God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (8 page)

It was a shameful misuse of talent, and the partner
they'd given him, Chuck Arbuckle, was simply a mistake in conception.
Eisenhower wondered sometimes how a sperm could swim all that way
knowing that's what he was going to turn into. They were taking the
body from Holy Redeemer to the medical examiner's office at
Thirty-fourth and Civic Center, and Arbuckle was going over it again.

"It must of been the ape," he said, meaning
Peets. "He probably never tied that thing up like it was
supposed to. The kid comes walking through, thinking of all the money
he's making, the thing moves and splat. We got to spend half the
fuckin' day cleaning up the mess." Chuck Arbuckle did not like
anybody under forty making more money than he did. He hated any
doctor without gray hair.

Eisenhower looked across the van at him. Arbuckle
said, "I ain't saying it was his own fault, but you work around
sloppy fuckers, you got to take it into consideration. You got to be
aware of where trouble is coming from. Anything you do, the first
rule is know where the problem is going to come from."

Arbuckle was thirty-live years old. He'd investigated
ninety-four fatal accidents in the last eighteen months, at great
personal inconvenience. He got his name in the
Daily
Times
once every two weeks. Eisenhower had
been given Arbuckle in February, and in that time he'd noticed that
Arbuckle never came away from a fatal accident without finding a
lesson in it. It was Arbuckle's order of things that people deserved
what they got, and his job was to figure out why, after they got it.

Arbuckle thought that protected him.

Of course, if he wasn't the way he was, Eisenhower
thought, he'd of seen the foreman was lying. A fifteen-year-old kid
would have seen that. In Eisenhower's experience, when everybody lied
it was usually best to leave it alone. Shit, it's how religions got
started. You could tell good people from the lies they told, and he'd
liked Peets right away.

Arbuckle turned left off Market Street and went into
the University of Pennsylvania area, then around to the back of the
M.E.'s building where they accepted deliveries. A kid in hospital
clothes was waiting at the door, smoking a cigarette. Arbuckle backed
the van up and got out. The body was zipped into a plastic bag, and
the kid unzipped it while Arbuckle read to him from the hospital's
certificate of death. "Male Caucasian, twenty-four years old,
massive cerebral hemorrhaging . . ."

When he'd finished that, Arbuckle told him what
happened. "The kid was walking by this crane and it came loose
or something, and hit him in the back of the head."

The kid said, "Yeah, well all I do is accept the
body."

Arbuckle shrugged. "It don't matter to me, pal.
Sometimes they like to know." Another kid in hospital clothes
came out of the building, and he and the first kid put Leon Hubbard's
body on a stretcher and wheeled him inside. The doors opened on
weight, like at the Acme.

Arbuckle drove the van back to Center City over the
Walnut Street Bridge and stopped at a phone booth outside Cavanaugh's
Bar. "You got that woman's phone number?" he said.

Eisenhower looked through the papers until he found
the number Peets had given them for the kid's parents. "I
thought somebody there was going to take care of it," he said.

Arbuckle shook his head. "Naw, I said we'd do
it." He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to two. "This
won't take a second," he said. Eisenhower sat in the van and
listened. "Mrs. Hubbard? . . . Oh, I see, but you are the mother
of Leon Hubbard, who worked on the construction crew at Holy
Redeemer? . . . No, he's not exactly in trouble, Mrs. Hubbard . . ."

Eisenhower cringed. There wasn't another cop he knew
of who liked talking to the relatives. Arbuckle told her about the
crane, Eisenhower closed his eyes. He didn't even know what Arbuckle
was talking about, and he'd been there. "No," Arbuckle was
saying, "you're not listening, 'ma'am. It didn't fall on him,
the thing on the end hit him in the head. No, I already told you .
.·."

Five minutes later Arbuckle hung up and got back in
the van. "That's it," he said.

Eisenhower said, "Wel1,
Chuck, you never know."

* * *

Mickey sat on the bed with her until the sisters
came. She watched him awhile, crying that way that didn't make any
noise, then she stared at the ceiling, and the tears ran sideways
into her hair. He never touched her, something told him not to touch
her.

