The Roy Stories

by Barry Gifford

  Mr. Boyle told Jimmy that the girl’s mother had supposedly run off with a knife thrower from a travelling carnival when Fátima was eight or nine years old. According to a pal of Mr. Boyle’s who had been in a bowling league with Oleg Bodanski, the diner owner’s wife was killed in an accident a few months later when the knife thrower’s car went off an icy road and plunged into Lake Superior near Grand Marais, Minnesota. Both she and her paramour drowned before rescuers could pry open the doors of his automobile and extricate the bodies.

  Roy knew that his chances of getting to know Fátima Bodanski better were slim, but he held out hope for the future, when their age difference would not matter so much. One rainy Saturday afternoon in August, Roy found himself near the Odessa Grill and decided to go in and get something to drink. He had been playing in a baseball game that ended prematurely due to the weather; he was dirty and wet and glad to get inside for a little while before walking the rest of the way to his house.

  Oleg Bodanski was sitting on a high stool behind the counter reading a newspaper; there were no customers in the diner. Roy sat down on the stool nearest the front door. Oleg Bodanski was forty-two years old, slightly built, a couple of inches under six feet tall. He wore wire-rim glasses, was clean-shaven, and his bushy brown hair was graying at the temples. Fátima, Roy decided, must favor her mother as far as her looks were concerned. He noticed that the paper Bodanski was reading was the Christian Science Monitor.

  “Hi,” said Roy.

  Oleg Bodanski looked up and said, “Do you know what you want?”

  Before Roy could answer, Bodanski added, “Does anyone?”

  The diner owner put down the Monitor and slid off his stool.

  “I’ll have a chocolate phosphate,” Roy said.

  Bodanski made the drink and set it down on the counter in front of Roy.

  “Tell me if there’s enough syrup in it,” said Bodanski. “I’ll put in more if you want.”

  Roy took a sip through the straw in the glass.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  Bodanski nodded. “Sometimes people want it sweeter. Me, I don’t like so much chocolate that it overpowers the seltzer.”

  Oleg Bodanski stood behind the counter and watched Roy sip the phosphate.

  “You look like an intelligent boy,” he said.

  “How can you tell?” asked Roy.

  “What would you think if I told you that I’ve had encounters with visitors from other planets?” said Bodanski. “And that you might have, too, even if you don’t realize it.”

  “What happened to you?” said Roy.

  Oleg Bodanski hovered over Roy from the other side of the counter, leaning more than a little in the boy’s direction.

  “They nabbed me once while I was driving my old Ford, the ’51, and twice while I was asleep. Each time they kept me for exactly two hours.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Lost the time. I was drivin’ home from Racine one night, my cousin Boris lives there, and arrived two hours later than I should have. Lost two hours of sleep twice. Checked the Westclox next to my bed. Know what they wanted?”

  Roy shook his head.

  “My sperm. They milked me, then put me back where I’d been.”

  “How did the car keep driving without you at the wheel?”

  “Don’t really know,” said Bodanski. “Didn’t feel a thing other than a weakness in my groin. They got methods our scientists haven’t thought up yet.”

  “Where were they from? I mean, what planet?”

  Bodanski did not answer. He had a faraway look on his face, so Roy didn’t ask him again. He did not want to know how Oleg Bodanski knew the aliens had deprived him of his sperm. Just then the door to the diner opened and in walked Fátima Bodanski.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Can I borrow five bucks?”

  Her father emerged from his reverie and said, “What for?”

  “Francine and Donna are waitin’ outside in Donna’s mother’s car. They want me to go to the movies with ’em. I told ’em sure since it’s so hot and rainin’ and I don’t have anything to do until eight when Ronnie’s comin’ to get me.”

  Oleg Bodanski turned around and punched open the cash register.

  “Hi,” Fátima said to Roy, and gave him a big smile.

  She had perfectly straight, small teeth, and she was chewing Juicy Fruit gum. Roy could smell it.

