Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  Peck’s face flushed and Elefante watched, half-amused, as Peck beat back the rage, ignoring the insult. “Thing is . . .” Peck glanced through the front windshield, then through the rear one, to make sure no one was nearby listening. “The kid was shot by some old geezer. So my customer in Bed-Stuy sends one of his guys to even things out. He’s tracking the old gunner to squeeze him. But the old bum don’t wanna get caught.”

  “Maybe he’s a humble man who don’t like attention.”

  “Can’t you fucking listen for a minute?”

  Elefante felt his pulse racing. He resisted the urge to reach across the seat, yank Peck out by his shirt collar, and part his pretty, girly face with his fist. “Get your blockers outta the backfield and get moving downfield, would ya, Joe?”

  “What?”

  “Just tell me what you want. I got stuff to do.”

  “The guy they sent out to even things, he screwed up. The cops got hold of him. Now he’s singing to the Seven-Six. A bird I know over there tells me the guy is singing like a robin—telling the cops everything. So before they cut him loose this snitch tells the cops that my main colored customer up in Bed-Stuy wants to cut me out. The coloreds don’t want me supplying them no more. How do you like that? Ungrateful niggers! I set them up and now they wanna double-cross me. They’re gonna start a race war.”

  Elefante listened in silence. This is what happens when you deal with people you don’t trust, he thought bitterly. It doesn’t matter if it’s drugs or cereal. Same problem.

  “I ain’t involved,” he said.

  “Gorvino won’t like it.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Yeah . . . well, not yet. I talked to his guy, Vincent. He says Gorvino will get back to me, but Bed-Stuy is our area, that’s what Vincent says. He says we got to deal with it.”

  “It’s your area, Joe. Not mine.”

  “It’s our dock.”

  “But it’s your dope.”

  He saw Peck’s face darken; he was fighting back his boiling temper, just a string away from busting loose. With great effort, Peck checked himself again.

  “Would you roll with me just this one time, Tommy?” he said. “Just this once? Please? Move this Lebanon shipment for me and I won’t ask you ever again. Just this one fucking time. With this one shipment, I’ll make enough to muscle them niggers off and tell them to fuck off forever. And I can clean up things with Gorvino too.”

  “Clean up things?”

  “I’m into him for a few thousand,” Joe said, adding hastily, “but I get this shipment and I can clean that up easy and I’m outta dope forever. You’re right, by the way. You’ve always been right about the dope. It’s too risky. This is my last job. I’ll clean things up and I’m out of it.”

  Elefante stared at Peck in silence for a long moment.

  “C’mon, Tommy,” Peck pleaded. “For old times’ sake. You haven’t taken one goddamn shipment in six months. Not one. I’ll give ya eight grand. It’ll take an hour. One fucking hour. Straight off a freighter, to the dock, and out. No unloading tires or nothing fancy. Just grab the stuff and get it to me. One hour. That’s how long it’ll take to get it outta your hair. One hour. You can’t make that much slinging cigarettes in a month.”

  Elefante nervously tapped one hand on the car roof. The GTO rumbled, shaking, and Elefante felt his resolve shaking with it. Just an hour, he thought, to risk everything. It sounded easy. But then his mind ran through the scenario quickly. If the crap came in from Lebanon, it’d be on a freighter, probably out of Brazil or Turkey. That meant getting a fast boat to retrieve it, because a freighter would not dock in the Cause. The waters were deep enough, but only barges came to Brooklyn, which meant probably taking the speedboat to the middle of the harbor from the Jersey side to be safe. That meant slipping past harbor patrol on that side, grabbing the loot in the middle of the harbor, racing back to shore, getting the stuff to an untraceable car that would likely have to be stolen, and then moving it to wherever Joe Peck wanted it. Knowing how the feds were everywhere now, it might be that Peck had the feds watching his front door and the Gorvino family watching the back door, since he owed the Gorvinos money. He didn’t like it.

  “Get Ray out at Coney Island.”

  Peck’s temper broke through. He banged the steering wheel furiously with his fist. “What kind of fucking friend are you?!”

