Tuff

6- THE BICYCLE THIEF

My purse! He stole my purse!” The shout shattered what remained of the afternoon’s fragile tranquillity, a rock thrown through an already broken window. And pedaling in its wake was a skinny, graham-cracker-colored black boy. Shirtless and wearing only sneakers and a pair of denim cutoffs, the boy weaved his mountain bike through the stickball game. He held a leather purse to the handlebars, the cleaved straps flapping in the wind like streamers. Running down the middle of the street giving chase was a husky woman taking short, lung-burning, end-of-the-marathon strides. “That’s Big Sexy,” remarked Nadine, biting her nails. “That boy stole her purse.” The last time Winston had seen Big Sexy was at Jordy’s baby shower. She’d been thoughtful enough to buy Jordy pajamas that he’d grow into. Her daughter Lydia DJ’d, mixing salsa, merengue, and hip-hop into a seamless concerto that glued her mother to the dance floor the entire night. A pink Spaldeen sailed past the cyclist’s head. “Fuck you doing, man? You fucking up the game.” The purse snatcher bunny-hopped the bicycle onto the sidewalk, nearly knocking over Inez and Armello. Winston glanced over at the Bonilla brothers, who sanctioned the crime with their idleness. “Anyone know that nigger?” Winston asked. No one said anything. In painstakingly slow slow motion, Winston dug his gun from his pocket, cocked it, then slipped the small pistol onto his trigger finger like a wedding ring. “What the hell this fat fool doing, Smush?” Nadine asked. “I think he thinks he’s starring in one of those Chinese gangster movies. You know how they move in slow motion for no apparent reason.”

Slapping Armello on the butt, Winston nodded at his friend’s motorcycle. “Uncle, but still. Let’s go.”

Armello acknowledged his orders with a snappy, Cantonese-accented “Yes, sir!” and the vigilantes leapt onto Armello’s motorcycle. Armello stomped the kick start and gunned the bike into gear. Winston placed one hand on Armello’s hip and with the other held the gun aloft. Firing a round into the sky, he yelled, “You can’t get away with the Crunch, because the Crunch always gives you away! Il ladro! Il ladro!” The quip was barely audible over the screech of the skidding rear tire as the motorcycle peeled off into the street. Big Sexy pumped her fist, too exhausted to deliver any words of encouragement.

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.’ ”

Fariq tossed Winston his cellular phone. “Well, call somebody who cares, you big bitch.”

“Don’t be like that, Smush,” Yolanda pleaded. “Say something to him. He just trying to turn his life around but he don’t know how.”

Fariq waved her off. “Tuff like a big ol’ battleship that sees some torpedos heading right for it. He want to turn on a dime and spin out the way, but he can’t. Too much momentum. Nigger too big. Moving too fast. Tuff gots to deal.”

“And y’all supposed to be boys. You not right, Fariq.”

Winston had Fariq’s slightly damaged cell phone pressed to his ear. “Hello, Big Brothers of America? … Yeah, I need a Big Brother.… No, I don’t want to be a Big Brother, I need a Big Brother.… How old am I? Twenty-two … Too old? To whom am I speaking? … Mr. Russo? Mr. Russo, you don’t send a nigger to 291 East 109th Street, you going to wish you had.… Foshay. Winston Foshay.” Laughing, Fariq flipped his business magazine in the general vicinity of the trash barrels. “Motherfuckers is hopeless.”

Feeling better, Winston walked back to the stoop. He handed Fariq his phone and took the bottle of rum from Inez. Unscrewing the pink top, he downed a capful of liquor. “Wooo! Yeah, this’ll do.” Slowly, he circled Der Kommissar, liberally splashing the pungent spirits around the carcass.

“Winston, what are you doing?” asked Inez.

“Standing on that manhole cover, looking down, I had a thought.” He took another sip, this time eschewing the cap. “Ms. Nomura, how many books have you given me to read over the years? About thirty?”

“I guess.”

“You know how many of those I read? Two: Go Tell It on the Mountain and Musashi. And out of those two books I remember nothing from Go Tell It on the Mountain, and one chapter from Musashi.” Winston asked Charles for some matches. He struck one and threw it onto the ring of rum. Suddenly the dog was encircled by an ankle-high wall of fire. “Miyamoto Musashi a samurai, right? Nigger trying to find the way of warrior and shit. Killed umpteen motherfuckers and still don’t know any more than when he hadn’t killed nobody. So one day he asks a monk for some advice. ‘Show me the way’ and shit. With a stick the monk draws a circle in the dirt around Musashi and walks away. Musashi like, ‘What the fuck?’ ”

Charles handed the blunt to Nadine. “Nigger, I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ ”

Winston pressed on. “Musashi stood in that circle for hours trying to figure out what the monk meant. Finally he has a revelation; he and the universe are one. The circle is like time and space, never-ending.”

“Yo, Tuff, you do not need to be smoking no weed. You have lost your fucking mind. On the strength, just say no to drugs.”

Winston spread his arms out wide as he could. “Extend the circle, its edges go the ends of the universe.” He closed his arms and made a small circle with hands. “Shrink the circle, it becomes size of your soul.”

Inez and Winston shared a knowing smile: the Big Brother from the agency would be his monk. Winston poured the rest of the rum over Der Kommissar’s body, inadvertently spilling some on Bendito Bonilla, who, still unconscious, was perilously close to the fire. Winston nudged him out of harm’s way with the side of his foot, then tossed the bottle back to Inez. But before he could light another match, Charley O’ flicked the remainder of his joint onto the dog. A column of black smoke rose into the air, and underneath it the dog’s fur crinkled and its hide sizzled.

“You a hostile person, Tuffy. You got some issues,” Yolanda said from behind Winston, stepping over Bendito Bonilla and joining him outside the funeral pyre. She saddled Jordy on Winston’s shoulders. Fariq was bent over Bendito, probing the officer’s slow-breathing torso with his crutch.

Peering over his shoulder, Inez swallowed a mouthful of rum and asked how long Bendito would be unconscious.

Fariq stood up and said, “I don’t know, but he ain’t been out that long, about five minutes.”

“I thought knocking someone out with one punch was some ‘manipulative Hollywood bullshit.’ ”

“No, that shit is on the real. Cockstrong nigger, nice with the hands, like Tuffy, catch you right, forget about it. I seen niggers knocked unconscious for twenty, thirty minutes. Motherfuckers pissing on ’em and shit.” He unzipped his fly and straddled Bendito. “Come to think of it …”