God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (20 page)

She took the glasses and the silverware and every
stick of furniture in the house. She got the Audi and the rugs and
the Nautilus machine she'd bought him for their first Christmas
together. She took everything and then sold it and went to Europe,
back to Paris to forget. She would have taken the television, but to
sell that somebody would've had to know she had one.

"I don't get it," said the girl from
Temple. Her hand was still on his penis but it had stopped moving. He
looked down at his stomach and his penis and her hand. Stevey would
have wanted to paint it, a still life, and it would have come out
looking like Venetian blinds. "Why do you have to bleed?"
the girl from Temple said.

Shellburn had a brief thought that he was paralyzed,
but he moved his legs and saw he was only numb.

"I think you ought to get a word processor,"
the girl was saying. He closed his eyes and time drifted, and then
Stevey and the freelancer from Temple University had each other's
voices, and when he woke up, Stevey had caught him in the cheek with
a mason jar and was saying. "Oh, no, you don't." Only it
was the girl from Temple.

She had taken off her panties, he could see that. She
had also pulled his head up out of his pillow and he was staring now
at her crotch, about half a foot away. He realized she had slapped
him awake and she was sitting on his chest.

"I have needs too," she said.

"A talking cunt," he said, "oh, no . .
."

She rode up his chest, and Shellburn let her push his
face into her pubic hair. "There," she said, “that's
better .... " And Shellburn smiled and went to sleep.

Shellburn could sleep
anywhere there was a television on.

* * *

The phone rang just as Donahue introduced his first
pervert, so it was a few minutes after nine o'clock. The freelancer
from Temple was sleeping on the side of the mattress near the wall,
but the phone didn't wake her up. He studied the line of her back a
minute and then picked up the receiver.

"Richard'?" It was Gertruda, calling for T.
D. Davis. T. D. answered his own phone, but he never made his own
calls. Gertruda put Shellburn on hold, and he studied the girl next
to him on the mattress. He pulled the sheet down with his toe to look
at her ass. He realized he was still drunk.

"Richard, good morning," T. D. said. He
always sounded surprised to get you on the phone. "What you
doin'?"

Shellburn said, "I'm lying here with a
jaybird-naked-ass girl graduate of the Temple University- School of
Journalism."

"Good. How was she'?"

"If you let me off the phone, I'll try to find
out for you," Shellburn said. T. D. laughed, the girl reached
down in her sleep and pulled the sheet back up over her bottom.
Shellburn did not take either of those things for a good sign.

"Richard," T. D. said,"'I need a
favor. We ran a story yesterday, some boy killed on a construction
job, and somehow we got it all dicked up. I'm finding out now who.
But the thing is, you know, this boy was a veteran and supported his
mother. I think she's crippled or something, and he was one of those
unofficial neighborhood leaders we count on in this city .... "

Shellburn held the phone away from his ear and looked
at it. T. D.'s voice got farther away, like Shellburn had gone into a
coma. He waited until it stopped and put the phone back against his
ear. "You follow me, Richard?"

Shellburn said, "She's got my dick in her mouth,
T. D. Is this important?"

"What I was thinking," T. D. said, “was
that instead of sending one of these damn kids down there and get it
wrong again, why don't I ask Richard Shellburn to head over there and
write me a column about this boy? Get it done right."

Shellburn said, “Because he's getting blown."

"Be good for you to stretch your legs anyway,"
T. D. said. Shellburn looked at his legs. Bone-thin, almost hairless.
Old man legs. "I had a couple things I had to look at today,"
he said.

He didn't want to find out about Leon Hubbard, he
already knew. He could sit down right now at the table and write it
in twenty minutes, off what Davis had just told him. "I could
send Billy over there, I guess .... "

T. D. said, "Maybe you could go yourself. You
know, get some of that description in there. Bibles, pictures of the
dead boy, grieving mother. Things only Richard Shellburn would see."

He picked up a sock off the floor and put it in his
mouth. "I can't talk now, T. D. I'm eatin' pussy." And then
he broke the connection with his finger.

He looked again at the girl on the mattress. She was
stirring, now that he thought about it she was probably already
awake. Shellburn called Billy for the address and phone number of
Leon Hubbard's widowed mother.

He wrote the phone number in the dust on the floor
beside the mattress. He found a crayon in the bathroom—how long had
that been there?—and copied the numbers onto a piece of typing
paper. The freelancer from Temple University got off the mattress and
stormed past him into the bathroom. He thought she was mad, but then
he heard her throwing up. Then she opened the door six inches and
asked for her purse.

He passed it through the crack. A little later the
toilet flushed, the water went on and on and a couple of times the
toilet flushed again. He heard her open his medicine cabinet. There
wasn't anything in there but pills. Valium, aspirin, shit from when
he was sick. There were pills six years old in there.

A minute later the medicine cabinet shut and she came
out wearing a towel and some lipstick. She gave him a quick kiss on
the cheek but didn't grab his peter—now there was a word he hadn't
thought of in a while—and she fell back into the mattress and
smiled.

"Come back to bed," she said. He looked at
her breasts and her butt and her legs and her mouth with the fresh
lipstick. She had all the parts you could ask for, but something was
missing for Shellburn. Once you could fuck somebody, then you were
left with whether you wanted to. Shellburn remembered when those two
things went together.

"I've got to be somewhere," he said.

"Can I come along?"

"Not this time."

"Remember, you promised I could watch you write
a column."

"Sometime," he said. And he thought, Right
after I suck off a German shepherd on Broad Street. He took a shower,
shaved and put on clean clothes. When he came out she was still lying
on the mattress. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing in
steady, deep sighs that blew her hair where it crossed in front of
her mouth He looked at her and thought of how empty her life was.

