Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  “All right. Gimme half now. I’ll tell you where to send the rest after I’m done.”

  “I got a junkpile of shit now ’cause of you. I got Joe Peck on my ass. He’ll be gunning for all my people. He’ll try to switch out my people with his Uncle Tom niggers.”

  “I’ll clean up my end,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  Bunch rose. He moved to the window, speaking with his back to her. “This is the last time you and I do business,” he said. He glanced out the window and noticed a motorcycle puttering down the street, followed by a car, a GTO. But they were coming from the right, the safe side, in full view. Not down the side street, so they weren’t dangerous. Still, he wondered: had he seen them before? He decided to watch to see if they circled the block, then saw the motorcycle throw on a turn signal before reaching the corner, and the girl was talking again, so he turned away.

  “Where’s my money?” she asked.

  He nodded toward the dining room door. “Downstairs. At the back door, there’s a cabinet there.”

  “Where’s the back door?”

  “Do they call it a back door because it’s in the front?”

  “Is it the basement back door, or the first-floor back door?”

  That drew him from the front window. He marched to the dining room door and pointed down the stairs. They were on the second-floor landing. “Go all the way to the basement. Use the back basement door. Don’t go out the front basement door. Don’t go out the ground-floor front door. Go to the basement back door. Near that back door is a cabinet. Open the top drawer. There’s an envelope in there. It’s got half. And train fare.”

  “All right.”

  “We clear on who’s who?”

  “Deems and the Deacon. And the other guy.”

  “What other guy?”

  “The old guy with the Deacon.”

  “I didn’t say nothing about a third guy. I ain’t paying you for no third guy.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “He saw me.”

  She slipped down the stairs quickly and deftly. Bunch found himself watching her back, feeling a little regretful. Those stairs were creaky and she slipped down like a ghost, silent and fast, barely making a sound. That girl, he thought, had skills. He decided to watch her out the back window to make sure no neighbors spotted her exiting the yard—he didn’t want her near him anymore. Then he remembered the car he’d seen through the front window and quickly stepped to it to check on the GTO. It was gone. It was safe.

  * * *

  At the basement back door, Haroldeen found the cabinet and removed the envelope. It was dark down there, so she held it to the sliver of light from a nearby small ground-level window to check its contents, then hastily stuck it in her jeans. From there, she removed her shoes, took the stairs two at a time up to the ground floor, unlocked the front door, then sprinted back to the basement, put on her shoes, exited through the back door, and stepped outside.

  The yard was piled high with junk and trash and was full of weeds. She picked her way through it slowly, as if she weren’t certain where she was going, then looked up.

  Sure enough, Bunch was watching her through the open second-floor window, glaring.

  That was all she needed to see. She turned and ran toward the back gate, as fast as she could, leaping over the piles of junk that lay in the way, making toward the gate at top speed.

  Up on the second floor, Bunch saw her sprinting for the gate and heard the thunder of footsteps on his stairwell at the same time, and a sudden dread seized his insides. He glanced in panic to the seat of the chair next to his, several long feet away, where his gun lay. He was still looking when the door burst open and Joe Peck charged in bearing a revolver, followed by two other men, one of them with a shotgun.

  Just before she reached the gate and heard the boom of gunshots, Haroldeen heard yelling and thought she heard someone scream, “You fucking black bitch!”

  But she wasn’t sure. She was out the back gate and gone.

  23

  LAST OCTOBERS

  On his third day in the hospital, Deems awoke with his arm in a cast and the familiar painful buzzing in his ears that made his blood tingle and rush to his head. His hospital bed was tilted at a slight angle, which prevented him from rolling onto his left shoulder and further aggravating the injury. Not that he would. Every time he leaned in that direction the pain across his back and down his spine was so powerful he felt like throwing up, so lying on his right side was obligatory. But it meant he couldn’t turn away from any visitors that came. Not that many did other than the cops and Sister Gee and a couple of assorted “sisters” from Five Ends. He’d said nothing to them. Even Potts, the old-time cop he remembered who used to come by to watch him pitch baseball games from his squad car. He’d said nothing to Potts. Potts was okay, but at the end of the day, Potts was just a cop. Deems’s problem was bigger than cops and stupid Five Ends people. He’d been betrayed by somebody—probably Lightbulb, he guessed—and Beanie was dead.

