Tuff

14- MUSKRAT LOVE

Top down, the faded pink Mustang convertible chugged up 106th Street, serenading the block with a selection from America’s Greatest Hits. Before Spencer could bring the car to a stop, Winston leapt into the passenger seat secret-agent style. He slunk low into the tattered leather. “Man, this ride is a piece of shit.”

“Big and Little Brother out for an afternoon jaunt. How quaint.”

“Don’t push it. But thanks for coming, yo.” Winston paused, his attention on the airy-voiced singer. “ ‘Muskrat Suzy, Muskrat Sam do the jitterbug out in Muskrat Land’? What the fuck you listening to, yo? A song about animals fuckin’?”

Spencer turned up the volume even louder and asked where to.

“The Ville,” Winston said. “The Ville.”

Some niggers like hanging out in the East Village, finding its effete bohemian sensibilities, if not exciting, at least freakish. Tuffy wasn’t one of them. He hated the place. It used to be a good spot to pass off bags of oregano as weed, and glassines of toasted bread crumbs as crack, on stupid white kids from the hinterlands, but that was about it. To him the neighborhood, with its hodgepodge architecture and populace, looked like the bottom of somebody’s shoe.

He and Spencer strode across St. Mark’s Place until Winston found what he was looking for, a sidewalk vendor selling glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white head shots of entertainers and sports figures.

“How much this one?” Winston asked, holding up a photo of Michael Jackson.

“Seven dollar.”

“You got any of him when he was dark-skinned and had a nose and ’fro?”

“Yes, only four dollar.”

“Prince?”

“Five dollar.”

“Todd Bridges?”

“Fifty cent. I give you Gary Coleman also. Free, no charge. You want MC Hammer? Arsenio Hall?”

He purchased twenty dollars’ worth of photos, mostly of has-been television actors and rhythm-and-blues one-hit wonders from the eighties and nineties. However, he did spend three dollars on a Denzel Washington. He also bought a roll of tape at a magazine stand, then asked Spencer to drive him to New Jersey.

“What’s in Jersey?”

“My sister.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“I do and I don’t.”

They drove to the Evergreen Cemetery listening to America’s Greatest Hits, Winston unconsciously bobbing his head and tapping his fingers to the chorus of “Horse with No Name.”

A wrought-iron fence separated the cemetery from the Weequihac Golf Course. Brenda was buried in the northwest corner of the grounds. Errant approach shots had nicked the tombstone. Tuffy knelt beside the grave, scraping the bird droppings from the headstone with a piece of bark. Taking out the stack of photographs and his marker, he began scribbling inscriptions and forging signatures on the faces of the washed-up heroes of his sister’s youth. Sometimes, to heighten the effect, he signed with his left hand.

To Brenda,

R.A.W.

Kool Moe Dee

Brenda,

Paz Mamacita!

Feliz Navidad!

Los chicos de Menudo

To Brenda,

My biggest fan,

thanks.

Much love,

Denzel Washington

After taping the signed publicity photos to the headstone, Tuffy bored a small cavity in the burial mound with his index finger. He rolled a hundred-dollar bill into a tube, placed the money in the hole, then covered it with mulch. “One for me and one for you,” he said, kissing the marker. As he stood to leave, a black foursome of golfers ambled up to the tee box on the other side of the wrought-iron gate, chattering loudly as they smacked their balls onto the fairway. Who are these niggers? Winston thought, as another foursome of black men tromped up the hill searching for golf balls in the rough. As he read the inscription on the headstone, he had a sobering thought. He wanted Jordy to grow up to be like the golfers: successful, carefree, suburban, independent — the kind of nigger he couldn’t stand. Carefully, as if he were peeling away a Band-Aid covering a tender blister, Winston removed the snapshot of Denzel Washington from Brenda’s marker, then tore the photo to pieces.

Two hours later Winston found Yolanda in a corner arcade playing a video machine. Spencer drove off and for five minutes Tuffy leaned against a post and watched her do battle with a computer villain, raining a torrent of thundering kicks and punches on her hapless opposition. Yolanda’s fighter grabbed the opponent by the nose and pulled the skin off its body with the ease of a magician snatching a satin sheet off a caged assistant. The gargoyle collapsed in a heap of muscle tissue and bone.

