself and rocked, back and forth,
hissing, while Fat Pat told him that it was the only way the cat had
to tell people not to pick it up by the tail. A couple minutes later
he realized he still had his hard-on.

There was nothing in his history to suggest the
problem would ever develop, but there it was. Torn and bleeding, it
would not fall. "We got to get it down to make it stop
bleeding," he said.

Fat Pat said, "Try
thinking about something else. Multiplication tables." In the
end, he had forced it inside his forty-five-dollar blue jeans and
walked home with it pushing into his pants leg. It hurt him
everywhere. It hurt so bad at home he didn't even wash off the smell
of Fat Pat's bedroom. He took a couple of Percodan and got into bed,
and gradually the pain drained back from his eyes and his chest and
his stomach and gathered itself in the head of his penis, where it
seemed to go to sleep with him. He got out of bed carefully now, not
wanting to wake it up all at once.

* * *

Downstairs, Mickey was sitting at the kitchen table
with a cup of coffee. Jeanie was sitting on the other side of the
table, eating chocolate donuts and reading Richard Shellburn's column
in the newspaper. "Listen to this, Mickey. 'The old man had eyes
as sad as the dog's. He looked into the empty rooms where he and his
wife had lived their lives, quiet lives, and wondered what had
happened to his neighborhood, that children would come into the house
and beat up an old man for his money. "At least they didn't hurt
Hoppy," he said. "Isn't that sad?"

Mickey watched her pour sugar into her coffee and use
that to wash down a donut. "I don't know how you eat that shit,"
he said. "You get sugar diabetes, they're going to cut off your
feet."

"You're sweet," she said. "You ought
to eat something too. . .You can't go to work with nothing in your
stomach."

He shook his head. He could never eat on a day he had
to steal a truck, not until after it was done. He looked at his
watch. Seven-thirty. "Is Leon going to get out of bed, or what?"

"I heard him moving," she said. "He'll
be down."

He looked at his watch again, but he didn't say
anything else. He didn't know much about women, but he knew enough to
stay out of the line between Jeanie and her son. The kid was 
there first, and that counted. No matter what Leon did, Mickey didn't
have any opinion on it.

Before they'd gotten married, Jeanie had mentioned
from time to time that Leon had been his whole life without a father
figure, and she was glad there would be somebody now to show him how
to be strong. Leon had been to Byberry twice Mickey knew of, for
observation. She would somehow drop his emotional problems into a
conversation, and Mickey would somehow ignore it.

A month or two into the marriage, Jeanie gave up on
it and settled for Mickey getting him a job. Which looked easier than
being a father figure. He asked around and found him a spot
bartending four nights a week on Two Street. Leon lasted three weeks.
Mickey went down to try to straighten it out.

"Listen," the man said, "I expect him
to steal. Everybody steals, that's what a job is for, but he don't
have enough respect to keep it reasonable. He comes in the first
night and grabs thirty. I got people workin' for me for five years
don't take thirty. Plus, I come into my own place and he stands there
lookin' at me like he wants to cut my head off."

When Mickey got home he told Jeanie he didn't know
what had gone wrong. And after that, when she asked him to find Leon
another job, he'd always tell her nobody was hiring. He'd tell her it
was the economy.

Which was all right with Leon. At least it had been
for three years. Jeanie gave him money for clothes and a place to
stay and let him use the Monte Carlo when he had a date. Her
insurance was fourteen hundred dollars, letting him use the Monte
Carlo. "A nice girl will be good for him," she said.

But they never saw his dates, even Cheryl. Leon said
Cheryl was a flight attendant for U.S. Air and lived in the
Northeast, which Mickey recognized for the classiest thing Leon could
make up. But he never said it, and Jeanie kept giving the kid forty,
fifty every Friday night to take her out, and Mickey never said a
word.

Then, about six weeks ago, Leon had decided he wanted
a job again. "Not some bar," he'd said, "a real job.
You know, a trade or somethin'." He'd told that to Jeanie.

She'd gone to Mickey like this: "It was him,
this time. It wasn't me, it was him. Can't you talk to somebody
downtown? Please, Mickey, talk to somebody for him." She went
through it again, how the kid had grown up without a father figure,
and finally time and maturity must have turned him around.

Mickey knew it was something else, but he didn't know
what. He did know by then that nothing would turn the kid around but
a chance to run over you twice.

"He's always been good with his hands,” she
said. "You know how old he was when he took the locks off
upstairs .... " And he'd given in. The next time he'd seen Bird
down at the flower shop he asked if he could find something for the
kid. Bird was eating a cold cheese steak.

He'd known Bird a long time, since he was still
hauling poison for Dow Chemical. They'd drunk beer together and bet
the ponies together, and they were friends except for business, which
Bird kept separate. Mickey bought his meat from Bird, and once in a
while he took a truck for him. But even when he did that—it was
never more than two or three a year—it was straight cash, never a
percentage.