  Elefante’s top teeth met the bottom of his folded lip as he felt the dreadful silence descend on him. The day, once hopeful and full of promise, with a pleasurable trip to the Bronx ahead to sound out a possible treasure, was ruined. Even if that so-called treasure was the pipe dream of an old Irish con artist who was likely full of shit, the idea of tracking it down to zero was still a reprieve from the day-to-day of his own trapped, screwed-up life. Now the lightness of the day was gone. Instead, a familiar seething spread inside him, like a black oil slick sliding into place, and the silence took over. It wasn’t rage, uncontrolled and raw, but rather a cool anger that launched a terrible, unstoppable determination within him to squelch problems with a speed and dispatch that even the most hardened mobsters of the Gorvino family found unsettling. His ma said it was the Genoan in him, because Genoans learned to live unhappily and trudged forward no matter what, just finishing things up, dealing with it, bearing up doggedly till the job was finished. The Genoans had been doing that, she said, ever since the ancient days of Caesar. He’d been to Genoa with his parents, and he’d seen it himself, a city of dull, exhausting hills, the dreary, ancient, gray buildings, the solid stone walls, the bleak cold weather and miserable rain-soaked cobblestone and brick streets, the unhappy souls wandering about in tight circles, from home to work and back home again, grimly walking past one another, tight-lipped, pale, never smiling, marching stolidly down the small, drenched streets as the cold sea splashed over the sidewalks and even over them and them not noticing it, the smell of stinking sea and nearby fisheries climbing onto their clothing, into their miserable tiny houses, their drapes, and even into their food, the people ignoring it, plodding forward with grim determination like robots, having accepted their fate as unhappy sons of bitches living in the shadow of happy Nice, France, to the west and under the sunshine disdain of their poor dark cousins to the south, Florence and Sicily, who laughed like dancing Negroes, happy and content to be the black Ethiopians of Europe, while their smiling cousins on the Mediterranean Sea, the French, sunned themselves topless on the lovely beaches of the Riviera. All the while the hardworking, joyless Genoans marched on grimly, eating their fucking focaccia. No one appreciated Genoan focaccia except the Genoans. “Best bread in the world,” his father used to say. “It’s the cheese.” Elefante tried it once and understood then why Genoans were a miserable lot, because life was nothing compared to the delicious taste of Genoan food; once they got to the food, the business of life, whatever that business was—loving, sleeping, standing at the bus stop, shoving each other at the grocery store, killing each other—had to be done with speed so as to get to the food, and they did it with such silent grit, such determination and speed, that to get in the way of it was like stepping into a hurricane. Christopher Columbus, his mother pointed out, was a Genoan who wasn’t looking for America. He was looking for spices. For food. A real Genoan, she said, would hang themselves before they’d let anyone destroy the one or two things in life that gave them a little relief from the difficulties of the devil’s world.

  Elefante found the whole business of his own anger frightening, because that’s what his great furious silences were. Relief. A pressure cooker blown open. To his utter disgust, he’d found himself liking when the great silences came upon him. He hated himself later for those moments. He’d done some terrible things during those times. Many times afterward, in his darkest hours, in the late nights when Brooklyn slept and the harbor was dark, lying in bed in his lonely, empty brownstone with no wife and no children snoring in
another room, with his widowed mother clomping around the house in her late husband’s construction boots, the things he did during the spells when the silence came upon him tortured him with a searing brutality that caused him to sit up in the dark and check his pajamas for blood, feeling like his soul had been sliced into quarters, sweat bursting out of his pores and tears running down his face. But there was nothing to do then. The moment was over. The rage had already poured out of him like lava, unrelenting and merciless, steaming over whoever or whatever was in the way, and the sorry soul on the receiving end saw nothing more than a blank stare of cold clarity. Were they seeing the eyes of Tommy Elefante, the lonely man with the kind heart who ordered his obedient crew to pull poor old colored women out of the harbor who had landed there for one reason or other, and why shouldn’t they, since New York was shit? Or were they seeing the eyes of Tommy Elefante, the shy Brooklyn bachelor who dreamed of escaping Brooklyn to move to a farm in New Hampshire and marry a fat country girl and even had the looks and charm to find one, but was too kind to drag any woman into his life of brutality and stealth, which had made his mother a prison widow and half-mad eccentric, a life that had diced his father’s kindness into bits? Perhaps they saw neither; perhaps they saw only the outer shell: the silent, cold, brutal Elephant, whose calculating calm and mum stare said, “You are finished,” and who dispatched them with the matter-of-fact speed and brutality of a Category 5 hurricane, ripping everything apart as he went. The Elephant’s stare reduced the hardest men to terror. He’d seen the fright explode across their faces when his silent business face emerged, and try as he could, he could not wipe those expressions of fright from his own memory, the most recent being the colored kid Mark Bumpus and his two hooligans at the abandoned factory on Vitali Pier three years ago, when he’d caught them red-handed trying to steal fourteen grand from him. I’ll help you, Bumpus had pleaded. I’ll help you fix things, he wailed. But it was too late.

  Peck found himself staring at Elefante’s silence at that moment, a silence so palpable that to Joe, it was almost like hearing it and seeing it at the same time, for Peck had experienced it several times when they were teenagers, and his own inner alarm sounded off as loud as the blaring of a ship’s bullhorn. Peck realized he’d gone too far. His angry facial features twisted into blinking alarm as Elefante’s blank stare combed his face, the interior of the car, and Joe’s hands, which, they both noted, remained on the steering wheel—where they should be, Joe noted ruefully—and had better stay.

  “Don’t come at me like that again, Joe. Find somebody else.”

  Elefante withdrew from the GTO and stood with his hands at his sides as Joe threw the GTO in gear and roared off. Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face. A dreamless, friendless, futureless, sorry-ass New York guy.

  Elefante watched the GTO turn the corner. He sighed and headed back to his Lincoln. He slowly slid his key into the lock, entered the car, and sat behind the steering wheel in silence, staring. He sat in the soft leather of the car for several long moments. Finally, he spoke aloud.

