The Roy Stories Page 5

  The man raised his head slightly and from under his heavy lids studied the boy’s face. He kept smiling.

  “Before Chicago, you mean?”

  Roy nodded.

  “Why do you stop to ask me this?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen you around and I’m just curious, I guess.”

  “Hongkew.”

  “I never heard of that place. Where is it?”

  “If you’re really curious, you’ll find out,” the man said, and walked away.

  The next time Roy was in the library he looked up Hongkew in the encyclopedia. Hongkew, it said, was a ghetto in Shanghai, China, where Jewish refugees from Europe lived after Germany invaded their countries before and during World War II.

  Roy told Don Diego Rosagante that he might be right about the old man after all.

  “What do you mean?” asked Don Diego.

  “I ran into him walkin’ on Washtenaw and he told me before he came to Chicago he lived in Hongkew, which is part of Shanghai. So maybe he was in that movie you saw where the guy gets murdered on a boat in the river.”

  “The Old Whangpoo. He said that, huh?”

  “He didn’t say the name of the river, or even Shanghai. He just told me Hongkew, so I looked it up in the encyclopedia and it said that’s where Jews went to in China to escape the Nazis during the war.”

  “How about that?” said Don Diego. “Hey, next time you see him, ask how well did he know Little Kiss.”

  The Wicked of the Earth

  Roy and Jimmy Boyle were shooting pool on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Lucky’s El Paso when Mooney Yost, a Lucky’s regular, came in and sat down on a bench near the boys’ table. Yost was about fifty years old, a fin and a sawbuck hustler who was always kind to Roy and his friends. He liked to tell slightly off-color jokes. “What’s the lightest thing in the world?” he’d ask, then answer himself: “A man’s penis—it only takes a thought to lift it.” He didn’t look happy sitting on the bench, though, and after Roy and Jimmy finished their game they sat down on either side of him.

  “What’s wrong, Mooney?” Jimmy asked. “Your dog get run over?”

  “Dogs don’t dig me,” Mooney said. “They take one sniff and head for the hills. Must be something in my blood reminds ’em of bein’ beaten in Egypt back in the days of the pharaohs. No, I was just talkin’ to my sister, Rita, in Peoria, and she told me that our mother’s last husband died a bad death. He was her fourth or fifth, not even my mother remembers any more. His name was Reno Mott. He was Rita’s stepfather, she’s twelve years younger than I am, and I was gone by the time our mother married him. Rita’s father was my mother’s third or fourth husband, a cat burglar named Slippery Elmo Daniels.

  “Anyways, this last husband had been divorced from our mother for more than twenty years. He wasn’t smart or rich or even very goodlookin’, but my sister says he was always nice to her. I met Reno Mott a few times but I had no use for his ass. Despite his religious dishonesty, constant lies and penny ante swindling, he never made even a modest living and lost every cent my mother had, including whatever I give her or Rita did.

  “He remarried, my sister said, and he and his new wife lived in a trailer on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. He worked odd jobs, Rita told me, the final one for a messenger service deliverin’ small packages in his old Buick that didn’t have headlights. His wife worked as a bank teller. Reno kept at it until he was eighty, then his vital organs began to go one by one. Rita went to see him in the hospital a few days before he died. Drove all the way from Peoria, Illinois, to Phoenix. She’s a good girl, Rita. He was hooked up to a few machines and he was scared. He told my sister that he’d lived a bad life, cheatin’ people all the time, pretending to be a big shot and failing at everything he tried. Mott lost his messenger job after he drove into a kid on a bicycle and killed him. The police let him off because the kid had darted out from an alley or a side street without lookin’ to see if any cars were comin’. It was typical of his bum luck, Mott told Rita. He’d done everything the wrong way, he said, and now he was about to die without money, love or peace of mind.

