God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (41 page)

"Yo, Mick. Who's fuckin' your wife now?"

Four days after Shellburn got killed, Mickey walked
into the house and found Eisenhower sitting next to her on the couch,
drinking hot chocolate. The cop jumped when he came in the door,
Jeanie never even looked to see who it was. “I just dropped over to
tell you it turned out Shellburn had a heart attack," Eisenhower
said, "would of died anyway. I don't know if that changes things
.... "

Mickey said, "It don't have nothin' to do with
me either way."

The next morning he packed
his things and caught the Amtrak for Palatka, Florida. He was
surprised it all fit in the same two cloth bags he'd brought it in
with when he moved in. It seemed like being married and living in a
house, somehow there ought to of been more.

* * *

Peets heard the news about Richard Shellburn on the
truck radio. It was a little after six o'clock in the morning, and he
was already at work. He cou1dn't sleep in the morning since his wife
left.

He didn't know why it bothered him in the morning, he
went to sleep easy enough at night, but sometime around four-thirty
or five he'd miss her weight—or her heat, or something—there on
the other side of the bed, and that would wake him up.

He should of gone to the hospital after the fight, he
knew it then. Something depended on her thinking he couldn't get
hurt, and the one with the knuckles had half scalped him. But he'd
tied his shirt around his head like a cleaning lady and gone home,
thinking there was some things you couldn't hide. "Dear God,
Peets," she'd said. And he knew just from the sound of it that
things had changed.

She'd taken him to her hospital to get his lid sewed
back on, she'd made him dinner afterward. And the next day when he
got home, she'd left him a note with a phone number, in case he
couldn't lind his socks. 'I need some time to get over this,' it
said.

S0 he woke up early and made breakfast and then he
went to work an hour and a half early. There wasn't much to do until
the others showed up, but it was comfortable there, and it wasn't
comfortable at home. Sometimes he'd pick up the beer bottles somebody
was leaving there every night, more often he'd just sit in his truck
and listen to the morning news.

This morning the news was that Richard Shellburn'd
had a heart attack the night they found him lying on the sidewalk
with his head beat in. A spokesman for the district attorney's office
said, "The development of this new evidence, of course,
immeasurably complicates the potential prosecution."

Peets shook his head. "It's a lot of that going
around," he said. The radio repeated the story every eight
minutes, but they'd been picking over Shellburn's bones all week. In
between, they gave the weather and the helicopter traffic report.

About quarter to seven, the C bus stopped at the
comer, and Old Lucy got off.

Peets was looking in his rearview mirror at the time,
checking skirts, more out of habit than anything, and he turned
around in his seat to be sure. The old man stepped off the bus and
walked slowly into the site. He put his lunch pail against the wall
where he ate and then crouched dead still near the cherry picker to
wait.

Peets left him alone fifteen minutes. If the old man
didn't want some time alone, he wouldn't of come an hour early.
Finally, though, he turned off the radio and got out of the truck. He
slammed the door so the old man would know he was there.

Old Lucy stayed where he was. He didn't turn his head
or stand up. Peets crouched down beside him. "Mornin', Lucy,"
he said.

"Peets."

"Radio says we got a good day to work." Old
Lucy didn't say anything. "You been all right?" Peets said.
"I thought of comin' over to your place, but, you know, you
don't want to go buttin' in."

"I got it settled," the old man said.

Peets nodded. "Sometimes it can take a while,"
he said.

"Took that boy his whole life," Lucy said.
Peets let that alone, and after a while the old man said, "But
it do settle. Ain't nothin' so bad or so good you can do that it
don't settle, and in the end you became what you been." He was
looking down the wall he'd started, at the work that had been done
since he left. It was the most Peets had ever heard him say at one
time.

Peets started to put his arm around Lucy's shoulder,
but he patted him once on the back instead. "I'm glad you come
back," he said. He said it and then he pulled away from it.

"I mean, lookit that wall. I can't get no work
done here alone, Lucy."

"I can see that," Lucy said. Then he looked
at Peets and didn't try to hide what the settling had done to him. "I
might be old now," he said.

Peets stood up on bad
hinges. He said, "I might be headed that way myself." And
in a few minutes they walked over and uncovered the cement bags, so
they could get back to building the new wing of Holy Redeemer
Hospital.

