God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (37 page)

Mole looked down at the top of Jack's head, then at
Mickey, then at Jeanie. Changing gears. "He always left it right
in the door," Mole said. "Leon was a good boy."

Then he said, "Father, I got to go.” He pried
himself out of the minister's arms, shook hands with Mickey again,
and then walked through the little white gate and headed back down
the  street toward the Hollywood. `

Smilin' Jack's housekeeper had heard the noise and
came out the door just as Mole Ferrell was leaving. Jack was still on
the ground, and he'd thrown his head back, trying to get the bleeding
to stop. She knelt next to him and began wiping at his face with her
apron. "Mr. Moran," she said, "what is happened to you
now?"

Jack let himself be cleaned up. She handled his face
gently, shaking her head like he was her own child, and when most of
the blood was gone, she ran her finger along the bridge of his nose
until she found the place where the cartilage separated.

"Oh, dear," she said, “you all busted up,
ain't you?"`

Smilin' Jack didn't answer. When she took her linger
off his nose, he stood up, still looking at the sky, and headed back
into the funeral parlor. The housekeeper tried to take his arm but he
pulled away. Mickey opened the door for him and Jack walked in,
bleeding. Jack closed the door behind him, in his housekeeper's face.
She seemed to notice the blood on her hands then, and they all waited
on the front steps and didn't know what to do. Fifteen or twenty
people were standing on the sidewalk when it happened, and they
hadn't moved either.

"Dear Jesus," the housekeeper said, "three
o'clock Saturday ain't the time for no funeral." She folded her
arms to hide her hands. The coffin was in the hearse, the hearse was
still running.

They stood on the steps and waited.

ln a few minutes they heard Jack upstairs, arguing
with the old man. They stood on the steps in their best clothes and
listened. Mickey said, "You want to go back to the house and
wait?" Jeanie didn't answer him. She was looking over at the
hearse now.

Upstairs it got louder. Mickey wished he had somebody
to talk to. The housekeeper smiled at him, a sweet old gold-tooth
smile full of apologies. It was her family, and it wasn't. "He
shouldn't talk that way to his father," Mickey said, looking up
there.

The old woman shook her head. "It don't matter,"
she said. "The old gentleman, he don't hear none of it. He just
sit there in the wheelchair."

Mickey looked at her to make sure he'd understood.
"The old man's deaf?"

She smiled at him and
shook her head. "He don't know morning from night," she
said.

* * *

It was getting dark before they got back from the
cemetery. They'd waited at the funeral home an hour, and then Jack
Moran had come out wearing a clean shirt. He'd stuifed cotton into
both sides of his nose, but he hadn't changed suits, and Jeanie saw
the bloodstains in the material.

He'd come out looking angry and gone to the hearse
without apologizing. She and Mickey and the minister got into the
Cadillac behind it, and her sisters followed that in Joanie's Ford
wagon. At the grave they put the coffin under a tent, and the
minister read from the Bible.
"To
everything there is a season . . ."

She had to admit it was a beautiful coffin.

Mickey looked straight ahead, the sisters stood
together, apart from the others. Jack Moran's nose was bleeding
again. She saw they were all tired of Leon now, they wanted to get it
over. She thought she wanted to get it over too, but when the service
had ended, she couldn't leave him there alone. The minister had tried
to talk to her. "There's nothing more you can do now, Jeanie,"
he'd said.

"A few minutes," she'd said. And she'd
stood out there under the tent for an hour, because she cou1dn't
stand to leave him alone. Finally Mickey had come close to her,
touched her arm.

"They're closin' the cemetery," he'd said.
.

And she'd pulled away from him, and walked alone back
to the Cadillac. She didn't want to be near him, or her sisters. She
didn't want to be near anybody she knew. She turned to the window and
stared outside the whole trip back.

At the house, Mickey had wanted to talk, but she'd
gone upstairs, into the bathroom, and stared at her face in the
mirror. Stared a long time, until it felt like a trance. It was like
that at the graveyard too, standing beside the coffin. Time didn't
come into it anymore. After a while, she washed her face, and then
she began putting on makeup again, slowly, without a plan. She put it
on that way to see what she would be when it was finished. Sometime
later the phone rang, eight or nine times. Mickey must have gone out.
She picked it up and waited.

“
Jeanie?"

"Hello," she said. It was Richard
Shellburn.

"Is it finished'?"

She said, "Why does everybody want it to be
finished? He was mine, not anybody else's."

"I'll pick you up tomorrow," he said. "We
can have lunch and talk. If you want to, we could take a drive out to
the place."

"l don't know," she said.

"That's the reason to do it," he said.
"I'll pick you up."

"No,” she said. "Not yet." Not ever,
she thought.

"Let's go to the place," he said. "It'll
do you good, just to be out in the fresh air."

"It's not my place," she said.

"It will be," he said. "I'll pick you
up." She let the line go quiet for a minute. "You don't
have a place of your own," he said.

"I know it," she said. He was saying
something else when she hung up. Then she went back to the mirror and
darkened her lips and lightened her cheeks, and after a few minutes
it came to her that she didn't know what she looked like anymore.

She closed her eyes to clear her head and saw the
casket.

Sitting under the tent at the cemetery, and she saw
herself standing next to it. She saw the black dress and her hair,
but she couldn't see her face. She could see Leon's though, she could
see him awake, curled over on his side somewhere in the box. Awake
and blinking. It was a beautiful casket, but it was too big for him.
And when she opened her eyes and saw herself in the mirror, she was
surprised—for the half second she could see it—how bad this had
hurt her. She thought it must be like a car accident, when you
couldn't tell for yourself how bad you were hurt. Your body lied to
you at first, you had to wait and see.