  “My sister talked to his wife after he died and the woman told her it had been a real ugly deal. She was in the hospital room when the nurses pulled the plugs. He stood up next to the bed and howled, ‘I don’t want to die! I’ve led a mean life, I’ve hurt everyone I’ve ever known. I’ve stolen money from children, I’ve killed people! Now I’m goin’ to hell, I have to go to hell and I’m afraid! Oh, Lord,’ he cried, ‘you know me only as one of the wicked of the earth and my flesh trembleth for fear of thee!’

  “Reno carried on like this, his wife said, for more than a minute before he collapsed to the floor and was pronounced dead. His eyes were rolled back in his head and his mouth was open. Almost all of his teeth were gone. His tongue was green and hung out of one side of his mouth. Rita told his wife that Mott had been nice to her when she’d been a young girl. The woman thanked her for saying so, and said once Reno had read about a boy who’d been hit in the head and lost his ability to remember anything after that. The child’s mind was frozen in time. Not only could he not remember anything new but also did not even recognize himself in the mirror as he grew older. Reno thought that would be the perfect way to live, with nothing terrible in your mind to haunt you forever.

  “When my sister told our mother that Reno Mott had died, she said, ‘I thought he died years ago.’ Rita said he believed he was going to hell and was afraid to burn. ‘I’m not surprised,’ my mother said. ‘He never did any good in his life.’ ‘He was always nice to me,’ said Rita. Out mother looked at her and said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ ”

  Mooney stood up, stretched his lanky frame, and said, “Be thankful, boys, you don’t have a Reno Mott messin’ with you. Guess I’ll see if I can scare up a game of one-pocket.”

  “I don’t really feel like playin’ any more,” said Jimmy.

  “Neither do I,” said Roy.

  They racked their cues, walked to the door and pulled their jackets up over their heads before going out into the rain.

  Christmas Is Not For Everyone

  When Roy was seventeen years old, his mother got married without telling him. He found out when he came back home to Chicago from college for Christmas. Roy was sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast the morning after he arrived and his mother was standing at the sink washing dishes when she told him that she and his little sister were going to move from Chicago to Ojibway, Illinois, on the Wisconsin border.

  “Why?” he asked. “And when?”

  “Right after the new year,” she said. “In about ten days. I’ve already sold my half of the apartment building to Uncle Herman.”

  “What’s in Ojibway?”

  “That’s where Eddie Lund lives. He has a nice house there on Sweden Road. Your sister will have her own room, at least during the months Eddie’s daughter is away at nursing school in Ohio.”

  “Who’s Eddie Lund?”

  “His family owns a steel company in Rock City, close to Ojibway. Eddie works for Rock City Steel.”

  “Ma, who is this guy?”

  Roy’s mother did not answer right away, then Roy realized that she was crying.

  “What’s wrong, Ma?”

  “I’m going to marry him, Roy. Actually, we’re already married.”

  “When did this happen?”

  She turned off the water at the sink and wiped her eyes with her apron, but did not turn around to look at Roy.

  “On my birthday, the day after Thanksgiving.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to bother you while you were at the university. I thought it would be better to tell you when you were home.”

  Eddie Lund was his mother’s fifth husband. Roy knew she was embarrassed by this and had been afraid to tell him she’d gotten marri
ed again, especially after promising Roy, following her divorce two years before from her fourth husband, a drug addict jazz drummer named Spanky Wankovsky, that she was finished with matrimony.

  “Eddie’s a good guy, Roy, you’ll see. He’s coming here today, so you’ll meet him.”

  Roy’s father had been his mother’s first husband; he died when Roy was five. Each of the husbands who came after him had considered Roy a nuisance, if not a burden. None of them had any interest in assuming responsibility for him. Roy was his mother’s son, and he learned to keep his distance from her husbands. Since these men never lasted very long with his mother, Roy just waited them out, hoping, of course, that there would not be another. He soon realized, however, that the only control he had was over himself, and since the age of nine knew that he was on his own.

