God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (31 page)

He drove by the flower shop on the way to Little
Eddie's Automotive Emporium. He could still see flowers through the
window, but the whole place had been roped off by the police, and
there were barricades all around the front that said CRIME SCENE——Do
NOT ENTER. There were cops inside. The first thing cops did after a
shoot was see how many guys they could get in the room where it
happened, and they stayed until they got another room somewhere.
else.

The Cadillac was gone, Bird and Sophie with it. The
cops would be going through their place across the street soon,
trying to find them. Palatka. Mickey shook his head, thinking Bird
must have found it in one of the geography books lying around the
warehouse.

"One of only two rivers in the country that
runs north. It's very interesting."

The cops would be back in the warehouse now, trying
to put his business together. Mickey wasn't worried that Bird kept
records, but he had to get rid of the meat today anyway. He'd thought
of one other restaurant, over by the Italian Market, where he knew a
bar manager, and planned to stop there after he made the deal for the
truck. If they didn't want it there, he'd give it to somebody old.

Little Eddie's Automotive Emporium sat in a gap
between two lines of row houses near Third Street and Emily. He had
thirty-five cars on the lot and one colored man that was supposed to
keep them all shiny. His office was eight feet square, and there was
a deer head on one wall and a deer's ass on the other. Little Eddie
was close to eight feet square himself. Between deer parts was a sign
that said l /3 DOWN and above that one that said BUYERS ARE LIARS.
People who knew them both from the old neighborhood said Little Eddie
was funnier than Joey Bishop, and could of been that famous if he'd
got a break.

Mickey left the truck on the street where he could
see it and went in. "Hey, Mick," Eddie said, "you come
to sell me your truck?" Whenever somebody bought a new car,
Little Eddie would try to buy it from them for four hundred dollars.
That was one of the ways he was humorous. He'd seen Mickey's truck
the week he bought it, at a bar where he was making a delivery.

"Lemme buy that truck off you," he'd said.
"What's somethin' like that worth?"

The truck was $19,000, but Mickey didn't tell him.
"I'll give you four hundred, right now," he'd said, and the
whole bar laughed. Every time he saw Mickey after that, he asked
about the truck. He'd say, "You takin' care of my truck?"
Every single time.

Mickey looked around the office now, smiling. "Yeah,”
he said. "I need to get rid of it."

Little Eddie's face changed. "What's wrong with
it?" he said.

"Nothin'. It's a temporary financial problem."
Eddie stood halfway up and looked past Mickey to the street.

"What'd you-pay for that?" he said. Mickey
pulled out the bill of sale. Eddie whistled. "They seen you
comin', didn't they?"

Mickey didn't mind. "What can you do?" he
said.

Little Eddie shook his head and looked troubled. He
lit a cigarette and said, "I don't know where I'd get rid of
somethin' like that, Mick. It's specialized, and what I got here is a
young couples/singles—oriented operation."

Mickey shrugged. Everybody he knew, they changed when
they did business. Bird had told him once that it didn't mean
nothing, it's what business was. Mickey never saw why you couldn't be
one way all the time. If you changed, then something was wrong one
place or the other, maybe both.

"What can you do?'? he said.

Little Eddie looked out the window again. "There's
nothin' wrong with it?"

"It's got eight thousand miles," Mickey
said. "I changed the oil twice already, kept it in the garage.
Here, start it." He handed Little Eddie his keys, three pounds
of them, holding onto the one that would start the truck. Little
Eddie got out of his chair and went to the door. He had a layer of
loose fat like a bear that was always a little behind whatever he
did. He called the colored man, who was running an electric buffer
over a six-year-old Camaro. His name was Stretch.

Eddie watched him put the buffer down and start
toward the office. "That is the slowest nigger God ever put on
the face of the earth," he said. "Sometimes I think he made
the rest of them faster than us to make up for him." Mickey
didn't like the way Little Eddie said "nigger." Some people
could say it careless, like it was just a word—which it was—and
some people made it an insult.

