God's Pocket - Pete Dexter

  God's Pocket

  Pete Dexter

  1983

  For T C Tollefson

  (1917-1978

  Now there was a teacher. . .

  1

  Common Labor

  Leon Hubbard died ten minutes into lunch break on the first Monday in May, on the construction site of the new one-story trauma wing at Holy Redeemer Hospital in South Philadelphia. One way or the other, he was going to lose the job.

  The foreman was a 270-pound ex-Georgia Baptist named Coleman Peets, who'd had to fight men twelve or fourteen times in twenty years of bossing crews, who'd had to kill a man once on a shopping-center job in Florida, but had never actually had to fire anybody before. Before, they'd always known when to leave. Peets had a policy about bossing, and that was you never gave anything away that they could use against you.

  The best man he had was an old shine who talked to himself named Lucien Edwards, Jr. Everybody called him Old Lucy, and as a rule he didn't answer. He had the same work policy as Coleman Peets, and after eleven years together, on and off, either one of them would have been surprised to find out the other one was married. And that suited them both.

  Old Lucy came to work on time. He shaved every day of his life and carried the same lunch box he'd had the first day Peets saw him. You could leave him alone a week, he'd do a week's work. And now Peets had to watch this $17.40-an-hour brick-layer they'd sent over from the union office, who couldn't lay a straight line of piss, going after Old Lucy too.

  Leon Hubbard had worried most everybody on the crew at one time or another, he'd even touched something in Peets. It wasn't the razor—Peets had taken razors away from people, that was as simple as understanding you were going to get cut—it was something in the kid you didn't want to listen to. The truth was, he didn't believe the kid's stepfather was connected. That was more bullshit, the same way the razor was. He kept it in his back pocket and brought it out twenty, thirty times a day. He used it to cut lunch meat and tell stories and shape his fingernails. There was a neatness connected to it. Once they'd found a bat inside a cinder block and he'd used the razor to Cut its head off. Then he'd wrung everything out of the body and said, "I seen that happen to a nun once."

  There was another boy Leon's age on the crew. Gary Sample. Leon's age or he could of been a couple years younger. He'd said, "I got a nun I'd like to do like that. Sister Mary Theresa at St. Anthony's." Only he'd said it slower than that, because he stuttered. "P . . . p . . . p . . . pull-ed my ears e . . . e . . . ev-ry day."

  And that did not sit well with Coleman Peets. The others smiled, and they were worried.

  The next time Leon Hubbard pulled his razor out Peets had said, "Boy, you 'bout to figure out a way to wipe your ass with that thing, ain't you?" And they'd smiled at that too, and then Leon Hubbard had stepped in front of him, holding the razor behind his leg, and they'd looked at each other until Peets had given way.

  He couldn't of weighed 130 pounds, and he took the afternoon off to polish the blade.

  Peets never told his wife about that, he never told her the kid was supposed to be connected either. "You ever climbed out on a roof," he asked her that morning, "and looked down, and for just a breath somethin' inside you said, 'Jump'?"

  She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth for work. She opened the door to look at him, the toothbrush was still in her mouth. He said, “Leon Hubbard is what the voice looks like." She turned back to the sink and rinsed out her mouth. "You're scared to fire him, Peets," she said.

  He said, "I do wisht he'd leave.” He looked at himself in the bedroom mirror, muscle and belly and scars—there were places he'd of forgot he'd been except for the scars—and wondered how much he'd have to say to get rid of him.

  His wife came back out of the bathroom and he watched her dress in the mirror.

  "Old Lucy, he won't talk to the boy," he said. "Got half the damn crew standin' around now, watchin' him, looks like we work for the fuckin' city, and then he gets a bug up his ass for Old Lucy, 'cause he's the only one wants to do his work."

  She said, "He got a bug up his ass for you too'?" Peets shrugged. She stood next to him and pulled her white panty hose up, bunching the uniform around her waist. She was thirty-seven years old, supervising nurse in the emergency room at Hahnemann Hospital, where Saturday nights they brought in bodies like the moving company. "Where do you want this?"—and as far as Peets knew, the idea that he could be hurt too had never occurred to her. He thought she loved him for that, so he never messed with it.

