She wants to argue about the cheese (long story), and he wants her help finding the missing Christmas money, but Madame Blavatsky, Sportcoat is not. Sportcoat alone can see Hettie, and her ghost laces into him mercilessly. Hettie, with her red wig and sharp tongue, is a lively presence, despite being two years dead, having drowned in the harbor under mysterious circumstances, in full view of the Statue of Liberty.

1 plug, a “dreadful, poison-selling, murderous meathead with all the appeal of a Cyclops.” Sportcoat’s relationship with his wife of 40 years, Hettie, has also cratered. The baseball team he’s so proud of has disbanded and his star player, Deems Clemens, has gone from the neighborhood’s No. Lately, however, life has started throwing Sportcoat some serious curves. But all that liquor hasn’t knocked Sportcoat out of the game he still attends church, still has more odd jobs than fingers, still helps everyone with almost anything - he’s the neighborhood handyman and gardener, TaskRabbit and Radagast the Brown, all in one. A “wiry, laughing brown-skinned man who had coughed, wheezed, hacked, guffawed, and drank his way through the Cause Houses for a good part of his 71 years,” Sportcoat reads like something out of Zora Neale Hurston updated by Paul Beatty: a “walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen.” The old man is also a sot who dedicates much of his free time (and most of his work time) to getting King Kong drunk on the local King Kong hooch. Sportcoat is the vexatious heart of James McBride’s cracking new novel, “Deacon King Kong.” With his porkpie hat and garish jackets, Sportcoat is a beloved fixture of the Causeway Houses (the Red Hook projects in Clark Kent glasses). The church Christmas fund his wife was safekeeping is missing, and certain members of the Five Ends Baptist Church of South Brooklyn are beginning to wonder whether ole Deacon Sportcoat might not be responsible. Besides, our hero has bigger worries than his own death foretold. On someone else this fate might be a crusher, but Sportcoat is the type of stubborn coot on whom doom roosts lightly, if at all. But this time things are looking terminal. Having miraculously brushed off three strokes and a Job-like torrent of near fatal afflictions, Sportcoat has been pronounced dead more often than Michael Myers. Well, to be accurate, Sportcoat, as he is better known, is about to become more of a dead man walking. It’s September 1969, and Deacon Cuffy Lambkin is about to become a dead man walking.

Deacon king kong book