Deacon King Kong(50)
Elefante found the whole business of his own anger frightening, because that’s what his great furious silences were. Relief. A pressure cooker blown open. To his utter disgust, he’d found himself liking when the great silences came upon him. He hated himself later for those moments. He’d done some terrible things during those times. Many times afterward, in his darkest hours, in the late nights when Brooklyn slept and the harbor was dark, lying in bed in his lonely, empty brownstone with no wife and no children snoring in another room, with his widowed mother clomping around the house in her late husband’s construction boots, the things he did during the spells when the silence came upon him tortured him with a searing brutality that caused him to sit up in the dark and check his pajamas for blood, feeling like his soul had been sliced into quarters, sweat bursting out of his pores and tears running down his face. But there was nothing to do then. The moment was over. The rage had already poured out of him like lava, unrelenting and merciless, steaming over whoever or whatever was in the way, and the sorry soul on the receiving end saw nothing more than a blank stare of cold clarity. Were they seeing the eyes of Tommy Elefante, the lonely man with the kind heart who ordered his obedient crew to pull poor old colored women out of the harbor who had landed there for one reason or other, and why shouldn’t they, since New York was shit? Or were they seeing the eyes of Tommy Elefante, the shy Brooklyn bachelor who dreamed of escaping Brooklyn to move to a farm in New Hampshire and marry a fat country girl and even had the looks and charm to find one, but was too kind to drag any woman into his life of brutality and stealth, which had made his mother a prison widow and half-mad eccentric, a life that had diced his father’s kindness into bits? Perhaps they saw neither; perhaps they saw only the outer shell: the silent, cold, brutal Elephant, whose calculating calm and mum stare said, “You are finished,” and who dispatched them with the matter-of-fact speed and brutality of a Category 5 hurricane, ripping everything apart as he went. The Elephant’s stare reduced the hardest men to terror. He’d seen the fright explode across their faces when his silent business face emerged, and try as he could, he could not wipe those expressions of fright from his own memory, the most recent being the colored kid Mark Bumpus and his two hooligans at the abandoned factory on Vitali Pier three years ago, when he’d caught them red-handed trying to steal fourteen grand from him. I’ll help you, Bumpus had pleaded. I’ll help you fix things, he wailed. But it was too late.
Peck found himself staring at Elefante’s silence at that moment, a silence so palpable that to Joe, it was almost like hearing it and seeing it at the same time, for Peck had experienced it several times when they were teenagers, and his own inner alarm sounded off as loud as the blaring of a ship’s bullhorn. Peck realized he’d gone too far. His angry facial features twisted into blinking alarm as Elefante’s blank stare combed his face, the interior of the car, and Joe’s hands, which, they both noted, remained on the steering wheel—where they should be, Joe noted ruefully—and had better stay.
“Don’t come at me like that again, Joe. Find somebody else.”
Elefante withdrew from the GTO and stood with his hands at his sides as Joe threw the GTO in gear and roared off. Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face. A dreamless, friendless, futureless, sorry-ass New York guy.
Elefante watched the GTO turn the corner. He sighed and headed back to his Lincoln. He slowly slid his key into the lock, entered the car, and sat behind the steering wheel in silence, staring. He sat in the soft leather of the car for several long moments. Finally, he spoke aloud.
“I wish,” he said softly, “somebody would love me.”
12
MOJO
Sportcoat sat on a crate inside Sausage’s boiler room clasping a bottle of King Kong. He was in no hurry now. The disappointment of chasing the bottle of brandy around the plaza before it was destroyed by Soup that morning was softened by this pit stop at Sausage’s headquarters. Sausage was nowhere to be found and that was fine. Sportcoat had spent the rest of morning there, cooling his heels with some Kong. He felt better now. Evened out. Noooooo hurry, he thought happily, clasping the bottle. He thought he might get up to look at the clock to check the time, but by the tilt of sunlight in the tiny basement window he got the general idea. Afternoon. He stretched and yawned. He was supposed to be at work at the old lady’s garden on Silver Street at least two hours ago. He tried for a moment to remember her name, but couldn’t. It didn’t matter. It was Italian and ended with an “i” and she paid cash, that’s what was important. She didn’t mind too much if he was late—he always stayed late if he arrived late—but she had seemed a bit unsteady on her feet in the past few weeks. Getting old, he thought wryly. You got to be strong to get old. He was about to put the Kong away and head out when Hettie suddenly appeared.