God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (34 page)

"Tomorrow afternoon,” Mickey said, “if you
wouldn't mind lettin' people know."

"That's good," McKenna said. "Saturday's
a good day."

"It's just a small service, up at Jack's."
McKenna nodded.

Mickey felt somebody wedge into the spot next to him,
hurting his elbow, and then he smelled something wet and awful. He
turned to look, and it was Ray and his neck brace.

McKenna held his nose. "Awful, ain't it?"

Ray spit on the floor, stepped on the spot like he
was putting out a cigarette. "I can't take this off," he
said to Mickey. “If I take this off, I could aggravate the injury."

Mickey sucked on his beer. "Don't want to do
that," he said.

"It doesn't smell bad," Ray told him. "Can
you smell it? It's medicinal, like a hospital, McKenna wants me to
take it off` because of his criminal liability .... "

McKenna said, "It's a medicinal smell, like you
cut off your fuckin' lizard for a necklace."

Ray said, "Mickey doesn't think it's so bad."

"How do you know that?" McKenna said.

"He's still standing here, isn't he?"

McKenna said, "Yeah, but he's grievin'. You
can't expect him to smell right." McKenna reached into the box
and brought out another Schimdt's. Then he went to the other end of
the bar to kill the argument again.

Ray leaned closer to Mickey. "A shame about the
boy," he said. He shook his head. The brace was stained at the
edge where it met his neck. Mickey nodded, pulling away. There was
class of people that couldn't talk to you when they were drinking
without putting their mouth right up next to your face.

"The whole neighborhood was sorry," Ray
said. He was spitting too. "But there's no way anyone can
entirely sympathize with you. It's like being black. You can feel for
them, but you can't ever really understand what it is."

The woman on the other side of him yelled to McKenna.

"Ray's talkin' about the niggers again.” Ray
was the only person in God's Pocket who liked colored people, and
every time he opened his mouth about them in the HoHywood it was
trouble. McKenna left the argument and came back to Mickey's end of
the bar.

He put a finger in Ray's face and said, "I told
you before, no talkin' about niggers."

Ray ran his hands over the neck brace, reminding him.
"It's a free country,” he said. "We still have the First
Amendment. Some of the people in here tonight fought for freedom of
speech."

McKenna leaned closer. "If you bring patriotic
into it, you're flagged," he said. "You start talkin' about
niggers and America in here tonight, I swear you won't get another
drink till winter. You understand?"

For an answer, Ray pointed to his shot glass, which
McKenna filled with Old Hickory, locally brewed bourbon whiskey. Ray
put his lingers around it and picked up where he'd been. A long time
ago Ray had got used to being told to shut up. "What I was
saying was, nobody can feel what you feel. They didn't live with the
boy, they can't know what it's like."

Mickey said, "That's the truth."

"And they didn't live with Jeanie. They look at
it from the outside and say this or that, but it's just talk."

Mickey looked at him. "What's just talk?"

Ray shook his head. "Doesn't matter, because
they aren't there. They don't live in your house, they haven't walked
a mile in your shoes."

Mickey said, "Every fuckin' time you begin to
say somethin', Ray, you throw in somethin' like walkin' in other
people's shoes. That's why everybody thinks you're full of shit."

"It doesn't matter what everybody thinks,” Ray
said. "I was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. Do you
see anybody else educated in this bar?” Ray looked down the bar,
then in back of him. "There's nobody here who went further than
twelfth grade," he said.

"Not me," Mickey said. “I quit when I was
fourteen." Ray nodded his head. "But you're an intelligent
man," he said.

"What are they sayin'?"

Ray said, "Nothing. It's nothing. Everybody in
this neighborhood quit thinking at the end of the Korean War. The
ones that- didn't quit thinking got out." Mickey started to say
something but Ray stopped him. "You want to know why I didn't
get out," he said. "The truth is, I don't know. Maybe I
like being the only educated man in the Hollywood Bar. Maybe . . ."

"What I want to know," Mickey said, "is
what everybody's sayin' about this."

Ray shook his head. "To what purpose? They can't
understand, it's like trying to understand being black. . . ."
He'd dropped his voice to say that last part.

Mickey said, "Because I wanna know. Because how
somethin' looks to everybody else is sometimes how it really looks."

"There are no absolutes," Ray said.

Mickey found himself leaning into Ray's face to talk,
ignoring the smell. "Have you ever noticed them old sayings?"
he said. "Like, 'It takes one to know one', and, 'It's the early
bird that gets the worm'? And, 'Nothin' is for nothin'?"

Ray nodded. "Clichés," he said. "They
have replaced thought."

Mickey said, "Yeah, well, everybody says things
like that, but when you sit down and think about it, they're always
true. That's why everybody says them. Lemme tell you another one.
'Whistlin' past the graveyard'. You ever think about that, what it
really is?"

"The average American has substituted clichés
for thought," Ray said.

Mickey pulled away from Ray's face and drank the
second Schmidt's. "Tell me what they're sayin' about me and
Jeanie," he said.

Ray closed his eyes, putting it together. He drank
the shot of whiskey he'd been holding and tugged at his neck brace.
"That she's fucking Richard Shellburn," he said. "And
she's got you sleeping on the couch."

"She ain't fuckin' Richard Shel1bum," he
said.

Ray shrugged. "It's not what I think," he
said, "it's what they're saying." Mickey looked around the
bar to see who it was looking in his windows at night.

"She ain't fuckin' nobody," he said again.

He'd seen the way she looked af him, but she wouldn't
do that. He would of felt it, just being around her. Of course, he
hadn't been around her. Not since the morning Leon had got himself
killed. "She ain't," he said.

For the first time since Mickey knew him, Ray didn't
have a thing to say. "What, did she go somewhere with him
today?"

