Tuff by Paul Beatty

elementary school. One day Tuffy noticed Enrique’s face looked like a beginner’s jigsaw puzzle of a map of the United States. He shoved young Enrique into the custodian’s closet and with a felt-tip pen placed a black dot in each sector of Enrique’s face, scribbled a state name in each patch of skin, and labeled every dot with all the capitals he could remember: Sacramento, California, was near Enrique’s right ear; Topeka, Kansas, under his right eye; Indianapolis, Indiana, beneath the left; and Tallahassee, Florida, on the lower left jaw. Winston turned his human political map into the teacher as a makeup assignment for a missed quiz, explaining that the squiggly blackline running down Enrique’s forehead, over the bridge of his nose, and ending at the cleft in his chin was the Mississippi River. The feud was set in motion, and thereafter Winston honed his pugilistic skills on the Bonilla triplets.
    Despite the Bonilla boys having enrolled in every karate and boxing school in Manhattan, Winston beat the brothers viciously and regularly, pulverizing every zygotic permutation: individually, Bendito and Enrique, Bendito and Miguelito, Enrique and Miguelito, all three at once. Like many bullied city kids, the Bonilla brothers had become auxiliary police officers right after finishing high school. Their civil servitude stemmed not from any sense of social justice; rather, it was a state-sanctioned training course for a job that would serve as an outlet for their vengeance and pent-up rage. Armed only with handcuffs, a flashlight, and a ticket book, the Bonilla brothers had a well-deserved neighborhood reputation for being the last ones on a crime scene, sucker-punching the suspect in a chintzy display of cop solidarity.
    The Bonillas and their dog stopped in front of the stoop. The two factions, police and policed, looked at each other in silence for a few moments. Bendito, the oldest brother by three minutes, placed one shiny patent-leather shoe on the bottom stair. The hellhound, Der Kommissar, followed with a stumpy paw. Winston spat, the globule landing inches away from the tip of Bendito’s shoe, and the dog’s paw snapped back to the sidewalk.
    “Afternoon,
morenos
,” came the greeting from Enrique.
    “Buenas tardes a los tres pendejos. Ahora, vete por carajo,”
answered Winston. Der Kommissar, whose Spanish was better than the Bonillas’, growled.
    “Yo, Tuffy, you better be glad this dog is on a leash, else you’d be in trouble, bro,” cautioned Bendito.
    “That dog is leashed for its own protection, because I’m a dangerous nigger. He comes near me, it’s over for him.”
    “Don’t you people see the No Loitering sign?” asked Enrique, using his flashlight to point out a rusty metal placard that since the turn of the century had been ignored by the poor and used by the police as an excuse for harassment. Both parties overlooked the broadsides sloppily wallpapered beneath the No Loitering sign. Still wavy and wet with paste, the block of posters read: ON ELECTION DAY EMPOWER YOURSELF AND YOUR COMMUNITY—VOTE FOR MARGO TELLOS DEMOCRAT COUNCIL-WOMAN DISTRICT 8—LIMPIANDO NUESTRAS CALLES .
    Fariq made a halfhearted peace offering to the officers. “We’re not loitering. We’re having a board meeting. Planning how to make money this summer.”
    “That wouldn’t include drug dealing, would it?” asked Miguelito, both hands tugging at Der Kommissar’s leash.
    “I doubt it. We thinkin’ ’bout going legit this summer. Actually, Tuffy was just about to share with us his brainstorms.”
    Winston lifted his leg and pulled out the handgun. The Bonillas hurriedly stepped back, falling over each other in a dither. As the triplets disentangled themselves from the dog’s leash, Winston pressed his advantage. He held the small pistol in the flat of his hand, showing it off like a downtown gunsmith. “Way I figure it is, we buy a shitload of guns, paint the noses and barrels that street-cone orange