God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (24 page)

She sat down on the bed next to him. He let go of one
of her hands, held onto the other one. She wasn't sure if this had
something to do with Leon or not. "I go there at night
sometimes," he said. "I drink too much and wake up there in
the morning, with the birds coming in and things growing everywhere
you look."

He was looking at her now to see if she was following
his drift, and she gave him that too. “I know," she said.

"You do, don't you?" he said. And he let go
of her hand and put his arms around her neck and pulled her into him.
He was as soft as her sisters, and she could smell the alcohol in his
skin. And it made her happy to sit there with him. Richard Shellburn,
holding onto her for comfort. She had been with most kinds of men,
but nobody ever acted like this. She didn't expect many did.

She put her hand down, as much for balance as
anything else, and it rested on his leg, just above the knee. She
smelled the alcohol and cats, and then they were lying back, and he
was showing her the fall of the land by the water with his hand. "The
house was going to be on the hill," he said, "where you
could wake up in the morning and see the whole picture."

"I know," she said.

"I was just there this morning," he said.
And then he held her a long time, lying on Leon's bed, and didn't say
anything else. She felt him relax, and then sometime later she felt
him pull himself together. Little movements in his shoulders and
arms. Not muscles. He didn't have muscles the way Mickey did, and he
didn't rub her with his dick or try to get his hands up under her
skirt or in her blouse. He had an erection, she could see that, but
he never tried anything. She thought it was part of how sad he was.

They'd been on the bed half an hour when she felt him
moving, and then he sat up and blew air out of his mouth and felt his
whiskers, and seemed to forget for a moment that she was there. It
happened suddenly, and the skin where she had been against him felt
cool and empty. She sat up and put one of her hands on his leg again.
"You seem so sad," she said.

He blew again and stood up. His notebook was on the
floor next to the bed, and he picked that up and began looking at the
pages on top, flipping back through five or six of them. "I
don't know what I can do yet," he said, like it was all
connected to Leon after all. And then she heard the front door open
downstairs, and Mickey walking into the house.

He called up the stairs. "Jeanie?" he said.
"You up there?"

Richard Shellburn ran a hand through his hair and
straightened his shirt. She walked to the top of the stairs and
looked down. Mickey was filthy. "I'm up here with Richard
Shellburn," she said.

She surprised herself, how
natural that sounded.

* * *

Bird left the Cadillac outside the front window of
the flower shop and walked in with his long, thin arm around Mickey's
neck, and dropped all the money in his pockets on the counter, beside
Aunt Sophie's eyeglasses. She'd left them there while she boxed
corsages. The schools were having their dances this weekend, and it
was busy.

She looked at the money, then she looked at Mickey to
see if Bird had stuck up a Purolator truck to get it. Mickey smiled
at her and pulled himself loose from Bird. "He go wacko?"
she said.

Bird pulled the old lady toward him and kissed her
head and her cheeks and her nose, leaving wet marks everywhere he
went.

"Sometimes it works," Mickey told her.

Bird said, "I tried to get Mick to come with me
on this horse, but he wouldn't listen."

"Nobody listens to crazy men," she said.

Bird hugged her again and said, "But they
oughta. You listen to some of those old bums walkin' around on the
street, talking to themself. They get like that, they can see
somethin'." He picked up some of the money and held it in front
of the old woman's face. "What do you see?" he said.

"That's very nice," she said.

"We're goin"to Florida," Bird said.
"We're going to get out of here while all these people are
fightin' each other over who docs business. We'll get suntans."

"You going to leave your business, Arthur?"
she said.

"We'll let Tony run it," he said. "I
don't care .... "

"You be better off giving it to the nigger,"
she said. "Tony don't care about the business."

"Then we'll give it to the nigger," he
said. The old woman began to smile. Arthur could be so funny ....

Mickey had to see Smilin' Jack. It was getting dark,
and he didn't want to do it after Jack started to drink. "I'l1
see you tomorrow," he said, but Bird stopped him on the way back
to the warehouse.

He stopped him and shook his hand, and embarrassed
him. "You always got a place," he said. "No matter
what happens, you always got a place to stay. You're like my own
fami1y."

The old woman told Arthur to pick up his money off
the counter so she could finish her work, and then she walked Mickey
back through the flowers to the door that led to the warehouse. She
kissed him on the cheek and said, "You looked after Arthur good,
Mickey. That's a nice boy, not to let him do nothin' crazy."

She turned on the lights in the warehouse and he
walked through the meat cooler, and then out past the truck Bird
hadn't given back, and got in his own truck. He didn't bother to
check the load, it wasn't going to be his truck long enough to worry
about.

The neon light was still on in the window at Moran's
Funeral Home. Mickey found Jack in the viewing room, leaning against
a dark pink casket and its contents, an old woman wearing a fluffy
sort of dress that just missed matching the color of the box. Jack
had loosened his tie and his shoelaces and was drinking a can of
Rolling Rock, and he hadn't heard the front door when Mickey came in.

"Jack?"

He jumped away from the casket and spilled the beer
down the front of his suit. “Jesus, God," he said, "you
scared the piss outta me." He wiped at the beer, then noticed
some of it had spilled over the woman in the box. He forgot about
himself and took care of her. He wiped at it with his hand and then
blew on it and then wiped at it with the handkerchief from his suit
coat pocket. "You think this is going to stain?" he said.

Mickey looked at the woman closer. "I don't
think so," he said.

"This shit's organdy," Jack said. "Fuckin'
water stains organdy .... " Mickey waited while Jack worked on
the dress. "You want to know the way this business is?" he
said. “Right now, if the family walked in here, they'd think I was
feelin' her up." Jack stood back and took another drink of the
beer. "You suppose people are going to smell this shit on her'?"

