Deacon King Kong(90)

“What you making something out of nothing for? Your mom’s walked these lots for years. Nobody bothers her.”

“That’s just it. The old coloreds know her. The kids don’t.”

“I can’t do anything about that, Tommy.”

Elefante rose, downed his drink, put the bottle of Johnnie Walker back inside his desk drawer, and closed it. “You been told,” he said.





20





PLANT MAN



Sportcoat lay on a battered couch in Rufus’s basement. He had been there by his count for three days, drinking, sleeping, drinking, eating a little, sleeping, and mostly, Rufus acknowledged curtly to him, drinking. Rufus came and went, delivering news that was not so good, not so bad. Sausage and Deems were alive and in the hospital in Borough Park. The cops were looking for him. So was everyone at his various jobs: Mr. Itkin; the ladies from Five Ends, including Sister Gee; Miss Four Pie; and assorted customers he did odd work for. So were some unusual-looking white men who had come over to the Cause before.

Sportcoat didn’t care. He was consumed with the events around fishing Deems out the water, the feel of being in the harbor water at night. He had never done that. Once many years ago when he first came to New York, when he and Hettie were young, they’d agreed they would try that one day—just jump into the harbor at night to see the shore from the water, to feel the water and what New York felt like from there. It was one of the many promises they’d made to each other when they were young. There were others. See the giant redwood trees in Northern California. Visit Hettie’s brother in Oklahoma. Visit the Bronx botanical garden to see the hundreds of plants there. So many resolutions, none of them ever fulfilled—except that one. In the end, though, she had done it alone. She had felt that water at night.

That day, the third day, in the afternoon, he fell asleep and dreamed of her.

For the first time since her death, she appeared young. Her brown skin was shiny, moist, and clear. Her eyes were wide and sparkled with enthusiasm. Her hair was braided and parted neatly. She wore the brown dress that he remembered. She’d made it herself with her mother’s sewing machine. It was adorned with a yellow flower stitched onto the left side, just above her breast.

She appeared in Rufus’s basement boiler room looking as if she’d just breezed in from a Sunday church picnic back home in Possum Point. She sat on an old kitchen sink that lay on its side. She perched on it lightly, easily, the picture of grace, as if she were seated on an armchair and could float away from it if it fell over. Her pretty legs were crossed. Her brown arms rested on her lap. Sportcoat stared at her. With her brown dress and its yellow flower and her hair parted, her brown skin shimmering from some secret source of light in the dank, dark basement, she looked achingly beautiful.

“I remember that dress,” he said.

She offered a sad, bashful smile. “Oh hush,” she said.

“I do recollects it,” he said. It was his awkward way of making up for previous arguments they’d had, tossing off a compliment at once.

She looked at him sadly. “You look like you been living rough and wrong, Cuffy. What’s the matter?”

Cuffy. She hadn’t called him that in years. Not since they were young. She called him “daddy,” or “honey,” or “fool,” or sometimes even “Sportcoat,” a name she despised. But rarely Cuffy. That was something from long ago. A different time.

“Everything’s right as rain,” he said cheerfully.

“Yet so much has gone wrong,” she said.

“Not a bit,” he said. “Everything is skippy now. It’s all fixed. ’Cept that Christmas Club money. You can fix that.”

She smiled and gave him the look. He’d forgotten Hettie’s “look”: her smile of understanding and acceptance that said, “All intangibles are forgiven, I accept them and more—your faults, your dips and turns, everything, because our love is a hammer forged at the anvil of God and not even your most foolish, irrational act can break it.” That look. Sportcoat found it unsettling.

“I been thinking about back home,” she said.

“Oh, that’s old-time stuff,” he said, waving his hand.

She ignored that. “I was thinking about them moonflowers. Remember how I used to go through the woods and gather up moonflowers? The ones that blossom at night? I was crazy about them things. I loved the way they smell! I’ve forgotten those things!”

“Oh, that ain’t nothing,” he said.

“Oh, c’mon! The way them things smell. How could you forget?”

She stood, clasping her hands near her chest, emboldened with the enthusiasm of love and youth, a way of being he’d long forgotten. That attachment was so long ago it seemed like it had never happened. The newness of love, the absolute freshness of youth. He was startled but tried to hide it by making a “pfffft” noise with his lips. He wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t. She was so pretty. So young.

She sat back down onto the sink and, noticing his expression, leaned forward and touched his forearm playfully. He didn’t move, but frowned: he was afraid to give in to the moment.

She sat up straight again, serious now, all playfulness gone. “Back home when I was little, I used to walk through the woods gathering up moonflowers,” she said. “My daddy warned me off it. You know how he was. A colored girl’s life wasn’t worth two cents. And he wanted me to go to college and all. But I liked adventure. I was about seven or eight years old, jumping around the woods like a rabbit, having my fun, doing what I was told not to do. I had to search out quite a distance to find them flowers. I was deep out there one day and heard some yelling and hollering and jumped out of sight. The yelling was so loud and I got curious, so I crept up on it and who do I see but you and your daddy lumbering. Y’all was sawing a big old maple tree with a crosscut saw.”