God's Pocket Read online

  Peets pulled the one in back off his feet. He felt him give up the hold on his neck. He turned back to him then, thinking again that it was Old Lucy they were after, and picked him up by the jaw and the pants and held him over his head. The man’s hand found Peets’ face, and Peets bit his thumb. He’d spent years in a dojo, he could fight judo or karate, even box a little, but in the end it always came down to biting fingers.

  Fighting was fighting. Twelve years of bowing and walking around wrapped in a tablecloth and you still ended up biting fingers. He threw the body now, from the bed of the truck to the ground. One of the legs attached to it hit the rear gate of the truck, twisted and came to rest bridged to the little pile of sand Peets had shoveled out of the truck.

  The leg looked broken, but Peets jumped down and made sure. Then he looked across the street at the man on the fire hydrant. The man looked back. He stood up, slowly, nodded, clapped five or six times and then headed east down the street.

  Philadelphia.

  A MEADOW IN THE CITY

  Shellburn brought her home from the Pen and Pencil Club. He only went there when he needed somebody to take home. Sometime after one in the morning, somebody would come in. A photographer sometimes, or a copy editor. Somebody.

  He’d been drinking vodka and orange juice all night long. She came in with a couple of people he didn’t like—he didn’t like anybody that came into a bar laughing—and stood next to him. Shellburn never drank sitting down. “You’re Richard Shellburn,” she said. He thought she might be a city hall reporter for one of the radio stations.

  “Yes, I am,” he said.

  “I thought you’d look older.”

  “I thought you would too,” he said. She smiled at him and laughed, and didn’t have an idea what he was talking about.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” she said. He told her it was screwdrivers and she made a face. A cute face. She looked about twenty-two to Shellburn, which meant she was probably thirty. “I can’t stand vodka,” she said, and moved away from the men she’d come in with.

  Shellburn nodded. “You might just as well shoot it into your veins,” he said.

  “Why is that?” she said. He shrugged. “Oh, you mean you might just as well put it in your veins.…” She was standing closer to him now. She was wearing a Temple University sweat shirt and blue jeans with the word “Chic” written over the back pocket. Oh, yes, she’d shown him her ass.

  “Do you go to Temple University?” he said. He killed the screwdriver in his hand and took another one. There was a line of them on the bar. Shellburn bought them six at a time because the bartender got busy this time of night, and because he liked the way it sounded, ordering half a dozen.

  “I graduated,” she said, “in journalism. I’m freelance now, sports mostly.…” He looked at her closer. “Sports,” she said.

  Then, “You don’t approve of women in the locker room?”

  He thought about that half a minute, and then he said, “Who was Yahama Bahama?” She smiled and leaned against his leg. She picked up one of his screwdrivers and finished it before she put it down. He guessed it was how the women’s movement bought you a drink.

  “Is that a name for your penis?” she said. “Jesus, everybody’s got a name for their penis.…”

  They finished the vodka and orange juice and he took her back to his apartment. She didn’t believe him when he told her Yahama Bahama had been a middleweight fighter. She sat next to him in the car with one arm in back of his shoulder, and the other one draped across his stomach so her hand rested in his lap. She was a pretty girl, but she wasn’t troubled enough to be much of a piece of ass.

  He parked the car on the sidewalk in front of his building, and before they got out she pushed her hand up into the crotch of his pants, and then kissed him on the cheek. It seemed like a misunderstanding.

  He lived on the second floor, behind a steel door that unlocked in three places. The windows looked out across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey, and the view was the first thing she noticed. Then she went to the only table in the place, and sat down on the chair in front of it—the only chair in the place—and looked at the old typewriter sitting on the table. “So this is where you do it,” she said. Her fingers touched the keys, but she didn’t press any of them.

  The apartment had three main rooms and two of them were empty. The room they were in had the table and the chair and the typewriter and a mattress in the corner. There was a phone on the floor next to the mattress, and a black-and-white television set on a bookshelf in the corner. “Sometimes I do it there,” he said.