Three years in Jeanie's house, in her neighborhood.
It wasn't long enough to touch her now. It wasn't long enough to be
part of this. The sisters came together. There were two of them, but
it seemed like more. All lipsticked and dressed. One of them had five
kids, the other one had a job at Pathmark. He could never remember
which was which.

He let them in the front door, and walked behind
Joyce up the stairs to Jeanie's room. Joanie went into the- kitchen
to fix coffee. Joyce was ten years older than Jeanie and looked like
she could have been her mother. Joyce and Joanie both. She sat down
where Mickey had been on the bed and Jeanie moved toward her, and
they put their arms around each other and rocked back and forth.

Mickey stood in the doorway, feeling like he
shouldn't be watching. He remembered now, Joyce had the job at
Pathmark. Her husband was a pressman at the Inquirer. She came over
once a month to look at everything in the house and comment on how
nice Jeanie's things were. How even with two incomes, they couldn't
afford a Betamax. And Jeanie would ask if they were going to their
place at the shore this summer, and Joyce would remind her it was
only a house trailer, and they'd go at it like that for three hours,
every month. Then Joyce would leave, and Jeanie would smile at him
and shake her head, and say something about how it wasn't easy being
the talented sister. He didn't know why, but after Joyce left, Mickey
always got laid, so you could say Joyce was his favorite
sister-in-law.

Joanie brushed past him and came into the bedroom
with a tray. A coffeepot, three cups and saucers, a sugar bowl, the
box of donuts. She sat in the chair by the window and settled the
tray at the foot of the bed. Joyce propped Jeanie up with pillows and
got her to try the coffee. Jeanie shook off the donuts, but the
sisters insisted. "You got to eat something," Joanie said.

"She probably just ate lunch," Mickey said.
Jeanie ate about two most afternoons. Nobody in the room seemed to
hear him. Joanie held a napkin under the pastry and moved them
together toward Jeanie's mouth. Jeanie took a small bite and began
crying, real crying now. The kind you could hear out on the street.

"He was only a baby," she said. "They
said something fell on him .... " The sisters put down their
coffee and held her again. Joyce looked over Jeanie's shoulder and
caught Mickey's eye. He would have been just as welcome down in
Society Hill knocking on doors asking to use the bathroom.

The phone rang. Mickey picked it up and moved out of
the room to talk. The cord on it, you could take it to the john,
except there was already one in there. "Mr. Hubbard?” It was
the medical examiner's office, saying they needed somebody to come
over and look at Leon. He told the sisters he had to go, and what he
had to do. He didn't know how to say it, so he just said it. That
brought Jeanie around, and she wanted to come too.

"You don't want to see him now," Mickey
said. And she didn't. And neither did he.

A lot of it, he figured, depended on what had fallen
on him. He took the Monte Carlo over the South Street Bridge, looking
at the Schuylkill River, the trees, kids on bicycles. He was in no j
hurry to get to Leon, no hurry to get home. If it was a hammer, Leon
probably wouldn't look too bad. That's what he was hoping for, a
hammer, so it wouldn't look bad. Christ, don't let it be one of those
radios ....

Jeanie would want to know what he looked like, she
would want to hold on.

He parked in a lot and walked a block to the M.E.'s
office. A doctor took Mickey back into the building to a window cut
into a wall. The window was two-foot square, it could of been the
complaint department at Sears, except it wasn't bulletproof. On the
other side of the window was an empty stretcher with a pillow at one
end. The imprint of somebody's head was still in the pillow. The
doctor shrugged and picked up the telephone.

"Could we have the, uh . . ."—he looked
at his clipboard—"the L. Hubbard crypt please?" There was
an impatience in that voice that had taken a while to build, but when
the doctor hung up he was calm and easygoing. He took Mickey by the
arm and turned him away from the window. "It'll be just a
moment, Mr. Hubbard," he said.

