The Cuban Club Read online

  “It was terrible,” his mother said, sobbing between words. “I was swimming close to shore and all of a sudden I was surrounded by jellyfish. They stuck to my back and I couldn’t get away from them. They kept stinging me.”

  “Jesus, lady, your back is full of wounds, your shoulders, too,” said one of the girls. “You should see a doctor right away.”

  “They’re hairs,” said the other girl. “The stingers are actually hairs that grow out of their tentacles. I learned it in biology.”

  Roy and his mother were in Miami Beach, staying at the Delmonico Hotel, waiting for his father to come over on the ferry from Havana. Roy knew that his parents were getting a divorce but he didn’t know exactly what it meant. He understood that his father would not be living with him and his mother any more, but his dad had seldom been with them in the past few months anyway, so Roy didn’t think that would make much of a difference.

  At the doctor’s office, Roy was made to sit in the waiting room while his mother was being attended to. A receptionist asked him how old he was and when he told her five but almost six she gave him six Tootsie Rolls. Roy didn’t like Tootsie Rolls but he took them from her anyway, said thank you, and stuffed them in the right hand pocket of his silver-blue Havana Kings jacket.

  Later, Roy decided, he would distribute them to the bus boys at the Delmonico. Roy had gotten to know them well during the five weeks he and his mother had been there. They had all been nice to him—especially Leo, Chi Chi, Chico and Alberto—giving him dishes of ice cream and Coca-Colas while he hung out in the hotel kitchen and talked to them about baseball. They were all Cubans and Roy often went to the Sugar Kings games with his father when he was in Havana. In December, Roy’s father had introduced him to El Vaquero, “The Cowboy,” the Cuban League home run champion who had for many years played third base for the Cienfuegos team. El Vaquero, whose real name was Raimundo Pardo, had recently had “una taza de café” with the Washington Senators, but he’d struck out much more often than he’d hit home runs for them so the Senators had cut him loose. El Vaquero was going to play now for the Sugar Kings. Roy was looking forward to seeing him hit home runs out of Gran Stadium, but when he told this to Chico and Leo they laughed and said El Vaquero was too old, that his nickname should be changed to El Viejo, “The Old Guy.”

  “What did the doctor do, Mom?” Roy asked when they were in a taxi going back to the hotel.

  “He washed and disinfected the places where I was stung and then applied ointment to them. He said they’ll take a few days to heal. You’ll rub the ointment on my back for me at night, won’t you, Roy?”

  “Sure, if you want me to. But I go to sleep before you do. When Dad gets here, he can do it if I’m already in bed.”

  Roy’s mother looked out the cab’s window on her side. The sidewalks were very crowded and the taxi couldn’t go fast because a wagon filled with plantains being pulled by a horse was in front of it.

  “Don’t talk about your dad,” she said. “Not right now.”

  “Why, Mom? He’s coming to Miami, isn’t he?”

  “It hurts, Roy. I didn’t think it would, but it does.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom, they’re just jellyfish stings. You’ll be okay in a few days.”

  EL ALMUERZO POR POCO

  The girl was sitting at a corner table next to a window, gently knocking ash from her cigarette into an empty cup. The café was crowded due to the rain; nobody wanted to leave until it stopped or at least let up a bit. Customers were standing, holding cups and saucers and plates in their hands, ready to pounce if a table became free. She didn’t want to give up hers, even though she had finished her coffee.

  Roy was with his mother having a quick lunch before her appointment at the dermatologist’s. After both of them had ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and coconut milkshakes, Roy’s mother told him that she had to make a phone call. He had noticed the girl in the corner as soon as they’d sat down and now could hardly take his eyes off of her. She was about seventeen or eighteen, Roy guessed. Her thick black hair fell over one eye but he thought she looked a lot like Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Suddenly, Last Summer, which he’d seen the day before with his mother. Roy was twelve years old and a sign at the theater had said No Minors Allowed but his mother had bought two tickets anyway and nobody tried to stop him from going in with her. After they’d taken their seats, Roy whispered to his mother that children weren’t supposed to see the movie.