* * *

Mickey woke up, and the air was warm and still, and
it smelled like the glue they used to stick the place together. Bird
had bought the mobile home used, for $12,000, and he and Sophie paid
the man forty dollars a month for the space in the lot. Most of the
spaces were sixty dollars, but theirs was on the far end, away from
the recreation center and the site of the proposed swimming pool. One
side of the mobile home backed up to the woods, and every morning
after Sophie and her new friends had finished worrying over tornadoes
and their flowers, she and Bird went back into the trees and
practiced shooting the pistol.

It was Bird who insisted on it. He'd set up bottles
and cans in a clearing back there, and they'd take turns shooting. "I
don't say nothin'," he'd tell Mickey, "'cause I don't want
to scare her, but, you know, they're comin'. And we got to be ready,
right?"

Then he'd ask if it was all right to go practice now.
Mickey would say it was all right.

And Bird would smile and take her out into the woods,
and she smiled and went with him, and they depended on Mickey like he
was their father.

The mobile home had three bedrooms. Mickey's was in
the back, the air conditioner was in front, and it was that still,
warm air that woke him up every morning. Sometimes he woke up
thinking about Jeanie, and sometimes, like this morning, it was the
reporter. What had he said? "It's all light and dark"?

He got out of bed with a headache and listened. He
heard them outside. He put on a pair of pants and went into the
bathroom and brushed his teeth. Bird had put tape around the handles
of all the toothbrushes and written each of their names on the tape.
"Yo, Mick," he'd said. "I got an idea. What if I write
everybody's names on their toothbrush? Would that be all right?"
`

Sometimes they walked into the woods together, past
the clearing scattered with broken glass and shell casings, all the
way to the river. It was wide and muddy and slow, and it flowed
north. "See, what'd I tell you, Mick?" Bird had said. “See,
what d'ya think?"

It took a while to get used to how Bird and Sophie
was away from Philly. They clung to him like something that floated
after the boat sank. He didn't pull away from it, though. He guessed
his own boat had sank too.

He brushed his hair and laid his toothbrush next to
Sophie's on the sink. Then he went back in his room and found the
yellow alligator T-shirt Mickey and Sophie gave him the first night
he was there. He put it on and went out the door. "Watch your
step," Sophie said.

The first step out was a yard down, and they always
told each other to be careful. Mickey even noticed himself saying it.
She and Bird were sitting in lawn chairs on the little piece of grass
that went with the trailer lot. Sophie was in the shade, holding a
water can over her flowers. Bird had taken off his shirt and put his
face into a three-sided sun reflector. He said good morning without
opening his eyes. Mickey smiled at them. There was some people
shouldn't take off their shirts in public.

Sophie said, "You want some breakfast, Mickey?"

He shook his head. "I can't even think about
food, this time of the morning," he said.

Bird folded the sun reflector and sat up, sweating.
He looked at his watch awhile. "We better go practice," he
said. "You want to come along, Mick?"

"I think I'll just read the paper."

"You don't mind if we go?"

"No, it's all right," he said. "Just
be careful."

Aunt Sophie picked up a big straw purse off the table
and looked inside. Then she reached in and got the gun, and then a
box of shells. "Lemme carry those for you," Bird said, and
she gave him the shells. She leaned over and kissed Mickey on the
cheek and then the two of them walked off into the woods. She carried
the gun behind her back, the way young girls in the movies carried
their hands when they flirted. Bird waded through the weeds like a
sunburned heron. Sometimes, when Sophie was with her new girl
friends, Mickey and Bird talked.

"We got to be ready, when they come," Bird
would say.

Mickey never knew what to tell him. They might come
and they might not. In the old days, you wouldn't of had to wonder.

"Bird," he'd said, "I can't live off
you and Sophie forever. I got to get a job, start somethin' .... "

"You'll be here when they come," Bird said.
"You'll know what to do."

He sat down in the chair Bird and Sophie had bought
for him and picked up the
Gainesville Sun
.
It was different from the
Daily Times
,
calmer. He wondered what he would do if they came. It wouldn't make
much difference, of course, they wouldn't come in stupid like at the
flower shop. If they came at all.

He'd give it another month, or two.

It was quiet awhile, and then he heard the shots a
long ways off spaced minutes apart, breaking the quiet Florida
morning like unexpected reminders of the people he'd loved.

They were out there in the woods most of an hour,
Bird and Sophie, shooting at bottles.

FEBRUARY 5, 1983
TIMBER LAKE
Cicil, New Jersey