  Her father handed her a fin and said, “Have a good time, baby.”

  “Oh, Daddy, you’re the tops!” said Fátima, as she took the money, then blew him a kiss and left the diner.

  Roy looked out the window and saw Fátima climb into the back seat of a tan 1955 Dodge Lancer and close the door as the car pulled away from the curb.

  “Ronnie,” Bodanski said. “You know who Ronnie is?”

  “No,” said Roy.

  “Neither do I.”

  Oleg Bodanski stood still. For a moment Roy thought the man might have gone back into his reverie.

  “My daughter,” said Bodanski. “I named her Fátima Portugal Bodanski because of the flying saucer sightings near Fátima, Portugal, in 1917. Called the ‘miracle of Fátima.’ Thousands of people saw ’em. One of the aliens, a tiny, woman-like creature, appeared, walked right out of a spaceship while it was still in the air and said she’d descended from Heaven, and declared that the only way further suffering on Earth could be averted was if people stopped offending God. Catholic Church verified the events. You can look it up.”

  Roy put a quarter on the counter.

  “I enjoyed the chocolate phosphate,” he said, and got down off the stool.

  “Come again,” said Oleg Bodanski. “You’re a bright boy.”

  Walking home in the rain, Roy thought about Fátima Bodanski standing next to him, cracking her Juicy Fruit. He could still smell it. It was as close an encounter with her as he was likely to have, but if he did run into her, Roy decided, he would say hello and remind her that they’d sort of met in the Odessa Grill. He could tell her that her father had told him what he’d named her after and ask her what she thought about it. And he wouldn’t say anything to Fátima about how spacemen had drained her father’s sperm. Roy figured she didn’t know anything about that.

  Blue People

  Roy’s fascination with maps began before he was eight years old. His curiosity about what people in distant lands looked like, what languages they spoke, and their customs, accelerated the more he read about countries whose names and geography he discovered in the Great World Atlas.

  In school one day, a substitute teacher named Arvid Scranton mentioned that just after the war he had been stationed in North Africa, and had traveled extensively in that region. In Morocco, he told Roy’s class, he had been in a place called Goulimime, at the edge of the Sahara desert, where he had encountered the Blue People, a nomadic tribe called the Tuareg, who wore blue robes dyed with natural indigo that was absorbed by their skin and turned it blue. Many people believed, said Arvid Scranton, that the dye had become so pervasive over time that it entered the Tuaregs’ bloodstream to the degree that their babies were born with a decidedly blue tinge to their otherwise black skin.

  Roy was eleven when he learned of the existence of the Tuareg. A year later, he was playing in a basketball tournament at Our Fathers Out of Egypt when he saw a blue person. The center on the team from Kings of Assyria had skin that was exactly as Arvid Scranton had described: deep, dark blue that glowed under and despite the dull yellow gymnasium lights. The kid on Kings of Assyria was taller than anyone else on either team and extremely thin, so thin that he was easily pushed around and brutalized by shorter but stockier opponents. Occasionally, he lofted a shot high over a defender’s head that was impossible to block, but more often than not it clanged harmlessly off the rim of the basket, or banged too hard against the backboard. The kid had no tou
ch, as well as not enough strength, and his team was easily defeated. After the game, Roy was tempted to ask him if he was related to the Tuareg of the Sahara, but he was afraid the kid would be offended, so he did not.

  Later, at Meschina’s Restaurant, Roy and Jimmy Boyle were sitting at the counter eating club sandwiches and drinking Dad’s root beers, when Roy told Jimmy about the Blue People, and how he figured the kid on Kings of Assyria must be related to them.

  “You ever seen anyone else with skin dark blue like that?” Roy said.

  Jimmy’s mouth was too full to speak, so he just shook his head.

  Lorraine, a waitress who had worked at Meschina’s for forever, stopped in front of the boys and said, “My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.”

  “What’s that?” asked Jimmy. “You ain’t black, and it’s freezin’ outside.”

  “Job, 30:30,” said Lorraine. “I heard you talkin’. Kid must be descended from those desert people, the ones move around all the time.”

  “Nomads,” said Roy.

  “Roy says they turn blue because of the dye on their robes,” said Jimmy.

  “Very clever,” Lorraine said. “I wish I could just wear a red babushka over my hair to make it stay red, then I wouldn’t have to pay the beauty parlor no more.”

  As Roy and Jimmy walked home from Meschina’s, the sky got dark fast and snow began to fall. A hard wind made them duck their heads.

  “The weather in Chicago’ll turn you blue, too,” said Jimmy, “you get stuck out in it too long.”

  “Good thing that blue kid couldn’t shoot,” Roy said.

  “He could,” said Jimmy, “nobody’d stop him.”

  “He’s too skinny,” said Roy, “but if he keeps playin’, he’ll learn how to score and beef up as he gets older. Probably be a pro, he grows more.”

  “Good thing for him his family moved here,” said Jimmy. “I bet they don’t play basketball much in the Sahara desert.”

  Call of the Wild

  When Roy was eighteen years old, he learned that an old friend of his from the neighborhood, Eddie Derwood, had attempted suicide by placing a plastic bag over his head in an effort to asphyxiate himself. Eddie, Roy was told, had been committed to the Illiniwek Psychiatric Institute in Chicago, where he was undergoing treatment for severe depression. Roy was away at school when he received this news in a letter from a mutual friend, and when he returned to Chicago for the Christmas holidays, he went to see Eddie.

  Roy did not know why Eddie Derwood, with whom he had been friends all through high school and had played with on many baseball, football, and basketball teams, had tried to kill himself. This was a mystery to Roy and Eddie’s other friends, too, since Eddie had always seemed like a happy guy. Derwood was smart, handsome and well-liked by almost everyone in the neighborhood. He had gone off to college in Wisconsin, and two months into his freshman year his roommate found him unconscious on the floor of their dormitory room with the plastic bag over his head secured by rubber bands around his neck.

  The Illiniwek Psychiatric Institute was a large, ugly brown brick building. Snow was falling lightly but insistently as Roy entered, registered at the reception desk as a visitor and was told to wait until an attendant arrived to escort him to the fourth floor, where Eddie Derwood was housed. Two other people were in the waiting room: an old man with a week’s growth of white whiskers on his face, wearing a green hat with earflaps and a dark blue overcoat with a gray, fake fur collar; and a woman who looked to be in her late thirties or early forties, perhaps the old man’s daughter, or even granddaughter, whose bleached blonde hair with black roots showing was partially covered by a bright red scarf, and whose thin, red cloth coat, Roy thought, could hardly succeed in keeping her warm. She was very skinny and had a long, sharply pointed nose that she kept wiping with a black handkerchief.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked the old man.

  “Louise,” he said, “you always ask the most terrible questions.”

  A large, powerful-looking man with carrot-colored hair brushed to a point on the crown of his head, wearing a dirty white smock, entered the waiting room and called Roy’s name. Roy walked over to the man and stood in front of him.

  “You here to see Derwood?” the man asked.

  “I am,” said Roy.

  The man turned around and walked away. Roy followed him. They took an elevator to the fourth floor and got off. The attendant walked swiftly ahead without looking back and stopped in front of a door with the number 404 on it. He turned and faced Roy.

  “You don’t give him nothin’,” said the attendant. “You don’t take nothin’ he try to give you. Don’t touch him, even if he touch you. Don’t say nothin’ could disturb him. You do, I put you out real fast. You understand?”

  Roy nodded.

  The man opened the door and entered the room, followed by Roy. Eddie Derwood was standing in front of the only window. There were bars on it.

  “Person to see you,” said the attendant.

  “Hi, Eddie,” said Roy.

  Eddie did not say anything. His eyes were foggy and the corners of his mouth had white crust on them.

  “It’s me, Roy. Don’t you recognize me?”

  Eddie stared at Roy for thirty seconds before saying, “You’re just a bird, a big, dark bird without wings.”

  “I’m your friend, Eddie. I’m Roy.”

  Eddie stood still. His eyes did not move and did not blink.

  “Is he on drugs?” Roy asked the attendant. “His eyes are messed up.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said.

  “That’s why I asked you,” said Roy. “He’s like a zombie.”

  The attendant went over to Eddie, bent down and put his face close to Eddie’s. The attendant’s body completely blocked Roy’s view of his friend.

  “You need somethin’, Mr. Derwood?” the attendant said.

  Eddie squawked like a crow.

  “Caw! Caw!” he said.

  The attendant straightened up and turned back to Roy.

  “Visit’s over,” he said.

  The attendant took Roy firmly by his right arm and led him out of the room, closing the door behind him. In the elevator going down were two men besides Roy and the attendant. Both of them wore thick-lensed eyeglasses and had wild, curly hair like Larry Fine of the Three Stooges.

  “Don’t ever say that again,” one of them said to the other.

  “Say what?” said his companion.

  “That you run this place.”

  “But I do.”

  “No, you don’t. I do.”

  The elevator stopped at the ground floor, the door opened and Roy got off. The attendant and the two curly-haired passengers stayed on. The door closed and the elevator started going back up.

  The old man and the younger woman were no longer in the waiting room. Roy walked out of the building. It was snowing harder and the air seemed colder, but Roy decided to walk for a while before taking a bus back to his neighborhood.

  The only time Roy could remember Eddie Derwood losing his temper was once when they were fifteen at Eddie’s house and his mother told Eddie that he was not as smart as his older brother, Burton. Eddie sprang from his chair like a leopard catapulting out of a tree onto an unsuspecting passing animal and grabbed his mother with both hands around her throat, pinning her against a wall. Eddie held her there for several seconds before letting go. He did not say a word and neither did his mother. Eddie sat down and his mother left the room. Roy did not go back to Eddie’s house again for a long time after that.

  Arabian Nights

  Roy, the Viper, and Jimmy Boyle were sitting on top of the back of a bench at Heart-of-Jesus Park drinking grape Nehis after playing a football game. Their team had lost that afternoon to Our Father of Fearful Consequences, a school from Kankakee, and th
ey were not happy about it.

  “We shouldn’ta run the ball so much,” said Jimmy. “We needed to throw it more.”

  “Three yards and a cloud of dust,” said Roy. “Except we could only get two.”

  “It’s what worked in ancient times,” said the Viper, “when Coach was playin’, but not no more.”

  It was a little windy and cold, but the boys didn’t want to go home yet. Stan Yemen, the park janitor, came out of the fieldhouse carrying a long-handled rake and walked over to them. Yemen was in his midthirties and had been a janitor at Heart-of-Jesus ever since he had dropped out of high school at sixteen. He always wore a dark brown windbreaker zipped up to his neck, dark brown trousers, white socks and dark brown clodhopper shoes. He never wore a hat, even in winter and even though he had a crewcut. Yemen’s most outstanding feature was his missing left ear. His family was from Arabia and Yemen said they were desert people. He had lived over there until he was nine.

  The Viper had once gotten up the nerve to ask him how come he didn’t have a left ear, and Yemen said, “When I was seven, an elder of our tribe tried to circumcise me, but I dodged his dagger and he sliced off my ear instead.”

  The boys didn’t know whether or not to believe him, but all Yemen had where his ear should have been was a small lump of congealed flesh that looked like somebody had thrown a mudball at his head and part of it had stuck there.

  “Hey, fellas,” Stan Yemen said.

  “Hi, Stan,” said Jimmy Boyle. “You see our game?”

  “No, I had to work. Lots of leaves to clean out of the gutters and rake up this time of year. I heard you tried to run on ’em and got beat.”

  “It was ugly,” said Roy.

  “Tell the truth, Stan,” said the Viper. “You really lost your ear when they tried to circumcise you?”