Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  “Cha cha cha!” Sportcoat blurted cheerfully. “Play it, fellas!” He took another sip of the Kong, shook his hips, then hooted, “Best bongo music in the world!”

  That last crack brought a smile to the face of the mother next to him and she glanced at him. When she saw who it was, her smile disappeared and she backed away, pulling her children protectively to her. A man nearby saw her step away, spotted Sportcoat, and he too backed off, followed by a second.

  Sportcoat didn’t notice. As the crowd peeled away from him, he spotted at the front of the crowd near the band the familiar porkpie hat of Hot Sausage, nodding to the bachata music, holding a cigar in his teeth. Sportcoat worked his way forward through the crowd and tapped Hot Sausage on the shoulder. “What’s the party for?” he asked. “And where’d you get that cigar?”

  Sausage turned to him and froze, his eyes wide. He glanced around nervously, yanked the cigar from his mouth, and hissed, “What you doing here, Sport? Deems is out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Out the hospital. Out the house. Around.”

  “Good. He can get back to baseball,” Sportcoat said. “You got another cigar? I ain’t had a cigar in twenty years.”

  “Ain’t you heard me, Sport?”

  “Stop fussing at me and gimme a cigar.” He nodded his head toward his hip jacket pocket, where the Kong bottle was stashed. “I got the gorilla here. Want some?”

  “Not out here,” Sausage hissed, but then took a quick glance in the direction of the flagpole, saw the coast was clear, snatched the bottle out of Sportcoat’s pocket, and nipped quickly, slipping the bottle back in Sportcoat’s pocket when he was done.

  “What’s the cigar for?” Sportcoat asked. “You get Sister Bibb pregnant?”

  The reference to Hot Sausage’s part-time lover and the church organist, Sister Bibb, did not please Hot Sausage. “That ain’t funny,” he grunted. He took the cigar out of his mouth, looking uncomfortable. “I won a bet,” he murmured.

  “Who’s the sucker?” Sportcoat asked.

  Hot Sausage glanced at Joaquin, who from the front steps was staring at somebody and suddenly went pale. Indeed, Sportcoat noticed the entire Los Soñadores band staring at somebody now: him. The music, which had loped along poorly before, dropped to an even slower clip-clop.

  Sportcoat pulled the bottle of Kong out his pocket and finished the last corner, then nodded at Los Soñadores. “Let’s face it, Sausage. They ain’t Gladys Knight and the Pips. Why’d Joaquin bring ’em out of mothballs?”

  “Can’t you see the sign?”

  “What sign?”

  Sausage pointed to the sign above the band scrawled on a piece of cardboard, which read Welcome Home, Soup.

  “Soup Lopez is out of jail?” Sportcoat said, surprised.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Glory! I thought Soup got seven years.”

  “He did. He came out in two.”

  “What was he in for again?” Sportcoat asked.

  “I don’t know. I reckon they went broke feeding him and cut him loose. I hope he ain’t hungry today.”

  Sportcoat nodded. Like most in the Cause, he had known Soup all his life. He was a mild, scrawny, quiet runt who got his exercise mostly by running from the local bullies. He was also the worst player on Sportcoat’s baseball team. Little Soup preferred to spend his afternoons at home watching Captain Kangaroo, a children’s show about a gentle white man whose gags with puppets and characters like Mr. Moose and Mr. Green Jeans delighted him. At nine, Soup hit a growth spurt the likes of which no one in the Cause had ever seen. He grew from four foot nine to five foot three. At ten he mushroomed to nearly six feet. At eleven he topped off at six feet two inches and had to sit on the floor of his mother’s living room and strain his neck to peer down at the small black-and-white screen to watch Captain Kangaroo, whose puppet tricks and gags he found, at that age, increasingly boring. At fourteen he abandoned Captain Kangaroo altogether and later favored a new TV show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, about a gentle white man with better puppets. He also added three inches to his frame. By sixteen he topped six foot ten, two hundred seventy-five pounds, all of it muscle, with a face scary enough to make the train leave the track, with the kind disposition of a nun. But, alas, Soup played baseball like one too. Despite his size he remained the worst player on Sportcoat’s team, in part on account of he was so tall he had a strike zone the size of Alaska. Plus the idea of striking a ball, or anything else, was foreign to Soup.

