The Roy Stories Read online

  The Roy Stories

  BARRY GIFFORD

  Seven Stories Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2000, 2007, 2010, and 2013 by Barry Gifford.

  A Seven Stories Press First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gifford, Barry, 1946-

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The Roy stories / Barry Gifford. -- A Seven Stories Press First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-60980-497-8

  I. Title.

  PS3557.I283R69 2013

  813’.54--dc23

  2013012765

  College professors and middle and high school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. To order, visit sevenstories.com/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acknowledgments

  A number of these stories have appeared in the following magazines, newspapers, books or anthologies:

  A Boy’s Novel (Santa Barbara), A Good Man to Know (Livingston, Montana), Amerarcana (San Francisco), Another Magazine (London), Arizona Republic (Phoenix), Brick (Toronto), Bridge (Chicago), The Chicagoist (Chicago), City Lights Review (San Francisco), Confabulario (Mexico City), Dazed and Confused (London), El Angel de la Reforma (Mexico City), El País, (Madrid), Film Comment (New York), The Fireside Book of Baseball (New York), Flash Fiction Forward (New York), The Independent (London), L’Immature (Paris), La Nouvelle Revue Française (Paris), La Repubblica delle Donne (Milan), The Lifelovers ABC No. 3 (Madrid), Max (Milan), Memories from a Sinking Ship (New York), Narrative (San Francisco), New Sudden Fiction: Short Stories from America and Beyond (New York) Nude (London), The PEN Short Story Collection (New York), The Phantom Father (New York), Plan V (Buenos Aires), Ploughshares (Boston), Positif (Paris), Post Road (New York), Sad Stories of the Death of Kings (New York), San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Santa Monica Review (Los Angeles), Southwest Review (Dallas), Speak (San Francisco), Vice (New York) and Wyoming (New York).

  Drawings by Barry Gifford. Barry Gifford’s artwork is represented by the George Krevsky Gallery, 77 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108. For more information visit www.georgekrevskygallery.com

  For Jerry Rosen

  and David Bromige

  still around here

  somewhere

  “I listened and looked at them—there they were: the ones who would yet raise hell and kill a lot of bad people . . . I remember them all, I assure you. They pass and pass again through my memory, and I call them by their names as they go by.”

  —João Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  The Vast Difference

  Alligator Story

  The Vast Difference

  The Birdbath

  Storybook Time

  The Red Studebaker

  The Trumpet

  Unspoken

  Haircut

  The Invention of Rock ’n’ Roll

  Infantry

  Drifting Down the Old Whangpoo

  The Wicked of the Earth

  Christmas Is Not For Everyone

  Memories from a Sinking Ship

  Memories from a Sinking Ship

  A Good Man to Know

  The Forgotten

  Mrs. Kashfi

  The Old Country

  The Monster

  The Ciné

  Dark Mink

  Nanny

  Island in the Sun

  An Eye on the Alligators

  The Piano Lesson

  The Lost Tribe

  The Lost Christmas

  My Catechism

  Sunday Paper

  The Origin of Truth

  The Trophy

  The Aerodynamics of an Irishman

  A Rainy Day at the Nortown Theater

  Renoir’s Chemin montant dans les hautes herbes

  Forever After

  The Mason-Dixon Line

  The Wedding

  The Pitcher

  A Place in the Sun

  The Winner

  The God of Birds

  Sundays and Tibor

  Poor Children of Israel

  The Man Who Wanted to Get the Bad Taste of the World Out of His Mouth

  Johnny Across

  The Secret of Little White Dove

  The Delivery

  The Deep Blue See

  Radio Goldberg

  Why Skull Dorfman Went to Arkansas

  Wanted Man

  The Bucharest Prize

  Blows with Sticks Raining Hard

  The Chinaman

  The End of Racism

  Way Down in Egypt Land

  Bad Things Wrong

  Detente at the Flying Horse

  Shattered

  A Day’s Worth of Beauty

  The Peterson Fire

  Door to the River

  Sailing in the Sea of Red He Sees a Black Ship on the Horizon

  Wyoming

  Cobratown

  Chinese Down the Amazon

  Bandages

  Soul Talk

  Skylark

  Flamingos

  Wyoming

  Saving the Planet

  A Nice Day on the Ocean

  Perfect Spanish

  Seconds

  Roy’s World

  Nomads

  Ducks on the Pond

  Sound of the River

  Red Highway

  Lucky

  K.C. So Far (Seconds/Alternate Take)

