God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (10 page)

His father's argument was that Jack ought to go out
of the neighborhood to drink. Everybody agreed the old man must of
gone senile. Nobody went out of the neighborhood to drink, except for
a month every year at North Wildwood. Everybody in the Pocket who
went to the shore had places in the same part of North Wildwood.

Mostly, Jack would go to the Uptown or the Hollywood
three or four times a week, sit around and argue about the Eagles or
the Flyers or the niggers, and once a month he'd get into a fight. It
was a queer thing how all the arguments were over the things
everybody agreed on.

Jack had been the way he was since he was a kid,
because he was always small. Every time a nun lined up the class
according to height, that was somebody who got sucker-punched twenty
years later. And even though Jack Moran wasn't much of a fighter, he
was dangerous in a light. It was nothing for him to pick up a beer
bottle.

Mickey walked through the little white gate Jack had
put up and into the front room of the funeral parlor. It was dark and
quiet, and you could just see the neon sign through the curtain.
Someplace in back a buzzer went off.

Smilin' Jack came through a pair of green velvet
curtains, wearing a dark suit. His hair was slick and close to his
head, and he took Mickey's hand in both of his. "We are so sorry
to hear about Leon," he said. "You wonder sometimes about
God's plan .... "

Jack had a black eye, which he'd almost covered with
makeup, and he'd dropped his voice about six feet. "I was
thinkin' of something that would make Jeanie feel better,"
Mickey said.

Jack nodded and smiled the exact smile he smiled
before he sucker-punched Mole Ferrell at the Hollywood last February.
Mickey had seen that. He wondered if the smile had started with
sucker-punching or with grieving relatives, and how Jack had put it
together that it worked both ways. Maybe for smiles it was all he
had. Jack said, "Let me show you what we got, Mick."

He held the curtain for Mickey and then led him past
the viewing room, through a door to a room of caskets. They were all
open, linings like the sport coats at Jacob Reed. It looked like a
room full of traps. Jack closed the door behind them. The prices were
printed on folded cards, sitting on top of each unit. That's what
Jack called them, units.
 

The figures were broken down into total funeral
services, and then a price for only the box, in case you just wanted
to have one around. Jack put his hand on a dark mahogany unit. It had
a real serious look. "Of course, you know Jeanie best," he
said, "but you know, she ain't going to want some piece of junk.
You know, she likes things to look good."

The price for the mahogany casket, by itself was
$2,700. If you wanted a funeral with it, and an embalmed body and a
vault, it was $5,995. Mickey felt the wood, which was smooth, and
looked at his reflection in it. It distorted his face, the way the
toaster did. "Of course," Jack said—he didn't say "of
course" much at the Hollywood—"there are some people who
prefer bronze. The sealing's better, and it's airtight." Mickey
looked up and Jack had moved to the bronze casket, which was $5,995
all by itself. Mickey noticed how graceful Jack was around caskets.

“
It's all up to the family, of course,” he said.

Mickey thought of the box they'd buried his father
in. It wasn't what he had in mind for Jeanie to be looking at
Saturday morning, but it was what he could afford. Smilin' Jack
assumed he had money that he didn't have. Everybody in the Pocket
did. They assumed he was connected too. There was nobody but Bird
that knew anything about it, and that included Jeanie.

With Jeanie, it was always kind of an expectation of
what he was, and he saw right away that's as close as she wanted it.
If all he did was deliver hot meat in ten- and twenty-pound
packages—if he was no better than the rest of the Pocket—she
didn't want to know. She kept her accounts and he kept his, and it
seemed like a funny way to be married, but she kept a distance from
everything. He guessed it was her way of seeing things. "I tell
you what,” Mickey said, "I got to think this over,  maybe
talk to Jeanie. I don't want to do nothin' that she ain't gonna like
.... "

Smilin' Jack smiled the smile that sucker-punched
Mole Ferrell. "There's no hurry," he said. "The
important thing is to be sure."

