God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (32 page)

He took a step and almost fell. His legs were on
their own. He tried again, holding onto parked cars, and made his way
fifty or sixty feet closer to the accident.

He was that far when he saw the back door of the
truck had come open in the accident. People were passing him from
behind, trying to get closer. He moved a step at a time. Sides of
beef were scattered all over the street. People were dragging them
into their houses, trying to get them into their cars. There was a
fist fight starting over by the bus. "This is my motherfuckin'
meat," one of them said. The other one said, "I got here
the same time as you," and threw a right hand from nine feet
away.

Mickey watched them circle each other, and the meat,
neither one of them letting the other one get closer to it. They
threw jabs and right hands, but they never got close enough to land.

"Motherfucker, you're going to get killed,"
one of them said.

Mickey felt himself coming back. His breathing
smoothed out, it looked like he wasn't going to throw up. He heard
sirens, a long way off and honking from the direction he had come. He
hit the front of his thighs, trying to get them to stop shaking.

He took a few more steps forward, until he was
standing in the intersection. From there, he could see all of it. He
could see fights starting in two other places, he could see old
Stretch sitting against a wall across the street, bleeding from the
head, staring at a circle of people—mostly kids—right in front of
him. The screaming was coming from there.

Mickey took a step, and just then a girl who had been
standing in the circle broke out, covering her mouth with her hand,
and ran up the sidewalk. The circle broke and then mended, but in the
second that took, Mickey saw what was inside it.

One of them said, “Where the fuck did he think he
was, in a suit like that?"

It took the police about fifteen minutes to come, and
by the time they did the only meat on the street was Leon. They came
in three cars and pushed people away from the body, and then one of
them, a little one with a clipboard, walked around the circle of
people, asking if anybody had seen which vehicle had hit the victim,
or knew who he was. He looked like one of the cops come by to see
Jeanie.

Nobody knew nobody that wore clothes like that. The
bus driver said he wasn't talking to nobody until he'd talked to his
union rep, and Stretch was too dazed to talk. The little cop looked
around and then walked right to the corner where Mickey was standing,
until he was close enough so Mickey could read his name tag.
ARBUCKLE. He looked like an Arbuckle.

The police put a blanket
over the body, but nobody moved it, even after the wagon showed up.
The blanket was blue and yellow, and Mickey could see the words
"Bull's-eye" sewed into one side. A horse blanket. He
thought of Jeanie again, finding out all the places that body had
been, and then he turned around and walked the mile and a half back
to Little Eddie's Automotive Emporium.

* * *

Little Eddie knew trouble when he saw it. He was
sitting outside on a Mustang, watching Mickey come the last block,
smiling like he had a mouth full of broken glass. Mickey sat down
next to him on the car.

"Where's the truck?" Little Eddie said.

"Wrecked," Mickey said.

Little Eddie nodded. "Where's Stretch?"

"Hospital, I guess."

Little Eddie gave him the broken-glass smile again,
thinking maybe Mickey had put him there. "That's the last one I
ever hire," he said. Then, "You got insurance?" Mickey
stared at him. "Use my phone, if you want to call the company."

Mickey looked at his elbow. It was a mess. "I
told you," he said, "you could start it, but I said don't
take it nowhere."

Little Eddie put out his hands. "Look, what can
I do? In this business, everybody in the world's tryin' to get over
on you. I got to try before I buy .... "

"You said seven and a half." Mickey said.
“Let's go inside, I'll sign over the title."

"I can't buy somethin' wrecked," Little
Eddie said. "I'd like to help you out, Mickey, but I got a
business to run, what's left of one."

Mickey said. "You already bought it." He
stood up and started for the office. Little Eddie followed him,
breathing hard, sweating. Mickey signed over the title. "You
better make it eight," he said. "You said seven and a half
or eight, and you're probably going to get eleven, twelve out of your
insurance."

"That takes a long time," Eddie said. "Time
is money. I got to put out seven and a half for two, three months,
that costs me."

He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out
at checkbook.

"Eight," Mickey said.

"Plus, the insurance company is going to raise
up my rates," Little Eddie said. "You know you don't get
over on the insurance company. They'll get their seven and a half
back out of me, and Christ knows what they'll want for Stretch."

Mickey stared at him. "Seven and a half?"
Little Eddie said.

Mickey said, "I don't care," and Little
Eddie wrote the numbers. He handed him the check and put the title
back in the drawer with the checkbook.

"Tell you the truth," he said, “you had
me for eight, Mick, if you wanted to be a prick about it .... "

Mickey got a bus to Broad Street and cashed the
check. He took it all in hundreds, The teller looked him over, torn
and bloody, and made him wait while she called Little Eddie. She put
the phone back in the cradle and handed it over, seventy-five
one-hundred-dollar bills. Against her better judgment.

He caught a cab back to the Pocket. Cab rates in
Philly stayed even with Locust Street pussy. One went up, the other
went up. The chances of catching a social disease was about the same
too. On the way there he squeezed his legs, trying to get some
feeling back into them. The trouble wasn't that they didn't have any
feeling when he squeezed them, though, it was that they went numb
when he used them. "Fuck it," he said.

The cabdriver turned around. "The Pocket,
right?" he said.

The cab let him out in front of Moran's Funeral Home,
the bill was seven dollars. "I can't take no hundred," the
driver said.

"It just come out of the bank," Mickey
said.

The driver shook his head. "I don't have that
kinda change. The fuckin' places I drive to, they ain't even sent in
missionaries yet."

Mickey went through his pockets and found a ten. “I
keep it," he said. He crawled out of the cab on dead legs and
walked through the gate to see Smilin' Jack.

The waiting room was empty again. Mickey walked into
the back, past the viewing room and the display room and the office.
He heard yelling upstairs. "This is my fuckin' business now. You
had yours .... " Then, "What the fuck do you want'?"

