God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (29 page)

She looked at the cab and then she looked at him. She
said, "I think I'll wait for somebody goin' farther than
Philly." And then, before he could say anything else—not that
he had anything else to say—he slammed the door and walked back to
the place she had been before and stuck out her thumb.

He wondered what it was about him she didn't like. It
wasn't the truck, if she didn't like trucks she wouldn't of opened
the door. He watched the mirror for a breakin the traffic;
embarrassed, wanting to get away from her. The traffic was steady,
though, and he sat there two minutes. Once she turned around, and
when she saw he was still there she picked her guitar up and walked
twenty yards farther away.

There wouldn't be nothing after Jeanie but what he
paid for. The front door was locked when he got home, and he went
through his keys twice before he found the right one, thinking
somewhere in the back of his head that she'd taken it away. The house
was empty, he closed the door and stepped in. He turned on the
television and walked from the living room to the kitchen and got
himself a Schmidt's and a cheese sandwich. The place was all right
while he moved, but as soon as he stood still it felt like he'd broke
in.

On the television they were showing pictures of the
flower shop. There was a pool of blood just outside the door, broken
glass. They brought the bodies out in green bags. Then they showed
old pictures of Angelo Bruno, open-mouthed against the car window
after they'd shot the back of his head off. And then Chickie
Narducci, lying in the street next to his Buick, hit seven times and
not even covered with a blanket, just lying out there while the kids
and neighbors and reporters stood on the sidewalk and looked. And
then they showed a snapshot of Chicken Man Testa, and then the front
of his house after they blew it up.

Television loved blood on the sidewalk. The people
that decided what went on the air, they were the same ones who'd
stand out in the cold for an hour and a half looking at Chickie
Narducci's body.

Mickey sat down. He put his sandwich in his lap and
drank the beer. On the news, they said Aunt Sophie had been released
and was not expected to be charged.

He took the phone off the table and put it in his
lap, next to the sandwich, and called Smilin' Jack. Jack said,
"Moran's Funeral Home," in that voice he used for business.

"Jack, this is Mickey."

"Oh'?"

“
Can we still do it Saturday? I'll have the money
by tomorrow."

Jack Moran said, "How you going to get the
money'?"

"That's my business,” he said. "I'm
askin' if you can still do it Saturday. The mahogany box,
everything."

"I got to have the money twenty-four hours in
advance," he said.

Mickey said, “All right, I'll drop Leon off tonight
.... "

"No," he said, "l don't want to see
none of you again until after l see the money. Fool me once, shame on
you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

"I never fooled you," Mickey said.

“
You come into my place and slapped me around,"
he said.

"You try to get over on me like I was some
jerk-off. What the fuck did you expect?"

"Tomorrow afternoon,"
Mickey said. "One o'clock, maybe two," and he hung up. Then
he ate his sandwich and waited for Jeanie to come home, so he could
tell her it was going to be all right.

* * *

He had called at noon and said they needed to talk.
"Have you found something out?" she said. He said yes, but
the way he said it, she knew it wasn't about Leon.

"I'll pick you up," he said. And she said
yes.

Jeanie stood in front of the closet half an hour,
pulling things out, putting them back. She took a skirt and two
blouses with her into the bathroom and hung them from the towel rack,
where she could look at them and make up her mind while she was in
the tub. One of the blouses was a flat red, the other one was white.
When she got out, the white one went back in the closet. She put on
her makeup slowly, considering her eyes and the color of her skin as
if she was seeing it all for the first time. She put perfume under
her arms and in the creases beneath her breasts. She dressed and
touched the line of her blouse from the side of her breast to her
waist. It was the right blouse. He knocked on the door just as she
got downstairs.

Richard Shellburn was moving better than he had last
night. His hair was combed and his shirt was ironed. He didn't look
as sad with his hair combed. He started the car and said, "Do
you know who T. D. Davis is?"

She'd thought it was something to do with Leon at
first. "T. D. Davis is the kind that never comes right at you,"
he said. "When he wants you to know something bad, he goes
around the edges and leaves you to find it in the middle."

She waited then for him to tell her something bad
about Leon, but then he was talking about rape clubs and lady
columnists. They'd driven out past the airport before she figured out
that he was talking about somebody at the newspaper.

Twenty minutes later they were out of the airport
traffic and riding south on I-95. He was still talking to her like
she worked at the
Daily Times
and knew the people he knew. And something else too. He was talking
like there was already something between them, like he'd decided to
just skip two months. She didn't know that she liked that.

"Where are we going'?" she said. He smiled
at her then and reached across the seat to touch her hand. He had a
soft hand, wet and heavy. She guessed it didn't make much difference
what his hand felt like, because she put her other hand on top of his
and squeezed. She was trusting something, she didn't know exactly
what. Her sisters had moved out of the house now, Mickey might as
well be on Easter Island.

"I wanted to show you the place," he said.

Half an hour later, they went past a sign that said
Maryland welcomed safe drivers. He hadn't moved his hand an inch.
They were on a two-lane road now, following a green tractor at
fifteen miles an hour around curves and up and down hills. She had no
idea what direction they were pointed.

"When I was little," she said, "my
father used to take us to the shore in August. I never knew how he
found his way, and I used to think if it wasn't for him, we'd never
get back." She looked out the window. Cows, weeds, daisies.
Brick farmhouses. "It all looks the same, doesn't it?" she
said. "If you woke up out here alone, you'd never get back."

Shellburn moved his hand then, back to the steering
wheel. "You wouldn't want to," he said.

