The Roy Stories

by Barry Gifford

  A woman opened the door and told me to please put the bags on the kitchen table, pointing the way. I put down the bags and looked at the woman. She was wearing a half-open pink nightgown, her nipples standing out against the thin material. Her hair was black halfway down her head, the bottom half was bleached and stringy.

  “How much is it?” she asked.

  “Five dollars,” I said, looking at her purpled cheeks and chin.

  “Just wait here and I’ll get it for you,” she told me. “Be right back.”

  I looked around the kitchen. I was twelve years old and was not used to being alone in strange kitchens. There were dishes in the sink, and one of the elements of the overhead fluorescent light was burned out, giving the kitchen a dull, rosy glow, like the woman’s face, and her nightgown.

  The woman came back and gave me a fifty-dollar bill. She had put on a green nightgown similar to the one she’d had on before, and flicked her pink tongue back and forth through her purple lips.

  “I don’t have any change for this,” I said. “Don’t you have anything smaller?”

  She smiled. “Well, I’ll just go see!” she said, and went off again.

  I sat down on the kitchen table. I was beginning to enjoy myself, and was disappointed when she returned in the same green nightgown. She handed me a twenty.

  “Will this do?” she asked.

  I dug in my pocket for the change but she stopped me.

  “Don’t bother, darling,” she said, smiling, and put her hand on my wrist. Her nails were painted dark red, but looked lighter in the hazy glow. “Keep it all,” she said, and took me by the hand to the front door.

  She put my hand on her breast. I could feel a lump through the nightgown.

  “Thank you very, very much,” she said, heavily, like Lauren Bacall or Tallulah Bankhead. I thought she looked like Tallulah Bankhead except for her hair, which was more like Lauren Bacall’s.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and she opened the door for me, letting me out.

  It was still raining, but I stood for a minute under the Dutch elm tree where I’d left my bike and the bags of food covered by a small piece of canvas. I removed the cover from the bicycle and folded it over the bags in the basket. I felt the twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, and I smiled. If I could have two deliveries like this a day, I thought, just two.

  The Deep Blue See

  When I was in the eighth grade I was given the job of being one of the two outdoor messengers of Clinton School. Since I was far from being among the best behaved students, I could only surmise that some farsighted teacher (of whom there were very few) realized that I was well suited for that certain responsibility, that perhaps some of my excess energy might be put to use and I’d be honored and even eventually behave better because of this show of faith in my ability to run errands during school hours. Either that or they were just glad to get rid of me for a half hour or so.

  I thought it was great just because it occasionally allowed me to get out of not only the classroom but the school. Escorting sick kids home was the most common duty but my favorite was walking the blind piano tuner across California Avenue to and from the bus stop.

  For two weeks out of the year the old blind piano tuner used to come each day and tune all of the pianos in the school. My job during that time was to be at the bus stop at eight forty-five every morning to pick him up, and then, at whatever time in the afternoon he was ready to leave, to walk him back across, wait with him until the bus arrived, and help him board.

  We became quite friendly over the two-week period that I assisted him. The piano tuner looked to me like any ordinary old guy with white hair in a frayed black overcoat, except he was blind and carried a cane. My dad and I had seen Van Johnson as a blind man in the movie Twenty-three Paces to Baker Street. Van Johnson had reduced an intruder to blindness by blanketing the windows and putting out the lights, trapping him—or her, as it turned out—until the cops came, but I’d never known anybody who was blind before.

  I couldn’t really imagine not being able to see and on the last day I asked the piano tuner if he could see anything at all. We were crossing the street and he looked up and said, “Oh yes, I see the blue. I can see the deep blue in the sky and the shadows of gray around the blue.”

  It was a bright sunny winter day and the sky was clear and very blue. I told him how blue it was, I didn’t see any gray, and there were hardly any clouds. We were across the street and I could see the bus stopping a block away.

  “Were you ever able to see?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, shapes,” he said. “I can see them move.”

  Then the bus came and I helped him up the steps and told the bus driver the old man was blind and to please wait until I’d helped him to a seat. After the piano tuner was seated I said good-bye, gave the token to the driver, and got off.

  While I was waiting at the corner for the traffic to slow so that I could cross, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it was like to be blind. I looked up with my eyes closed. I couldn’t see anything. I opened them up and ran across the street.

