God's Pocket - Pete Dexter (9 page)

Jeanie's family had been like that. She'd told him
her father had never seen her dance because the dance school wasn't
in the Pocket. Her sisters had married boys from the neighborhood and
settled into the houses of their parents. Joyce took a bus to
Pathmark and a month at the shore every year. Joanie was the oldest
and never left.

Or maybe it was the other way around.

Jeanie had married two outsiders—him and Leon's
father before him—but she'd never moved out of her house. Only when
she was a kid and thought there was something for her in New York,
and everybody in the Pocket knew what that had led to. It was a story
mothers told to scare their daughters. And as much as her sisters,
Jeanie was part of God's Pocket.

Mickey finished the hot dog and wrapped the
Daily
Times
around the napkin and threw it all in
the trash. He gave the old man running the parking lot a buck tip and
headed back across the Schuylkill. Once, he thought about Leon. Eight
or ten times, he thought about the sisters in his bedroom. Jeanie's
bedroom.

He pulled into the alley that led to the garage in
back of the house, looked at the second floor and knew they were
still there. He had to see Smilin' Jack about the arrangements, but
there was plenty of time for that. Jack would be over to the funeral
parlor all night. Either there or at the Uptown. Mickey walked to the
end of the alley, and then back up the street to the front door of
his house. Then he crossed the street to the Hollywood. Out of habit,
he checked in the window for Leon.

McKenna stood up as soon as he came in, walked to the
end of the bar and shook Mickey's hand. "We're real sorry,
Mick," he said. "Leon was a good boy."

There were six other people in the bar, and they all
nodded. Mickey sat down at the end near the window and McKenna gave
him a Schmidt's and, out of the occasion, a glass.

The other people in the bar were old, and remembered
Leon from a long time ago. They came in at the same time every
afternoon, they sat in their same seats, drinking the same drinks.
They argued or they kept to themselves, and at suppertime they'd go
home and the kids and the working people would take their places.

A woman named Eleanore said, “It don't make sense
to me. How come nobody else got kilt, if it was an accident?"
The man next to her shut his eyes. "Somebody ought to do
somethin'," Eleanore said. "The youth is our hope for the
future."

She killed a small glass of beer, stood up and
stumbled. She steadied herself and walked to the bathroom. On the
way, she dropped a dollar into a five-gallon jug at the other end of
the bar. "We're collectin' to bury Leon," McKenna said.
Mickey took a long pull off the beer, McKenna leaned closer.

"I keep hearin' different things," he said.

Mickey shook his head. "I don't know. I think
somethin' dropped on him at the job. I haven't talked to the cops
yet." He sighed. "I suppose I'l1 have to."

McKenna said, "Well, you know, you're going to
have to put Jeanie's mind to rest. You know women .... "

He picked a beer out of the cooler and put it in
front of Mickey. "You want me to do that for you, Mick? I could
call them like as a friend of the family and tell you what they
said."

Even McKenna wasn't going to leave him alone. Mickey
felt like going home and sleeping, except nobody was going to be
doing any sleeping in that house for a while.

"Naw, it's all right," he said. "I
better do it. I'l1 do it after I see Smi1in' Jack about the
arrangements."

"Saturday's best," McKenna said.
"Saturday's always a good day for a funeral. You know, more
people can come and nobody's got to get up and work the next day."
Mickey finished the first beer and half of the second. Eleanore came
out of the john and walked past her seat over to Mickey's end of the
bar.

She shook his hand and said how sorry she was. “He
was always such a nice youngster," she said. "Tell Jeanie
that for me."

Then she said the same thing eleven more times and
McKenna tried to help him out. "Eleanore, go sit down," he
said. She ignored him and stood, boozy and sweet, looking into
Mickey's face. He saw that she was starting to cry. "For
Christ's sake," McKenna said, "you didn't even know him."

She turned on him. "That is a damnable lie. I
know all our youngsters .... " She looked back at Mickey, “I
knew him,” she said. "And he was a nice youngster. He never
broke into nobody's house in the neighborhood?

