Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  She sat very still as she spoke, but her lovely olive eyes bore a softness and a hurt so deep that when he looked in them he saw the swirls of pools beneath; he felt as if he were looking at a piece of ice cream left on a picnic table in the hot sun too long. Regret poured out of her eyes like water. She seemed to be breaking apart in front of him.

  He felt himself reddening and looked away. He was about to blurt an apology when he heard her say, “You looks a lot better in street clothes than you do wearing that fancy uniform. I guess that’s why I remember you.”

  Later, much later, it occurred to him that maybe she remembered him because she had been watching him, sitting outside the bar with his friends listening to the bitter soldiers of the IRA swear at the British and complain about the neighborhood going down because the Negro and the Spanish had arrived with their civil rights nonsense, taking the subway jobs, the janitor jobs, the doorman jobs, fighting for the scraps and chicken bones the Rockefellers and all the rest tossed to them all. He found himself stammering, “So I needn’t look into her death?”

  “Look all you want. Hettie was a hard woman. She was a hard woman because she lived a hard life out here. But she was good through and through. She wore the pants in that house. Sportcoat did everything she told him. Except,” she chuckled, “when it came to that cheese.”

  “Cheese?”

  “They give out free cheese in one of the buildings every first Saturday of the month. Hettie hated that. The two of them fought about it all the time. But other than that, they were good together.”

  “What do you think happened to her?”

  “She walked into the harbor and drowned herself. Things ain’t been right around this church since.”

  “Why’d she do it?”

  “She was tired, I reckon.”

  Potts sighed. “Should I write that in my report?”

  “Write whatever you want. The truth is, I hope Sportcoat’s run off. Deems ain’t worth going to jail for. Not no more.”

  “I understand. But your guy’s armed. Maybe unstable. That creates instability in a community.”

  Sister Gee snorted. “Things got unstable ’round here four years ago when that new drug come in. This new stuff—I don’t know what they call it—you smoke it, you put it in your veins with needles . . . however you do it, once you do it a few times you is stuck with it. Never seen nothing like it around here before, and I seen a lot. This projects was safe till this new drug come in. Now the old folks is getting clubbed coming home from work every night, getting robbed outta their little payday money so these junkies can buy more of Deems’s poison. He ought to be ashamed of hisself. His grandfather would kill him if he was living.”

  “I understand. But your man can’t take the law into his own hands. That’s what this is for,” he said, holding up the warrant.

  Now her face hardened, and a space opened up between them again. “Warrant on. And while y’all is throwing them warrants around, maybe y’all can throw a warrant at the person who stole our Christmas Club money. There’s a couple thousand in there, I expect.”

  “What’s that about?”

  “Christmas Club. We gathered that money every year for us to buy our kids toys at Christmas. Hettie was the one who collected the money and kept it in a little box. She was good about it. Never told a soul where she put it, and every Christmas she handed you your money. Problem is, she’s gone now and Sportcoat don’t know where it is.”

  “Why not ask him?”

  Sister Gee laughed. “If he knew, he’da gived it back. Sportcoat wouldn’t steal from the church. Not for drink even.”

  “For drink, I seen people do worse.”

  Sister Gee frowned at him, frustration etched across her clear, pretty face. “You’s a kind person, I can tell. But we is poor folks here in this church. We saves our little dimes for Christmas presents for our children. We pray for each other and to a God that redeems, and that does us well. Our Christmas money’s missing and likely gone for good, and that’s God’s will, I reckon. To y’all police, that don’t mean nothing other than maybe old Sportcoat mighta took it. But you’re wrong there. Sportcoat would throw hisself in the harbor before he’d take a penny from any soul in this world. What happened was, he got drunk out of his mind and tried to clean this place up in one big swoop. And because of it, you ain’t never seen so many cops turning up rocks trying to get hold of him. What’s that say to us?”

  “We want to protect him. Clemens works for a pretty rough bunch. That’s who we’re really going after.”

  “Then arrest Deems. And the rest of ’em who’s selling whatever the devil wants.”

