Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  Bunch sat for a moment, looking thoughtful, then the tension seemed to ease out of him. He spoke softly. “I appreciate you coming by, young blood. I appreciate you letting me and my man here know you got our best interests at heart.”

  “So I get the flagpole?”

  “I’mma give you a break on that,” Bunch said, reaching in his pocket and pulling out a roll of crisp bills.

  Lightbulb smiled, relieved, grateful, and felt a sudden burst of guilt. “I just wanna say: I like Deems, Mr. Bunch. We go back a long way. But like I said, he wanna be a cop now. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I understand,” Bunch said calmly. He slowly, deliberately counted out four fifty-dollar bills and slid them across the table to Lightbulb.

  “Take that and git gone.”

  “Do I get the flagpole?”

  “Can a donkey fly?”

  Lightbulb seemed confused but didn’t speak at first, then asked, “Does that mean yes?”

  Bunch ignored that. “You want a chicken wing on your way out?”

  Lightbulb, flummoxed, found it suddenly hard to breathe. “So I don’t get the flagpole?”

  “I’ll think on it.”

  “I done told you everything like I said I would. What do I get now?”

  Bunch shrugged. “You get two hundred dollars. You can get a lot with that. Some soup. A bottle of beer. Some poontang. Even get a job with it in some places. I don’t care what you get, so long as you stay out my business. And if I ever see your face here again, I’ll part it with a hammer.”

  Lightbulb’s eyes widened. “What’d I do wrong?”

  Bunch turned to Earl. “He rats his own boy out. Rats out the guy who gave him his own rice and beans in the joint. The guy who gave him food from his own mouth practically. And he comes to me saying he wants to work for me?”

  “Dig thaaaat,” Earl said. He stood, menacingly.

  Lightbulb, watching Earl out of the corner of his eye, slid his hand over to the money on the table. Bunch’s hand suddenly slammed down on his.

  “Need I remind you, young brother, to forget us?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because we will not forget you. Now git.”

  Lightbulb snatched the two hundred dollars off the table and fled.

  After the front door closed, Bunch shrugged and reached for the newspaper. “We’ll get back every penny of that dough. He’s skin popping now.”

  “Dig thaaaat.”

  Bunch shot an irritated look at Earl. “You mucked it up, man.”

  “I can fix it,” Earl said.

  “You had three shots at it already. You get your head banged in twice, then get shocked like a clown. You’re like the Three Stooges, bro, with a bag full of excuses. You made it worse.”

  “You said don’t kill him. Killing and hurting’s different. You hurt a guy, you gotta make so he can’t see you, so he can’t rat. Taking him out is—”

  “Something I ain’t asked you to do, bro.”

  Bunch reached for a chicken wing, dipping it in the sauce and chewing slowly as he scoured the newspaper. “The game’s changed, Earl. I should’ve watched Deems closer.”

  “Lemme even it out, Bunch. It’s my load. Let me carry it.”

  Bunch wasn’t listening. He had placed the newspaper down and was staring out the window. There was so much to think about.

  “Peck says this big shipment from Lebanon is coming soon. He says he’s got a dock for it. But that idiot’s so dumb he lights up a room by leaving it. And now this crap with this old motherfucker who shot Deems. If we can’t shake up an old drunk, how the fuck we gonna run Peck’s operation?” He shook his head, biting his bottom lip angrily. “All my luck is junior grade.”

  Earl felt the same way. He sat in silence, studying his fingers atop the crossword puzzle. His nerves felt as if they were sitting on a razor blade. He’d already been collared twice by that white cop, Potts, who’d promised him he’d look the other way when the cops dropped the hammer on Bunch—if he flipped on Bunch, which Earl had agreed to do with trepidation. But now, sitting before Bunch, he realized he’d underestimated Bunch’s cleverness and forgotten the power of his rage, which seemed to ooze off him. If Bunch found him out, he was cooked. That suddenly seemed a possibility. Worse, the old woman from the Cause had recognized him as Reverend Harris’s son. His father, he felt, was torturing him from the grave.

