Roy's World Read online

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  ROY’S WORLD

  STORIES 1973–2020

  Barry Gifford

  Seven Stories Press

  New York • Oakland • Liverpool

  Copyright © 2000, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2018, and 2020 by Barry Gifford

  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 has been applied for.

  LCCN: 2020032405

  ISBN: 978-1-64421-022-2 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-64421-023-9 (ebook)

  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.

  Drawings by Barry Gifford.

  Acknowledgements

  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).

  “Roy and the River Pirates” and “Lost Monkey” originally appeared in Vice magazine (New York). “The King of Vajra Dornei” appeared, in different form, in The Up-Down (New York, 2015). “A Long Day’s Night in the Naked City (Take Two)” originally appeared, in different form, in The 2nd Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction (Berkeley). “Mules in the Wilderness” appeared in The Collagist (Ann Arbor). “Dingoes” appeared in Contrapasso (Sydney). “The Colony of the Sun” appeared in the Santa Monica Review (Los Angeles). “The Religious Experience” and “The Cuban Club” appeared in Narrative (San Francisco). Several of these stories also appeared in Confabulario, the cultural supplement of El Universal (Mexico City). “The Best Part of the Story” originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. “Tell Him I’m Dangerous” appeared in Zoetrope All-Story (San Francisco).

  The following stories were published in The Chicagoist (Chicago): “Mona,” “Mud,” “King and Country,” “Dark and Black and Strange,” “Sick,” “The Italian Hat,” “I Also Deal in Fury,” “Creeps,” “Dingoes,” “Chicago, Illinois, 1953,” and “Role Model.”

  “Bar Room Butterfly” appeared, in different form, in the anthologies Berkeley Noir (New York) and Noir Journal (Philadelphia).

  To the memory of Jack Colby

  “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

  “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”

  —Arthur Rimbaud

  Contents

  Preface

  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 Swedish Bakery


  The Man Who Swallowed the World

  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

  The Red Studebaker

  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

  The Cuban Club

  Roy and the River Pirates

  Dingoes

  The King of Vajra Dornei

  Real Bandits

  Haitian Fight Song (Take Two)

  The Cuban Club

  Appreciation

  The Awful Country

  Deep in the Heart

  Unopened Letters

  Chicago, Illinois, 1953

  The Colony of the Sun

  Creeps

  Achilles and the Beautiful Land

  Men in the Kitchen

  Anna Louise

  Mules in the Wilderness

  The Boy Whose Mother May Have

  Married a Leopard

  Stung

  El almuerzo por poco

  Vultures

  I Also Deal in Fury

  Hour of the Wolf

  Lost Monkey

  When Benny Lost His Meaning

  Sick

  The Best Part of the Story

  Tell Him I’m Dangerous

  The Shadow Going Forward

  Feeling the Heat

  The Sharks

  Smart Guys

  Apacheria

  Dark and Black and Strange

  The Vagaries of Incompleteness

  King and Country

  House of Bamboo

  The Unexpected

  The Way of All Flesh

  Some Products of the Imagination

  The Comedian

  Lament for a Daughter of Egypt

  The Old West

  Incurable

  Shrimpers

  Learning the Game

  The Fifth Angel

  A Long Day’s Night in the

  Naked City (Take Two)

  The Religious Experience

  The Familiar Face of Darkness

  Las Vegas, 1949

  In Dreams

  Lucky

  Danger in the Air

  Child’s Play

  The Message

  River Woods

  The History and Proof of the

  Spots on the Sun

  War is Merely Another Kind of

  Writing and Language

  The End of the Story

  Innocent of the Blood

  The Italian Hat

  The Senegalese Twist

  Kidnapped

  The Dolphins

  Dragonland

  Role Model

  Mona

  Mud

  The Phantom Father

  Roy’s Letter

  The World in the Afternoon

  The World in the Afternoon

  Wing Shooting

  Acapulco

  His Truth

  Disappointment

  The Navajo Kid

  In My Own Country

  Rinky Dink

  Where the Dead Hide

  Bar Room Butterfly

  Absolution

  The Goose

  Spooky Spiegelman and

  The Night Time Killer

  Constantinople

  The Same Place in Space

  The Good Listener

  The Garden Apartment

  Kitty’s World

  Preface

  In the company of eighteen new ones, which comprise the section “The World in the Afternoon,” Roy’s World is a compilation of my previously published Roy stories, an effort to evoke a portrait of a time and place that no longer exist, one I’ve been crafting for the better part of a half century. This is history on my own terms, a series of intertwined episodes based on events real and imagined, dosed with sense impressions designed to enable the reader to both visualize and, most important, feel them as does Roy and other inhabitants of this fictional universe. That said, the Roy stories come closer to comprising an autobiography than any other form I might have chosen. People have often remarked that I have a very good memory; perhaps, but memory is subjective beyond doubt or control and therefore unreliable, insufficient to present a viable or even acceptable, let alone accurate, compendium. My hope is that they prove entertaining and suggestive, perhaps even meaningful. Just as the real world keeps spinning, so does Roy’s.

