Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  “He stashed it!” The Governor paused. “Look, I had it before I went to prison. I couldn’t tell my wife about it. She’d already spent my dough on fuckin’ bagels. The statue wasn’t in a safe place. I told your poppa where it was when we were in Sing Sing. He got out two years ahead of me. He agreed to get it and hold it. I told him, ‘After I get out, when things cool off, I’ll come for it. And I’ll give you a piece of it.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ But he had that stroke in prison just before he got out, and I didn’t see him no more. I tried passing word to him when he was in the prison hospital, but he was gone before I could reach him. They released him after his stroke. He passed word to me after he got out. He sent a letter. It said, ‘Don’t worry. I got that little box of yours. It’s clean and safe and in the palm of God’s hand like that little song you used to sing.’ So I know he got it somehow. And I know he kept it someplace.”

  “In God’s hand? What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know. He just said the palm of God’s hand.”

  “You got the wrong guy then. My pop didn’t write that letter. He never went to church.”

  “Weren’t you Catholic?”

  “My mother dragged me to Saint Augustine till I was big enough to quit. But my father never went. Until he was dead, he never went into a church. We had his funeral. That’s when he went to church.”

  “Maybe he left it in a church. Or in his coffin.”

  Elefante thought for a moment. His mother did say she wanted his father’s coffin exhumed so she could get in the same grave. And Joe Peck had promised to do the job himself. The thought of that pea-brained idiot Joe Peck digging through his father’s remains, flipping his poppa’s corpse around, working through the pockets of his dad’s best suit, drilling through his poppa’s brains with a screwdriver, trying to find whatever the hell the fat girl’s name was that was worth three million dollars threw him, and for a moment Elefante felt out of breath. After a moment, he regained his composure and said: “He wouldn’t leave it in a church. He had no contact with churches. There’s no one in any church he’d trust. He wouldn’t be dumb enough to bury it with himself either. He wouldn’t do that to my mother.”

  “I agree,” the Governor said. “But you have a storage place. You move stuff.”

  “I looked through every single storage rental we have. The ones I have access to.”

  “What about the ones you don’t have access to?”

  “I guess I could get in them,” Elefante admitted. “But that’ll take time.”

  “Time I ain’t got,” the Governor said. “The guy who wants to buy, he won’t deal with nobody else. You don’t call this type of guy. He calls you. I’m stalling him. I told him I had to think about the deal. He’s skittish. He won’t like it if there’s a second person involved. As it is, I’m thinking he might make a move on me regardless. Which is the other reason I’m hoping you’ll dig it up.”

  And there it was, Elefante thought bitterly. He’s got nobody. If a big shot in Europe wants a fucking artifact worth an arm and a leg and the only stumbling block between him and that dough is a bagel maker and his daughter . . . well there it is.

  “I thought you told him you’re in Staten Island,” Elefante said.

  “People like that can find you,” the Governor said. “On the other hand, he’s like my brother Macy. These guys are fanatics. We got a little maneuvering room. I let him know that the minute I smell a rat, the statue is gone forever. Flushed down the toilet. Peeled to pieces. Tossed in the river. But I still think of Melissa here. So when I came to you . . . well, with you, knowing how your father was, I know I have at least one guy on my team who won’t cut and run.”

  Elefante was silent. “My team,” he thought. How the hell did I get on his team?

  The Governor sat up on the couch a moment, arched his back awkwardly, then reached under the couch and pulled out an envelope. “One more thing,” he said.

  He handed the envelope to Elefante, who instantly recognized the painful scrawls of his father’s handwriting, which toward the end of his life was shaky and big. The envelope was addressed to the Governor.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Your poppa sent this to me when I was in prison.”

  Elefante opened the envelope. Inside was a simple greeting card, with a picture of the old Cause docks, taken perhaps in the 1940s, the familiar Statue of Liberty in the distance. On the back was taped the traditional Irish blessing, obviously clipped from a book or a newspaper:

  May the road rise up to meet you.

  May the wind be always at your back.

  May the sun shine warm upon your face,

  The rains fall soft upon your fields.