  Concertina Locomotion

  Imagine

  The Geography of Heaven

  Man and Fate

  Where Osceola Lives

  The Crime of Pass Christian

  Cool Breeze

  Night Owl

  Islamorada

  On the Arm

  Look Out Below

  The Up and Up

  Black Space

  Fear and Desire

  God’s Tornado

  Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

  The Age of Fable

  The Great Failure

  Irredeemable

  Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

  The Sultan

  The Liberian Condition

  Six Million and One

  War and Peace

  Chop Suey Joint

  Significance

  Einstein’s Son

  The Albanian Florist

  The Weeper

  The Weeper

  The Swedish Bakery

  Ghost Ship

  Caca Negra

  Roy’s First Car

  El Carterista

  Crime and Punishment

  The American Language

  Lonely Are the Brave

  Force of Evil

  The Choice

  Bad Girls

  The Sudden Demise of Sharkface Bensky

  Portrait of the
Artist with Four Other Guys

  The Starving Dogs of Little Croatia

  In the Land of the Dead

  The Secret of the Universe

  Far from Anywhere

  Rain in the Distance

  Bad Night at the Del Prado

  The Theory of the Leisure Class

  Innamorata

  The Exception

  Close Encounters of the Right Kind

  Blue People

  Call of the Wild

  Arabian Nights

  Last Plane out of Chungking

  The Vanished Gardens of Córdoba

  Benediction

  About Barry Gifford

  PREFACE

  The stories in the first section are the last ones I have written (as well as “Benediction”) and are published here in book form for the first time. The others were written over roughly a forty year period and have been previously published in books and magazines. I’m pleased to have them collected now in one volume. They constitute not just one person’s story but the history of a time and place, the late 1940s through the early 1960s in America, and is a record, as best I could render it, of the language of that period. This is not a memoir or an autobiography; these are stories, I made them up. Roy ages from about five to seventeen years old. After that, I have no idea what happened to him.

  —B.G.

  The Vast Difference

  Alligator Story

  A kid wearing a Tampa Tarpons t-shirt came running up the street shouting, “Some cracker just shot a gator!”

  Roy and his uncle Buck were in the driveway of the house on Oakview Terrace, rinsing down the boat. They had just come in from fishing out of Oldsmar and had been gone since five o’clock that morning; it was now six thirty in the evening. They hadn’t had much luck, having boated several kingfish and a few mackerel, but they’d run on sharks everywhere and had to cut lines to get rid of them. The weather had been spotty, the water in the Gulf was cloudy, and there were periodic brief showers. It was just the two of them, so they’d had a lot of time to talk. Roy was twelve and a half years old and he loved to listen to Buck, who was forty-five. Buck was full of information on almost any subject. He was well-traveled and well-read and today he had been teaching Roy about navigation, explaining a rhumb line, which is a course that makes the same angle with each meridian which it crosses; it is constant in direction throughout and always appears as a straight line on charts.

  “But the curve of shortest distance between any two points on the earth is always an arc of a great circle,” Roy’s uncle told him, “the sort of circle which would be marked out if we were to slice the earth into two halves, passing the cut through the ends of the course and the center of the earth. The shortest path will always be a great circle course.”

  Buck had been a Lieutenant Commander in the navy during the war and he was a civil and mechanical engineer; sometimes his explanations were too esoteric or complicated for Roy to absorb, but his uncle was always careful to show Roy what he was talking about.

  “It’s the wind you have to pay the closest attention to,” said Uncle Buck. “The winds will control the course more than mathematical considerations.”

  As the kid in the Tarpons t-shirt ran by, Buck asked him, “Where’s he got it?”

  “On the little pier at the end of Palmetto,” the kid shouted.

  Buck cut off the hose and went into the utility shed and came back out with a sheathed knife and a hatchet. He handed the hatchet to Roy and said, “Come on, nephew, let’s go down there.”

  Roy and his uncle walked along River Grove under massive hanging moss and cut across the narrow skiff launch to Palmetto Street, which they followed down to the little pier. When they got there they saw a skinny man about forty years old wearing only a pair of gray trousers with the butt of a pistol sticking out of the waistband and a dark brown Remington Ammo cap slicing up the belly side of a six-and-a-half-foot-long alligator. The man’s pants, chest, and arms were spattered with blood.

  Buck and Roy watched him work for a minute, then Buck said, “What are you going to do with the hide?”

  The man was working fast and he did not look up.

  “Throw it away. There’s a five hundred dollar fine you get caught with it. All I need’s the meat.”

  Roy and his uncle and two boys who were about eight or nine years old and had been swimming in the Hillsborough River watched the man hack and tear feverishly at the carcass. It was still very hot although the sun had begun to go down. Roy knew that it was against the law to shoot a gator without a permit; he guessed that the man didn’t have permission to kill alligators, so he wanted to take what was edible and get going.

  When the man had finished carving up the belly, he crammed the meat into a canvas sack, stood up and wiped his knife on his right trouser leg and said to Buck, “I’ll leave the rest to you, then.”