"He can start it," Mickey said, "but I
don't want him takin' it out." Something crossed Little Eddie's
face. "I got some stuff in the back," Mickey said.

Little Eddie gave the keys to Stretch, talked to him
a minute, and then closed the door. He sat back down behind his desk.
Mickey saw his chair was a couch somebody had sawed in half. "I'll
tell you the truth," Eddie said, "this is a motherfucker,
this business. Sometimes I wonder what the fuck am I doin' here.

The nigger's makin' more money than me, and he can't
keep up. The cars look like shit. The kids come in, they know I ain't
going to get into any fuckin' car for a test ride, so they say they
want to see this car or that car, and you got to let them look,
right? How are you going to sell somethin' if you don't let nobody
see it?"

“
So you give them the keys and they're gone for
half the day, and when they bring it back it's got French fries and
beer cans all over the floor, they burned half the oil out of the
engine. You know what I mean here? Somebody's always tryin' to get
over on you."

Outside, the colored man started the truck.

Little Eddie opened a desk drawer and found his truck
book. "What's that, an eighty-two'?” he said.

"Yeah, it's six months o1d." Little Eddie
ran his finger down a list of trucks.
 
"I
had this idea," Eddie said, "to open up at night. Maybe
seven, eight o'clock, after the sun goes down. Cars look better when
the sun goes down. You don't have to keep tellin' the nigger he
missed this or that, 'cause most of it you can't see at night anyway.
What do you think?"

Mickey said, "What's the book say?"

"I might be able to get rid of it for you,"
he said. "I'd have to make a couple of calls, you know. If it's
all right, I might get you seven and a half, eight .... ” He shook
his head. "It's a bad time of year. Business stinks in spring,
Mick. Everybody's thinkin' about pussy. I'm tellin' you the truth."

Outside, Stretch was revving the engine. Mickey was
sitting with his back to the window, watching Little Eddie, so he
didn't see it when the truck pulled out in front of a SEPTA bus and
started north up Third Street. Little Eddie was talking about doing
his business at night again, and suddenly Mickey noticed the sound of
the engine was gone. He turned in his chair to see if Stretch was
finished.

Little Eddie said, "He's just takin' it around
the block once, make sure everything works." Mickey was on his
feet, moving toward the door. "Hey, he'll be back in a minute
.... "

He ran out the door and looked up Third Street. The
truck was a block ahead, stopped in front of the bus. Little Eddie
came out of the office. He said, "I can't buy no truck without
takin' it out for a drive, Mickey. You know that .... "

Mickey started after it. It'd been fifteen or twenty
years since he ran anywhere but to keep something from falling, and
then only if there was somebody underneath it. Running hadn't felt
dignified ever since he started working for himself, and he'd started
that when he was a boy. It was something he'd never thought about
much, and then one year every time you looked out the window, there
was some guy forty-seven years old, in new sneakers and a
faggot-colored headband, moving up the street half a mile an hour
with this glazed look on his face.

Mickey Scarpato was never swept up in the jogging
craze. Jeanie, back when it was all right to talk to him, had said
once that he was scared to be trendy.

He hadn't run for fifteen or twenty years, and he'd
forgot what it was like. Toward the end of the first block it began
to come back to him. There was a jolt every time his foot hit the
cement. It went right to his head. His arms were tight and
uncomfortable and every five steps there was something to get out of
the way of. A school kid, a dog, a garbage can. There were uneven
places in the sidewalk.

He was closing in on the truck. It was still sitting
at the stop sign, in front of the bus, but just as he got there the
traffic began to move again, and then he was running in a cloud of
diesel smoke, and the truck was out a block in front of him again. He
could see the bus driver's face in his mirror, smiling. He must of
thought Mickey was trying to get on.

He kept running, dodging kids and garbage cans,
people watching him from their steps. The jolts when his feet hit the
cement had changed. They weren't getting to his head now, they all
stopped in his chest. Two blocks, and it already hurt to breathe.