  He shifted slightly to lie on his back, moving slowly, then reached for the cup of water that the nurses kept beside his bed.

  Instead of a cup, a hand caught his, and he glanced up and saw the wrinkled face of Sportcoat standing above him.

  He almost didn’t recognize him for a moment. The old fool wasn’t wearing his usual ragged, ugly sport coat from some era gone past. The plaid green-and-white one—the one that the old drunk wore for special occasions and church—used to bring howls of laughter from Deems and his friends every time they saw Sportcoat proudly strut out of Building 9 wearing it. The plaid sport coat looked like a walking flag draped around the old fart. Instead, the old man wore the blue pants and blue shirt of a Housing Authority worker and a porkpie hat. Clutched in his right hand was a homemade doll of some kind, a hideous-looking thing the size of a small pillow, brown with knitting material for hair and buttons stitched across the fabric to create a face. In his other hand was a small paper bag.

  Deems nodded at the doll. “What’s that for?”

  “It’s for you,” Sportcoat said proudly. “Remember Dominic, the Haitian Sensation? He lives in our building. Old Dominic makes these. He says they’re magic. They bring good luck. Or bad luck. Or whatever he wants ’em to. This here’s a get-well one. He made it special for you. And this here”—he reached into the paper bag, squirming his hand inside the bag, and produced a pink ball—“I got for you myself.” He held the ball out. “It’s an exercise ball. Squeeze that,” he said. “It’ll make your pitching hand stronger.”

  Deems frowned. “What the fuck you doing here, man?”

  “Son, you ain’t got to use that filthy language. I come a long way to see you.”

  “You seen me. Now git.”

  “That ain’t no way to talk to a friend.”

  “You want me to say thank you, Sport? Okay, thank you. Now get lost.”

  “I ain’t come here for that.”

  “Well don’t ask me my business. The cops been doing that for two days.”

  Sportcoat smiled, then placed the doll pillow at the edge of the bed. “I don’t care none about your business,” he said. “I care about mine.”

  Deems rolled his eyes. What was it about this old man that made him tolerant of his stupid bullshit? “What kind of business you got in this hospital, Sport? They make your grape here? Your King Kong? You and your drink. Deacon King Kong,” he snickered. “That’s what they call you.”

  Sportcoat ignored the insult. “Them names can’t hurt me. I got friends in this world,” he said proudly. “Two of ’em’s in this hospital. They put Hot Sausage in here, too, you know that? Right on the same floor. Can you believe it? I don’t know why they done that. I just come from him. He was digging at me the minute I walked in his room. Saying, ‘If you wasn’t chunking at me so bad, Sport, I’da never gone out there dressed like an umpire
to bother Deems about that dumb ball game.’ I said, ‘Sausage, you can’t deny the boy got a future in base—’”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Deems said.

  “Huh?”

  “Shut your talking hole, you stupid motherfucker!”

  “What?”

  “Who wants to hear about you, you drunk bastard? You’s a fuckup, man. You fucked up everything. Don’t you ever get tired of hearing yourself talk? Deacon King Kong!”

  Sportcoat blinked, feeling slightly cowed. “I already told you, your words can’t hurt me, boy, for I ain’t never done nothing wrong to ya. Other than care for you, a little bit.”

  “You shot me, ya dumb nigger.”

  “I don’t recall none of it, son.”

  “Don’t ‘son’ me, you shitface bitch! You fucked around and shot me. The only reason I didn’t smoke your ass was because of my grandfather. That was my first mistake. Now Beanie’s dead because of you—and Sausage, that lazy, stupid chickenshit plumber’s-helper bitch. Two dumbass, old-time, donkey-ass idiots.”

  Sportcoat was silent. He looked down at his hands, holding the pink Spaldeen ball. “Ain’t no cause for you to use them kind of words ’round me, son.”

  “Don’t call me ‘son,’ you cockeyed, hundred-proof bitch bastard!”

