God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (33 page)

He waited by the vomit awhile, and when nobody came
by he went back into the crowd to look for witnesses again. It took
an hour to clean up the mess. Wreckers, ambulances, sweeping the
glass. The doctor had gone into a bar halfway down the block.
Arbuckle made a note of that, but there wasn't much else to write
down. Nobody would admit they'd seen it.

He stayed until the truck was towed, asking questions
and drawing pictures that showed where it was and where the bus was,
and where the body was lying in the street. He thought · about
drawing a little pool of vomit, but you couldn't count on everybody
having a sense of humor.

When it was finished, Arbuckle went back to the
station house and made a phone call to the city room of the
Daily
Times
and asked for assistant city editor
Brookie Sutherland. Brookie Sutherland had told him anytime he had
something to give him a call.

Arbuckle didn't know why Brookie Sutherland liked to
talk to him personally, but whenever he called with something,
Sutherland put his name in the paper. The regular police reporter
never did that. "This is Arbuck1e," he said when Brookie
Sutherland picked up the phone.

"Hey, buddy, how are you?" Arbuckle winced.
His greatest fear was that his phone was bugged, and someday his
friends would hear a newspaperman calling him buddy.

"Look, I got a little accident here," he
said. "One fatal, one hospitalized. I thought you might be
interested." Arbuckle always called everything "little"
when he talked to Brookie Sutherland.

“
Just a minute.” He heard him load his
typewriter. "Okay, shoot."

Arbuckle cupped his hand over the receiver and read
him the times and places off his accident report. "We don't got
a name on the DOA yet," he said. "Wasn't carrying no ID."

Brookie Sutherland said, "Is that it?"

Arbuckle felt
disappointed. He never knew what the
Daily
Times
would like and what they wouldn't. He
thought for a minute, and then told him about the doctor who threw
up. He started that by saying, "Well, there was one human
interest story. . . ."

* * *

Brookie Sutherland thanked the cop and hung up. There
was a new girl on tryout, and they'd put her on Friday nights to see
how she did. A timid-looking girl, always wore white blouses with a
scarf around the neck, skirts that were too long. He wasn't sure, but
he thought she was pretty. You couldn't tell about that until a girl
had been around awhile and the office had a chance to form an
opinion. "That dumb sonofabitch," Brookie said, loud enough
so she looked up from her desk.

He smiled at her. "Cops," he said. "I
got one calling that wants to give me a human interest story about
vomit." Brookie Sutherland could see she didn't understand. "I
got the weirdest sources in the city," he said.

"It sounds like it," she said. He couldn't
tell if she liked him or not. He thought he might ask her out for a
drink after work.

"Check with the medical examiner's office,"
he said, "and see if you-can get me an ID on some guy who got
killed in a traffic accident at Third and Fitzwater this afternoon,
will you?"

Then he put a fresh piece of paper in his typewriter
and prepared a memo on Peter Byrne's having blown a fatal
accident-in-South-Philadelphia story. He wrote, "Tried twice to
reach Byrne, but per usual, he was out of office." He hadn't
called, but he didn't have to. Byrne was at Hammer's Bar drinking
with his buddies, the cops. To Brookie Sutherland, the way Peter
Byrne got his stories was unprofessional.

The memo was three paragraphs long, and he signed it
at the end and then made two copies. One went to T. D., one to the
managing editor. He kept the original for his own file on Peter
Byrne.

Half an hour later the new girl had the name. "It's
Leon Hubbard," she said, "but it's kind of strange . . ."

Brookie Sutherland held up his hand and smiled. "The
first thing you leam," he said, "is that every accident is
strange."

She said, “But this guy . . ."

Brookie Sutherland stopped her again with his hand.
"The news hole on Saturday is this big." He made a bird's
beak with his thumb and first finger. "All we got room for on
Saturday is the name, the time, the place. If he wanted space, he
should of waited till Monday. Unless the President gets shot, there's
no room on Saturday."

"All right," she said.