  And until we meet again,

  May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

  Next to that was a sketch, in his father’s hand, of a tiny box. Inside the box was a wooden stove, with small bits of firewood, crudely drawn, and a cross above it. The box had five sides; on one of the sides was a circle with a stick figure drawn in the middle, its arms outstretched.

  “If this weren’t his handwriting, I wouldn’t believe he’d drawn it,” Elefante said.

  “Do you recognize anything?”

  “No.”

  “It’s an Irish blessing,” the Governor said.

  “I figured that much,” Elefante said. “But what’s with the firebox and the firewood?”

  “Do you have a storage locker with something like that in it?” the Governor asked.

  “No. That box could be anything. A garage. A house. A milk crate. A cabin in the woods. It could be anywhere.”

  “Yes, it could,” the Governor said. “But where would Guido Elefante go?”

  Elefante thought a long moment before he answered.

  “My father,” he said dryly, “never went anywhere. He never went three blocks outside the Cause District. Hardly ever. He couldn’t walk very well. Even if he could, he wouldn’t go far. Maybe to the store in Bay Ridge once in a while that sold food from Genoa. There was a place on Third Avenue that sold Genoese stuff, focaccia, cheese mostly from the old country, but he hardly went there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He never went anywhere, I tell you. He went to the boxcar every once in a while. He went to the storage place hardly ever. Maybe three times my whole life I saw him walk in there. I took care of the storage place, not him.”

  “What else is around you?”

  “Nothing. Just the housing projects. The subway. Some abandoned buildings. That’s it.”

  The Governor looked at him oddly. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “That box is somewhere. Sure as I’m living, it’s sticking out like a blind cobbler’s thumb someplace. Somewhere your poppa put it.”

  “How would I know where?”

  The Governor yawned. “He’s your father,” he said sleepily. “A son knows his father.”

  Elefante stared at the paper in his hands a long time. He wanted to say, “But you weren’t my father’s son. You don’t know how difficult he was. He was impossible to talk to.” But instead he said, “That’s not gonna be easy.”

  He looked over at the Governor. He was talking to himself. The old man had fallen asleep. As quietly as he could, he rose from the rocker, stepped out the door, and slipped silently out into the hallway just as Melissa was coming up the stairs.

  14

  RAT

  Bunch sat at the table of his dining room in his Bed-Stuy brownstone and chewed a chicken wing. A huge spread of wings and a platter of barbecue sauce were on the table. He motioned to the young man seated at the table across from him. “Help yourself, young brother.”

  Lightbulb, Deems Clemens’s right-hand man, reached deep into the chicken wings, his fingers scooping out two, and then dipped them in the sauce. He sucked down t
he tender meat and reached for the plate again.

  “Slow your roll, bro,” Bunch said. “The chicken ain’t going nowhere.”

  Lightbulb still ate fast—too fast, Bunch thought. Either the kid was starving or he might be a dope user already. He guessed the latter. The kid was awful thin and wore long sleeves to cover what might be tracks in his arms.

  Lightbulb glanced at the end of the table where Earl, fresh from his painful electrocution in Sausage’s basement boiler room, silently scratched at a crossword puzzle, his right arm in a sling and his head bandaged from where the bottle had smashed him at Soup’s coming-home party. Earl kept his head down.

  “So tell me about Deems,” Bunch said.

  “What you wanna know?” Lightbulb asked.

  “How’d he win the flagpole?” he asked. “That’s the busiest section of the Cause. Who was doing business there before Deems took over?”

  “I want the flagpole plaza, by the way,” Lightbulb said. “If this works out.”

  “How about a flagpole up your ass. I asked you about how Deems won it. I didn’t ask you what you want.”

  “I’m just saying I can do a better job than him. I’d need the flagpole to do it.”

  “Who you think you talking to, kid, Santa Claus? I don’t care about your needs. You ain’t done nothing so far other than say what you need and lick your nasty fingers while eating my chicken.”