Mickey said, "There's a lot ridin' on this,"
and Jack led him past the viewing room to the front door, and gave
him another one of those handshakes like he was making a snowball.
"Maybe I'll drop over tomorrow morning," Jack said. "It
might be easier for her to talk about it in familiar surroundings."

Mickey started down the street and Jack stopped him,
not quite yelling. "Yo, Mick," he said, "was the body
messed up?" Mickey shook his head. "No, the body's all
right. It's just the back of his head."

"That's no problem at all," Jack said. "The
back of the head takes care of itself.”

Mickey walked back toward his house, and for the
second time that afternoon he didn't know where to go. He didn't
think he ought to get drunk, the sisters were guarding Jeanie. It
felt like everything was moving but him. He had eight hundred dollars
and the truck, and he couldn't sell the truck. He thought of asking
Bird for the seven hundred again, but if he'd had it, he'd of given
it to him.

In Jeanie's mind, he'd fucked it up with Leon. She'd
expected something—he didn't know what—and the kid was dead. She
would expect something now too. She would expect him to make things
different than they was.

Mickey got into the Monte Carlo and drove into Center
City. They were showing a double feature at the Budco. Halloween and
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He put the car in a lot, bought himself
a ticket, and went to sleep in a seat three rows from the front and
all the way to the wall. Away from the damn marijuana.

He went to sleep and
dreamed of Turned Leaf.

* * *

Monday afternoon, Shellburn went to court.

"And then me and the defendant went into the
office where he was and, you know, capped him .... "

The prosecutor said, "What exactly did you do
when you capped him, Charlie?"

Charlie Piscoli was nineteen or twenty years old, a
nightshift waiter at Bookbinders Restaurant. "Well, me and
Eddie—the defendant—we went in there, and I talked to him, said,
you know, that he'd been takin' a quarter off the top, everything he
was supposed to be cuttin', and he says, 'The fuck I have, you think
I'm crazy?' And while I'm talkin' to him, Eddie caps him."

The prosecutor looked back over to the table where a
man a few years older than Charlie Piscoli was sitting in a suit that
did not fit him, considering his fingernails. Eddie Allen sold
souvenir Liberty Bells on the street, across from Independence Hall.

"Eddie being Edward Allen," the prosecutor
said.

"Yessir, the defendant."

"And exactly how did he cap him?"

"Well, first he shot him in the head, but it
didn't seem to do nothing. I mean he stood up and started sayin'
something .... "

"What did he say?"

"Uh, I believe he called us motherfuckers.”

"All right, go ahead."

"Well, like I said, the bullet didn't seem to do
nothin', so Eddie shot him again, in the side I think, and he grabbed
himself there, and tries to get the gun. That's when he got his
finger shot off. By then I see it's trouble, because his old lady's
comin' down the stairs. You know, the office was in the house.”

Richard Shellburn was sitting at the end of the bench
reserved for the press. He was fifty-three years old and he'd never
been in as much as a fistfight in his life. He leaned forward to hear
Charlie Piscoli tell the rest of the story, how the wife had come
down the stairs and started screaming, “You're killing him!"
By then Charlie was holding him from behind and Eddie was sticking
him in the eyes with a screwdriver, and the victim—a fifty-year-old
hood named Pirate John Bonalini—was still calling them
motherfuckers.

"And what did you do then?” the prosecutor
asked.

Charlie Piscoli shrugged. "I told the lady we
was tryin' our best,?' he said. Shellburn heard some of the people on
Eddie Allen's side of the courtroom laugh. Up on the bench, Judge
Kalquist pounded for quiet, issued the familiar warnings. Shellburn
watched as the judge and the witness looked at each other. He
wondered what things had come to, that the people who ran things had
taken to using lowlifes like Charlie Piscoli and Eddie Allen to do
their killing.

Screwdrivers, fingers on the coffee table, wives
running down the stairs.

