Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  But all that, everyone agreed, changed the day he shot Deems Clemens.

  Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. He didn’t arrive in New York City from some poor place where kids ran around with no shoes and ate chicken bones and turtle soup, limping to New York with a dime in their pockets, overjoyed at the prospect of coming to New York to clean houses and empty toilets and dump garbage, hoping for a warm city job or maybe even an education care of good white people. Deems didn’t give a shit about white people, or education, or sugarcane, or cotton, or even baseball, which he had once been a whiz at. None of the old ways meant a penny to him. He was a child of Cause, young, smart, and making money hand over fist slinging dope at a level never before seen in the Cause Houses. He had high friends and high connections from East New York all the way to Far Rockaway, Queens, and any fool in the Cause stupid enough to open their mouth in his direction ended up hurt bad or buried in an urn in an alley someplace.

  Sportcoat, all agreed, had finally run out of luck. He was, truly, a dead man.

  3

  JET

  There were sixteen witnesses at the Cause Houses plaza when Sportcoat signed his death warrant. One of them was a Jehovah’s Witness stopping passersby, three were mothers with babies in carriages, one was Miss Izi of the Puerto Rican Statehood Society, one was an undercover cop, seven were dope customers, and three were Five Ends congregation members who were passing out flyers announcing the church’s upcoming annual Friends and Family Day service—which would feature Deacon Sportcoat himself preaching his first-ever sermon. Not one of them breathed a word to the cops about the shooting, not even the undercover cop, a twenty-two-year-old detective from the Seventy-Sixth Precinct named Jethro “Jet” Hardman, the first-ever black detective in the Cause Houses.

  Jet had been working on Deems Clemens for seven months. It was his first undercover assignment, and what he found made him nervous. Clemens, he’d learned, was the low-hanging fruit on a drug network that led up the food chain to Joe Peck, a major Italian crime figure in Brooklyn whose violent syndicate gave every patrolman in Jet’s Seventy-Sixth Precinct who valued his life the straight-out jitters. Peck had connections—inside the precinct, down at Brooklyn’s city hall, and with the Gorvino crime family, guys who would stake out a claim on a cop’s guts for a quarter and get away with it. Jet had been warned about Peck from his old partner, an elderly Irish sergeant named Kevin “Potts” Mullen, an honest cop recently returned to the precinct after being banished to Queens for the dreadful habit of actually wanting to lock up bad guys. A former detective busted back to swing sergeant, Potts had dropped by the precinct one afternoon to check on his former charge after discovering Jet had volunteered to work undercover in the Cause Houses.

  “Why risk your skin?” Potts asked him.

  “I’m kicking doors down, Potts,” Jet said proudly. “I like being first. I was the first Negro to play trombone in my elementary school, PS 29. Then first Negro in Junior High School 219 to join the Math Club. Now I’m the first black detective in the Cause. It’s a new world, Potts. I’m a groundbreaker.”

  “You’re an idiot,” Potts said. They were standing outside the Seven-Six as they talked. Potts, clad in his sergeant’s uniform, leaned on the bumper of his squad car and shook his head. “Get out,” he said. “You’re outta your league.”

  “I just got in, Potts. I’m cool.”

  “You’re in over your head.”

  “It’s just small-time stuff, Potts. Grift. Jewelry. Burglary. A little narcotics.”

  “A little? What’s your cover?”

  “I’ll be a janitor with a drug habit. First black janitor in the projects under the age of twenty-three!”

  Potts shook his head. “This is drugs,” he said.

  “So what?”

  “Think of a horse,” Potts said. “Now think of a fly on the horse’s back. That’s you.”

  “It’s an opportunity, Potts. The force needs Negro undercovers.”

  “Is that how the lieutenant sold it to you?”

  “His exact words. Why you dogging me, man? You worked undercover yourself.”

