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Rufus made a special blend of white lightning known as King Kong that everyone, even Hot Sausage, enjoyed.
Church fights are normally hushed, hissy affairs, full of quiet backstabbing, intrigue, and whispered gossip about bad rice and beans. But this spat was public, the best kind.
he told her the titles of sermons he planned to preach one day, which usually amused her, since he always had the titles but never the content:
Everyone had a reason to be crazy in the Cause. There was mostly a good reason behind everything.
Jet felt his mouth go dry watching the old drunk teeter forward five feet at a time, stopping to swing an imaginary baseball bat, then swaying forward once more, taking his time, talking, apparently having a two-way conversation with himself: “Ain’t got time for you, woman . . . Not today I don’t! You’re not yourself today anyway. And that’s an improvement!”
Sitting in the cold seat, he had an unfamiliar, odd, nagging feeling that something terrible had occurred. The feeling wasn’t unusual for him, especially since Hettie died. Normally he ignored it, but this time it felt bigger than usual. He couldn’t place it, then suddenly spied the prize he was looking for and forgot about the problem instantly. He stood up, shuffled over to a hot-water heater, reached under it, and pulled out the bottle of Rufus’s homemade King Kong.
“Hell, I don’t need ya. I can read . . . ,” which was actually not true. He could read a calendar. Words were another matter.
Stacking booze and helping customers cart their wine to their cars was one of his favorite small jobs. Small jobs that didn’t last more than a day and didn’t require tools were perfect for him.
“You shot that boy, Sport. Understand?” “Sausage, I reckon that running lie is a good one to truck about, being that a boy with that kinda talent that don’t use it ought to be shot in this world for wasting it. But—hand before God—I didn’t shoot him to my recollection. Even if I did it’s only ’cause I wanted him to go back to pitching baseball.
Hot Sausage stared, incredulous, as Sportcoat continued unloading liquor bottles. “Nigger, your cheese done slid off your cracker.”
Moving hot goods while cops were running an investigation in your backyard was like being the dumbest kid in class who always raises his hand anyway. No matter how stupid you are, it’s only a matter of time before the teacher calls on you.
The cop looked disappointed and a little afraid, and for the briefest of moments, Elefante felt sorry for him. It bothered him that people, even cops, feared him. But it was the only way. He had done a few terrible things over the years, but only to defend his interests. Of course he’d done some nice things, too, but got no credit for any of them. It was how the world worked.
Rube Foster hit a ball so far in Texas it had to take the train back home from Alabama!
“How you gonna replace something you don’t know what it is?
Sportcoat would throw hisself in the harbor before he’d take a penny from any soul in this world.
Potts, without a word, placed his NYPD cap on his head and stepped out into the dark evening, the smell of the dirty wharf drifting into his nose and consciousness with the ease of lilacs and moonbeams, fluttering around his awakened heart like butterflies.
Little Soup preferred to spend his afternoons at home watching Captain Kangaroo, a children’s show about a gentle white man whose gags with puppets and characters like Mr. Moose and Mr. Green Jeans delighted him.
At fourteen he abandoned Captain Kangaroo altogether and later favored a new TV show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, about a gentle white man with better puppets.
“Well, I do apologize for whatever misunderstandings you has had in the Cause,” she said. “We seen from your wallet papers where you was from, and being God-fearing people, we brung you here so you could get home without no trouble from the police. We takes care of our visitors in the Cause.” She paused a moment, then added, “We takes care of our own too.”
He used to come by sometimes and watch my show with me. The number’s from that.” “What show is that?” “Mister Rogers.” “You mean the nice little white man who sings? With the puppets?” “That’s Mister Rogers’s address. One forty-three. You know what one forty-three means?” “No, Soup.” His stoic face folded into a smile. “I would tell you, but I don’t wanna spoil it.”
The way he drinks, solid food makes a splash in his stomach when he eats it.
Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians,
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He slowly slid his key into the lock, entered the car, and sat behind the steering wheel in silence, staring. He sat in the soft leather of the car for several long moments. Finally, he spoke aloud. “I wish,” he said softly, “somebody would love me.”
So powerful!
He thought he might get up to look at the clock to check the time, but by the tilt of sunlight in the tiny basement window he got the general idea. Afternoon.
“If it pleases me to stop for a bracer while I ruminates on getting my baseball game going again, that’s my business.”
“I’m talking about the old days when you was a child. Everything ever said to you or done to you back then was at the expense of your own dignity. You never complained. I loved that about you.”
“You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now.
Ha!
“Ain’t nobody following me. And I ain’t talking to Hettie’s ghost. It’s a nag that’s bothering me, Sausage. What I’m talking to is a nag. A nag ain’t a ghost. It’s a mojo. A witch. Playing tricks. It looks like a person, but it ain’t. It’s just a witch. The old folks talked about that back home all the time. A witch can take any form she wants. That’s why I know it ain’t my dear Hettie talking. She never talked that way, calling me an idiot and carrying on. That’s a witch.”
He scanned the East River, checking the line of barges moving along. Some of them he knew. A few were run by honest captains who refused hot items. They wouldn’t move a stolen tire if you paid them a thousand bucks. Others were captained by blithering idiots who would kick their scruples out the window for the price of a cup of coffee. The first type were honest to a fault. They just couldn’t help it. The second type were born crooks. Which one am I? he wondered.
He was the man her father trusted. But why him? Why not a cousin or an uncle? Or at least a fellow Irishman? Why an Italian? In those twenty minutes the war between the races, the Italians versus the Irish, was waged, the two representatives of the black souls of Europe, left in the dust by the English, the French, the Germans, and later in America by the big boys in Manhattan, the Jews who forgot they were Jews, the Irish who forgot they were Irish, the Anglos who forgot they were human, who got together to make money in their big power meetings about the future, paving over the nobodies in
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“For almost a thousand years, the Church of the Visitation in Vienna, Austria, had these precious treasures,” he said. “Manuscripts, candleholders, altar cups. Most of it would be biscuits to a bear to you and me. Stuff used during mass, altar cup to drink our savior’s blood, candleholders, that sort of thing. Some gold coins. All of it was made to last. It’s hundreds of years old, this stuff. Passed down through generations. When World War II came, the church hid it from the Allies.
I was a young man back then, fast on my feet and a bit of a wanker, but even then I knew the difference between a sick man who likes children and a man sweet on men.
Until he was dead, he never went into a church. We had his funeral. That’s when he went to church.”
I reckon I’m like most folks. Most times I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes I feel like I don’t hardly know enough to tie my own shoes.”
By the way, what does a deacon do?” Sportcoat grinned. “Well now, that’s a good question. We do all sorts of things. We helps the church. We throws out the garbage. We buys the furniture sometimes. We shop for the food for the deaconesses to make for the repast and such. We even preaches from time to time if we is called upon. We does whatever needs to be done. We’re your holy handyman.”
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
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Peck shook his head slowly. “This area used to be safe. Before the coloreds came.” Elefante frowned. “Before the drugs came, Joe. It’s not the coloreds. It’s the drugs.”
There was danger everywhere now, full-out shooting coming because of the whites, the blacks, the Spanish, the Irish cops, the Italian families, the drug wars. It wouldn’t stop.
The conversation danced up and down, draping the walls with conjecture as they pushed various theories into play, then oblivion, and then back again.