  “It’s a matinee, Roy,” she whispered back to him. The theater’s not even half full. They’re just glad to sell tickets.”

  When the girl at the corner table leaned back in her chair and brushed the hair off of her face, Roy felt a little flutter in his stomach. She had almost the identical expression as Elizabeth Taylor had when she was telling the story of how the desperately poor and starving kids on the beach had devoured Montgomery Clift.

  The grilled cheese sandwiches and coconut milkshakes arrived before Roy’s mother returned but Roy ignored the food and continued to stare at the girl. The café was in Little Havana, on Southwest 8th Street, close to the dermatologist’s office. Roy had been there twice before and he and his mother always ordered the same thing. Everyone in the café, which was named La Cafetería Fabuloso, was speaking Spanish, so Roy assumed the beautiful girl was Cuban, like most of the people in this part of Miami. He wondered why she was alone and imagined she worked in a shop somewhere in the barrio.

  His mother came back and said, “Oh, good, I’m starved. Aren’t you, Roy? I couldn’t get Margie to stop complaining about Ronaldo. I told her to just tell him to go back to his wife.”

  Roy took a sip of his milkshake through the straw in the glass and thought about those wild boys biting into Monty Clift’s flesh. Elizabeth Taylor told the psychiatrist, or Katherine Hepburn, who played Montgomery Clift’s mother, Roy couldn’t remember who, how there had been nothing she could do to stop them.

  “Come on, Roy, we don’t have much time.”

  The girl stood up. She was taller than Roy expected her to be, and slender, not short and buxom like Elizabeth Taylor. She still had a terrified expression on her face, as if she expected something bad to happen to her as soon as she left the café.

  “I’m glad it’s raining today,” said Roy’s mother. “Too much sun makes me want to wriggle out of my skin like a snake.”

  Roy watched the girl walk out. She was wearing a pink cotton dress and did not carry an umbrella. Roy wanted to get up and follow her.

  “We’re late, Roy. If you’re not hungry now, wrap up your sandwich in a napkin and we’ll take it with us. You can eat it at the dermatologist’s.”

  VULTURES

  “In Africa, some tribes believe that wearing a freshly decapitated vulture head can give a person the ability to see into the future.”

  Roy was sitting on a bench against a wall in Henry Armstrong’s second floor boxing gym in Miami listening to Derondo Simmons, a former middleweight once ranked number five in the world by Ring magazine. Derondo was forty-two years old and worked as a sparring partner for up-and-comers. Mostly he hung around Henry’s and talked to whoever would listen. He was a great storyteller and a voracious reader, especially in the areas of ancient history and anthropology. Roy, who was nine, was a willing audience for Derondo’s lectures, and Derondo appreciated it.

  “You’re a great listener, Roy,” he said. “It will pay off for you in the future.”

  “Pay off how?”

  “If you listen carefully, you can figure out how a person’s mind works, how they think, then you know what you’ve got to do to get them to pay you.”

  Roy’s father often dropped him off at the gym when he had business to do downtown. He’d make a contribution to Armstrong’s Retired Fighters Fund and press something into Derondo’s hand and know they would keep a close eye on his son until he returned.

  “Did you ever have a vulture head?” Roy asked Derondo.

  “Only seen ’em in pictures and the
movies.”

  “There’s vultures in the Everglades.”

  “Don’t take to snakes and gators, Roy, and I don’t want snakes or gators takin’ to me. I don’t go into the ’glades because I can’t figure how those creatures think, or even if they do think. Did you know that in ancient Rome soldiers rode two horses at a time, standing up?”

  Henry signaled to Derondo and he got up and went over to the larger of the two rings where Henry was talking to a small, well-dressed man wearing a Panama hat. Standing above them leaning down over the top rope was a lean young guy with boxing gloves on. Roy pegged him as a welterweight in the making, a few pounds shy, sixteen or seventeen years old. Derondo nodded his head while Henry spoke to him, and when Henry stopped talking Derondo walked around to the other side of the ring, slipped a sleeveless sweatshirt over his T-shirt, let one of the ring boys grease his face then wrap his hands before fitting on the gloves and fastening his headgear. The kid in the ring began bouncing around, shadowboxing, getting warm. Derondo climbed through the ropes, did a few deep knee bends, practiced a couple of combinations and uppercuts then motioned to the kid.

