Tuff by Paul Beatty Read Free Book Online Page A

out-of-towners and racing up the spiral stairs to the upper deck. Yolanda sat next to a porthole window and Winston squeezed in beside her.
    “Got enough room?”
    “Plenty.”
    Winston lifted Yolanda’s curls and a cold sea breeze raised goose bumps on her neck. She braced for a kiss; instead, Winston slapped a Dramamine patch behind her ear. “What’s that?” Yolanda asked.
    “In case you get seasick.”
    “Thanks, but the boat don’t go but two miles an hour.”
    “Knots.”
    “I know.”
    As the boat chugged around snowy Gotham, they talked over the droll tour guide, defining the landmarks for themselves. “See that building?” Yolanda asked, pointing at a limestone-and-steel skyscraper, “I used to work there two summers ago—thirty-second floor, in the cafeteria.”
    “For real? You know that tan building right next to it? I used to slave there, Strudder, Farragut, and Peabody.”
    “What’d you do?”
    “Kept the fax machine from getting clogged.”
    “That’s it?”
    “My shit was high-tech, right? I lasted two whole days on that one.”
    The roof speaker crackled, “Ladies and gentlemen, I know it’s a cloudy night, but those of you with binoculars can see the Rikers Island guard towers just past the Triborough Bridge. Commissioned in 1936, Rikers Island jail is the former residence of nefarious felons such as the Son of Sam, alias David Berkowitz, child-killer Joel Steinberg, the Cosa Nostra don John Gotti, and Harlem drug lord Nicky Barnes—”
    Yolanda stood up and waved at the distant jailhouse. “Ahoy, Luscious and Tabitha! Jasmine, what up, girl?” Winston hissed and looked down at his feet. “You okay?” Yolanda asked, knuckling the brooding boy on the chin. “You know somebody in Rikers?”
    “Please, I know much niggers on the rock.”
    “ ‘Many niggers,’ or ‘a lot of niggers,’ ” Yolanda corrected.
    Winston nodded, blinking to hold back his tears and a slew of sins past, present, and future. “You got bad memories?” Yolanda asked. Winston kept looking at his feet. Yolanda pulled on Winston’s earlobe, stroked his eyebrows, looking for the hidden lever that spins the bookcase, revealing the secret room. Winston raised his head and took a deep breath. He unlocked his chest plate and removed his armor piece by heavy piece.
Fuck it
. Winston started with his first arrest at age thirteen after a summer’s day spent shoplifting and chain snatching with every teenage boy from the block. At dusk, he and the posse were walking down Forty-fifth Street, nineteen deep—pissy drunk, brash and boisterous as soldiers on a three-day pass. Someone shouted “Pockets!” pointing at a man exiting the movie house. Before the sex fiend noticed the red-eyed wolf pack surrounding him, they were on him. Four kids grabbed a pocket and yanked. With a loud Mama-making-Sunday-morning-dustrags tear, the man’s pants fell apart at the seams. His billfold dropped to the ground and vanished before he had a chance to shout “Hey!” Coins and peep-show tokens clattered onto the sidewalk and raced around his shoes. The man scrambled after what remained of his belongings, trying to hold up his shredded pants, and fight off the boys, who descended upon the coins like pigeons upon breadcrumbs.
    Somehow, one boy, Dark, a fresh-off-the-Greyhound-bus émigré from Duarte, California, left the robbery with pearls of errant masturbatoryejaculate in his hot combed hair. Eager to diffuse the taunts of the other boys and prove that his thick pigtails were “gangster” and not “sissified,” he backtracked four blocks and found the victim reporting the crime to two patrolmen. Ignoring the officers, Dark began pummeling the man, shouting, “You got sperm in my perm, now I’m full of germs.” Winston was rolling on the sidewalk in a fit of laughter when the police handcuffed him. He snickered all the way to the police station: “AIDS in my braids, now I’ll never get laid!” Giggled through the