God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (5 page)

Bird looked into the rearview mirror. Mickey hoped it
wasn't for an answer. "My aunt give you that flower? What'd she
tell you?"

"She said you had to have faith in the electric
company," he said.

The man next to Bird looked at his watch. "C'mon,
let's go," he said. Bird started the Cadillac and drove north on
Twenty-fourth Street.

Bird was smiling. "That old woman is somethin',
ain't she, Mick?"

"A very nice woman," he said.

"She don't look like it," Bird said, "but
she knows what she's runnin' there. Did you know that flower shop's
makin' money? She don't have to do nothin' but sit on her ass like
everybody else, watch
All My Children
all fuckin' day, but she keeps it She's in there right now, worryin'
what the electric's doin' to her flowers."

"What happened to it?" Mickey said.

Bird shrugged. "They don't know," he said.
"I noticed it always happens right after the democrats get their
welfare checks, though." Bird always called them democrats.
"They get the juice runnin', Jesus knows what they can think of
to fuck things up. They come down in civil rights buses from North
Philly to do it .... " Bird took a right on Race Street and took
it all the way to the Ben Franklin Bridge. The right-hand lane was
closed down because they were painting that side of the bridge.

Bird said, "I heard they never stop paintin'
this fucker. You heard of that, Sally?” The man next to him didn't
answer. "They start at one end, and the air in Camden is so bad,
and it takes so fuckin' long to get to the other end, that by then
it's all peelin' and they got to go back and start all over again."

Mickey saw that Bird was scared to death of the man
in the front seat. "The meat business is like that," Bird
said. "I mean, lookit. Here we go, drivin' to Jersey to take a
truck, right? Some place in Kansas, a young calf is just learnin' the
ropes. You know—eat, shit; eat, shit . . ."

The man in the front seat gave him a look, which Bird
took for interest. "The guy drivin' the truck knows what we're
going to do. In fact, right now he's wonderin' where the fuck we are.
Am I right or wrong?

"The guy shippin' the load knows we're going to
take it. He sends us a set of keys. The guy s'posed to be waitin' for
the load knows somebody's going to take it. He's got a receipt for
State Farm says he paid eight thousand more than he's got in it."

He stopped beside the tollbooth and threw in three
quarters.

"Now what happens," he said, "if we
don't show up? We got all this business dependin' on us to take the
truck, and there's cows comin' up right now in Kansas, and without us
there's no place to put them. Without us, nobody's got nothin' to
do."

Bird took Admiral Wilson Boulevard to 70, then 70 to
the Turnpike. He said, "Sometimes, you wish you didn't have so
many people dependin' on you," and then he shut up. Mickey
settled back into his seat and looked at New Jersey. It was pretty.
He'd never say that out loud, but this part, shit, it could be Iowa.

They drove north about twenty minutes, to Exit 7. The
truck stop was a twenty-booth restaurant with showers and bunks in
back, a couple of Pac-Man games and a parking lot a quarter-mile
square, which was full. The man in the front seat turned to Bird and
said, "Which one'?"

Not,
"Holy shit, look at
all of them trucks"
or,
"What
the fuck?"
but,
"Which
One?"
So it was all in Bird's lap, any
problem they had. Mickey watched it work on him.

"It's a silver truck," Bird said. "Here,
I got a plate .... " He went into his shirt pocket and came out
with a piece of paper.

"They're all silver," the man said, “and
it's going to take half a fuckin' hour to read all the plates just on
that one." He pointed at the first truck in the first row.
Fourteen plates, half of them covered with mud. Then he said, "Hey,
it's runnin' .... ”

Mickey saw Bird looking for him in the rearview
mirror.

"That ain't it," Mickey said. "We're
lookin' for a reefer." The man in the front seat turned around
to look at him. "A refrigerated truck," Mickey said, “you
know? So the meat don't cook on the way to Vermont?"

