Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  “I’ll go away for a minute,” she said. “You can talk.”

  “Naw, girl, stay here.”

  Hot Sausage said to Phyllis, “I think it’s best you go.”

  “Git off her, Sausage!”

  “It’s just a minute, Deems. Please. Gimme a minute in privacy, will ya? For God’s sake, boy! Just a minute!”

  Deems lowered his voice, enraged now. “State your business right now, or I’ll knock every Chiclet outta your mouth.”

  “All right,” Sausage slurred. He glanced at Phyllis, then said, “Sister Gee . . . you remember her?”

  “Out with it, motherfucker!”

  “Okay then!” Sausage cleared his throat, swaying drunk, trying to control himself. “Sister Gee come by the boiler room today when me and Sport was there having a . . . taste, y’know. She said the cops been asking lots of questions. She come upon some information from one of them cops that she gived to Sportcoat. He wanted you to have it.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Somebody’s coming to get you, Deems. Someone bad.”

  “Tell me what I don’t know, old man.”

  “Somebody named Harold Dean.”

  Deems sucked his teeth and turned to Beanie. “Beanie, get him the fuck outta here.” He turned away and suddenly noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a movement to his right.

  The girl.

  She had stepped away from him, and in one smooth motion she slid her arm into her leather jacket, pulled a .38 short-nose Smith & Wesson, aimed it at Beanie, and pulled the hammer on it. Beanie saw her and tried to reach, but he wasn’t fast enough. She dropped him, pivoted to Hot Sausage, who was backing away, and popped him once in the chest, which sent the old man reeling to the deck. Then she turned the gun on Deems.

  Deems, standing at the dock edge, leapt backward into the harbor when he saw the light wink from the eye of the Smith & Wesson. When he struck the water he felt his ear, still healing from Sportcoat’s blast, burning, then the cool waters of the East River surrounding him, then an explosion of pain bursting out of his left arm, the pain seeming to paint his whole body, which felt as if it were ripping apart. He was sure his left arm was gone.

  Like most kids who grew up in the Cause Houses, Deems had never learned to swim. He’d avoided the filthy harbor and the projects pool, which was used mostly by the white residents from the surrounding neighborhood and was policed by cops who discouraged the projects kids. Now, in the river, he flapped his hands uselessly and reached out desperately with his right hand. As he did, he swallowed a gulp of river and heard a splash of someone landing in the water near him and thought, Oh shit, that bitch jumped in. Then he went down again, and for the first time since he was a child, in the darkness of the water, he found himself calling on God, asking for help, pleading, Please help me, swallowing more water and panicking as he flailed. Help me now, God, and if I don’t drown . . . God, help me please. Every lesson he’d learned in Sunday school, every prayer he’d uttered, every pain he’d felt in his young life, every sorrow he’d caused that stuck in his craw and nagged his conscience, like the gum he stuck under the pews of Five Ends Baptist Church as a kid, felt like they had risen up in a swirl to create a necklace around his neck that choked. He felt the current grab his legs, toss him to the surface, where he took a desperate gulp of air before it snatched his legs and pulled him down again—for good this time. He couldn’t resist. He felt himself being gently sucked away by the current and was suddenly exhausted and could no longer fight back. He felt urgency seeping from his feet, and felt blackness coming.

  Then something grabbed him by the jacket and pulled him up into air. He was yanked backward, slung against one of the deck pilings, and pinned there, held fast by a single strong forearm. Whoever was holding him was out of breath. Then he heard a harsh whisper: “Shhh.”

  He couldn’t see a thing in the pitch black. Deems’s left shoulder burned so badly it felt like it had been dipped in acid. He was dizzy and felt warm blood oozing down his left arm. Then the grip that held him loosed for a moment to get a better grip and pulled him farther back under the wooden dock and closer to the shore. He felt his feet touch rocky ground. The water was neck high now. Whoever held him was standing. Deems tried to stand himself but he couldn’t move his legs. “Jesus,” he gurgled. A hand quickly slammed over his mouth and a face moved close to his, speaking just over his shoulder.

