The Roy Stories

by Barry Gifford

  “That’s crazy, Mom. What’s it mean?”

  “‘I love the java and the java loves me.’ It’s just a silly little song that was popular when I was a girl. Coffee’s called java because coffee beans come from there.”

  “Where?”

  “The island of Java, near Borneo.”

  “Borneo’s where the wild men are.”

  “It’s part of Indonesia. Coffee wakes you up, makes you feel jivey, you know, jumpy.”

  “Who’s Mr. Moto?”

  “Peter Lorre played him in the movies. He was a Japanese detective.”

  “Why is he in the song?”

  “I don’t have the faintest, baby. I guess just because he was a popular character at the time, before the war.”

  “Look, Mom, there’s tree branches all over the road.”

  “Sit back, honey, I don’t want you to bump your head.”

  “There must have been a big windstorm.”

  “This part of the country is called Tornado Alley. I don’t know why people would live here, especially in trailers. It’s always the trailers that get destroyed by tornadoes.”

  “Where were we when a tornado made all those rocks fall on our car?”

  “Kansas. Wasn’t that terrible? There were hundreds of dents on the roof and the hood, and we had to get a new windshield.”

  “Where does weather come from?”

  “From everywhere, baby. The wind starts blowing in the middle of the Arabian Sea or the South China Sea or somewhere, and stirs up the waves. Pretty soon there’s a storm and clouds form and the planet rotates and spins so the rain or snow works its way around and melts or hardens depending on the temperature.”

  “Does the temperature depend on how close you are to heaven or hell?”

  “No, Roy, heaven and hell have nothing to do with the weather. What matters most is where a place is in relation to the equator.”

  “I know where that is. It’s a line around the globe.”

  “The nearer to the equator, the hotter it is.”

  “I think hell must be on the equator, Mom. The ground opens up like a big grave and when the planet turns all the bad people fall in.”

  “How do good people get to heaven?”

  “A whirly wind called God’s Tornado comes and picks them up and takes them there. People disappear all the time after a tornado.”

  “And what about purgatory, the place where people are that God hasn’t decided about yet?”

  “I think they wait on the planet until God or the Devil chooses them.”

  “Are they kept in any particular place?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe they just stay where they are, and they don’t even know they’re waiting.”

  “I don’t know if you know it, baby, but what you say makes perfect sense. I wish I could write down some of these things, or we had a tape recorder to keep them.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ve got a good memory. I won’t forget anything.”

  Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

  The Age of Fable

  Roy read a story about a tribe of female warriors who interrupted the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans in their quest for males to assist in the propagation of their race. These women called themselves Amazons and were led by Penthesilea, who, as had the rest of the tribe, severed her right breast in order to more swiftly and easily draw back her bow. The most exciting part of the story, Roy thought, was the Amazon queen’s confrontation with the champion of the Greeks, Achilles, whose ferocity in battle attracted Penthesilea as no man ever had before. For the first time she encountered a man whom she could consider her equal.

  The idea of a tribe of brave, vicious, single-breasted women was almost beyond the comprehension of Roy’s eleven-year-old mind. He drew pictures of the Amazons as he imagined them: naked, tall and lean, their long hair tied back with leather thongs.

  Roy asked his grandfather if he’d ever read this story.

  “Sure,” said Pops, “it’s in The Iliad, by Homer.”

  “That’s right,” Roy said. “I kind of found it by accident on a table at the library. Do you think there really ever was a tribe of savage women like that?”

  “I don’t think savage is the correct word for them, Roy. They knew what they were doing. The Amazons wanted to be independent of men, the problem being that they needed men to impregnate them in order to keep their race from dying out.”

  “But they only wanted girls, right?”

  Pops nodded.

  “Then what did they do with boy babies?”

  “Killed at birth,” Pops said. “Drowned them or slit their throats.”

  “It’s just a story, though, isn’t it?” Roy asked. “Homer made it all up.”

  “Yes,” said Pops, “but there’s a lot of truth to it. Even today many Chinese drown their female babies because they think they’re worth less than men.”

