God's Pocket Page 16

  Bird looked at the beers, then at Mickey. “I took care of that matter for you at the hospital,” he said.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Mickey said.

  “I talked to downtown,” he said. “They listen to me, Mick. You oughta listen to me too. The filly can beat Turned Leaf.”

  Mickey said, “You remember what we saw up in New York? You remember about sewin’ up her pussy? I ain’t tellin’ you what to do, Bird, but if she runs at all, there’s nothin’ in this fuckin’ dog kennel that’s going to catch her.” Bird took a roll of money out of his pocket and began to count it, right there in his seat. “What the fuck are you doin’ now?”

  Bird said, “It’s the other filly, Mick.”

  Mickey said, “How much you got there?”

  Bird shrugged. “Seven, eight thou, I don’t know. Whatever I could get my hands on. You know how things been.” Mickey watched the sixth race thinking about Aunt Sophie. She’d asked him to keep an eye on Arthur. He didn’t know if that meant to take his money away before he could lose it or not. He didn’t know how he’d do that in the middle of the reserved section of the clubhouse either.

  The tote board flashed up the seventh race and Turned Leaf, the two horse, opened at eight to one.

  “Three to one,” Bird said. “They made her the second favorite in the program, and all these fuckin’ cannibals never would of seen her are going to bet her down. You wait and see.…”

  Mickey looked at the board and Bird’s filly—the six—was three to one. “C’mon, Bird, I’m responsible,” Mickey said. “I told Sophie I’d keep an eye on you.”

  Bird said, “Responsible? There’s nobody responsible for each other.”

  Mickey leaned back in his seat and watched the board a few minutes, then he stood up to bet. “Be right back,” he said. He went to the fifty-dollar window and put the stack of fifties on the counter. “Two win, forty-five times,” he said. The man behind the window was smoking a cigar. He sighed and punched up the tickets and never looked up. Mickey thought he had a future as a bank teller if he wanted it.

  He put the tickets in the pocket where his money had been and bought himself a watery Pepsi-Cola. He took a swallow and checked the cup, wondering what kind of people Jeanie’s family was to drink that kind of shit night and day.

  When he got back to the seats, Bird was gone and there was a jockey change on Turned Leaf. They’d put a Colombian named Charles Suarte on her, and Mickey didn’t like the looks of that at all. Bird had left two beers on the floor and his racing form on his seat, and the smell of hair oil up and down the aisle. When he came back, he was carrying three inches of tickets, most of them exactas with the New York filly on top. “Not the whole eight thousand,” Mickey said.

  Bird sat down next to him, picked one of the beers up off the floor and took a long drink. “It turned out I had a little more,” he said. He split the tickets into two piles—exactas and win tickets—and put one pile in the left pocket of his suit coat and one pile in the right pocket. Then he patted the pockets. “George ain’t never going to say no to Bird again,” he said. George was the automatic twenty-four-hour bank teller at Girard Bank.

  “You’re fuckin’ crazy,” Mickey said.

  Bird nodded. His filly went to five to one, Turned Leaf stayed where she was. Mickey closed his eyes and waited. There wasn’t anything he could do about it now. Not about horses or jockeys or people, alive or dead. It was out of his hands.

  A few minutes later, just after they’d announced one minute to post, he heard Bird say, “No, no … Fuck.” He opened his eyes and looked at the board, and somebody had dumped enough late money on the six horse to drop her to five to two. “The fuckin’ cannibals,” Bird said. Down on the track they were loading the gate. The two men pushed them in, one at a time. Horses didn’t like the starting gate, neither did jockeys. That’s where you got killed.

  “Cannibals,” Bird said again. That was what he called anybody that knew less about the horses than he did, but it wasn’t ignorance behind that kind of late money, it was the opposite. Mickey had a feeling that seemed to continue from the moment that morning when he’d looked down at Jeanie’s hair and the curve of her head and thought maybe he’d lost her. It was part of the same thing.

  The race was only six furlongs, which was a good thing for the Colombian. He couldn’t have held her much longer. He put Turned Leaf on the outside and pulled her head that way all the way around. And she ran anyway, looking sideways. She came six wide around the last turn, fifteen lengths behind, and still closed so hard that the Colombian had to stand up to keep her from finishing second.