  “Shush now,” the voice said.

  Even in the water, with the stench of the dock and the fish and the funk of the East River everywhere, Deems could smell the booze. And the smell of the man. The personal body funk of the old Sunday school teacher who had once held him in his lap by the warm woodstove at Five Ends Baptist when he was a howling boy of nine with wet pants, because his mother got too drunk to go to church on Sundays and sent him alone in piss-smelling church clothes, knowing that the old drunk Sunday school teacher and his kind wife, Hettie, would put shoes and clean pants, shirt, and underwear on him, clothes once worn by their blind son, Pudgy Fingers, knowing that Hettie, each and every Sunday, would discreetly carry Deems’s soiled clothes back to her apartment in a bag she carried to church expressly for that purpose, along with a Christmas Club money box in which the two faithfully dropped fifty cents each week—twenty-five cents for Deems and twenty-five cents for their own son, Pudgy Fingers. Then she’d wash Deems’s clothes and send them back to his mother’s apartment in a paper bag with a piece of cake, or a piece of pie, or some fried fish for the children. True Christian kindness. Real Christian love. A hard woman showing hard love in a hard world. Her and her husband, a straight-up-and-down drunk, who years later would show the boy how to throw a pitch at ninety miles per hour and kiss the outside part of home plate with it, which was something no eighteen-year-old kid in Brooklyn could do.

  Sportcoat held Deems against the piling, his old head cast upward, his old eyes peering through the slats in the pier walkway. He listened intently until the sound of the girl’s running feet passed overhead, rang along the dock, and disappeared toward the paint factory and the street beyond.

  When all was silent, save for the sound of the water lapping up against the pilings, Sportcoat’s grip on Deems loosened and he spun Deems backward and yanked him toward the shore, pulling him like a rag doll till they reached the rocks. He laid him on his back on a sandy stretch near the rocks and sat next to him, exhausted. Then he called out to the docks directly above where they sat. “Sausage, you living?”

  There was a gurgled response on the deck.

  “Shit,” Sportcoat said.

  Deems had never heard the old man curse before. It felt sacrilegious. Sportcoat moved toward the edge of the dock to climb onto it, then dropped to one knee, his spent face illuminated by the lights of Manhattan just across the river. “I got to catch my breath, Sausage,” Sportcoat called out. “I can’t move quite yet. Just a minute. I’m coming.”

  Sausage gurgled again. Sportcoat glanced at Deems, who still lay on the sand, and shook his head. “I don’t know what got into you,” he panted. “You don’t listen to nobody.”

  “That bitch shot me,” Deems gasped.

  “Oh shush. Your good arm ain’t hurt.”

  “I didn’t know she was packing.”

  “That’s the problem with you young’uns. If you’da growed up down south, you’d knowed something. This city don’t teach y’all nothing. I told Sausage to tell you. Sister Gee passed the word about Harold Dean coming to kill you.”

  “I was on the lookout.”

  “Yeah? Whyn’t you look past your little wee wee then, which I expect was stout and hard as bone? Harold Dean was holding your hand, son, purring like a kitten and stinking of trouble. Harol-deen, boy. Haroldeen is a girl’s name.”

  The old man stood up and climbed onto the dock where Sausage was. Deems watched him, then felt sweet blackness coming. It came right
on time.

  18

  INVESTIGATION

  The fight over the free cheese in Hot Sausage’s basement boiler room that Saturday morning would have broken out into a full-scale riot if Soup Lopez hadn’t been there. Sister Gee was glad she’d made him come. It wasn’t so much that Hot Sausage wasn’t there to dole out the free cheese, Sister Gee thought, but rather the fact that Sausage was dead—shot and killed the previous Wednesday, along with his dear friend Sportcoat. Apparently both had been shot and dumped in the harbor by Deems, who also shot himself dead. That’s what the early word was. They were just bad rumors. The Cause was used to those, Sister Gee knew. Even so, the whole business hit everyone pretty hard.