  “But they need girls to keep China going.”

  “They don’t drown all of ’em.”

  After talking to Pops, Roy walked over to the park to see if anybody was playing ball. Halfway there it started to rain, so Roy ducked under a canopy in front of the entrance to an apartment building. A very tall, sturdily built blonde lady wearing a thin black coat came out of the building. She stopped under a canopy and looked at the rain, which was falling hard.

  “Damn!” she said. “Now it’ll be a bitch to get a cab.”

  She turned around and walked back into the building without glancing at Roy. He waited under the canopy for a few more minutes until the rain let up a little, then ran back to his house.

  Pops was sitting in the kitchen eating a chopped chicken liver sandwich and drinking a beer.

  “I thought you were going to the park to play ball,” he said.

  “There won’t be a game. Maybe I’ll go when it stops raining.”

  Roy opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of milk.

  “What’s the leader of the Amazons called?” he asked.

  “A virago,” said Pops.

  “Is that the same as queen?”

  “You need a king to have a queen, Roy. No, a virago is a termagant.”

  “Termagant? That sounds like an insect.”

  Pops bit into his sandwich.

  “It means a big, tough woman,” he said, as he chewed.

  “I guess the Chinese don’t want any of them,” said Roy.

  “Probably not,” Pops said. “Close the refrigerator door.”

  The Great Failure

  Roy was puzzled by the last words spoken by the dying father to his daughter at the end of the movie The Great Failure: “It is far more difficult to forget than to remember. How much happier I might have been had I sooner understood this simple fact.”

  Roy was nine years old when he saw The Great Failure at the Uptown theater with Jimmy Boyle. It was part of a double bill with Taza, Son of Cochise, the movie he and Boyle had gone to see, where Rock Hudson plays the Apache chief’s kid who joins up with the renegade Geronimo.

  “Rock must’ve spent a lot of time lyin’ around his swimming pool in Beverly Hills to get that good a roastin’,” said Jimmy Boyle.

  “They rub grease on his skin to turn it dark,” Roy said. “That way he doesn’t get burned.”

  “He still don’t look like an Indian,” said Jimmy. “He looks like an actor with a Hollywood tan. Rocky Graziano looks more like an Indian than Rock Hudson.”

  Both Boyle and Roy were shivering in the late December wind as they walked home.

  “And he don’t talk like one, neither,” Jimmy added.

  “Mrs. Sweeney, the librarian at Clinton, doesn’t sound like an Indian either,” said Roy, “and she is an Indian.”

  “Oh yeah? What tribe?”

  “Navajo. She told us
she grew up on a reservation in New Mexico.”

  “No shit. How’d she get to Chicago?”

  “Went to a college for Indians in Kansas, then got a job here.”

  “Her skin stay dark even in the winter?” asked Jimmy.

  “Yeah.”

  “She ever talk Navajo?”

  Roy shook his head. “Not at school. Maybe at home she does.”

  That night Roy thought more about what the dying father said at the end of The Great Failure. His daughter in the movie was about the same age as Roy and Roy wondered if she was supposed to have understood what her father meant about it being tougher to forget things than remember them. Roy remembered everything; he could read or see or hear something and it stayed in his brain and when he needed to recall it, or even sometimes when he didn’t try to recall it, he could. Roy assumed it would always be this way, which was why he was curious about what the father said about being happy. Things happened and either they were good or bad and depending on what they were a person was happy or sad.

  Before he fell asleep, Roy decided that the father thought he was a failure even though he had been a rich lawyer who had become governor of his state and run for president of the United States. He hadn’t failed because he lost the presidential election but because he hadn’t spent enough time with his wife and daughter and made them unhappy. His wife had committed suicide by jumping off a bridge into a raging river during a thunderstorm and was swept away and drowned; and his daughter liked to tear the arms and legs off of her dolls.

