Paul Beatty - Tuff

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.”

Winston spoke very slowly in the lilting voice of the deeply intoxicated. “You going to poison the whole fucking place?”

“No, we just going to knock them out,” Nadine said. “Ain’t you listening?”

Armello clapped his hands, “I still got these date-rape pills from my baseball days. Roofies. Been saving them for something important.”

“That ain’t nothing new. It’s basically the chloroform dog-snatching bit. You on some coward shit, as usual.”

“It’s not cowardly, it’s slick. There is a difference. Want-to-be-brave, flex-they-muscles — type motherfuckers get shot. Like your boy Kennedy fittin’ to get.”

Turning back toward the television, Winston brushed the dust from the screen with his hand. The electrostatic crackle underneath his palm stood the hair on his arms on end. Kennedy’s limo was rounding the corner. Jackie’s left hand was atop her pillbox hat, keeping it from blowing away in the wind. The president was smiling like her right was buried in his groin. “All y’all, shut the fuck up.”

The dowdy white man halted the film and tapped the movie screen with a wooden war-room pointer. “Keep your eye on the limo driver. From this point on I’ll advance the film in slow motion, the chauffeur will turn around slightly, extend his right arm behind his head and over his left shoulder, you’ll see the gun, hear the shot, see a puff of smoke, and Kennedy’s head will snap back grotesquely. It wasn’t Oswald, the Cubans, the mob, it was the limo driver.” The film advanced frame by grainy frame. The driver turned his head. The driver’s arm reached back as if he were scratching the back of his neck. “Oh shit.” The report of a gun, the smoke, the snap of head, all the events unfolded exactly the way the man said they would. “Oh shit.” Amazed, Winston leaned in closer to the television, examining the fuzzy black blip the white man said was the gun. Is that a gun? That ain’t no gun. Fuck, I’m too high to see the gun .

Charles walked in front of the television. “That’s what’s going to happen to you if you run, Tuffy.” He held up the Fuckman #144 videocassette. “You mind?”

Winston shrugged, replaying the image of Kennedy slumped in the backseat of the limousine in his head. The echo of the shots reverberated, recalling his brush with death the last time he was in Brooklyn. Man, this politicking dangerous. If I won I’d be dropping so much truth, niggers would have to shoot me .

Charles backed away from the TV set, revealing a ponytailed middle-aged white man fingering a brunette who looked as if she’d been eighteen years old for all of ten minutes. Properly moistened with saliva and pillow talk, the young woman readied to receive the gray-bearded man, legs spread, eyes open. The lech, a saggy-skinned convulsion of grunts and grimaces, mounted the woman.