God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (4 page)

The foundation for the new wing ran east from the
cherry picker eighty feet, then another sixty feet south, back to the
main building. Lucien was laying cinder block when they quit Friday.
He saw where he'd left off and the work was as level as you could
draw it. Things was what they looked like, good work looked like good
work. There were a dozen empty beer bottles on the ground near the
wall, and he'd picked them up by the time Peets climbed out of his
pickup.

The ground was softer where he parked, and the old
man heard Peets' boots sinking into the mud and then sucking up what
was underneath. He was naturally messy.

"Mornin', Lucy," Peets said.

"Peets." He didn't move, and Peets squatted
down beside him. The old man could feel the heat from his body and
hear his hinges creak. A couple of minutes passed and Peets looked at
his watch. "Damn, it's nobody wants to work today," he
said. There were nine men on the crew, and as of eight o'clock, seven
of them were late. "It ain't turned to daylight savings time
again, has it?”

Lucien looked at him and smiled. Minnie Devine called
it Daylights Scaring Time, and thought it was something a white man
had invented to keep city Negroes lazy. She said they had no such
thing in the country.

Peets said, "Could be it's just us today."

Lucien said, "Could be we get somethin' done."
They stood up together and walked over to pull the plastic cover off
the cement. The sacks were eighty pounds, and the old man handled
them like nothing. Peets primed the Wisconsin that ran the mixer, and
it caught on the third try. It was whisperized, according to the law.
Peets missed the old noise, but times changed, and being the job was
next to a hospital, it was probably to the best.

The old man tore open a cement bag and poured it into
a wheelbarrow. Peets shoveled. Lucien had worked for bosses who
cheated, even on little jobs, or were lazy, which came to the same
thing. Some of them mixed it two to one. He'd also worked for bosses
that didn't use half the steel they was supposed to. Peets kept it
honest. Three sand, two cement, one lime. He wouldn't be coming past
in no Mark VI in five years, but he wouldn't have to wonder if his
wall was still there either. Lucien didn't believe in leaving things
unsettled. If you did, they never let you rest.

Lucien got the hose and watered the mix. He added by
eye, but it was never soupy and it was never hard. When his cement
came out the mixer, it would stand up three inches on a trowel.

The sun was up, and Peets
and the old man worked fifteen minutes before a caved-in station
wagon with five men from the crew stopped on the sidewalk and emptied
but Peets didn't say so, but he was sorry to see them come. The job
was twenty days behind now, and there'd be more wet weather next
month, but working alone with the old shine, he was happy. He would
of been glad to haul blocks and mix cement for him all day. With just
him and Old Lucy, he didn't have to tell nobody to leave the damn
nurses alone, or argue over some damn union rule he never heard of.
He didn't have to think any way but practical. He gave his shovel to
the boy Gary Sample and put Old Lucy back on the wall where he was
laying block Friday.

* * *

Mickey was two blocks from Holy Redeemer when the kid
said he had to go back. He told him, "Leon, I got to be
somewhere. You got me ten minutes late already."

"Listen," he said, "I forgot my
medicine."

"What medicine?”

"The medicine the doctor gave me. I can't go to
work without that shit, Mickey. If you can't go back, let me out here
and I'll walk." He looked over and the kid was sweating.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Nothin'," he said. “I just can't go to
work without my medicine. Jeanie didn't tell you about that?"

Jeanie. Mickey pulled the truck into an alley, found
a cross street and took the kid home. Then at the house the kid said,
"Not here, drive up half a block."

He stopped half a block from the house. Leon dropped
out of the truck. He hit the sidewalk crouched, looking all around a
him, and then ran to the house, zigzagging in and out of garbage
cans. Monday was garbage day on Twenty-fifth Street. Mickey didn't
let himself think about what Leon must be like at work, or what kind
of an asshole that made him with Bird.

Seven seconds after he'd gone through the front door,
Leon was in the window on the second floor, checking the street. Then
he was back out on the sidewalk running toward the track.