  The intervals between his mother’s marriages were when Roy and she got along best. Christmas, though, was always difficult because his mother was so often either getting married or divorced around that time. When she threw her third husband, Dion Braz, a sailboat salesman, out of the house for the last time on Christmas Eve, he said to Roy, “Christmas is a trick on kids.”

  Finally she turned and faced Roy and said, “Remember when you were little and I would play the piano and you’d sing? You had such a sweet voice. Why don’t we do it now, Roy, while your sister is sleeping and before Eddie gets here? I always loved it when you sang ‘Count Your Blessings.’ Do you remember that song?”

  Roy looked as his mother’s face. She was not yet forty years old and she was still very beautiful. Before he could answer her, the doorbell rang.

  “That must be Eddie,” she said, taking off her apron. “He’s early.”

  Memories from a Sinking Ship

  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 10,000 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.

  Albert Thibodeaux was a gambler. In the evenings he presided over cockfight and pit-bull matches across the river in Gretna or Algiers but during the day he hung out at Tujague’s on Decatur Street with the railroad men and phony artists from the Quarter. He and my dad knew each other from the old days in Cuba, which I knew nothing about except that they’d both lived at the Nacional in Havana.

  According to Nanny, my mother’s mother, my dad didn’t even speak to me until I was five years old. He apparently didn’t consider a child capable of understanding him or a friendship worth cultivating until that age and he may have been correct in his judgment. I certainly never felt deprived as a result of this policy. If my grandmother hadn’t told me about it I would have never known the difference.

  My dad never really told me about what he did or had done before I was old enough to go around with him. I picked up information as I went, listening to guys like Albert and some of my dad’s other friends like Willie Nero in Chicago and Dummy Fish in New York. We supposedly lived in Chicago but my dad had places in Miami, New York, and Acapulco. We traveled, mostly without my mother, who stayed at the house in Chicago and went to church a lot. Once I asked my dad if we were any particular religion and he said, “Your mother’s a Catholic.”

  Albert was a short, fat man with a handlebar mustache. He looked like a Maxwell Street organ-grinder without the organ or the monkey. He and my dad drank Irish whiskey from ten in the morning until lunchtime, which was around one thirty, when they sent me down to the C
entral Grocery on Decatur or to Johnny’s on St. Louis Street for muffaletas. I brought back three of them but Albert and Dad didn’t eat theirs. They just talked and once in a while Albert went into the back to make a phone call. They got along just fine and about once an hour Albert would ask if I wanted something, like a Barq’s or a Delaware Punch, and Dad would rub my shoulder and say to Albert, “He’s a real piece of meat, this boy.” Then Albert would grin so that his mustache covered the front of his nose and say, “He is, Rudy. You won’t want to worry about him.”

  When Dad and I were in New York one night I heard him talking in a loud voice to Dummy Fish in the lobby of the Waldorf. I was sitting in a big leather chair between a sand-filled ashtray and a potted palm and Dad came over and told me that Dummy would take me upstairs to our room. I should go to sleep, he said, he’d be back late. In the elevator I looked at Dummy and saw that he was sweating. It was December but water ran down from his temples to his chin. “Does my dad have a job?” I asked Dummy. “Sure he does,” he said. “Of course. Your dad has to work, just like everybody else.” “What is it?” I asked. Dummy wiped the sweat from his face with a white-and-blue checkered handkerchief. “He talks to people,” Dummy told me. “Your dad is a great talker.”

  Dad and Albert talked right past lunchtime and I must have fallen asleep on the bar because when I woke up it was dark out and I was in the backseat of the car. We were driving across the Huey P. Long Bridge and a freight train was running along the tracks over our heads. “How about some Italian oysters, son?” my dad asked. “We’ll stop up here in Houma and get some cold beer and dinner.” We were cruising in the passing lane in the powder blue Caddy over the big brown river. Through the bridge railings I watched the barge lights twinkle as they inched ahead through the water.

  “Albert’s a businessman, the best kind.” Dad lit a fresh Lucky from an old one and threw the butt out the window. “He’s a good man to know, remember that.”