Deacon King Kong(24)

And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color. And all the while, the ants marched each fall, arriving at Building 17 kicking ass, a roaring tidal wave of tiny death, devouring Jesus’s cheese, moving out of the clock and into the boiler room and into the trash can by the hall door, polishing off whatever leftover sandwiches and bits of cake from the wilted, soggy, uneaten lunches Hot Sausage left behind each afternoon as he and his buddy Sportcoat ignored food in favor of their favorite beverage, King Kong. From there they moved on to more plentiful goods in the halls and supply closets: rats and mice, which were in abundance, some dead, some alive, the mice still trapped in glue traps and tiny cardboard boxes, others expired, having been smashed by Hot Sausage’s hand, the rats crushed by his shovel and lying underneath old carburetors and discarded fenders, amidst brooms and on dustpans, sprinkled with lime for later incineration in the giant coal furnaces that heated the Cause Houses. After supping on them, the ants turned upward, filing in a thick line up the broken toilet pipe to Flay Kingsley’s apartment in 1B, where there was little food or garbage to be found, since Miss Flay’s family of eight actually used apartment 1A across the hall, which had been empty since Mrs. Foy, the sole tenant, died four years previous and forgot to tell the welfare department about it, which created the perfect scenario for the welfare department and housing to blame each other about it—since one department didn’t tell the other. The apartment was quiet. Welfare paid the rent. Who knew? From there the ants moved up to Mrs. Nelson’s apartment, 2C, munching on the old watermelon rinds and coffee grounds she kept in a garbage can for her outdoor tomato garden, then up the waste pipe to 3C, Bum-Bum’s place, which was slim pickings, then across the hallway via outdoor viaduct to Pastor Gee’s place in 4C, which had no pickings at all, since Sister Gee kept a spotless house, then through Miss Izi’s bathroom in 5C, where they sampled all manner of delicious soap from Puerto Rico, which Miss Izi every year forgot to store in glass containers in the fall knowing they were coming, and finally to the outer roof, where they attempted to perform a high-wire act by trooping across a stepladder that connected the roof of Building 17 to the roof of Building 9 next door—where they met their death care of a group of clever schoolboys: Beanie, Rags, Sugar, Stick, and Deems Clemens, the best pitcher the Cause Houses had ever seen, and the most ruthless drug dealer in the history of the Cause Houses.

As he lay in bed in apartment 5G of Building 9, his head wrapped in gauze, his mind fogged by painkillers, Deems found himself wondering about the ants. He had dreamed of them many times since he’d been hospitalized. He’d been home in bed three days, and the fog of painkillers and the constant ringing on the right side of his head had brought on odd memories and vivid nightmares. He had turned nineteen two months before, and for the first time in his life, he found himself unable to focus and remember things. He discovered with horror, for example, that his childhood memories were fast disappearing. He couldn’t remember his kindergarten teacher’s name, nor the name of the baseball coach from St. John’s University who had called all the time. He couldn’t remember the name of the subway stop in the Bronx where his aunt lived, or the name of the dealership in Sunset Park where the car salesman sold him his used Pontiac Firebird and then drove it home for him because Deems himself couldn’t drive. There was so much going on, everything was a spinning whirlwind, and for a kid whose almost-perfect memory once allowed him to collect illegal numbers for the local numbers runners needing neither paper nor pencil, the whole business of losing his past was troubling. It occurred to him, as he lay in bed that afternoon, that the shrill buzz on the right side of his head where what was left of his missing ear now lived might be the cause of the problem, or that if there are a thousand things you should remember in life, and you forget them all but the one or two useless things, maybe those things aren’t so useless. He couldn’t believe how good it felt to remember the dumb ants from Building 17. It had been ten years since he and his buddies had dreamed up wonderful ways to stop them from invading their beloved Building 9. He smiled at the memory. They tried everything: Drowning. Poison. Ice. Firecrackers, aspirin soaked in soda, raw egg yolk sprayed with bleach, cod liver oil mixed with paint, and one year a possum that his best friend, Sugar, produced. Sugar’s family visited relatives in Alabama, and Sugar hid the creature in the trunk of his father’s Oldsmobile. The possum arrived in Brooklyn sick and prostrate. He was tossed into a cardboard box taped shut with an entry hole and placed in the ant path on the roof of Building 9. The ants arrived and obediently climbed into the box and began to politely devour the possum, at which point the possum came to life, writhing and hissing, which caused the frightened boys to toss a glass of kerosene on the box and set it on fire. The sudden whoosh of flames caused panic and they kicked the whole business off the roof, where it landed in the plaza six stories below—a bad idea, since that was sure to bring the wrath of adults of one kind or the other. It was Deems who saved them. He grabbed a five-gallon bucket left on the roof by a work crew and, scampering downstairs, scooped the remnants of the whole business into the bucket and dashed to the harbor, dumping everything at the water’s edge. He became their leader then, at ten, and had remained their leader since.