  "It's simple," she said. "You go up to him and stand there pissed off, pretend you found me asleep on your side of the bed, and pretty soon he'll move.”

  Peets said, "Leon's immune. The more you don't like him, the more he likes bein' around. I never run into a case like it."

  She said, "I've seen potatoes move because you thought they were on the wrong side of the plate, Peets." She pulled her skirt down, smoothed it in front and back. Watching her dress always worked on him the way watching her undress was supposed to. He reached out and helped smooth her behind, and they looked at each other in the mirror. She pushed back into his hand, just a shade.

  "I used to believe you didn't know what you was up to," he said.

  She ignored that and sat down on the bed to tie her shoes.

  "If standing there looking doesn't do it," she said, "then talk to him. Tell him, 'You're fired, and I'm not going to pay you anymore.' " Peets made a face. "It'll work," she said. "It's a whole new generation out there that won't come to work if you don't pay them. It must of been the rock-'n'-roll." Peets had been brought up strict. He'd gotten over being a Baptist—he had to, to end up with Sarah—but the idea you had to work went deeper. Firing somebody was more of a judgment than he felt comfortable to make on a human being.

  "If he'd just leave the rest of them alone, I wouldn't care," he said. "But I see him over there jackin' up Old Lucy, and it ain't going to end. I know that much, it ain't going to end by itself."

  His wife put on a raincoat and bent over to kiss him goodbye. She stuck her tongue square in his mouth, so it was showing how worried he was. "It'll work itself out," she said. "It always does."

  He watched her from the window until she got to the car, then sat back down on the bed to think. He couldn't do that with her in the house. Five minutes later he stood up and went into the bathroom to shave, and he knew what it was bothering him. He and the old shine had an understanding. And it tortured Peets to think of Old Lucy having to ask him for help.

  * * *

  "Oh, Mickey," she said, "your balls, your cock, oh, Mickey . . ."

  Mickey was her husband, and he liked her to name the parts of his body while they made love. She didn't mind. Jeanie Hubbard Scarpato was Leon Hubbard's mother, and her life had more sorry chapters than the Old Testament. She had buried one husband in the ground, a couple of possible replacements had gotten lost in her reflections of that event. Neither of her sisters had lost a husband, so they cou1dn't understand. She was in the habit of reminding them of that. They would say thank God for her police widow's benefits, which had kept her more comfortable than some people they could think of.

  Jeanie had been born prettier and more talented than either of her sisters. When she was young, she had gone to dance school in New York and been badly treated there by a man the same age as her father. He was a patron of the arts, but he made her promises he never intended to keep, and in the end he had punched her in the eye in the gentlemen's room on the balcony level of the Lunt—Fontanne Theatre. His name was Rex.

  She could still get moody over that night. He was her first real happiness, her first real tragedy. It was a long time since those were separate things. Rex had
manners, especially when he wasn't drinking, and he understood the arts. He had taken her to the Met, to restaurants other people couldn't get into and, of course, to the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. He respected her and asked her opinions. "What do you think of that wonderful contralto?" He had opened the gentlemen's room door for her that evening. "I don't go down on anybody," she had said. He hadn't respected her for that as much as she'd thought he

  would.

  Mickey was getting close. In a minute he would grab her neck in his mouth and breathe hard through his nose, close up to her ear, where she could hear every little thing in there that didn't belong. She settled her chin against her shoulder to wait it out.

  There was a hedge of black hair on his shoulders. It grew from there down his back in two wide stripes. On his back, at least, it all grew in the same direction. It looked combed.

  It was funny. In the beginning, she'd thought he was an animal. He'd sat in the corner at a party, not talking to anybody. On the street they said he was a man who had made his bones, and when she found him staring at her later, she saw he probably was. He had eyes like he was, anyway. Little ones. And he was the best friend of Arthur "Bird" Capezio, who had the hot meat business for all of South Philadelphia, right out of his warehouse in God's Pocket. Arthur worked for Vinnie the Italian, who had Angelo Bruno's ear. This was before somebody put a shotgun in his ear one night, of course, and changed the way things worked.