  Like most of Sportcoat’s team, Soup disappeared from adult radar at the Cause when he entered the labyrinth of his teenage years. One minute he was striking out to the guffaws of the opposing team, the Watch Houses, the next minute word got out that Soup was in jail—adult jail—at seventeen. What put him there, no one seemed to know. It didn’t matter. Everybody went to jail in the Cause eventually. You could be the tiniest ant able to slip into a crack in the sidewalk, or a rocket ship that flew fast enough to break the speed of sound, it didn’t matter. When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is. Soup got seven years. It didn’t matter what it was for. What mattered was that he was back. And this was his party.

  “I think it’s dandy that he’s out,” Sportcoat said. “He was a . . . well, he wasn’t a solid ballplayer. But he always showed! Where’s he at?”

  “He’s running late,” Sausage said.

  “We could use him as a coach for the team,” Sportcoat said gaily. “He can help us get the game rolling again.”

  “What game?”

  “The game against the Watch Houses. That’s what I come to talk to you about.”

  “Forget the game,” Sausage snapped. “You can’t show your face out here, Sport.”

  “What you chunking at me for? I ain’t the one out here making cha-cha at nine o’clock in the morning. Joaquin is the one you oughta be humping at. He should be taking numbers in his window right now. People got to get to work.”

  As if the band heard him, the music ground to a halt. Sportcoat looked up to see Joaquin heading inside.

  “Soup ain’t here yet!” someone said loudly.

  “I gotta open for business,” Joaquin said over his shoulder. He disappeared through the front door, followed by his band.

  “He ain’t worried about no business,” Sausage grumbled. “He wants to be inside when the shooting starts.”

  “What shooting?”

  Several people shoved past Sportcoat and Hot Sausage, forming a sloppy line beneath Joaquin’s window. Slowly, reluctantly, Joaquin opened the window and stuck his head out. After peering both ways to make sure the coast was clear, he began taking number bets.

  Sportcoat nodded at the window and said to Hot Sausage, “You gonna play today?”

  “Sport, get the hell outta here and back ins—”

  “Sausage!” a shrill voice hollered. “Are you gonna raise the flag or not?” Sausage had been interrupted by the high-pitched yammer of Miss Izi, who strode up with her hands folded across her chest, followed by Bum-Bum and Sister Gee. “We been waiting at the bench for a half hour. Where’s the doughnuts? Did you know Soup Lopez is back?”

  Sausage pointed to the sign over the building entrance. “Where you been? Alaska?”

  Miss Izi looked at the sign, then back at Sausage, until her gaze slipped over to Sportcoat and she blinked in surprise.

  “Oh, papi. What you doing here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “¿Papi, olvidaste lo que le hiciste a ese demonio Deems? Su banda de lagartos te va a rebanar como un plátano. You got to leave, papi.”

  Sister Gee stepped forward and said evenly to Sportcoat, “Deacon, the police came by the church asking for you.”

  “I’mma find that Christmas money, Sister. I told the pastor I’m gonna and I’m gonna.”

  “They wasn’t fretting about that. The
y was asking about somebody named Thelonius Ellis. You know him?”

  Sausage had taken a seat on the top step of the building entrance when the women arrived. From his seat on the step, Sausage looked up, stunned, and then blurted, “What they want me for? I didn’t shoot Deems!”

  At the mention of “Deems,” there was a pregnant silence. Several people standing in line to play numbers slipped away before placing their bets. The rest of the people stood in anxious silence, staring straight ahead, number papers in hand, edging forward, one eye in the direction of the flagpole where Deems worked, pretending not to have heard anything. This was juicy indeed, juicy enough to risk your life over but not juicy enough to get involved.

  “I didn’t know Thelonius Ellis was your name,” Sister Gee said to Hot Sausage. “I thought you was Ralph, or Ray . . . something or other.”

  “What difference do it make?”

  “Makes a big difference,” she said, exasperated. “It makes me out to be a liar to the police.”

  “You can’t be a liar ’bout what you don’t know,” Hot Sausage said. “The Bible says Jesus had many names.”

