Deacon King Kong(52)

Sausage lightened and pulled a long hand out of the machine to shake.

Instead of shaking it, Sportcoat stared at the hand, frowning. “I done apologized. So why the left hand? You know that’s bad luck.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Hot Sausage hurriedly pulled his right hand out of the generator and extended it. Satisfied, Sportcoat shook it and sat on a nearby crate. “Where’s the Kong?” he shouted over the din.

Sausage reached under a nearby tool bench and produced a quart-sized glass jug full of clear fluid, carefully sliding it over to Sportcoat, then he turned his attention back to the generator, peering inside. “This thing quits every week,” he said.

“Rufus got the same problem over at the Watch Houses,” Sportcoat yelled. “These projects was built the same year. Same apartments, toilets, generators, everything. Bad junk, these generators.”

“But I takes care of my generators.”

“Rufus says it ain’t the generators. It’s bad spirits.”

Sausage sucked his teeth, made a few adjustments, and the machine’s decibel level lowered to a bearable volume. “It ain’t no damn spirits.”

“Rats? Ants maybe?”

“Not this time of year. Even ants ain’t stupid enough to climb inside this thing. It’s cockeyed wiring is what it is. Old as Methuselah. Been fiddled with a lot too. Whoever done it was pulling his privates with one hand and fiddling at the wires with the other.”

Sportcoat sipped from the whiskey jug again and held it out to Sausage, who took a generous gulp, handed it back to Sportcoat, then peered back into the guts of the old machine. “Dumbest thing in the world,” he said. “There’s thirty-two units in this building. This thing runs electric to only four of ’em. It’s wired to the other one over there.” He nodded toward a second large generator on the wall on the far side of the room, separated from the first by a sea of junk that cluttered the basement: old sinks, bricks, brooms, refuse, pieces of bicycles, mops, toilet parts, and Sausage’s old wooden pendulum clock. “Whoever built this place was drunk, I reckon, to set ’em apart that way, instead of making ’em just one.”

Sausage sipped again, placed the bottle on the floor next to the generator, stuck his long hands into the machine, and tied two wires together. The generator sputtered, coughed a moment, then chugged onward.

“I got to replace the church’s Christmas Club money somehow, Sausage.”

“That’s the least of your problems.”

“Oh, cut that nonsense. This is real money here we talking. Hettie never told me how much was in that Christmas box. Or where she hid it. Or who put what in. Now Pastor Gee says there’s three thousand dollars in claims on it. Everybody and their brother’s swearing they got money in it.”

“That don’t include the fourteen hundred dollars I throwed in,” Sausage said.

“Very funny.”

“No wonder you seeing Hettie’s ghost, Sport. I’d be chickenhearted too with that kind of money floating north of me. You got trouble all ’round. You did lock that door behind you coming in, didn’t you? Deems ain’t got nothing against me, but outside of a child in pain, the worst sound in the world is an old man begging for his life while he’s at work. What’s to stop him from coming in here blasting?”

“Stop fussing about nothing,” Sportcoat said. “Ain’t nobody following me. And I ain’t talking to Hettie’s ghost. It’s a nag that’s bothering me, Sausage. What I’m talking to is a nag. A nag ain’t a ghost. It’s a mojo. A witch. Playing tricks. It looks like a person, but it ain’t. It’s just a witch. The old folks talked about that back home all the time. A witch can take any form she wants. That’s why I know it ain’t my dear Hettie talking. She never talked that way, calling me an idiot and carrying on. That’s a witch.”

Sausage chuckled. “That’s why I never got married. My uncle Gus married a girl like that. He met a girl down in Tuscaloosa and got into a hank with her daddy. One of his cows ate some of her daddy’s corn. Her daddy wanted forty cents for that corn. Uncle Gus didn’t pay it. His wife hollered at him but he wouldn’t, and then she died and put a wangature on him. Baddest mojo I ever seen. His chest bone growed out like a chicken’s breast. The hair on the sides of his head smoothed out. The top of his hair stayed kinky. That was a weird-looking nigger. He looked like a rooster till he died.”

“Whyn’t he just pay her daddy back?” Sportcoat said.

“Too late then,” Hot Sausage said. “Forty cents ain’t gonna stop no mojo. Four hundred cents would stop it, once it gets going. His wife put a nag on him, see, like Hettie done to you.”

“How you know Hettie done it?”

“It don’t matter who done it. You got to break it. Uncle Gus broke his by taking a churchyard snail and soaking it in vinegar for seven days. You could try that.”

“That’s the Alabama way of breaking mojos,” Sportcoat said. “That’s old. In South Carolina, you put a fork under your pillow and some buckets of water around your kitchen. That’ll drive any witch off.”

“Naw,” Sausage said. “Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it about your neck.”

“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”