Just after Jordy was born, Winston, feeling the pressures of an extra mouth to feed, joined up with a chain-snatching ring that operated in the tony Chelsea/West Village area. Although the baby was good subterfuge, he quickly tired of lugging Jordy to work with him, but was averse to leaving him at the day-care centers in his neighborhood. He couldn’t bring himself to entrust his child to places that sounded more like halfway houses or reclamation institutions than nurseries: Bridge the Gap Day Care, Family Restoration Through Faith, Empowerment House, Sheltering Arms Children’s Service. Even Ms. Nomura’s day care at the community center was called the Crack Is Wack Children’s Center. Winston wanted to drop Jordy off at one of the Chelsea spots he passed while running from the cops — child-care centers whose names seemed to emphasize preparing kids for the future: the Multimedia Preschool, the Piaget Discovery School. The implied mission of the other nurseries was simply allowing children to be children: the Acorn School, City and Country School, Kids Curious, and Buckle My Shoe. Winston had fixated on Buckle My Shoe. To him it sounded like a luxury rumpus room where the staff called the kids “toddlers” and “youngsters,” not “clients” and “crumb snatchers.” He’d seen the name somewhere before. The job board!
The index card termed the position as “custodial in nature,” one day a week, and ten cents over the minimum wage. Winston accepted the job, negotiating free child care two days a week for Jordy in return for an eighth of top-grade marijuana a week. On his first Tuesday, at precisely one-thirty, while Winston was cleaning the windows, Diedre Lewis, his supervisor, took a break to smoke her weed on the roof. “Watch my kids for me, Mr. Foshay.” The moment Diedre left the room, all fifteen brats started wailing like tripped-up security alarms, and no amount of cradling, lullabies, or “Aw, there now”s would silence them. Next Thursday, on his way to work, Winston grabbed a crusty brown bottle from the medicine cabinet — a bottle he hadn’t opened since his dognapping days. That afternoon when Diedre went on break, the kids cried like beaten seals. Winston twisted the cap off the bottle and poured the clear, dense liquid onto a cleaning rag. Shaking a box of Chiclets as if it were a hunting rattle, he lured Kyle Palmetti into striking distance. Quickly, Winston pounced on the boy, covering his mouth and nose with the towel. The child fell instantly into a deep sleep. Instead of fleeing after seeing one of their brethren incapacitated, the other kids clamored to be next. “How’d you do that?” “Do me next.” “No, me!” “Me!” When Diedre returned from her break, the entire brood were asleep in their cubbyholes. Winston sang the latest radio hit to himself and ran his squeegee over the windows. “How?” she asked.
“Chloroform.”
Convicted of child endangerment, the state sentenced him to six months’ probation.
“Any of those jobs interest you, Winston?”
“Ms. Nomura, can I get a job putting up jobs on the job board?”
“No.”
“This sumo sounds interesting. Is there a sumo school near here? Maybe I can be professional sumo wrestler.”
“Get serious!”
“Chill, Pops.”
Winston put a beefy hand to the side of his face, a makeshift horse-blinder blocking out the distractions on his determined run for the roses.
“If you’re going to get a job, get one you look forward to going to,” suggested Spencer. “Winston, what do you look forward to?”
“This documentary called Seven Up, where they follow these British people around. But it only comes out once every seven years.”
Winston got up from his chair and, hands on knees, studied the board. Reading each card carefully, he hoped something in the text would jump out at him, showing itself from among the overabundance of data-entry positions. NEW YORK CITY PLANETARIUM — ASTRONOMER’S ASST. “Hey, I like this one,” he said, tapping the card with his finger. “Look into the sky all night. Naming stars, look for spaceships — who knows, maybe I’ll discover a comet. Tuffy’s Comet. Sounds kind of ill. This might could work.”
“You should be a comet, ’cause niggers like you don’t come around too often.”
Winston frowned at his father’s insult. Inez asked him to read the bottom of the card, trying her best not to sound too discouraging.
His voice hesitant, Tuffy began reading. “ ‘Excellent math skills required. All applicants must have working knowledge of basic physics.’ Is my math that bad?”
Fariq, who during games of twenty-one always knew when Winston had over fifteen in his hand because he’d roll his eyes into his head, count his fingers, and take forever to say “Hit me,” spat out, “You ain’t never even had pre-algebra, kid. What x stand for?”
Winston shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Actually, that’s right—x stands for the unknown.”
“Told you. Ask me another one.”
“What’s an average?” Inez said impatiently.
“Average? Let’s see …” Winston answered cautiously, gauging the correctness of his response by the twists and frowns in Inez’s expression, “that’s like the most regular. If you put everything together and picked out the most typical. I’ll use it in a sentence. ‘The average black man can whip four or five white boys.’ ” A look of skepticism swept over Inez’s face. “I mean, because of the anger,” Winston said quickly.
Yolanda pointed at the job board. “Once more.”
“I’m just playing.” Winston giggled. “I know what average is. That’s when you add the numbers, divide, and come up with the number in the middle. Ha, I’m about to be an Astronomer’s Assistant. Later for all y’all.”
“I have one,” said Spencer. “In the equation E = mc2, what does c represent?”
Clifford waved his hand in disgust. “Forget that. Ask him what’s physics.”
Winston said nothing and returned to the board. Embarrassed, he read one of the campaign flyers aloud, as if to prove a point. “Collette Cox — City Councilwoman for the 8th District. Vote Social Democrat for Justice. September 9th.” He looked back at the poster of Debs, then ripped the handbill from the wall and sat back down. “You all would back me in anything I do, long as it’s positive, right?”
“Of course,” said the collective.
He slid the campaign flyer across the table and announced, “I’m going to run for City Council.” The assuredness in his voice surprised him. Everyone but Inez scooted away from the table like tapped-out poker players. Winston had a satisfied smirk on his face. Politician. Don’t need to know physics to run for some bullshit office. Jordy scrambled up his father’s face, using Winston’s ears, lips, and eye sockets for toe- and handholds.
“You stupid?” asked Fariq. “This is a waste of time, this boy is hopeless.” Clifford added, “This shit isn’t funny.”
“I’m serious. Ever since I can remember, you, Moms, Yolanda, my counselors been going on about how I need to meet the challenges of life. That I need to stop taking the easy way out. Well, here go my challenge.”
“Tuffy, leave me out of this.”
“Didn’t nobody say nothing about you, Smush.”
“I just challenge you to pay me back my money. Anyway, I don’t know why you talking this nonsense about running for City Council when you don’t even vote.”
Having reached the top of Winston’s head, Jordy planted a flag of saliva on the bristly peak. “I vote,” Winston said, wiping the top of his head with a napkin.
“Who you voted for?”
“Voted for president.”
“The one we got now?”