Deacon King Kong(25)
But leader of what? he thought bitterly as he lay in bed. He turned on his side, groaning. “Everything,” he muttered aloud, “is falling apart.”
“Say what, bro?”
Deems opened his eyes and was surprised to see two of his crew, Beanie and Lightbulb, sitting by his bed staring at him. He had thought he was alone. He quickly turned to the wall, away from them.
“You all right, Deems?” Lightbulb said.
Deems ignored him, staring at the wall, trying to think. How had this started? He couldn’t remember. He was fourteen when his older cousin Rooster dropped out of CUNY and started making big bucks selling heroin, mostly to junkies from the Watch Houses. Rooster showed him how to do it, and bang, five years passed. Was it that long ago? Now he was nineteen, had $4,300 in the bank; his mother hated his guts; Rooster was dead, killed in a drug robbery; and he was lying in his bed without his right ear.
Fucking Sportcoat.
Lying there staring at the wall, the smell of the lead paint wafting into his nostrils, Deems thought of the old man not with rage, but rather with confusion. He could not understand it. If there was one person in the Cause who had nothing to gain by shooting him, it was Sportcoat. Sportcoat had nothing to prove. If there was one person in the Cause who could get away with backtalking him, charming him, yelling at him, calling him names, kidding him, jiving him, lying to him, it was old Sportcoat. Sportcoat had been his baseball coach. Sportcoat had been his Sunday school teacher. Now he’s a straight drunk, Deems thought bitterly, though that’s never affected anything before. As far back as he could remember, he realized, Sportcoat had been a drunk more or less, but more important, he’d been the same—consistent. He never complained, or gave opinions. He didn’t judge. He didn’t care. Sport had his own thing, which is why Deems liked him. Because if there was one single thing in the screwed-up Cause Houses—in all of Brooklyn, for that matter—that Deems hated, it was people who complained about nothing. People with nothing complaining about nothing. Waiting on Jesus. Waiting on God. Sport wasn’t that way. He liked baseball and booze. Real simple. Sportcoat did the Jesus thing, too, Deems noted, when his wife, Miss Hettie, used to make him. But even then he could see the old man and he were the same. They were stuck in Jesus houses.
Deems had long ago decided that Sport was different from the Jesus nuts of his life. Sport didn’t need Jesus. Of course he acted like he did, just like a lot of grown-ups at Five Ends church. But Sportcoat had something that nobody at Five Ends, nobody in the projects, nobody Deems Clemens had known in his entire nineteen years of growing up in the Cause Houses, had.
Happiness.
Sport was happy.
Deems sighed heavily. Even Pop-Pop, his grandfather, the only man he’d ever known as a father, had not been happy. Pop-Pop had spoken in grunts and ruled his house with an iron fist, collapsing into his armchair at night after work with a beer in his hand, listening to the radio all night until he fell asleep. Pop-Pop was the only person who visited him when he went to juvy prison. His mother didn’t bother. As if hours of talking about Jesus and the Bible would substitute for a kiss, a smile, a solitary meal together, a book read to him at night. She wore his ass out with her switch for the least offenses, rarely found anything good in what he did, never went to his baseball games, and dragged him to church on Sundays. Food. Shelter. Jesus. That was her motto. “I sling eggs and sugar and bacon twelve hours a day and you don’t even thank Jesus that you got a place to live. Thank you, Jesus.” Jesus my ass.
He wanted her to understand him. She could not. There was no one in his house who could. He wanted to be an equal. He saw how stupid the whole thing was, even as a child, all these people crowded into these shitbox apartments. Even a blind person like Pudgy Fingers could see it. He’d even talked to Pudgy about it, years ago, when they were in Sunday school. He was nine and Pudgy was eighteen. Even though he was a teenager, Pudgy was sent down to stay in Sunday School with the little kids during service because he was said to be “slow.” Deems once asked if he minded. Pudgy simply said, “Nope. The snacks are better.” They were in the basement and some Sunday school teacher was prattling on about God and Pudgy was sitting behind him and he saw Pudgy feeling the air with his hand until his hand landed on Deems’s shoulder and Pudgy leaned over and said, “Deems, do they think we’re retarded?” That surprised him. “Of course we ain’t retarded,” he snapped. Even Pudgy knew. Of course he knew. Pudgy wasn’t slow. Pudgy was smart. Pudgy remembered things that nobody else remembered. He could remember how many singles Cleon Jones of the New York Mets hit against the Pittsburgh Pirates in spring training last year. He could tell you when Sister Bibb playing the organ in church was feeling sick just because of the way he heard her feet on the pedals. Of course Pudgy was smart, because he was Sportcoat’s son. And Sport treated kids like equals, even his own. When Sportcoat taught Sunday school, the Lord’s word was all candy and bubblegum, games of catch played in the church basement with balled-up church programs while the congregation sang and yelled upstairs. Sportcoat even took the class on a Sunday morning “outing” to the harbor once, where he’d hidden a fishing pole, tossing the fishing line into the water while Deems and the other kids played and muddied up their clothes. As for baseball, Sportcoat was a whiz. He organized the All-Cause team. He taught them how to catch and throw a ball properly, how to stand in the batter’s box, how to block the ball with your body if need be. After practice on lazy summer afternoons, he’d gather the kids around and tell stories about baseball players long dead, players from the old Negro leagues with names that sounded like brands of candy: Cool Papa Bell, Golly Honey Gibson, Smooth Rube Foster, Bullet Rogan, guys who knocked the ball five hundred feet high into the hot August air at some ballpark far away down south someplace, the stories soaring high over their heads, over the harbor, over their dirty baseball field, past the rude, red-hot projects where they lived. The Negro leagues, Sport said, were a dream. Why, Negro league players had leg muscles like rocks. They ran the bases so fast they were a blur, but their wives ran faster! The women? Lord . . . the women played baseball better than the men! Rube Foster hit a ball so far in Texas it had to take the train back home from Alabama! Guess who brought it back? His wife! Bullet Rogan struck out nineteen batters straight until his wife took a turn and knocked his first pitch out of the yard. And where you think Golly Honey Gibson got his nickname? His wife! She’s the one made him good. She’d hit line drives at him for practice, the ball traveling like a missile at the height of your face for four hundred feet, so hard he’d jump out the way, yelling “Golly, honey!” If Golly Honey Gibson was any better, he’d be a girl!