Deacon King Kong(110)

The romance was new territory for them both. A couple of lunches and a quick dinner at a Bronx diner had dissolved into long, peaceful dinners at the Peter Luger Steak House in Williamsburg, then lovely walks along the Brooklyn Esplanade as the cocoon of affection and lust blossomed into the kaleidoscope of bursting, passionate, gorgeous love.

Even so, he thought, as he steered the car down the FDR Drive, the Chrysler Building at Forty-Second Street receding in the distance, to love a man by the light of day when the sun is shining and there is a promise of love is one thing. But to rumble into the housing projects of Brooklyn in his Lincoln to pick up the old deacon in the dead of night was quite another.

He pondered it as he spun the Lincoln into the Battery Tunnel, the fluorescent lights along its ceiling glinting across Melissa’s face as she sat next to him. Until then he’d always believed a partner brought worry, fear, and weakness to a man, especially one in his business. But Melissa brought courage and humility and humor to places he’d never known existed. He’d never partnered with a woman before, if you didn’t include his mother, but Melissa’s quiet sincerity was a weapon of a new kind. It drew people in, disarmed them. It made them friends—and that was a weapon too. He’d seen that happen with the old colored woman in the Bensonhurst nursing home who called herself Sister Paul.

He thanked God he’d brought Melissa to the old folks’ home the week before. He almost didn’t do it. He took her along as an afterthought, to show his sincerity and openness. She’d turned matters in his favor.

The old deacon had assured him that he’d told Sister Paul all about him. But when he walked into the room, the old biddy, wrinkled and covered in a gray blanket, gave him the malocchio, the evil eye. She ignored his greeting and, without a word, extended an old claw, pointing at an old tin coffee can near her bed. He reached for it and handed it to her. She spat in it.

“You look like your daddy but fatter,” she said.

He placed a chair close to her wheelchair and sat in it facing her, trying to smile. Melissa sat on the bed behind him. “I ate more peanuts than he did.” He said it as a joke, to loosen things.

She waved that off with an ancient, wrinkled hand. “Your daddy didn’t eat no peanuts to my recollection. And he didn’t say but four or five words a day. Which means you is not only fatter, but you uses your talking hole more.”

He felt the color moving into his face. “Didn’t the deacon talk to you?”

“Don’t be coming in here sassifying and frying up air castles ’bout some old deacon! Do you do?”

“Huh?”

“Do you do?”

“Do what?”

“I asked you a question, mister. Do you do?”

“Listen, miss—”

“Don’t sass me,” she barked. “I’m asking you a question. Yes or no. Do you do?”

He raised his finger to make a point, to try to slow her down. “I’m only here bec—”

“Put that finger in your pocket and listen, sonny! You walk in here without a can of sardines, nor gift, nor bowl of beans, not even a glass of water to offer somebody who is aiming to give you a free hand to the thing you come for. And you don’t even know if you gonna hit the bull’s-eye on that or not. You is like most white men. You believes you is entitled to something you ain’t got no hand in. Everything in the world got a price, mister. Well now, the bottom rail’s on top, sir, for I has been walked on all my life, and I don’t know you from Adam. You could be Italian, being that the old suit you wearing has got wine stains all over it. On the other hand, you could be some fancy-figuring devil-may-care wino pretending to be Mr. Guido’s son. I don’t know why you is here in the first place, mister. I don’t know the deacon that good. He didn’t explain nothing to me about you. Like most mens, he don’t feel he got to explain nothing to a woman, including his own wife, who did all the frying and cooking and hair straightening while he rumbled ’round throwing joy juice down his throat for all them long years he done it. I been around the sun one hundred four whole times and nobody’s explained nothing to me. I read the book on not being explained to. That’s called being an old colored woman, sir. Now I ask it again. For the last time—and if you don’t show your points here, then you can slip your corns inside them little Hush Puppy shoes of yours with the little quarters inside ’em and git on down the road. Do you do?”

He blinked, exasperated, and glanced at Melissa, who—thank God—said softly, “Mrs. Paul, he does do.”

The old lady’s shriveled face, a mass of wrinkled, angry rivers, loosened as she turned her ancient head to look at Melissa. “Is you his wife, miss?”

“Fiancée. We’re gonna be married.”

The old biddy’s anger loosened a bit more. “Hmph. What kind of feller is he?”

“He doesn’t talk much.”

“His daddy didn’t talk much neither. Talked a lot less than him, that’s for sure. Why you wanna marry this loser? He comes tumbling in here rough and wrong, asking questions like he’s the police or some God-sent minister. His daddy never asked me but one single question. Never asked me na’ar question after. Is he that type of man, this feller of yours? Is he the type that’s good for his word? Is he the type who do stuff and don’t talk about it to nobody later? Do he talk or do he do? Which is it?”