God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (16 page)

He shut the door on the police and sat down on the
chair he always sat on. It was warm from one of the cops. "What'd
they say?" One of the sisters appeared from the kitchen—or the
ceiling or someplace—and stood next to her.

"They were very nice," Jeanie said. "They
said they'd go back and talk to the men at the hospital." He
looked at her, she looked at her hands. "Something happened,"
she said.

"What happened?" Mickey said.

"Something they didn't tell us," she said.
And suddenly she was staring right at him, like he was in her way.

"How do you know?"

"I don't know, but I
know."

* * *

Lucien had been late getting home from work. It
didn't spoil supper—she'd fixed him a ham and green pea soup—but
when he came in he wasn't hungry.

He'd come to the table, but he didn't eat, not like
he'd done no day's work. He pushed the ham-and potatoes around his
plate, run his spoon through the thick soup, never got none of it in
his mouth. He was smiling at her too. He'd sit there running his
spoon through his soup like he'd lost a tooth in it, smiling at her
with that kind smile.

"Lucien, you comin' down with something?"
she said. He'd shook his head.

"I'm healthy, I just ain't hungry." She'd
asked him then if he'd ate his lunch, and she could see from his face
that he didn't. All he'd said, though, was, "Things was real
busy today." And then he'd smiled that way at her again.

The last time she'd saw such a smile his mother just
died. `She was ninety-seven, and they wasn't nearly enough power left
in her motor to make things work all at once, so sometimes she did
her thinkin' and sometimes she did her talkin', but it wasn't never
at the same time.

Lucien had stayed close to her until the day she
died, and it had hurt him bad when she died, and he'd walked around
the house for a week giving Minnie Devine those kind, killer smiles.
She was afraid now, like she was then, but she did what she could.
She got up half an hour before the sun to make him breakfast. She
took the fat off a pork roast and then cut the meat into squares.
Then she cut the fat into squares too, and then ran them together
through the grinder. She put the skins to soak in a pan, added
vinegar to soften them up. She put the bowl of ground meat on one
side of the kitchen counter and the bowl of skins on the other, and
stood between them reading her Bible.

"Dear Jesus," she said, with her hand
touching His picture, “don't let this be nothin', please." She
stood at the counter half an hour, but she couldn't find nothing in
the book aimed at what was going on this particular morning. She went
over the familiar comforts, but she thought there must be something
in there closer to what was going on. She couldn't find it.

She added salt to the pork, then black pepper, then a
couple of cloves of garlic and some coriander. She measured by eye.
Finally she crushed part of a red pepper she found in the icebox and
put that in the meat too. She worked the meat through her fingers,
talking to Jesus until the muscles in her forearms started to hurt
her, and she kept at it, looking at the ceiling now, until her
muscles cramped, and when it hurt enough, she knew Jesus was
listening.

She ran the meat back through the grinder, a little
bit at a time. It went in at the top and came out into the skins she
fit over the funnel on the side. She stuffed a couple inches of meat
into the skins, careful not to split them or get air pockets, and
then twisted them twice—always the same direction—and then ground
a couple more inches of meat into them, making links.

When she'd finished, there were three long pieces of
sausage with six links in each one. She put two of them in the icebox
and cut the third one into pieces and put them over a low fire on the
stove.

It would be good for Lucien, waking up smelling
homemade sausage. "Maybe he was just tired," she said to
Jesus. "He's sixty-nine year old, maybe he just get tired like
everybody else .... " It didn't feel like Jesus was paying
attention. She heard Lucien moving around in the bedroom and put
biscuits in the oven. She chopped the potatoes he hadn't ate last
night and put them in a pan to fry. She heard him dressing, and when
he started down the stairs she put four eggs in with the sausage,
shook in a handful of water to make it steam, and then covered the
pan.

It seemed to take him a long time to get down the
stairs, like he was hurt and leading down with the same foot.
"Please, Jesus," she said, “don't let this be nothin'
.... "

He smiled at her across the kitchen table. He was
wearing his robe and slippers, and he kept one hand on the chair and
one hand on the table when he'd sat down, like he'd just let go of a
walker. There was white whiskers on his chin. She took the eggs off
the fire and slid two of them onto a plate, with most of the sausage
and potatoes, and four biscuits. She put the plate in front of him,
and he smiled at that too.

She fixed a plate for herself. He put a piece of
potato in his mouth but he didn't chew it. She said, "How is
things at work, Lucien?" He smiled at her, shook his head.

"Real busy," he said.

She said, “You don't look in no hurry to get back
at them."

He put another piece of potato in his mouth.

"I ain't in no hurry,” he said. He felt her
looking at him then. "I don't think I'll be goin' in today,"
he said. Lucien Edwards had missed two days of work in the time
Minnie Devine had known him. One for his mother's funeral, one for
getting married. There was times there wasn't no work, but he'd never
once called in sick when there was.

"What did they do to you?" she said. He
smiled at her again. "Lucien, don't look like that to me.
Please." So he met her for just a minute, dead in the eye, and
let her read what was there. Then he looked back down at his plate.
He hated to waste food.

"They didn't do` nothin' to me," he said.
Then, "I did somethin' to a boy, where I couldn't help it.”
She sat and waited. "I expect the police will be comin' by."

Her mouth opened, but she didn't know what to ask.
Finally, "How long they going to want you, Lucien?" He
shook his head. Then he smiled at her—that kind, killer smile—and
left the table. He walked slowly to the front room, moved his rocking
chair away from the television and the Bible Minnie Devine kept on
the table beside it, next to the TV Guide. He moved the rocking chair
to the window overlooking the street, then he sat down in his robe
and waited for them to come get him.

