Deacon King Kong(39)

Sausage turned to him and froze, his eyes wide. He glanced around nervously, yanked the cigar from his mouth, and hissed, “What you doing here, Sport? Deems is out.”

“Out where?”

“Out the hospital. Out the house. Around.”

“Good. He can get back to baseball,” Sportcoat said. “You got another cigar? I ain’t had a cigar in twenty years.”

“Ain’t you heard me, Sport?”

“Stop fussing at me and gimme a cigar.” He nodded his head toward his hip jacket pocket, where the Kong bottle was stashed. “I got the gorilla here. Want some?”

“Not out here,” Sausage hissed, but then took a quick glance in the direction of the flagpole, saw the coast was clear, snatched the bottle out of Sportcoat’s pocket, and nipped quickly, slipping the bottle back in Sportcoat’s pocket when he was done.

“What’s the cigar for?” Sportcoat asked. “You get Sister Bibb pregnant?”

The reference to Hot Sausage’s part-time lover and the church organist, Sister Bibb, did not please Hot Sausage. “That ain’t funny,” he grunted. He took the cigar out of his mouth, looking uncomfortable. “I won a bet,” he murmured.

“Who’s the sucker?” Sportcoat asked.

Hot Sausage glanced at Joaquin, who from the front steps was staring at somebody and suddenly went pale. Indeed, Sportcoat noticed the entire Los So?adores band staring at somebody now: him. The music, which had loped along poorly before, dropped to an even slower clip-clop.

Sportcoat pulled the bottle of Kong out his pocket and finished the last corner, then nodded at Los So?adores. “Let’s face it, Sausage. They ain’t Gladys Knight and the Pips. Why’d Joaquin bring ’em out of mothballs?”

“Can’t you see the sign?”

“What sign?”

Sausage pointed to the sign above the band scrawled on a piece of cardboard, which read Welcome Home, Soup.

“Soup Lopez is out of jail?” Sportcoat said, surprised.

“Yes, sir.”

“Glory! I thought Soup got seven years.”

“He did. He came out in two.”

“What was he in for again?” Sportcoat asked.

“I don’t know. I reckon they went broke feeding him and cut him loose. I hope he ain’t hungry today.”

Sportcoat nodded. Like most in the Cause, he had known Soup all his life. He was a mild, scrawny, quiet runt who got his exercise mostly by running from the local bullies. He was also the worst player on Sportcoat’s baseball team. Little Soup preferred to spend his afternoons at home watching Captain Kangaroo, a children’s show about a gentle white man whose gags with puppets and characters like Mr. Moose and Mr. Green Jeans delighted him. At nine, Soup hit a growth spurt the likes of which no one in the Cause had ever seen. He grew from four foot nine to five foot three. At ten he mushroomed to nearly six feet. At eleven he topped off at six feet two inches and had to sit on the floor of his mother’s living room and strain his neck to peer down at the small black-and-white screen to watch Captain Kangaroo, whose puppet tricks and gags he found, at that age, increasingly boring. At fourteen he abandoned Captain Kangaroo altogether and later favored a new TV show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, about a gentle white man with better puppets. He also added three inches to his frame. By sixteen he topped six foot ten, two hundred seventy-five pounds, all of it muscle, with a face scary enough to make the train leave the track, with the kind disposition of a nun. But, alas, Soup played baseball like one too. Despite his size he remained the worst player on Sportcoat’s team, in part on account of he was so tall he had a strike zone the size of Alaska. Plus the idea of striking a ball, or anything else, was foreign to Soup.

Like most of Sportcoat’s team, Soup disappeared from adult radar at the Cause when he entered the labyrinth of his teenage years. One minute he was striking out to the guffaws of the opposing team, the Watch Houses, the next minute word got out that Soup was in jail—adult jail—at seventeen. What put him there, no one seemed to know. It didn’t matter. Everybody went to jail in the Cause eventually. You could be the tiniest ant able to slip into a crack in the sidewalk, or a rocket ship that flew fast enough to break the speed of sound, it didn’t matter. When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is. Soup got seven years. It didn’t matter what it was for. What mattered was that he was back. And this was his party.

“I think it’s dandy that he’s out,” Sportcoat said. “He was a . . . well, he wasn’t a solid ballplayer. But he always showed! Where’s he at?”

“He’s running late,” Sausage said.

“We could use him as a coach for the team,” Sportcoat said gaily. “He can help us get the game rolling again.”

“What game?”

“The game against the Watch Houses. That’s what I come to talk to you about.”

“Forget the game,” Sausage snapped. “You can’t show your face out here, Sport.”

“What you chunking at me for? I ain’t the one out here making cha-cha at nine o’clock in the morning. Joaquin is the one you oughta be humping at. He should be taking numbers in his window right now. People got to get to work.”

As if the band heard him, the music ground to a halt. Sportcoat looked up to see Joaquin heading inside.