  “That was twenty years ago.” Potts sighed, feeling hungry. It was nearly lunchtime, and he was thinking of mutton stew and bacon stew with potatoes, the latter of which he loved. That’s how he got his nickname—Potts—from his grandmother, because as a toddler he couldn’t say “potato.”

  “Undercover work was mostly memos back then,” he said. “Horse racing. Burglaries. Now it’s heroin. Cocaine. There’s a load of money in it. Thank God the Italians around here in my day didn’t like drugs.”

  “You mean like Joe Peck? Or the Elephant?” Jet tried to keep the excitement out of his voice.

  Potts frowned, then glanced over his shoulder at the precinct building to make sure nobody he knew was within earshot. “Those two got ears in this precinct. Leave ’em alone. Peck’s crazy. He’s probably gonna get burnt by his own people. The Elephant . . .” He shrugged. “He’s old-fashioned. Trucking, construction, storage—he’s a smuggler. He moves stuff out of the harbor. Cigarettes, tires, that kind of stuff. He doesn’t work in drugs. He’s a hell of a gardener.”

  Jet squinted at Potts, who seemed distracted.

  “He’s a weird bird, the Elephant. You’d think he’d favor Lionel trains or toy boats, or something. His yard looks like a flower show.”

  “Maybe he’s growing flowers to hide marijuana plants,” Jet said. “That’s illegal, by the way.”

  Potts sucked his teeth and shot an irritated glance at him. “I thought you liked to draw comic books.”

  “I do, man. I draw them all the time.”

  “Then get back in the blues and draw your comics at night. You wanna be the first at something? Be the first Negro cop smart enough to forget the Dick Tracy crap and retire with your head in one piece.”

  “Who’s Dick Tracy?” Jet asked.

  “Don’t you read the funny papers?”

  Jet shrugged.

  Potts snickered. “Get out. Don’t be an idiot.”

  Jet tried to get out. He actually broached the subject with his lieutenant, who ignored him. The Seventy-Sixth Precinct, which Jet had only recently joined as a detective, was a demoralized mess. The captain spent most of his time at meetings in Manhattan. The white cops didn’t trust him. The few black cops, smelling his ambition and terrified about being transferred to East New York—considered hell on earth—avoided him. Most wanted to talk about nothing more than fishing upstate on weekends. The paperwork was overwhelming: twelve copies for a shoplifting arrest. The bomb squad sat around and played cards all day. Potts was the only one Jet trusted, and Potts, at fifty-nine, was biding his time to retirement with one foot out the door, having been demoted to sergeant for reasons he never discussed. Potts planned to retire in less than a year.

  “I’ll get out,” Jet said, “after I’ve done it a year. Then I can say I’m a pioneer.”

  “All right, Custer. If it goes bad, I’ll call your mom.”

  “C’mon, Potts, I’m a man.”

  “So was Custer.”

  * * *

  The day of the shooting, Jet, clad in the blue Housing Authority janitor’s uniform and leaning on his broom, was standing in the plaza daydreaming about taking a job in his cousin’s cleaners and being the first Negro to invent a new shirt steamer, when he saw Sportcoat in his ragged sports jacket and beaten slacks teetering out of the dim hallway of Building 9 and drifting toward the crowd of boys around Clemens, who sat at the plaza flagpole surrounded by his crew and customers, not ten feet from where Jet was standing.

  Jet noticed Sportcoat smiling, which w
as not unusual. He’d seen the ancient coot around, grinning and talking to himself. He watched as Sportcoat stopped for a moment in the crowded plaza, did a batter’s pose, swung at an imaginary pitch, then straightened, stretched, and teetered forward. He chuckled and was about to turn away when he saw—or thought he saw—the old man pull out a large, rusted pistol from his left jacket pocket and place it in his right-hand pocket.

