“No, Your Honor. Just the dog. I ain’t never used a gun to do nothing.”
Judge Weinstein asked the bailiff to bring up Winston’s criminal record. He looked down the list for gun violations.
“Where’s the gun now?” the judge asked.
“In the East River, Your Honor,” Winston lied.
“Mr. Foshay, anyone ever tell you you look like Mookie Wilson?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“The people of the state of New York hereby sentence you to ninety hours’ community service.”
To the consternation of the drug-sweep detainees and the prosecutors, Winston pounded his breastbone. He thanked Rachel, then strode out of the courtroom, not quite a free man, but more an indentured servant. Close enough. As he exited, a court officer, his hands clasped in front of him, whispered, “You know who Mookie Wilson is?”
“No fucking idea.”
Winston shadowboxed his way out of the courthouse. Haymakers landed on the chins of Judge Weinstein, Rachel Fisher, and the assistant district attorney. With each punch he grunted and spat out a phrase of legalese. “Pro se”—jab. “Defendant”—jab, jab, right hook. “Penal code”—body blow. “The state sentences you to—” Winston fired an uppercut at the state, wondering exactly what the state looked like.
When he got back home he found the lock on his front door had been changed. After a few desperate knocks, he walked down the block, stopped outside Fariq’s building, and whistled the shrill bar that for over ten summers had called his best friend to the window. He whistled again. One more time.
Armello’s lockless front door opened with a haunted-house creak. The apartment was empty. He took a half-eaten Jamaican beef patty from the Salcedos’ refrigerator and washed it down with two gulps of ginger ale. Then it was on to Whitey’s. “Hey, Ms. O’Koren, is Whitey home?… Where he at?… Come on, they ain’t going rob no bank. Plus, they need a white lady to go in with them.… Well, as long as you only thinking about it.… Do mind if I use the phone?”
Winston couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one of these lonesome summer weekdays. He felt betrayed. How dare his friends live the portions of their lives that didn’t include him? On days like this, he used to shovel breakfast cereal into his mouth, then bolt outside to play, only to discover nine-tenths of his world missing. Downcast, he’d return home and skim his sole Hardy Boys mystery, The Missing Chums, blind to the title’s irony. After a few boring pages, he’d behead a few of his sister’s dolls, then fight her off with the knife. Then they’d share a cantaloupe half, arguing about whether it tasted better with or without salt.
Thinking of Brenda, Winston rubbed the two one-hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, went back to Armello’s apartment, and made a phone call.
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.