"The guy wasn't the President," he said.
She shook her head. "Then all we want is the name, the time, the
place. Gimme two paragraphs, okay? And put the cop in. Charles
Arbuckle, AID. You got to throw the bears a peanut to keep them
interested."

"Okay," she said, "two graphs."
`But Brookie Sutherland wasn't listening. She typed her code into the
VDT machine, slugged the story HUBBARD, and began to write:

ONE MAN WAS DEAD AND ANOTHER INJURED AFTER A
BUS/TRUCK COLLISION YESTERDAY IN SOUTH PHILADELPHIA. ACCIDENT
INVESTIGATION DIVISION OFFICER CHARLES ARBUCKLE, WHO INVESTIGATED THE
ACCIDENT, IDIENTIFIED TI-IE DEAD MAN AS LEON HUBBARD, OF TWENTY-FIFTH
STREET IN TIIE GOD'S POCKET SECTION OF THE CITY.

POLICE SAID NO CHARGES HAVE BEEN FILED IN
THE ACCIDENT.

She finished the story, checked it for mistakes, and
then pressed a key on the keyboard to file it in the system's memory.
The key she punched blinked on and off for about half a minute, and
then a note came up on the screen. DUPLICATE SLUG.

She looked over at the desk and thought about trying
to tell Brookie Sutherland again, but she decided it might make him
mad. She changed the slug to LEON H and this time the system
took it.

"It's in there," she said. Sutherland
looked up and smiled.

"Good," he said. "See? There isn't
really much to do Friday night, unless they shoot the President. Hey,
why don't we have a drink after work?"

She looked at him like she didn't understand. "I'm
married," she said.

He smiled and turned red.
"Oh. I didn't mean like that. I just meant as colleagues .... "
And then he was looking through some papers on his desk, still
smiling and still red, and she knew he'd never be nice to her again
as long as she was there.

* * *

Mickey called Smilin' Jack right at five o'clock from
a phone booth in Center City. He didn't want to see Jeanie until he
could tell her about the funeral, one way or the other.

"Jack," he said, "it's Mickey."

"Hey, Mick, how are you'?”

"I'm fine," he said. He left it there for
the undertaker to pick up.

"I called down to the medical examiner,” Jack
said. "It's lucky there's a guy I know down there. I told him
what happened, that you was just bringin' the body over for me when
the accident happened, and he took care of the red tape." Mickey
waited. "So we do it tomorrow," Jack said. "Tomorrow
afternoon, I got somethin' else in the morning."

"What time?"

"Three o'clock? It ain't going to be nothin'
fancy. Just a nice, quiet little service here. Dignified. Some
flowers, we got a minister will say a few things over the casket,
cost you a fifty. And then we'll all drive out to Edgewood in
Delaware County and bury him there. That sound all right?"

"That's it?"

"Right. The same way we was going to do it
before. The details don't make much difference in the long run, as
long as you get him in the ground dignified."

“
I paid for the mahogany box, Jack.”

"Right, right. I didn't mean nothin' was
different. I just meant, you know, in the excitement a lot of the
details don't get noticed."

"Okay," he said. `

"And Mick," he said, "I want to
apologize for what happened, you know? I mean, it don't do nobody any
good to have it all over the neighborhood."

Mickey hung up and called
home. The phone rang eight times and nobody answered. He wondered if
she was with the newspaper reporter. again.

* * *

Eisenhower woke up at seven in the morning, thinking
of his brother diving off the roof of the Holiday Inn. It felt like
he'd been dreaming about it every night since it happened. Even when
he was working, it was off somewhere in the back of his mind, working
too. Even when he was having himself a piece of ass, it was working.
Especially when he was having himself a piece of ass.

He'd quit drinking the night it happened. He knew
without trying it wouldn't be any fun without How-Awful! And that's
what Calamity Eisenhower had always gotten drunk for. Fun. His
brother was different.