Minnie Devine felt her eyes till, then there were
cool tracks where the tears—one from each eye—had slid down her
cheeks. She wiped at her eyes and cleaned the dishes off the table.
She looked into the front room, and Lucien was sitting there in the
rocker, moving back and forth in the window, just enough so he had to
be alive.

He looked a hundred years
old.

* * *

Peets had told his wife what happened as soon as
she'd got home from the hospital. "Old Lucy killed the boy,"
he'd said. ."I lied about it to the police."

She picked up his hand and held it in hers. Dead
weight.

"How did it happen?" she said.

"The boy cut him," Peets said. "He was
fuckin' with that razor again and cut his face, and the next thing I
knew Old Lucy had a piece of pipe up the side of his head."

“
That doesn't sound too bad," she said. I

He shrugged. "I told it was an accident."

She smiled and pushed at his hair, "Peets, that
imagination of yours is really something." He didn't smile back.
She rubbed his leg up and down, first on top, then the inside,
touching him. That was the way she was when there was trouble. He
began to get a hard-on he didn't want. "There was nothing you
could do, was there?"

. "No," he said. "Not really. No."
She unzipped his fly. Peets' dick was built something like Peets,
only smaller and without the scars. It took things just as serious.

The hard-on disappeared. "The thing is," he
said, "I'm not sure I couldn't of got over there in time. It was
like when you're watchin' something you don't want to see, but you
can't look away. It was like when you don't exactly know where you
stand on it."

And later, lying in bed, "I didn't say nothin'
to the crew in front of Lucy. I'll have to talk to them tomorrow ....
" Peets lay in bed, imagining what that would be like. "And
I got to talk to Lucy too. Away from the others . . ."

She'd said, "Old Lucy won't be there tomorrow,
Peets."

"You don't know him," he said. "He
never missed a day's work in his life."

But the next morning when Peets showed up, Lucy
wasn't there. It was a cool morning, and there was half a foot of fog
on the ground. Peets uncovered the cement by himself, backed the
pickup over to the mixer and began to work. A C bus would stop every
five minutes, on the other side of Broad Street, and every five
minutes Peets would stop what he was doing and watch until everybody
that was going to had got off.

He didn't stop waiting for Old Lucy until the rest of
the crew had showed up. He knew if Lucy wasn't there ahead of them,
he wasn't coming. He wondered how Sarah had known that. They pulled
the old station wagon onto the sidewalk and got out slowly, like they
was afraid of him. Nobody was doing much talking or laughing, they
didn't even lie about why they was late. They just come over and
stood in front of him. The ones in front had folded their hands and
was looking down, like he was the minister committing Leon back to
the earth.

Peets looked them over. There was something he needed
to say, but it still wouldn't come to him exactly what it was. Only
the kid Gary Sample looked back. He was the one that wasn't old
enough to let the thing go. He was the one that didn't see what
happened to Leon wasn't no random drawing.

Peets cleared his throat, but it still came out weak
and dry.

"It was an accident," he said, "that's
all there is to it. The boy was the wrong person at the wrong place,
and it fell on him." As he talked, Peets realized what he was
saying was the truth, in a way. "You can't say why a person is
the way he is .... " That fast, he was out of things to say.
He'd meant to say thank you, but he didn't know how to do that and
still keep it an accident.

So he looked at his watch, then the sun, and then
said they'd wasted half the morning already, standing around gabbing.
They seemed glad to move, everybody but Gary Sample. "Did The
cops get the nigger?" he stuttered.

Peets saw the boy was tougher than he was the day
before. It was how you grew up—changing when things happened. He
understood that, and he didn't mind. He walked through the others and
stood in front of Gary Sample. He put his hand under the boy's
jawline and lifted him up off his toes, all the way up out of Peets'
shadow. The boy's weight rested on his cheeks, giving him bulldog
eyes. He held onto Peets' arm below the wrist, supporting himself
more than trying to get loose. By now the boy knew he couldn't get
loose.

Peets brought the face closer. "You ain't grown
enough to call that old man a nigger,” he said. And then he put him
down. The kid Gary Sample held his jaw, working it up and down. The
fingerprints on his cheeks turned from white to red, and, he blinked
away the tears that Peets had squeezed out. Peets put a hand on Gary
Sample's shoulder and looked at the rest of them. "Old Lucy'll
be back when he's ready," he said. Gary Sample pulled away, and
he let him go. He'd got the boy's attention, he didn't want his
pride.

It was probably the best they'd worked, but Peets
knew it wasn't anything permanent. He wouldn't of wanted it to be.
They were scared, and if you couldn't see what you was doing, there
wasn't no point. It cheated you to work because you were scared.

Sometime after ten, the police came back. It was the
same two, Eisenhower and Arbuckle, and the big one took Peets over by
the cherry picker to talk to him again. The little one, Arbuckle,
walked around the construction site, touching things, asking what
this or that was for. Arbuckle had soft, white-blue hands that he
must of kept in mittens. A man got harder hands than that pulling on
his wang.

"It's the mother,” Eisenhower said to Peets.
"The mother thinks something happened."

Peets considered that. "What does she think?"

"She doesn't know," the cop said. "But
I met her, and she'll have somebody to find out for her."

Peets said, "She got the police workin' for
her?"

Eisenhower smiled. "No. If it was me, you'd know
it. I just came out to let you know it ain't settled. Before it's
over, she'll get somebody to help her." The cop looked around
then, over to where Arbuckle was standing with Gary Sample. The kid
was trying to talk.

Peets thought Eisenhower was watching them, but he
said, "You missing somebody today besides Leon Hubbard?"
The cop counted the men with his finger, twice, and then he said,
"There were eight yesterday, not counting Leon Hubbard."

Peets didn't bother to count. Eisenhower closed his
eyes, trying to remember. "Seems like there was an old man,"
he said. "He was sitting over against the wall."