Then she couldn't even remember where she'd seen the
damage in her face. She studied herself a long time and then washed
off the makeup, and began her face over again, without a plan, to see
if it would be happy again when she finished.
 

5
DEAD
ISSUES

Sunday afternoon Old Lucy thought they'd finally come
to get him. He was sitting in his chair by the window, looking out
across the street when he heard the police cars. Minnie Devine was at
church. The noise they made wasn't a siren anymore, it was a panic
noise.

It started out a long ways away, and then got closer,
like a heart attack. There was two of them, then three, maybe more.
Lucien was glad Minnie wasn't here to see it, he'd worried her
enough, not eating. He came to the table, but he couldn't eat. He
felt too tired.

He thought maybe he ought to get dressed, but he
guessed they'd tell him what to wear. The noise got louder, until it
seemed to be coming from the kitchen. He felt himself trembling.

He'd never been in jail before, never even been in
the hospital. "Well, boy," he said out loud, "it's all
comin' to settle now."

In the week since he'd killed Leon Hubbard, Lucien
had come to think of the boy and himself in it together. The last
couple of days, he'd found himself talking to him, guiding him
through what was happening. He felt friendly toward him, and when he
thought of him that way it took the pressure off what he'd did.

He got up out of the chair, feeling heavy and tired,
and pulled his jacket off the hat tree. He thought it would be cold
where they'd put him. He put the jacket on and stepped out the front
door, wearing his slippers. He didn't want them coming into Minnie's
house to get him.

He stepped outside, and one of the police cars came
around the corner, making that panicky sound that seemed to match his
heart. He thought they'd made a mistake when they went past him, but
there was another car right behind, and it went past too. And then a
third one. And then the children from the neighborhood was all
running and skating toward Broad Street, where the police had finally
stopped.

It came to him that it was the Korean. The Muslims
had finally settled with him. He sat down on the steps and waited.
The children would be back soon and tell him what happened. It was
likely they shot him in the night.

The Korean would have been asleep in the doorway,
they wouldn't of even had to get out of the car, just slow down, roll
down the window, and shoot. The Korean might never of even woke up.
That's the way Koreans was.

He shook his head, thinking about it. There was
things that God meant to happen, he believed that. But there was also
things wasn't decided until they came around, and the Korean had gave
up his family and his house to wait for them. He thought again that
the Muslims probably come for him at night. That's the way they was.

He wondered how long the Korean had been sitting
there before somebody noticed he was dead, and how many people
noticed it before somebody called the police. It didn't make no
sense, sittin' there waitin' for them to kill him. It didn't make no
sense that the Korean didn't have a plan of his own. Everybody dies,
he thought, it's all settled in the end, but it's no sense in waitin'
for them to come by in the night.

A few minutes later, one of the children came back
from the Korean's direction. She was a wild girl, never paid no
attention to her mother. Lucien knew everybody in the neighborhood
from listening to Minnie over the last week. Thirteen, fourteen years
old, she already been pregnant. "Clorese," he said, "what
all them police doin'?"

She had a pinch of chewing tobacco under her lip and
a scar from her nose to her ear,'and she looked him over like he was
For Sale. "They offed one of them Ko-reans," she said.

"When they did it?" he said.

"I mind my own bi'niss," she said.

"That's what I heard," he said. She
shrugged and began to walk away. "The police be askin'
questions?” he said. He wondered what he'd say if the police asked
him.

"You askin' all the questions," she said.
"All they doin' is cleanin' him up off the sidewalk." She
shrugged. "He didn't give no fuck if he died. They's some people
around like that."

Lucien saw that she meant him. "I mind my own
bi'niss," she said.

He sat on the steps, and in fifteen or twenty minutes
an ambulance came around the comer, screaming like there was
something left to do, and it stopped up where the police cars was.
There was still a crowd, but it didn't have a bloody spirit. He could
tell that from where he was. It was just a Korean.

He thought of the boy again, and the way the blade
had felt up under his chin. He worked his whole life, nobody ever
tried to take nothin' away from him before. At least they never tried
where he couldn't get around it. So he'd picked up the pipe, and the
feeling when he'd hit him had went all the way down to his shoulder,
solid as a bag of cement. "It wasn't all your fault, boy,"
he said. "You was takin' more than you knew."

He looked down the street, trying to see if Channel 6
had the Action Cam live on the scene, but it was too far to tell. He
saw them carrying something from the street to the ambulance, though.
He guessed it was the Korean. Then the ambulance left, and the people
hung around the spot.

They was still there when Minnie Devine come back
from church. She was wearing a light blue hat with webbing that come
down over her face. "How was the services?" he said.

She said, "Reverend asked for you, said was you
sick."

"What'd you say?"

"I said you was out of sorts."

"What'd he say?"

"He said Jesus was good for that." She
noticed then he was sitting outside in his slippers. "Lucien,
what come over you now?"

"I heard the noise," he said, "and
there wasn't no time to get dressed." She made a face, but she
didn't say anything. He looked back down the street, where she had
come from. "Did you see the police carry him off?"

“
I seen it," she said. "I couldn't do
nothin' but seen it, all the children they got runnin' around
blockin' things up. Nobody goin' to church no more. .. ." She
looked at him.

"They must of finally shot him in the night,"
Lucien said. It wasn't like him to think so much about other people's
business. He guessed that's what happened when you quit work and
didn't have no business of your own.

She shook her head. "Ain't nobody shot that
Korean," she said. She started up the steps past him, but he
reached out and touched her hand. She saw he didn't understand. "They
didn't do nothin' to him," she said. "He died by hisself."