God's Pocket - Pete Dexter Read Free

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.
    It was a little God's Pocket right inside her
apartment. Fat Pat worked the Hunt Room of the Bellevue-Stratford,
waiting tables. Nights she hung out at the Hollywood or the Uptown,
drinking vodka and 7-Up with cherries in it, waiting for Leon. She
never ate the cherries, but she accumulated them in her glass to keep
track of how many drinks she'd had, and late at night they got soft
and petaled, and looked like an old corsage.
    Pat sat at the far end of the bar from Leon and never
bothered him when he came by. She didn't even speak to him unless he
said something first. That's the way Leon liked it. Sometimes, mostly
on Fridays, he took her home. Not from the bar, though. He always met
her outside. "I don't need people knowin' about my personal
business," he'd said once. "It's the same principle as
changin' your patterns every day."
    She'd heard him talking about her, though. At the
Hollywood and the Uptown both.
    At her apartment, they'd go into the bedroom right
away, because there weren't as many cats in there. He'd take his
clothes off, fold them