  She'd sat next to him in the corner. The house belonged to a traffic court judge, on the way to Holmesburg Prison to do one-to-three for bribery, theft, embezzlement. It was sort of a going-away party, and everybody was happy. The rumor was that even if he did ten months, it still came to $10,000 a week. There wasn't a kid over five years old in God's Pocket who didn't know he'd beat the city for $400,000.

  Mickey said, "You married?"

  "Widowed," she said, and waited. Nothing. "How about you?" He shook his head, and didn't say anything else until Jeanie asked him what he did for a living.

  "The meat business," he said. The way he said that ran a chill straight through to her ass. "I work for Bird.” She'd noticed his hands then. They were thick hands, hair clear down into the knuckles. She pictured them gripping herself and other victims. When she'd looked up he was smiling at her. She took him home, got him a Schmidt's, and sat next to him on the couch. This is good beer," he said.

  An hour later she gave up hope of being abused and led him by the hand up the stairs to her bedroom. He wasn't quite rough and he wasn't quite tender, and then in the end he took her neck in his mouth and breathed hard through his nose until he'd finished.

  Jeanie liked the way the neighborhood women looked at her in the morning, though. She was not the kind to feed gossip, but this much did slip out once or twice during the day: "A jackhammer," she'd said.

  He put his mouth on her neck now and came at her faster. It wasn't a jackhammer, it was more like, well, a dick. Something real hungry with a little-bitty mouth. Like a guppy . . . "

  And that is how she would remember it. On the day her only child would die, Jeanie Scarpato satisfied her husband at seven-fifteen in the morning, thinking of tropical fish. It was the kind of life she had been given to lead.

  * * *

  Mickey Scarpato was forty-five years old and did not understand women. It wasn't the way bartenders or comedians didn't understand women, it was the way poor people didn't understand the economy. You could stand outside the Girard Bank Building every day of your life and never guess anything about what went on in there. That's why, in their hearts, they'd always rather stick up a 7-Eleven.

  And why Mickey, married three years, would still rather be with Bird or McKenna than with Jeanie. It was the strain. Being in the meat business, Mickey spent his share of time with bartenders. The one who complained the most about women was probably McKenna, at the Hollywood. He delivered there Mondays—it was right across the street from his house—and once in a while if he finished early and Leon wasn't sitting in there buying drinks and flashing his bricklayer money, he'd stay for a couple of beers. Mickey didn't like his stepson to buy him a beer.

  McKenna always had a story about his old lady, and when Mickey came in McKenna would bring him into it. Like, "Last Saturday night, I was out all night fuckin' around, you know how you do sometimes. Mickey'll understand this—see, I'm out till eight o'clock in the morning, and when I come toolin' in, the old lady's pissed six ways they ain't invented yet.

  "So I know I got to make up a lie, and she knows I got to make up a lie. I been doin' pretty good lately, so I come into the bedroom and says, 'Hey, baby, I been in a game. I won five bills.' I take all the money out of my pocket and show her. I says, 'Here is a couple hundret for you.' She puts her robe on and walks past me into the bathroom. She says, 'I'm very happy for you?' Just like that. Cold.

  "She goes in there and locks the door; 'I'm very happy for you.' She don't even give you the satisfaction of sayin' you're full of shit. And she takes the money. Right, Mick? Two hundret dollars, and she don't talk to you anyway?"

  Mickey only liked McKenna's stories when Leon wasn't around to look at him. He didn't mind being brought into them—it made him less of an outsider—but not with Leon sitting there grinning at him like they were two buddies, just fucked the same whore.

  Mickey had only lived in the Pocket since he'd been married. Most of the neighborhood was nice to him because they were afraid of him, but McKenna liked him from the day they met. He thought it could of been because they were about the same age, or it could of been because Jeanie still had her looks. She could dress up and fix her hair so beautiful it still surprised him that she wanted him around.

  The truth was, he was forty-five years old and Jeanie was the only woman who had wanted him around, unless it was for money, or doing somebody else a favor.