  “Well golly, Sausage, where’s it say in the Bible that you’re Jesus?”

  “I ain’t said I was Jesus. I said I ain’t stuck with just one name.”

  “Well, how many names you got?” Sister Gee demanded.

  “How many do a colored man need in this world?”

  Sister Gee rolled her eyes. “Sausage, you never said nothing about having no other name. I thought your real name was Ray Olen.”

  “You mean Ralph Odum, not Ray Olen. Ralph Odum. Same thing. It don’t matter. That’s not my real name nohow. Ralph Odum’s the name I gived to Housing when I come on staff twenty-four years ago. Ellis is my real name. Thelonius Ellis.” He shook his head, pursing his lips. “Now the police want me. What I done?”

  “They don’t want you, Sausage. They want the Deacon here. I reckon they called your name thinking you was him.”

  “Well there it is,” Hot Sausage fumed at Sportcoat, sucking his teeth. “You done pulled me into the swill again, Sport.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sister Gee asked.

  But Hot Sausage ignored her. Boiling, he glared at Sportcoat. “Now the cops is hunting me. And Deems is hunting you! You happy?”

  “This projects is going down!” Miss Izi exclaimed. “Everybody’s hunting everybody!” She tried to sound disconsolate but instead sounded almost happy. This was high-grade gossip. Delicious. Exciting. The numbers players still in line who were listening shifted lustily, edging closer to the conversation, almost gleeful, their ears wide open, waiting for the next tidbit.

  “How did this happen?” Sister Gee asked Sausage.

  “Oh, I bought an old Packard back in fifty-two. I wasn’t following the Ten Commandments back in them days, Sister. I had no license or papers or nothing when I come to New York, on account of I hoisted a shot, a sip, and a nip of spirits from time to time in them days. I bought that car and let Sport here register the dang thing for me. Sport’s good at talking to white folks. He went down to motor vehicles with my birth certificate and got the license and all the papers and everything. One colored looks just like another down there. So . . .”

  He removed his hat and wiped his head, glancing up at Sportcoat. “We keeps the license and switches off. One week he holds it. The next week I holds it. Now the cops is holding me to judgment on account of Sportcoat.” Sausage barked at Sportcoat, “Somebody who seen you drop Deems in the plaza must’ve seen you beating it to my boiler room and told the cops.” Then he said to Sister Gee, “They looking for him—with my name. Why I got to be burdened with his note? Only wrong I done to him is to place a bet.”

  “What bet?” Sister Gee asked.

  Sausage glanced at Joaquin in the betting window, who, along with the line of bettors, was openly staring at them. Joaquin looked chagrined but remained silent.

  “What difference do it make?” Hot Sausage said glumly. “I got bigger problems now.”

  “I’ll explain it to the police,” Sister Gee said. “I’ll tell them your real name.”

  “Don’t do that,” Sausage said quickly. “I got a warrant out for me. Back in Alabama.”

  Sister Gee, Miss Izi, and Sister Billings stared at each other in surprise. Joaquin, and several people in line, watched with interest as well. This confession was unexpected but juicy.

  “A warrant! Oh, that’s bad luck, papi!” Joaquin piped up from his window. “You good people, too, bro.” He said it so loudly that several people in line who had tuned out now tuned back in, staring at Hot Sausage.

  Sausage glanced at them and said, “Whyn’t you just put it on the radio, Joaquin?”

  “That does change the bet, though, papi,” Joaquin said.

  “Don’t try to twist out of it.” Hot Sausage sucked his teeth. “I won the bet fair and square.”

  “What bet?” Sister Gee said.

  “Well . . .” Sausage began, then trailed off. To Joaquin he said hotly, “I’d sleep in a hollow log before I give you a plugged nickel.”

  “Things happen, bro,” Joaquin said sympathetically again. “I understand. But I still want my cigar.”

  “I’d fertilize my toilet with ten cigars before I give you one!”

  “Could a grown-up speak here?” Sister Gee said impatiently. She turned to Sausage. “What was the bet?”