  Roy went over to ringside and stood near Henry and the man wearing the Panama. Derondo outweighed the boy by twenty-five pounds, so Roy knew he would not throw any hard leather. For the kid’s part, it was not unexpected that he would be faster both with his hands and feet. Neither Henry nor the man in the hat, who Roy figured was the boy’s manager, said a word for the first minute, then Panama shouted, “No baile! Pégale!”

  Roy understood that Panama wanted his boy to prance less and punch more. The kid could not get inside on Derondo, who took whatever the boy offered on his arms and shoulders and did not himself do more than feint and tap. Printed in cursive in gold letters on both sides of the boy’s black trunks were the words El Zopo. Suddenly, Derondo threw a left hook off a jab that landed flush on the kid’s right temple. The little welter tilted onto his left leg and froze for a moment like a crane or heron in the shallows before toppling over and landing on his left ear. Henry jumped into the ring and he and Derondo bent over him. Panama stayed put while Henry and Derondo helped the boy to his feet.

  Roy looked over at Panama and examined his face. He had a thin, dyed black mustache, almond eyes with pale flecks in them and no chin. Roy thought the man resembled a small monkey, a marmoset. When Panama walked around to where Henry and the ring boy were talking to the kid, Roy went back to the bench and leaned against the wall.

  A few minutes later, Derondo came and sat down next to him. He had removed the headgear, gloves and sweatshirt and sat still, staring straight ahead for several seconds before saying, “I tell you, Roy, if I’d had a decapitated vulture head I could have told you that kid has no future as a fighter.”

  Roy’s father picked him up an hour later. When they reached the bottom of the forty-seven steps Roy asked him what el zopo means in English.

  “Deformed. A deformed person, like in a sideshow. Why?”

  “A boxer had it written on his trunks.”

  “Did he look weird?”

  “No, he looked okay. He was just a kid. He was sparring with Derondo Simmons and Derondo knocked him down. I don’t think he meant to.”

  Roy felt safe walking on the street with his father. There were always a few stumblebums on 7th Street outside Henry’s; people who had lost their way, his dad called them.

  “All fighters get deformed sooner or later, son. You don’t need a crystal ball to tell you that.”

  “Or a vulture head,” said Roy.

  I ALSO DEAL IN FURY

  “Then that greaseball actor shows up, and guess who’s with him?”

  “What actor?”

  “Guy with black, curly hair was in the picture where the giggling creep pushes the old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs.”

  “The actor pushed the woman in the wheelchair?”

  “No, the other one, the cop. He’s got the rich kid’s wife with him, the brunette the queer actor falls for so he drowns his pregnant girlfriend.”

  “The same movie?”

  “No, another one.”

  “I don’t go to the pictures much. I get antsy. Half of the show I’m in the lobby smokin’, waitin’ on Yvette.”

  “I Also Deal in Fury, you didn’t see it?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, they don’t want nobody to know they’re in Vegas together, but after ten minutes it’s all over town.”

  “What did they expect?”

  “In for the weekend.”

  “They want privacy they go to the springs, get a mud bath.”

  Roy was sitting next to the men on a pile of unsold newspapers waiting for his father. It was three-thirty in the morning and his father had said he’d be back at the liquor store by three. Phil Priest and Eddie O’Day were keeping an eye on the boy.

  “You okay, kid?” Eddie asked. “Your dad’ll be here soon.”

  “Here,” said Phil. “Take it by the grip.”

  Phil Priest pulled a snubnose .38 out from inside his coat and handed it to Roy.

  “You ever handled a piece?”

  “Phil, you nuts?” said Eddie. “His old man won’t like it, he finds out.”

  “Be careful, kid,” Phil said, “Don’t touch the trigger.”