  “Damned Deems,” Bum-Bum said. “He got the order wrong. He shoulda shot hisself first.” She was usually the first in line at the basement ramp door, rising at five a.m. to arrive by six. It was part of a quest she’d begun in recent months to find out who the secret cheese giver was. She hadn’t found out yet, but her early arrival confirmed three points: One, that Hot Sausage wasn’t the cheese giver. Two, that her place at the front of the line was always assured, since most of her friends were there early too. And three, she’d have first dibs on the gossip, since all the early cheese grabbers were friends from the flagpole she’d known for years.

  That morning she got there ten minutes later than normal, to find Miss Izi first in line, having arrived early as usual, chatting with Sister Gee, who stood behind the cheese distribution table, having been appointed to the sad duty of distributing the cheese in Sausage’s absence. Not far behind her were the Cousins, Joaquin the numbers runner, and Bum-Bum’s secret delight, Dominic the Haitian Sensation, whose face, she noted, looked freshly washed and whose fingernails looked clipped—always a sign of good sanitation in a man. Behind him were the two other members of the Puerto Rican Statehood Society of the Cause Houses. All the heavy hitters of news, views, and gossip were there in perfect formation. Today had all the makings of good conversation and excellent hot gossip.

  She sidled into her honorary place at the front of the line just behind Miss Izi, who had saved her a spot, and slipped in just in time to hear Miss Izi give her views on the matter.

  “Sportcoat had been drinking himself to the quit line for twenty years,” she said. “But I didn’t think Sausage drank that much. Maybe they got into a fight and shot each other.”

  “Sausage didn’t shoot nobody,” Bum-Bum said.

  Standing in line behind her, Dominic—who just happened to rise up at five a.m. and just happened to arrive at the basement door at six a.m., and by golly just happened to find himself lined up behind Bum-Bum after trading places with several people in line so that he could move up—agreed. “Sausage was a good friend,” he said.

  Joaquin, several spots behind them, looked strangely sad. “I borrowed twelve dollars from Sausage,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t pay it back.”

  “God, you are cheap,” Miss Izi said. She was standing a good five people ahead of her ex-husband and stepped out of line to address him. “You’re so tight with money your ass squeaks when you walk.”

  “At least I have an ass,” he said.

  “Yeah. Three. One’s on your face.”

  “Pig!”

  “Gilipollas!”

  “Perro!”

  A man at the back of the line yelled at Miss Izi to get her fat ass back in line.

  “Mind your business!” Joaquin snapped.

  “Make me, Joaquin!” he hollered.

  Joaquin stepped out of line and a general ruckus was about to get out of hand but was quelled by Soup the giant, who stepped in, looking somber in his Nation of Islam suit. Sister Gee quickly intervened, moving from behind the long table piled high with cheese and gently coaxing Soup aside.

  “Can y’all keep your heads, please?” she said. “We don’t know what happened. We’ll know more later.”

  Later came right away, as there was a bit of shuffling at the entranceway. Sister Gee watched as the cheese line that snaked out the door suddenly shifted. Several people stepped aside, and Sergeant Potts stepped into the boiler room.

  He was followed by his young partner and two plainclothes detectives, all business, who squeezed past the line that jammed the doorway and into the middle of the suddenly crowded boiler room, which fell silent.

  Potts looked at the table where Sister Gee stood, then at the nervous residents waiting in line. He noticed movement out of the corner of his eye and saw three people, one woman and two men, step out of line and slip toward the exit without a word. He guessed they were either parolees or had outstanding arrest warrants. A fourth, a huge, young, well-dressed Puerto Rican nearly seven feet tall, moved to follow. The young man looked vaguely familiar to Potts, and as the big figure moved toward the door, Potts’s partner Mitch tapped him and nodded at Soup. “You want me to question him?”

  “You kidding? You see the size of that guy?”

  Soup slipped out, along with the others.

  Potts turned his attention to Sister Gee. Even on an early, bleak Saturday in that dank, crowded basement, she looked lovely as an Irish spring morning. She wore jeans and a blouse that she tied at the waist and her hair tied in a bun with a colorful sash, which set off her lovely features.