  Mickey watched the finish standing up, without moving, and then he sat down. “They ought to break his legs,” he said, not to anybody in particular. “That spic couldn’t of been plainer about it if he’d of nailed her dick to the starting gate.” He noticed Bird then. He’d taken the exactas out of the side of his coat and begun to separate the winning tickets from the others. All of the exactas had the six horse on top, so everything in the other pocket would be a win on the six.

  “I tried to tell you, Mick,” he said. “It was a lock.…” The prices came up on the board then. Bird’s filly paid seven dollars to win, and the exactas, six-one, was $54.60. Bird sorted his tickets. “Sometimes you just know,” he said. “Sometimes you’re so sure it ain’t real.”

  Mickey didn’t say anything. He took the tickets out of his own pocket and dropped them on the floor, that was how easy you got left behind. “You notice that race my filly run in New York?” Bird said.

  “Yes, I seen it,” Mickey said.

  “I figure they wouldn’t of kept her out this long if they wasn’t going to bring her back ready. I figured they had her ready to run that same race again.…” Mickey closed his eyes.

  Bird was talking and sorting, Mickey was imagining what he would say to Smilin’ Jack. There must of been people in the neighborhood before that died and the families didn’t have the money to cover it. He’d ask him for a couple of weeks, a month to get him his cash. Bird was still sorting. He must of had eighty ten-dollar exactas that said six-one.

  The ones that had the six over some other horse he was flipping into the air, one at a time, watching them blow in the wind and drop into the seats around him. A few of them dropped on Mickey, one landed in his chair. “When I get like this I ain’t real.…”

  Mickey went with Bird to cash the tickets. It came to just over $32,000. Bird divided the money and put half of it into one side of the suit coat and half of it into the other side. “You ready to go?” he said.

  Bird gave the kid he’d almost killed on the way in a twenty to get the car, and then drove out of the parking lot at thirty miles an hour, just like somebody normal. On the way back to I-95 he said, “What was that job Monday? Seven hundred?”

  Mickey shook his head. “It’s old business, Bird. I took the meat.” It was one thing to lose your ass, it was something else to have your friends feeling sorry for you.

  “Seven hundred, right?” Bird reached into one of his coat pockets and pulled out about two pounds of hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Mickey. “Take seven of them,” he said. “Take ten, for the interest.”

  Mickey gave them back. “Keep your money, Bird,” he said. “I took the meat.”

  “Fuck meat,” he said. “Look, I got maybe thirty thou here. I got to give six back, which I borrowed, the rest is clear. I’m goin’ to Miami. They got trailer parks down there, you can buy one of them things for what, twelve, thirteen thou? That’s what Sophie wants, to live in one of them trailer parks with her buddies, grow some shit in the yard.”

  Mickey said, “You borrowed six and bet the wrong horse? What were you going to tell them if you lost?”

  Bird said, “Five. You gotta give six for five, the fucks, but I been tryin’ to tell you. It couldn’t happen. Now take your grand and gimme my money back.” Mickey took seven hundred-dollar bills and put the rest back in Bird’s pocket.

  �
��I’ll give you the meat,” he said.

  “Fuck meat,” Bird said. “You always gotta be movin’ it in or out or sideways, so fuck it. They can’t touch you when you don’t give a fuck.” They drove with the traffic then, neither one of them saying anything until Bird turned off the Interstate into South Philadelphia.

  “I think I’m done now,” Bird said. “I think I’m used up in Philly. These new people takin’ everything, they don’t own Miami. The people that own Miami know what their business is about.”

  Vinnie Ribbocini was sitting behind his desk with a glass of milk and a package of Oreo cookies when they came in, without knocking, and stood one on each side of the door staring at him.

  Vinnie knew one of them. The new people had him overlooking his business. His name was Sally. “So what do you want, comin’ in here like this?” he said. “You want to put smack in the jelly donuts, what is it?”

