Deacon King Kong(77)

“Get shot on your own, Sport. I think I’ll set here and strangle this bottle of bourbon.”

“A true friend would do it. Otherwise, he would not be no true friend.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“I ain’t your friend.”

“I’ll get Rufus then. He’s from my home country. You can count on a South Carolina man. He always said Alabamans gets torn up when they got to stand up for something.”

“Why should I hitch my mule to you, Sport? You the one that got drunk and shot him.”

“You got a can tied to your tail, too, Sausage. Deems knows we is partners. You taught him in Sunday school too. But you go on. I’ll get Rufus to do it.”

Sausage frowned and poked at the ground with his boot, pursing his lips, his nostrils flaring angrily. He rose off the crate, turned away from Sportcoat, and with his back to him, held his arm out parallel to the ground, straight, fingers stretched.

“Bourbon.”

Sportcoat, from behind, placed the bottle in Sausage’s hand. Sausage took a long, deep sip, set the bottle down on the cinder block, and with his back to Sportcoat, stood a long moment, swaying as he got drunker. Finally, he shrugged and turned around. “All right, dammit. I’ll be a fool with you. You don’t give me no goddamned choice anyway. I’ll set it up. I’ll see Deems and ask him to come down here and talk to us—talk to you. I ain’t got no pony in that race.”

“Sausage, you never gets tired of thinking, do you. Why’s he gonna come down here and talk to me? We got to go see him.”

“We ain’t gotta do nothing. It’s you. But I’ll go see him, man to man, and explain that you want to see him in private, in person, and that he got to come by hisself, so you can apologize to him in person and explain everything. That way, if he’s gonna kill you he can do it in privacy someplace so I don’t see it and he don’t go to jail right off. I reckon he won’t air me out for asking him, being that I wasn’t the one who shot him.”

“Don’t you ever tire of bringing that up? I told you I don’t recall not one bit of it.”

“That’s funny. ’Cause Deems damn well do remember it.”

Sportcoat thought a moment, then said, “You go fetch him. You watch. I ain’t gonna have to beg that youngster for nothing. I’d just as soon put him over my knee and paddle him for wasting what God gave him.”

“I don’t know that you could lift his hand, Sport. You seen him with his shirt off?”

“Seen more than that. I warmed his two little toasters in Sunday school many a day.”

“That was ten years ago.”

“Same difference,” Sportcoat said. “You get to know a man after you seen his straight and narrow.”



* * *





It was nearly dark when Deems and Phyllis, the new fly girl in the neighborhood, had settled onto the edge of Vitali Pier. They dangled their feet over the water, staring at Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

“Can you swim?” Deems asked, pretending to shove her from behind, as if pushing her off the dock.

“Stop it, boy,” she said. She elbowed him playfully.

He’d seen her the very first day she came to the flagpole as a customer, then a couple of days later when she came for a second go-round. She’d bought two bags of smack, then another bag two days later. She was a light user, he guessed, and a hottie, a redbone, a killer looker: a light-skinned black girl with long limbs and a gaunt, tight jaw and high cheekbones. He noted she wore long sleeves on hot days like junkies did, to cover her arm tracks, but her skin was smooth and her hair was long. She seemed awfully nervous, but that didn’t bother him. They all were when they were fucking up. He’d noticed her the first day she came out. He watched her disappear into Building 34 and sent Beanie into the building to find out who she was. He reported her name was Phyllis. A visitor. From Atlanta, niece of Fuller Richardson, a regular dope fiend who’d gotten busted and whose apartment was full of his wife, his cousins, his kids, and everybody he owed money to, which apparently included this girl’s mother, who was his sister. “She says he owes her mom a bunch of dough, so she can stay in his bedroom till he gets back,” Beanie reported. “She might be around awhile.”

Deems wasn’t taking any chances. He decided to move in quick before someone else popped game. He took a close look at Phyllis the second time she came through, just to make sure she was worth it, before he made a move. He happily concluded she had too much weight to be a full-blown junkie. She still owned a purse. Her shoes, coat, and clothing were clean. And she had some kind of temp job. She wasn’t a dopehead yet. Just another light-skinned chick on her way to skankdom who maybe got herself skinned by some bad motherfucker in Georgia probably. Come to New York to ease her broken heart and play big. Telling all her friends in Georgia she was dating the Temptations or some shit, no doubt. But Phyllis was fly, and she was new. And he had money. And it was all good.

The third time she showed, he let Beanie and Dome handle sales, posted Stick, his main lookout, on the roof above with three other kids on roofs nearby, and broke from his bench to follow her back toward 34 as she left. Business was slow that day anyway.

She saw him coming. “Why you following me?”