The shooting causes, or rather reveals, fractures among the network of criminals, smugglers, and drug dealers that Deems works with and for. When Hettie died, she left many of her responsibilities behind for Sportcoat, including the care of their blind son Pudgy Fingers, and a box of money for the Church’s Christmas Club, which Sportcoat cannot find, much to the Church’s frustration. His memory issues are further punctuated by the fact that he frequently sees, communes, and argues with the spirit of his dead wife Hettie. Sportcoat is an alcoholic with memory issues, frequently mixing up past and present, and for the rest of the novel cannot recall the shooting.

Deems is not killed, thanks to the intervention of an undercover police officer named Jet, but he is injured. Cuffy “Sportcoat” Lambkin, a deacon at the Five Ends Baptist Church, shoots 19-year-old drug dealer Deems Clemens at the flagpole, Deems’s usual selling spot. (Mar.The following version of this book was used to create the guide: McBride, James. This generous, achingly funny novel will delight and move readers. With a Dickensian wealth of quirky characters, a sardonic but humane sense of humor reminiscent of Mark Twain, and cartoonish action scenes straight out of Pynchon, McBride creates a lived-in world where everybody knows everybody’s business. As Deems’s crew ineffectually try to murder Sportcoat, Elephant follows clues left by his dead father to find a hidden treasure, and Potts tries to keep the neighborhood safe while falling for the wife of a preacher, McBride unravels the mystery of Sportcoat’s inexplicable ire against Deems. This sets in motion a hunt for Sportcoat by Deems’s employers that draws in Tommy “Elephant” Elefante, a sweetly melancholy Italian mover of “hot goods” whose grip on the neighborhood is slipping, and scrupulous police officer “Potts” Mullen, who is on the brink of retirement. McBride ( The Good Lord Bird) delivers a sharply compassionate shaggy dog tale of a heavy drinking Baptist deacon who shoots a drug dealer and becomes a “walking dead man.” In the autumn of 1969, handyman and occasional baseball coach Deacon Cuffy Lambkin, known to his friends as “Sportcoat” because of his colorful wardrobe or as “Deacon King Kong” on account of his equal affection for a moonshine with that name, inexplicably shoots off the ear of Deems Clemens, Sportcoat’s former baseball protégé.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride