Deacon King Kong(82)
Then something grabbed him by the jacket and pulled him up into air. He was yanked backward, slung against one of the deck pilings, and pinned there, held fast by a single strong forearm. Whoever was holding him was out of breath. Then he heard a harsh whisper: “Shhh.”
He couldn’t see a thing in the pitch black. Deems’s left shoulder burned so badly it felt like it had been dipped in acid. He was dizzy and felt warm blood oozing down his left arm. Then the grip that held him loosed for a moment to get a better grip and pulled him farther back under the wooden dock and closer to the shore. He felt his feet touch rocky ground. The water was neck high now. Whoever held him was standing. Deems tried to stand himself but he couldn’t move his legs. “Jesus,” he gurgled. A hand quickly slammed over his mouth and a face moved close to his, speaking just over his shoulder.
“Shush now,” the voice said.
Even in the water, with the stench of the dock and the fish and the funk of the East River everywhere, Deems could smell the booze. And the smell of the man. The personal body funk of the old Sunday school teacher who had once held him in his lap by the warm woodstove at Five Ends Baptist when he was a howling boy of nine with wet pants, because his mother got too drunk to go to church on Sundays and sent him alone in piss-smelling church clothes, knowing that the old drunk Sunday school teacher and his kind wife, Hettie, would put shoes and clean pants, shirt, and underwear on him, clothes once worn by their blind son, Pudgy Fingers, knowing that Hettie, each and every Sunday, would discreetly carry Deems’s soiled clothes back to her apartment in a bag she carried to church expressly for that purpose, along with a Christmas Club money box in which the two faithfully dropped fifty cents each week—twenty-five cents for Deems and twenty-five cents for their own son, Pudgy Fingers. Then she’d wash Deems’s clothes and send them back to his mother’s apartment in a paper bag with a piece of cake, or a piece of pie, or some fried fish for the children. True Christian kindness. Real Christian love. A hard woman showing hard love in a hard world. Her and her husband, a straight-up-and-down drunk, who years later would show the boy how to throw a pitch at ninety miles per hour and kiss the outside part of home plate with it, which was something no eighteen-year-old kid in Brooklyn could do.
Sportcoat held Deems against the piling, his old head cast upward, his old eyes peering through the slats in the pier walkway. He listened intently until the sound of the girl’s running feet passed overhead, rang along the dock, and disappeared toward the paint factory and the street beyond.
When all was silent, save for the sound of the water lapping up against the pilings, Sportcoat’s grip on Deems loosened and he spun Deems backward and yanked him toward the shore, pulling him like a rag doll till they reached the rocks. He laid him on his back on a sandy stretch near the rocks and sat next to him, exhausted. Then he called out to the docks directly above where they sat. “Sausage, you living?”
There was a gurgled response on the deck.
“Shit,” Sportcoat said.
Deems had never heard the old man curse before. It felt sacrilegious. Sportcoat moved toward the edge of the dock to climb onto it, then dropped to one knee, his spent face illuminated by the lights of Manhattan just across the river. “I got to catch my breath, Sausage,” Sportcoat called out. “I can’t move quite yet. Just a minute. I’m coming.”
Sausage gurgled again. Sportcoat glanced at Deems, who still lay on the sand, and shook his head. “I don’t know what got into you,” he panted. “You don’t listen to nobody.”
“That bitch shot me,” Deems gasped.
“Oh shush. Your good arm ain’t hurt.”
“I didn’t know she was packing.”
“That’s the problem with you young’uns. If you’da growed up down south, you’d knowed something. This city don’t teach y’all nothing. I told Sausage to tell you. Sister Gee passed the word about Harold Dean coming to kill you.”
“I was on the lookout.”
“Yeah? Whyn’t you look past your little wee wee then, which I expect was stout and hard as bone? Harold Dean was holding your hand, son, purring like a kitten and stinking of trouble. Harol-deen, boy. Haroldeen is a girl’s name.”
The old man stood up and climbed onto the dock where Sausage was. Deems watched him, then felt sweet blackness coming. It came right on time.
18
INVESTIGATION
The fight over the free cheese in Hot Sausage’s basement boiler room that Saturday morning would have broken out into a full-scale riot if Soup Lopez hadn’t been there. Sister Gee was glad she’d made him come. It wasn’t so much that Hot Sausage wasn’t there to dole out the free cheese, Sister Gee thought, but rather the fact that Sausage was dead—shot and killed the previous Wednesday, along with his dear friend Sportcoat. Apparently both had been shot and dumped in the harbor by Deems, who also shot himself dead. That’s what the early word was. They were just bad rumors. The Cause was used to those, Sister Gee knew. Even so, the whole business hit everyone pretty hard.
“Damned Deems,” Bum-Bum said. “He got the order wrong. He shoulda shot hisself first.” She was usually the first in line at the basement ramp door, rising at five a.m. to arrive by six. It was part of a quest she’d begun in recent months to find out who the secret cheese giver was. She hadn’t found out yet, but her early arrival confirmed three points: One, that Hot Sausage wasn’t the cheese giver. Two, that her place at the front of the line was always assured, since most of her friends were there early too. And three, she’d have first dibs on the gossip, since all the early cheese grabbers were friends from the flagpole she’d known for years.