Deacon King Kong(114)
“Morris wants to impress new customers,” Bum-Bum fumed, watching as two men in black suits from the Hurly home stood guard over the limo’s open tailgate, while the rear end of the aged Morris, a grim-looking soul with a completely white Afro, dangled out the back, his shiny shoes getting muddied from the black soil of the new garden. Back and forth his shoes went, in and out of the limousine, as he made last-minute adjustments to Sportcoat.
“Look at him,” Bum-Bum said in disgust. “Morris looks like a ferret.”
Still, it was a homecoming that beat all, a celebration of celebrations. All of the Cause Houses came. Folks from Mount Tabernacle, St. Augustine, and even Mr. Itkin and two members of the Jewish temple on Van Marl Street showed. The line stretched past the Elephant’s boxcar, up Ingrid Avenue, down Slag Avenue, and all the way back into the plaza of Cause Houses, nearly all the way to the flagpole. The free distribution of cheese at the funeral might have helped, some said, and where it came from still no one knew, but it arrived the night before in bulk, weight, and volume never before seen, crates of it, neatly stacked in the basement of the church, waiting, when Sister Gee came to open the building at five a.m.
The viewing lasted nine hours.
Five Ends only held 150 people—that was what the fire code allowed. Twice that many actually squeezed in for the service. There were so many people that someone called local Fire Engine Company Station 131, which sent a truck over. The firemen took one look at the crowd and left, radioing for the cops, who sent over two squad cars from the Seventy-Sixth Precinct. The officers took one look at the crowd and the line of double-parked cars that required onerous traffic-ticket writing and announced they’d been called away for an emergency accident in Bay Ridge that would hold them up for approximately three hours, exactly long enough for Reverend Gee to shout his sermon to all about what a great man Sportcoat had been, and for the Cousins to lead the Five Ends choir in some of the most saintly and heavenly rousing and hollering that anyone had ever heard, joined in the end by Joaquin and Los So?adores, who were, praise Jesus, drowned out by the hollering of the Cousins, who, as usual, stole the show.
It was a death extravaganza, only this time the usual suspects—Sister Gee, Sister Bibb, Hot Sausage, Pudgy Fingers, now legally in the care of the Cousins, who fought over him with the same tenacity with which they fought over everything else—were amended by Sister Paul, who now, at 106, enjoyed a special seat on the dais, accompanied by none other than former deacon Rufus Harley, janitor of the Watch Houses, who had sworn up and down that he would never, ever darken the doorway of that hotbed of hypocrisy and holy impotence known as Five Ends Baptist Church as long as he drew air. Also there was Miss Izi, flanked by all seventeen of the newly sworn-in members of the Puerto Rican Statehood Society of the Cause Houses. The gentle giant Soup Lopez was there as well, along with Joaquin’s cousin Elena from the Bronx and Calvin the subway tollbooth operator—those two talked trains. Bum-Bum, accompanied by her new husband, Dominic the Haitian Sensation, along with his best friend, Mingo the witch doctor, were in attendance, as were several members of Sportcoat’s All-Cause Boys Baseball Team, now grown and retired from baseball, save one. And an unusual conglomerate of outsiders: Potts Mullen, the retired cop, and his former rookie partner, Jet Hardman, who was currently working for the New York City Harbor Patrol, the first black ever, having broken that color barrier at the NYPD Bomb Squad, the Department of Internal Affairs, the accounting department, the traffic division, and the mechanic transportation division, which fixed squad cars—all of which broke down five minutes after Jet finished working on them.
And finally two of the most interesting parties: Thomas G. Elefante, formerly known as the Elephant, resplendent in a gray suit, along with his mother and his new wife, a hefty, shy Irish woman said to be from the Bronx; and Deems Clemens himself, the former drug-dealing terror of the Cause—now a twenty-one-year-old rookie pitcher for the Iowa Cubs, a minor-league affiliate for the hapless major-league Chicago Cubs, accompanied by baseball coach Bill Boyle from St. John’s University, with whom he lived for a year while pitching St. John’s to the NCAA finals in his only college season. The wound that the right-handed-pitching Clemens had received in the shooting twenty-two months earlier was, thankfully, in his left shoulder, and had healed nicely, along with his mental state, which had improved dramatically when he vacated the Cause Houses to live in Coach Boyle’s home.
Deems’s appearance—he arrived twenty minutes late—and the news of his good fortune in professional baseball blitzed through the church mourners like a cyclone. “It’s just our luck,” Joaquin mumbled. “The only guy from the Cause who goes to the bigs gets drafted by the lousy Cubs. That team hasn’t won a World Series in sixty-three years. Who’s gonna bet on them? I won’t make a dime on him.”
“Who cares?” said Miss Izi. “Did you see his car?”
She had a point. Clemens, who had owned a used Pontiac Firebird during his drug-selling days, had arrived driving a brand-new Volkswagen Beetle.
After the service and burial, a large group of about forty neighborhood residents gathered in the basement of Five Ends and talked late into the night, in part because there was so much food to eat, and in part because there was so much cheese left to distribute they had no idea what to do with it all. The arguing about the cheese distribution took hours. It was later determined, from an eyewitness account of Bum-Bum, that ever-vigilant cheese cop, and old Dub Washington, who had fallen asleep in the old factory at Vitali Pier and had wandered outside in the middle of the night to forage through the garbage on Silver Street, that the cheese had arrived the night before in a refrigerated eighteen-foot box truck containing forty-one cases, each bearing twenty-eight five-pound hunks of delicious, delectable, delightful white man’s cheese. It had been distributed because it could not be stored, but despite the crowd at the viewing, the church ran out of takers, so it was hurriedly decided after Sportcoat’s service that they would spread the love into the wider Cause Houses district. They shoved eight hunks into the trunk of the two squad cars of the cops from the Seven-Six who had returned from their Bay Ridge “traffic emergency.” The cops protested that it was too much, so they were instructed by Sister Gee to carry half of the cheese out to Ladder Company 131 over on Van Marl Street and share it with their fellow city workers. The cops agreed but didn’t give the firemen a single curd, since the cops and firemen in the Cause District hated each other just like they did all over New York. Word was spread also to the Watch Houses. A line formed outside the church, residents from both housing projects came back in droves, and still there were not enough takers. Many of the people who did show up were forced to carry home more than they could handle. They hauled blocks of it in shopping carts, sacks, shopping bags, wagons, purses, baby carriages, and mail carrier carts swiped from the nearby post office. There had never been so much cheese in the Cause District. And sadly, there never would be cheese there again.