Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  “Who?”

  “Deems, fool. Louis’s grandson. Remember Louis Clemens?”

  “Louis Clemens?” Sportcoat tilted his head sideways, looking genuinely surprised. “Louis been dead, Sausage. He been dead five years this May. He been dead longer than my Hettie.”

  “I ain’t talking about him. I’m talking about his grandson Deems.”

  Sportcoat brightened. “Deems Clemens! Greatest ballplayer this projects ever seen, Sausage. He’s gonna be the next Bullet Rogan. I seen Rogan play once, back in forty-two. In Pittsburgh, just before I come up here. Hell of a ballplayer. He got to arguing with the umpire and got throwed out the game. Bob Motley was umping. Motley was something. Greatest Negro umpire ever. Jumped like a basketball player, Motley did.”

  Hot Sausage stared at him a moment, then said softly, “What’s a matter with you, Sport?”

  “Nothing. Hettie’s just been a bear. She come to me said, ‘I know your momma—’”

  “Lissen to me. You shot Deems and he ain’t dead and he’s gonna come at you with his hooligans. So you gotta get moving . . .”

  But Sportcoat was still talking and didn’t hear him, “‘—degraded you.’ My momma did not degrade me. That was not my momma, Hettie,” he said to no one in particular. “That was my stepmomma.”

  Hot Sausage whistled softly and sat down on another crate across from Sportcoat. He looked out into the store at Mr. Itkin, who was still busy with customers, then he picked up the root beer can full of gin and took a long swallow. “Maybe I can get a visitor’s pass,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For when they put you in the penitentiary. If you live that long.”

  “Quit chunking at me ’bout nothing.”

  Hot Sausage sat thoughtfully a moment, sipped the gin, then tried one more time. “You know Deems, right? Louis’s grandson?”

  “Surely,” Sportcoat said. “Coached him in baseball. Taught him in Sunday school. That boy got talent.”

  “He’s shot. Near dead.”

  Sportcoat’s brow furrowed. “Gosh almighty!” he said. “That’s terrible.”

  “He’s shot on account of you. Hand before God. You shot him.”

  Sportcoat chortled for a moment, thinking it was a joke. But Hot Sausage’s serious face didn’t waver, and Sportcoat’s smile thinned. “You funning, right?” he said.

  “I wish I was. You rolled up on him and throwed that old cannon of yours on him. The old one your cousin from the army gave you.”

  Sportcoat turned and reached into the pocket of his sports jacket lying on the shelf behind him and pulled out the Colt. “I wondered why I got this damn thing . . .” He hammered it against his hand to check. “See, it ain’t been fired since I bought it. Ain’t got but one bullet in it, and that’s just for show.” Then he noticed the empty cartridge and a pasty look crossed his face as he held the gun in front of him, staring at it.

  Hot Sausage pushed the gun barrel toward the floor, glancing at the door. “Put that goddamn thing away!” he hissed, his voice low. “You already done caused a world of trouble with it!”

  For the first time, seeping through Sportcoat’s drunken stupor, the words began to have an effect. Sportcoat blinked in confusion, then laughed and snorted. “I disremember a lot of what I do these days, Sausage. After you and me got pixilated on the Kong last night, I went home and had a dream about Hettie and we got to fussing as usual. Then I woke up needing a breakfast of champions as they say so I had a taste of the Kong to keep the crease down, y’know. Then I went to see Deems about getting the baseball game against Watch Houses going again. We can’t win without Deems, y’know. That boy got talent! Could throw seventy-eight miles per hour when he was thirteen.” He smiled. “I always favored him.”

  “Well, you picked a poor way of showing it. You walked to the plaza and throwed that gun on him. Right in front of his gang of heathens.”

  Sportcoat looked stunned. His brow crinkled in disbelief. “But I hardly carry this thing, Sausage. I don’t know how I . . .” He wet his lips. “I was drunk, I reckon. I didn’t hurt him bad, did I?”

  “He ain’t dead. They say just his ear’s shot off.”

  “That don’t sound like me. It ain’t smart to shoot a man’s ear off. A man ain’t got but two.”

  Hot Sausage couldn’t help himself. He stifled a chortle. “You been home today?”