  “I wish,” he said softly, “somebody would love me.”

  12

  MOJO

  Sportcoat sat on a crate inside Sausage’s boiler room clasping a bottle of King Kong. He was in no hurry now. The disappointment of chasing the bottle of brandy around the plaza before it was destroyed by Soup that morning was softened by this pit stop at Sausage’s headquarters. Sausage was nowhere to be found and that was fine. Sportcoat had spent the rest of morning there, cooling his heels with some Kong. He felt better now. Evened out. Noooooo hurry, he thought happily, clasping the bottle. He thought he might get up to look at the clock to check the time, but by the tilt of sunlight in the tiny basement window he got the general idea. Afternoon. He stretched and yawned. He was supposed to be at work at the old lady’s garden on Silver Street at least two hours ago. He tried for a moment to remember her name, but couldn’t. It didn’t matter. It was Italian and ended with an “i” and she paid cash, that’s what was important. She didn’t mind too much if he was late—he always stayed late if he arrived late—but she had seemed a bit unsteady on her feet in the past few weeks. Getting old, he thought wryly. You got to be strong to get old. He was about to put the Kong away and head out when Hettie suddenly appeared.

  “If you gonna come at me hanking about what happened at Soup’s party today, don’t bother,” he said.

  She chortled bitterly. “I don’t care what you done,” she said. “Fact is, when you walk about being spit on, it don’t much matter what else you think you done.”

  “Who spit on me? Nobody spit on me.”

  “You spit on yourself.”

  “Get gone with that foolishness. I’m going to work.”

  “Well git on then.”

  “If it pleases me to stop for a bracer while I ruminates on getting my baseball game going again, that’s my business.”

  “That game don’t mean nothing to these children around here,” she said soberly.

  “How would you know? You didn’t see a game I umped in ten years.”

  “You didn’t invite me in ten years,” she said.

  That stumped him. Like most things he did most of his adult life, he couldn’t remember exactly what happened, largely because he was drunk at the time, so he said, “I was the best umpire the Cause Houses ever seen. I gived joy to everyone.”

  “Except your own wife.”

  “Oh hush.”

  “I was lonely in my marriage,” she said.

  “Stop complaining, woman! Food on the table. Roof over our heads. What else you want? Where’s the damn church money, by the way? I’m in a heap of trouble on account of it!”

  He lifted the Kong to his lips and gulped down a long swallow. She watched him silently, then after a moment said, “Some of it’s not your fault.”

  “Sure ain’t. You the one hid that money.”

  “I ain’t talking about that,” she said, almost pensively. “I’m talking about the old days when you was a child. Everything ever said to you or done to you back then was at the expense of your own dignity. You never complained. I loved that about you.”

  “Oh, woman, leave my people out of it. They long dead.”

  She watched him thoughtfully. “And now here you are,” she said sadly, “an old man funning around a ball field, making folks laugh. Even the boys don’t follow you no more.”

  “They’ll follow me plenty when I get ’em back on the field. But I got to get off the hook ’bout them Christmas Club chips first. You kept the money in a little green box, I remember that. Where’s the box?”

  “The church got plenty mo
ney.”

  “You mean the box in the church?”

  “No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.”

  “Where’s it at, woman?!”

  “You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now.

  “Stop talking in circles, dammit! Pastor declares the church got three thousand dollars in claims for that money. We got liars falling out of the trees now. There’s more folks at Five Ends on Sunday mornings hankering about that money than you’d see in a month of Easter Sundays. Every one of ’em’s got eyes for that box. Digs Weatherspoon says he got four hundred dollars in there, and that fool ain’t had two nickels to rub together since Methuselah got married. What I’mma do about that?”

  She sighed. “When you love somebody, their words oughta be important enough for you to listen.”

  “Stop lumping on about nothing!”

  “I’m telling you what you wanna hear, fool.”

  Then she was gone.

  He sat in a huff for several minutes. There was no money in the church. He and Hot Sausage had searched the small building a dozen times. He felt thirsty and turned the bottle of Kong, only to discover it was dry. But there were other joy juice hiding places in that basement. He rose, dropped to one knee, and ran his hand under a nearby cupboard, finding it bare, then heard, over his shoulder, the sound of the door opening and saw the back of Hot Sausage’s head as Sausage walked in and strode out of sight behind a large generator on the other side of the room. He said, “Sausage?”

  There was no answer. He could hear Sausage grunt and the clattering of tools being moved around. So he said, “You ain’t got to hide from me. There was three bottles of Kong down here to my recollection.”

  As if in answer, there was a sparking sound and the huge generator fired up with a roar, the sound filling the room. Sportcoat rose and shuffled around to the side of the generator to find Hot Sausage nearly prone on the floor, stretched out with his head inside the motor of the same model of ancient roaring electric generator that befuddled Rufus in the Watch Houses boiler room. Sausage stretched out on his hip sideways, offered a quick sullen glance, then turned his attention back to the generator, which sputtered unhappily.