  Lightbulb blinked and started in. “Back when we was all playing baseball, Deems had an older cousin named Rooster. Rooster started selling first. He was making so much bank we quit ball to work under him. We ran customers to him. Junkies on the street. White boys from New Jersey cruising through, like that. Rooster got killed by somebody who tried to rob him. So Deems took over.”

  “Just like that? Y’all just let Deems be top dog?”

  “Well . . . he done some things, Deems did.”

  “Like?”

  “Well . . . a boy named Mark Bumpus was the first guy. He dead now.”

  “How’d he get that way? Was he a heavy sleeper? Did he fall down a flight of stairs?”

  “Deems set him up.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, Rooster died while we was all in jail. When we come out, Bumps—Mark Bumpus—ran things.”

  “And Deems didn’t mind? Even though Rooster was his cousin?”

  “We got, like, forty dollars a day. That’s a lot of money.”

  “And Deems didn’t say nothing?”

  “I got to back up a minute to tell it right,” Lightbulb said. “See, we was all in Spofford together,” Lightbulb said, referring to the juvenile center. “Me, Beanie, Sugar, Deems, and Bumps. Deems and Bumps got into it in Spofford, in the rec room. It wasn’t over Rooster. He was already dead.”

  “Over what then?”

  “The TV. Deems wanted to watch baseball. Bumps didn’t. They got into it. Deems whipped up on Bumps pretty bad. Then Deems’s grandfather visited and gave Deems fifty dollars. The food was bad in Spofford, so Deems went to the commissary and bought some rice and beans. He shared it with his boys: me, Beanie, Sugar. Bumps wasn’t his boys. When Bumps asked Deems for some rice and beans, Deems said no, I just share with my boys. So that night Bumps and a couple of his friends caught Deems alone in the shower and cut him up bad. They took his rice and beans and the rest of that fifty dollars.

  “Deems never forgot that,” Lightbulb said. “Bumps got out of Spofford before Deems did. When he come out Spofford a few months later, Bumps had taken over the plaza. Bumps was hot, man, selling dope, weed, acid, everything. By that time most of us was out of Spofford. We all needed money, so we went to work for Bumps. He paid forty dollars a day. He even hired Deems. He told Deems, ‘Forget all that stuff from Spofford. You’re with me now. We boys now.’

  “Deems ran customers to Bumps better than any of us. Deems knew how to find dopeheads. Deems would go all the way downtown to get customers and run them over to Bumps. It got so that Bumps would let Deems carry dope to his far-off customers, because Bumps was rolling. He was selling to everybody. That’s when Deems got him.

  “He sent Deems out with thirty grams of coke to this Jamaican guy out in Hollis, Queens. Deems switched out the dope for some white soap flakes and flour and gived the bag to the guy. The guy used it and damn near died. He called on the phone and Deems had Beanie answer the telephone and Beanie told the guy ‘Fuck off.’ So the guy got his revenge. Deems took a bunch of us to the top of Building Nine where we could wait to watch the ants come—”

  “What ants?”

  “It don’t matter. Just a bunch of ants that crawl up there every year. But you can see the plaza from there. You could see Bumps out there working. Deems said, ‘Remember my rice and beans when we was in juvy? I’mma square that with punk-ass Bumps. Just watch.’

  “Sure enough, a couple of nights later this pretty Jamaican girl come around to the flagpole saying to Bumps she wanted some dope but didn’t have no money. She offered to, you know, service his rod if he let her shoot up afterward. Bumps said okay. He followed her to the alley behind the plaza and them Jamaicans was waiting for him. They damn near killed him. Cut his face, down his forehead, all down his eye, oh man, messed him up. They left him like that.

  “Soon as they started whipping on him, Deems ran off the roof. He run off soon as they started cutting Bumps up. The minute them Jamaicans left Bumps laying in the alley, Deems came out the back door of Building Nine and ran over to Bumps holding a steaming pot of rice and beans. He must’ve had it cooking in his house. He said, ‘Here’s your rice and beans, Bumps.’ He poured that whole pot on him.

