Typecast as the heavy, Winston played the same part in the sham as always: he was to be the stick man — a bit player who stayed away from the action, vigilant for the police and the suckered, who having lost face in front of their girlfriends invariably returned demanding a refund. After he lobbied for a speaking role, Moneybags gave Tuffy a tryout as the lead shill, directly across from Armello. But Winston was in Armello’s light, and as Moneybags said while shunting him once more to the side: “Tuffy, you too big. Can’t nobody see the cards!” Winston kicked the milk crates, scattering the cards to the floor. Only Fariq deigned to speak up. “Look, Tuff, every nigger got to do what he do best, and motherfucker, can’t nobody regulate like you!”
Winston brusquely stepped past Fariq toward Whitey. Reaching into Charley O’s trouser pocket, he pulled out a sack of weed and dangled it in front of his nose. The curl in the corner of Whitey’s mouth gave Winston tacit “But don’t smoke it all” approval, and he sauntered out of the room.
“What’s wrong with you?” Antoine asked.
“Nothing,” Winston replied, gazing up at the television set. Antoine laughed through his nose. Though he hadn’t seen his cousin in nearly two years, he hadn’t changed very much. “Tuff?”
“What?”
“Why don’t you sit?”
Winston backed onto a bar stool. When he was younger, he thought the television screen was a mirror: a telepathic reflecting glass that sucked the thoughts from his mind, then played them back, so that he would know what he was thinking.
“Antoine?”
“What?”
“Movie is this?”
“You don’t know? Get out, I thought you’d seen everything ever made! It’s one of Carl’s movies, The Green Berets. John Wayne joint with this big-eared motherfucker as a nosy reporter. Sulu from Star Trek plays an Uncle Tom Vietnamese.”
“I hate war movies. Especially ones with a reporter or a writer in it, always too good to shoot at the enemy until the very end, then they pick up a gun. Like if a writer has to kill, then war must really be horrible. And they never get killed. The writer never dies.”
“Nigger, you must hate your father. Fuck was Uncle Clifford doing to you, man?”
Both men watched the war reporter, David Janssen, smash a machine gun against the trunk of a tree. Winston giggled. “White people so fucking obvious.” He eased the bottle of vodka off the shelf and held it next to his leg. “Antoine, is there somewhere I can be alone in this place? I ain’t trying to hear John Wayne right now. I just want to smoke my get-high and chill, know what I’m saying? Carl still got them crazy videos?” Antoine handed Winston the key to his brother’s room upstairs. When Winston pinched the key’s blade, Antoine held tight onto the bow. Little Tuffy was growing up; he was just about at the age when cousins go from being trusted playmates to near-strangers seen only at funerals and on errands to the post office. Antoine let go of the key. “Thanks, cuz.” Tuffy headed for the stairs, keeping the bottle of vodka out of Antoine’s sight. “How Aunt Ruthie, by the way?”
12- THE LITTLE BELL
Carl’s room, the cupola of the brownstone, was cramped with war memorabilia. Winston bypassed the swords, Nazi flags, Croix de Guerre and went straight to the army footlocker stuffed with videos. He rummaged through the pile, reading the labels, then tossing them aside: AC/DC Live at Budokan; Faces of Death; Lynyrd Skynyrd; The Maginot Line; GG Allin; All-Time Greatest Hockey Fights — The Probert Years; Fuckman #144. “This one looks good,” Winston said, inserting a tape labeled Any Niggers Who Ain’t Paranoid Is Crazy — The History of Conspiracy into the VCR.
The video opened with a washed-out fourth-generation dub of the Minister of the Nation of Islam standing behind a podium, dabbing his glistening brow with a meticulously folded handkerchief and addressing an auditorium filled with true believers.
The history they teach us is incomplete! If you believe them, the black man wasn’t invented until the first day of slavery. The red man didn’t show up on the planet until Thanksgiving, the brown man until the Alamo, and the first time they set eyes on the yellow man he was dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor. You want to get somewhere in this world? Then you have to learn about them, the white man. I don’t know why black children do so badly in school, their version of history isn’t very difficult. Lesson One: The white man was the first to do this and that. Lesson Two: The white man is the best at such and such. If you’re lucky they tell you, then quiz you on the white man and the black man. And all you need to know is the white man did X, Y, and Z to and for the black man on such and such a date. But they’ll never teach what the black man has done independent of the white man. No multiple choice, true-or-false questions on the history of the black man that have nothing to do the white man, his wars, his foibles, his laws. And they definitely don’t … won’t teach you about the relationship between the white man, the black man and the sharks in the Pacific Ocean. What they don’t … what they won’t tell you is that sharks are in the Pacific Ocean because they followed the slave ships from Africa, eating the Africans as they were thrown overboard.
Settling back in a desk chair, Tuffy made a makeshift marijuana pipe by puncturing the base of a stray beer can with a bloodstained bayonet. He pushed the Minister’s slave-trade lesson from his mind. Fuck this nigger talkin’ ’bout? Critical thinker that Winston was, it wasn’t the historical implausibility of slave ships sailing the Pacific, when the middle passage was a transatlantic voyage, that caused him to dismiss the Minister’s claims. His ghetto cynicism was bathyal. A deep nigger-you-ain’t-said-shit doubt that looked below the ocean’s rolling surface. Come on now, sharks in the Pacific ’cause they was following slaves, that’s bullshit. Why the sharks still there then? What, they swimming in circles talking about “Gee, Harold, ain’t been no niggers around in a while — hell, they was good eating”?