God's Pocket - Pete Dexter Read Free Page A

and put them in the closet. Leon always took
care of his clothes. Then he'd lie sideways across the bed, his head
against the wall, and watch her blow him.
    Last night, one of the cats was watching too. Sitting
on a little table with the pictures of Fat Pat's dead brother Monte
in a Navy uniform, half a foot out of reach, blinking the way cats
do, like they're changing lenses back there. It was on the table
about five minutes, and then Leon felt a soft concussion and it was
next to him on the bed. He picked the cat up by the tail, and then
three or four things happened, he couldn't say in exactly what order.
    The cat screamed. He saw the look of Fat Pat's face
and said, "No cat is comin' near this dick." Fat Pat had
taken his penis out of her mouth to beg for the cat, and the cat had
ripped a coma in the head of Leon's dick.
    It hurt too bad to even look for his razor to cut the
cat's head off. He grabbed himself and rocked, back and forth,
hissing, while Fat Pat told him that it was the only way the cat had
to tell people not to pick it up by the tail. A couple minutes later
he realized he still had his hard-on.
    There was nothing in his history to suggest the
problem would ever develop, but there it was. Torn and bleeding, it
would not fall. "We got to get it down to make it stop
bleeding," he said.
    Fat Pat said, "Try
thinking about something else. Multiplication tables." In the
end, he had forced it inside his forty-five-dollar blue jeans and
walked home with it pushing into his pants leg. It hurt him
everywhere. It hurt so bad at home he didn't even wash off the smell
of Fat Pat's bedroom. He took a couple of Percodan and got into bed,
and gradually the pain drained back from his eyes and his chest and
his stomach and gathered itself in the head of his penis, where it
seemed to go to sleep with him. He got out of bed carefully now, not
wanting to wake it up all at once.
    * * *
    Downstairs, Mickey was sitting at the kitchen table
with a cup of coffee. Jeanie was sitting on the other side of the
table, eating chocolate donuts and reading Richard Shellburn's column
in the newspaper. "Listen to this, Mickey. 'The old man had eyes
as sad as the dog's. He looked into the empty rooms where he and his
wife had lived their lives, quiet lives, and wondered what had
happened to his neighborhood, that children would come into the house
and beat up an old man for his money. "At least they didn't hurt
Hoppy," he said. "Isn't that sad?"
    Mickey watched her pour sugar into her coffee and use
that to wash down a donut. "I don't know how you eat that shit,"
he said. "You get sugar diabetes, they're going to cut off your
feet."
    "You're sweet," she said. "You ought
to eat something too. . .You can't go to work with nothing in your
stomach."
    He shook his head. He could never eat on a day he had
to steal a truck, not until after it was done. He looked at his
watch. Seven-thirty. "Is Leon going to get out of bed, or what?"
    "I heard him moving," she said. "He'll
be down."
    He looked at his watch again, but he didn't say
anything else. He didn't know much about women, but he knew enough to
stay out of the line between Jeanie and her son. The kid was 
there first, and that counted. No matter what Leon did, Mickey didn't
have any opinion on it.
    Before they'd gotten married, Jeanie had mentioned
from time to time that Leon had been his whole life without a father
figure, and she was glad there would be somebody now to show him how
to be strong. Leon had been to Byberry twice Mickey knew of, for
observation. She would somehow drop his emotional problems into a
conversation, and Mickey would somehow ignore it.
    A month or two into the marriage, Jeanie gave up on
it and settled for Mickey getting him a job. Which looked easier than
being a father figure. He asked around and found him a spot
bartending four nights a week on Two Street. Leon lasted three weeks.
Mickey went down to try to straighten it out.
    "Listen," the man said, "I expect him
to