  Potts sighed. “Twenty years ago I could’ve done it. Not now.”

  He felt the space between them close up, and he wasn’t imagining it. Sister Gee felt it as well. She felt his kindness, his honesty and sense of duty. And she felt something else. Something big. It was as if there were a magnet somewhere inside him pulling her spiritually toward him. It was odd, exciting, thrilling even. She watched as he rose and moved toward the door. She quickly stood and walked down the aisle with him, Potts humming nervously, picking his way past the woodstove and down the sawdust-covered aisle to the door as she watched him out the corner of her eye. She hadn’t felt that way about a man since her father showed up at school one afternoon to walk her home after a boy in her class got beat up by some white kids, the feeling of comfort and safety that radiated from someone who cared about her so deeply. And a white man, no less. It was an odd, wonderful gush to feel that coming from a man, any man, especially a stranger. She felt like she was dreaming.

  They stopped at the vestibule door. “If the deacon turns up, tell him he’s safer with us,” Potts said.

  Sister Gee was about to respond when she heard a voice from the vestibule say, “Where’s my daddy?”

  It was Pudgy Fingers. He’d wandered upstairs and was seated in a folding chair in the dark next to the church front door, his eyes covered with their customary shades, rocking back and forth as he always did. In the basement, the choir sang, obviously no one bothering to fetch him, since Pudgy Fingers knew his way around the church as good as anyone and often liked to wander about the tiny building on his own.

  Sister Gee placed a hand on his elbow to stand him up. “Pudgy, g’wan back to rehearsal,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Pudgy Fingers reluctantly stood. She carefully spun him around and placed his hand on the stair railing. They watched him work his way downstairs and disappear into the basement.

  When he was out of sight Potts said, “I expect that’s his son.”

  Sister Gee was silent.

  “You never told me what building your man lives in,” he said.

  “You never asked it,” she said. She turned to the window, her back to him, and rubbed her hands nervously as she gazed out the window.

  “Should I go down and ask his son?”

  “Why would you do that? You see the boy’s not all the way there.”

  “He knows where he lives, I’m sure.”

  She sighed and continued to stare out the window. “Lemme ask you, what good does it do to squeeze the one person around here who done the little bit of good that’s been done?”

  “That’s not my call.”

  “I already told you. Sportcoat is easy to find. He’s around these parts.”

  “Should I write that down as a lie? We haven’t seen him.”

  Her expression darkened. “Write it down however you like. However the cut comes or goes, once y’all take Sportcoat to jail, social services will have Pudgy Fingers. They’ll ship him up to the Bronx or Queens someplace and we won’t see him no more. That’s Hettie’s boy there. Hettie was in her forties when she had him. For a woman, that’s old to have a child. And for someone who lived a hard life like she did, that’s very old indeed.”

  �
�I’m sorry. But that’s not my department either.”

  “Course not. But I’m the type of person that goes to sleep if something comes along that don’t interest me,” Sister Gee said.

  Potts laughed bitterly. “Remind me to eat some knockout pills next time I go to work,” he said.

  Now it was her turn to laugh. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “Hettie done a lot for this church. She was here at the very beginning of it. She never took a penny of the Christmas money for herself, even when she lost her job. Do what you will or may, but once you arrest Sportcoat, they’ll roll Pudgy Fingers up in, too, and that’s a different pack of crackers altogether. I reckon we’d make a fight of it ’round him.”

  Potts, exasperated, held out his hands. “You want I should pass out free jawbreakers to every kid in the projects with a gun? The law’s the law. Your guy is a triggerman. He shot somebody. In front of witnesses! The guy he shot ain’t a choirboy—”

  “He was a choirboy.”

  “You know how it works.”