Looking at her surreptitiously from the rear gave him a perverted chill of satisfaction, a feeling similar to a breeder’s pride in watching his prized mare fly around the racetrack. When Yolanda first moved into his apartment, Winston, full of common-law jealousy, would follow her around the neighborhood, spying on her from behind double-parked cars, eavesdropping on her conversations to the best of his lip-reading ability. Once he saw Player Ham, the neighborhood ladies’ man, run out of Danny’s Cuts, still cloaked in the barber’s towel, smelling of coconut oil and hair sheen. “Damn, girl, you fine.” Cracking his knuckles, Winston hid behind a van, ready to pounce at the first peck on the neck or affectionate squeeze of the hand. “Thank you,” said Yolanda, going on about her business. “I just had to tell you, because you a looker.” Then softly to himself he said, “Boy, I’d tear that shit up.”

Winston emerged from behind the van, glowering at Player Ham. He waited a couple of beats and, when Yolanda was out of earshot, whispered, “Nigger, if I ever …” Shaking, Player Ham dug into his pocket, saying “Tuffy, come on now, I didn’t know,” and slapped forty dollars into Winston’s hand, paying back a debt he never owed. “We straight, right?” Jogging to catch Yolanda, Winston realized how lonely she was in the neighborhood without him. Her family and friends in Queens had written her off for moving in with an obese unemployed habitual offender, and the local women her age were just too fast for her. With Player Ham’s money he treated her to a bouquet of bird-of-paradise flowers and a dinner of bacalao and white rice.

Belted into his stroller, Jordy tried to alert his mother to his father’s presence, but she was too engrossed in the game to pay any attention. Tuffy nudged Yolanda aside and dropped fifty cents into the machine’s slot, interrupting her duel with a turbaned, scimitar-wielding Sikh caricature. As the coins plunked into the change box, the machine’s screen flashed A CHALLENGER COMES in bold red letters. Each player was presented with a cast of fighters from which to choose. Yolanda stuck with her warrior, Kashmira, a ponytailed ninja assassin. Winston selected a scaly green behemoth. He pressed a button and the video game roared “Rotundo” in a deep electronic voice. “That’s right, Rotundo in the house. Ro-fuckin’-tun-do about to get busy.” Yolanda said nothing, mentally rehearsing the intricate joystick-button combinations that would unleash a flurry of secret moves upon Winston’s fighter. Yolanda toggled her joystick with her left hand, the fingers of her right hand darting over the red, white, and blue set of buttons. Her dexterity resulted in a samurai sword assault that dropped Rotundo’s arms to the ground like pruned tree branches. Unfazed, Rotundo parried by raising his stumps and squirting a stream of his blue acidic blood in Kashmira’s face. Temporarily blinded, Kashmira endured a barrage of flying kicks that sapped her strength, turning her energy bar from green to yellow to red.

“Girl, you about to get laid the fuck out.”

Yolanda didn’t panic. Holding down the red button, she calmly jiggled the joystick left, right, up, then tapped the white button twice. Kashmira let out a threatening “Kiai!” unsheathed two swords, and, raising her arms to the side, began to spin. The swords, twirling like helicopter rotors, lifted her up and sent her flailing toward Rotundo. Winston tapped his joystick twice to the right, causing Rotundo to back off, but before he could assume a defensive crouch Kashmira decapitated him, slicing the character’s balloon-sized head in half before it hit the ground. “Kashmira wins,” the machine announced.

“No fucking shit.”

Yolanda walked away from the game and pushed Jordy’s stroller outside. “Where you going? It’s still two more rounds left. Landa, you better get back here and finish.” Winston had Rotundo throw a couple of punches at the defenseless Kashmira, then gave up and followed Yolanda outside.

“How in the hell you come at me with ‘You better finish’? Winston, you leave me like that again and I’m done.”

“I know, Boo. I’m sorry. I got caught up. It won’t happen again, I promise.”

“You know how Jordy get when one of us isn’t around. You know he had an attack.”

“He did? When?”

“Last night. The asthma hit him and he stopped breathing. If I wasn’t up doing homework, I wouldn’t have noticed. He was fucking turning blue. Like an idiot I called your name three times before I remembered your ass was in jail. I had to walk to Metropolitan. Three hours until the doctor saw him.”

“They put the oxygen mask on him?”

“I mean it, never again. Next time a locked door ain’t all you going to come home to.”

Winston gingerly took the stroller from Yolanda. In doing so commandeering his son and his status as head of the household. Yolanda hooked a finger around his belt loop and the trio slowly hiked back to the house. Winston played father at the steering wheel, his avuncular blather shortening the trip back home. “Long as you don’t lock up the coochie, Boo, you can lock anything up you damn well please. Because you know, sooner or later I’m going to fuck up. It’s in a nigger’s nature. All I ask is you two accept my apologies. I ain’t saying forgive and forget, but remember I’m just a young nigger trying to break the cycle.”

“Winston, unless you start acting right, I’m going to break your cycle.”