Sober, they were the same. How-Awful! was crazy,
Ca1amity was crazy, and anything mean they did was never on purpose.
But from the first night they'd sat out under the bleachers at
Franklin Field, twenty-five years ago, drinking a half-pint of vodka
each, the juice had always dropped his brother's pitch. What did they
call that—a minor key? It was in the pitch, it was in his eyes.

And all the crazy-ass, crying-funny things they'd
done drunk together, that sad key was always there in How-Awful! And
the older they got, the more it showed. But he never let it settle
inside him and turn him ugly. He'd shoot up a bar, or drive a car
into the Delaware River, but he never let it take him over. It was
inside him, though, and for as long as Calamity lived he'd never
believe his brother didn't know the swimming pool in Arizona was
empty.

He lay in bed a few minutes, trying to bury himself
in the pillow, but once he'd started thinking about Arizona he knew
it was all over for sleep. His leg was bothering him anyway.

He got out of bed and put on a pair of shorts and a
sweat shirt and tennis shoes. He brushed his teeth and splashed some
water on his face and then walked into his living room, where an
eighty-pound Everlast heavy bag was hanging from a beam in the
ceiling. He wrapped his hands carefully and put them inside a pair of
eight-ounce gloves and beat on the bag for twenty straight minutes.

Until he was sweating and tired and he'd quit
thinking about his leg. He slipped off the gloves and untied the
wraps and hung them in the bathroom. Hand wraps smelled worse than
anything in sports. He pulled some cheese and ham out of the
refrigerator and put them into a hamburger bun, and sat down at the
kitchen table to eat breakfast. Then he realized he didn't have
anything to read, so he limped downstairs and across the street and
bought a Saturday
Daily Times
.

He put the paper next to the sandwich and opened a
carton of milk. He turned the first couple of pages, looking for
something he wanted to read, and was about to turn the newspaper over
and look at the sports section when he noticed the story, down in the
comer of page 6. At first he thought it was some kind of mistake the
paper made, running an old story twice, and then he thought it might
of been two Leon Hubbards.

But not on Twenty-fifth Street in the Pocket, it
wasn't. He read it again, a traffic accident at, Third and Fitzwater.
AID Officer Charles Arbuckle.

He'd underestimated him. The body was dead five days,
and Arbuckle had called the newspaper and told them he had a traffic
victim. He decided not to think about how Leon Hubbard got to Third
and Fitzwater, he'd save that for later. For now, he just
concentrated on Chuck Arbuckle and his phone calls to the
Daily
Times
. "You poor, dumb fuck," he
said.

And then he began to
laugh, out loud, a way he couldn't stop if he wanted to. Crazy-ass,
crying-funny laughing, until his chest hurt, until all he could think
of was what a shame it was that How-Awful! wasn't there to see it
too. Crying-funny laughing.

* * *

It was almost over now. That was the first thing
Mickey thought when he hung up on Smilin' Jack, that this time
tomorrow he could rest. And after the phone rang eight times at his
house, he hung up and thought it again.
 
He
took two hours to walk back to the Pocket, stopping in every bar on
the way. When he got there his house was dark, and he'd had enough of
empty rooms.

His legs were feeling better, he wouldn't have minded
walking another hour or two, but there wasn't anyplace to go. He
thought about checking Bird's place, but he didn't want to look at
that now. He stood on the sidewalk outside the house for a minute,
thinking it over , and then he crossed the street and went into the
Hollywood.

McKenna was behind the bar, running up and down,
killing an argument that would not stay dead at one end of the bar,
pouring straight shots and beer to forty or fifty people. Some of the
customers he was nice to, and some of them he had to keep in line.
Mickey wondered how he kept it straight from night to night, who was
who. At the end where the argument was, everybody was drunk and
staking claims, and jumping claims. In a while they'd get mad and
punch holes in the bathroom wall. It was possible they'd punch each
other.

Mickey went to the end away from the argument, away
from the kids. McKenna brought him a Schmidt's and a glass, and even
though he was in a hurry he took the time to ask about the funeral.