  Sportcoat looked at him oddly. Deems noted that the old drunk’s face was unusually clear. Sportcoat’s eyes, normally bloodshot, his eyelids, normally drooping and half-closed, were wide open. He was sweating, and his hands were shaking slightly. Deems also noticed, for the first time, that beneath the old drunk’s Housing Authority shirt, Sportcoat, even as an old man, was thickly built around the chest and arms. He had never noticed that before.

  “Has I wronged you, son?” Sportcoat said softly. “In all them times we played baseball and all. Me giving encouragement and all . . . in Sunday school, teaching you the good word.”

  “Get the fuck outta here, man. Get gone!”

  Sportcoat puffed out his cheeks and released a long, drawn-out sigh. “All right,” he said. “Just one more thing. Then I’ll leave.”

  The old man shuffled to the door, stuck his head into the hallway, looked both ways, then closed the door tightly. He shuffled back to Deems’s bed and leaned over him, to whisper something in his ear.

  Deems snapped, “Get the fuck away—”

  And then Sportcoat was on him. The old man lifted his knee quickly, pinned Deems’s usable right arm to his body with it, and with his right hand, picked up the doll pillow on Deems’s bed and rammed it onto Deems’s upturned face.

  Deems, pinned, couldn’t move. He felt his air supply suddenly choke off. His head was pressed as in a vise. Sportcoat held firm, pressing down as Deems struggled, frantically gasping for air. Sportcoat spoke, slowly and calmly:

  “When I was but a wee boy, my daddy did this to me. Said this would make me grow big and tough. He was an ignorant man, my daddy was. Mean as the devil. But he was chickenhearted when it come to the white man. He bought a mule once from a white man. That mule was sick when my daddy bought him. But the white told him that the mule couldn’t die because he, a white man, had ordered it to live. Know what happened?”

  Deems struggled, panicked, straining for air. There was none.

  “My daddy believed him. He took that mule home. And sure as we setting here, that mule died. I told him not to do it, but he didn’t listen to me.”

  Sportcoat felt Deems’s struggles strengthen for a moment, then pressed the pillow down harder and continued speaking, his voice quiet, insistent, and frighteningly calm.

  “See, my daddy thought I was too smart. He believed my mind was my enemy. So he pushed that pillow on my head to crush my mind. He wanted to make sure he was in control of my mind and my body. He was just like every white man I ever knowed who wanted power.”

  He tightened the pillow against Deems’s face and felt Deems’s strains grow desperate now; he arched his back off the bed, struggling to live. But Sportcoat didn’t let up, pressing the pillow down even harder than ever; he continued talking:

  “But then again, I can’t rightly say that if a colored man was in a position of power, he wouldn’t be the same.”

  He felt Deems’s struggles grow wildly desperate now, the murmurs from beneath the doll pillow sounding like cat mewing, long ga-ga sounds, like the muffled bleating of a goat, then Deems’s frantic antics slowed and the sounds grew weaker, but Sportcoat kept pressing down and continued speaking calmly:

  “See, Deems, in them days, everything had been decided for you. You had to go along. You didn’t even know that you were going along. You didn’t know there was anything else to do. You never wondered about anything else. You was locked into a kind of thinking. It never occurred to you to do anything but what you was told. I never asked why I was doing something or why I wasn’t doing something. I just did whatever I was told. So when my daddy did this to me, I didn’t feel no wrong in it. It was just another natural thing in the world.”

  Deems’s struggles ceased now. He’d quit fighting.

  Sportcoat released the pillow, and the suction of Deems pulling air into his lungs sounded like the starting of a car, a long, loud whirring noise, followed by several choking gasps. Barely conscious, Deems tried to turn away but could not, as Sportcoat still had his head pinned under one powerful hand, the other hand still holding the pillow doll high.

  Then the spell was released, and Sportcoat casually tossed the doll pillow onto the floor and, rising, removed his knee from Deems’s right arm. “You understand?” he said.

