Deacon King Kong(103)
“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 Aged 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.