God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (27 page)

* * *

The phone woke him up again Thursday morning, and he
focused on it with one eye, as evil as he could make it, but it
wouldn't stop. It rang seventeen times before he picked it up.
Gertruda. "Mr. Davis wants to see you, Richard," she said.

Shellburn said, "I can't get my other eye open."

He'd gone from Leon Hubbard's house to a bar in
Center City where, at eleven o'clock, he'd called the paper to say he
wouldn't be writing for Thursday. He said he had some loose ends to
tie up. He'd forgotten that and called again at two, and said he had
the flu.

Gertruda said, "Mr. Davis wants to see you at
ten-thirty. He was sure that's what time he wanted to see you."

Shellburn said, "Did it sound sexual?"

"Ten-thirty," she said, and hung up. He lay
back in the pillow and closed his eye and thought about Jeanie
Scarpato. When he'd been younger, Shellburn thought he understood
temporary insanity. He would read those words together and think of
the things he had done and the lies he had told, trying to get into
somebody's pants. He knew what it was to give himself up for twenty
minutes of a woman's time.

Twenty minutes. And then in the mornings he'd wake up
with a woman he didn't know, and try to explain to her who he really
was. And that was even crazier than the rest of it because, even if
he could have done that, nobody wanted to hear it then. And he would
read how a garbage man had gone home and shot his wife and her mother
and two neighbors, and he thought he understood how the garbage man
might have felt, standing in front of a judge and jury trying to
explain that it wasn't really him who'd done that, trying to explain
who he really was.

Shellburn thought he understood that much of it, but
he never understood the shooting. He wondered if that came up out of
the same hole as going pussy-crazy. He followed those cases all the
way through trial, looking for similarities.

Shortly after his marriage, he quit going
pussy-crazy. He didn't give it up, but he quit giving himself up. He
thought about Jeanie Scarpato again and what had happened at her
house it wasn't like pussy-crazy, but there was something in that
bedroom he wanted that bad.

He reached over his head for another pillow, thinking
of the way she looked, and hugged it against his chest. It was soft
and cool and fit him perfectly. Was it that easy?

He lay like that for an hour, and then his thoughts
moved from God's Pocket to T. D. Davis and he got up, feeling better
than he expected to, and took a shower. He stood under the water,
wondering if T. D. Davis wanted him to write better or to quit. He
didn't know if T. D. liked having him around.

For twenty years Shellburn had made his reputation
reading strangers. He could walk into a neighborhood bar or a
hospital room for half an hour and know who everybody was. Some of
it, of course, was experience. Cops lied to you, firemen told you the
truth. Lawyers were always full of shit. But there was more to it
than that. Shellburn could pick up what people were to each other,
and the balances that connected them, and that was where he looked to
see who they were.

He was good at that in a bar full of strangers, but
the older he got, the more he realized he couldn't do it with the
people he knew.

The closer Shellburn got to anybody, the less he
could read them. He didn't know, for instance, if Billy Deebol liked
him or pretended to, or what Genruda was thinking when she called him
in the morning for T. D. Or what T. D. wanted from him.

Shellburn had made his reputation reading people he
didn't know, and he kept it to himself that he couldn't read the ones
he did know. There was nobody close enough to tell that to anyway.
Maybe Jeanie Scarpato.

He dried himself in front of a steamed mirror and
wrapped himself up to the armpits in the towel before he cleared a
patch of the mirror to take a look. His eyes were red and he needed a
shave, but Shellburn thought his color was better. He'd been gray a
lot lately.

He came out of the bathroom, trailing water
footprints, thinking about calling her. It was just ten o'clock,
though, and he decided to wait. He wasn't sure what to say yet,
anyway. He dressed sitting on the mattress. Socks, shirt and pants.
He had to lie down to get the pants on. He was still sweating from
the shower, and the clothes stuck to his skin.