  She said, “Sometime could I watch you write a column?”

  “Sometime,” he said. He turned on the television set and took her away from his table. He didn’t like people touching his typewriter. He didn’t like touching it himself. She went with him to the mattress and unbuttoned his shirt. She didn’t seem to notice his body, which was white and moley and had inverted nipples. It was nothing like the bodies she saw in the locker room, he knew that.

  And as he thought that, it began to come to him who this girl was. She’d spent two weeks in the Phillies’ locker room, if he remembered it right, and then written a story for Velvet magazine describing the different sizes and shapes of every penis on the starting rotation. She unbuckled his belt, pinching his skin there, and then unfastened his pants. He sat on the mattress, thinking of the players’ wives who had formed a barricade in front of the locker room to keep her out and said on television that nobody was going to see their husbands’ private parts but them and Danny Ozark.

  The sports reporter was smiling.

  She pulled his pants down around his knees, then fought his shoes off and pulled the pants over his feet. He was wearing sky-blue, leafy underpants that were two feet long. He wondered if she had ever seen Jim Palmer, who was a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, in his underwear. Jim Palmer posed in underwear for Newsweek magazine.

  She took the pants back to the table and folded them over the back of the chair, and then put her own clothes on top of his. She was wearing a pair of red panties under the jeans—panties the size of the ones Jim Palmer wore in Newsweek magazine—and nothing under the sweat shirt. She was slim, and tan for early May. And she had high-beam tits.

  She folded into the mattress and reached into his shorts for his poor, drunk dick. She found it, smiled—whatever it was behind that smile, he didn’t like it— and began to rub it up and down, absently, while she looked at the typewriter.

  “Could you always write?” she said. “I mean, did you always want to be a writer?” He pictured her asking Pete Rose if he always wanted to be a baseball player. She let go of his dick and cupped his balls. “Hmmmm?”

  Shellburn barely noticed. He was getting sleepy now. If he didn’t fuck this graduate of Temple University Sportswriters’ School in the next ten minutes, it wouldn’t happen in eternity.

  “As a boy I wanted to shave things,” he said.

  She pulled on his dick and smiled. “You’re kinky?” And then she bent over without being asked and put old Yahama in her mouth. He couldn’t feel it at all, but there wasn’t much else she could be doing down there. There was a cool sensation when she came up for air. “You had a lot of those screwdrivers,” she said.

  “Eighteen,” he said. “But you drank two of them. That’s why I can’t get it up. You drank two of my screwdrivers.”

  “Relax,” she said, “tell me about shaving …” and she began rubbing him again.

  “If that relaxes any more,” he said, meaning his dick, “we got a problem with brain death.” She giggled and looked back toward his typewriter.

  “Do you work every morning?” she said. “Is there a time you do it, or do you wait for an inspiration?”

  “The family had two dogs,” he said. “A mongrel and a sheepdog. I was never allowed near the sheepdog with a razor.”

  She looked around the room. “It doesn’t look like there’s much here to inspire a writer.
” He looked around with her.

  The place was empty, but he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to put in it. It was a place to sleep. Shellburn could sleep anywhere there was a television on. There was nothing he saw outside that belonged there with him. No painting, no furniture, no plant. As a matter of fact, he was thinking of getting rid of the table.

  He had moved to this place after his separation, and what was in the room was what he’d brought with him. That was six years ago in September, and all he’d added were two locks on the door. The woman he’d married was twenty years younger than he was. Stevey. Her father owned furniture stores in Camden and North Philly, where he sold bedroom suites to blacks and Puerto Ricans who couldn’t afford them and who, on an average, would make two payments and quit. Then her father would hire other blacks and Puerto Ricans to repossess the bedroom suites and he would sell them again. Her father was a rich man and a big employer of minority Americans. He had a letter thanking him from President Richard Nixon. He resented having them around all the time, though, and used his money to keep his daughter as far away from that part of the world as he could.