  “I can straighten out the old man,” Earl said.

  “Don’t need to,” Bunch said matter-of-factly. “There’s a nine-thirty train coming in tonight from Richmond. Take my car down to Penn Station in the city and pick up Harold Dean. You can do that without mucking it up, can’t ya?”

  “We don’t need Harold Dean!”

  “You think I’m running a summer camp? If Deems convinces Peck to sell to him instead of us, we’ll be buying our groceries with Green Stamps, brother. We’re done. Nobody will sell to us. Not Roy and them Italians out in Brighton Beach. Nobody from the West Side. Nobody in Harlem. It’s the Elephant’s dock or nothing. Peck’s the only one who’s still got a line to the Elephant. If Deems convinces Peck to go with him, then he’s got the Elephant’s dock, too, and we’re outta business. Deems has got to go. And Peck. We got to flatten things out, get everything back to zero, before that Lebanon thing comes in. I’ll talk to the Elephant myself. But first let’s get rid of the old man. What’s his name?”

  “Something . . . Sport Jacket, they call him.”

  “Whatever the fuck he is, he got to be put to sleep. Now. Get off your spine and get Harold Dean. Make sure Harold Dean does the old man first. Nobody in the Cause has seen HD; that one will be quick and easy.”

  15

  YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S COMING

  Dominic Lefleur of Building 9 spent days apologizing to Bum-Bum for starting the fight at Soup Lopez’s coming-home party. He “accidentally” ran into her on three separate occasions as she went about her business. The first time she was coming out of Five Ends. She had gone inside to place a few cans of beans in the pantry, and when she emerged he happened to be outside, which gave him the opportunity to explain that the doll he tried to give Sportcoat was not bad luck.

  “It’s a custom back home in Haiti,” he said. When she seemed doubtful, he explained defensively that black Americans had their own rituals: black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, carrying a raw potato in the left pocket for rheumatism, or “holding a copper coin under your tongue during coitus.”

  “Coitus?” she asked.

  “Doing the nature thing,” Dominic said. “You hold the copper coin under your tongue during . . . coitus . . . to keep from getting pregnant. My first wife was from Tennessee.”

  Bum-Bum received this information with a snort. “What did they feed her down there, smog? I never ever heard such nastiness. Anyway, that ain’t the same as witchery.” Still, she let him walk her home.

  The next time he “happened” to be across the street from the wall of Jesus painted on the back side of Five Ends Baptist, where she stopped every morning on the way to work to silently pray for the destruction of her ex-husband who ran off to Alaska, that his testicles might be pressed in a juice maker or lopped off with a saw. Dominic happened to be marveling at the wonderful artistry of the garbage piled high on the back wall of the church under the painting of Jesus—garbage that the church sexton, Sportcoat, had somehow forgotten to haul to the curb, being that he’d unexpectedly received a bottle of Haitian Creation from his wonderful neighbor Dominic that very afternoon, who had supplied it with the hope it would spark a binge and Sportcoat would forget the garbage altogether. Which is exactly what happened. That left Dominic with the task of informing Bum-Bum that since they happened to be at Five Ends together on a Tuesday morning when sanitation picked up, it was their civic duty as residents of the Cause and respecters of all religions to clean up the house of the
Lord, as it wouldn’t be right to leave garbage setting right under Jesus’s nose for a full week before sanitation came again. Bum-Bum muttered that Five Ends’ rival church, Mount Tabernacle, put its trash out faithfully, and Five Ends’ garbage was Sportcoat’s business, not hers, plus she was dressed for work in all white, being a home care attendant. But she agreed that no Christian person in their right mind could walk away while Jesus’s painting stood above a pile of garbage. Which gave them a full twenty minutes of setting out the garbage that normally took thirty seconds, since Dominic refused to let her dirty her uniform and did all the lifting while he talked. That gave him twenty minutes to explain to Bum-Bum what a mojo could do.