Jeanie's head came out the door and watched him all
the way back. Mickey waved, but she must not have seen it.

The kid got in and slammed the door. "See? I
told you I'd run." Mickey thought there must be some
conversation going on all the time in Leon's head that he thought he
was having out loud. "Didn't take no time at all," he said.

It had taken long enough, though, so a City of
Philadelphia sanitation truck had turned left off Lombard and got in
front of them and was moving half a mile an hour down Twenty-fifth
now while three democrats strolled back and forth across the street,
picking up garbage cans, dumping half the shit inside into the truck,
the other half into the street. At the end of the block, the driver
got out, and all four of them went into the Uptown to shake the place
down for a ten and a drink.

There was a half a block of cars lined up behind
Mickey by then, most of them blowing their horns or shouting, but
none of it had much conviction. Nobody hurries the City of
Philadelphia. Mickey looked at his watch. “Eight-fifteen in the
morning," he said. "They ought to be ashamed of
themselves." .

"I seen a guy get thrown into the back of one of
them once," Leon said, to pass the time. Mickey looked over and
the kid was smiling in a way that Mickey almost believed him. That
was the trouble with Leon. You could never be sure he was completely
full of shit. There was a way he committed himself to it. "You
ever seen that, Mickey? They throw the guy in the back and then mash
him into all the other shit back there."

Mickey didn't say a word, and Leon didn't read
nothing into it. "I knew the guy they did that to," he
said. Mickey checked his watch. They'd been inside the Uptown four
minutes. The kid had been sweating out his eyeballs fifteen minutes
ago, now he was cold.

"He was cute," Leon said. “Asshole bet
K.C. against the Phillies the whole series. A grand, a grand, two
grand. The series ended, he owed five, and he didn't have no idea
where he was going to get his hands on something like that.

“
That's what he told Skully. You know Skully, what
a nice guy he is, but the people he works for ain't nice. And a
couple nights after the parade they had for the team, a couple guys
come by and take this guy right out in the street, in front of his
family and everybody. Just then a garbage truck was comin' by, and
they just threw him in there instead of breakin' his legs themselves.
It was sort of like progress. Like computers, they throw this guy in
back so they don't have to do all the work. Wasn't as noisy, either.
One of them gets in the cab, the niggers go into a bar. But the guy
had claustrophobia, see, and nobody knew it. So when they pulled him
out of there, he wasn't just broke up a little bit, you know what I
mean? He was suffocated."

The garbage men came out of the Uptown and started
down Twenty-fifth Street, Mickey made a left through an alley. “He
panicked," Leon said, "or he'd of been all right. You panic
sometimes, that's all she wrote.”

"How come you're always talkin' that shit,
Leon??' Mickey said. He looked over at him again and wished he'd kept
his mouth shut. "I mean, it's the first thing in the morning
.... "

"You think it's shit?" the kid said. "You
think it's shit? Say it, you think it's shit."

Mickey stopped the truck and waited. "Leon, I
don't need this now." If it came to that, he'd decided to choke
him enough to change the amount of air his brain was getting and
figure out a way later to explain it to Jeanie without saying Leon
was crazy. Then, while he watched, it changed again. Leona smiled at
him, began to nod.

"I know you done your
share, Mickey," he said. "I know you been there." They
rode the rest of the way to Holy Redeemer without talking. Then the
kid climbed out of the truck and said, "Thanks, Mickey. Hey, I
really appreciate everything," and slammed the door.

* * *

Mickey drove back into the Pocket, thinking what a
crazy fuck the kid was and how someway Jeanie would eventually tie
him into that, turned left for seven blocks thinking the same thing,
and then he saw Bird sitting in a new yellow Cadillac outside the
flower shop. Mickey liked the color. There was another man in the
front seat Mickey had never seen before, and the life and times of
Leon Hubbard was old business.