Mickey said. "She's got some idea that Leon got
killed different , than the cops said, that's all. He's just helpin'
her."

McKenna had heard some of that, and he was back down
in front of them again. "What the fuck are you startin' now,
Ray?" he said.

Ray pointed to his shot glass. "We were just
talking,” he said.

"I heard what you said," McKenna said. He
was staring at Ray, Ray was looking at his shot glass. "The
fuckin' funeral's tomorrow afternoon, and you're talkin' shit like
that."

"I didn't say anything that everybody else in
here didn't say first," Ray said, and he looked back at the
bartender to see how far he wanted to take it. McKenna got Mickey
another Schmidt's out of the cooler.

"Don't listen to nothin' he said, Mick,"
McKenna said.

Mickey picked up the beer and drank most of it.
"Fuckin' people talk about everything." McKenna poured Ray
another shot and one for himself and put another beer in front of
Mickey. "Forget about it," he said.

Half an hour later, Ray threw down the shot and
looked around. "You want to know the real reason I never left?"
he said.

He was drunk enough so some of the words were
slurring now, and the thoughts slid into each other too. "The
real reason?"

Mickey stared at his hands. He was wishing Jeanie
would get home. He wanted to be around her tonight, to see where it
stood, but he didn't want to go home and wait. He'd had enough of
empty rooms.

Ray reached over and took the shot McKenna had left
for himself on the bar, putting his own shot glass where the full one
had been. "The real reason," he said, "is
forgiveness." Mickey looked up from his hands. "I want to
be forgiven," Ray said. One of his eyes had crossed, and the
spit had collected in the corner of his mouth and was running down
his chin.

"Don't worry about what you said," Mickey
said. "It's just ta1k."

Ray shook his head. "You can't forgive me,"
he said. "You're an intelligent man, but you don't know anything
here. I grew up with these people. They've seen me lying in puke and
I've seen them lying in puke."

"I seen you lyin' in puke, Ray," Mickey
said.

Ray shook his head. "Everybody here has stolen
something from somebody else. Or when they were kids they set
somebody's house on fire, or they ran away when they should have
stayed and fought. They've stolen from each other and they've lent
money to the people they took it from. You're an intelligent man, but
everybody here's seen everybody else naked. They know who's scared to
fight and who cheats at cards and who slaps his kids around. And no
matter what anybody does, we're still here, and whatever we are is
what we are." His head was beginning to fall, a couple of inches
at a time, and then he'd catch it.

"And no matter what I am, they've got to forgive
me, because I'm no worse than anybody else, I'm just different. The
only thing they can't forgive is leaving the neighborhood." As
he said that, Ray folded his arms on the bar, making himself a
pillow, and then dropped his head, neck brace and all, from a foot
above the bar, and went to sleep where he landed. He looked so
peaceful.

Mickey finished his beer, thinking about it. When
McKenna came back and went through the formality of trying to wake
Ray up, Mickey got another one, and then another one. About eleven
o'clock he looked out the window and the lights in the house were on,
and when he looked again at one, she had gone to bed. He thought
about what Ray had said, and he wanted to be forgiven too. Not by the
neighborhood—Ray was right, they didn't know anything about each
other, him and God's Pocket—it was Jeanie he wanted to forgive him.
He didn't know what for.

McKenna gave last call at two and turned on the
lights, and for a minute everything stopped. Mickey saw that Ray was
attached by a line of spit to a puddle he'd made on the bar. And he
saw the rest of them too, frozen in the light. Pale, soft faces,
missing teeth, mascara run all down the girls' cheeks. A fat girl
sitting six feet away—how long had she been here?—crying into a
glass full of wilted cherries.

People who would never leave God's Pocket, who
couldn't. "Drink up," McKenna said.

Somebody yelled, "Yo, turn off the fuckin'
lights."

McKenna went back to the wall and dimmed the lights.

"Drink up,” he said again. And they did.
They'd seen each other in the light once, and that was enough. They
finished their drinks and left the bar in twos and threes, back to
row houses and hangovers, and the mornings to get through.

Mickey watched them leave, drunk as he'd been since
he was a kid, and he knew in that moment exactly what Ray had been
talking about, only he'd said forgiveness when he meant love.

Mickey could see how you could get them mixed up.

And he could see he'd never shown Jeanie enough of
who he was. That's why she thought everything was his fault. He
finished the beer in front of him and helped McKenna get Ray over to
a booth. They tried slapping him awake, but when McKenna pulled up
his eyelids, all there was was white, so they dragged him across the
floor and laid him out in the booth. It was a hard fact that nobody
alive could wake up Ray when his eyeballs went white.

He left his change on the bar for McKenna and crossed
the street, and there was something moving around inside his head
that turned out to be an idea. Tonight he was going to wake her up
and let her see him. He didn't trust himself to wait till morning. By
morning, he'd pull back. He didn't know what he would say, but he was
going to give her something to forgive, or love.

He went through the house
and checked the garage even though there was nothing in it, and
decided what he would tell her as he was walking up the stairs.

* * *

Richard Shellburn had told her at ten-thirty in the
morning that he loved her. He said, "Let me pick you up."

Jeanie said, "I'm not sure, Richard. There's so
much going on right now. The funeral, my husband . . ." It was
the first time she called him Richard, she hadn't known what to call
him before.

He said, "I love you."

She said, "Thank you."

"Let me pick you up," he said. It didn't
seem to matter what she said, it never changed him.

She said, "I could meet you somewhere?

"Bookbinders," he said. She met him there
for lunch, and the owner had come over to the table to shake hands
with Richard and make sure the food was all right. It reminded her of
New York, and the way things could have been all along. When Richard
had introduced her, the owner had taken her hand and said, "You're
very beautiful to be with somebody like this ugly guy."