Paul Beatty - Tuff

Inez appeared a bit worried as the two-man posse leaned into a left-hand turn and ran a red light, disappearing into the Lexington Avenue traffic. Yolanda offered her the joint roach. Inez refused, and removed a bottle of Bacardi 151 rum from her handbag. “Ain’t that warm?” asked Yolanda.

“I don’t give a fuck, I need a drink.”

Her thumb on the nozzle, she shook the contents, then took two strong gulps that wrinkled her nose. The roar of Armello’s mufflerless motorbike could be heard in the distance. What if Tuffy managed to catch the boy? Would he shoot at the kid just for appearances’ sake, to show the block he’d completely overcome his fears: guns, jail, the sunrise? “Yolanda, you’re not worried?”

“About what?”

“Winston.”

Yolanda shrugged.

“Ms. Nomura, they’re just bored and broke. Armello can handle that bike. Plus, ain’t no use worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet. Right or wrong?”

After a few minutes there was a war whoop from the far end of the block. Winston was twirling the recovered purse overhead like a Pony Express rider. He flung the bag to Big Sexy, the bag flying over her head and landing in a pile of discarded furniture. Winston hopped off the motorcycle before it came to a complete stop.

“Nigger, you ill.”

“You shoot that man?”

“Nah, it was mad weird, yo. I thought about it. Pointed the gun—‘Yeah, nigger? What? What? Playing stickup, kid? On my block? What?’ But I felt stupid. Shoot no nigger for no purse. I felt like a dog chasing a car. What am I going to do with it if I catch it, know what I’m saying?”

Armello dismounted, swaggering over to the stoop, narrating his way up the stairs. “So I pulls alongside that fool and nigger’s eyes like to pop out his head. Tuffy sidekicked the bike in the sprocket and B slammed headfirst into a parking meter. Wasn’t no resistance from Papi after that. Where’s that dank at?”

Charles handed Winston a freshly rolled blunt.

“I never could figure out,” Ms. Nomura pondered aloud, “when do you call somebody G and when you call them B?”

“You call a moreno you don’t know Papi, B, or G, but Puerto Ricans is strictly B, whether you know them or not. A Puerto Rican rarely calls another Papi in public, but a non-Rican trying to be down can call another Rican Papi and maybe get away with it.”

Der Kommissar ambled up to the group, his leash taut from dragging the deadweight of his three masters. The dog wheezed and panted like a diesel engine pulling slag. Miguelito pointed his fingers at Winston and Armello. “You callejeros think you the police? Why don’t you go down to the precinct and pick up an application? You sucias, también . The department needs a few good men.”

“¿Qué jodiendo?” Nadine asked, flipping a middle finger at the brothers. She glared at the Bonillas. “You cabrones didn’t do a damn thing. What if one of these two had been hurt doing your dirty work?”

Winston blew a dense puff of marijuana smoke in Der Kommissar’s face. The dog snapped at him, its jaws closing with the force of a sprung animal trap. Winston slapped Der Kommissar across his foamy jowls with the butt end of the handgun. The dog barked and turned in frantic Chihuahua circles. “Y’all want to hear a joke?” Winston asked his friends.

“Yeah,” they answered in unison.

“Why do cops hang out in threes?”

“Why?” asked Enrique to the chagrin of his brothers.

“One to do the reading, one to do the writing, and the other just likes to be around intellectuals.”

Bendito slackened Der Kommissar’s leash and the dog leapt for Inez’s forearm, its yellowed incisors just missing Jordy’s face. In a blur of reflex, Winston caught the dog in midleap by the collar and body-slammed him off the stairs. Der Kommissar yelped but didn’t stop struggling as Winston pinned his stocky carcass to the sidewalk by kneeling on the dog’s hindquarters and neck. Jamming the barrel of his gun into the dog’s ear like a metallic swab, Winston drilled until the muzzle disappeared. Without being asked, the Bonillas backed off. The dog squirmed and simpered.

Again a crowd gathered around the stoop to watch the Bonilla — Foshay rematch. “That motherfucker ain’t barking now,” commented a little girl who’d gathered to watch the skirmish, “he going, hmmmm himmm mm himmmm . I wonder what that means in dog talk?”

“That means ‘Somebody get this fat motherfucker off me,’ ” Charles joked.

“Ever notice dogs in movies never die,” Winston asked the crowd, pressing his knee into the dog’s groin. Der Kommissar yelped. “People be drowning, burning alive, tornadoed, laser-beamed, and the dog always lives. Fucking mutt runs through a wall of flame, gets crushed by a falling car, rammed by a runaway ocean liner, and the dog comes out wagging its tail. The audience goes crazy. That’s manipulative Hollywood bullshit. But this ain’t Hollywood, this East Harlem, the fuckin’ barrio.” There was a muffled crack and Der Kommissar’s carcass bounced once on the sidewalk: a forced sneeze spewed a mist of blood and mucus from his black nostrils. With some effort Winston yanked the gun from the dog’s ear. He swabbed the ear wax and blood-clotted gun barrel on his pants leg, then punted the dead dog into the gutter. “Bet you won’t be snapping at little kids no more.”

Forgetting all of his police training, Bendito rushed Winston like a berserk third-grader, arms windmilling, propelling him headlong into battle. Like a pawn making an en passant capture, Winston flanked Bendito’s frontal assault with a sidestep, and uncorked a right hand that caught the officer flush on the chin. The crack of the cop’s jaw dislocating was louder than the gunshot. Bendito lay on the sidewalk, eyes closed, the brass badge on his chest slowly rising and falling. Seeing their oldest and strongest brother supine, Enrique and Miguelito turned heel and ran, catcalls of “Mommy!” flogging them down the block. It was a neighborhood beef; no one worried about the beaten officers calling the cops.

One stickball player cautiously touched Der Kommissar’s gummy nose and exclaimed, “Hey, it’s cold. I thought when a dog’s nose is cold that meant they was healthy.” Another boy pressed his hand to Bendito’s nose and remarked, “This one’s warm. What that mean?”

Yolanda brushed aside the circle of stunned children staring at Der Kommissar’s carcass. She grabbed one of the dog’s cropped ears, lifted its head, then dropped it back into the gutter. “I knew it — no exit wound. These pits got thick-ass skulls. Learned that in my animal husbandry class.”

Nadine downplayed Yolanda’s observation. “You’re not taking into account the size of the gun — it was only a two-fifth.”

“But I am taking into account the size of your brain, bitch.”

“Heifer.”

“Ho, ad infinitum.”

“Speaking of animal husbandry, Yolanda, you better check your man,” Charles said, rolling another marijuana cigarette. Winston was in the middle of the stickball infield, standing on the manhole cover that was second base. He stared directly into the sun for few seconds, then looked down at the manhole cover as if he were comparing their dimensions. “He having a breakdown like an ’89 Ford.”

“Shut up, Whitey!” Yolanda called out to Winston: “Honey, what’s the matter?”

“I killed a dog.”

Unmoved by Tuffy’s behavior, Fariq questioned his friend’s sincerity. “You’ve put niggers in comas, and you feeling guilty about shooting a fucking dog?”

“It was just a dog, it didn’t know no better. I mean, it took a minute, but now I’m like damn, that dog could have been me back up in Demetrius’s spot two weeks ago. Niggers could’ve been looking at my dead body. Talking about, ‘It’s just some nigger, he didn’t know no better.’ ”