The man turned back in his seat without saying
anything else, but he was looking at the truck again. "They
don't turn them off" Mickey said, "they're diesels. They
leave them goin' a week at a time."

The man in the front seat said, "That's very
interesting, the history of the trucking industry." So Mickey
shut up and Bird drove the Cadillac up and down the rows of trucks,
stopping when he came to a reefer to check the plate numbers. Then he
almost ran over a whore, coming out from between trucks. Bird hit the
brakes, then gave her a little wave and a smile. She gave him the
finger.

"Truck whores won't have nothin' to do with
nobody but truckers," Mickey said.

Bird looked concerned. "Is that so?"

"That's a fact," Mickey said. The man in
the front seat looked straight ahead. Mickey wondered what kind of
trouble Bird was in that they'd pick a hard dick who wouldn't know
the difference if they stole a load of live chickens to keep an eye
on the job. Before, it was always just him and Bird.

"Pull up here,” the man said. "I got to
piss." Bird stopped the Cadillac and the man walked between two
trucks.

"Who is that?" Mickey said. Bird shrugged.
"He don't seem to know a hell of a lot."

Bird said, "He knows what he knows, and he don't
give a shit about the rest."

"I can see that," Mickey said. "But
what's he doin' here with us? I don't like none of this."

"It's nothin' to do with you," Bird said.

"A guy like that, I seen them do things,"
Mickey said. "I mean, he don't know somethin', that's fine until
you know he don't know. Like right now, he's standin' there pissin'
on his shoes. The wind's comin' from under the trailer, but he don't
notice it because of all the noise, which he ain't used to. But if
you were to go out there and tell him he's pissin' on his feet, he
might shoot you, just to show you he knows what he's doin'."

Bird said, "That's why God gave you and me
brains, not to go out there and tell him he's pissin' on his feet."

They found the truck in the last row, a new
Peterbilt. The driver was a skinny kid with a beard and a Cleveland
Indians baseball cap. Bird stopped the car in front of him, and the
kid watched the three men get out. He was sitting sideways in the cab
with his feet up on the other side, listening to some shit wasn't
even music. You could hear it even with the windows closed and the
engine on. He was a dirty kind of kid, you could see that. If the
truck was his, Mickey wouldn't let somebody like that put air in the
tires. The kid looked down at the three of them awhile, then he
turned around slowly in his seat and rolled down the window. He said,
"Yeah?"

The man with piss, on his shoes turned to Bird. "You
notice," he said, "the fuckin' world's got an attitude
anymore." He glanced at Mickey, to include him, and then he
stared up into the cab. The kid shrugged, turned off the tape and
climbed down. Bird handed him an envelope and said, “Go on in there
and have some breakfast, pal. Take an hour, unnerstand? An hour
before you come out here lookin' for your outfit."

The kid smiled. "Who's driving?" he said.
He looked them over one at a time, still smiling. Some private joke.
The man with piss on his shoes was left-handed. He turned halfway
around, like he was walking away, and then he came back. The fist
drove up under the ribs, toward the liver. The kid's face all came
together in the middle, and he dropped.

He lay where he fell, afraid to move anything that
might make it worse. The man watched him, nodding as the kid
improved. "All of a sudden," he said, "the world don't
have no attitude no more." He sat down on the hood of the
Cadillac and waited.

Bird bent over the kid and started talking. "Lookit,"
he said, "it's none of your business who's drivin', am I right?"

The kid held himself waiting for things to come back
together. “Lookit, you all right, pal? You run your business, we
run ours. We give you the trump, your business is over. Now go on
into the restaurant like I said, eat a nice breakfast, all right?
Nothin' happens. I mean, it was lucky you wasn't hurt, pally .... "

Bird was sweating. Mickey saw things were getting
away from him. He didn't like the job at all. He didn't like what had
happened to the kid, but more than that he didn't like it that nobody
was under control. The next you knew, the kid would be crying.

