God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (28 page)

Then the woman read the same history of
Philadelphia's organized crime violence that they always read after
somebody got shot, told who got found in a garbage sack and who got
shot in his car and who got found with his dick and a wad of
twenty-dollar bills in his mouth. Only they never mentioned it was a
dick, they always said he'd been mutilated. Mickey heard the woman
say mutilated and wondered if she knew what that meant.

He didn't think so. He thought somebody wrote it for
her and she read it. He couldn't imagine a woman talking about
something like that if she knew what it was.

He felt sad about Bird. As soon as he heard God's
Pocket, he knew Bird was dead. Even if he got two of them this
time—he wondered how that was possible, the way he'd been
lately—they'd be coming for him. He thought about the $30,000 Bird
made at Keystone, and how he'd said he was taking Aunt Sophie to
Florida. But there wasn't anywhere in Florida for him now. Or if
there was, Bird would never find it.

Mickey moved the tuner over to 1060, looking for KYW
all-news radio. He knew a bartender in Queen's Village who sat around
all day listening to KYW, the same news over and over. Twice a month
he broke out in hives. He found the station just as they were
finishing up the story. ". . . The seventy-four-year-old woman,
who police say fired the fatal shots, has not been charged."

Well, it was a fucked-up world. He thought of Aunt
Sophie and how strong her bands were for an old woman, and was sadder
than he had been for Bird. She and Bird might get out of the city,
but that was putting it off. It seemed like all any of them could do
now—himself included—was put it off. It was an accident where
they all were, but that wasn't nothing anybody wanted to hear. He
wished he could tell that to Jeanie. Just say, "Lookit, if Leon
doesn't get killed, none of this shit would of happened."

He wished he could tell her it wasn't his fault that
he didn't look the same to her anymore. Somehow, though, the more it
went on, the more it was his fault.

He drove past Camden into Cherry Hill to a place he
knew just off the highway. The guys that owned it were brothers. One
you couldn't talk to, the other one you could. The brothers never
talked to each other.

The brother you could talk to was named Nicholas, and
he worked from noon to six. The brother you couldn't talk to was
Stanley, and he came in at seven o'clock at night, when they opened
for dinner, and ran things until closing. They left an hour between
shifts, so they wouldn't have to look at each other. The place was
called 'Brothers'.

Mickey rang the bell in front, and Nicholas, came to
the door. He was short and bald and fat, and anytime you got near him
you could hear him breathing. Mickey knew him from Garden State. Bird
introduced him one afternoon and told him how he and his brother
worked their business.

Mickey said, '“Hey, Nick, you got a minute?"

Nicholas took his time, deciding. "I'm here,"
he said. "What do you want?" When the brothers divided up
the business, they decided Stanley ought to run things at night, when
the customers came in, because he had the clothes for it. Nicholas,
though, had the personality.

"I got some meat," Mickey said. "I
thought maybe you could use some meat."

Nicholas shook his head. "No," he said.
"How much you got?”

"Seven sides, Kansas choice beef."

Nicholas shook his head. "No," he said. He
was still standing on the other side of the door. "How much you
want?"

Mickey shrugged. "A thousand," he said. "I
ain't got time to fuck around with this." Nicholas opened the
door and came out. "You got it with you?" he said.

"Yeah. Lemme get you a side to take a look."

Nicholas said, "I can look at it in the truck."

"I got some other shit in there," Mickey
said. Nicholas gave him a long look.

"I don't care what you got in your truck,"
he said. "I don't see nothin' but meat when I'm lookin' at
meat."

Mickey said, "Let me pull one down and show it
to you."

"Fuck it," Nicholas said. "I don't
think I want in this." He started back into the restaurant and
Mickey stopped him.

"All right," he said, "take a look.
It's good beef but the thing is . . ."

"I don't see nothin' but what I'm lookin' at,"
Nicholas said.

"Anything else is your own business. I don't
want to see it, I don't want to know about it."

Mickey opened the door to the back end of the truck.
He climbed in and then he turned around and gave Nicholas a hand up.
The truck dropped under the new weight, and then the fat man was
standing right next to him and Mickey couldn't hear him breathing.

His air came out all at once. "Look,"
Mickey said, "I'm just doin' a guy a favor. Don't pay no
attention to that, it's nothing."

Nicholas said, "It's a fuckin' body." He
leaned over and touched a leg, then moved up and touched the hand.
"It's cold," he said.

"It's a refrigerated truck," Mickey said.
"What do you think?" He knew he'd made a mistake. "What
do you say, Nick?

Can you take this off my hands, or what?" It was
dark in the truck, but Mickey could see his face change. "The
meat," he said. "I'm talkin' about the meat. Forget that."

The fat man touched the lapels of Leon's suit. "It's
a cheap suit," he said. "What happened to him?"

"He died," Mickey said. "It's just
doin' somebody a favor."

"What kind of a favor is that?" he said.
"You takin' him out for some fresh air?" The fat man was
touching Leon's shirt now. "I don't like this/' he said. Then he
stood up, without looking at the meat, and climbed out of the truck,
sitting down first and then dropping the few inches to the ground.
Mickey got down behind him.

"You can't go carryin' a stiff around in the
back of a truck," Nicholas said. "You put me in a bad
position. Because of you, I'm an assessory now."

Mickey said, "You ain't nothin' because you
didn't see nothin' but the meat back there. It's dark in there, and
all you did was look at the meat before you bought it."

Nicholas shook his head. "No," he said. "I
ain't takin' that kind of meat. Who knows what sickness it could of
got, ridin' back there with a human body?”

"Nicholas," he said, "the body's
clean. It got cleaned up before I put it back there."