  Jet looked around helplessly. This was what Potts called “a situation.” Most of his work up until this point had been smooth. Make a few buys. Take mental notes. ID this one. Figure out that one. Get the lay of the land. Figure out where the spiderweb goes, which was to a supplier in Bed-Stuy called “Bunch” and through a dreaded enforcer on Bunch’s crew named Earl, who came around to distribute and collect. That was as far as Jet had gotten. There was a killer, he heard, a hit man named Harold who was apparently so horrible that everyone seemed afraid to mention his name, including Deems himself. Jet hoped not to meet him. As it was, he wasn’t feeling skippy about matters. Every time he briefed his lieutenant on his progress, the man seemed nonchalant. “Doing good, doing good” was all he said. The lieutenant, Jet knew, was angling for a promotion and had one foot out the door, too, like most of the commanders at the Seven-Six. With the exception of Potts and a couple of kind older detectives, Jet was on his own, with no guidance and no direction, so he cooled it and did the job easy as Potts had instructed. No busts. No collars. No comments. Do nothing. Just watch. That’s what Potts said.

  But this . . . this was something different. The old man was approaching with a gun. If Potts were in his shoes, what would he do?

  Jet glanced around. There were people everywhere. It was nearly noon, and the assortment of neighborhood gossips who met at the flagpole bench every morning to sip coffee and salute the flag had not quite departed. An odd truce had developed, Jet noticed, between Deems and his drug-slinging crew and the old-timers who came here every morning to gossip and insult one another with jokes. For a short period, between eleven thirty and noon, the two groups actually shared the flagpole space. Deems worked a bench on one side of the flagpole, and the morning residents gathered on the other, mumbling about the declining state of the world, which included, Jet noticed, Deems himself.

  “I’d put a baseball bat to that little wormhead if he was my son,” Jet had heard Sister Veronica Gee grumble once. Added Bum-Bum, “I’d send him hobbling, but why interrupt my prayers?” Threw in Hot Sausage, “I’m gonna warm his two little toasters one of these days—when I’m not under the influence.”

  Deems, Jet noticed, ignored them, always keeping his foot traffic to a minimum until the old-timers departed, leaving the squabblings, the posturing, the cursing, the harsh arguments, even the fights, for later. Before noon the plaza was safe.

  Until now, Jet thought.

  Jet checked his watch. It was 11:55. Some of the old-timers were starting to rise up from the bench, with the old man and his gun still coming, now fifty feet away, his hand thrust into his gun pocket. Jet felt his mouth go dry watching the old drunk teeter forward five feet at a time, stopping to swing an imaginary baseball bat, then swaying forward once more, taking his time, talking, apparently having a two-way conversation with himself: “Ain’t got time for you, woman . . . Not today I don’t! You’re not yourself today anyway. And that’s an improvement!”

  Jet watched, unbelieving, as Sportcoat closed to forty feet. Then thirty. Then twenty-five, still talking to himself as he moved toward Deems.

  At twenty feet, the old man stopped muttering, but still he came on.

  Jet couldn’t help himself. His training kicked in. He dropped to a crouch to grab the snub-nosed .38 strapped to his ankle, then stopped himself. A gun strapped to the ankle was a dead giveaway. It screamed cop. Instead, he stood up and drifted away as the old man circled the crowd surrounding Deems. As casually as he could, Jet walked to the wide, circular concrete flag base, placing his broom against the base, stretched his arms, and feigned a tired yawn. He glanced at the bench where the old-timers sat, and he saw with alarm that a few of them were still there.

  They were laughing, saying a last word as they stood up, joking, taking their time. A couple of them glanced at Deems and his crew, who were gathering, happily ignoring the old folks on the opposite bench, the young troops surrounding their king. One of the boys handed his leader Deems a paper bag. Deems opened it and removed a large hero sandwich, unwrapping it. From where he was standing, Jet could smell it was tuna. He glanced at the old-timers.

  Hurry up.