The man was looking at him now. "Business is
business," he said. The kid sat up in the dirt, still holding
his side.

"An hour," Bird said, "all right? You
go have a nice breakfast, you feel a lot better, then you come out
lookin' for the truck."

The kid stood up, Bird
holding his arm. "Take a couple deep breaths," he said. The
kid took a couple of deep breaths, so his ribs weren't broke. Bird
picked up the Cleveland Indians hat and dusted it off then put it on
the kid's head. "Am I right or wrong?" he said.

* * *

The cab of the truck smelled like a Chestnut Street
double feature. There were a couple dozen roaches in the ashtray,
smoked down to raggedy little squares. The kid had left orange peels
and banana peels and empty cartons of Wendy's chili all over the
floor. Mickey wondered how people could live like that. You did live
in a truck.

He pulled the rig out of the lot, getting used to the
throw of the gears, fixing the mirrors. The Cadillac came out behind
him, Bird was alone with the man again. Mickey looked over the tapes.
Plasmatics, AC/ DC, the Sex Pistols. Sex Pistols? He remembered the
look on the kid's face before the man with Bird hit him. Queers
always thought they were smarter than anybody wasn't in their club.

He drove away from the Turnpike, up over a little
hill, and pulled onto 295 South. The truck was new and tight and
strong, ten forward gears, and his hands and eyes fell into old
patterns, and there was something simple and comfortable about it
that he didn't have anymore.

He'd driven trucks since he was fourteen years old.
He'd made the run from Miami to Atlanta with the old man a hundred
times before that. The old man didn't care if he went to school, as a
matter of fact he felt better if Mickey was with him because there
wasn't nobody to watch him at home, and when he'd died Mickey had
taken the truck and made the runs for him. He was sixteen, and that's
what it felt like he was doing.

Daniel had taught him the driving end and he'd taught
him the business end. He didn't talk about much else. Once, coming
down old 441 through Georgia, Mickey had said the sunset was pretty
behind the pines. The old man had said, "If it is, you can't
make it no better, sayin' it."

And when he'd died—the old man thought he had
hemorrhoids for two years, truck drivers always had hemorrhoids, and
by the time the doctors went in there it was in everything—when
he'd died, Mickey had taken the rig and made the runs and kept his
feelings in order, and to himself

He looked in the mirror and caught the yellow
Cadillac a quarter mile behind him.

The old man had never taught him anything about
women, of course, or drinking or the ponies. When Mickey got older,
he sometimes wondered if it was because the old man didn't know
anything about it.

He found the ponies for himself. First at Hialeah,
then Gulfstream and Sunshine. He'd lost the rig to the ponies when he
was eighteen. He kept coming back. He didn't cry the blues when he
lost, he didn't kiss strangers when he won. And there'd been days
when he won as much as the old man had made in half a year.

Mickey knew he didn't have hold of it, it had hold of
him. It made him feel weak, and a couple of times he quit. And he
kept coming back.

He'd took a job with Peabody Movers and went all over
the South. His favorite track was the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. It
was a dignified old track, you walked in there and you could see it
was built with that in mind. He always did all right at the Fair
Grounds.

Peabody had died—he heard that at the garage and it
surprised him to hear there was actually somebody named that—and
the company folded in four months. He'd gone back to Florida for a
while, pulling double-size mobile homes, but with the winds and the
narrow roads then, it was about as peaceful as hauling leaky
dynamite. And by then he didn't like the way the mobile home business
was doing Florida anyway. There was thing safe from them but the
ocean.

He'd gone to Chicago then, and hauled cattle in from
Iowa and Nebraska. In the winter, you'd have to stop every hundred
miles to see that none of them were down. The driver was responsible
for that. They gave you a hollow metal pole, and when some of the
cattle went down you slid the pole in through the slats and poked it
in the eye.

A cow didn't lie down back there for nothing, and
when it was cold that's all you could do to get them up. When it was
cold enough, they didn't care what you did.