  That night she'd taken him home from Judge Lourdy's party, he'd made her happy. She'd moaned and perspired and said "cock" and "balls" and "dick" into his ear. And she was a biter. She'd said, "Oh, you're so good." He'd lived forty-one years to that point, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and everywhere else, and nobody ever said anything like that to him before.

  As he'd started to come, he almost bit her too. He'd gotten scared, though, and put his lips over his teeth and closed his mouth over the skin on her neck. He'd been afraid of leaving marks, and she'd know he didn't belong there.

  She'd come then. Closed her eyes and tightened and hissed and pulled the hair on his back. So she'd noticed it. Once a whore in Hollywood, Florida, had called him an ape.

  Afterward, he pulled back a few inches to look at ,Jeanie's face. He wanted to see for himself that it wasn't a trick, She was quiet and smiling, except there was something going on. And neither of them moved for what seemed like half an hour, and by the time he'd looked away, Mickey Scarpato understood he didn't even have a guess what it was, and never would.

  He rolled away from Jeanie now and looked at the clock. Seven-twenty. "Leon goin' to work today?" he said.

  She seemed to come back from somewhere else. "I didn't hear him come in last night," she said. She sat up and put on the black robe with the map of Vietnam on the back. Leon had given her that for Christmas, bought it from some colored vendor on Chestnut Street. It was so thin you could see her nipples through it. He'd given it to her and winked at Mickey when she'd taken it out of the box. He'd got the box at Bamberger's.

  The house was narrow and cold. Two bedrooms, one bath, four Touch Tone Princess telephones. She closed the bathroom door behind her, and he heard water running. Then he heard her knock on the door to Leon's room. The bathroom separated the bedrooms and had doors leading into both of them, and another door leading into the hall. Leon had taken all the locks off when he was eleven. Jeanie told that story like he'd taught himself to read.

  "Leon," she said, "it's time for work, honey." She sounded tired, he didn't make any sound at all. She knocked on the door again, and a few seconds later she came back into the bedroom with
Mickey. He stood up into his pants. She said, “He must of been out late."

  He said, "I got to be down to Bird's by eight o'clock, if he wants a ride." She went back and knocked harder. She didn't want Leon to lose another job. On the average, it took three years to get him another one.

  In the series of misfortunes that had been Jeanie Scarpato's life, the greatest tragedy had been Tom Hubbard. She had married him after she quit New York. He was the opposite of dance school. She'd married him and lost him, all in eleven months. Shot dead outside a regular Thursday-night crap game in South Philadelphia. Leon Hubbard was the issue of that marriage. He was what Tom Hubbard had left her. Leon and the house and a little over $44,000 she found, mostly in hundreds, in a shoe box out in the garage. Her sisters knew she had something—always remarking about her widow's pension—but she never told them what.

  She could close her eyes and still see the way she had looked at the cemetery, holding the folded flag off Tom's coffin, crying, her soft blond hair moving against the front of the black dress. The wind was perfect.

  She pounded on the door again and heard him move.

  "Mickey's got to be to Bird's place by eight, if you want a ride," she said. She listened, he moved again. "Honey?"

  * * *

  Leon Hubbard hated to be told anything. There was something about it that didn't take him into account. He woke up with a hangover and a torn dick, smelling like Fat Pat's bedroom, Jeanie kicking down the door telling him where Mickey had to be by what time. "All right," he said.

  "Honey?"

  "I said all right." He lifted the sheet to look at his dick. The tear ran half an inch, from the foreskin to the center of the mouth, and resembled a harelip. "Don't ever pick up a cat like that, " she'd said. "He was just telling you the only way he could . . ."

  Fat Pat lived over a little hoagie shop on Twenty-seventh Street in a two-room apartment. Anywhere from fourteen to twenty cats lived there too. "How come you don't have these fuckers fixed, at least?" he'd said, more than once. Three of them were pregnant, and there had to be seven or eight males walking around all day, spraying every inch of the floors and the furniture, trying to stake out their territory over the scent of everybody else who'd sprayed there. She never let the cats out because they were wild and wouldn't come back.