  Finally, the last of them stood up. He watched with relief as Hot Sausage grabbed the giant coffee thermos and Bum-Bum picked up the cardboard cups and they were off, leaving only two: Miss Izi and Sister Gee. Sister Gee got up first, her arms full of flyers, and wandered off. That left only Miss Izi, a heavyset, light-skinned Puerto Rican with shiny black hair whose laughter followed Sister Gee, her cackles sounding like chalk screeching across a blackboard.

  Get gone, Jet thought. Go, go!

  The elderly Puerto Rican woman watched Sister Gee drift off, rubbed her nose, scratched her armpit, glared at the gathering of drug users now circling Deems, said something in Spanish toward Deems, which Jet guessed was an oath, and finally began to amble away.

  Still, the old man came on. Ten feet. He smiled at Jet as he slipped past, smelling strongly of booze, then eased into the circle of heroin heads surrounding Clemens, disappearing from Jet’s view behind the shoulders of the anxious users clamoring for their first hit of the day.

  Jet’s fear amped into panic. What the fuck was the old fool thinking? He was gonna get blasted.

  He waited for the bang, terrified, his heart racing.

  Nothing. The circle didn’t move. The boys stood around Deems, bustling as usual, ribbing one another and joking.

  Jet snatched his broom off the flagpole and, pushing it toward the circle of boys, tried to appear nonchalant, absentmindedly sweeping, picking up pieces of trash as he went, knowing that the normally careful Deems wouldn’t bother noticing him, since he too was a customer. As he swept close to the group, he paused to tie his shoe this time, placing his broom on the ground. From this vantage point, low to the ground and less than ten feet away, he could see through the angle of bodies straight into the circle surrounding Deems and the old man. Deems was seated on the back arm of the bench working on his hoagie, talking to another boy, the two of them laughing. Neither noticed Sportcoat standing over them.

  “Deems?” The old man spoke up.

  Clemens looked up. He seemed surprised to see the old drunk swaying before him.

  “Sportcoat! My man.” He bit into his sandwich, the tuna hero dripping with mayonnaise and tomatoes. Sportcoat always made him a little uncomfortable. It wasn’t the old man’s drinking, or his bravado, or his stern lectures about drugs that bothered him. Rather it was the memory, not long ago, of Sportcoat shagging fly balls with him at the baseball field on warm spring afternoons; it was Sportcoat who taught him how to pivot and zing a throw to home plate from 350 feet out. It was Sportcoat who taught him how to pitch, to throw his weight on his back foot when he wound up, to extend his arm as he powered the ball home, to grip the ball properly to throw a curveball, and follow through with his legs so all his weight and power was on the ball, not on his shoulder. Sportcoat made him a star in baseball. He was the envy of the white boys on the John Jay High School baseball team, who marveled at the college scouts who risked life and limb to venture to the funky, dirty Cause Houses baseball field to watch him pitch. But that was another time, when he was a boy and his grandpa was living. He was a man now, nineteen, a man who needed money. And Sportcoat was a pain in the ass.

  “How come you ain’t playing ball no more, Deems?” Sportcoat asked.

  “Ball?” Deems said, chewing.

  “That’s right. Baseball,” Sportcoat said, swaying.

  “Got bigger
ball to play, Sportcoat,” Deems said, winking at his cohorts as he took a second big bite of his sandwich. The boys laughed. Deems wolfed another bite, barely looking at Sportcoat, his attention focused on the dripping sandwich, while Sportcoat stared, blinking dully.

  “Ain’t nothing bigger than ball, Deems. I ought to know. I’m the big cheese when it come to ball ’round this projects.”

  “You right, Sportcoat. You the man.”

  “Best umpire this projects ever had,” Sportcoat said proudly as he swayed. “I brings the cheese. Not Peter. Not Paul. Not Jesus. Me. I brings the cheese, see. And I has not excused you, Deems Clemens, from playing ball, y’understand? For that is what you do best. So how come you is not playing ball?”

  Clemens, his hands clasped around the giant sandwich, chuckled and said, “G’wan, Sportcoat.”