  The one he knew came across the room to the desk. The other one stayed where he was. He had that look like he had them fuckin’ little earphones on, that you couldn’t hear what everybody else could hear. He was standing with his feet wide apart and his coat open. The shooter. Vinnie laughed out loud. The one he knew reached across the desk and slapped him across the face.

  The slap spun him around in his chair. “I oughta fuckin’ kill you right here,” the man said. Vinnie straightened himself and stared at him. He promised to kill him for that. “Before Angelo got wasted,” he said, “if I spit in your face, you’d a asked if it was all right to wipe it off.” Sally slapped him again.

  This time the old man saw it coming and moved with the hand. His cookies sprayed into the wall, the milk stayed where it was. He picked it up and took a drink. His hands were shaking, and he was ashamed. The left side of his nose was bleeding down into his mustache, and he dabbed at it with a Kleenex he took out of a box on the side of the desk that hadn’t been disturbed.

  “You set me up,” Sally said.

  The old man laughed at him. “If I set you up,” he said, “you’d be where you belong.”

  Sally said, “I sent my brother-in-law on that job yesterday. Him and another guy just as good. I sent him over there with two eyeballs, Vinnie, and when they find him he’s walkin’ around Broad Street holdin’ one of them in his hands.” He grabbed the old man’s shirt and pulled him across the desk. “You told me it wasn’t no problem.”

  The blood filled his mustache and began to drip on the desk. He stared right into Sally’s eyes.

  “The other guy, they got his ass in the hospital, tied to the ceiling in six places on account of his back’s broke and his leg’s broke, and they can’t give him no painkiller because they don’t know if his fuckin’ head’s broke too.”

  He let go of the old man and straightened his clothes. Vinnie used another Kleenex to clean the spots off the desk. “So?”

  “So you said it wasn’t no problem, Vinnie. And I sent my brother-in-law over there with another guy, just as good, and they run into a fuckin’ gorilla. I mean a real fuckin’ gorilla. What’s that make me look like?”

  The old man saw that they hadn’t noticed him shaking, and Sally’s voice began to change, like he wanted to talk now. If they’d seen he was afraid, they’d of beat him half to death before they wanted to talk.

  “So shoot the gorilla,” the old man said. His nose began to swell, he could feel it. It had been broken before and he knew better than to blow his nose, but he did it anyway.

  “It ain’t him we want,” Sally said. “We ain’t got no business with him, never did. Not until you asked us to go to the hospital.”

  “So shoot me,” he said.

  Sally shook his head and sat down on the corner of the desk. Blowing his nose had pushed some of the blood up into the cavities under the old man’s eyes, and they were swelling now, cutting off his vision. “To tell you the truth, that crossed our mind,” Sally said. “Comin’ over here, me and Mike talked that over, right, Mike?” Mike smiled, distracted, almost polite. He’d be the one to do it, if that’s what it came to.

  “My sister calls me up and says they found Ronnie walkin’ around carryin’ one of his eyeballs, it crosses my mind to come over here and cut your head off. She’s real upset, screamin’ all over the neighborhood that nobody can get away with that. You know how they are. So I promise her I’ll take care of it, but, like I said, on the way over, me and Mike talked it over, and we figure it don’t have to be you. I mean, somebody told you it was no problem and you told us. So it’s him.…”

  Vinnie saw his nephews was working both sides—they’d talked to these two—and he shook his head. The reason these two wouldn’t cut off his head, they was afraid. The old man was the one Angelo had listened to. Angelo loved him. They might kill him, but they wouldn’t cut his head off. Scarin’ was one thing, but you didn’t want nobody scared and pissed at the same time. That would be bad for everybody.

  “I done business with this guy since before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor,” he said.

  “He fucked up,” Sally said. “Somebody’s got to make this good.”

  “So shoot the gorilla,” he said again.

  Sally said, “We ain’t goin’ near that motherfucker.” The old man laughed at them again, and Sally slapped him. His eyes had swollen almost shut now, so he didn’t see it coming and it knocked him out of his seat. Then there were hands on his collar, lifting him back up. “It’s him, or it’s you and him,” Sally said. The old man could smell his breath, and his legs were shaking like the palsy.