The voice got louder, and then the door to the stairs
opened and Jack was standing in the hallway, a yard away, red-faced,
looking eight directions at once. "Mick," he said. "I
didn't hear you come in."

"It's cause you were yellin' at your father,”
he said.

Jack looked back up the stairway and shook his head.
"I hope they put me outta my misery before that happens,"
he said. "How you been?"

"I been all right," Mickey said.

Jack said, "Lissen, I'm sorry about the
misunderstanding. You know, I got problems too. Nobody realizes that.
They think because you're a professional, you don't got problems."

"I realize you got problems," Mickey said.

"Hey, bygones are bygones, right? That's the
whole principle of the business." He closed the door to
upstairs, and that was bygones too. "C'mon in the office,"
he said. "You want a beer?"

Mickey shook his head. Smilin' Jack sat down at his
desk and noticed Mickey's clothes. "What happened to you?"
he said. "You okay?"

Mickey took the roll of hundred-dol1ar bills out of
his pocket and counted sixty of them on the desk. It was dead quiet
in the office. He pushed the money across the desk and left it for
Jack Moran to pick up. He didn't want to hand it to him and touch his
skin. In his whole life Mickey'd never disrespected old Daniel. "Six
thousand," Mickey said. "That's for the mahogany box and
the funeral and everything else, right?"

Smilin' Jack picked up the stack of bills and counted
them, using a little sponge on his desk to wet his thumb. When he
finished, he straightened up the stack. "Where is the deceased?"
he said.

Mickey rubbed his elbow. “They got him at the
morgue again," he said. He told them there'd been another
accident. Smilin' Jack nodded like it was something happened all the
time.

"When it rains it pours," he said.

"Yeah, well they got him down there, but they
probably don't know who he is," Mickey said. "He wasn't
carrying no identification? Jack scratched his head. Mickey said,
"Can we still take care of it tomorrow? I want to get it over."

"I don't know," Jack said. "This never
come up before. Let me call down there and find out." He reached
for the phone, and Mickey stood up. "Sit down, I can tell you in
a minute," Jack said.

"I'll give you a call
tonight," Mickey said. He didn't want to be in the room when
Jack called about Leon. He just wanted to get the boy in the ground.
Even if Jeanie was gone, he wanted to get the boy buried. He wanted
to be past Leon, so he could look up and not see him there waiting
for him anymore.

* * *

The paramedic was a thirty-seven-year-old Vietnam
veteran named Michael Cooper who took tranquilizers to get through
the morning and sleeping pills to get through the night. He smoked a
little dope to kill the time in between, which is what he'd been
doing when the call came in to go to Third and Fitzwater. He'd gone
over in the ambulance, hanging out the window to feel the wind
pressing on his face. "I get off on the weather," he said
to the driver.

The driver looked at him without answering.

"You take this shit too serious," he said
to the driver, who was twenty-three years old. "When you been
around it enough, you see it don't mean nothin'." The driver
looked straight ahead.

"You weren't in Nam, were you?" Michael
Cooper said. "No, you're too young. Man, when you've seen some
dude's supposed to be running things eating cinnamon rolls next to a
stack of bodies, you know you ain't supposed to take it serious."

The driver said, "I get sick to my fuckin'
stomach, listenin' to this Nam shit. Nam-this, Nam-that, seem like
every fuckin' time I turn around, there's some motherfucker tellin'
me about Nam like there ain't nobody else ever done nothin'." He
spit out his window.

Cooper smiled at him. "You got a lot of anger,
bro," he said.

The driver said, "Fuck," and Cooper stuck
his head back out the window and watched people on the street turning
to look as they went past. Two blocks from the accident the traffic 
stopped dead. The driver pulled up onto the sidewalk and drove half a
block farther, but there were cars parked there too, so Cooper got
out and ran. The sidewalk seemed to float up to his feet.

By the time he got to the corner, the police were
pushing back the crowd. One of the cops had a clipboard. Cooper asked
him, "What we got, man?"

"Where the fuck have you guys been?" the
cop said. The cop didn't wait for an answer. "There's one
against the wall over there,"' he said, pointing to a thin black
man sitting on the sidewalk, holding a cloth against his head, "and
there's one on the street. I think he's dead."

Cooper walked through the accident, smelling the
street, noticing the texture of the road, the patterns of the windows
against the brick houses. He didn't look at the body until he was
next to it, and then he only looked a little while.

He touched the hands and the skin on the cheek. The
cheek was smooth and cold, and there was powder on his fingers where
he'd touched it. Cooper walked away from the body and threw up into
the drain on the comer. He'd seen dead people, stacks of them, but he
never went to funerals. You saw them like that, dressed up and
drained and filled and-powdered, you had to consider it. If you
didn't walk away from it when it happened, you were stuck with it.

"You'll get used to it." It was the cop
again, snuck up behind him, smiling. ARBUCKLE the name tag said. "The
first few, it bothered me too," he said. "I never threw up
like you did, but it takes a while."

Cooper's eyes watered and his nose stung. "He's
dead, right?" the cop said. "I thought he was dead, but it
ain't official until you say it."

"He's dead," Cooper said. And then he
walked over to the black man sitting against the wall to look at his
head.

Arbuckle stood near the vomit, waiting for somebody
to show it to. Somebody who was a cop. Too bad Eisenhower took the
day off, he'd of loved it. A kid doctor who couldn't stand to see
nobody dead. He thought Eisenhower would have loved it, but with him
you could never be sure. He wasn't always what the stories about him
said. Arbuckle never said it, but he was glad they'd put through
Eisenl1ower's transfer back to detectives. He hoped his new partner
would be somebody you could count on to be one way.