  The man walked off with the sack over his left shoulder. Roy noticed that he was barefoot and his right leg was considerably shorter than his left. The bag full of gator meat seemed to help keep him balanced as he made his way up the pebbly incline from the dock and disappeared behind the hanging moss.

  Buck unsheathed his knife, flipped what remained of the alligator onto its stomach and told Roy to chop off the head.

  Roy hesitated and his uncle said, “Come on, nephew, we don’t want Fish and Game to find us. Run your fingers along the top of the spine and find the soft spot.”

  The ridges along the gator’s back were hard as stones and sharp-edged but not abrasive like a shark’s skin. Roy’s fingers found what felt like a seam two inches behind the head and with both hands wrapped tightly around the handle of the hatchet raised it just above his right shoulder and brought it down into where he judged the seam to be. The blade cut a half-inch into the hide before meeting resistance from muscle and tendon. Roy dropped down from his squatting position and straddled the snout with a knee on either side of the gator’s head resting on the planks. The two boys watched intently as Roy hacked away until the head began to separate from the rest of the body. It took about fifteen or twenty minutes to sever the head entirely. When Roy stood up his legs and arms were trembling and his hands hurt.

  “Pull the head away,” said his uncle, “and stand back.”

  Buck knelt on the gator’s back from the opposite end and began cutting at the hide. Roy stood with the two boys and observed as Buck swiftly but carefully skinned the ancient-looking reptile. Sweat streamed down Roy’s uncle’s face as he worked, cutting evenly as he progressed from neck to tail, taking particular care not to mutilate the feet. The sun had been down for three hours before Buck completed the job. Roy and the two boys, who were cousins named Rupe and Rhett, were seated cross-legged on the pier.

  “That was tough, huh?” Rupe said.

  “Alligators have survived for tens of thousands of years,” said Buck. “They don’t live in houses, like people do, so they have to be protected from the elements.”

  “God made ’em tough,” said Rhett.

  “What you gonna do with the head?” asked Rupe.

  “You can take it, if you like,” Buck said.

  Rupe and Rhett stood up and together they lifted the head.

  “Whoa, it’s heavy,” said Rupe, and they dropped it. “We can’t carry it all the way to my house.”

  “Your mama wouldn’t let you keep it anyhow,” said Rhett.

  “Shove it into the river,” said Buck.

  The cousins slid the head to the end of the pier and pushed it over. There was a small splash when the head hit the water. It floated on the surface for a few seconds, then tilted backwards so that the mouth half opened and grinned at them before the head sank out of sight.

  “Them were some terrible lookin’ teeth,” said Rhett.

  Buck kicked what was left of the gator’s guts, bones and intest
ines into the river, then lifted the hide under the front legs.

  “Grab the tail with two hands,” he told Roy. “Put your arms underneath. Adiós, muchachos.”

  Rupe and Rhett watched Roy and his uncle carry off the hide.

  Back at the house, Buck brought out from the garage a board about six feet long and three feet wide. He and Roy centered the hide on top of it, then Buck tacked it down so that it was stable. He went into the house and came back out with a box of salt and sprinkled the salt liberally all over the hide.

  “Pick up the other end,” Buck said, and he and Roy carried the board with the gator skin tacked to it around to the backyard and set it down on the ground. Buck took two cinder blocks and placed them down five and a half feet apart, then he and Roy picked up the board and set it down end to end on the blocks.

  “It’ll be all right here for now,” said Buck. “The sun will hit it first thing in the morning, then we’ll hoist it up onto the garage roof in the afternoon to dry out.”

  Buck looped his right arm around Roy’s shoulders.

  “You did a great job, nephew. I know that head didn’t come off easily.”

  “You did the real work, Unk. You skinned the gator like a Seminole would.”

  Both Roy and his uncle were covered with blood and gristle.

  “How is it you were able to keep your concentration the way you did while you were skinning him?” asked Roy. “I mean, you hardly said a word for two hours.”

  Buck pulled his blood-stained shirt off over his head and threw it down.

  “I started thinking about your grandmother’s second husband, the one who raised your mother. He hated me and I hated him and so I imagined that I was skinning him instead of the alligator.”

  “Why did he hate you?”

  “For no good reason, really. I’m almost fourteen years older than your mother. He disliked the fact that my mother had been married before, so he resented my existence. Some men are like that; some women, too.”

  “Did he hate my mother?”

  “No, she was a young girl, and he sent her away to school when she was old enough. I was almost a man, it was easier for him to hate me.”

  “My mother never talks about him; all I know is that he died.”

  “He had a heart attack after he and your grandmother were married for ten years; then she remarried my father.”