  And he saw what they would do, and gave them the address. Sally wrote it down and then, without another word, they walked out the door. The old man heard them get into their car outside. He turned toward the window, but his eyes were almost shut and he couldn’t see. The door to his office opened, and he heard the girl who worked behind the bakery counter. She came in and made a noise like she’d found a kitten. “Oh …”

  He sat up straight and faced the voice. “Lock up the store and go home, child,” he said.

  She said, “Oh, Mr. Ribbocini …”

  “Go home,” he said. And for a few minutes he listened to the sounds of the cash register and the window blinds and then the front door being closed and locked. He was still shaking, but he wasn’t scared.

  “I shouldn’ta gave you up, Arthuro,” he said out loud. “But we’re all dead now, so it don’t matter, and I need to see these monkey cunts dead too. Humor an old man on this.…”

  Shellburn stopped at a bar near the Wilmington airport and bought a six-pack of Schmidt’s. There was a phone booth outside, a few yards from the highway, and he opened one of the beers before he dialed the number in God’s Pocket. He deposited seven quarters, a dime and a nickel and got a busy signal. So he went over uninvited, which would have seemed like bad manners to him if he hadn’t been who he was.

  He found a place to park the Continental on the sidewalk just outside a dark, wet-looking hole in the block called the Hollywood Bar. There was a faded rainbow painted across the window. The six-pack of beer was working, smoothing him out, and he went inside to use the bathroom so he wouldn’t have to ask Leon Hubbard’s mother if he could use hers.

  There were a couple of old women drinking rock nips at one end of the bar, a couple of old men drinking the same thing at the other end. Shellburn got the idea they were married. They watched him come in. There was a wasted rummy in a neck brace, standing by himself in the middle, talking to the bartender. The bartender was tired of listening and looked played out when he brought Shellburn his can of Schmidt’s from the cooler.

  When he said “Schmidt’s,” one or two of the men had looked at him again. They drank Rolling Rock or Ortlieb’s at the Hollywood. Shellburn drank half the beer and went into the bathroom. The toilet was cracked and leaking and rotting out the floor, and when he stepped inside, the wood gave underneath his feet.

  There was a mirror in the towel machine and a bare orange light bulb over the sink. Standing on his toes, Shellbur
n could see the top half of his head. He patted down his hair and saw that his eyes were a sunset over Key West. Reds, pinks, lovely. He tucked his shirt into his pants and brushed some of the dust from Maryland off his shoes, and then went back out and finished the beer.

  “Is that Leon Hubbard’s house across the street?” he said.

  The bartender cocked his head, to see who was asking. Then he said, “You aren’t Richard Shellburn, are you?” Shellburn nodded, the bartender reached across to shake hands. “I knew it,” he said. “I read you every day. You look different from your picture, but I knew it was you.”

  “Is that the Hubbard place?” he asked.

  “Scarpato,” the bartender said. “The mother’s remarried. Jeanie Scarpato.”

  Shellburn looked at the narrow brick row house across the street. The windows were all covered, like nobody lived there anymore. “How’s she taking it?” he said.

  The bartender shrugged. “He was the only child,” he said. Shellburn had another beer, then put a five-dollar bill on the bar and walked outside. They watched him cross the street and knock on the door. Then the door opened, and a few seconds later he went inside. One of the old women said, “Richard Shellburn is the only one ever come down here, to the Pocket.”

  Ray shook his head. “Adlai Stevenson was right on this spot,” he said.

  “Well, I never voted for him,” the woman said. “I like Ike.”

  “Dwight David Eisenhower had the third-lowest I.Q. of any U.S. President since Grover Cleveland,” he said. Then they ordered more Rolling Rock beer and watched the street so they would know how long he was in there with Jeanie Scarpato before he came out.

  Shellburn knocked on the door and waited to see the grief-stricken mother, so he could put her red eyes and shaky hands and her tear-stained cheeks in the newspaper, along with the harsh, naked light in the bathroom of the Hollywood Bar, where Leon Hubbard drank. And then she opened the door and Shellburn was struck stone dumb. “Mrs. Scarpato?” He heard his voice but he didn’t seem to be the one talking.