  So Shellburn’s wife had grown up in private schools, taking dance lessons and violin lessons and tennis lessons and art lessons. She had gone to the Moore School of Art, and some of the teachers there thought she had a talent.

  Then she’d gone to Paris and learned to resent America.

  That was the kind of woman Shellburn had married. He’d met her at some women’s club where he’d given a talk. He was getting $500 then. She liked him right away, and thought they made an interesting couple—this great, rough-talking, common man’s writer, who spoke better to the city than any man alive, and the young artist, who would paint things that spoke to no one but herself. She liked the cultural juxtaposition. Those were the words she used, “cultural juxtaposition.”

  He smiled, thinking of her motives. He could smile at her, but he never asked himself who would marry somebody like that.

  The freelancer from Temple was encouraged by the smile. She got closer to Shellburn and pecked at his cheek and pulled at his dick. “Tell me something about writing,” she said. “Tell me a trick.”

  Shellburn shook his head, and the motion staggered him. “It’s like shaving,” he said. “You bleed worse than it hurts.”

  Shellburn’s marriage had lasted sixteen months, counting the time in the lawyer’s offices. It had taken her three months for it to set in that she really had married beneath herself, and the juxtaposition lost its novelty about a week after that. Shellburn hadn’t done anything to save it, and that had brought out the violent edge of cultural juxtaposition.

  He was used to watching things happen, and he watched this. “Do whatever you want to,” he’d said, and she’d thrown a mason jar at his head. She’d bought forty of them for drinking glasses—five different sizes, eight glasses each size—and before the papers were signed she broke everything but the little juice glasses, which would bounce off the walls with impunity. Shellburn liked the little glasses for their toughness, but she took them with her when they split up.

  She took the glasses and the silverware and every stick of furniture in the house. She got the Audi and the rugs and the Nautilus machine she’d bought him for their first Christmas together. She took everything and then sold it and went to Europe, back to Paris to forget. She would have taken the television, but to sell that somebody would’ve had to know she had one.

  “I don’t get it,” said the girl from Temple. Her hand was still on his penis but it had stopped moving. He looked down at his stomach and his penis and her hand. Stevey would have wanted to paint it, a still life, and it would have come out looking like Venetian blinds. “Why do you have to bleed?” the girl from Temple said.

  Shellburn had a brief thought that he was paralyzed, but he moved his legs and saw he was only numb.

  “I think you ought to get a word processor,” the girl was saying. He closed his eyes and time drifted, and then Stevey and the freelancer from Temple University had each other’s voices, and when he woke up, Stevey had caught him in the cheek with a mason jar and was saying. “Oh, no, you don’t.” Only it was the girl from Temple.

  She had taken off her panties, he could see that. She had also pulled his head up out of his pillow and he was staring now at her crotch, about half a foot away. He realized she had slapped him awake and she was sitting on his chest.

  “I have needs too,” she said.

  “A talking cunt,” he said, “oh, no …”

  She rode up his chest, and Shellburn let her push his face into her pubic hair. “There,” she said, “that’s better.…” And Shellburn smiled and went to sleep.

  Shellburn could sleep anywhere there was a television on.

  The phone rang just as Donahue introduced his first pervert, so it was a few minutes after nine o’clock. The freelancer from Temple was sleeping on the side of the mattress near the wall, but the phone didn’t wake her up. He studied the line of her back a minute and then picked up the receiver.

  “Richard?” It was Gertruda, calling for T. D. Davis. T. D. answered his own phone, but he never made his own calls. Gertruda put Shellburn on hold, and he studied the girl next to him on the mattress. He pulled the sheet down with his toe to look at her ass. He realized he was still drunk.

  “Richard, good morning,” T. D. said. He always sounded surprised to get you on the phone. “What you doin’?”

  Shellburn said, “I’m lying here with a jaybird-naked-ass girl graduate of the Temple University School of Journalism.”