  “Mojos,” he said patiently, as he swung a half-filled garbage bag toward the curb, “can work on a person for miles and miles.”

  “How many miles?” she asked.

  “A hundred miles. Five hundred miles. A thousand miles even,” he said, marching toward the curb as she followed. “As far away as, say, Alaska.”

  Bum-Bum, standing at the edge of the street in front of the garbage, worked hard to keep the lightbulb that went off in her brain from showing in her face. She frowned. So even the Haitian Sensation knew about her husband’s running off to Alaska. She wondered if he’d heard the part about her ex taking up with a man. Probably, she thought. She shrugged. “It’s better to pray for the saving of an enemy’s soul than their ruination,” she said, “but tell me about it anyhow,” and allowed him to walk her to the subway as he explained the magic of rituals.

  The third time he “happened” to be passing through her building, Building 17—a good fifteen-minute walk to her third-floor unit from his own apartment on the fifth floor of Building 9—it was a warm night, and Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” played out the window of an upper apartment. He arrived holding a plate of Haitian mayi moulen ak sòs pwa, poul an sòs—cornmeal with beans and stewed chicken. He knocked on her door, holding the plate and the doll, which he had ripped in half. “I’m going to make a pillow out of it,” he explained, then handed her the plate and asked her out to the movies. Bum-Bum refused. “I’m a Christian woman and I don’t do worldly things,” she said firmly. “But I’m going to Five Ends tomorrow morning. We need folding chairs. And Mount Tabernacle is offering us some.”

  “I thought Tabernacle and Five Ends don’t get along,” Dominic said.

  “We are Christian people, Mr. Lefleur. Their music is too loud and they fall out and speak in tongues and so forth when they gets filled with the Holy Spirit, and we don’t do that here. But the book of Hebrews twelve fourteen says ‘Strive for peace with everyone,’ which means Mount Tabernacle too. Plus my best friend, Octavia, is a deaconess there and everybody knows the police is trying to shut our church down for protecting old Sportcoat, who helped me put in my washing machine even though Housing says I’m not supposed to have one. Mount Tabernacle is with us for sure. We’ve always gotten along.”

  Thus it was the sight of Dominic Lefleur, Bum-Bum, Sister Gee, and Miss Izi struggling toward the side door of Five Ends Baptist with seventeen folding chairs stuffed inside an old post office dolly, the chairs stacked six feet high, that greeted Sergeant Potts Mullen as he swung his Plymouth squad car to the front of Five Ends Baptist Church a week after Soup’s big party. Sister Gee didn’t notice him when he pulled up. Her back was to him. He watched as she peeled off from the others and moved to the rear of the church, grabbing an old-fashioned weed chopper from the back wall and stepping into a field of high weeds. The weed cutter was shaped like a golf club and she swung it high over her head, slaying weeds as she went. Had he driven by the church three weeks ago and seen that sight, he would’ve said to himself the woman looked like a cotton picker on a plantation someplace. But now he saw a woman whose long back reminded him of the sea near the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare, the part of Ireland he’d seen when he’d visited, the sea gently pushing against the mountainous shore. She looked beautiful.

  The three chair haulers at the side door saw him first and quickly moved inside, unstacking the chairs one by one and marching them down the basement stairs without a word. Potts parked the squad car, emerged, and walked past the side door to Sister Gee, standing in the weeded field out back.

  She saw him coming, the harbor water sparkling behind him, and stopped swinging, leaning on the weed cutter with her hand on her hip as he came. She was clad in a spring dress covered with azaleas, not ordinary garden clothing, he thought as he approached. Then again she’d said she was a country woman, and country women, as he knew from his mother and grandmother, didn’t dress for success. They dressed up and worked in the clothing they had. He walked straight into the weeds to her. When he reached her she smiled, a small one that bore, he hoped, just a hint of eagerness, then nodded at his patrol car, where his young partner, Mitch, sat in the passenger seat. “Why don’t he come?” she asked.

  “You scared him off,” he said.

  “We don’t bite here.”

