Deacon King Kong(14)

“He’s well enough to pin a gold star on your chest before airing you out.”

“Can’t be!”

“You done it!”

“I disremember it! It couldn’t have been me.”

“You shot that boy, Sport. Understand?”

“Sausage, I reckon that running lie is a good one to truck about, being that a boy with that kinda talent that don’t use it ought to be shot in this world for wasting it. But—hand before God—I didn’t shoot him to my recollection. Even if I did it’s only ’cause I wanted him to go back to pitching baseball. He’ll forget all about it when his ear heals. I got only one good ear myself. A man can still pitch with one ear.” He paused a moment, then added, “Anybody seen it?”

“No. Just everybody at the flagpole.”

“Gee,” Sportcoat said softly. “That’s like being on TV.” He took a swig of gin and felt better. He was having trouble deciding whether this was a dream.

Hot Sausage picked up Sportcoat’s jacket and held it out for him. “Git down the road right now while you can,” he said.

“Maybe I should call the police and explain it to ’em.”

“Forget them.” Sausage glanced at the door. “You still got people in South Carolina?”

“I ain’t been to my home country since my daddy died.”

“Go see Rufus over at the Watch Houses. Lay low over there. Maybe it’ll blow over somehow . . . but I wouldn’t buy no sweepstakes ticket on it.”

“I ain’t going over to no Rufus’s place at no Watch Houses to sleep!” Sportcoat snorted. “That Negro ain’t showered in two years. His body is dying of thirst. I got to be dead drunk to be around him. Plus, I got my own house!”

“Not no more.”

“Where’s Pudgy gonna go? I gotta take him to the school bus in the morning.”

“The church’ll see to that,” Hot Sausage said, still holding out Sportcoat’s jacket.

Sportcoat snatched his jacket from Sausage’s hand and placed it back on the liquor rack, grumbling. “You lying! I didn’t shoot Deems. I woke up this morning fussing with Hettie. I walked Pudgy to the blind folks’ school bus. I maybe had a taste or three. Then I come here. Sometime in the middle there I had another swig of the erratic and took Deems’s ear off. Maybe I done it. Maybe not. So what? He got another ear. What’s an ear when you got an arm like Deems? I knowed a man back home who got his pecker cut off by a white man for stealing a lady’s purse. He peed through a groin hole his whole life. He did all right. He’s yet living, far as I know.”

“The white man, or the man without a pecker?”

“They both yet living to my knowing. And they got to know each other good over time. So why you all hot and bothered about somebody’s old ear for? Even Jesus didn’t need but one sandal. The book of Psalms says you ain’t desired my ears and you ain’t opened ’em either.”

“It says what now?”

“Something like that. What difference do it make? God’ll straighten it out. He’ll make Deems’s one better’n two ears.”

That business decided, Sportcoat began unpacking liquor bottles from a crate. “You wanna go fishing this weekend?” he said. “I’m getting paid tomorrow. I needs to reflect on my first-ever sermon at Five Ends. It’s in three weeks.”

“If it’s about the hereafter, you ain’t gonna be short on critters and believers, that’s for sure. If I was a fly and wanted to get to heaven, I’d throw myself in your mouth.”

“It ain’t about no fly. It’s about not eating the dressing without confessing. Book of Romans, fourteenth chapter, tenth verse. Or maybe it’s Simon, seventh and ninth. It’s one or the other. I got to look.”

Hot Sausage stared, incredulous, as Sportcoat continued unloading liquor bottles. “Nigger, your cheese done slid off your cracker.”

“Just ’cause you says I got a note due someplace don’t mean I got one!”

“Is you listening, Sport?! You dropped Deems in his tracks! Then humped him like a dog. In front of everybody.”

“You ought to test your lies someplace else other than your best friend, Sausage. I never humped a man in my life.”

“You was drunk!”

“I don’t swallow any more spirits than anybody else in these projects.”

“Now who’s lying? I ain’t the one they calling Deacon King Kong.”

“I don’t get in a knot over the fibbing and twiddling things folks say about me, Sausage. I got my own thoughts about things.”

Hot Sausage glanced out the door. Itkin’s customers had left, and the store owner was peering into the back room where they were standing. Sausage reached into his pocket and pulled out a small clump of dollar bills. He held the crumpled bills out to Sportcoat, who had paused and was now standing before him, glaring, his arms full of liquor bottles.

“Thirty-one dollars. It’s all I got, Sport. Take it and get a bus ticket home.”

“I ain’t going no place.”

Hot Sausage sighed sadly, pocketed the money, and turned to leave. “All right. I guess I’ll use it to buy a bus ticket to see you in the penitentiary upstate. If you live that long.”