They came to a bridge. The tractor crossed it and
went straight. Shellburn turned right, onto a little dirt road on the
other side. They rode beside a river for a few hundred yards. There
were sailboats on the water and people sitting in them wearing
sweaters and white hats. Jeanie thought of herself in a sailboat,
then the trees got between them and the river and she thought about
waking up lost in the country.

Shellburn covered her hand again. "A1most
there," he said.

She suddenly felt happy, and she wanted to tell him
something true. It didn't matter what.

She said, "When you told me about this, I didn't
know if it was real." He looked at her, but he didn't move his
hand. "I thought it might of been something you made up. I mean,
sometimes I still pretend I'm a dancer. I went to New York to study
when I was younger, and sometimes I pretend I stayed there and got
famous, and that's where I am."

Which was all a lie, except about wondering if the
place was real. Jeanie Scarpato only pretended things that could
happen, like her sisters dying. He put his arm around her shoulder
then and pulled her closer. She fit herself into his side.

They went around more curves and then over one last
hill, and then she saw the place he'd told her about. There were
sailboats out on the water here too. It was all the way he'd said it,
but she'd liked it better when it was a story.

"It's beautiful," she said.

He sat there with his arm around her looking out the
window. Then he got out of the car. "C'mon," he said, "I'll
show you where we'll put the house."`

At least two months, he'd skipped. But she took his
hand and slid over his seat, and came legs first out of the
Continental. He took a blanket out of the trunk, then a straw basket.
The price tag was still on the basket. She took his arm and went with
him toward the water. The ground was soft, and the grass was deeper
than it looked, and tougher. It caught at her feet, and once she
stumbled. He walked beside her, limping and smiling, and by the time
they'd gone fifty yards he'd broken a sweat.

Then he stopped, moved a few yards to the left, and
pointed out over the trees and water.

"Right here," he said, breathing hard. "The
living room goes right here." He looked at her, and she tried to
think of something to say.

"It's a good view," she said.

He spread the blanket over the ground and put the
basket in the middle of it and himself next to the basket. She sat
down on the other side. He was wearing a tie and pants that hung off
his legs like old skin.

"Sometimes it's like that for me too," he
said. "I think about this place, and I'm not sure if it's real."
He opened the basket and I pulled out a bottle of French wine. The
kind with a cork. Then he looked back into the basket, moving
bottles, until he found the corkscrew. She saw three or four more
bottles and a bag of potato chips. Paper cups. The tag on the basket
said $9.95, and over that, Crown Liquors.

He sat pretzel-legged on the blanket with the bottle
in one of the holes where his legs crossed, and pressed into it with
the corkscrew. His hands shook, and she looked out over the water .
again and pictured herself in a sailboat and a white hat. When she
looked back at him, he'd taken the top of the cork out and pushed the
rest down into the wine, where it floated in pieces on top. He took
the stack of paper cups out then and filled two of them with the
wine, handed one of them to her. She sipped at it, straining the bits
of cork with her teeth, and by the time she took the cup away from
her lips he was refilling his glass. "How would you like to wake
up in the morning here'?” he said.

“
I wouldn't know where I was," she said. He
laughed and touched her hand, and then he drank everything in his cup
and filled it again. Somewhere off to the side she saw something move
in the trees. "There's something over there," she said.

He rolled over on his elbow and looked. "Probably
a deer," he said, and when he rolled back he put his hand on her
ankle and then smoothed the skin on the back side of her calf. She
saw the movement again, but when she turned to look, nothing was
there.

"You don't have bears, do you?"

"Bears?" he said. "Jesus, wouldn't
that be great?" He poured himself another cup of wine and
freshened hers. This time she threw it down with him, mostly thinking
about bears. "I'm fifty-three years old," he said after a
while.

She said, “You don't look that old."

He said, "I'm fifty-three years old, and a whole
city loves me." He laughed and she laughed with him. "Every
day when I go to work there's letters from people who love me,"
he said. "People I never met. They want me to come to dinner or
go out drinking or visit them in the Poconos."

"Do you go?" she said.

He shook his head. "Golf," he said. "They
want me to play golf." He lay back on the blanket, resting the
cup on his chest.

“
Sometimes I think I ought to take one of them up
on it," he said. "Just bring a suitcase over and move in."
As he spoke he found her leg with his hand again, moved it from her
ankle up her calf. She had the feeling that he'd moved in on her, now
that he mentioned it.

"How long do you think it would take to get
tired of having a celebrity around?" he said.

"I don't know," she said. His hand had come
up over the top of her knee, bringing the skirt with it. The skirt
fell into her lap, Richard Shellburn was looking at the sky. She took
a long drink of her wine and then brushed the hair back off his
forehead. She left her hand there and said, "It's hard to
believe it was only Monday Leon was alive."

He looked then and saw her legs were bare. "Time
is a bad bastard," he said. "There's nothing else that
works against you like time. It goes slow when you're where you don't
belong and fast when you're comfortable. Are you comfortable here?"

"I think so," she said. .

"And then, no matter what you're doing, there's
another kind of time, keeping track. But it isn't to tell how far
you've gone. It's to make sure you can't get any of it back."

Something moved again, farther up in the trees. A
glimpse of brown, and then Richard Shellburn moved again. His hand
slid from her knee all the way up her leg and stopped with one finger
resting against her underwear. "Let me tell you about your
husband," he said. She didn't want to hear Richard Shellburn
tell her about Mickey, not with his hand on her pants. She wasn't
sure she wanted to be with Richard Shellburn at all, but she was lost
in this, and trusting something.