God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (21 page)

He didn't know how long he'd had the picture, he
thought it must have been there a long time before he knew what it
was like that feeling you've forgotten something—because when he
saw it, he recognized it. He'd bought twenty-One acres for $85,000,
everything he had, and instead of worrying about the money—Shellburn
always worried about money—he took the perfect fit of the price and
his bank account for a sign. And he'd never even told her. They were
married in a 230-year-old church and moved into a townhouse in
Society Hill, where the front door was four feet from the street, and
where she watered one skinny ass little tree growing out of a hole in
the sidewalk next to a fire hydrant.

And when it was over a few months later—over except
for the lawyers—he would get himself drunk and lonely at some
Center City bar and wake up in the morning, parked where he was now.
He wouldn't remember driving down, and he'd sit there in the early
sun, watching the water birds come in like storms.

He walked farther into the meadow, watching where he
put his feet. There were holes in the ground, covered with dried
grass, and there were rabbit nests.

He'd thought about selling the property. A year after
he'd bought it a developer had offered him $140,000, and he knew then
he ought to take the money before he wrapped himself around a truck
some night trying to get there. He knew he ought to take the money
because he'd never build a house there. He'd gone past that turn.

He didn't sell the meadow. Not for $140,000, not for
the quarter million they'd offered him last year. Not after the
marriage ended, not after he'd nearly died in the hospital. He had a
picture in his head, and in the picture he was safe all the time.

He came to the bottom of the meadow, and climbed over
a barbed—wire fence that separated it from the woods. A long time
ago the land had been a cow pasture. He began to sweat again, and he
felt shaky and sick and poisoned. He stopped for a moment and it
passed.

The last hundred feet to the water was grown over
with thick underbrush, and everything that grew there had thorns or
stickers and was four times as wiry as it looked. Shellburn walked
carefully, lifting his feet straight up and down, pushing the briers
down and away with his hands, then stepping on them to get past. The
briers rose with his feet and then clung to his pants legs and made
tearing sounds as he made his way through.

When that happened, something in him always wanted to
run. But he was slow and steady, and pointed for the water. Then he
ducked under the lower branches of an oak tree and was there. The
tree was 150 years old, so thick you couldn't get your arms around
it. You might as well try to hug your house. The mouth of the tree
took the last six feet of ground before the bank dropped down to the
beach. Shellburn used a branch to ease himself down onto the round,
gray rocks that were the floor there. Then he looked back at the bank
where the tide had eaten the ground from underneath the old oak and
had left half its root system hanging in the air.

The tree was tilted about
thirty degrees toward the water, holding on. Shellburn hadn't noticed
it until after the heart attack, when he was thirty degrees toward
the water himself He admired the tree until his breathing got easier.
The wind off the water was cool, and he walked north until the beach
changed from rocks to sand, and then found a place to sit where the
bank fit his back and held his head, and it was no work or pain to
look out over his cove. He closed his eyes and the picture was still
there—he could feel it the same way he could feel the cove—and
for a long time what he was and what he might have been were as close
as Shellburn could ever get them. And it was late afternoon before he
knocked on Jeanie Scarpato's door in God's Pocket.

* * *

Mickey got up early 'while the house was still quiet.
He didn't want her to see him in Leon's bed again. When he'd cleaned
up and gone downstairs, though, Jeanie and her sisters were sitting
in the kitchen, drinking coffee and working over a new box of donuts.
There was a beer can on the sink, where he'd left it when he'd come
in last night. He'd had maybe a six-pack to help him sleep.

He walked in there with the beer can and the sisters
and patted Jeanie on the shoulder. She reached up and touched his
hand, for just a second, and then let her hand fall back into her
lap. Like it was a pain there that came and went before it mattered.

"You all right this morning, Jeanie? You sleep
all right?"

The sisters gave each other the now-famous look over
the table. "Jeanie?"

"It just seems like it's been so long," she
said. He could barely hear her. "Like it happened two years ago
and it's still going on."

"It'll start going fast again," he said.
"As soon as it's taken care of and we did what we could."
And it was like saying it to an empty room. It sounded like that too,
like he was telling it to himself so he'd believe it.

He looked at the curve of her head, and how the hair
seemed to get blonder where it touched her skin, and for the first
time he thought he might not be able to get her back. Not even after
the sisters moved out and Leon was in the ground. And then for a few
seconds, he couldn't breathe.
 
He
took the truck around to half a dozen regular stops and only got rid
of half of the meat that Bird's nephew had cut before the electricity
went out. If he didn't find somebody with a restaurant, he was going
to lose most of it. He'd have to get rid of it before it went bad,
one way or the other. Anywhere meat went bad, it never smelled the
same. He should of been pissed at Bird—anybody with eyes could see
he couldn't handle that kind of a load—but when he thought about
Bird, all he could see was the old woman leading him home. He'd keep
the meat seven days if the truck stayed cold. Seven days; and then
he'd take it over to the Women's S.P.C.A. Or maybe he'd find somebody
in Jersey.

He made his stops and then he went to the bank, and
began thinking about the horse. There was $868 in his account. He
took it in fifties, all except what couldn't go into fifties. The
teller's name was Miss Olby, and she was plainly inconvenienced. Back
in the truck, he reached up under the seat and found McKenna's bag.
He put the fifties on top of the money from the Hollywood and the
Uptown, and it wouldn't fit into his pocket. He went back.

The bank had velvet ropes in the lobby, with the idea
that you were supposed to stand in line between the ropes until it
was your turn to see a teller. The way you knew when a teller was
available was that she would turn on a light over her cage. Which is
all to say it was not Mickey's idea to go back to Miss Olby to turn
the rest of the money into fifties too. But when he got to the front
of the line, her light went on and he put the stacked bills in front
of her and asked for twenty-eight more fifty-dollar bills.

