Deacon King Kong(72)
“Don’t she got a real name?” Sausage asked.
“Of course she do. In fact the lady from the senior center who recommended me for the job wrote her name down for me once. But I lost the paper.”
“Whyn’t you just ask the lady her name again?”
“She don’t care what I call her!” Sportcoat declared. “She likes it when I calls her Miss Four Pie!”
“Why you call her that?”
“Sausage, she had four hot blueberry pies in her oven first day I come on the job. That whole house was stinking of blueberries,” Sportcoat said. “I said, ‘By God, miss, it do smell good in here.’ She told me her name then.”
“You don’t remember it at all?”
“What difference do it make?” he said. “She pays in cash.” He pondered it a moment. “I do believe she got an Italian name. Like Illy-at-ee or Ella-rant-ee or some such thing.” He scratched his head. “I remembered it the first day, but I drunk a bottle of essence after I come home and forgot it. It just runned right outta me.”
“Did she give you one that first day?” Hot Sausage asked.
“Give me a name? I got my own name.”
“No. A pie! She had four of ’em.”
“Do a buzzard fly? Course she did!” Sportcoat declared. “Miss Four Pie don’t play around! She knows I’m a plant man. She’s good people, Sausage.” He thought a moment. “Now that I thinks on it, to be legal and proper, I reckon I ought to call her Miss Three Pie instead of Miss Four Pie, being she didn’t have but three pies when I left that first day. She deducted herself one whole pie for old Sportcoat.” He laughed. “I’m killing ’em, Sausage! They love me out here. She’s crazy about me.”
“That’s because you probably got more teeth than her.”
“Don’t get jealous, son. She’s a salty lady. Full of sand, as they say. Why, if she was colored and bowlegged, I’d run her down to Silky’s and buy her a sip of some top-shelf brandy.”
“Why she got to be bowlegged?”
“I do got standards.”
Sausage laughed, but Sportcoat felt embarrassed about the wisecrack, which he felt was in poor taste. “Fact is, Sausage,” he said soberly, “I miss my Hettie. She don’t spare me talking this kind of devilment, and if she hears of it, she might not show around no more. I can’t have that.” To make up for his insult, he said: “Miss Four Pie’s a spicy soul. She moves her tongue however she pleases. She ain’t afraid to speak out. Fact is, I’m scared of her a little. Her husband’s long dead, and I reckon she might’ve talked him into the ground, her being so strong-minded. That lady knows more about plants than anybody around here. The hours just whiles away when I’m working under her hand, for I favors plants myself. I hardly has a need to get a glow going on the days I works for her—well, I need a little protective custody, but not much. It don’t compare to the rest of the week when I ain’t got no garden to fool around in. Then I gets parched and goes from a toot to a tear to a wallbanger, especially if Hettie don’t show, for then I get ever more bleary and swim on ahead, getting overserved, thinking about Hettie and whatever wrong I done to her and all. It ain’t good.”
Sausage was amused, but as usual, Sportcoat’s long-winded talks about his adventures in plant life bored him, so he changed the subject. But it occurred to Sportcoat that talking with Miss Four Pie about plants, as they thrust about the weeds in the lot, was one of the few things he looked forward to every week, even if she was the one doing all the talking.
They were an odd sight, an elderly white woman in housedress, apron, and oversized men’s construction boots, followed by an elderly black man in porkpie hat and plaid sports jacket, moving past the railroad boxcar, the abandoned docks and railroad tracks, and into the high weeds of discarded junk surrounding the abandoned factories that sat near the water’s edge, the glistening Lower Manhattan just across the water.
That Wednesday, as he walked behind her, Sportcoat noticed she moved unsteadily. Over the past month or so, she’d seemed tired and unsteady on her feet. When they got back to her house, she’d occasionally ask him to step into the kitchen to clean and cut up some of the plants they’d found, but not very frequently. It was an unwritten rule he’d followed as a black man who grew up in the South that he always stay outside. That suited him fine, for he was afraid to step into any of their houses. Miss Four Pie had advised him early on that her son, who lived in the house with her—a son he had never met (or maybe he had met but could not recall)—was strict and did not want any strangers in their home. That was fine with Sportcoat, who worked under the assumption that if anything went wrong in any white person’s house in any part of the world and he happened to be near it, why, there was no doubt on whose head the hammer of justice would fall. But over the months he’d worked for her she’d come to trust him. Once in her kitchen, after he did her bidding, he’d move back into the yard as quickly as possible. He was, after all, just an outdoor man. Miss Four Pie seemed to understand that.
They wandered into a lot filled with high weeds just south of the harbor and spread out from one another. He saw her disappear down an embankment out of sight momentarily. He went over to check on her and found her sitting on a discarded sink, scanning the swamp before her.