God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (38 page)

She went past him into the house, hung up her coat
and hat, and put her church Bible away in the drawer where she kept
it. She went into the kitchen and began to fix a chicken for dinner.

"He just died by hisself?" he said, close
behind her.

The voice startled her, but she answered without
turning around. "All by hisself." she said. "I believe
that's what he wanted."

"They ain't nobody wants to die sittin' in a
doorway," he said.

"Then what else was
he doin' there, Lucien?" she said. And when he didn't answer,
she went back to fixing the chicken.

* * *

Shellburn sat dead still.

She'd hung up on him. She'd said the place in
Maryland wasn't hers, he'd said it could be, and he'd felt her moving
away then, even before she'd hung up. The more he thought about it,
the worse it seemed. He went over it again, getting so lost in it
that when the phone rang he thought he was saved. Only it wasn't
Jeanie. "Richard? It's Billy."

Shellburn sighed.

"Is it a bad time? I can get back to you later."
Billy was always worried that it was the wrong time. The boy must
have been born premature. "I got a call from T. D. is why I'm
calling you."

"What'd he want?" Shellburn said.

"You," he said. "He wanted to know if
you'd seen the
Daily Times
."

"I've seen it every day for twenty years,"
Shellburn said. "It's beautiful, tell him."

"It's the God's Pocket thing," Billy said.
"We got your construction worker dying again. Tuesday we wrote
he was killed on a construction job and today we got him dying in a
traffic accident at Third and Fitzwater. He says you could of
prevented the whole thing .... "

Shellburn said, "He's trying to blame me?"
He shook his head in the empty room.

“
The way he sounded, he was getting heat from
somewhere," Billy said. "And you know if he's getting heat,
he's going to hand it to somebody else. They already fired some girl
only been there a week."

Shellburn said, "That sounds right."

"What he said was, the neighborhood's losing its
faith in the
Daily Times
."
Billy said.

Shellburn laughed out loud. "Fuck, what does it
say?" Billy Deebol read it to him and waited. ·

"You want me to read it again?" he said.
Shellburn hadn't said anything, he was putting it together with
Jeanie on the phone.

"Once is enough," he said.

"T. D. wanted you to call him," Billy said.
"He says he wants you to go out there and straighten it out,
like you were supposed to do."

"Fuck T. D.," Shellburn said, and saying
that, a column began to come to him, in a shape. He bought a paper at
the bar where he ate dinner—four beers and an egg sandwich—and
then he drove over to the office. The whole place was empty on
Saturday night, quiet. He sat down in front of his typewriter and
thought of ways to start it. Thinking of Jeanie reading it, thinking
of T. D. reading it. He was breaking his hardest rule: you don't let
anybody else into it. If you did, it always showed. The only person
you could imagine reading it was yourself, and if it didn't make you
cringe, then you could go ahead and write it.

The truest thing in the world was that you showed who
you were writing a column. He said that at his lectures, and they
always took that to mean politics or how you feel about the death
penalty. Which had nothing to do with it. There were as many dick
shrivelers that wanted to ban nuclear sites and love the brother as
there were that wanted to bomb Russia. It was almost incidental, what
you had for issues. But how you saw things, how physical things went
into your eyes and what your brain took and what it threw back, that
told who you were.

"Until the coming of New Journalism,"
he wrote,
"you only got to die once in
this city, even if you came from God's Pocket."
He read that over a couple of times, then changed "coming” to
"advent."

"There was a time,"
he wrote,
"when a 24-year-old working man
could die once, have the event noticed in his local newspaper and
then move on to his reward, without the complications of an
additional death."
He read it back, out
loud, and decided the tone was right. You had to hard-boil dying,
unless it was a cat.

"On Saturday, the Daily Times changed all
that. We had help, of course. Someplace in this city is a policeman
who cannot tell an accident victim from a five-day-old corpse,
someplace there is a SEPTA bus driver who doesn't stop for red
lights. Everywhere, in fact, there are SEPTA bus drivers who don 't
stop for red lights.

"But it took the Daily Times to turn what
happened to Leon. Hubbard into a multiple death. And to turn his
death into a nightmare for all the people from God's Pocket who loved
him.

"For his mother, his friends, his
co-workers."
Shellburn thought about
throwing Mickey Scarpato in there, and then decided against it.

"The first death, according to police,
happened when part of a crane came loose and hit Leon Hubbard in the
back of the head. The Daily Times reported that incident on page 16
of last Tuesday's editions in a two-paragraph story.

"It was reported incorrect, but then, Leon
Hubbard wasn't important. If he had been, surely one of the New
Journalists would have written at some length about what Leon Hubbard
had for breakfast, what he was about the moment it happened."
Shellburn stopped again and thought about T.
D. Davis.

"There are people at the Daily Times who
aren't going to like this,"
he wrote
.
"Some of them are the New Journalists themselves, who dislike
facts, and some of them, I suppose, are the people who brought the
New Journalists to Philadelphia from places like Florida. It would be
hard for me to care less what they like.

"There isn't a New Journalist in this city
worth a hair on Leon Hubbard's head or of any man who works for a
living who knows what it is to get up every morning and sweat for his
money.

"Leon Hubbard lived in a row house on 25th
Street in God's Pocket-small, Dirty-faced, neat as a pm inside. And
Leon Hubbard was like the other working people in God's Pocket.
Dirty-faced uneducated, neat as a pin inside."

Shellburn read it again, weighing T. D. Davis and
Jeanie Scarpato in the sentences.