  “Good. How was she?”

  “If you let me off the phone, I’ll try to find out for you,” Shellburn said. T. D. laughed, the girl reached down in her sleep and pulled the sheet back up over her bottom. Shellburn did not take either of those things for a good sign.

  “Richard,” T. D. said, “I need a favor. We ran a story yesterday, some boy killed on a construction job, and somehow we got it all dicked up. I’m finding out now who. But the thing is, you know, this boy was a veteran and supported his mother. I think she’s crippled or something, and he was one of those unofficial neighborhood leaders we count on in this city.…”

  Shellburn held the phone away from his ear and looked at it. T. D.’s voice got farther away, like Shellburn had gone into a coma. He waited until it stopped and put the phone back against his ear. “You follow me, Richard?”

  Shellburn said, “She’s got my dick in her mouth, T. D. Is this important?”

  “What I was thinking,” T. D. said, “was that instead of sending one of these damn kids down there and get it wrong again, why don’t I ask Richard Shellburn to head over there and write me a column about this boy? Get it done right.”

  Shellburn said, “Because he’s getting blown.”

  “Be good for you to stretch your legs anyway,” T. D. said.

  Shellburn looked at his legs. Bone-thin, almost hairless. Old man legs. “I had a couple things I had to look at today,” he said. He didn’t want to find out about Leon Hubbard, he already knew. He could sit down right now at the table and write it in twenty minutes, off what Davis had just told him. “I could send Billy over there, I guess.…”

  T. D. said, “Maybe you could go yourself. You know, get some of that description in there. Bibles, pictures of the dead boy, grieving mother. Things only Richard Shellburn would see.”

  He picked up a sock off the floor and put it in his mouth. “I can’t talk now, T. D. I’m eatin’ pussy.” And then he broke the connection with his finger.

  He looked again at the girl on the mattress. She was stirring, now that he thought about it she was probably already awake. Shellburn called Billy for the address and phone number of Leon Hubbard’s widowed mother.

  He wrote the phone number in the dust on the floor beside the mattress. He found a crayon in the bathroom—how long had that been there?—and copied the numbers onto a piece of typing paper. The freelancer from Temple University got off the
mattress and stormed past him into the bathroom. He thought she was mad, but then he heard her throwing up. Then she opened the door six inches and asked for her purse.

  He passed it through the crack. A little later the toilet flushed, the water went on and off, and a couple of times the toilet flushed again. He heard her open his medicine cabinet. There wasn’t anything in there but pills. Valium, aspirin, shit from when he was sick. There were pills six years old in there.

  A minute later the medicine cabinet shut and she came out wearing a towel and some lipstick. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek but didn’t grab his peter—now there was a word he hadn’t thought of in a while—and she fell back into the mattress and smiled.

  “Come back to bed,” she said. He looked at her breasts and her butt and her legs and her mouth with the fresh lipstick. She had all the parts you could ask for, but something was missing for Shellburn. Once you could fuck somebody, then you were left with whether you wanted to. Shellburn remembered when those two things went together.

  “I’ve got to be somewhere,” he said.

  “Can I come along?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Remember, you promised I could watch you write a column.”

  “Sometime,” he said. And he thought, Right after I suck off a German shepherd on Broad Street. He took a shower, shaved and put on clean clothes. When he came out she was still lying on the mattress. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing in steady, deep sighs that blew her hair where it crossed in front of her mouth. He looked at her and thought of how empty her life was.

  He opened the door quietly and let himself out, and he was half into the hallway when she said something that reached out like two-inch fingernails and grabbed his stomach from the inside. She said, “You know, I was just thinking what a really terrific magazine piece you’d make.…”

  Shellburn got into the Continental and lay his head against the adjustable steering wheel. She was still up there, in his apartment, probably making notes. All he’d said was, “Lock up when you leave,” and then he’d closed the door before she could sit up and get a look at him.