  Sausage didn’t address her, but rather turned to Sportcoat, looking sheepish. “Oh, it was about you, buddy—getting pulled in, arrested, y’see. I ain’t mean nothing by it. I’da bailed you out—if I could. Best thing for you is to get arrested, Sport. But now I got to worry about my own skin.” Hot Sausage looked away glumly, rubbing his jaw.

  “A warrant ain’t nothing, Sausage,” Sportcoat said. “The police gives ’em out all over. Rufus over at the Watch Houses got a warrant on him too. Back in South Carolina.”

  “He does?” Sausage brightened immediately. “For what?”

  “He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t no cat he killed,” Sausage snorted. “Rufus ain’t got no moderation. Who knows what he done? That’s the thing with a warrant. You don’t know what it’s for. When a person got a warrant on them, they coulda killed somebody!”

  There was a pregnant silence as Miss Izi, Bum-Bum, Sister Gee, Joaquin, Sportcoat, and several people in line stared at Hot Sausage, who sat on the top step, fanning himself with his porkpie hat. Eventually he noticed them staring and said, “Well. What y’all looking at me for?”

  “Did you . . . ?” Miss Izi asked.

  “Izi, keep quiet!” Joaquin barked.

  “Shut your talking hole, you evil gangster!” she snapped.

  “Go take drowning lessons, woman!”

  “Monkey!”

  “Ape!”

  “Me gustaría romperte a la mitad, pero quién necesita dos de ustedes!”

  “Will y’all quit!” Sausage shouted. “I ain’t ashamed to tell it. I was on a work crew in Alabama and runned off.” He looked at Sportcoat. “So there.”

  “That’s the difference between Alabama and South Carolina,” Sportcoat said proudly. “In my home country, a man on a work crew stays on the work crew till the job is done. We ain’t quitters in South Carolina.”

  “Can we rope this in and get to the problem!” Sister Gee said, her voice sharp. She turned to Sportcoat. “Deacon, you’re gonna have to go to the police. Deems was a wonderful boy. But the devil’s having his way with him right now. You can explain that to the police.”

  “I ain’t explaining nothing. I done him no wrong that I recall,” Sportcoat said.

  “You don’t remember humping Deems like a dog when you shot him?” Miss Izi said.

  “I heard t
hat too,” a woman in line at Joaquin’s window said to the man behind her.

  “I was right there,” Miss Izi said proudly. “He showed Deems who’s boss.”

  The woman laughed and turned to Sportcoat. “Ooooh-wee! You a bad man, Mr. Sportcoat! Oh, well. Better to be a fat man in a graveyard than a thin man in a stew.”

  “What’s that mean?” Sportcoat asked.

  “Means Deems is gonna come meddlin’. And you best not be around,” Hot Sausage said.

  “Deems ain’t gonna do nothing,” Sportcoat said. “I known him all his life.”

  “It’s not just him,” Sister Gee said. “It’s the folks he works for. I hear tell they’re worse than a bunch of root doctors.”

  Sportcoat waved his hand dismissively. “I ain’t come here to sit around talking all this who-shot-John nonsense. I come here,” he said, glaring at Hot Sausage, “to talk to a certain boiler man about my umpire suit, which I put up in his boiler room.”

  “Well, since we is on the subject of taking back things, where’s my driver’s license with your picture on it using my name?” Hot Sausage asked.

  “What you need that for?” Sportcoat said. “You’s in trouble enough. Plus it’s my week to hold it.”

  “It ain’t my fault that your past is bad.” Sausage held out his hand. “I’ll take it now, please. You won’t be needing it nohow.”

  Sportcoat shrugged and pulled out a weathered wallet, thick with papers, and from it produced the license, frayed around the edges, and handed it over. “Now gimme my umpire stuff so I can start up the game again. I’mma get these kids ’round here on the right track again.”

  “Is your cheese done slid off your cracker, Sport? These kids don’t want no baseball. Them days ended the minute Deems walked off the team.”

  “He didn’t walk off,” Sportcoat said. “I throwed him off for smoking them funny reefer cigarettes.”

  “Sport, you is more outta date than a Philadelphia nightclub. I know bartenders from Hong Kong smarter’n you. These children want tennis shoes now. And dungaree jackets. And dope. They whupping ass and robbing old folks to get it. Half of your baseball team works for Deems now.”