McKenna said, "Eleanore, you going to sit down,
or do I pour out your drink?" She looked at him, still holding
onto Mickey's hand. Tears began to run down her old, cracked cheeks.
"This is important," she said.

McKenna said, "I mean it today, Eleanore, I'm
throwin' your drink out and flaggin' you for the rest of the week."

"There's something I need to tell Mickey,"
'she said.

McKenna looked at the ceiling. She fastened in on
Mickey's eyes and squeezed his hand. "He was a nice youngster,"
she said.

McKenna said, “Al1 right, you told him. Now go back
to I your seat and drink your drink or I'm cuttin' you off."

She looked at McKenna and said, "You can't cut
off the truth." And then she went back to her seat.

McKenna shook his head. "This neighborhood,"
he said, "even the old ladies are hard dicks. You want another
one?"

"Yes," Mickey said.

McKenna said, "That's the spirit. You sure you
don't want me to call the cops for you?" `

Mickey drank a six-pack at the Hollywood, and on the
way home he saw Dr. Booras going into his house. He followed him
through the open door and ran into Joanie, who had a no-account
husband of her own and knew what he'd been up to. She stood in the
path to the stairs, folded arms under folded breasts. "The
doctor's going to give her a shot," she said. “He said it
would be best if she got some rest."

Something was cooking in the kitchen, maybe ham. He
tried to walk around her, but Joanie moved in his way. "The
doctor thinks she should rest," she said.

"I'll just use the bathroom," he said, and
she let him past.

While he was up there, he heard Joyce talking to Dr.
Booras. "My sister and me will stay a couple of days," she
said. "She'll need support?

Dr. Booras said that was a good idea. "It never
hurts to have the extra support," he said. "This is the
worst kind of shock a woman can have."

Mickey wondered if Jeanie was lying on the bed
listening or if she was already asleep. He went back downstairs
without looking in. Joanie had put herself by the door and was
accepting a macaroni salad from one of the neighbor women. The phone
rang and she picked that up and handed the macaroni salad to him.
"Who?"

 
She retrieved the salad and gave him the phone,
and a warning look. Then she went into the kitchen, but there wasn't
a g sound in there, so she was listening.

"Mick? It's Bird."

"Yeah. You get your electricity back?"

"Right, right. It come on right after you left.
Is somethin' wrong? Jeanie don't sound good."

"That was her sister," Mickey said. "We
had an accident with Leon."

"What, he got his dick caught in somebody's cash
register?"

Mickey had told him about the job at the bar before
he asked for the one laying brick.

“
No, the real thing," he said. Joanie came out
of the kitchen and sat down on the sofa. Mickey moved a few steps
away from her, up the stairs. "Somethin' happened at work, some
kind of accident, and he's dead."

Bird said, "No shit. What was it?"

"I don't know yet. Somethin' . . ."

“
You want me to find out? I could do that for you,
Mick."

"No, let's just see what happens."

Bird said, "Some strange shit's goin' around.
Everywhere. I ask but, you know, it ain't on my level or somethin'.
This, though, I could find out about this."

"Let me talk to the cops first," Mickey
said. "Just see what happens, if it settles down." He
didn't want any more obligations on account of Leon, even if he was
dead. "Bird?" The line had gone quiet.

"Right, right. I was just thinkin'. Anyway, what
I was callin' you about Mick, I don't know if it's the appropriate
time, but it's Turned Leaf. They got her in a $15,000 claimer
Wednesday at Keystone. I'm scarin' up everything I got out, and I
figured you'd want to know."

Mickey looked at Joanie.
"Right," he said, "thanks. I'll tell Jeanie what you
said .... " He hung up and smiled at her. "I got to take
care of the arrangements," he said.

* * *

The first place Mickey had seen Turned Leaf was New
York, at Aqueduct. She'd run six furlongs in l:09.2, and he'd seen
her gather herself at the top of the stretch and then run down two of
the best three-year-old fillies in the country, and win by two. He'd
looked at the board, and she'd run the last quarter in 23.5, and he
knew somewhere, sometime, she was going to make him some money.

