God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (7 page)

Leon had worked six weeks and his hands was still
like a baby's ass. And Lucy just let the blocks pile up, and used
them as he needed them, and didn't hurry or slow down for anybody.

And talked to himself in that singsong way that he
probably didn't even know was out loud.

Peets called lunch break twenty minutes before noon.
He walked away from the crew and sat down in the cherry picker to eat
some Kentucky Fried Chicken he'd bought on the way home from work
Friday, sat up there to eat so he wouldn't have to look at anybody
else while he did it. It was testing him today.

The kid, of course, wasn't hungry. The rest of the
crew—everybody but Old Lucy—sat on the cement sacks talking about
an El Camino pickup one of them just bought. Peets listened, because
there wasn't no choice, and it turned out what they were talking
about was the sound system in the El Camino pickup one of them just
bought.

Old Lucy got his lunch box and walked up the wall to
where he'd been working to eat. He sat on the ground with his back
against the wall and looked at where he'd come from that morning.
Peets watched him, thinking the old shine was the only one he had who
cared that they were supposed to of done something when they'd
finished for the day. There was others who would do what you told
them, but Lucy was the only one wasn't just putting in the hours.
Peets expected it wasn't their fault. No, what they was talking about
was how the sound system in the El Camino pickup got somebody some
pussy off a little hippy girl he'd I found up on South Street.

Then Leon was cutting the air with the razor again.
This time he said he'd almost cut the flight attendant's tits off
after he took care of her cat. "I seen that happen to a girl
once," he said.

The kid Gary Sample stuttered, "Shit." The
older men ignored it. Leon moved closer to Gary Sample, like he
hadn't heard him. Peets stayed where he was. The kid who said that
smiled to show he hadn't meant anything by it. “Really?"

Leon stopped and saw some of the others were
beginning to get away from him. He put the razor back in his pocket
and backed off the story. "The truth is," he said, "I
didn't get to see it happen. I seen the tits afterward, though."

The way the rest of them looked at it, Leon said some
things that were full of shit, but they did send him over from the
union as a bricklayer, first class, and Jesus knows he had to be
connected to get that. He said it was his stepfather, so it probably
was. It had to be something, he didn't know nothing about work. And
it didn't make a shit one way or the other anyway. The way the rest
of them looked at it, Peets was scared of him and that was good
enough for them.

Peets sat in the cherry picker, holding a piece of
cool gray chicken until he decided he didn't want to eat it. "At
the end of the day," he said, "he's gone. One way or the
other." Peets only talked to himself to make promises.

He dropped the chicken leg back into the box and
carefully closed the lid. He hated to see food wasted, it was the way
he was brought up. While he was closing the box, Leon had moved over
in front of Old Lucy.

"I heard you talkin' about me," he said. "I
don't give a shit personally, but I don't like a nigger talkin' about
my business? Old Lucy chewed his sandwich, slow and all the way
through. He never even acknowledged there was something standing in
his light.

"You want part of me, old man?" Leon said.
"You and Peets, standin' there, tellin' me, lookin' at me behind
my back . . ."

Peets stayed where he was. Old Lucy didn't say
nothing, he just ate his lunch. It was like some people Peets knew at
home, they'd fish all afternoon out on Hard Labor Creek, and the
mosquitoes never bothered them. They'd get bit once in a while, but
they never got bothered. Peets would slap himself silly, killing
mosquitoes, and the Hard Labor Creek never ran out.

Leon looked back to the rest of the crew. "This
old nigger has been talkin' about me all morning," he said. "I
heard him, but you know, it's never out loud so you know what he's
sayin'."

Gary Sample laughed.

Leon pulled the razor out, almost without thinking
about it, and put the blade under Old Lucy's chin. The razor brought
the chin up, and the old man's eyes came with it. Leon didn't
recognize what he saw there. "You hear me now, don't you'?"
he said.

Old Lucy didn't move or speak. The kid pulled the
razor away, and a thin pink line marked the place it had been.

The line darkened, puddled, "and a tear of blood
ran down the old man's neck into his shirt. Leon felt the weight of
his eyes and began to laugh. He didn't mean to, he couldn't help
himself.

"Hey," he said. "I didn't mean to cut
you, Lucy .... "

Peets stayed in the cherry picker.

"Hey, go get a
Band-Aid," Leon said, "it's a hospital right here." He
pointed at the hospital, and he couldn't say more than two words
without this strange laugh coming up out of him. He looked at the men
sitting on the cement sacks, dead still, and they were laughing too.
But not out loud, like he was. The sun was warm on the top of his
head, he felt that, and he felt the weight of the old man's eyes, and
he started to say something to the men sitting on the cement. But
there was a cracking noise and he couldn't remember what it was, and
somehow they couldn't hear him anyway. And for a long second he
looked up into the sun and went blind in the light.

* * *

It developed before Peets could move. No, that wasn't
exactly true. It developed without a place where he could interrupt
it. The old shine had never asked him for help, and then the razor
was sitting under his chin where Jesus knew what Leon had in mind,
and then he'd taken it away and Peets had started out after him.

The kid had turned to the others, and Old Lucy had
put his sandwich down and stood up with a piece of half-inch pipe in
his hand and brought it down on the back of Leon's head. The old man
only hit him once. Leon reeled in the air and dropped on his side and
slowly curled into himself in the dirt.

Old Lucy watched a minute, then he sat down where he
had been. He wiped blood off his chin and put the pipe next to him on
the ground and then, because there was no way not to, he stared at
the body. He didn't try to get away from it, it was his.

Peets was out of the cherry picker. He didn't hurry,
he'd heard the sound when the pipe hit Leon's head. It was like
dropping it into mud. By the time Peets leaned over him, Leon Hubbard
had already begun to shake. Spasms in the legs and hands. There was
no blood Peets could see, but the back of his head was ruined.

