God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (36 page)

"I didn't want to mention it," he said. "I
knew it'd upset you."

"Where is he now?" she said. She sat up
like she was going to put on a coat and go pick him up. He saw that
she would need a coat, that nightgown must of been made for the
summer.

"He's at Jack's," he said. “It's all
settled now. The cops picked him up, but Jack knew somebody at the
morgue.

She lay back down and turned away. "turn off the
light, Mickey," she said. He turned off the light and sat on the
edge of the bed waiting for her breathing to even out. He didn't want
to leave until she was asleep. He didn't want to feel like he was
running away.

He'd thought telling her what happened to Leon would
make her see him. He sat in the dark, trying to remember how that was
supposed to connect. He'd begun to wonder if she was asleep when she
suddenly spoke to him again. "Do people know what happened?"
she asked.
 
"Jack knows,"
he said, "but I didn't tell nobody in the neighborhood. Or your
sisters . . ." Who did she mean?

"Jack Moran?" she said.

"Yeah, he had to know. But he ain't anxious to
have it all over the neighborhood that he threw Leon out the door
because he didn't have cash in hand to bury him. That makes him look
bad."

"Threw him out the door?" she said. He
could have screwed a bolt through his forehead.

"Yeah, well, not exactly threw. He put him
outside. I tried to get him back in, but Jack'd locked the doors.
He'd been drinkin', and you know how he gets when he's like that."

"Out on the street?" He reached over to pat
her shoulder and stopped his hand just before it touched her, not
knowing what she might do. He knew her better than this when he
didn't know her.

"He wasn't there
long," he said. "On1y a couple minutes before I found him,
and then l got him right in the truck.” He waited a little bit, but
Jeanie didn't say anything else. After a while she picked up the
pillow and put it over her head. He saw she didn't want to talk and
went back downstairs and fell asleep on the couch.

* * *

In the morning, Mickey couldn't walk. The couch was a
foot shorter than he was, so he'd slept with his legs bent about like
a frog's, at least that's how they were when he woke up. He tried to
straighten them out, and the shot of pain caught him up short before
they'd moved an inch. He sat up on the couch and looked at his legs,
expecting they'd be purple and hard. They looked like his legs. He
rubbed them, up and down from his knees to his shorts, and every
place he touched hurt, but not like it did when he tried to move
them.

He thought of the way he would look at the
funeral—the way he would look to Jeanie at the funeral—and pushed
himself off the couch. His legs were still bent, but not as bad. He
closed his eyes and straightened them. It took a minute, a minute and
a half and then before he opened his eyes, he lost his balance and
stumbled.

He caught the fall, but his legs had moved a new way,
and it felt like he was breaking guitar strings in there. He stood up
straight again, this time the pain lost some of its edges. He didn't
know if it was because he was getting used to it, or because he'd
done it before and the strings were already broke. Maybe that's what
getting used to something was, running out of strings to break.

It was quiet upstairs. He moved from the couch to a
chair to the table with the telephone, keeping most of his weight on
his arms. The table was next to the staircase, and he used both hands
on the banister to pull himself up. At the top of the stairs, he
found out he could walk without hurting himself if he kept his steps
six inches long.

He went into the bathroom that way and filled the tub
with hot water. He got in, butt first, and then pulled his legs in
after him. He lay in the tub while it filled, squeezing his legs,
working the elbow, trying to remember how much walking you have to do
at a funeral.

The water was up over his chest before he realized he
had to stand up to turn it off. He tried it with his toes, but that
was new guitar strings breaking all over again. He put a hand on each
side of the tub and pushed up, and as he did that the phone rang. She
picked it up as he got his feet under him, and when he turned off the
water he could hear her talking.

It was one of the sisters, he could tell from her
voice. "I'm all right," she said, "how are you?"
There was a pause, "Are you sure?” There was another pause,
this one was longer. "I wasn't trying to say you couldn't read
.... No, I'm just tired. I've carried it all alone .... Of course you
and Joanie helped, I didn't mean you didn't help, but there's things
you can't know about until it happens. .. ."

He eased himself back into the tub while she said
goodbye, and the phone rang again before he'd found a comfortable
position. This time he couldn't hear what she said. She must have
moved, he thought. Then he thought of Richard Shellburn and the
muscles in his legs tensed, and he hadn't run out of strings to break
yet.

A minute later she opened the bathroom door and
looked at him. "Everybody knows," she said.

"What?" he said.

"It was in the
Daily
Times
," she said. "About the
accident. Only they said Leon got killed again."

He said, "Why'd they say that?"

She shook her head. "Everybody in the
neighborhood, my sisters, everybody that's coming to the funeral is
going to know."

"It ain't so bad, Jeanie," he said. "We
didn't do nothin' bad. It's nothin' to be ashamed off runnin' into a
money problem."

"I have to live in this neighborhood," she
said. And the way she said that, he didn't. She went downstairs then,
and when he got dressed and went down there too, she came back up.
They passed in the living room without a word.

He thought of McKenna's stories about his fights with
his wife, but that was always over getting drunk or staying out all
night. McKenna had something he'd done to get her over, and when his
wife was over it, it was all right again. Mickey was trying to get
Jeanie over who he was.

 
He thought of the newspaper reporter again and
tried to see where he came into it. Mickey knew from the last five
days how it was when all you had for ambition was for time to pass,
but Shellburn had been doing it a long time. He thought maybe that's
what getting old alone did to you. He thought maybe he'd find out for
himself before it was over.