"Scarpato," Mickey said. "I'm the
stepfather." When the doctor turned him back around, Leon was
there. It took Mickey a second to be sure—it was the first time
he'd ever seen him relaxed—but it was Leon. They'd propped his head
up to make him look comfortable, and they'd put a blue curtain over
his body, so all you could see was the head and part of the chest.

A circle of blood had crusted inside the ear, and
some hair was gone from the back of his head, but he looked good.

"It don't look like he's even hurt," Mickey
said.

 
The doctor looked at his clipboard. "The
fracture is in back of the head," he said. He patted himself on
the back of the head, to show Mickey where that was. Mickey looked at
Leon again. Leon without all that crazy shit floating around in his
head, it was just a kid, a skinny kid. Dark hair, skinny neck. It
didn't look very substantial to already be a whole life.

His nose was straight and rounded. at the end, just
like Jeanie's. And he had her cheekbones. There wasn't anything
complicated about it now. The shoulders were hollowed out, no muscle
to speak of Women's shoulders, bird wings. That was what it was.
Without all that crazy shit floating around in his head, he looked
like an angel.

Mickey saw that that was what Leon must of looked
like to Jeanie every day of his life.

"Mr. Hubbard?"

"Scarpato," he said. He wanted that
straight. "I'm not a blood relation." Mickey signed the
papers out in front.

` "We can release the body anytime after ten
tomorrow morning," the doctor said. "There hasn't been any
request for a postmortem, unless the family . . ." Mickey
thought about it,
shook his head.

"I don't think so," he said. "I don't
think they'd want anybody cutting up the body." He walked back
out into fresh air and didn't know where to go. He bought a hot dog
and a
Daily Times
and
sat down on the hood of the Monte Carlo to look at the entries at
Keystone. He studied them a minute, then turned to the back of the
paper. They ran horses at Keystone in worse shape than Leon. There
were worse tracks as far as horses went, but he'd never been to a
worse track. Keystone reminded you of prefab housing. He checked the
Phillies score, which he didn't care about, and then he checked
Richard Shellburn. "
Thomas Haskin lived a
quiet life, in a quiet neighborhood. He and his wife and his dog,
Hoppy. The wife is gone now, perhaps the neighborhood is too ....
" Jeanie loved that shit. Everybody did.

Richard Shellburn was the most famous newspaper
columnist in Philadelphia. He was famous for his drinking and for
getting pissed off at the government and for standing up for the
little guy. People said he used to be a little guy himself and never
forgot where he came from.

And he wrote things that made old women cry and
things that made street people laugh. With Richard Shellburn, there
was always somebody to get pissed off at. Some mornings, Mickey would
be delivering and every bar he went into they'd ask him did he read
Richard Shellburn yet. When he hadn't, they'd stick the Daily Times
in his face and tell him what Richard Shellburn had said while he
read it. "That's exactly what everybody's thinkin'," they'd
say. "He's the only guy knows what it's like out here."

Mickey didn't know why writing down exactly what
everybody was thinking was any better than thinking it in the first
place. He never said that, though, to anybody. In the neighborhoods
you got along by getting along. You might hate the 76ers and get away
with it if you lived in South Philly all your life, but nobody wanted
to hear that shit from the outside.

Nobody really wanted to hear from the outside at all.
If you didn't like the way things was, that's what they had Delaware
County for. Move there.

Center City was different. You could come and go in
Center City, but the neighborhoods belonged to the people who lived
there. At least the strong ones did. Tasker, Whitman, Fishtown, Two
Street, God's Pocket. Outsiders walked around those neighborhoods,
they stayed out of their bars.

Mickey had heard the coloreds were the same way, but
he doubted it. You could get yourself shot or your head split open in
North Philadelphia or anyplace west of the Schuylkill, but out there
it wasn't a community project.

There were people in Fishtown and Whitman and the
Pocket who never left. Who would as soon get on a bus for Center City
as a bus for Cuba, who married each other's sisters and knew each
other's business. There weren't many, but they were the hardest cases
when an outsider came in.