  But Deems didn’t understand. He was still gasping for breath and struggling to stay conscious. He wanted to reach for the nurse call button, but his good arm, his right one, felt frozen from where Sportcoat had smashed it. His broken left arm was roaring in pain. The noise in his ears sounded like a screeching buzz. With a great effort, he reached with his right hand for the nurse call button, but Sportcoat slapped the hand away and suddenly grabbed Deems by the hospital gown with hands that were firm and veined from seven decades of pulling weeds, digging trenches, planting trees, opening bottles, yanking out toilets, tightening pliers, hauling steel beams, and driving mules. The hands wrenched him to a nearly sitting position with a firm, tight snatch that felt like steel claws, yanking Deems so hard that the force of the pulling caused Deems to squeal, and Deems saw Sportcoat inches away from his face. And from there, so close, he saw in the old man’s face what he had felt down in the darkness of the harbor when the old man had yanked him to safety: the strength, the love, the resilience, the peace, the patience, and this time, something new, something he’d never seen in all the years he’d known old Sportcoat, the happy-go-lucky drunk of the Cause Houses: absolute, indestructible rage.

  “Now I know why I tried to kill you,” Sportcoat said. “For the life of goodness is not one that your people has chosen for you. I don’t want that you should end up like me, or my Hettie, dead of sorrow in the harbor. I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.”

  He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit the headboard and he nearly passed out again.

  “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”

  24

  SISTER PAUL

  Marjorie Delany, the young Irish-American receptionist working at the Brewster Memorial Home for the Age
d in Bensonhurst, was accustomed to the wide range of strange visitors strolling in asking stupid questions. The amalgam of parents, kids, relatives, and old friends who wandered into the lobby angling to get into the rooms, and sometimes the pockets, of the home’s permanent residents—the aged, the dying, and the near dead—ran the gamut from gangsters to lowdown bums to homeless children. She had a keen sense of humor about the whole business and a large streak of compassion, despite having seen it all. But after three years on the job, even Marjorie was unprepared for the unsightly elderly black man who ambled in wearing the blue uniform of the New York City Housing Authority that afternoon.

  His face was seized in a crooked smile. He seemed to have trouble walking. He was sweating profusely. He looked, she thought, mad as a hatter. If he weren’t wearing the uniform, she would have had Mel, the security guard, who sat near the door and spent his afternoons reading the Daily News and nodding off, toss him. But she had an uncle who worked for Housing, and he had several colored friends, so she let him amble to the desk. He took his time about it, peering around the lobby, seemingly impressed.

  “Looking for Sister Paul,” the old man mumbled.

  “What’s the name?”

  “Paul,” Sportcoat said. He leaned on the desk for support. He had a blasting headache, which was unusual. He was also exhausted, which was also unusual. He hadn’t had a drink since he spoke to Hettie fourteen hours ago—though it felt like years ago. The effect of not drinking was enormous. He felt weak and agitated, sick to his stomach and trembling, as if he were in a nightmare falling off a cliff and stuck in the air, spinning ’round and ’round as he fell, no bottom, topsy-turvy, just falling. He had just come from seeing Deems and Sausage at the hospital and couldn’t seem to remember what he’d said to either of them or even how he got here. The nursing home was fifteen blocks from the hospital in nearby Borough Park. Normally, Sportcoat could make that kind of walk in a cinch. But now he’d had to stop several times, both to rest and to ask for directions. The last time he’d asked, he was actually standing right in front of the place when he stopped and asked a white man, who simply pointed over Sportcoat’s shoulder, swore under his breath, and walked away. Now he was standing in front of a young white woman behind a desk who had a look on her face just like the folks did back in the Social Security office in downtown Brooklyn when he went to see about his late wife’s benefits. The same look, the irritated questions, the impatience, the demand for documents that had odd names he’d never heard of, pushing forms through the window at him with titles he couldn’t even pronounce or understand; forms that demanded lists and birth dates and more papers, and even some forms that demanded names of other forms, all of which were so complicated that they might as well have been in Greek, the whole conglomeration of document names vanishing into thin air the moment the clerks uttered them. He could not remember what a “Lifetime Sheet for Pro Forma Work Information Record” was from the moment the words came out of a clerk’s mouth, or what it was supposed to be or do, which meant by the time he walked out of the Social Security office, tossing the form in the garbage as he left, he was so addled by the experience that he worked to forget about it, which meant it was as if he hadn’t been there at all.