Of course, Jeanie liked
famous things—she talked about New York City, and the whole place
sounded like the inside of a store window—but he didn't know how
she could look at Shellburn and not see he was losing ground every
day, that he might as well of had lung cancer. And that all he wanted
from her was comfort while it ended.

* * *

It turned out three o'clock was too late for a
funeral. If you had it at nine or ten in the morning, people got out
of bed, put on their neckties and had to hurry to get there on time.
Three o'clock, though, meant they got out of bed in the morning, put
on their neckties and then had five or six hours of Saturday to kill
before the service.

It wasn't that funerals didn't call for drinking, but
the time for that was the night before, or later, after it was over.
Or both. You could grieve with a hangover, probably better than you
could sober, but nothing that came out of a bottle was any good
before they started saying the words. It made things come up that
might of been left alone.

They had the service in the viewing room. By the time
Mickey and Jeanie came in, a few minutes before three, every chair in
the place had somebody sitting in it, except for the front row, which
was saved for members of the family. He held her at the elbow as they
walked down the aisle, in front of her sisters and their husbands,
her eyes fastened ahead on the closed coffin sitting underneath the
cross. Mickey thought of the old woman in the organdy dress that had
been there the night he slapped Smilin' Jack, he thought that most of
the people in the room would end up in that same spot. Not for their
funerals—the fimerals would be at church—but this is where they'd
get primed.

The room had that same stale smell as the Hollywood.
It never occurred to him before that the smell belonged to the people
as much as the bar.

He guided her down to the front seats, five feet from
the box, and they sat down just as the minister came out and began to
talk about Leon. He said he didn't know him, but the Lord did. And
the Lord had His reasons.

Mickey looked straight ahead and Jeanie buried her
face in a handkerchief He felt her shaking but he .didn't know what
to do about it. She hadn't spoken to him since that morning in the
bathtub.

Once or twice, the minister stopped and looked toward
the back of the room, where people were coming in from the bathroom
across the hall. He'd never been in God's Pocket before, but he
seemed to know he was losing his hold and hurried the last part. Then
he hurried off the podium and stood with Mickey and Jeanie and
Smilin' Jack on the front steps of the funeral parlor, shaking hands
with the people who had come to say goodbye to Leon. He even shook
hands in a hurry.

The people shook hands with Jeanie first, the ladies
kissed her on the cheek, then they shook hands with the minister, and
then with Smilin' Jack, and then with Mickey. The ladies told Jeanie
they were sorry for her troubles—Mickey could hear himself included
as part of them—and they told Smilin' Jack and the minister it was
a very good service. Ray said it was the best since Caveman
Rafferty's—a local middleweight who was beaten to death one
Saturday afternoon twelve years ago on national television. Caveman
was born and raised in the Pocket, and it was still common knowledge
that there were five people in the neighborhood who could beat him in
a fight. It was an argument who they were, but there were five of
them. Everybody agreed on that.

Nobody had much to say to Mickey. Some of the kids
from the Hollywood and the Uptown even stared at him, like there
might be trouble later. Everybody'd read the
Daily
Times
, or heard about it. Mickey stared back.
Whatever happened between him and Jeanie, it wasn't going to be a
bunch of kids from the bar that caused it.

It didn't turn out to be the kids that made the
trouble anyway. Mickey and Jeanie and Jack and the minister had been
shaking hands out on the funeral parlor steps about ten minutes, the
casket had come out and been loaded into Jack's eleven-year-old
Cadillac hearse, and then Mole Ferrell had stepped out of the door,
looking lost. Mole had been sitting near the front, so he was one of
the last in line at the bathroom after the minister had finished. He
came out, rolling and dizzy, and shook hands with Jeanie and Mickey.
He smelled stronger than anybody but Ray. “Leon was always a good
boy," he told them. "I remember when he had his paper route
.... "

Mickey hadn't known Leon ever had a paper route. He
thought he must of fucked it up terrible or Jeanie would of told him
about it. She was always looking to mention his good points, up to
and including dressing himself and when things got slow—as they
tended to do when you were looking for Leon's good points—she could
sit in front of the television news, listening to all the crimes the
colored people had done to each other in North Philadelphia that
night, and count it to his side that he hadn't shot who they had.

She'd shake her head and say, "Can you imagine
how you'd feel if your child did something like that?"

"A lot of paper boys just throw the paper any
which way," Mole Ferrell was saying, "but Leon always put
it in the door. He was a good boy." As Mole Ferrell spoke, his
eyes went big and out of focus, and he seemed to be seeing it again.
Mole had been hit in the head a lot and was famous for moving around
in time.

He glanced at Jack as he talked, and then looked at
him again. Jack was smiling his funeral director's smile, and when
Mole Ferrell looked at him, he remembered the night when Jack smiled
that smile and then sucker-punched him. Or maybe it was that night
again.

Whichever, one minute Mole was looking at Jeanie,
saying how important it was to know your
Daily
Times
would be in the same place every
morning, and the next minute he screamed, "All right,
motherfucker," and hit Jack Moran dead in the middle of the
face. The punch came halfway across the entranceway to the funeral
parlor and knocked Jack off the steps. Mole Ferrell was big and slow
and did not struggle when the minister grabbed him around the waist.
"Please, sir," the minister said, "remember where you
are." Of course, it was the minister who'd never been in God's
Pocket before.

Smilin' Jack lay flat on the ground for a few
seconds, and then he sat up, covering his nose with his hand. Blood
leaked through the fingers. He sat and stared at Mole Ferrell, who
was still wearing the minister around his waist, staring back. Jeanie
had stopped crying. Mickey noticed that, and when Jack moved his
hand, he noticed that his nose had been  moved an inch off
center. "This man is drunk,” said the minister.