He opened the door quietly
and let himself out, and he was half into the hallway when she said
something that reached out like two-inch fingernails and grabbed his
stomach from the inside. She said, "You know, I was just
thinking what a really terrific magazine piece you'd make .... "

* * *

Shellburn got into the Continental and lay his head
against the adjustable steering wheel. She was still up there, in his
apartment, probably making notes. All he'd said was, "Lock up
when you leave," and then he'd closed the door before she could
sit up and get a look at him.

The digital clock in the dashboard built a fragile
10:28 out of straight green lines. Cars were in the street, honking.
It was dirty and busy, and he thought about the house in God's Pocket
where they wanted him to go. The place would be narrow and small and
dark. The windows would be closed and the mother would be sitting in
a dark dress on the couch, so he wouldn't be able to see her until
his eyes adjusted, and when she spoke it would be so soft he'd have
to ask her what she'd said, over and over.

There would be relatives around, big guys, and an
argument. Old brothers against young brothers, maybe. Shellburn felt
a line of sweat break out at his hairline, and he was suddenly weak.
He started the car to get the air conditioning on, noticed his hands
shaking.

He pulled into the street and headed for Lombard
Street, where he turned west and took it all the way to Twenty-fifth.
He could go north on Twenty-fifth and be inside the house in three
minutes. The clock said 10:50, and Shellburn stopped at Twenty-fifth
Street, then went past it, crossed the river on the South Street
Bridge and got on the Expressway South.

He drove out past the refineries and the airport, and
then got on I-95. He began to feel better. He took the Continental up
to eighty—in that car you couldn't tell eighty from forty—and put
the radio on. He would take care of the house in God's Pocket when he
got back, or it would take care of itself

He hit a button and rolled the window down a few
inches, and then turned the radio up to cover the noise. The radio
had been set to WWDB-FM talk radio. Listeners called in to report
their feelings about Mayor Green and abortions—speaking of the
mayor—and capital punishment.

The subject of the day, however, was a week-old
wolf-pack killing, in which eight or ten black kids stomped an
eighteen-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania to death
on . Chestnut Street at five o'clock in the afternoon to steal his
wallet. Some of the callers were for it and some were against it. Six
of them reported that most black crime was directed against other
blacks, four callers said there wasn't anything else for inner-city
children to do and predicted a long, hot summer.

On the other side, a lot of people wanted public
executions, and there were stories about things that had happened to
elderly parents. They said getting old made you a target in the city.

Shellburn drove past Wilmington and found 213 South.
The land changed, and the voices from the city faded and broke with
static. A woman called in and began to cry. She was drunk, he
thought. He wondered if she was as drunk as he was. The vodka was
coming out of his skin now, and he turned the air conditioner off
because the air on the sweat was chilling him.

"I'm sorry," the woman on the radio said,
"I'm all alone .... " He closed his eyes and could see her,
she was one of his people too. "But the thing I want to say . .
."

The man who answered the calls and told the people
what he thought said, "Madam, is it possible you have been
imbibing this morning? You sound like you need to sleep it of£"

“
I'm not drunk," the woman said, and Shellburn
could see her straightening in her chair. "Please, what I wanted
to say . . ."

Shellburn crossed the little bridge over the Bohemia
River, made a right t turn over another, smaller bridge.

"We've got people waiting, madam .... "

"Let her finish,” Shellburn said. The man who
answered the calls and told the people what he thought had read the
week-old account of the wolf-pack killing from the
Daily
Times
. That was how people got on the subject
of public executions, and things that happened to their mothers, and
the lack of job opportunities for inner-city youth, and how Frank
Rizzo had tried to genocide them anyway. Genocide was a big word on
the street this year. And in the middle of all the words on the
street, it seemed to Shellburn that the man on the radio had somehow
stumbled across the real thing—a drunk old woman who wanted to make
her statement before she slid off into the other side, where she knew
nobody would listen.

The man on the radio was cutting her off. "Please,"
she said again. The man on the radio sighed.

"All right, madam, say it. We've got people
waiting."

She gathered herself. "Thank you," she
said. "What I wanted to say . ..." Shellburn felt himself
tense. "What I wanted to say was . . ." Then, "I can't
remember now."

Shellburn came to a dirt road that looked like a
tunnel hidden in trees. He followed it up and down two hills, and
then around a long left-hand turn. Then there was one more hill, and
at the top of that the trees disappeared and the land opened up and
it was like the first day of the world. He parked at the side of the
road. From there, he could see the Bohemia, and the cove where it
emptied into the Elk River and ran into the Chesapeake Bay. It was a
quarter mile from the road to the water, a long, sloping meadow that
ended in a hundred feet of thick trees. Beyond that was the cove, a
mile and half around the lip.

There were a few sails on the water, and beyond them,
two or three miles, was another meadow like Shellburn's on the other
side. There were horses over there, sometimes cattle, and in the
morning you could see deer on both sides.

Shellburn got out of the car and walked fifty yards
into the meadow. That was where the house was going to be. The ground
rolled there and began its long, easy drop to the water. From there
you could look out a window and watch the storms coming in over the
water. Or you could watch the geese coming in, so thick sometimes
they could have been a storm too.

He'd bought the meadow two months before he'd married
Stevey, and never told her. He'd been forty-live years old, and he'd
had a picture of the place in his head a long time. The picture had a
house in it, a family. At the time, of course, Stevey was planning a
life around. the impact their cultural juxtaposition would have on
Center City society, it never came up that he had a picture in his
head of her pregnant and isolated, living on a hill in Maryland
overlooking the Chesapeake Bay.