God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (3 page)

When he'd asked about Leon, Bird had stopped eating,
a piece of onion hanging from the comer of his mouth where he had to
know it was there, and looked at him like it was somebody else. "You
sure you want to ask that?"

Bird had a famous temper and balanced that against a
melancholy that left him weighing his life against his expectations,
to measure what he was against a standard that would change with how
bad he felt at the time. Any kind of crisis would set him off—a
flat tire, a bad day at Keystone, money moving some direction it
wasn't supposed to—and it always ended the same way. He'd go from
mad to sad, and decide he'd wasted his potential. Bird had to stay
pissed off to keep from being weak.

"If it was just me, Mick," he said, "I'd
just fuckin' do it. I'd pick up the phone just because I know you,
that's how much I think of you. You got a nice thing here the way it
is, you know? A nice truck, a nice business, you don't got to ask
anybody for nothin'. A lot of these assholes around here don't
appreciate what a blessing that is. A lot of these assholes don't
appreciate when you start askin' for shit you don't have, you start
givin' away the shit you got."

He was still looking at Mickey like there was
something about him left to figure out. "I know what I'm talkin'
about," he said. "I got shit goin' down right now, I can't
even find out where it's comin' from."

Mickey said, "Yeah, well, I didn't mean to put
you into awkward positions.”

Bird held up his hands. A piece of meat slipped out
of the roll. "Nothin's awkward. Like I said, if it was just me,
I'd do it. But for somethin' like this, I got to ask somebody to make
a phone call. For somethin' like this, they're going to say, 'For
what?' You unnerstand? Nothin' is for nothin'."

Mickey nodded.

"You still want me to do somethin'?"

He thought of Jeanie, he put the kid out of his mind.
"Yeah, see what you can do." Bird finished the sandwich,
blew his nose in the wax paper, and a couple of days later they'd
called from the union hall for Leon to go down there and sign the
papers to be a bricklayer, first class.

He'd sold something for that, and he didn't even know
what it was yet, and the second week the kid was already showing up
late for work, telling Jeanie some shit about changing routines. Now
he was holding up Mickey's work too. Mickey heard the shower go on
upstairs. It was twenty minutes to eight. Jeanie said, "You
ought to eat something," and then they heard him scream.

The shower went off and it was quiet. "Did you
use all the hot water?" she said.

Leon stood in the shower, holding his mouth and his
dick. When he could trust himself he let go of his mouth. Then he
opened the other hand, a crease at a time, making a little stretcher
for it. He caught a reflection of himself in the mirror then. He
could have been looking through his change for a dime.

The tear didn't look as bad as it was, and for once
he was glad. Usually he didn't mind looking bad, like after a light.
But this nobody else was going to see. Nobody is scared of you
because you got a torn dick anyway.

He got out of the shower, dressed and took another
Percodan. He thought it over and took two black beauties too, to keep
his edge. He got dressed and began to feel the black ones right away;
He dropped six more of them into his back pocket, with the razor. He
smiled. There was nothing he carried in there that was good for
anybody else.

He pulled the razor out, smooth and fast and quiet,
and held it open-bladed in the empty room. He wished there was a way
for them to see into his pocket, they'd see what he was and call all
this shit off. He folded the razor and put it on the window ledge
while he checked the street, and then he went downstairs.

Mickey was already outside, sitting in the truck.
Jeanie was standing at the bottom of the stairs with that look she
had. She was his mother, so he loved her, but if he ever got sick
enough to do one of those family jobs you read about out in Kansas or
Michigan, she was the first one to go. She didn't know that, though.
She was always looking up into his eyes like she was now, trying to
find something out. She thought she could push in there with him and
sometimes, in a way, she could.

But what she didn't know was that he could hide
things from her, and that he could look into her too. He did that now
and saw she'd been fucking Mickey again. If she was supposed to be
his mother, what was she doing fucking Mickey in the next room?

"The shower turn cold, hon?"

He couldn't remember a time when she didn't make
everything that went on in the bathroom her business. She'd caught
him in there once with a pair of her panties, and the next day she'd
taken all the locks off the doors. Never said a word, just backed out
of the bathroom and the next day the locks were gone.

A long time later, he'd caught her telling her sister
Joyce about the locks, saying he was the one who took them off. She'd
winked at him, like it was something they'd agreed on. And she'd told
that story to so many people he finally saw she was telling it to
him. That's what they did to you when you let them make agreements
you never agreed to.

Fuck it. He tried to walk past her but she caught his
arm.

"Leon? You want something to eat in the truck?
You can't go to work with nothing in your stomach, hon."

He pulled away when she tried to kiss him. He didn't
want to smell Mickey on her, he didn't want her to smell Fat Pat's
bedroom on him. "Well,” she said, “you certainly got up on
the right side of the bed." He looked at her a minute, trying to
see what she meant by that.

He reached the front door and turned the handle. He
felt her touch his arm again. "What's the matter, baby?"
she said, flirting now. "Cat got your tongue?" He pulled
the door open just as the sun broke through the clouds, and for one
second he went blind in the sun and thought he'd been shot.

He was halfway to the
truck before what she'd said sunk in. "Cat got your tongue?"
What the fuck had she meant by that? He was so pissed off they were
nearly at Holy Redeemer before he noticed he'd left the razor at
home.

* * *

Lucien Edwards, Jr., was married to a religious
woman. She kept a Bible in her kitchen and prayed while she cooked
and cleaned for the destruction of the white race.

She was a good wife and a good cook, and sometimes
she'd start dinner in the middle of the morning. Lucien would walk
through her kitchen on Saturday or Sunday and find her bent over her
work, sweating, reminding God how, when things had got out of hand,
he'd smote the oldest-born child in every house in Egypt.