And of course, the cops caught one of them coming
out. Charlie had run into the side of the police car, and he gave
them Eddie, and everybody else he knew, and before the district
attorney and the federal prosecutor got him a new driver's license
and a room somewhere in Phoenix, he would testify against everybody,
he'd ever met.

"Thank you," the kid told the judge.

Kalquist covered his eyes. The judge was protecting
Charlie Piscoli as much as the government was. Four weeks ago, before
he declared a mistrial and separated the defendants, Kalquist had
lectured the courtroom on the serious nature of the matter being
tried, and to end the lecture he had looked down at the bench where
Shellburn was sitting and said, "It is not funny, and it is not
romantic, except to the most adolescent of minds."

The day before this lecture, Shellburn had written a
column comparing the coming of New Journalism to the coming of the
Charlie Piscolis to organized crime, wondering if there were 
any standards left. He had written about the way newspapers used to
be, and the way organized crime in Philadelphia used to be, before
somebody put a shotgun in Angelo Bruno's ear and blew away all the
order and dignity and discipline organized crime had. That was when
the drugs came into it—the old man never allowed that—and the
next thing you knew, motorcycle gangs and guys like Charlie Piscoli
were doing family business.

The day Judge Kalquist looked at Shellburn and made
his remark about adolescent was the day Shellburn started his
investigation of Kalquist. He put his man Billy on it, looking
through Kalquist's trial records. Billy had said, "What is it
we're looking for again?"

"Anything," he'd said.

"How do we know there's anything there?"

Richard Shellburn had said, "Judges are lawyers,
Billy."

Sitting in the courtroom now, Shellburn knew what
Kalquist's house cost, where his daughters went to college, sentences
he'd given everybody with money who ever got convicted in his court.
That wasn't why Shellburn was there, though. Billy would take care of
that. Shellburn wanted to know how it was when Pirate John Bonalini
got shot in the head. He was fifty-three years old and had never been
in a fistfight in his life, but violence held something for Richard
Shellburn.

"What happened," the prosecutor asked,
"when his wife got down the stairs?"

"By then, the Pirate was gettin' heavier, you
know? Like when I grabbed him, he was sort of stunned but he was
still standin' up, talkin', but as she come down the stairs he got
heavier to hold. He got so heavy that finally I let him go, and he
sunk to the floor.”

"He sunk to the floor," the prosecutor
said.

"Yessir.”

"And what did his wife do?”

"She sunk to the floor also," he said. "She
was, you know, real upset. And me and Eddie ran out, he went one way
up the street, I went the other, and I run into the cop car. Oh,
yeah, Eddie wanted to cap her too, but I just wanted to get out of
there .... "

Shellburn had almost died once, three years ago
driving home from a lecture he'd given to a bunch of women for
$1,200. First he'd thrown up, and then it grabbed the middle of his
chest, like everything there had seized up, and then it shot into his
jaw. He'd stopped his car and opened his door, and somebody had found
him there, half in and half out, and they'd called an ambulance.

He woke up in Jefferson Hospital, and the doctor told
him he'd almost died. “I remember," he'd said.

But there was something else too, that he couldn't
remember. For a while that night he couldn't breathe, and once he'd
stopped lighting, it wasn't so bad. It was like boarding up the
windows, the things that happened. The house got dark inside, smaller
at first, then bigger, and then he seemed to fill it. And there was
something else, the hum of it, that started moving away from him even
before he woke up. Away, or back inside.

And then the doctor was telling him he'd almost died,
and then his boss from the paper—T. D. Davis—was standing there,
and Shellburn was shaking and couldn't talk. There had been something
sad in that humming. "Pull yourself together," T. D. Davis
had said.

Davis didn't know it, of course, but that's what
boarding up all the windows had been about.

Charlie Piscoli said, "No, it wasn't me that
capped him. I never capped nobody in my life. The worst I ever done
was scare somebody."