Paul Beatty - Tuff

“You don’t know how close you were to a bagpipe funeral and a plaque on the wall: ‘In memory of Officer—’ “—Winston tugged on the officer’s nametag—” ‘Officer Bitch-Ass.’ ” Insulted, the officer raised a fist, but Winston slapped him before he could deliver the punch. And until Bendito separated them, the two flailed at each other like children fighting over dinner scraps. “Tuffy, get out of the car, now!”

“Naw, Bendito, man, you’ve got to arrest me.”

“It’s our first day, I can’t arrest you. And it’s not Bendito anymore, it’s Ben.”

“I need to go to jail and I don’t feel like taking the bus, Ben .”

Bendito turned the music off. “Listen, if I arrest you on day one, fifteen minutes into my tour, we’ll look like gung-ho supercops out to impress the brass and none of the other guys will trust us.”

“Officer Negro here a new jack?”

“Dave’s been on a year. Why do you want to get arrested anyway? Because you rappin’ now, you want some bad publicity for your album or something?”

“I’m not rappin’,” Winston protested.

“I had breakfast at Delia’s, I seen the poster.”

“I’m running for City Council.”

“You’re what?”

“I not really running, I’m …” Winston looked hopelessly out the window. He could see Inez and Yolanda, carrying Jordy like a bag of groceries, huffing their way toward the car. “Look, do me this solid. Just take me in.”

“And charge you with what?”

With the heel of his hand, Winston cuffed Dave in the temple just hard enough to knock the officer’s hat askew. “Slapping Officer Negro upside the head.”

“First arrest, assault on an officer? I don’t think so. I’d be the laughingstock of the precinct.”

“Bendito, why you acting like I shot your dog? Just give me a break.”

Fueled by memories of his beloved Der Kommissar lying dead in the gutter, Bendito gunned the car into reverse, just as Inez, Yolanda, and Jordy reached the passenger-side door. “Winston, where in the hell you going?” Yolanda asked, holding on to the door handle and jogging alongside the car.

“Jail.”

“Motherfucker, if you leave me to go to jail, don’t bother comin’ back. You hear?”

“Calm down, damn. It ain’t serious. I’ll be out tomorrow — Wednesday at the latest.”

Winston knew that if he had any outstanding warrants Tuesday or Wednesday could easily be February, and as a precaution, he peeled off two one-hundred-dollar bills from his bankroll, then, knowing Bendito wouldn’t say anything, brazenly reached into his sock for his gun. “Hold this for me,” he said, tossing the pistol and the rest of the money out the window. They continued to back down the street, while Inez and Yolanda stared at the money and the automatic. Yolanda picked up the gun. “Somebody get my money from out the goddamn street!” Winston ordered, his head sticking out the window. Inez and Yolanda both reached for the money. Inez yielded, and Yolanda slipped the cash into her purse.

As Bendito backed the cruiser into the precinct parking lot, Winston, hoping to speed up the time it took to process him, removed his belt and shoelaces. Hands cuffed behind him, struggling to keep his baggy britches from falling to his knees, he entered the station looking like a maladroit circus clown. His size-fourteen boots flapped against the linoleum floor like shower slippers. Bendito shoved him into an empty cell and Winston began the interminable wait. Thinking the worst, he resigned himself to being Rikers Island — bound. Three dull months in a hangar-sized white fiberglass tent, trying his damnedest to stay out of trouble. Yolanda, right. I need to stop being so “impetuous.” Fuck am I doing? It’s easier to get jail time in jail than it is on the outside. I’ll be in Rikers forever. Fucking with them niggers and catching charges just for defending myself . In the cramped dampness of the holding tank, head against the bars, Tuffy heard his name. Someone reported to the process officer that the check came up clean, he didn’t have any outstanding warrants. The desk sergeant asked Bendito what charges he was filing. Bendito cited cruelty to animals and illegal possession of a firearm. Then the sergeant began adding what he termed “obligatory counts”: loitering, endangerment of public safety, criminal negligence, resisting arrest.

“Well, no, Sarge, he didn’t exactly resist arrest.”

The Tombs were overcrowded because of the previous night’s sweep, and Winston was hustled to a storage space that had been converted into a temporary billet. Designed to hold forty men, it currently held fifty, not including the seven corrections officers. Winston walked directly to an empty cot, shook the pillow, lifted the foam rubber mattress, then ran his hand underneath the bed frame. Turning to face the rest of the inhabitants of temporary holding pen D-6, he said, “Any motherfuckers got some shit hid up in, near, around, over, or under my area, come get it now. I’m not trying to catch no kind of charges on this bid, but I will get in your ass if I have to.” Winston immediately recognized at least two-thirds of the inhabitants, and his caveat, though earnest, was inflected with a bit of whimsy. No one spoke, though judging by the grins on their battered faces, most of his bunkmates were happy to see him.

“Stop woofing, yo! This is a Blood thing, son.” A slim boy of about seventeen with a red bandanna tied around his neck stepped out of a pack of twelve rumpled, red-clad black men languishing about the center of the room. “We’ll hide anything we want, where we want.” Winston glanced at the nearest corrections officer, who was reading the paper and not paying much attention to the conversation. “I know you will,” he said, opening his hands and taking an easy stride toward the goateed young man. “But I’m just letting you know, you don’t want to hide jackshit my way.”

Winston knew who he was talking to: Yancey “Whip Whop” Harris, member of the upper echelon of the Spanish Harlem Bloods, and once a gifted comedian. When he was younger Yancey was as far from the thug life as a boy could be. An honor student, he was the neighborhood funny man, whose antics and impressions made two hours’ worth of grade-school detention fly by. Whip Whop was the type of guy people fought to sit next to on the subway. When a merchant killed his two brothers during an armed robbery three years ago, Yancey stopped telling jokes, stepped off the stage, and joined the shock troops.

Winston and Yancey both knew that in a fair fight Winston would beat Yancey like a slave, but none of the soldiers standing behind Yancey were fair. They also knew that after a night of police brutality from arrest to arraignment, Yancey wasn’t spoiling for a fight, just asserting his leadership. “Zero-zero-one,” Yancey said to his aide-de-camp, relaying some command in their coded binary language. The acolyte muttered back, “One-Zero-One-One-Zero,” then asked a guard to turn up the volume on the boom box, an implicit okay that it was now safe for Winston to turn his back.

There was some temptation for Tuffy to throw his lot in with the Bloods — sit at their table, playfully pinch their wounds, thump their bruises, and stare down the Puerto Ricans. Though he remained alone, he found himself staring at the Puerto Ricans anyway. Not long ago they ran the city’s jails. Powered by overwhelming numbers and a loose coalition, the Latin Kings and La Ñeta regulated every aspect of a prisoner’s life, from what hand he ate his meals with to when he could defecate. The two groups feuded and the Bloods stepped in to fill the breach. Now reduced to being the French Résistance of the New York State prison system, the Latinos sat on their beds, observing the occupying forces. Scattered about the makeshift holding pen were the independents, most of their anuses puckered tight with fear. Three Asian boys huddled in a corner doing cigarette tricks. Two stray white boys, arrested on the wrong weekend for minor violations, changed positions every few minutes, trying to stay within the guards’ sight lines. The unaffiliated colored kids congregated in the corners. Those who had their sneakers stolen wore orange foam-rubber slippers that made a sickening crinkly noise when they walked. The mentally ill were the only ones who mingled.