Mickey shrugged. "At an Irish funeral?"

Jack thought it over and calmed down. He looked at
the spots on the woman's dress from different angles, then he got
down into the casket and blew on it again.

Mickey was waiting for the right moment to bring up
the problem with Leon's funeral, but he saw there wasn't going to be
one. "Jack," he said, "I got a problem with the
money."

Smilin' Jack stopped blowing on the old woman's chest
and came out of the casket as still as the old woman herself. He
turned around and picked up his beer, which he'd put on the rim of
the casket while he blew on her. "That's too bad," he said.

"It's nothin' permanent," Mickey said. "I
was thinkin', if we could have the service, I could pay you in a
couple weeks, a month tops. If I don't have it by then, I'd sell the
truck. You know, it was just a bad time for it to happen."

Smilin' Jack finished the beer. "How come it's a
bad time?" he said. "How much money you got?"'

"Seven hundred."

Smilin' Jack threw the empty can into the wall over
the casket. "What about the fuckin' money from the Hol1ywood?"
he said. "There was more than seven hundred they collected
there."

Mickey said, "Things happen. You'll get your
money, but I got to have this funeral on time, and it's got to be
right. The mahogany box, everything. Jeanie's all fucked up over
this."

Jack said, "That's nothin' to me. It's your
fuckin' woman and your fuckin' body unless I get paid." He was
shouting.

Mickey closed his eyes. "Don't get hysterical,"
he said.

"You ain't an old woman, and I don't want my
business on the street."

"You ain't got no fuckin' business," Jack
said. He was still shouting. "What you got is somethin' on the
side, right? No, you bet a game. That's it, you bet a fuckin' game
.... "

"What I did is nothin' to do with you,"
Mickey said. "What you got to worry about is makin' sure
everything is right on Saturday. You'l1 get your money." He
stood up and moved closer to him. Smilin' Jack relaxed and smiled the
smile that sucker-punched Mole Ferrell.

"Sure, Mick," he said. Mickey saw Jack was
going to hit him. He wondered how many beers he'd had, fixing up the
old woman in the casket. "Sure," he said.

Mickey said, ?'Jack, put it out of your head .... "

Which Smilin' Jack took to mean Mickey was scared. He
said, "What? What are you talkin' about'?" He smiled again,
then focused on Mickey's nose and then aimed a right hand that the
old woman in the box would have ducked. Smilin' Jack followed the
fist, stumbled, the word "motherfucker" stumbling out too,
and Mickey grabbed his collar underneath his ear and kept him from
falling. Then he straightened him up and slapped him across the face,
harder than he meant to.

"This ain't the time to panic," he said.
"You'll get paid in two weeks, a month at the outside." He
held him and said, "You understand me, Jack?"

Jack's face was red and his eyes were watering and
surprised. He shook his head. "Jesus," he said. "I
don't know what's wrong with me. Me and the old man ain't been
gettin' along, I don't know. Hey, let me get us a beer."

Mickey sat down and waited. He heard Jack bumping
into things in back, opening doors, cleaning himself up. In five
minutes he was back, holding a couple of cans of cold beer. "Yo,
Mick," he said, "I was wrong. I don't know what's got into
me .... " He touched Mickey's beer with his own, and they drank
a long toast.

After that there wasn't much to say. "I'm sorry,
Mick," Jack said.

Mickey said, "I just didn't want none of this on
the street Jeanie's all fucked up."

"Yo, we'll take care of it, don't worry about
the money .... "

Mickey said, "I said you'll have it in two
weeks, a month tops." Smilin' Jack leaned toward him and they
touched beer cans again.

“
You and me got no arguments, Mick," he said.

When the beer was gone, Smilin' Jack took Mickey to
the ' side door, which opened to Lombard Street. "I hope you
don't mind going out the side," he said. "I'm locked up in
front."

Mickey said, "I don't mind nothin'."

Jack opened the door and the light from inside threw
their shadows across a square cement step, eight feet on a side.
There was a railing around three sides of the step, and the fourth
side, to the right as he went out the door, led to a ramp, wide
enough to handle a coffin.

Jack said, "I got to get the light fixed out
here."

Mickey said, "I don't mind," and stepped
out the door. On the way out he had the feeling Jack was getting
ready to sucker him again. But he walked past and nothing happened.
The air was cooler than it had been when he'd gone in half an hour
before, and it was beginning to mist. "It's gettin' cold,"
he said. Jack said, "Yeah, it's a cold world," and shut the
door.

There was no handle on the outside. Mickey heard him
on the other side, locking up. He put his hand on the railing and
walked down the ramp. The railing was cold and wet, and he let go of
it to shake the water off his hand, and that was when he stepped on
Leon's leg and bounced the rest of the way to the sidewalk.

He knew it was Leon before he looked, he knew it
before he hit the sidewalk. He tucked himself in as he fell, and if
he hadn't grabbed the railing and snapped his elbow out of its
socket, all he would have had for damages would have been his ear,
which felt like it was floating in a pan of hot boiling water.

He sat up, holding the ear, and made himself breathe
slow and even. He could hear his pulse in the ear and feel the elbow
swelling. He moved his legs, one at a time, then his neck. Nothing
else was hurt. The mist turned into a light rain.

He stood up and felt for the body. It was lying
across the width of the ramp, face up, the arms folded across the
chest. He started to slip and caught himself his hand across Leon's
face. He went from there down the front of his shirt and found his
belt. He turned the body over and used the belt to lift him up off
the ground. The body was stiff and awkward, the arms stayed close to
the chest. There was an alley halfway between Twenty-sixth and
Twenty-seventh, and Mickey took him there. He held the body as high
as he could, but it was heavy and the head skipped on the sidewalk.
He could not get rid of the feeling that there was something left in
there.