  Sister Gee didn’t move from the vestibule window. Potts watched her, straight-backed, tall, staring outside, breathing slowly, her breasts moving like two nodding headlights. Her face turned in profile as her olive eyes searched the streets, the fragility and gentleness gone, the cheekbones, the strong jaw, the wide nose that flared at the tip, angry again. He thought of his own wife, back home in Staten Island in her bathrobe, cutting coupons from the Staten Island Advance, the local paper, her eyes moist from boredom, complaining about getting her nails done on Thursday, her hair done Friday, missing bingo night on Saturday, her waist growing wider, her patience growing thinner. He saw Sister Gee rub her neck and found himself pondering the notion of placing his fingers there, then down her long arched back. He thought he saw her mouth move, but he was distracted and couldn’t hear. She was saying something and he caught just the end of it, and only then did he realize it was he who was talking, not her, him saying something about how he had always loved the neighborhood and came back to the Cause District because he’d had some trouble at another precinct trying to be an honest cop, and the Cause was the only place he felt free because he’d grown up just a few blocks away and the neighborhood still felt like home. That’s why he was back, to finish his career here, to be home at the end. And this case, he said, was “just a doozy, in every way. If this was any other part of Brooklyn, it might disappear. But your choirboy Deems is part of a big outfit. They got interests all over the city, with the mob, politicians, even the cops—and you didn’t hear that last part from me. They’ll hurt anyone who bothers their interests. That’s got to be dealt with. That’s just how it is.”

  She listened in silence as he spoke, staring out the window at the darkened projects, at the Elephant’s old boxcar on the next block, the worn, battered streets with newspapers blowing about, the hulks of old cars that sat at the curbs like dead beetles. She could see Potts’s reflection in the window as he talked behind her, the white man in a cop’s uniform. But there was something inside the blue eyes, in the drift of his broad shoulders, in the way he stood and moved, that made him different. She watched his reflection in the window as he talked, his face downcast, fiddling with his hands. There was something large inside him, she concluded—a pond, a pool, a lake maybe. The lovely Irish brogue in his voice gave him an air of elegance, despite his wide shoulders and thick hands. A man of reason and kindness. He was, she realized, as trapped as she was.

  “Let it roll as it will then,” she said softly to her reflection.

  “You can’t leave it there.”

  She looked at him sideways, tenderly. Her dark eyes glistened in the vestibule.

  “Come ’round and see me again,” she said. With that, she opened the church door for him.

  Potts, without a word, placed his NYPD cap on his head and stepped out into the dark evening, the smell of the dirty wharf drifting into his nose and consciousness with the ease of lilacs and moonbeams, fluttering around his awakened heart like butterflies.

  10

  SOUP

  The morning after he visited Rufus, Sportcoat lay in bed trying to decide, with Hettie’s help, whether to wear his plaid sport coat or go with the straight yellow.

  She was in a good mood and they were getting on quite well when the twang of an errant guitar interrupted them. Hettie vanished as Sportcoat, irritated, lumbered over to the window and looked down, frowning as a crowd gathered in the plaza at the front steps of Building 17, which faced his Building 9. On the front steps four musicians—one guitarist, one accordion player, and two playing bongos and congas—had already gathered. From his fourth-floor view, Sportcoat saw several other bongo and conga players approaching the plaza, toting their instruments.

  “Geez,” he grumbled. He looked back into the room. Hettie had gone. And they were getting on so good too.

  “It ain’t nothing, Hettie,” he said aloud to the empty room. “Just Joaquin and his bongos. C’mon back.” But she was gone.

  Irritated by her disappearance, he crawled out of bed, having slept in his pants, and put on a shirt and a sport jacket—the yellow one that Hettie had favored—and sipped a quick bracer from a leftover bottle of Kong, which Hettie did not favor, but that was what she got for leaving. He stuck the bottle in his pocket and stumbled out into the plaza, where a crowd had gathered around the front stoop of Building 17 to hear Joaquin and his band Los Soñadores (the Dreamers).

