The Roy Stories

by Barry Gifford

  The next time Roy ran into Izzy Rostov, the delivery boy winked at him but did not stop to talk. His cart was loaded with mink and fox stoles.

  “Gotta get these on a truck goin’ to the Merchandise Mart,” Izzy said, and pushed on toward the freight elevator.

  A couple of Saturdays after that, all four of the brothers were playing bridge when Louie said, “You hear the Rostov boy got killed?”

  “The delivery cart kid?” asked Ike.

  “Yes. Apparently he tried to rob a liquor store on Huron the other night and the clerk shot him in the back before he could get away.”

  “You know about his parents?” asked Nate.

  “What about them?” Jack asked.

  “They were survivors of Auschwitz.”

  “Horrible,” said Ike. “Imagine how they must feel.”

  “What’s Auschwitz?” asked Roy.

  The men were silent for a few moments before Nate spoke.

  “It was a concentration camp, a prison death camp during the war where the Germans murdered Jews.”

  “They also murdered Gypsies and Communists,” said Ike, “but mostly Jews.”

  “But Rostov’s parents are still alive,” Roy said.

  “Some prisoners were rescued by the Allies before the Nazis could kill them,” said Louie.

  “How many people did they kill?” asked Roy.

  “Too many to count,” said his grandfather. “The accepted figure is six million.”

  “More,” said Louie. “They murdered more.”

  “To think that the parents escaped the Holocaust,” Nate said, “they come to America and their child is shot down in the street like a wild animal.”

  “He had a gun,” Roy said. “He showed it to me.”

  The men all looked at Roy.

  “It was a snub-nose .38,” he said. “Izzy told me he was going to stick up a gas station and move to Miami Beach.”

  “What kind of home life could the boy have had?” said Nate.

  Roy looked out a window onto State Street. The Chicago Theater was showing Alan Ladd in The Badlanders. Clumps of brown dirt the size of pigeons were blowing through the gray air.

  “Let’s play cards,” said Ike.

  War and Peace

  Lots of guys went into the service from Roy’s neighborhood. Most of them got drafted into the army and were sent to Germany or Korea. This was during the 1950s, between World War II and the Vietnam War, after the cease-fire of the police action in Korea, so the only guys who got killed bought it by accident. Stuffy Foster drowned during basic training in South Carolina. Little Goose Wentworth’s older brother, Big Goose, went AWOL from Fort Polk, in Louisiana, and disappeared into a swamp; his body was found two weeks later covered with snake bites, his corpse half-devoured by varmints. Woody Crow drove a tank over a cliff while on maneuvers in Düsseldorf and broke his neck. The biggest success story came after Moe Israel stole a general’s jeep in Belgium and drove it to Monte Carlo where he was arrested in a casino and then sent to prison. Moe’s cousin Artie told Roy that Moe set up a book-making operation in the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, that was so successful he was able to send money to his mother every month.

  When Phil Flynn told Roy that as soon as he could drop out of high school he was going to enlist in the navy, Roy asked him why. Both boys were eleven years old; they were sitting on upturned milk bottle crates in the alley behind Phil’s house swapping drags on a Lucky Strike. Phil lived with his parents and two older sisters in a one-bedroom apartment above a meat market. His sisters slept in the bedroom and their parents slept in a Murphy bed that came down from the living room wall. Phil slept on a cot in the apartment’s only hallway; every time someone had to use the bathroom during the night he or she invariably bumped into Phil’s cot and woke him up.

  “I figure it’s the only way I’m gonna get to Tahiti,” Phil said. “If I let the army draft me, they’ll stick me up on the DMZ in Korea where I’ll fuckin’ freeze to death, or in Germany where I’ll also fuckin’ freeze to death.”

  It was cold sitting outside in the alley. Brownish snow was piled up against garage doors and a thin layer of ice covered the cracked and potholed pavement. This was early March in Chicago and more bad weather was on the way.

  “What’s the DMZ?” asked Roy.

  “Demilitarized zone,” said Phil. “It’s supposed to be the scariest place on earth, where the commies and our guys stand day and night with their rifles pointed at each other.”

  “Does the U.S. Navy go to Tahiti?”

  “I went into the recruitin’ office upstairs of the currency exchange,” Phil said, “and the Chief Petty Officer in charge told me the navy would send me to the south seas if that’s where I wanted to go.”

  “Why do you want to go there?”

  Phil finished off the cigarette and flicked the butt away.

  “Hot and breezy,” he said, “and fabulous brown babes with big tits and almost no clothes. I saw ’em in my sister Mary’s art book. Standin’ around with flowers in their long black hair and lyin’ down by a lagoon without tops on and nothin’ to do. You gotta be on a ship to get there.”

  “You told your parents?”

  “Nah. My old man wants me to go to college. He talks about it all the time, about how me and Mary and Wanda are all gonna graduate from college. It’s a big thing with him since he never went past the third or fourth grade and works in a bottle factory.”

  “Was he in the service?”

  “Uh-uh. He gets fits, so they wouldn’t take him. Wanda gets fits, too. Next time you’re around ask her to show you her tongue where she bit off part of it.”

  Roy stood up. “I’m goin’,” he said.

  Phil took a cigarette out of a pocket of his blue tanker jacket.

  “I got another Lucky. You wanna share?”

  Roy shook his head and put up his coat collar.

  “You oughta join the navy with me,” said Phil.

  He took out a book of matches and lit his cigarette.

  “Warm breezes, naked women and no wars. Nobody would fight if they could lay by a lagoon all day with a girl with titties like coconuts and flowers behind her ears.”

  Roy grinned and nodded his head then turned and started walking toward his house. His nose was running and he wiped it with the back of his left hand. Roy had seen Phil’s sister Wanda twice, once walking with another girl on Ojibway Boulevard, and once waiting for a bus on Blackhawk. Her skin, he recalled, was much darker than Phil’s, and her hair was black, not ginger colored like her brother’s or Mary’s, and her eyes were big and brown, theirs were small and blue. She was probably the prettiest girl Roy had ever seen.

  Chop Suey Joint

  When Roy was eleven years old, he got a job delivering Chinese food on a bicycle. He was paid twenty-five cents an hour and a dime for each delivery, plus tips. He worked three nights a week from five o’clock until eight, and from four to eight on Sundays. Kow Kow Restaurant provided the bicycle, which was equipped with baskets attached to the handlebars and mounted on the rear fender. Roy was also fed dinner, for which he usually requested a hamburger on toast, vegetable chow mein and egg foo yung. He enjoyed this job except when the weather was really foul, which was when he often had the most deliveries. Riding in traffic over icy streets or in driving rain was difficult, but he was skillful enough to avoid any serious mishaps during the year or so that he worked as a delivery boy.

  Every Sunday night a man came into Kow Kow at eight twenty, ten minutes before closing. This was also the time when Roy ate his dinner. The man always sat in one of the two red leather booths on either side of the front window and ordered the same items: won ton soup with extra dumplings, served extra hot; shrimp fried rice; and two pots of tea, also extra hot. He was in his late forties or early fifties, had a three or four day beard, was of medium heigh
t and size, wore the same brown sportcoat, a black shirt buttoned up to his neck and a weather-punished brown Fedora, which he did not remove while he ate.

  Don Soon, the owner’s son, always waited on him. Don was twenty-three, he smiled a lot and Roy liked him the best of anyone at Kow Kow, although all of the guys who worked there—waiters, cooks and kitchen help—were nice to him. No women worked at Kow Kow. Mr. Soon, the owner, tended the cash register while seated on a high stool behind a counter near the entrance.

  He said the same thing to every customer after ringing up the bill: “You come back. We waiting for you.” Mr. Soon spoke Cantonese to his employees but when speaking to his son and to Roy he used perfect English. When Roy asked Don why his father spoke pidgin to non-Asian customers, Don said, “He thinks they expect it, so he does his Charlie Chan act. This is a chop suey joint—you get egg roll and atmosphere.”

  One Sunday night, when Don was in the kitchen and Mr. Soon had left early, the man in the hat, as the employees called him, looked over at Roy, who was eating his dinner at a nearby table, and said, “Hey, kid, you work here, don’t you?”

  Roy nodded. “I do deliveries.”

  “You suppose you could go in the kitchen and tell ’em I’m ready for my second pot of tea?”

  “Sure,” Roy said, and stood up.

  “Make sure you tell ’em ‘extra hot.’”

  “Okay.”

  “Sorry to disturb your meal.”

  “No problem,” Roy said, and walked back to the kitchen.

  He came back and sat down.

  “Don’s bringing it,” he said to the man in the hat.

  “Thanks, kid.”

  Thirty seconds later, Don Soon brought the man a pot of tea, smiled at him and walked away.

  “These are nice people here,” the man said to Roy.

  “They are,” said Roy.

  “They pay you good?”

  “Enough, I guess.”

  “This waiter, he’s always smiling.”

  “His name is Don. He’s the owner’s son.”

  “He reminds me of an Arab I knew when I worked in the oil fields in Saudi. His name was Rashid bin Rashid. Bin means ‘son of.’ He smiled all the time, too. This Rashid, he captured falcons and sold ’em. He showed me how to do it. Took a pet pigeon and tied a long piece of string to one of its legs and the other one to a stone. We sat and waited until a falcon flew over, then Rashid threw the pigeon up into the air and we took off. The falcon swooped down and killed the pigeon and when he brought it to the ground we ran back and chased the falcon away. Then we dug a shallow pit in the sand downwind of the dead pigeon. Rashid got into the pit holding the end of the string tied to the stone. I covered him with a blanket and he told me to get far away. When the falcon came back to finish picking at its kill, Rashid slowly reeled in the pigeon. As soon as the falcon got close to him, Rashid reached out and grabbed it.”

  The front window behind the man was streaked with rain. Roy was glad he had finished his deliveries before it started. The man poured himself a fresh cup of tea and took a long sip.

  “The Arabs mostly drank coffee,” he said, “sometimes tea. They like it boiling hot. I got used to drinking it that way.”

  “How long were you in Saudi Arabia?” Roy asked.

  “Three and a half years. Made a pile. Gone now.”

  Roy stood and picked up his dishes to take to the kitchen.

  “Nice talking to you,” he said. “I enjoyed the story about catching a falcon in the desert.”

  The man in the hat poured more tea.

  “If you’re here next Sunday, I’ll tell you about the time I helped save a camel from drowning in quicksand.”

  “I’ll be here,” said Roy.

  He never saw the man again. A few weeks after their conversation, Roy asked Don Soon if the man had come in at a time when he wasn’t working. Don said no, that as far as he knew the man in the hat had not been back since that night.

  “You must have told him about a better Chinese restaurant,” said Don.

  Roy asked Mr. Soon if he’d seen him, and Mr. Soon shook his head and said, “White ghost all look same.” Then Mr. Soon smiled and messed up Roy’s hair with his right hand. “Just kidding, Roy,” he said. “No, I don’t know what happened to him. He always left a fair tip. I hate to lose a good customer.”

  In his second year of high school, four years after he’d stopped working at Kow Kow, Roy came across a book on a shelf in the school library about falcons and falconry. He immediately remembered the man in the hat’s story. Roy looked through the book to see if there was any information on capturing falcons but there was not. Most of the text was about training the birds to hunt, which seemed silly to Roy because it was obvious that a falcon knows how to hunt without a man having to teach it. He put the book back on the shelf. There were millions of pigeons in the city, Roy thought. They shit on everything. Chicago would be a better place, he decided, if more falcons lived there.

  Significance

  Roy often wondered what the significance was of having a favorite color or number. His favorite color was blue, a common enough preference, he came to learn. His mother’s favorite number was eight: whenever she asked him to guess what number she was thinking of, he always said eight and he was always right. One time she asked him and he guessed eight and his mother said, No, I was thinking of the number four, and Roy said, You’re fibbing, you were thinking of eight, and she laughed and said, You’re right, I was thinking of eight. I can’t help it. You can’t fool me, Roy said, and his mother said, No, Roy, you know me too well.

  Roy and his mother played this game often when they were in the car and she was driving. When his mother tried to guess what number Roy was thinking of she usually guessed three or nine and she was correct about half the time, though neither three nor nine were Roy’s favorite number. As Roy grew older, he and his mother played this game less frequently, and by the time he was ten or eleven they stopped playing it for good.

  Many years later Roy was walking alone at night on a street in a city his mother had never been to when he thought about their numbers guessing game. He was thinking of the number five and he wished his mother were there because if he asked her to guess she would have said three or nine. Just then Roy passed a house with an open window from which he heard a record playing: Eartha Kitt singing “April in Portugal” in French. He stopped in the street to listen. “April in Portugal” had been one of his mother’s favorite songs when he was a boy; she often used to play it on the piano and sing the lyrics in English, though she could speak French passably well.

  Eartha Kitt finished singing and Roy walked on. Any number divisible by three, he remembered, was in certain ancient cultures considered to have mystical or occult significance, but he could not recall why; the number eight placed horizontally was the mathematical symbol for infinity, as well as an overhand knot as illustrated in the Merchant Marine handbook.

  The significance of April in Portugal, Roy knew, was that it was the month in which the people in the song had fallen in love. The importance of numbers or colors in one’s cosmology was far more arcane, except, perhaps, to adherents of numerology and whatever students of color symbology might be called. (Colorologists?) Roy had an urge to stop the next person he encountered on the street and ask him or her if he or she could guess what number he was thinking of at that very moment, but he overcame it. Even if the person played along and guessed correctly, Roy knew no meaning could be discerned from it, that nothing profound would be revealed. More significant, Roy thought, was his having been reminded of his mother playing and singing “April in Portugal.” There was no doubt as to its value in Roy’s cosmology.

  He could still remember the photograph of Eartha Kitt on the cover of her album That Bad Eartha, bare-shouldered in a black cocktail dress, slinky, cat-like, a vixen amused by the charade. The signi
ficance of her come-on-and-try expression had not been lost on him. Roy wondered what Eartha Kitt’s favorite number was.

  Einstein’s Son

  There was a man in Roy’s neighborhood who claimed he was the son of Albert Einstein. Roy was ten years old when he saw a picture of Einstein on the cover of Look magazine. Einstein’s long white hair starfished from his head, he had a droopy ringmaster’s mustache and a slightly befuddled expression on his face that made Roy think of him as a dotty but benevolent scientist who would not seem uncomfortable throwing elbows in the headslapping, eyethumbing company of the Three Stooges.

  The man who told people that he was Einstein’s son was in his midfifties, tall, already bald and immaculately shorn of facial hair. He wore gold wire-rim glasses and always dressed in a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie under a shabby beige trenchcoat frayed at the cuffs, and battered brown wing tip shoes. His name, he said, was Baron Otto von Loswerden, so everyone in the neighborhood referred to him as the Baron. According to Steve the Newsie, who owned the newspaper and magazine stand on the northwest corner of Dupré and Minnetonka, and from whom von Loswerden bought a Chicago Tribune at eight o’clock every morning while stopping to chat for a few minutes, the Baron was an illegitimate child of Albert Einstein and his then girlfriend, Mileva, whom the young physicist later married and who bore him another child. The Baron, however, who was not yet Otto, nor, obviously, a baron, was given away to avoid scandal and financial responsibility. It was not until he was thirty years old, the Baron confided to Steve, and at the deathbed of his adoptive father, that he learned of his true parentage.

  “Do you believe him?” Roy asked Steve the Newsie.

  Roy’s friend, Billy Murphy, who worked on Sunday mornings for Steve piecing together newspaper sections, was the only person Roy knew who had ever been in the newsie’s apartment. Billy told Roy that the floor of the apartment was carpeted half a foot thick with old newspapers, and the walls were decorated with photographs of very young girls cut out of the papers.