He stood up and went to the table where he'd thrown
his pants over the typewriter when he'd come in last night. He got
his wallet out of the back pocket, some folding money out of the
front pocket. The change fell on the floor, quarters and dimes
scattered over the room in a way that might have resembled the
beginning of the universe. It wasn't ten o'clock in the morning, and
he'd already discovered the big bang. The only question that mattered
then was when the cleaning lady came in and swept it all up.

"Yes, I am still drunk," he said out loud.

He pulled into the office parking lot right at
ten-thirty. The elevator was slow, so he was ten minutes late walking
into T. D. Davis's office. He wasn't worried about the ten minutes,
he wasn't worried about Davis. He was only slightly worried about
Jeanie Scarpato's husband. He'd watched them together for two
minutes, and that was more time than he'd needed. She looked right
through him, and he looked at her like there was nothing else in the
room.

A long ways down the road, he would feel bad about
Mickey Scarpato.

He knocked once on the door before he went in. T. D.
Davis was sitting beneath the torn picture of himself and Jackie
Robinson. He had a copy of the
Daily Times
on the desk in front of him, opened to page 2.

Shellburn sat down without being invited to and
looked across the desk. T. D. sighed. "I thought you was headin'
over to God's Pocket," he said, "write us a column about
that boy got killed in the accident."

"It needs more time," Shellburn said.

T. D. said, "I didn't see your column on page 2
today. I opened the paper and we got some goddamn picture of this
girl had her teeth wired together in Omaha to lose weight."
Shellburn waited. "That ain't my idea of what our readers want
to see [ on page 2 of the newspaper, Richard." Shellburn leaned
forward to look at the girl in Omaha. She was smiling.

"Not over breakfast," he said.

"Have you been feelin' all 1ight?" Davis
said. “I looked at page 2 today and started to think there's been a
lot of days you been missin'. Our readers count on you. They buy the
paper for it, some of them, and then they turn to page 2 and see this
fat girl in Nebraska smiling at them with a bunch of scum and shit
stuck to her teeth." T. D. looked at the picture again.

"So I had Brookie look back over the last year,
and you know, you missed forty-two days, not countin' vacations,
Christmas and personal leave. I heard that and thought I better ask
if you been feelin' all right, because if you haven't, then we got to
get you to a doctor."

Shellburn said, "It just needs a little more
time. There's some loose ends to tie up."

T. D. cut him off "It's a daily job," he
said. "Every day, 365 days a year. There ain't nothin' matters
less than what you did yesterday."

Shellburn saw T. D. was coming to it now. "I
been thinkin' about it, hoss," he said, "and the idea hit
me that maybe we ought to bring in another columnist, you know,
somebody to take the load off." T. D. watched him. "I don't
mean like you, I was thinkin' maybe we ought to get us a woman
columnist anyway."

Shellburn smiled at him.

"A lot of papers are doin' it," T. D. said.
"Forty-five percent of our readership is women, and maybe we
ought to give them something to read too. You know, from one of their
own. Pussy diseases, rape clubs, like that. Even when you're workin',
you don't speak to our average female reader."

"You going to run pussy disease on page 2?"
Shellburn said.

T. D. shrugged. "It's been done," he said.
"There's that girl up in Boston does real well. We could run
hers when you was sick, or we could take turns.”

Shellburn said, "Did you find one yet?"

T. D. shook his head. "It ain't decided yet,
boss. I just thought I'd bring it up, you know, let you think it
over." He leaned closer now, making a show of looking at
Shellburn's face. "You sure you ain't sick? You don't look worth
a shit."

Shellburn said, "I never been better."

"lf you get sick, you ought to see somebody,"
T. D. said. "Ain't nobody gettin' any younger, and you've had
the heart problem already. I don't want the
Daily
Times
kil1in' you. That's partly why I was
thinkin' about this female thing."

"Whatever you think," Shellburn said.

"There's one other thing," he said. "If
it was a drinkin' problem . . ." .

Shellburn shook his head. "No."

"Well, if it was, you know, we sent people up to
Live 'n' Grin before to dry out. We could do it for you too. If
that's what it turned out to be, it wouldn't have to be no public
announcement."