  Joaquin Cordero was the only honest numbers runner in Cause Houses history, as far as anyone could remember. He was a short, squat, brown-skinned man whose good looks were squeezed into a head that resembled a ski jump in that the back of his head was flat as a pancake and the top of his head sloped downward like a ski slope, thus his childhood nickname “Salto,” or “jump” in Spanish. He didn’t mind. Joaquin was what he called a “people person,” and like any good people person who wasn’t in politics, he had many jobs. He collected numbers from a custom-made countertop window at his first-story apartment in Building 17—the window accessible to pedestrians, with a special cabinet beneath the inside window ledge he’d constructed himself, from which he sold loose cigarettes, whiskey shots, and wine in paper cups to customers who needed a boost of happy sauce in the mornings. He also ran a part-time taxi service, charged a reasonable price for doing laundry for busy workers, repaired chair seat bottoms for anyone who asked, chased the occasional bored housewife, and played guitar and sang. Joaquin was, as they say, multitalented. He was the maestro of the Cause and his merry band was the hometown favorite.

  It was hard for anyone in the Cause to say whether Joaquin and Los Soñadores were actually any good. But there wasn’t a wedding, an event, or even a funeral where Los Soñadores were not participants, if not in person, then at least in spirit, for while they sounded like a diesel engine trying to crank on a cold October morning, it was the effort that counted, not the result. It didn’t matter that Joaquin’s ex-wife, Miss Izi, declared the only reason Los Soñadores played at all the Cause events was because Joaquin was piping Miss Krzypcinksi, the young white social worker with big boobs who couldn’t clap on beat and wouldn’t have known a salsa rhythm if it were dressed like an elephant in a bathtub, but whose wide hips moved with the kind of rhythm every man in the Cause could hear a thousand miles away. Miss Krzypcinksi ran the Cause Houses Senior Center, which doled out money and tidbits for special events all over the projects. And it did seem odd that the senior center, which constantly cried broke, always seemed to find the funds to pay Los Soñadores to play lumpty-dumpty music for every occasion in the Cause Houses when Hector Vasquez in Building 34 played trombone for Willie Bobo and Irv Thigpen in Building 17 played drums for Sonny Rollins. Couldn’t she get those guys to play around here sometime?

  It didn’t matter. Whenever Los Soñadores played, clunking along like four jalopies in tandem, they drew a crowd. The Dominicans nodded politely and chuckled among themselves.
The Puerto Ricans shrugged and said only God was greater than Celia Cruz and that crazy Eddie Palmieri, who stirs up salsa jazz so hot you charanga away all your money in the nightclub, so what difference does it make? The blacks, mostly Southern-born Christians who grew up in churches where preachers packed pistols, slung cotton, and could, without warning or warmup, toss their voices across half a state from their pulpits while holding a bale of cotton with one hand and fingering a female choir member with the other, liked any kind of music, so what’s the bother? They all danced along and got along, and why not? Joaquin’s music was free, and music came from God. Anything from God was always a good thing.

  Sportcoat wandered to the back edge of a crowd surrounding the front steps of Building 17, where Los Soñadores, their amps and drums set up on the top plateau of the building entrance steps, plunked on. An electric extension cord strung raggedly across the makeshift stage supplied power to the amps. The cord led to the first-floor window of Joaquin’s place, the window located right next to the main entrance of the building. On the building awning over the band members, a banner stretched across the doorway, which Sportcoat, standing at a distance, could not read.

  He stopped and watched from the back of the crowd as Joaquin, croaking away in Spanish, came to a particularly moving passage and lifted his voice to a higher pitch, causing his merry musicians to saw away at the accordion and bang their bongos with even more gusto.

  “G’wan, Joaquin!” Sportcoat said. He gulped a sip of King Kong and grinned at a woman standing next to him, displaying several yellowed teeth that stuck out of his front gums like sticks of butter. “Whatever they doing,” he said, “it ain’t no put-down.”

  The woman, a young Dominican mother with two little children, ignored him.

  “G’wan, Joaquin! The more I drink, the better you sound,” he yelled to the stage. Several people nearby, awed by the display of musicianship, smiled at the remark, but their gazes were trained on the band. Joaquin was on a roll. The band chunked forward. They did not notice Sportcoat.