Deacon King Kong(11)

When his head was snatched from the hood, Jet found himself staring at his old partner Potts. Deems was on the ground, twenty feet off and surrounded by cops.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Jet shouted, loud enough for Clemens and anyone nearby to hear.

Potts spun him around, then patted him down, carefully avoiding the .38 strapped to his ankle. As he did, Jet muttered, “Arrest me, Potts. For God’s sake.”

Potts grabbed him by the collar and swung him toward the backseat of his squad car.

“You’re an idiot,” he murmured softly.





4





RUNNING OFF



Sportcoat walked into the basement furnace room of Building 9 and sat on a foldout chair next to the giant coal furnace in a huff. He heard the wail of a siren, then forgot all about it. He didn’t care about any siren. He was looking for something. His eyes scanned the floor, then stopped as he suddenly remembered he was supposed to memorize a Bible verse for his upcoming Friends and Family Day sermon. It was about righting wrongs. Was it the book of Romans or Micah? He couldn’t recall. Then his mind slid to the same old nagging problem: Hettie and the Christmas Club money.

“We got along all right till you decided to fool with that damn Christmas Club,” he snorted.

He looked around the basement for Hettie. She didn’t appear.

“You hear me?”

Nothing.

“Well, that’s all right too,” he snapped. “The church ain’t holding no notes on me about that missing money. It’s you who got to live with it, not me.”

He stood and began to search for a bottle of emergency King Kong that Sausage always kept hidden someplace, but was still pie-eyed and feeling addled and murky. He pushed around the discarded tools and bicycle parts on the floor with his foot, muttering. “Some people got to stay mad to keep from getting mad,” he grumbled. “Some goes from preaching to meddlin’ and meddlin’ to preaching and can’t hardly tell the difference. Well, it ain’t my money, Hettie. It’s the church’s money.” He stopped moving items with his foot for a moment and stilled, talking to the air. “It’s all the same,” he announced. “You got to have a principle or you ain’t nothing. What you think of that?”

Silence.

“I thought so.”

Calmer now, he started searching again, bending down and talking as he checked toolboxes and under bricks. “You never did think of my money, did you? Like with that old mule I had down home,” he said. “The one old Mr. Tullus wanted to buy. He offered me a hundred dollars for her. I said, ‘Mr. Tullus, it’ll take a smooth two hundred to move her.’ Old man wouldn’t pay that much, remember? That mule up and died two weeks later. I coulda sold her. You shoulda told me to turn her loose.”

Silence.

“Well, Hettie, if I weren’t taking that white man’s good hundred dollars on principle, I surely ain’t gonna take no mess from you ’bout some fourteen dollars and nine pennies you done squirreled up in Christmas Club money and hid someplace.”

He paused, looked out the corner of his eye, then said softly, “It is fourteen dollars, ain’t it? It ain’t, say, two or three hundred dollars, is it? I can’t do three hundred dollars. Fourteen is sheep money. I can raise that sleeping. But three hundred, that’s over my head, honey.”

He stopped moving, frustrated, still looking around, unable to find what he was looking for. “That money . . . it ain’t mine, Hettie!”

There was still no answer, and he sat down again in the folding chair, flummoxed.

Sitting in the cold seat, he had an unfamiliar, odd, nagging feeling that something terrible had occurred. The feeling wasn’t unusual for him, especially since Hettie died. Normally he ignored it, but this time it felt bigger than usual. He couldn’t place it, then suddenly spied the prize he was looking for and forgot about the problem instantly. He stood up, shuffled over to a hot-water heater, reached under it, and pulled out the bottle of Rufus’s homemade King Kong.

He held the bottle up to the bare ceiling lightbulb. “I say a drink, I say a glass. I say do you know me? I say the note is due! I say bring the hens! I say a poke and a choke, Hettie. I say God only knows when! Brace!”

Sportcoat turned up the bottle, drank a deep swallow, and the nagging feeling bubbled away. He placed the bottle back in its hiding place and relaxed in his seat, satisfied. “G’wan, King Kong,” he murmured. Then he wondered aloud, “What day is this, Hettie?”

He realized she wasn’t speaking to him, so he said, “Hell, I don’t need ya. I can read . . . ,” which was actually not true. He could read a calendar. Words were another matter.

He rose, ambled over to a weathered wall calendar, peered at it through the haze of his drunken glow, then nodded. It was Thursday. Itkin’s day. He had four jobs, one for every day but Sunday: Mondays he cleaned Five Ends church. Tuesdays he emptied the garbage at the nursing home. Wednesdays he helped an old white lady with the garden of her brownstone. Thursdays he unloaded crates at Itkin’s liquor store, just four blocks from the Cause Houses. Fridays and Saturdays had once been baseball practice for the Cause Houses baseball team before it disbanded.

Sportcoat looked over at the wall clock. Almost one o’clock. He had to get to work.