  —B.G.

  Memories from a Sinking Ship

  ROY’S FATHER

  Memories from a Sinking Ship

  When Roy was five years old his mother took him to Chicago to stay with his grandmother while she went to Acapulco with her new boyfriend, Rafaelito Faz. Roy had been told that hell was boiling but when he and his mother flew up from Miami and arrived in Chicago during the dead of winter he decided this was a lie. Hell was cold, not hot, and he was horrified that his mother had delivered him to such a place. My mother must hate me, Roy thought, to have brought me here. I must have done something terribly wrong. The fact that his grandmother was there already was proof to Roy that she, too, had committed an unforgivable sin.

  Roy’s mother stayed in hell only long enough to hand him over. Rafaelito Faz would meet her in Mexico. “He’s very rich,” Roy’s grandmother informed him. “The Faz family owns a chain of department stores in Venezuela.” Rich people, Roy concluded, did not have to go to hell. His mother had shown him a picture of Rafaelito Faz clipped from the Miami Herald. His hair was parted down the middle and he had a wispy mustache that looked as if it might blow off in the Chicago wind. Underneath the photograph was the caption, “Faz heir visits city.”

  When Roy’s mother returned from her holiday, she was wearing a white coat and her skin was as brown as Chico Carrasquel’s, the shortstop for the Chicago White Sox. Roy did not tell his mother that he was angry at her for dropping him off in hell while she went to a fabulous beach in another country because he was afraid that if he did she would do it again. Roy asked her if Rafaelito Faz had come to Chicago with her. “Forget that one, Roy,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see the rat again.”

  The next time Roy went to Chicago to visit his grandmother, he was almost seven and it was during the summer. His mother disappeared after two or three days. Roy’s grandmother said that she had gone to see a friend who had a house on a lake in Minnesota. “Which one?” Roy asked. “There are 10,0
00 lakes in Minnesota, Roy,” his grandmother told him, “if you can believe what it says on their license plate, but the only one I can name is Superior.”

  While Roy’s mother was in the land of 10,000 lakes, there was a sanitation workers strike in Chicago. Garbage piled up in the streets and alleys. Now the weather was very warm and humid and the city started to stink. Big Cicero, the hunchback with a twisted nose who once wrestled Killer Kowalski at Marigold Arena and now worked at the newsstand on the corner near the house, said to Roy’s grandmother, “May they rot in hell, them garbagemen. They get a king’s ransom as it is just for throwin’ bags. Cops oughta kneecap ’em, put ’em on the rails. The mayor’ll call in the troops soon it don’t end, you’ll see.” Roy’s grandmother said, “Don’t have a heart attack, Cicero.” “Already had one,” he said.

  One afternoon Roy looked out a window at the rear of the house and saw rats running through the backyard. A few of them were sitting in and climbing over the red fire truck his grandmother had bought for him to pedal around the yard and on the sidewalk in front of her house. “Nanny, look!” Roy shouted. “Rats are in our yard!”

  His grandmother came into the room and looked out the window. The rats were climbing up the wall. She grabbed a broom, leaned out the window with it and began knocking the rats off the yellow bricks. They fell down onto the cement but quickly recovered and headed back up the side of the house. Roy’s grandmother dropped the broom into the yard and slammed the window shut. Rats ran up the windows. Roy thought that they must have tiny suction cups attached to their feet to be able to hold on to the glass. He could hear the rats scampering across the gravel on the roof. A flamethrower would stop them, Roy thought. If the mayor really did call in the army, like Big Cicero said he might, they could use flamethrowers to fry the rats. Roy closed his eyes and saw hundreds of blackened rodents sizzling on the sidewalks.

  By the time Roy’s mother returned, the garbage strike was over. Roy told her about the rats sitting in his fire truck and climbing up the wall and his grandmother swatting them with a broom. “Not all the rats are in Chicago, Roy,” she said. “They got ’em in Minnesota, too.”

  “And in Venezuela,” Roy started to say, but he didn’t.

  A Good Man to Know

  I was seven years old in June of 1954 when my dad and I drove from Miami to New Orleans to visit his friend Albert Thibodeaux. It was a cloudy, humid morning when we rolled into town in my dad’s powder-blue Cadillac. The river smell mixed with malt from the Jax brewery and the smoke from my dad’s chain of Lucky Strikes to give the air an odor of toasted heat. We parked the car by Jackson Square and walked over a block to Tujague’s bar to meet Albert. “It feels like it’s going to rain,” I said to Dad. “It always feels like this in New Orleans,” he said.