  “Morning,” he said to her.

  She smiled thinly. She didn’t seem happy to see him. “Seems like you brought the whole force today,” she said.

  He glanced at the people in line, noticed Bum-Bum, Dominic, and Miss Izi staring at him, nodded toward the three officers, and said, “Could you speak to these officers a minute? Just routine. Nothing to worry about. I saw you three at the church, is all. We just wanna learn about the victims.” To Sister Gee he said, “Can I speak to you outside?”

  Sister Gee didn’t bother to tell him that only Sister Bum-Bum was actually a member of Five Ends Baptist. Instead, she turned to one of the Cousins, Nanette, and said simply, “Nanette. Take over.”

  She followed Potts up the ramp and outside. When they were in the plaza he turned to her, placed his hands in his pockets, and frowned at the ground. She noticed he was wearing a double-breasted sergeant’s jacket. He looked quite sharp, she thought, and also bothered. Finally he looked at her.

  “I will not say I told you so.”

  “Good.”

  “But as you know, there’s been an incident.”

  “I heard.”

  “All of it?”

  “No. Just rumors. I don’t believe in rumors.”

  “Well, we think Ralph Odum . . . Mr. Odum. Um, Hot Sausage, the boiler man, drowned in the harbor.”

  She heard herself gasp without really feeling it. She had no plan to howl and lose her face in front of him. She felt foolish suddenly. He was a wonderful stranger, a lovely dream, and now he was just like any other cop. Bringing bad news. And probably reports. And more warrants. And more questions. Always questions from these types. Never answers.

  “I didn’t believe it when I heard it,” she said somberly. “I thought maybe Sportcoat was the one that drowned.”

  “No. Sausage drowned. Our guy—your guy—Sportcoat is alive. I saw him this morning.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Shot in the chest. He’s alive, though. He’ll make it.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Maimonides hospital in Borough Park.”

  “Why’d they brung him all the way out there?”

  Potts shrugged. “Also, Deems Clemens was shot in the left shoulder. He’ll live too.”

  “Lord. They shot each other?”

  “Unknown. Also there was a third person shot. Randall Collins. He was killed.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Apparently he had a nickname.”

  “Everybody does out here.”

  “Beanie.”

  “I know him.�
�� She said it curtly, to cut off the choking sound of her own weeping. Once it started she knew it wouldn’t stop. She was not going to cry in front of him. Then the first surge of shock and sorrow passed and he was still silent, so she spoke again, just to keep her composure. “What do you need from me?”

  “Any reason your man Sportcoat would want to shoot those two?”

  “You know the reason behind it much as I do,” she said.

  Potts’s glance moved to the rooftop of the plaza building in front of him. He noticed a kid peek over the edge of the roof and disappear. A cop watcher, he thought.

  “Actually, I don’t,” he said. “I saw your Sportcoat in the hospital this morning. He’d been shot close to the heart. They operated and took out the bullet, but he’s okay. He was groggy. Sedated. He was kind of confused. We spoke only a few minutes. He said he didn’t shoot Deems.”

  “That sounds like Sportcoat. He was drunk when he did it—that first time anyway. Says he don’t remember a thing. Which he probably don’t.”

  “Your Sportcoat, he says a woman shot them all.”

  “Well, I reckon a soul will say anything to stay outta jail.”

  “I told him that his buddy Hot Sausage drowned. That hit him hard.”

  Potts was silent a moment as she bit her lip and blinked back tears.

  “You sure he’s drowned?” she asked.

  “I’m sure we can’t find him. We found your Sportcoat in an umpire’s outfit. Randall, the dead kid. And Deems, who was wounded. No Hot Sausage.”

  She was silent.

  “I told you this was serious business, didn’t I?” Potts said.

  She looked away and said nothing.

  “Were they close friends, those two, Thelonius Ellis, your Sportcoat, and Mr. Odum?” Potts asked.