  Radio Goldberg

  Rigoberto Goldberg was a tall, lanky kid, an Ichabod Crane with thick glasses bordered by heavy black rims who didn’t talk much. He also had a mustache, which no other twelve-year-old in Roy’s neighborhood had. Dickie Cunningham thought it might have been because of Goldberg’s being half Spanish.

  “Puerto Rican kids grow up faster than we do,” he said.

  “Goldberg isn’t from Puerto Rico,” Roy told him. “He was born in the Dominican Republic.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “An island around Cuba, I think,” said Roy. “And how do you know Spanish kids grow up faster? Mostly they’re smaller than us.”

  “They’re shorter,” said Cunningham, “but they got hair on their chins when they’re our age. Lookit that kid Luis went to Margaret Mary.”

  “One got thrown out for pullin’ a switchblade on a teacher?”

  Cunningham nodded. “Luis Soto somethin’.”

  “Sotomayor.”

  “Kid had a goatee in seventh grade.”

  “He was thirteen already. Got put back twice.”

  Rigoberto Goldberg was not an outstanding student. Once in a while he’d crack wise in class, but mostly he seemed content to sit in the back row and hope to be ignored by the teacher. None of the other kids even knew if he could speak Spanish. Cunningham asked him if he could but Goldberg just shrugged and walked away. He was a real loner.

  It was a surprise, therefore, when one afternoon after school Goldberg approached Roy and Cunningham and asked them if they wanted to see his radio station.

  “What do you mean, your radio station?” asked Cunningham.

  “I got a radio station,” said Goldberg, “in my garage. I built it.”

  “Sure,” Roy said. “Let’s go.”

  As they walked to Rigoberto’s house, Cunningham said, “Do you have call letters for your station, like WLS or WBBM?”

  “I got a name,” he told them. “Radio Goldberg.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Roy, “don’t you have to have letters? I thought east of the Mississippi River radio stations are all K-something, and west of the Mississippi they begin with W.”

  “It’s my station,” said Rigoberto. “I can call it whatever I want to.”

  Inside his family’s garage, Goldberg had constructed what appeared to be a gigantic crystal set. He sat down in front of the table it was on, placed earphones over his head, switched on the machine and began turning dials. With his thick black glasses, droopy nose, uncombed dark brown hair and mustache, Goldberg looked every bit the mad scientist. All sorts of squealy, squeaky, dissonant noises emanated from the equipment, rattling off the brick walls. Several voices filled the room simultaneously. Roy felt as if he were inside a fun house at an amusement park.
Rigoberto remained calm, fiddling the controls with his spiderleg fingers. For the first time, Roy noticed that Goldberg had an inordinate amount of dirt under his fingernails.

  Suddenly, the cacophony ceased and Rigoberto spoke into a large, wood-framed microphone.

  “Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,” he said, “this is Radio Goldberg, broadcasting from the forty story Goldberg Building located in the heart of the heartland, Chicago, Illinois, U.S. of A. Seven hot watts for all you guys, gals and tots.”

  Goldberg at the mike was an astounding sight to Roy and Cunningham. He transformed himself from a geeky, shirt-buttoned-up-to-the-collar, four-eyed bed-head into a smooth-talking ball of fire. Amazingly, Goldberg’s body language became that of a slinky jungle cat’s, and his voice had the timbre of Vaughan Monroe’s recording of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Rigoberto talked about whatever was on his mind at the moment. He trashed teachers of his by name, castigated girls he deemed stuck up because they wouldn’t give him the time of day, and he played records. Goldberg owned only a few 45s; these included such diverse platters as Patti Page’s “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?,” Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and Jim Backus’s spoken word rendering of the story of “Gerald McBoing Boing.”

  Radio Goldberg’s broadcasting area, Rigoberto told Roy and Cunningham, encompassed approximately the six blocks surrounding his house. He came on the air after school on weekdays for a couple of hours, occasionally at night if his parents were out, and early Sunday mornings while his parents were still asleep. On Sunday, he said, he liked to tell his listeners that sometimes he thought he was a son of God, like Jesus, and then he would play Elvis Presley’s record, “I Believe.” His parents, Rigoberto said, knew nothing about Radio Goldberg.

