God's Pocket - Pete Dexter Read Online Free PDF

didn't
let himself think about what Leon must be like at work, or what kind
of an asshole that made him with Bird.
    Seven seconds after he'd gone through the front door,
Leon was in the window on the second floor, checking the street. Then
he was back out on the sidewalk running toward the track.
    Jeanie's head came out the door and watched him all
the way back. Mickey waved, but she must not have seen it.
    The kid got in and slammed the door. "See? I
told you I'd run." Mickey thought there must be some
conversation going on all the time in Leon's head that he thought he
was having out loud. "Didn't take no time at all," he said.
    It had taken long enough, though, so a City of
Philadelphia sanitation truck had turned left off Lombard and got in
front of them and was moving half a mile an hour down Twenty-fifth
now while three democrats strolled back and forth across the street,
picking up garbage cans, dumping half the shit inside into the truck,
the other half into the street. At the end of the block, the driver
got out, and all four of them went into the Uptown to shake the place
down for a ten and a drink.
    There was a half a block of cars lined up behind
Mickey by then, most of them blowing their horns or shouting, but
none of it had much conviction. Nobody hurries the City of
Philadelphia. Mickey looked at his watch. “Eight-fifteen in the
morning," he said. "They ought to be ashamed of
themselves." .
    "I seen a guy get thrown into the back of one of
them once," Leon said, to pass the time. Mickey looked over and
the kid was smiling in a way that Mickey almost believed him. That
was the trouble with Leon. You could never be sure he was completely
full of shit. There was a way he committed himself to it. "You
ever seen that, Mickey? They throw the guy in the back and then mash
him into all the other shit back there."
    Mickey didn't say a word, and Leon didn't read
nothing into it. "I knew the guy they did that to," he
said. Mickey checked his watch. They'd been inside the Uptown four
minutes. The kid had been sweating out his eyeballs fifteen minutes
ago, now he was cold.
    "He was cute," Leon said. “Asshole bet
K.C. against the Phillies the whole series. A grand, a grand, two
grand. The series ended, he owed five, and he didn't have no idea
where he was going to get his hands on something like that.
    “ That's what he told Skully. You know Skully, what
a nice guy he is, but the people he works for ain't nice. And a
couple nights after the parade they had for the team, a couple guys
come by and take this guy right out in the street, in front of his
family and everybody. Just then a garbage truck was comin' by, and
they just threw him in there instead of breakin' his legs themselves.
It was sort of like progress. Like computers, they throw this guy in
back so they don't have to do all the work. Wasn't as noisy, either.
One of them gets in the cab, the niggers go into a bar. But the guy
had claustrophobia, see, and nobody knew it. So when they pulled him
out of there, he wasn't just broke up a little bit, you know what I
mean? He was suffocated."
    The garbage men came out of the Uptown and started
down Twenty-fifth Street, Mickey made a left through an alley. “He
panicked," Leon said, "or he'd of been all right. You panic
sometimes, that's all she wrote.”
    "How come you're always talkin' that shit,
Leon??' Mickey said. He looked over at him again and wished he'd kept
his mouth shut. "I mean, it's the first thing in the morning
.... "
    "You think it's shit?" the kid said. "You
think it's shit? Say it, you think it's shit."
    Mickey stopped the truck and waited. "Leon, I
don't need this now." If it came to that, he'd decided to choke
him enough to change the amount of air his brain was getting and
figure out a way later to explain it to Jeanie without saying Leon
was crazy. Then, while he watched, it changed again. Leona smiled at
him, began to nod.
    "I know you done your
share, Mickey," he said. "I know you been there."