"The workingmen of God's Pocket are simple
men. They work, they follow the Phillies and the Eagles, they marry
and have children who inhabit the Pocket, often in the homes of their
mothers and fathers. They drink at the Hollywood Bar or the Uptown
Bar, small, Dirty-faced little places deep in the city, and they
argue there about things they don't understand: Politics, race,
religion.

"But they understand their lives—as much as
anyone can—and their deaths. And in the end they die, like
everybody else, leaving their families and their houses and their
legends. Sometimes they die old, but more often it's a heart attack
at 52, or cirrhosis at 47, or cancer. The refineries where they work
poison them, and poison their children. And sometimes, like Leon
Hubbard, they die at 24, when part of a crane comes loose and caves
in the back of their head

"And there is a dignity in that. A
Dirty-faced dignity that the New Journalists will never understand
Because they have never been Dirty-faced, they have never had to work
for a living. The air they breathed growing up didn't have poison in
it, their fathers didn't die from bad livers or hearts at 50 years
old Their fathers put them through journalism school.

"Of course, I have no idea what they teach in
journalism school these days, but it's not the lessons of God's
Pocket. And so maybe it's not their fault—the New Journalists that
a death in that world doesn't matter to them. That a 24-year-old man
who supported his mother and his neighborhood is dead.

"And maybe it isn't their fault that it
matters so little that they get the age wrong, or miss the street
where the Dirty-faced little house was. Maybe, it isn't their fault
that they care so little they can report the same man dying two
different times in the same week.

"But it's someone's fault. Someone gave the
New Journalists their VDT machines, someone brought them to
Philadehthia, someone gave them the space in this newspaper to write.
Someone armed them and turned them loose, and the victims pile up
quietly all over
Philadelphia, and in
the forgotten editions of this newspaper.

"And the victims sit quietly in God's Pocket
and a hundred other neighborhoods like it in this city, and they take
it. They are afraid and ignorant. They are being used like guinea
pigs in an experiment in child journalism, and none of them is doing
a thing about it.

"None of them cares enough to come down here
and shake somebody by the throat, none of them cares enough to say,
'You can't insult me.' Leon Hubbard might have done that, I don't
know. But I know we owe him an apology, and all the people who knew
him and loved him and worked with him. And I know that we stop
listening to Leon Hubbard's story, and all the stories like it in the
neighborhoods of this city, eventually the neighborhoods will stop
listening to ours."

Shellburn typed a "-30-" at the bottom of
the page, and then put his feet up on the desk to read what he had
written. He smiled, thinking of the phone calls Monday morning,
thinking of the crybaby New Journalists writing their defenses in
columns that they would submit for the Op-Ed page, and that would
never be run. He thought of Jeanie Scarpato and stopped smiling. He
wondered if she would understand the chance he was taking, going
against his own paper for her. She was confused now, he knew that
from the telephone call.

She was confused, and it would have been better to
wait a week, but in a week she might have moved so far away from him
that it wouldn't matter what he wrote. And in a week, Leon Hubbard
would be old news, unless the New Journalists hauled him out and had
him killed again.

He stapled the column together, went downstairs to
the city room and put it in the night managing editor's mailbox
instead of Billy's. He didn't want anybody softening it up. He
checked his own mail then, about twenty letters, half that many
messages. One of them from Yahama Bahama. He pictured her for a
minute. Pretty hair, perfect teeth, legs, everything. It didn't do a
thing. The best he ever liked his wife, Shellburn never stopped
looking for other women.

That was what Jeanie Scarpato had done to him. That
and the column lying in the night managing editor's mailbox spoke how
much he could feel. He had an impulse to call her then, but he pushed
it back.

"Let her read the
column," he said out loud, "let her see what you've done
for her."

* * *

T. D. Davis was watching television.

The Jap golfer was lining up a putt of less than one
foot on the eighteenth hole of a course someplace in North Carolina.
The announcers were whispering. “Keith?"

"Yes, Don."

"Keith, I think you could say this is the most
important eight inches in this young man from Japan's life." The
camera was behind the golfer, and from that angle the sun caught the
blade of his putter. From that angle, it looked like the Japanese
golfer could have been pissing into the cup. He stood over his ball
ten seconds, then fifteen, too long. He stood up and backed off.

"It's definitely the most important eight inches
in his life," Keith said, "and I think he realizes that
more than anybody."

A moment before the phone rang, T. D. sat up in his
chair to study the golfer from Japan. T. D. had seen the signs
earlier, on a three-footer at the fifteenth. He was trying so hard
now to concentrate that he'd gone past it. He'd turned the microscope
a little past things and now he couldn't get them focused again. The
Japanese golfer walked away from the putt for another look. T. D.
smiled. The Japanese people, of course, were famous for trying hard.
That's why the handles didn't fall off their car doors, but T. D.
could see this one was out of control. He'd lost a stroke at the
fifteenth, another one at the sixteenth, and now he needed this
little eight-inch putt to hold off Tom Watson, who had played the
back nine in thirty-two. Watson, the greatest player in golf, was
standing on the edge of the green, watching. The Jap knew he was
there. . .

The lie might have been a little downhill, not enough
to make any difference, unless the Japanese let it. He walked back
and stood over the putt again. Ten seconds, fifteen. Too long. He
tapped the ball and it rolled past the hole on the left side.

The phone rang just as the television camera got
close to the Japanese golfer's face—half apology, half terror. T.
D. wondered if there was a club in his bag for cutting open his
stomach. T. D. had been raised underprivileged in a country where
they liked to say anybody could grow up to be President, but now he'd
made himself a place, and the spirit behind that belief was the
single most repulsive thing he could think of. T. D. liked the old
order.