"It's just loose ends," Shellburn said. He
stood up, nodded at T. D., and headed out the door. When he got to
Gertruda's desk, he turned around and said, "I told you and told
you, T. D., I don't take it up the ass."

T. D. Davis sat still for fifteen minutes, looking at
the chair on the other side of his desk. People didn't change, he
knew that. Richard Shellburn was scared of dying and scared of having
people find out where he lived and scared of losing his job. T. D,
had seen him in the hospital after the heart attack, he'd gone in and
talked to him for two minutes when he was scared back to his momma,
and nothing Shellburn ever did would change that between them.

He sat and looked at the
chair.
Something had changed, though
.
He'd run it all by him, and Shellburn never blinked. Maybe he didn't
believe him. T. D. remembered Jimmy White then, and those
two-hundred-mile-an-hour eyes coming into the office behind the chain
saw.
 
It was a long time afterward
that he figured out that Jimmy White hadn't changed, he'd just never
paid enough attention to who he was. He sat and looked at the empty
chair and wondered if he'd paid enough attention to Richard
Shellburn.

* * *

The first stop, Mickey had to make himself open it
up. He parked in the alley behind the Two Street Tar and Feathers, a
bar that didn't do a lot of business with colored people, and he'd
gotten out of the cab, walked around to the back of the truck, and
just stood there with the garbage, looking at the handles that opened
the back end up.

He'd waited there until a couple of kids came by
carrying one of those forty-pound radios, and stood at the mouth of
the alley watching him. White kids, walking around on a school day
with a radio like that. Mickey said, "How come you're not in
school?"

The one holding the radio said, "We graduated."
He might of been eleven. The neighborhood didn't need colored people,
they was growing their own.

Mickey knew enough about kids not to tell them to go
away. He said, "Lemme see your radio," and began to walk
toward them. When he was ten feet away, they ran. They stopped once,
half a block away, and called him a motherfucker. Mickey went back to
the truck and made himself swing one of the back doors open. Leon was
right where he'd left him.

His arms were folded over his chest, and there was
some dirt on his suit. His face looked as sweet as an angel, only
nicked a few places. Mickey stepped over him getting into the back,
trying not to look, and then stepped over him again getting out. He
couldn't get it out of his head that there was something left inside
the body. He was carrying two ten-pound packages of steaks when he
noticed the dirt on Leon's suit again and, against his will, he got a
picture of Jeanie coming across the body and seeing that he hadn't
even kept it clean. So he put the meat down and wiped at the trousers
and coat. The dirt didn't brush off but it did seem to spread out,
and after a couple of minutes the coat looked the same all over, and
Mickey picked up his meat, got out and shut the door, and it was that
same relief as when the doc is finished examining your prostate.

The next stop was four blocks deeper into South
Philadelphia, and there was no alley. He double-parked in front of
the bar and climbed in and out without looking at Leon's face. It
wasn't like a load of meat, but he thought he was getting used to it.

Mickey made six regular stops, put a little over $250
in his pocket, and then he started across the bridge to Jersey to
talk to a couple of restaurants about the sides of beef.

He was halfway across when WFIL, country in the city,
left off on Hank Williams, Jr., for a news bulletin. He reached for
the button to find another station—there was enough news around
without going out of your way looking for it—when he heard it was
the flower shop.

"Details are still sketchy," the lady said,
"but police are investigating two killings in a Philadelphia
flower shop this morning that are believed to be mob-related. The two
men were apparently killed in what was described by neighbors as a
wild shootout about six-thirty this morning in the God's Pocket
section of the city. Dead are Salvatore Cappi, forty-four, of Snyder
Avenue in South Philadelphia, and William Tolli, twenty-four, of the
Northeast. According to police, both men had been associates of local
organized crime, belonging to the faction formerly headed by Phillip
'Chicken Man' Testa, who was killed last year in a bomb blast at his
home. Police are talking to the owner of the
shop—seventy-four-year-old Sophia Capezio—and her son, Arthur
'Bird' Capezio, fifty, who, according to police, is also a known
associate of organized crime, but no arrest warrants have yet been
issued .... "