He had seen people take house floods better. She
sighed, she checked her drawer, and then she had to get up off her
stool, and go clear to the next cage for more fifties. "Usually
we don't do this," she said.

He wondered if it was some kind of sign he should
leave the money alone, that something would go wrong at Keystone. He
decided it couldn't be, though. If you waited for a friendly bank
teller to get your money out, the banks would have it forever.

He found Bird dressed in a suit with somebody else's
shoulders, sitting behind the wheel of the yellow Cadillac in front
of the flower shop. Mickey parked the truck inside and said hello to
Aunt Sophie, who picked him a carnation off the counter and asked him
to keep an eye on Bird.

Bird had the car running and the air conditioner on.
The windows were open, the radio was playing, and he was sitting
there in the middle of it, staring at the racing form. Mickey slid
into the front seat and looked to see what keeping an eye on him was
going to take. "How you doin'?" he said.

Bird handed the form to Mickey, dropped the car into
gear and drove sixty miles an hour down South Street, slamming over
potholes. Mickey put his eyes behind the racing form so he wouldn't
have to see it coming when they died.

Bird got on I-95 at Girard and drove up through North
Philadelphia, and then out past the Northeast. To get an idea how
Philadelphia was, all you had to do was go to the Northeast and try
to find a street sign. Going to the Northeast was like going to the
hospital, you forget all the little things they do to you, you forget
how slow time moves until you're there again.

The road was six lanes—three each way—divided by
a concrete wall. Bird slowed down to forty miles an hour and drove
all the way to the Street Road exit in the general area of the middle
lane. About halfway there he said, "I took care of that matter
for you, Mickey."

Mickey looked at him, waited. "You remember,"
Bird said, "that matter at Holy Redeemer with Leon."

“
I remember."

"Right. I got some people lookin' into that
right now. I ought to have somethin' for you to tell Jeanie by the
time we go home, if you want." He gave Mickey a smile straight
from Byberry.

Bird did the driveway into Keystone at sixty miles an
hour. He threw the Cadillac into Park still going around thirty and
stopped one yard short of a kid in a red vest and a black tie who,
with the confidence of youth, obviously thought he was in control of
the valet parking traffic. The Cadillac would have stopped on top of
the boy, but in the end he'd run. The car made the last noise you
hear before somebody you live with tosses their cookies. Bird got
out, handed the kid in the red vest a five-dollar bill and then
bought a program, all in one thought. "Be careful of it,"
Bird said to the kid, “it's new."

They took the escalator up to the reserved seats,
which Bird paid for. Then Bird bought a couple of large beers in
paper cups and they sat down to wait. It was a wait Mickey wouldn't
have minded at another track. At another track he would have gone
down to the paddock and looked at horses or trainers, sometimes you
could see something that would tell you what was going on inside the
horse. That was the only kind of spooky shit Mickey didn't mind
thinking. Something about Keystone, though, made you hate to move.

Bird spread the racing form over the seats in front
of him and studied the seventh race. The two women sitting in those
seats turned around and looked at Mickey in a way he was getting used
to. Bird read the racing form the same way rich kids arranged cocaine
in lines on their mirrors, scared shitless that something was going
to blow away from him.

"It's the same as it was last night,"
Mickey said. Bird didn't hear him. His finger was following a race
that the only other New York horse in the race had run a year ago, as
a two-year-old. Mickey had seen the race and thrown it out. He was
the kind of handicapper who could throw a race out and not think
about it again. Bird wasn't.

"I don't like this other filly, Mick," he
said. He slid the form over to Mickey, keeping his finger on the race
that worried him. "She's come down a long ways in class."

Mickey said, "Yes, she did."

Bird went over it again, that race and a couple of
others. The filly hadn't run in half a year. "I don't like her,"
he said again. "She'd got a decent workout last week .... "

Mickey shrugged. "Put her on the bottom of an
exacta," he said. He opened his own form and looked over the
fifth race. Then he got up, bet a ten on a fourteen-year-old horse
named  Lexington Park, got a couple more beers and watched the
race on a television set. He'd bet the same ten dollars on the same
horse in Chicago a long time ago, and he'd won then and he almost won
now. This time, though, the favorite got him in the last couple of
strides.

Mickey sat down beside Bird. “That's somethin', you
know he said. Bird looked up from his racing form and the seventh
race.

"What?"

"That old horse went out and almost stole that
race," Ezkey said. He pointed out to the track, where they were
bringing the old gelding back, his neck and mouth foaming. You could
see the heat coming off his back. Bird looked for halfa second, then
put his nose back in the seventh race.

"This horse," he said finally, "this
horse can beat Turned Leaf."

 
Mickey said, "Your nerves are eatin' your
brain, Bird. Lookit, you got a couple beers sittin' on the floor.
Drink a beer, relax, give yourself a chance .... "

Bird looked at the beers, then at Mickey. "I
took care of that matter for you at the hospital," he said.

“
Yeah, thanks," Mickey said.

"I talked to downtown," he said. "They
listen to me, Mick. You oughta listen to me too. The filly can beat
Turned Leaf."

Mickey said, "You remember what we saw up in New
York? You remember about sewin' up her pussy? I ain't tel1in' you
what to do, Bird, but if she runs at all, there's nothin' in this
fuckin' dog kennel that's going to catch her." Bird took a roll
of money out of his pocket and began to count it, right there in his
seat. "What the fuck are you doin' now?"

Bird said, "It's the other filly, Mick."

Mickey said, "How much you got there?"