God's Pocket - Pete Dexter by Pete Dexter Read Free Book Online

there it was in everything—when
he'd died, Mickey had taken the rig and made the runs and kept his
feelings in order, and to himself
    He looked in the mirror and caught the yellow
Cadillac a quarter mile behind him.
    The old man had never taught him anything about
women, of course, or drinking or the ponies. When Mickey got older,
he sometimes wondered if it was because the old man didn't know
anything about it.
    He found the ponies for himself. First at Hialeah,
then Gulfstream and Sunshine. He'd lost the rig to the ponies when he
was eighteen. He kept coming back. He didn't cry the blues when he
lost, he didn't kiss strangers when he won. And there'd been days
when he won as much as the old man had made in half a year.
    Mickey knew he didn't have hold of it, it had hold of
him. It made him feel weak, and a couple of times he quit. And he
kept coming back.
    He'd took a job with Peabody Movers and went all over
the South. His favorite track was the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. It
was a dignified old track, you walked in there and you could see it
was built with that in mind. He always did all right at the Fair
Grounds.
    Peabody had died—he heard that at the garage and it
surprised him to hear there was actually somebody named that—and
the company folded in four months. He'd gone back to Florida for a
while, pulling double-size mobile homes, but with the winds and the
narrow roads then, it was about as peaceful as hauling leaky
dynamite. And by then he didn't like the way the mobile home business
was doing Florida anyway. There was thing safe from them but the
ocean.
    He'd gone to Chicago then, and hauled cattle in from
Iowa and Nebraska. In the winter, you'd have to stop every hundred
miles to see that none of them were down. The driver was responsible
for that. They gave you a hollow metal pole, and when some of the
cattle went down you slid the pole in through the slats and poked it
in the eye.
    A cow didn't lie down back there for nothing, and
when it was cold that's all you could do to get them up. When it was
cold enough, they didn't care what you did.
    Sportsman Park and Arlington didn't fit him at all.
In Chicago, it was like nobody gave a shit who they were when they
got around money, and he went east and got a job with Dow Chemical,
hauling poison. Mostly to Florida. They needed a lot of poison in
Florida.
    He'd met Bird at Garden State, sitting in the
reserved seats in the clubhouse. Bird had been to every track in the
East, and he was interested in Mickey's work. "Listen,"
he'd said once, "they give you a mask or somethin', handlin' all
that shit?" Mickey hadn't thought of that. It was always
something.
    Garden State was a good track, old and comfortable,
and he and Bird were there the day it burned down. They stood in the
parking lot and watched it go. Four hours later, in a bar across the
highway from the track, Bird told him about the meat business. They
had the place to themselves because it was full of smoke.
    The Cadillac had moved up and was sitting on his ass
now, close enough so he could see the faces in the front seat. Bird
was still talking, the other man looked straight ahead.
    They went by the state trooper at sixty-two miles an
hour, which should of been safe. He came out behind them though, and
Mickey felt himself go weak. His hands were shaking and the cop was
coming. So the kid had gone inside and made a call! Well, he was a
kid. The man with Bird had hit him, and he'd called the cops. He was
a kid. The Cadillac pulled into the passing lane and went around him.
Mickey touched his brakes and looked over into the car, but the man
with Bird didn't look back.
    Seven hundred dollars, that was his end. Half a day's
work, and some fuck who pissed on his own feet had decided the world
had an attitude. He was probably up there now, getting his story
together with Bird, how nothing had happened at the truck stop.
    Mickey eased the truck down to fifty-five. The cop
was two hundred yards and coming.