"They makin' prisoners and slaves of your people
again, Lord." She would say that like she knew she was nagging
and she was sorry it had to be done. "You warned them, time and
again, to let your people alone, but ain't no white people payin'
attention to nothin' but Pres'dent Riggin. I know what you got in
mind for him, Lord. Oh, you know they need a lesson .... "

Her name was Minnie Devine Johnson Edwards, and she
told God she loved him night and day, and never spoke that way to her
husband. She expected he ought to know by now. She got up every
morning at six o'clock to fix Lucien his lunch. Two sandwiches, an
apple, a piece of homemade candy. She laid them out in a symmetrical
way in his lunch box, snug, so nothing moved. Then she would close
the box and open it once, to see that nothing was creased. She didn't
want him looking at no unmade bed of a lunch after he'd been starin'
into Satan's eyes all morning.

"Thou preparest a table before me in the
presence of mine enemies .... Sure goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life. "

She handed him his lunch at the door and watched him
walk down Lehigh Avenue toward Broad, where he caught the C bus for
work. From behind, if he had his hat on like he did this morning, you
would of thought he was thirty-five years old. In fact, he was nearly
twice that, but there was nothing lame or old in his step.

Lucien had gone bald early, but she hadn't cared. His
body was still hard, like a young man. She wondered at the way time
seemed to pass him by. He never even wore out his shoes like other
people did, and there wasn't a day of his life he went to work
against his will.

Lucien crossed Fifteenth Street, nodded to an old
Korean he knew who slept in a doorway there, ignored the Muslims that
had taken the Korean's newsstand away half a year ago. The Korean was
there six years when the Muslims decided to take the corner. They'd
warned him and cussed him, and finally they'd burned him out. At
eleven o'clock on a warm Sunday morning in November, two of them got
out of a customized black van with a red fist holding a lightning
bolt painted on the side, poured a gallon of gasoline over the little
wood building, and lit it with a match. The heat melted the custom
paint job. Three hours later, two different Muslims came by and swept
up the ashes, and by Monday afternoon they'd built their own stand,
and there wasn't nothing to put into yourself that you couldn't buy
there but pork.

Botany 500 had its plant on the corner, so twelve
hours a day there were cops around to protect the workers from the
neighborhood. The Koreans showed up in the morning right after the
cops. They sold Bibles or umbrellas or soft pretzels, and they were
gone at night before the police left, and after the fire they never
talked to the one who'd moved into the doorway.

The Muslims let it out they did not want the
motherfuckers in their neighborhood—the ones who said that were
sometimes from Newark—and Lucien knew what they wanted from the
neighborhood wasn't just money. They wanted to bleed it. They called
out to him, "Hey, old brother." They called him that
bullshit, but he knew what they were.

The old Korean who slept in the doorway had sent his
family away when the Muslims burned him out. He'd moved out of his
house, left everything his wife and children hadn't taken, and put
himself in the doorway of. a boarded-up house, forty feet from the
Muslims, where he intended to stay until they killed him. He'd worked
the stand six days a week, cleared twenty-live, thirty dollars a day.
He'd come to work afraid and left afraid, and even with the cops
there he was afraid all the time in between. That was how Koreans
was.

When they'd burned him out, though, they lost what
they had over him. They called him a crazy motherfucker now. They
said it in front of him, they laughed about it, and before long,
Lucien knew, they would kill him.

And he knew the Korean didn't have no plan for the
way it would be. That was the part Lucien didn't understand. In some
little place in the back of their thoughts, the Muslims was 
scared of the old Korean too, but he wasn't using it for nothing.
He'd given up his family, and some morning they was going to find him
laying in his doorway with a bullet in his head. It might be the
middle of the morning before somebody noticed he wasn't asleep.

And by afternoon it would be like he was never there
at all. Lucien got on the bus and found a window on the left side,
where he could see the campus of Temple University. He liked watching
girls on their way to college. He wondered what they must be teachin'
them in there. On the other side of the bus, you could see what had
been some of the finest homes in the city.

Somebody had done a lot of good work in North
Philadelphia once. Minnie Devine said it was part of a white man's
plan to get all the city Negroes in one place, where they'd be handy
for scientific experiments. He smiled at her, that she could keep it
up so long.

Lucien never argued with Minnie Devine, but he knew
nobody had built houses like those for anything but the houses
themself You couldn't do that kind of work for hate. Twenty minutes
later, though, at Washington Avenue, he could look east and see the
Southwark Homes projects. Eight thousand people in fourteen stories.
She was right that there was a plan—Southwark Homes couldn't be no
accident—but it wasn't sneaky the way she thought. Most of the
time, things was the way they looked. But Lucien never argued with
Minnie Devine.

He got to the hospital a little alter seven-thirty
and squatted next to the cherry picker to wait for the boss. The
ground was wet, but he wouldn't of sat down anyway. Not before work.
The cherry picker was a small crane they used to move steel rods or
cement blocks, or anything else wasn't in the right place. The more
youngsters you had on a job, the more things wasn't where you could
use them. Lucien expected they would need two cherry pickers soon.
Shit, the new boy with the razor could use one all to hisself. Lucien
never wanted to be boss, and sometimes he looked at Peets and
wondered how he put up with somebody always gettin' in the way of
what he was tryin' to leave behind. He thought work must be different
for Peets, not as personal. For the youngsters, it wasn't nothing at
all.

The boom on the cherry picker was fifteen feet high.
A steel cable dropped from both sides of the pulley and connected at
the bottom at an eight-pound U-bolt. The bolt was tied to the boom
with a thinner cable to keep it out of the way. Lucien had seen one
like it swing into a man once, not even hard, and break his chest.
You could walk into one and knock yourself out.