God's Pocket - Pete Dexter Read Free Page B

steal. Everybody steals, that's what a job is for, but he don't
have enough respect to keep it reasonable. He comes in the first
night and grabs thirty. I got people workin' for me for five years
don't take thirty. Plus, I come into my own place and he stands there
lookin' at me like he wants to cut my head off."
    When Mickey got home he told Jeanie he didn't know
what had gone wrong. And after that, when she asked him to find Leon
another job, he'd always tell her nobody was hiring. He'd tell her it
was the economy.
    Which was all right with Leon. At least it had been
for three years. Jeanie gave him money for clothes and a place to
stay and let him use the Monte Carlo when he had a date. Her
insurance was fourteen hundred dollars, letting him use the Monte
Carlo. "A nice girl will be good for him," she said.
    But they never saw his dates, even Cheryl. Leon said
Cheryl was a flight attendant for U.S. Air and lived in the
Northeast, which Mickey recognized for the classiest thing Leon could
make up. But he never said it, and Jeanie kept giving the kid forty,
fifty every Friday night to take her out, and Mickey never said a
word.
    Then, about six weeks ago, Leon had decided he wanted
a job again. "Not some bar," he'd said, "a real job.
You know, a trade or somethin'." He'd told that to Jeanie.
    She'd gone to Mickey like this: "It was him,
this time. It wasn't me, it was him. Can't you talk to somebody
downtown? Please, Mickey, talk to somebody for him." She went
through it again, how the kid had grown up without a father figure,
and finally time and maturity must have turned him around.
    Mickey knew it was something else, but he didn't know
what. He did know by then that nothing would turn the kid around but
a chance to run over you twice.
    "He's always been good with his hands,” she
said. "You know how old he was when he took the locks off
upstairs .... " And he'd given in. The next time he'd seen Bird
down at the flower shop he asked if he could find something for the
kid. Bird was eating a cold cheese steak.
    He'd known Bird a long time, since he was still
hauling poison for Dow Chemical. They'd drunk beer together and bet
the ponies together, and they were friends except for business, which
Bird kept separate. Mickey bought his meat from Bird, and once in a
while he took a truck for him. But even when he did that—it was
never more than two or three a year—it was straight cash, never a
percentage.
    When he'd asked about Leon, Bird had stopped eating,
a piece of onion hanging from the comer of his mouth where he had to
know it was there, and looked at him like it was somebody else. "You
sure you want to ask that?"
    Bird had a famous temper and balanced that against a
melancholy that left him weighing his life against his expectations,
to measure what he was against a standard that would change with how
bad he felt at the time. Any kind of crisis would set him off—a
flat tire, a bad day at Keystone, money moving some direction it
wasn't supposed to—and it always ended the same way. He'd go from
mad to sad, and decide he'd wasted his potential. Bird had to stay
pissed off to keep from being weak.
    "If it was just me, Mick," he said, "I'd
just fuckin' do it. I'd pick up the phone just because I know you,
that's how much I think of you. You got a nice thing here the way it
is, you know? A nice truck, a nice business, you don't got to ask
anybody for nothin'. A lot of these assholes around here don't
appreciate what a blessing that is. A lot of these assholes don't
appreciate when you start askin' for shit you don't have, you start
givin' away the shit you got."
    He was still looking at Mickey like there was
something about him left to figure out. "I know what I'm talkin'
about," he said. "I got shit goin' down right now, I can't
even find out where it's comin' from."
    Mickey said, "Yeah, well, I didn't mean to put
you into awkward positions.”
    Bird held up his hands. A piece of meat slipped out
of the roll. "Nothin's