The truck was still a block ahead of him. Stretch had
his arm hanging straight down from the window, and Mickey could see
his head moving up and down with the radio. A block farther—between
Tasket and Moore—they were throwing a family out into the street. A
woman was crying, holding a five- or six-year-old child, and two men
were putting her furniture on the sidewalk, trying not to look at her
as they worked.

Mickey was watching Stretch bebopping in the window
of his truck and didn't notice the woman and her furniture until he
was almost on top of her. He hit a chair, missed a chair, jumped over
a television set. Then he had to step on a bed, to keep from falling,
and on the other side of it there was a sofa with cigarette burns in
the cushions. He stepped on that too, and the woman began to cry
"Stop" over and over. He didn't know who she meant, but he
knew how she felt.

Jumping the television set killed half of what he had
left. He thought of Jeanie and what was in the back of the truck, and
pushed himself up the street. He thought of Stretch going into a
parking lot somewhere and opening it up. The woman with the furniture
was still crying.

He moved into the street. There was less to run into
there. His lungs seemed to be cramping up. They wouldn't hold what
they would before, anyway. He wondered if he had that glazed look yet
that he'd seen on joggers.

The streets went by. Reed, Wharton, Federal. There
was a stoplight at Washington, and that's where Stretch saw him. He'd
glanced into the outside mirror, and then he'd turned around and
looked out the window. Mickey was soaked with sweat, his eyes were
burning, his hands were balled into lists. He wanted to tell him, "I
ain't mad, I'm runnin'," but Stretch ran the red light to get
away.

Mickey passed the bus and crossed Washington. The
people inside looked down at him, smiling. It took seventy-five cents
and a window seat to look down on him then, but it could of been
anybody else. It was just a matter of when it was your turn. He was
closed off now from the noises of the street, all he could hear was
his own noises. And they sounded like a choir, singing, "On the
road again . . ." Just those words, over and over. He could not
make them sing the rest of the song.

Stretch stopped at Carpenter and put his head out the
window again. He was in back of a tow truck now, and Mickey closed
the distance again. At Christian he was a half a block away, at
Catherine a hundred yards; When the truck stopped at Fitzwater, he
could almost touch it. The street began to sway. Mickey saw Stretch
blowing the horn at the tow truck, looking back like he was cornered.
Not panicked, just beat and ready to give up. Then the tow truck
moved and Mickey stumbled.

He didn't try to stop the fall, he'd lost the feeling
in his legs anyway. He covered his head with his arms and rolled. The
street was softer than it looked. He hit something hard—there was a
crash and a shattering sound,. almost like glass breaking—and then
he stopped.

He didn't try to move, he didn't even open his eyes.
He lay in the street, and the voices were singing "Oh, Jeanie .
. ." over and over, instead of "On the road again."

A minute passed, nobody came. He opened his eyes and
saw that he was lying against a tire. The traffic had stopped. He sat
up, looking around. The tire was bald and it belonged to an old Ford
station wagon. He grabbed a door handle and pulled himself up. His
legs were trembling, he still couldn't breathe and he felt sick to
his stomach.

There was a kid in the station wagon, sitting in a
car seat in the back. He was a cute kid, four or five years old,
blond. He looked at Mickey for half a minute and began to scream.

Someplace else there was screaming too. The knees of
his pants were torn and he'd scraped the skin oil` his elbow, the
same one he'd separated falling over Leon. Alive, Leon was a pain in
the ass; dead, he was killing him. There was another scream up ahead.

Mickey stood up straight enough to see over the
traffic, which was stopped now. He'd thought at first they'd stopped
for him, but when he saw he wasn't run over or dying, he knew that
didn't make sense. He saw his truck then. It took a minute to
recognize it because he'd never looked at it from underneath before.
It was lying on its side on Fitzwater Street. People were closing in
on it from all over. The back was caved in and there was a bus
stopped near it on the sidewalk, pointed almost the same direction.
The corner of the bus where the side met the front was folded in on
itself and flat. One of the truck tires was still moving.