  “Bumps got crippled from that. He was never the same. He got out the dope game altogether. He tried fooling around on the dock, smuggling, trying to make money that way. He didn’t last long. He was walking in the Elephant’s territory then. You ever heard of the Elephant?”

  “I heard of him.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the last anybody seen of Bumps.”

  Lightbulb paused, then reached for another piece of chicken and dipped it in the sauce. “That’s how Deems won the flagpole,” he said.

  “Why didn’t somebody from Bumps’s crew take the flagpole plaza back?” Bunch asked.

  “First of all, that ain’t the only thing Deems done, bro. Second, ain’t nobody smarter in the Cause than Deems.”

  “So people are afraid of him?”

  “Well, yes and no. The old folks in the Cause like Deems. He was a church boy. The church folks sit around the flagpole in the mornings and talk and bullshit. Deems stays out of their way. He don’t run his dope till the afternoons, when the church folks leave the plaza. He don’t allow it before then. He’s funny about them church people. He don’t wanna make the church people mad. Some of ’em’s old, but they can cause trouble. Some of ’em will shoot, y’know.”

  “I do know.” Here Bunch glanced disgustedly at Earl, whose face was shoved so deep into his crossword puzzle he appeared to be cleaning the puzzle with his nose.

  “Plus Deems was the star on the Cause Houses baseball team,” Lightbulb said. “That’s Sportcoat’s old team. Deems’s father wasn’t around. His mother drank a lot. Deems’s grandfather raised him. And his grandfather and Sportcoat was buddies. That’s why Sportcoat ain’t dead yet, I guess. Because Deems was on his baseball team and his grandfather was all for him doing that. He could play the shit outta some baseball. When his grandfather died, he left all that and went to selling the flour and rock. Good as he was in baseball, that’s how good he is at moving that dip. Deems thinks stuff out. All day long, he thinks how to move that powder. He’s to hisself too. He don’t chase girls too much. He don’t watch TV. And he don’t forget. If you cross Deems, he’ll let a year pass. Two years even. I seen him walk up to guys and choke them till they fall asleep for stuff they did to him two years before that they forgot all about.
I seen him put a hot iron to a guy’s neck to get the name of somebody who stole from him so long ago ain’t nobody remembered it but Deems. He’s smart, bro, like I said. He ain’t been in jail since Spofford. He don’t carry a knife. Don’t carry a gun. He’s organized. He pays little-kid watchers to set on the buildings and watch out. He got watchers in the plaza. They got the weapons. Not him.”

  “So what’s the matter with him now?”

  “He’s too strict, Mr. Bunch. He wants to be a cop now. Before he became a punk and let Sportcoat shoot him, he would sell to everybody. Now he won’t sell to grandmothers. He won’t sell to little kids. He won’t sell to nobody from the church. He don’t want nobody smoking near the church, or robbing the church, or falling asleep in the door of the church, like that. And like if somebody beats up their girlfriend over something, he won’t sell to ’em. He wants to be telling folks what they should be doing. That’s why Sportcoat shot him, I think, because he got pussified, talking about going back to baseball and all this, ordering folks around, telling folks what to do instead of making that money. It ain’t gonna be long before the Watch Houses come take our territory. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “What’s that I’m hearing about you saying Deems wants Joe Peck to supply him?”

  Lightbulb glanced at Earl.

  “Did I say that?” Lightbulb said.

  “I’m asking if he said it. Did he say that or not?” Bunch asked.

  Lightbulb paused. He had told that to Earl in confidence, a kind of extra carrot he’d dangled to Earl to get himself an audience with the boss. But he realized now, looking at Bunch’s operation for the first time, the brownstone, dilapidated on the outside and polished to a sheen on the inside, the busy factory a block away that Earl had shown him full of employees processing heroin, the large cars, and the fabulous modern furniture of Mr. Bunch’s dining room, that this man was a major roller. Bunch, Lightbulb realized, was a real-life gangster. He realized, too late, that he was in over his head.

  A cone of silence enveloped the room as Bunch stared at him, unblinking. Realizing his response could be a death sentence for Deems, Lightbulb said, “I might’ve said it. But I don’t know if Deems really meant it.”