  “Naw. I come straight to work after I . . .” Then Sportcoat paused a moment, his face etched with remembrance and concern. “Well, now that I think on it, I do remembers some boy with his head bleeding and choking for some reason. I remembers that. So I gived him that thing I seen a doctor do back home once. He was having trouble drawing air, poor fella. But I cleared him. I reckon that was Deems I cleared. He all right now?”

  “He’s well enough to pin a gold star on your chest before airing you out.”

  “Can’t be!”

  “You done it!”

  “I disremember it! It couldn’t have been me.”

  “You shot that boy, Sport. Understand?”

  “Sausage, I reckon that running lie is a good one to truck about, being that a boy with that kinda talent that don’t use it ought to be shot in this world for wasting it. But—hand before God—I didn’t shoot him to my recollection. Even if I did it’s only ’cause I wanted him to go back to pitching baseball. He’ll forget all about it when his ear heals. I got only one good ear myself. A man can still pitch with one ear.” He paused a moment, then added, “Anybody seen it?”

  “No. Just everybody at the flagpole.”

  “Gee,” Sportcoat said softly. “That’s like being on TV.” He took a swig of gin and felt better. He was having trouble deciding whether this was a dream.

  Hot Sausage picked up Sportcoat’s jacket and held it out for him. “Git down the road right now while you can,” he said.

  “Maybe I should call the police and explain it to ’em.”

  “Forget them.” Sausage glanced at the door. “You still got people in South Carolina?”

  “I ain’t been to my home country since my daddy died.”

  “Go see Rufus over at the Watch Houses. Lay low over there. Maybe it’ll blow over somehow . . . but I wouldn’t buy no sweepstakes ticket on it.”

  “I ain’t going over to no Rufus’s place at no Watch Houses to sleep!” Sportcoat snorted. “That Negro ain’t showered in two years. His body is dying of thirst. I got to be dead drunk to be around him. Plus, I got my own house!”

  “Not no more.”

  “Where’s Pudgy gonna go? I gotta take him to the school bus in the morning.”

  “The church’ll see to that,” Hot Sausage said, still holding out Sportcoat’s jacket.

  Sportcoat snatched his jacket from Sausage’s hand and placed it back on the liquor rack, grumbling. “You lying! I didn’t shoot Deems. I woke up this morning fussing with Hettie. I walked Pudgy to the blind folks’ school bus. I maybe had a taste or three. Then I come here. Sometime in the middle there I had another swig of the erratic and took Deems’s ear off. Maybe I done it. Maybe not. So what? He got another ear. What’s an ear when you got an arm like Deems? I knowed a man back home who got his pecker cut off by a white man for stealing a lady’s purse. He peed through a groin hole his whole life. He did all right. He’s yet living, far as I know.”

  “The white man, or the man without a pecker?”

  “They both yet living to my knowing. And they got to know each other good over time. So why you all hot and bothered about somebody’s old ear for? Even Jesus didn’t need but one sandal. The book of Psalms says you ain’t desired my ears and you ain’t opened ’em either.”

  “It says what now?”

  “Something like that. What difference do it make? God’ll straighten it out. He’ll make Deems’s one better’n two ears.”

  That b
usiness decided, Sportcoat began unpacking liquor bottles from a crate. “You wanna go fishing this weekend?” he said. “I’m getting paid tomorrow. I needs to reflect on my first-ever sermon at Five Ends. It’s in three weeks.”

  “If it’s about the hereafter, you ain’t gonna be short on critters and believers, that’s for sure. If I was a fly and wanted to get to heaven, I’d throw myself in your mouth.”

  “It ain’t about no fly. It’s about not eating the dressing without confessing. Book of Romans, fourteenth chapter, tenth verse. Or maybe it’s Simon, seventh and ninth. It’s one or the other. I got to look.”

  Hot Sausage stared, incredulous, as Sportcoat continued unloading liquor bottles. “Nigger, your cheese done slid off your cracker.”

  “Just ’cause you says I got a note due someplace don’t mean I got one!”

  “Is you listening, Sport?! You dropped Deems in his tracks! Then humped him like a dog. In front of everybody.”

