Tuff (25 page)

Typecast as the heavy, Winston played the same part in the sham as always: he was to be the stick man—a bit player who stayed away from
the action, vigilant for the police and the suckered, who having lost face in front of their girlfriends invariably returned demanding a refund. After he lobbied for a speaking role, Moneybags gave Tuffy a tryout as the lead shill, directly across from Armello. But Winston was in Armello’s light, and as Moneybags said while shunting him once more to the side: “Tuffy, you too big. Can’t nobody see the cards!” Winston kicked the milk crates, scattering the cards to the floor. Only Fariq deigned to speak up. “Look, Tuff, every nigger got to do what he do best, and motherfucker, can’t nobody regulate like you!”

Winston brusquely stepped past Fariq toward Whitey. Reaching into Charley O’s trouser pocket, he pulled out a sack of weed and dangled it in front of his nose. The curl in the corner of Whitey’s mouth gave Winston tacit “But don’t smoke it all” approval, and he sauntered out of the room.

“What’s wrong with you?” Antoine asked.

“Nothing,” Winston replied, gazing up at the television set. Antoine laughed through his nose. Though he hadn’t seen his cousin in nearly two years, he hadn’t changed very much. “Tuff?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you sit?”

Winston backed onto a bar stool. When he was younger, he thought the television screen was a mirror: a telepathic reflecting glass that sucked the thoughts from his mind, then played them back, so that he would know what he was thinking.

“Antoine?”

“What?”

“Movie is this?”

“You don’t know? Get out, I thought you’d seen everything ever made! It’s one of Carl’s movies,
The Green Berets
. John Wayne joint with this big-eared motherfucker as a nosy reporter. Sulu from
Star Trek
plays an Uncle Tom Vietnamese.”

“I hate war movies. Especially ones with a reporter or a writer in it, always too good to shoot at the enemy until the very end, then they pick up a gun. Like if a
writer
has to kill, then war must
really
be horrible. And they never get killed. The writer never dies.”

“Nigger, you must hate your father. Fuck was Uncle Clifford doing to you, man?”

Both men watched the war reporter, David Janssen, smash a
machine gun against the trunk of a tree. Winston giggled. “White people so fucking obvious.” He eased the bottle of vodka off the shelf and held it next to his leg. “Antoine, is there somewhere I can be alone in this place? I ain’t trying to hear John Wayne right now. I just want to smoke my get-high and chill, know what I’m saying? Carl still got them crazy videos?” Antoine handed Winston the key to his brother’s room upstairs. When Winston pinched the key’s blade, Antoine held tight onto the bow. Little Tuffy was growing up; he was just about at the age when cousins go from being trusted playmates to near-strangers seen only at funerals and on errands to the post office. Antoine let go of the key. “Thanks, cuz.” Tuffy headed for the stairs, keeping the bottle of vodka out of Antoine’s sight. “How Aunt Ruthie, by the way?”

C
arl’s room, the cupola of the brownstone, was cramped with war memorabilia. Winston bypassed the swords, Nazi flags, Croix de Guerre and went straight to the army footlocker stuffed with videos. He rummaged through the pile, reading the labels, then tossing them aside:
AC/DC Live at Budokan; Faces of Death; Lynyrd Skynyrd; The Maginot Line; GG Allin; All-Time Greatest Hockey Fights—The Probert Years; Fuckman #144
. “This one looks good,” Winston said, inserting a tape labeled
Any Niggers Who Ain’t Paranoid Is Crazy—The History of Conspiracy
into the VCR.

The video opened with a washed-out fourth-generation dub of the Minister of the Nation of Islam standing behind a podium, dabbing his glistening brow with a meticulously folded handkerchief and addressing an auditorium filled with true believers.