  “Tell him that. You scared the Jesus out of him last time.”

  She laughed. “We supposed to run Jesus into souls here, not out.”

  “Come to think of it, he was an angel till you laid boots on him and sent him the other direction.”

  The sight of her lovely brown face breaking into laughter and focusing tightly on him, as she stood in the dress of azaleas in the sunlit yard of weeds, made him feel light again. In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years on the NYPD and all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it. He wondered when he’d last had that feeling—indeed if he’d ever had it at all. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. Standing there in knee-high weeds behind an old black church that he’d passed by a hundred times over the last two decades without so much as a glance, he wondered if he had ever actually been in love or if love was, as his grandmother used to say, a kind of discovery of magic. He loved the stories she read to him when he was a boy, of kings and seafaring maidens and sailors gone awry and monsters slain, all for the sake of love. “Who is it who throws the light into the meeting on the mountain?” It was a poem she loved. He tried to recall the poet’s name. Was it Yeats maybe?

  He saw her staring at him and realized she was waiting for him to say something.

  “I think Mitch has lost interest in this case,” he managed to say.

  “Who?”

  “Mitch. The other officer. My partner.”

  “Good. So have I,” she said. She shifted the weed cutter to the other side and leaned on it again, one smooth hip thrust outward. “Or I’m trying to. We truck on here despite it all. Look at all these weeds.”

  “You do this often?”

  She smiled. “Not enough. You cut ’em down. They come right back. You cut ’em again. They come back again. That’s their purpose. To keep coming. Everything under God’s sun got a purpose in this world. Everything wants to live. Everything deserves life, really.”

  “If everything deserves to live, why kill a weed?”

  She chuckled. She loved this kind of talk. How was it that he could draw this foolish chatter out of her? Her discourse with her husband, what little conversation they had, was made up of stunted, dry, matter-of-fact grunts about bills paid, church business, the affairs of their three grown children, who were, thankfully, living away from the Cause Houses. At forty-eight, most days she awakened feeling like there was nothing left to live for other than her church and her children. She had been seventeen when she wed a man twelve years older than her. He had seemed to have purpose but turned out to have none, other than an affinity for football games and the ability to pretend to be what he was not, to pretend to feel things that he did not feel, to make jokes out of things that did not work for him, and like too many men she knew, daydream about meeting some lovely young thing from the choir, prefera
bly at three a.m., in the choir pew. She didn’t hate her husband. She just didn’t know him.

  “Well, I could let the weeds grow,” she said. “But I’m not a person who knows enough about what should or should not be to leave things as they are when they got no purpose that I can understand. My purpose is to keep this church open long enough to save somebody. That’s all I know. If I was a book-learned person, somebody who could use thirty-four words instead of three words to say what I mean, I might know the full answer to your question. But I’m a simple woman, Officer. These weeds is a blight to this house of worship, so I goes at ’em. The truth is, they do me no harm. They’re unsightly to me but sightly to God. And still I cuts at ’em. I reckon I’m like most folks. Most times I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes I feel like I don’t hardly know enough to tie my own shoes.”

  “I can tie your shoes for you,” he said, his eyes twinkling, “if you can’t manage.”

  The comment, offered in the lilt of his Irish brogue, brought her to a blush, and she noticed Miss Izi standing by the church door, staring in their direction. “What brings you around?” she said quickly. She glanced at Miss Izi again, who thankfully was called away by Dominic at the basement door. “Better hurry and tell it. My friend Izi there,” she said, nodding at Miss Izi’s back, “is what they call the walking news.”

  “Gossip?”

  “I wouldn’t call it gossip. Everybody knows everybody’s business in these projects, so why put a name to it? It’s news one way or the other.”

  Potts nodded and sighed. “That’s why I come. I have some.”

  “Do you now?”

  “We arrested a young fella. Fella named Earl. We know you know him.”

  Her smile disappeared. “How’s that?”

  “We saw you. We . . . one of our guys . . . followed you. After the little ruckus over in the plaza last week.”