He left his truck running in back of the Cadillac and
walked up to Bird's window. It was twenty minutes to nine. "Another
five minutes, we was going to leave without you, Mick," he said.
Mickey said, "Lemme put the truck in back. I still got meat back
there."

"You can put it in there, but it ain't going to
do nothin' for your meat," Bird said. "We ain't had
electric since six o'clock last night." Mickey looked around the
street. All the ladies were sitting on their steps instead of
watching Phil Donahue. The man he hadn't seen before didn't say
anything.

"Then what you going to do with the load?"
Mickey said.

"What the fuck you think we're doin' in here,
Mick?" Bird said. "Talkin' about the power windows?"
There was an edge to Bird that wasn't his natural edge. It was like
he was afraid to get mad. Mickey didn't know if it was because he was
late, or if it was the man in the front seat. There wasn't no reason
it took three people to steal a truck. Either way, he'd explain
later, when it didn't make him look weak.

He took the truck around the block and pulled into
the garage behind the flower shop, which had two stalls, both of them
with twenty-foot clearances. He shut the door on the truck and
himself then got a flashlight from under the front seat and walked
through the cooler. The place had once been a warehouse for the
school district.

From what he could see, it was about half full. The
light and the sides of beef made changing shadows—dog heads,
monsters, nightmare shit—always changing, always moving. He had the
sudden thought that something must be walking around inside Leon's
head with a flashlight.

Bird kept the meat from Argentina and Australia
separate from the Kansas Beef Association stuff which was for the
best people he knew. Bird's thinking was that the only steak in the
world better than Kansas Beef Association was from Japan, and nobody
knew about it. The way the Japs do business," he said, "they
got a lot of cars, you know about their cars. They got a lot of
cameras, you know about their cameras. They got maybe twelve acres in
the whole country that ain't got no cities on it, though, so you
don't know that they got beef. They know what they're runnin' over
there."

The cooler felt warmer than it usually did, but the
way you'd notice the electricity was off was the dampness in the air.
Nothing cold could get warm without getting sloppy. Not meat, not
air, not anybody you know. The cooler seemed bigger without the
lights. At the far end were two band saws, where the cutters and
boners usually worked, and beyond them was a door that led into a
smaller cooler, where they kept the flowers. If it was Mickey's, he'd
just as soon been in the flower business. For one thing, with flowers
you didn't have all those fucking hooks hanging out of the ceiling.

He stepped out of the flower cooler and said hello to
Mrs. Capezio, who ran the shop and was Bird's mother's sister. The
name was the same because the sisters had married cousins.

"Everybody look so worried this morning,
Mickey,” she said. "I tell Arthur he got to relax. What's
going to happen is going to happen, it's planned a long time ago. All
you can do is have faith in the electric company, right? He don't
listen to me, though. You talk to him when you see him, Mickey, he
listens to you."

She picked a pink carnation off a funeral arrangement
sitting on the counter, broke the stem and pinned it to the outside
of his jacket. Her old hands shook, and it took a long time. "Ever
since all the terrible business with Mr. Bruno," she said,
"Arthur don't know what's going on no more."

He walked outside and got into the back seat of the
Cadillac, behind the man he didn't know. Bird was saying, "I
think sometimes I got a prick for a brain and a brain for a prick. I
mean, I could of got into a nice, comfortable little bar twenty-four
years ago, had it paid off by now. I could of got into the movin'
business with my brother Tommy. I tell him, 'I wisht I was in a
business where the worst thing can happen is a hemia.' Sometimes I
think I might still do that .... "

He was asking the man something, the man wasn't
hearing it. "My brother Tommy," Bird said, "he looks
at me like I'm crazy. He says, 'Lookit all the money you're makin'.
Lookit all the pussy.' He don't know. I tell him, 'Sure, there's
pussy in the meat business, but anybody goes into a business for the
fuckin' don't enjoy it. It's like you lost your taste buds but you
still get hungry. How is that worth it?' "