  The family in The Great Failure lived in a mansion in New York and had servants and a big car. Taza, the son of Cochise, lived in a teepee in a desert, rode a buckskin horse bareback and spent most of his time fighting against the U.S. cavalry. Taza was not puzzled but he was not happy, either. Roy was almost always happiest when he was alone. Neither the father nor Taza were ever really alone, so maybe that had something to do with it.

  Irredeemable

  The Saturday afternoon that Roy and his friends heard about the fire at Our Lady of Abandoned and Irredeemable Boys, they were on their way to see a double feature at the Riviera. The movies were Rumble on the Docks and Don’t Knock the Rock. Roy was eager to see Don’t Knock the Rock because his favorite singer, Little Richard, was in it performing “Long Tall Sally.” The boys were on foot passing through Greektown when a kid Jimmy Boyle knew named Martin Kenna, whose great-great-Uncle Hinky Dink Kenna had been a strongarm boss before Capone, came up to them and said, “You guys heard Irredeemable Boys burned down?”

  It was an overcast, bone-rattlingly windy day in early March. A blizzard was supposedly on the way but the streets were clear of evidence from the last storm almost two weeks before. Neither Roy nor the Viper nor Boyle was wearing a hat; they kept their gloveless hands shoved deep into their coat pockets.

  “When?” asked Jimmy.

  Martin Kenna’s nose was blue. He wore a black watch cap under the hood of his gray parka. His hands were buried in the pockets and Roy bet he had gloves on.

  “Real early this morning,” Kenna said, “before it got light out.”

  “They know how it started?” Roy asked.

  Martin Kenna shook his head. “I ain’t heard. Worst part is the main staircase collapsed as the orphans was comin’ down it. Bunch of ’em died. Fried up. Don’t know how many. You guys goin’ to the Riv?”

  Jimmy Boyle nodded.

  “I thought so. Nick Kilennis said Don’t Knock the Rock’s good but Rumble on the Docks is bunk.”

  “You goin’?”

  “No, I gotta work today at the bakery. See ya.”

  “See ya,” said Jimmy.

  Kenna walked away and turned the corner onto Clark. The three boys continued toward the theater. Roy wished he’d worn a hat or had a coat with a hood.

  “You think somebody torched Irredeemable Boys?” he asked.

  “Why’d anybody burn down an orphanage?” said Jimmy.

  “For the insurance,” the Viper said. “Or maybe even an orphan was disturbed about bein’ mistreated.”

  Roy got a kick out of seeing Little Richard do “Long Tall Sally” while he banged on the piano with his right foot, but Rumble on the Docks was phony like Martin Kenna said Nick Kilennis had said, with a pretty boy gang leader whose hair never got mussed during a fight. Roy couldn’t get the thought of the orphanage fire out of his head, though, and after the show he told Jimmy Boyle and the Viper that he wanted to go by.

  “It’s a long way,” Jimmy said. “It’ll be dark by the time we get there.”

  “I got stuff to do,” said the Viper.

  Roy walked by himself up Ojibway Boulevard until he came to Terhune, where he turned east toward the lake. Roy kept his head down against the wind as best he could but it didn’t do much good. He was freezing and considered giving up but Roy kept walking and when he turned onto Tecumseh Street the wind calmed down.

  There were two hook and ladders and a red car parked inside the big iron gates of Our Lady of Abandoned and Irredeemable Boys. The sky was getting dark fast but from the sidewalk Roy could see the black, smoking skeleton of the orphanage. The gates were closed and no people were visible on the grounds. An old man and a woman passed by on the other side of the street but they did not stop or look over.

  Roy was about to leave when he saw a white-haired man wearing a long brown overcoat appear from around the other side of the orphanage. The man got into the red car and started it up but did not drive away, just sat in it with the motor running. Then tiny dots of light flashed on and off from the ruins like fireflies. Roy figured it was the men from the hook and ladders looking for sparks and smoldering debris.

  The part of the sky right over what was left of Irredeemable Boys was a very dark green while all around it was almost entirely black. For some reason Roy had stopped shivering. Instead of getting colder, the air seemed warmer. Maybe it was about to snow.

  Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

  Roy’s friend Magic Frank had a job cleaning up the Tip Top Burlesque House on Saturday and Sunday nights, which, because he began work at three thirty on the following days, was actually Sunday and Monday mornings. According to the law, during business hours patrons and workers at the Tip Top had to be at least eighteen years old and Magic Frank was only sixteen, but since the girlie shows stopped at three the city ordinance did not apply to him. He’d gotten the job through his older brother, Moose, who played poker on Thursday nights with the Tip Top’s owner, Herman “Lights Out” Trugen. Moose told Frank that Trugen’s nickname derived from his habit of turning out lights to save money on electricity. Trugen, who was in his sixties, supposedly had been pals with the comedic actor W. C. Fields, another famous miser who kept padlocks on his telephones to which only he had the keys. In Berlin, Moose said, Herman Trugen had operated a whorehouse favored by the Nazis, several of whom helped him escape Germany during the Holocaust. Trugen’s two sisters and a brother had died in Auschwitz.

  Magic Frank did not like to go alone to State and Congress, so on Christmas Eve he asked Roy to accompany him, promising to buy Roy breakfast after he’d finished mopping the theater and taking out the trash. It was already officially Christmas on Sunday night when the boys got to the Tip Top early, at two thirty, in order to catch the last show.

  “I thought you couldn’t get in until the place was closed,” Roy said.

  “I got a key to the back door,” said Magic Frank, “and Trugen don’t come in Sundays. The other guys don’t care, they just nod or wave and let me sit and watch if I want.”

  “What about the strippers?”

  “What about ’em?”

  “You know any?”

  “Not really. By the time I come in, they’re dog tired. They mostly just get dressed and leave.”

  A cold, sporadic rain pelted the boys as they walked down Dearborn past Van Buren, then turned
left on Congress Parkway, where a gust of wind hit them flush in the face.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Frank cried. “As soon as I can, I’m movin’ to Miami.”

  Magic Frank led Roy down an alley just west of State Street to the rear of the Tip Top and unlocked the back door. Roy followed him through the offices into the theater. The show was on so the boys snuck up a side aisle to the very last row and took seats. Two middle-aged, red-nosed men were on stage.

  “Where was you last night, Al?” one asked the other.

  “Inna cemetery.”

  “A cemetery?”

  “That’s right, Joe.”

  “What were you doin’ inna cemetery at night?”

  “Buryin’ a stiff.”

  The dozen or so members of the audience barely acknowledged this stale joke despite an urgent roll on the snare drum and the cymbal crash that punctuated it. To Roy, the comedians looked as beat as the pit band sounded once they began an overture to the last stripper of the night.

  “And now, for the delectation not to mention play-zeer of you germs out there,” announced Joe, the fellow who had performed the apocryphal interment, “direct from Paris—that’s a burg in southern Illinois—guaranteed to raise your spirits if nothin’ else, the proud proprietor of the best breasts in the Middle West, Miss May Flowers!”

  May Flowers entered stage left as the duo departed stage right. Draped in a bodice-hugging, floor length, bright yellow gown, she sashayed around out of synch to the pit band’s dull rendering of “Night Train.” Her high-piled hair was fiery red.

  “Sonny Liston uses this tune to jump rope by,” Roy whispered to Magic Frank.

  Before she stripped, Miss Flowers looked to be about forty years old. After her act was finished, Roy thought, she looked even older. Her breasts were long and narrow and set wide apart, the nipples sporting silver pasties; once released from imprisonment, they depended almost to her hips. During May’s flounce and inevitable divestiture, the few witnesses who had paid to get in out of the cold expressed no particular emotions that Roy could easily discern. Most of them remained passive, if not in fact comatose, undisturbed by this jactitative offering. Those individuals deep in slumber went undetected by the performer, their snores rendered inaudible by the unenthusiastic strains of Jimmy Forrest’s signature composition. May Flowers completed her act without much of a flourish. Once having shed all but a strategically positioned gold lamé triangle, she strode quickly out of sight and for all anyone knew directly out of the building.