  It wasn’t long after he had revealed his secret station to Roy and Cunningham that Goldberg’s neighbors began lodging complaints with the legitimate local radio stations whose signals were irregularly being interfered with. Three weeks into his broadcasting career, the police, armed with a search warrant, knocked on the Goldbergs’ door. They discovered Rigoberto’s garage set-up and confiscated his equipment. A small article describing the dismantling of Rigoberto Goldberg’s operation appeared in the evening paper, the Daily News, under the heading, ‘RADIO GOLDBERG’ GOES OFF THE AIR. BOY, 12, CITED FOR BROADCASTING ILLEGALLY. The article quoted Arturo Goldberg, Rigoberto’s father, who said, “My son is a genius. One day, you’ll see.”

  “They fined me fifty bucks,” Rigoberto told Roy and Cunningham. “My parents paid it but they’re making me pay ’em back out of the money I earn from my paper route.”

  “Did the police return your equipment?” Roy asked him.

  “Not yet. They still got my records, too.”

  “The cops are a bunch of crooks,” said Cunningham. “One of ’em’ll probably swipe ‘Gerald McBoing Boing’ and give it to his kid.”

  Why Skull Dorfman Went to Arkansas

  Roy usually avoided Skull Dorfman’s booth, but when Skull himself beckoned, Roy went over.

  “Here, kid,” Skull said, after reaching into one of his pants pockets and coming up with a five dollar bill, “get me a Form and an American.” As Roy took the fin from him, Skull added, “Make that a Sun-Times, too. And don’t forget to give the girl somethin’.”

  Roy walked to the front of Meschina’s, where Flo, who’d been a blonde the last time Roy had seen her, was working the cash register.

  “Hi, Flo,” Roy said. “I like your hair.”

  Flo smiled, patted the back and sides of her head, and said, “Thanks, hon. I was a redhead once before, you know. I changed it to black after Tony Testonena and me went on the permanent outs. Feel like myself again. Ain’t it late for you to be out, Roy? It’s almost midnight.”

  “No, my mother doesn’t care. She’s probably not home yet, anyway. Can I have a Racing Form, an American and a Sun-Times, please? They’re for Skull.”

  Roy handed Flo the five. He looked at her closely as she bent down to pick up the papers, put them on the counter, and then made change. Roy’s mother was thirty-four years old and a real redhead. Flo had some serious creases in her face; cracks and crevices marred the thick, sand colored make-up around her eyes and mouth. His mother didn’t have creases yet, at least none as evident as Flo’s, and she didn’t wear much make-up. Roy figured Flo had to be at least forty, if not older. She was skinny and her narrow breasts jutted out and up like steer horns. Cool Phil said they were falsies. Roy had only a vague idea of what falsies looked like. He wasn’t crazy about Cool Phil because Phil was always in a bad mood and never had anything good to say about anybody. Roy thought maybe it was because Cool Phil, who was eighteen, six years older than Roy, had bad acne and was already losing his hair.

  Flo gave Roy two dollars and fifty cents. “Here you go, hon,” she said, and shot him a big smile. Her lips were thin, too, and she applied ruby red lipstick unevenly beyond the edges.

  “Keep the quarters, Flo,” said Roy, and handed them back to her. He folded the three papers under his right arm and kept the two singles in his left hand.

  “Thanks, hon,” Flo said, “you’re a real gentleman.”

  Roy delivered the papers to Skull Dorfman, placing them carefully on the formica next to two empty and one half-eaten whitefish platters and a table barrel of old dills with three pickles left in it. He held out the singles toward Skull.

  “I gave Flo four bits,” Roy told him.

  Seated across from Skull Dorfman in the booth was Arnie the Arm Mancanza. Arnie only had one arm, having lost his right in an industrial accident at Pocilga’s sausage factory. The Arm carried a good three hundred pounds, and Dorfman had to go two-sixty or seventy, so Roy assumed the whitefish platters were merely a warm-up.

  Skull plucked one of the bills from Roy’s fingers and said, “The other one’s yours, kid. I’m fat but I ain’t cheap.”

  “You ain’t fat, Skull,” said the Arm. “I’m fat.”