Settling back in a desk chair, Tuffy made a makeshift marijuana pipe by puncturing the base of a stray beer can with a bloodstained bayonet. He pushed the Minister’s slave-trade lesson from his mind.
Fuck this nigger talkin’ ’bout?
Critical thinker that Winston was, it wasn’t the historical implausibility of slave ships sailing the Pacific, when the middle passage was a transatlantic voyage, that caused him to dismiss the Minister’s claims. His ghetto cynicism was bathyal. A deep nigger-you-ain’t-said-shit doubt that looked below the ocean’s rolling surface.
Come on now, sharks in the Pacific ’cause they was following slaves, that’s bullshit. Why the sharks still there then? What, they swimming in circles talking about “Gee, Harold, ain’t been no niggers around in a while—hell, they was good eating”?

Needing an ashtray, Winston turned a Nazi SS helmet on its crown. “I’m good to go now.” He covered the mouth of the can with his, lit the mound of weed in the dented chamber, and took a long pull. Through the exhaled smoke he watched the Minister’s left arm reach past the border of the screen and reel in a heavyset, middle-aged black woman. The tight embrace wedged the woman’s left side into the Minister’s underarm, creating the impression that the two were Siamese twins. The Minister introduced the woman as an embattled victim of the Philadelphia justice
system, and the crowd received her with an empathetic warmth. His voice boomed throughout the hall. “Now you all know that this kind, beautiful black woman”—the handkerchief made another cameo—“a teacher of beautiful black children”—the woman nodded her head in agreement, thankful that someone cared enough to defend her honor—“a highly trained educator, did not hit that white woman like they say she did. How dare they accuse her of beating that devilish woman to a pulp?” The woman looked down and demurely covered her mouth with her hand, but she was unable to prevent a grifter’s grin from breaking out across her face. Instantly, everyone in the auditorium knew she had hit the anonymous white woman. Titters of laughter reached the podium. The smile on the Minister’s face broadened, and he hugged the woman even tighter. “And even if she did …”

Winston’s own cannabis-coarsened laughter drowned out the guffaws somersaulting out of the television speakers.
Maybe I can learn something from this clown
, he thought,
“My niggers, right or wrong.”

The marijuana was potent, an
indica
strain. Winston blew smoke rings and watched them expand. There was a twinge in his neck; then suddenly he lost his sense of touch. The state of insensation lasted only for a few seconds, but he enjoyed the feeling of being unable to differentiate his body from the rest of his surroundings.
Yo, I feel like I’m the air. No, no, the air is me. Niggers are breathing me. Hold up, I’m breathing myself. Take a deep breath, yo, you buggin’ the fuck out
.

Winston karate-chopped the last few smoke rings still wafting in front of him and returned his concentration to the television. The Minister vanished under a blizzard of television static, and a well-dressed white man announced the existence of a secret society called the Illuminati. According to the nasal-voiced host, the Illuminati, all graduates of an institution known as the Invisible College, had surreptitiously ruddered the course of world history since 1500
B.C
. The University of Sumeria–Ur Campus was the alma mater of its founders; current members received their training in a basement lecture hall at Yale. Pythagoras, Mohammed, Martin Luther, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, the Logical Positivists of Vienna, Umberto Eco, and every American president excepting Taft, Carter, and Reagan (pawns) were alumni of the Invisible College. The crucifixion was a fraternity stunt that received an unanticipated amount of publicity, resulting in the forced spiriting of Jesus to France and the publication of his Master’s thesis in creative writing,
Sermon on the Mount
, the text now
known as the Bible. World War I was a practicum for honors students Mao Zedong, Lawrence of Arabia, and the mustard-gas manufacturers. Using the Nazis as patsies, World War II was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to set up a showdown between communism and capitalism. The Illuminati’s machinations were responsible for every late-twentieth-century conundrum, including the energy crisis of the 1970s, the chain letter, and Buster Douglas’s improbable knockout victory over Mike Tyson.

At the mention of Buster Douglas, the paranoia adjunctive to good marijuana kicked in and kicked in hard. Winston could hear the footsteps and muffled voices of the Illuminati’s henchmen speaking in cipher behind him. The true world-beaters were coming to get him and he would remain conscious throughout the plotting, the interrogation, and the torture.

“Tuffy, that boy.”

“What you watching?”

“That weed fucked your shit up, didn’t it?”