He stood up, avoiding Old Lucy's eyes, and called
Gary Sample over from the sacks. "You better get somebody from
the hospital," he said. The kid half-ran, half-walked to the
front of the building. He didn't know what was appropriate.

Old Lucy dabbed at the blood on his chin again, the
rest of the crew gradually fell into half a circle around Peets and
the body and the old man. "He's barely breathing," one of
them said. Little pieces of dust were blowing up in front of his
mouth. His eyes were open, but it was like they were looking in
instead of out.

And a minute after that, the dust settled. Peets was
feeling the side of the boy's neck, and while his fingers were there
the pulse stopped. All the tanglements to it were over, then. Peets
was relieved.

Gary Sample came back with a couple of nurses and a
doctor, and they pounded on Leon's chest and held his nose shut while
they blew into his mouth, but the tanglements were over. One of the
nurses, a young one, was crying. She looked at Peets and said, "Don't
any of you ever learn?" like it was the fifth one they'd killed
that month.

Old Lucy sat still and watched. The doctor and nurses
tried for a few minutes, and then two men came out of the hospital
pulling a stretcher. "He's so young," said the nurse who
was crying. Peets thought she probably wasn't much use in an
emergency room.

They moved Leon onto the stretcher, and carried him
inside. His razor was still lying in the dirt, and a few feet from
that was a small spot of blood that had dripped from his ear. Peets
picked up the razor and kicked dirt over the spot of blood, and all
the tanglements to it were over.

The police came five minutes later. There were two of
them. One limped and looked out of place in his uniform, the other
one was little and cold. He did the talking. He took out a note pad
and a pencil and wrote down Peets' name, a letter at a time, like he
was carving it in wood. In Peets' experience, there were some cops
who got used to writing things down and there were others who never
stopped resenting it. It's what made them cold.

The little cop finished writing his name and said,
"All right, what happened here?" The question was for
anybody. Nobody answered.

And then Peets did something against his policy, and
mortgaged himself forever to everybody there. He said, "It was
the cherry picker."

They all looked at him, he looked at the little cop.
"The U-bolt come loose," he said. He moved over to the boom
and lifted the U-bolt. The cable bowed. The bolt didn't look as heavy
as it was, and he handed it to the little cop the way the cop might
of handed his gun over to his boy, so he could feel the weight and
see it was serious.

"Usually," Peets said, "the cable and
the bolt are tied to the boom when we're not usin' it.” He picked
up the smaller cable they used to tie the cable to the boom and
handed it to the cop too. "The tie must of come loose, the cable
swung out, and the U-bolt hit the boy right in the back of the head."

The cop looked at the U-bolt, the boom, the cable in
his hand, trying to see it. One of the men on the crew was nodding.

"That's what happened," he said. "I
seen the whole thing. The kid never knew what hit him."

The cop turned to look at him, then he looked at the
rest of them. "Anybody else?"

Peets waited, and then somebody else said he'd seen
it too, and then a couple of the others said they almost seen it.
Gary Sample had eyes to say something different, but he didn't. Old
Lucy just sat in the dirt, the pipe right there by his side and, as
far as Peets could tell, he didn't hear any of it.

The little cop walked from the cherry picker to the
spot where the body fell, counting his steps. He estimated heights
and distances and asked questions about Leon's job. "He was a
bricklayer," Peets said. Shit, he might as well lie all the way.

The little cop moved here and there, satisfying
himself. His partner stood in one place, watching Peets, studying the
rest of them too. The little cop turned to him. "Let's go get
the groceries," he said.

His partner's name tag said Eisenhower. The little
cop walked toward the hospital entrance, Eisenhower stayed back. He
had been watching Peets about fifteen minutes, and he moved closer to
him now and spoke into his chest so only Peets could hear. "That
kid," he said, nodding toward Gary Sample, "is about to
make you some problems."

Then he stepped around Peets and followed the little
cop into the hospital.
 

2
The
Pocket

There wasn't a man on any shift in Central Detectives
who didn't admire Calamity Eisenhower. Even the captain who brought
him up on charges admired him, although he didn't miss him now he was
gone, the way the detectives did.

Calamity's brother How-Awful! had been lost at a
police convention in Phoenix, Arizona, one year to the day before
Calamity broke his hip falling down the stairs at South Detectives.
How-Awful! had climbed out on the roof of a Holiday Inn at three
o'clock in the morning and jumped into a swimming pool that had been
drained for painting. At the time, it seemed to settle the question
every cop in every corner of the city lived with every day of his
life. How-Awful! was crazier than Calamity. But then Calamity had
been found, broken-hipped and dressed in a rabbit suit, at the bottom
of the stairs at South Detectives, and it was an open case again.

There had been six detectives with him, all dressed
in rabbit suits they'd rented from three different costume shops in
three different cities—let internal affairs find that. They'd gone
into South Detectives at high noon on a Wednesday a couple of days
after South Detectives had beaten Central Detectives 22-2 in a game
of slow-pitch softball, and shot the place up. They blew out the
lights and put holes in the ceiling just to watch cops dive under
desks.

You do not steal home against Calamity Eisenhower
with a twenty-run lead and hope it will be forgotten.

They'd shot the place up and then run down the stairs
and out the door, and Calamity, who was last to leave, who could not
get enough of the way it looked, Calamity had tripped on his own
rabbit's foot and rolled all the way down.

The captain at South Detectives found him there
fifteen minutes later. The detectives from Central were back at Sixth
District before they noticed somebody was missing. They'd suspended
Calamity for thirty days without pay and then assigned him to the
radio room until his hip mended. When he could walk without a cane
they stuck him in AID, where he spent his time sorting out how some
kid got drunk and drowned trying to drive his car across a city
reservoir.