  “Okay, Arm,” Skull said. “Okay.”

  Roy joined his friends, who were occupying a booth in the back.

  “How much he tip you?” asked the Viper.

  “A buck.”

  “He pinch you on the cheek?” asked Jimmy Boyle. “I hate when he does that.”

  Roy shook his head no.

  “He’s a fat fuck,” said the Viper.

  “Arnie the Arm says Skull isn’t fat,” Roy said. “He says he’s fat.”

  “Takes the Arm twice as long to eat since the accident at Pocilga’s,” said Jimmy Boyle. “His appetite ain’t changed, just his velocity.”

  “What are you,” the Viper said, “a fuckin’ scientist?”

  “My old man says Mancanza and Bruno Benzinger were feeding a stiff through the grinder is how it happened. Arnie got careless and caught his sleeve. By the time Benzinger turned off the machine, Mancanza’s right arm was in slices.”

  “What happened to the stiff?” asked the Viper.

  “Benzinger was a medic in Korea, so he tied a tourniquet onto what was left of Arnie’s right arm to stop the bleedin’, then finished off the stiff before takin’ Mancanza to the hospital. My old man says if fuckin’ Benzinger had taken the cut off parts of the arm, the doctors might have been able to reattach it, but he ground them up, too.”

  The next time Roy was in Meschina’s, Skull Dorfman’s booth was empty.

  “Hey, Viper,” Roy said, as he slid into a booth. “It’s past midnight. Where’s Skull?”

  “You ain’t heard what happened?”

  “No.”

  “The Arm told Cool Phil Skull messed up. He got two jobs, you know, one tendin’ a bridge on the river, the other as a parimutuel clerk at Sportsman’s.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You work for the city, you ain’t supposed to work at the racetrack. It’s a law.”

&
nbsp; “What happened?”

  “Skull was at the track when he was supposed to be tending the bridge, and the fuckin’ Queen Mary come through.”

  “The Queen Mary on the Chicago River?”

  “One of them big god damn passenger liners. People want to see a river that flows backwards, I guess. Anyway, Skull’s got his key on him, the one unlocks the switch raises the bridge. They’re goin’ nuts, nobody’ll squeal on Skull, so the river pilot and the police don’t know where he is. The Queen Mary’s bobbin’ up and down, can’t go nowhere. Everybody and their mother’s pissed as hell. Takes ’em forever to find another key or break the lock. Finally, they get the bridge up. Skull gets back there, they put his ass in a sling.”

  “What did they do to him?”

  “The Arm says Skull’s suspended indefinitely from the bridge job without pay, and for sure he can’t work the track no more unless he quits the city, which’d mean he’d forfeit his pension, which he got more’n twenty years in.”

  Jimmy Boyle came in and sat down next to Roy.

  “I just told Roy about what happened to Skull,” said the Viper.

  “Yeah, the Arm’s out front on the sidewalk,” Jimmy Boyle said. “Heard him tellin’ Oscar Meschina that Skull’s in Hot Springs, workin’ at a dog track.”

  “Where’s Hot Springs?” the Viper asked.

  “Arkansas,” said Roy. “I was there once with my mother. Gambling’s legal.”

  A couple came in and sat down in Skull Dorfman’s booth.

  “I guess it’s true,” said the Viper. “Don’t look like Skull’s comin’ in.”

  Jimmy Boyle nodded. “Nope,” he said, “not tonight, anyway.”

  Wanted Man

  The summer I was thirteen years old I worked in Cocoa Beach, Florida, building roads and houses for my uncle’s construction company. One afternoon when we were paving a street in one hundred and five degree heat, a police car pulled up to the site, stopped, and two cops got out, guns drawn. They moved swiftly toward the steam roller, which was being operated by Boo Ruffert, a former Georgia sheriff. The cops proceeded without a word and grabbed Boo, dragging him down from his perch atop the steam roller. I was shoveling limerock off of a curb directly across from the action, and I watched the cops handcuff Ruffert and begin double-timing him toward their beige and white. Jake Farkas, who had been sweeping behind Boo, jumped up onto the steam roller and shut it down before the machine went out of control and careened off the road. My uncle came running out of the trailer he used as an office and intercepted the policemen before they locked Boo Ruffert into the patrol car.