The fat man shook his head. "No," he said.
"Shit, I'm already an assessory if I don't call the cops. They
find the body back there and trace the meat, the first thing you
know, the papers will be sayin' we're fuckin' cannibals over here.
Can you see my point? You see what that kind of shit does to
business?"

He shook his head, walking away from the truck. "No,"
he said, "if you was to give me the beet, I still don't need
that kind of trouble."

Mickey said, "All right. You was the one who
wanted to see what was back there."

"I didn't want to see that," he said. He
wiped the hand he'd touched Leon with against his pants, then smelled
it. "I didn't . want to see it, I didn't see it. I don't know
nothin' about it, and you didn't come by today and knock on the
door."

Mickey nodded. "There's one thing," he
said. "You was the one who got back in there, nobody made you,
and a couple off weeks go by and nothin' happens, I don't want to go
into my stops and hear stories."

Nicholas held up his hands. "You think I'm going
to tell this?"

He took the meat two other places in Jersey, but
nobody wanted to see it. The place he knew in Moorestown, the man
said, "I don't want nothin' to do with anything that don't come
with receipts. I don't know who nobody is anymore." He drove
from there to Berlin, and in Berlin they wouldn't even talk to him.
By the time he got to Berlin, he knew it wasn't going to work.

All the way there and back, the story about the
shootout at the flower shop was on the news. First they had the two
guys dead, then they had one of them dead and one of them critical,
and then they said Aunt Sophie had been hospitalized, and then they
said there was two dead and Aunt Sophie was in police custody. They
kept breaking into the show to say what they'd said before was wrong.

Finally he turned the radio off. It didn't matter
where they had Bird and Aunt Sophie. For some people, there wasn't
anyplace to go. He decided he'd sell the truck tomorrow, he knew a
place in South Philly where they'd buy it. He wouldn't get what it
was worth, but there'd be enough to put Leon in the ground. He
thought he might go back to work for Dow Chemical, or he might catch
on with Mayflower.

He thought about truck-stop whores and truck-stop
coffee.

Drinking eight cups of it, listening to the same shit
he'd heard the day, before, and the day before that; staying there
because it was cold outside, or because sometimes you get tired of
being alone in the cab. Or spooked. At night, you could forget where
you were going, or why you were going there, or what you were
pulling. Sometimes at night, you started to feel like there wasn't
nothing connecting you to nothing else.

He remembered, for the fiftieth time that day, how
she'd looked at the newspaper reporter when they'd come down from
Leon's room. He wasn't nothing special. Mickey could see that, but
she couldn't. People who were famous looked different to her. They
shined. She'd told him that after she'd seen Tim McCarver buying
clothes on Chestnut Street. She said he wasn't as big as she'd
expected, but once she saw who it was he seemed to shine, like there
was more light on him than anybody else.

Mickey had said, "Who is Tim McCarver?" It
turned out he played baseball. For a while after that, she watched
the Phillies' games on television. And anybody who'd come in, she'd
tell them about seeing Tim McCa1ver buying clothes on Chestnut
Street.

"At first," she'd say, "you wouldn't
notice him, because he isn't as big as you think, but then he smiled
and you've never seen nicer features, and he just seemed to . . .
shine all over. He's much handsomer in person .... "

Every time she told it, he got better, which Mickey
guessed had something to do with how famous people got famous in the
first place. Richard Shellburn, of course, wasn't any Tim McCarver to
look at. He was soft and sick-looking, and depressed. Mickey knew
enough about Jeanie to guess she'd turned it around, though, made it
into something artistic. He thought about Shellburn and was surprised
to feel himself getting mad.

He'd took it for granted from the beginning that
there wasn't any reason Jeanie picked him to marry. And for the last
four days, watching her turn away, he took it for granted there
wasn't any reason for that either. At least if there was, it was
decided apart from anything he did. It'd seared him and worried him
and had him thinking shit that grown men don't think, but it didn't
make him mad. It was like getting mad at the weather.

But now he thought about it, why couldn't Shellburn
stay in Center City to hunt pussy? There was every kind of woman in
the world in Center City, and somebody famous could find one of his
own. What was he doing, coming into his house to take what he had?

Of course, it wasn't really his house. He'd moved in
with Jeanie and the kid. Maybe that's how Leon had seen him, somebody
coming in to take what was his.

He drove the White Horse Pike all the way from Berlin
back to Philly, content to stop at the lights and watch the afternoon
traffic. He began to look at it different. It was only four days
since Leon died, in a couple of weeks who could say what would
happen? And if she ran off with the reporter, he might find somebody
else. He'd got confidence living with her. Not enough to know what to
say, like in a bar when there was two hundred hard dicks walking
around trying to pick up women, but if he met somebody, maybe at a
party . . . He thought of how that might go, but he was doing Jeanie
all over again.

There was a hitchhiker on the highway just past the
entrance to the high-speed line. She was young and round-faced,
homely as an Idaho potato, and she had a guitar. Mickey pulled the
truck into the right lane and then off the road. He looked in his
rearview mirror, and when she didn't move he backed up to where she
was.

Her hair was tied into an old-fashioned ponytail, and
she watched until he had stopped before she moved toward the truck.
To be that skinny, she had to be using a needle. She opened the door
but didn't try to get in. "How far you going?" she said.

He said, "Phi1adelphia."

She nodded, looking over the truck like she was
thinking of buying it. She had two earrings on each side, and the
holes she'd drilled to hold them were red and infected-looking. Her
fingernails were bit to hell, and the skin that puffed up over the
top looked infected too.

"What part of Philly?" she said.

"South Philly," he said. "Where you
goin'?"

"I don't know," she said. "New York."

He said, "Well, I can take you as far as Philly.
You might catch a ride up 295, but I ain't got all day." Mickey
didn't like people driving by thinking he was trying to pick up this
skinny girl.