And three months later, here she was running a
claiming race at Keystone. He'd seen her name in the entries again at
Aqueduct, and he and Bird had driven up to bet her. She'd broke on
top, stayed on top all the way around, and then, with a furlong to
go, she'd quit. Quit so bad that for a minute he thought she'd broke
down.

He'd turned to Bird, who was flipping fifty-dollar
win tickets into a line of empty plastic beer cups in front of his
seat, and said, "There's somethin' wrong with that horse."

"Whatever it is, it ain't enough," he'd
said. Bird was a fair handicapper, but he got too personally involved
with the animals. He got the idea that some of them owed him money.
An honest horse, Bird could forgive. But when he saw one quit in the
stretch, the way turned Leaf had, he never forgave and he never
forgot.

"I'm tellin' you," Mickey had said,
"there's somethin' wrong. I seen it a lot down in Florida, where
it's hotter. Some beautiful little filly would hit the stretch and
just back up. It would turn out they'd sucked air. You know,
vaginally."

"Are you tryin' to tell me," Bird had said,
"that this horse's got somethin' wrong with her pussy, makes her
quit three hundred yards from the finish?” They'd been sitting in
the restaurant at the clubhouse, and a few people began to turn
around. "That's beautiful," he'd said. .

"It happens all the time. Her vagina opens up
while she runs"—people began moving away now—"and a
couple gallons of air gets trapped in there. It cramps them all up,
and they can't run."

Bird said, "Like runnin' while you're tryin' to
take a shit," and they had that part of the restaurant to
themselves. He'd sat there with Mickey five minutes, then he'd gotten
up and gone into the trainers' room. Technically, Bird was a trainer.
He'd paid for a license in New York the day after a horse name Pete's
Delight went off at three to two, with a couple grand of Bird's money
on him, and then broke last and stayed last all the way around,
behind a field that had to improve to suck. Bird had intended to
claim Pete's Delight the next time he ran and shoot him. To do that
he had to be a trainer. That, of course, was before he had money
problems.

Mickey walked from the house to Twenty-seventh
Street, thinking about turned Leaf and Bird. He could always lose
himself in the ponies. They told you enough, if you paid attention,
to get close to what they would do. Of course, you could never get
all the way back to the magic. Sometimes you thought you could,
though, when you could do your handicapping and then just look at the
horse and feel something going on inside it. The trouble was, you
couldn't be sure if you felt it, or you just wanted to feel it.

Mickey'd had a streak once, back at Hialeah, that ran
fifteen days. At the end he was $40,000 to the good, more money than
he'd ever made in a year. It was still more money than he'd ever made
in a year, and it was damn sure more money than he'd ever lost in
nine days, which is what he'd done with it.

Smilin' Jack's was on the corner. He had a green neon
sign in the window, written in script. Moran's Funeral Home. There
were half a dozen stands in the street that said NO PARKING FUNERAL.
Jack had moved two of them to park his pickup, which he always
claimed belonged to his cousin. He'd told Mickey once that when
people know an undertaker's got a truck, they start wondering what he
does with it.

Jack Moran was born to his job. His father, Digger,
had the only funeral home in the Pocket, and when he'd seen it was
time to retire—the little mistakes can kill you in the funeral
business—he handed the whole operation over to Jack, his only son.
The old man had married late, and was fifty the year Jack was born.
He was eighty-eight now, and nobody but Jack and their housekeeper
had seen him since the stroke six years ago. He just sat up there on
the third floor refusing to die. You had to wonder what he knew.

Jack was short and famous for his temper, and since
the day he had taken over, he had tried to separate his job from his
personal life. He'd told everybody in the Pocket about the arguments
with his father. "You don't gotta stay in all night because you
work for the city,” he'd said. "You don't gotta stay out of
clubs even if you're a teacher. What you do with your own time,
that's your own business, and it ain't got nothin' to do with work.
It's in the Constitution."