Winston said nothing, cotton mouth having starched his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Fariq, Nadine, and Armello sat on the bed. Charles seated himself on the footlocker. “Smush, tell him about the bank job, kid.”

“Tuff, you know the new bank on Sixth and Second, around the corner from Kentucky Fried?” Winston nodded. He was interested in the heist, but his focus was on the television. A new white man entered the screen stage-right. The host stood in front of a paneled wall and pulled down a retractable movie screen, tugging at the bottom a few times to make sure it locked in place. “Since November twenty-two, nineteen sixty-three, the United States government has defrauded the American people concerning the truth about the Kennedy assassination. I know the truth. And soon you will know the truth.…” Winston leaned forward in his chair, trying to find the threshold in his immediate airspace where Fariq’s and the conspiracy theorist’s voices ceased to overlap. The best he could do was to turn sideways, the television broadcasting to his left ear, Smush to his right, their voices fading in and out like two distant shortwave radio stations on the same frequency. “I went in there with Charley O’s moms. Wednesday she hit the number at the travel agency, playing two thirty-seven—some Met’s batting average, Marvelous Marv Throneberry, or some motherfucker I ain’t never heard of. Anyway, me, her, and Whitey chilling on the roof smoking reefer. You, I don’t know
where you was. Charley’s moms listening to sports talk radio, trying to figure out what she going to do with six thousand tax-free dollars, when a commercial come on. Man talking real fast: ‘Experts predict that unrest in the Middle East, combined with the increasing use of farm equipment in the corn belt now that the drought has ended, will result in a rise in the price of oil. If the price of oil goes up as little as ten cents a barrel, an initial investment of five thousand dollars can expect a return dividend of twenty thousand dollars in the next six months.’ I seen her eyes get big and I marched her right down to the bank, explaining the difference between fixed-rate and variable checking.”

“The grassy knoll—bullshit. The book depository—hogwash. Oswald, Ruby, Oliver Stone—CIA subterfuge …”

“But peep this—Whitey’s mother walk in, ‘I want to open a high-yield savings account,’ and the new-account bitch like,
Oh shit, a white lady
, ‘Let me get my supervisor.’ The supervisor like,
A white bitch in the bank
, ‘Let me get the branch manager.’ In two minutes everybody in the bank falling over themselves trying to take care of Mrs. O’Koren. The branch manager is opening up the account and the security guard is pulling out a chair so she can sit down. You hear me? The branch manager opening up a savings account is like the president washing dishes in the White House. All that because Charley O’s mama is white. I’m like, ‘Somebody need to take these motherfuckers off. They sleeping. White bitch come in the place and they lose they minds.’ ”

“Who you calling a bitch?”

“I’m sorry, Charley, no offense. So what we going to do is go back to the bank, send in Whitey’s moms, and while they acting like she Princess Diana come back from the dead, rob the fucking place blind. But that’s more than you need to know, now that you running for City Council like a little bitch.”

“I’m going to run the Zapruder film. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, but you’ve never seen this, the new print blown up to thirty-five millimeter. What you’re about to see is more than you need to know, but everything you’ve wanted to know.…” The grille of Kennedy’s limousine emerged from the shadow of a Dallas overpass. Winston was so high the image looked three-dimensional. He felt as if he could reach out, lift Jackie’s skirt, and take a peek at her panties.

Winston turned around to look in the faces of his friends, gauging their resoluteness. To his surprise they looked half-serious. If he were to
say, “You niggers is full of shit,” they’d probably rob the bank tomorrow just to prove him wrong. “You niggers full of shit,” he said. His friends looked as if they’d been slapped in the face. Fariq poked Winston in the shin with his crutch. “For real, son. On TV I seen a documentary on these fucked-up Japanese war criminals. They was using the drug knowledge they got from experimenting on the prisoners of war to rob banks and shit. They put on lab coats and ran up in the place telling the employees they’d been exposed to some poisonous gas and had to take an antidote. The antidote of course knocked them out, and
boom
, it was on. A white lab coat and white skin will get you in anywhere.”