  “You ought to test your lies someplace else other than your best friend, Sausage. I never humped a man in my life.”

  “You was drunk!”

  “I don’t swallow any more spirits than anybody else in these projects.”

  “Now who’s lying? I ain’t the one they calling Deacon King Kong.”

  “I don’t get in a knot over the fibbing and twiddling things folks say about me, Sausage. I got my own thoughts about things.”

  Hot Sausage glanced out the door. Itkin’s customers had left, and the store owner was peering into the back room where they were standing. Sausage reached into his pocket and pulled out a small clump of dollar bills. He held the crumpled bills out to Sportcoat, who had paused and was now standing before him, glaring, his arms full of liquor bottles.

  “Thirty-one dollars. It’s all I got, Sport. Take it and get a bus ticket home.”

  “I ain’t going no place.”

  Hot Sausage sighed sadly, pocketed the money, and turned to leave. “All right. I guess I’ll use it to buy a bus ticket to see you in the penitentiary upstate. If you live that long.”

  5

  THE GOVERNOR

  Thomas Elefante, the Elephant, heard about the Deems Clemens shooting an hour after it happened. He was working on his mother’s flower bed in his brownstone on Silver Street just three blocks from the Cause Houses, dreaming of meeting a plump, good-looking farm girl, when a uniformed cop from the Seventy-Sixth Precinct rolled up, called him over to his squad car, and relayed the news.

  “They got a line on the shooter,” the cop said.

  Elefante leaned on the squad car door and listened in silence while the cop blabbed on about what the cops knew. They knew the victim. They were certain about the shooter too. Elefante didn’t care about any shooter. That was Joe Peck’s problem. If the coloreds wanted to kill each other over Peck’s dope, that was Joe’s headache, not his. Except, of course, killings brought cops like this one. Cops wrecked the economy—his economy anyway. Moving hot goods while cops were running an investigation in your backyard was like being the dumbest kid in class who always raises his hand anyway. No matter how stupid you are, it’s only a matter of time before the teacher calls on you.

  Elefante was forty, heavyset, and handsome; his dark eyes and gaunt jaw held a stony silence that cloaked a delightful, sarcastic sense of humor despite a childhood of bittersweet disappointment. His father had spent a good part of Elefante’s childhood in jail. His opinionated, eccentric mother, who ran his father’s dock at the harbor during his dad’s imprisonment, spent her spare time collecting plants from every empty lot within five miles of the Cause, a hobby to which she increasingly dragged her reluctant bachelor son, who, she often noted, had worked himself well past the marrying age.

  Elefante ignored those comments, though lately he’d conceded to himself she was probably right. All the good Italian women in the Causeway neighborhood were already married or had fled to the suburbs with their families, now that the coloreds were fully established. The time to get married, he thought, was when I was young and stupid, like this cop. Even this lumphead, he thought bitterly, was probably dating some hot young number. He could tell by the way the kid talked he wasn’t from Brooklyn. He likely wasn’t even from the Cause District. He looked barely twenty-one, and Elefante, staring at him, guessed the guy was clocking maybe seven grand a year—And still, he’s meeting women, Elefante thought. Me, I’m just a kickball. A blob. I might as well be a gardener.

  He listened with half an ear as the kid chatted, then stepped back and leaned on the fender of the parked car behind him to glance up and down the street while the cop yammered on. The kid was careless, and obviously inexperienced. He’d double-parked right in front of Elefante’s house, in full view of every house on the block, which, like everything else around here, the Elephant thought ruefully, wasn’t safe. It wasn’t like the old days when everybody was Italian. The new neighbors were Russian, Jewish, Spanish, even colored—anything but Italian. He let the cop blab a little more, then, interrupting him, said, “The Cause ain’t my business.”

  The cop seemed surprised. “You ain’t got interests down there?” he said, pointing out the windshield of his patrol car toward the Cause Houses, which rose like a pyramid three blocks distant, glimmering in the hot afternoon sun that sent heat waves off the beaten streets, and the Statue of Liberty, which could be seen shimmering at a distance in the harbor.

  “Interests?” Elefante said. “They used to have baseball games down there. I liked those.”

  The cop looked disappointed and a little afraid, and for the briefest of moments, Elefante felt sorry for him. It bothered him that people, even cops, feared him. But it was the only way. He had done a few terrible things over the years, but only to defend his interests. Of course he’d done some nice things, too, but got no credit for any of them. It was how the world worked. Anyway, this stupid kid seemed okay, so Elefante pulled a twenty out of his pocket, carefully folded it in his fingers in his left hand, leaned into the car window, and deftly let it slip to the floor of the patrol car before turning away and stepping back onto the sidewalk. “See ya, kid.” The kid drove off fast. Elefante didn’t bother watching his taillights disappear. Instead, he looked in the other direction. It was an old habit. If one cop goes this way, look for the second coming that way. When he was satisfied the street was clear, he stepped to his wrought-iron gate, opened it, and reentered the garden that fronted his modest brownstone, closing it carefully behind him. Still wearing his suit, he dropped to his knees and began digging at the plants, glumly considering the shooting.

  Drugs, he fumed silently as he dug. Fucking drugs.

  He stopped digging to peer over his mother’s flower garden. He scanned the different ones. He knew them all: sunflower, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedfly, hawthorn, witch hazel, cinnamon fern, and what was the last, this one he was replanting right here? Lady fern, maybe? The ferns were not doing well. Neither were the hazels and hawthorn.

  He bent over and began digging. I’m the only forty-year-old bachelor in New York, he thought ruefully, whose mother collects flowers like junk—and then expects me to replant whatever crap she finds. But the fact is, he didn’t mind. The work relaxed him, and the garden was her pride and joy. She’d picked most of the plants out of the abandoned railroad tracks, ditches, and weeds that sprouted around the deserted lots and factories of the Cause District. Some, like this fern, were real treasures, arriving as near weeds and blossoming into full-grown plants. He scratched away at the fern, digging it out, pulling fresh earth out of a nearby wheelbarrow, pushing more earth aside, setting the new earth in place, and reanchoring the fern gently into place with the smooth efficiency born of experience and repetition. He stared at his work a moment before moving on to replant the next. Normally, his mother would check his work later on, but lately she’d been too sick to get out, and the garden was beginning to show small signs of neglect. Several plants were brow
n and dying. Others needed replanting. Several she wanted brought inside and potted. “There’s something going around Brooklyn,” she declared. “Some kind of disease.” The Elephant agreed, but not the kind of disease she was worried about.

  Greed, he thought wryly as he dug into the earth. That’s the disease. I got it myself.

  Two weeks before, in the dead of night, an elderly Irishman had wandered into his boxcar at the pier while he and his men were loading cigarettes onto a truck. Nighttime visitors and odd characters were not unusual given his line of work, which included moving hot goods off harbor boats, storing them, or moving them inland to wherever the customer wanted. But this visitor was odd even by his standards. He looked to be about seventy. He was clad in a tattered jacket and bow tie, with a full head of white hair. His face had so many lines and rivulets it reminded Elefante of an old subway map. One eye was swollen shut, apparently permanently. He was thin and sickly, and seemed to have trouble breathing. When he entered, Elefante motioned for him to sit. The visitor complied thankfully.

  “I wonder if you could help a man in need,” the old man said. His Irish brogue was so thick Elefante had trouble understanding him. Despite his physical frailness, his voice was clear and he spoke with an air of solidity and bearing, as if walking into the boxcar of one of Brooklyn’s most unpredictable smugglers at three a.m. was as simple as walking into a bodega and ordering a pound of bologna.

  “Depends on the need,” Elefante said.

  “Salvy Doyle sent me,” the old fellow said. “He said you could help me out.”

  “Don’t know a Salvy Doyle.”

  The old Irishman smirked and tugged at his bow tie. “He said you can move things.”

  Elefante shrugged. “I’m just a poor Italian who runs a trucking and storage company, mister. And we’re running late.”

  “Construction?”

  “A little construction. A little storage, some moving. Nothing heavy. Mostly I move peanuts and cigarettes.” Elefante nodded at several nearby crates labeled “Cigarettes.” “You wanna cigarette?”