Deacon King Kong(86)
“We better go back down lest they think we’re out here ordering Chinese.”
He turned to head down the ramp until she touched his arm, stopping him.
“Are you sure that Sausage fell in the harbor?” she asked.
“Not really,” he admitted. “You can never be sure till you’ve seen the body.”
She followed him down the ramp. He gathered the other three officers and the four officers filed out in silence.
* * *
When the cops were gone, Sister Gee turned to the relieved cheese gatherers, who stood in groups, the line now disbanded. They ignored the cheese, which lay in neat stacks on the table, Nanette guarding them. They gathered around Sister Gee instead.
“I thought I said take over,” she said to Nanette.
“Forget that,” Nanette snapped. “What’d the cop say?”
Sister Gee looked at the people staring at her: Dominic, Bum-Bum, Miss Izi, Joaquin, Nanette, and the rest, at least fifteen people in all. She’d known most of them her whole life. They stared at her with that look, that projects look: the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery. Four of their number were down—gone, changed forever, dead or not, it didn’t matter. And there would be more. The drugs, big drugs, heroin, were here. Nothing could stop it. They knew that now. Someone else had already taken over Deems’s bench at the flagpole. Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.
She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die. The sight of Beanie’s mother howling at her son’s coffin would haunt them all in the next few days. Next week, or next month some time, some other mother would take her place, howling her grief. And another after that. They saw the future, too, she could tell. It would continue forever. It was all so very grim.
But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas, something that said, “Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God’s child. And I. Am. Still. Here.” She felt God’s blessing at that moment, thanked Him in her heart, for right then she could see that glimmer in their faces, too, could see that they would understand what she was about to tell them, about the man who had wandered among them for most of his adult life, whose lymph nodes grew to the size of marbles when he was eighteen, who staggered around with scarlet fever, hematoid illness, acute viral infection, pulmonary embolism, lupus, a broken eye socket, two bouts of full-blown adult measles, and several flus, and whose one-hundred-proof body had survived more operations in one year than most of them would have in a lifetime, and she felt grateful that the Good Lord had given her the opportunity and presence of mind to share it with them, because in her heart it was proof that God was forever generous with His gifts: hope, love, truth, and the belief in the indestructability of the good in all people. If she could have, she would have stood on top of Building 17 with a bullhorn and shouted that truth for the whole projects to hear.
But telling it to this small group, she knew, was enough. She knew it would go far.
“Sausage ain’t dead,” she said. “He was shot but he’s still living. He’s in the hospital.”
“And Sportcoat?” Bum-Bum asked.
A blanket of silence covered the room.
Sister Gee smiled. “Well now, that’s a story . . .”
* * *
Potts and the three officers trooped grimly across the plaza to their squad car. They hadn’t gone five steps when an unexpected sound from the basement boiler room caused them to stop. They stood in place and listened for a moment. The noise quickly dimmed, and after a moment the cops started walking again, this time more slowly.