  “Is it loaded?” Roy asked.

  “You got always to assume a piece is loaded. And never point it at anyone other than you mean business.”

  “It’s heavy,” said Roy. “Heavier than I thought.”

  “How old are you now, Roy?”

  “Ten. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  Roy’s father came in and saw Roy holding the gun. Phil took it from him and replaced it inside his coat.

  “Roy,” said his father, “go stand outside for a minute. By the door, where I can see you.”

  Roy slid off the stack of newspapers, walked out and stood by the entrance. He liked being up late and looking at people on the street. They were different than the people he saw during the day and in the evening who hung around his father’s place. Their faces were hidden even under the lights from the signs on the clubs and restaurants. Phil and Eddie came out of the store and walked away without saying anything.

  “Dad, can I come back in now?”

  Roy’s father came out and stood next to him and draped his right arm around Roy’s shoulders. He was wearing a white shirt with the long sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a blue tie with a gold clasp with his initials engraved on it.

  “It’s cooler out here,” he said. “Chicago gets so hot in the summer.”

  “Are you angry at Phil for showing me his gun?”

  A girl came by and stopped and whispered into Roy’s father’s ear. Her high heels made her taller than his father. She walked around the corner onto Rush Street.

  “What did she say, Dad?”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “I helped her out with something the other day.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Anita.”

  “She’s tall.”

  “She’s a dancer at The Casbah.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “Are you still angry at Mom?”

  “No, Roy. I’m not angry at your mother.”

  “What about Phil?”

  HOUR OF THE WOLF

  When he was eleven years old, Roy began waking up between four and four-thirty in the morning, four hours before he had to leave for school. His mother, her husband and Roy’s sister were asleep and so long as he kept to the back of the house he did not disturb them. No matter what the weather was, even if it was freezing or raining, Roy liked to go out onto the back porch to feel the fresh air and watch the sky. He could imagine that he lived alone, or at the least that this third stepfather did not exist. Roy had come to understand that his mother gave very little thought to how her bringing these men into his life might affect him. He knew now that
it was up to him to control his own existence, to no longer be subject to her poor judgment and desperation.

  It was on a morning in mid-December when Roy was standing on the porch wearing a parka over his pajamas looking up at a crescent moon with snow beginning to flurry that he heard a scream. It came from the alley behind his house. Roy could not identify the sound as having come from a woman or a man. He waited on the porch for a second cry but none came. Roy went inside to his room and exchanged his slippers for shoes and went back out. He pulled the hood of his parka over his head and walked carefully down the porch steps, not wanting to slip on the new snow, and continued through the yard along the passageway that led to the alley. Flakes were falling faster, translucent parachutists infiltrating the darkness.

  Roy looked both ways in the alley but did not see a person. He stood there waiting to hear or see someone or something move. He was about to go back to the house when he saw a shadow creep across the garage door directly opposite his own. Instinctively, he retreated a few steps toward the passageway. The shadow was low and long, as if cast by a four-footed animal, a large dog or a wolf, although he knew there were no wolves in Chicago. What if one, or even a panther, had escaped from a zoo? But could an animal have emitted such a human-like scream? Roy knew that he should go back inside the house but his curiosity outweighed his fear, so he waited, ready to run should a dangerous creature, man or beast, reveal itself.

  A car appeared at the entrance to the alley, its headlights burning into the swirling snow. Roy watched the car advance slowly, listening to its tires crunch over the quickly thickening ground cover. As the vehicle came closer, he stepped back further into the passageway, wanting not to be seen by the driver. The car crept past his hiding place and slid to a stop twenty feet away. Roy could not see the car clearly enough to identify the make. Nobody got out. The car sat idling, its windshield wipers whining and thunking.

  Roy imagined the driver or perhaps a passenger was looking for the person or animal responsible for the scream. If so, why didn’t someone get out of the car and call out or look around? What if the object of their search were injured or frightened, unable to make its distress and location known? After a full minute, the car moved forward, heading toward the far end of the alley. When Roy could no longer see its tail lights, he walked back through the passageway to his house.