She and Roy had first stopped on the way in from the airport to see Roy’s father, from whom his mother had recently been divorced, at his liquor store, and were now in a taxi on their way to Roy’s grandmother’s house when she told the driver to stop so that she could buy something at a pharmacy.
“Wait here in the cab, Roy,” she said, “it’s warmer. I’ll only be a couple of minutes.”
Roy watched his mother tiptoe gingerly across the frozen sidewalk and enter the drugstore. The taxi was parked on Ojibway Avenue, which Roy recognized was not very far from his grandmother’s neighborhood.
“That your mother?” the driver asked.
“Yes.”
“She’s a real attractive lady. You live in Chicago?”
“Sometimes,” said Roy. “My grandmother lives here. Right now we live in Havana, Cuba, and Key West, Florida.”
“You live in both places?”
“We go back and forth on the ferry. They’re pretty close.”
“Your parents got two houses, huh?”
“They’re divorced. My mom and I live in hotels.”
“You like that, livin’ in hotels?”
“We’ve always lived in hotels, even when my mom and dad were married. I was born in one in Chicago.”
“Where’s your dad live?”
“Here, mostly. Sometimes he’s in Havana or Las Vegas.”
“What business is he in?”
Roy was getting anxious about his mother. The rear window on his side of the cab kept steaming up and Roy kept wiping it off.
“My mother’s been in there a long time,” he said. “I’m going in to find her.”
“Hold on, kid, she’ll be right back. The drugstore’s probably crowded.”
Roy opened the curbside door and said, “Don’t drive away. My mom’ll pay you.”
He got out and went into the drugstore. His mother was standing in front of the cash counter. Three or four customers in line were behind her.
“You dumb son of a bitch!” his mother shouted at the man standing behind the counter. “How dare you talk to me like that!”
The clerk was tall and slim and he was wearing wire-rim glasses and a brown sweater.
“I told you,” he said, “we don’t serve Negroes. Please leave the store or I’ll call the police.”
“Go on, lady,” said a man standing in line. “Go someplace else.” |
“Mom, what’s wrong?” Roy said.
The customers and the clerk looked at him.
“This horrible man refuses to wait on me because he thinks I’m a Negro.”
“But you’re not a Negro,” Roy said.
“It doesn’t matter if I am or not. He’s stupid and rude.”
“Is that your son?” the clerk asked.
“He’s white,” said a woman in the line. “He’s got a suntan but he’s a white boy.”
“I’m sorry, lady,” said the clerk, “it’s just that your skin is so dark.”
“Her hair’s red,” said the woman. “She and the boy have been in the sun too much down south somewhere.”
Roy’s mother threw the two bottles of lotion she’d been holding at the clerk. He caught one and the other bounced off his chest and fell on the floor behind the counter.
“Come on, Roy, let’s get out of here,” said his mother.
The taxi was still waiting with the motor running and they got in. The driver put it into gear and pulled away from the curb.
“You get what you needed, lady?” he asked.
“Mom, why didn’t you tell the man that you aren’t a Negro?”
Roy’s mother’s shoulders were shaking and tears were running down her cheeks. He could see her hands trembling as she wiped her face.
“Because it shouldn’t matter, Roy. This is Chicago, Illinois, not Birmingham, Alabama. It’s against the law not to serve Negroes.”
“No it ain’t, lady,” said the driver.
“It should be,” said Roy’s mother.
“How could they think you’re black?” the driver said. “If I’d thought you were a Negro, I wouldn’t have picked you up.”
THE COLONY OF THE SUN
Gina Crow played Hoagy Carmichael records every Saturday morning. Certain records she played more than once. One day Roy heard “Hong Kong Blues” and “Old Man Harlem” twice, and “Memphis in June” three times. Usually, the last song Mrs. Crow played was “Stardust”. All of these versions featured Hoagy Carmichael with solo piano, except for “New Orleans”, on which he sang a duet with a woman. Roy liked to sit on his back porch from about eight to nine o’clock listening to the records during the year Gina Crow and her daughter, Polly, lived next door. Polly was twelve, a year older than Roy. She had cat’s eyes, billiard ball black with yellow flames in the center. Polly looked and acted older than she was, and she had a sharp-edged manner of speaking that made her sound mean or angry. She made Roy feel uncomfortable but excited at the same time.
“Martha Poole told me that Gina Crow’s husband is getting out of prison.”
“I didn’t know she had a husband.”
“Martha said he was busted in Toledo, where they used to live.”
“What for?”
“Embezzlement. She thinks he worked in a bank.”
Roy’s mother and her husband were washing and drying dishes while Roy was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal.
“What’s embezzlement?” he asked.
“It means he stole money,” said his mother.
“Is he coming to live with them?” her husband asked.
“Martha doesn’t know.”
“If he’s on probation, he’ll have to stay in Ohio. For a while, anyway.”
“I’m just glad he didn’t rape or murder anyone. I wouldn’t feel comfortable having a murderer living next door to us.”
Walking home from school the next day, Roy was following behind Polly Crow and her friend Vida when he heard Polly say that her father was coming home soon, and that she had not seen him for a long time.
“Where’s he been?” asked Vida.
“Far away, in the Colony of the Sun.”
“I’ve never heard of that place. Is it in the United States?”
“I think it might be in Canada, or Antarctica.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Working on a big project. My mother told me he was exploring for something that could save the planet.”
“You mean Earth?”
“Yeah. My mother says pretty soon there won’t be enough coal to heat all of our houses.”
“Maybe he was digging oil wells. They use oil to heat houses, too.”
“Could be. She says the men there have to shoot polar bears and seals to have meat.”
After Vida turned off at her street and Polly was by herself, Roy caught up to her and said hello.
“Oh, hi, Roy. Were you walking behind me and Vida?”
“Yes. I heard what you said about your father being in Antarctica.”
“It gets even colder there than here in Chicago. We might move to New Orleans, where it’s a lot warmer. My mother lived there when she was a little girl.”
Polly was taller than Roy. She had long brown hair and very white skin. The wind blew her hair across her face and she kept pushing it back into place.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“I was eight. We were in Toledo then.”
“I like the records your mother plays. Sometimes I sit on our porch and listen to them.”
Polly stopped walking and turned and faced Roy. Her lips were purple and she brushed her hair out of her eyes.
“Two nights ago my mother got drunk on vodka and told me my father isn’t my real father, and that my real father was a boy named Bobby Boles and that he was killed in a bar fight in Houston, Texas. At least that’s what she heard because he abandoned her when she told him she was pregnant. She married my father when I was a year old. She told me she still lo
ved Bobby Boles, even though he was dead, and that every time she looks at me she sees him in my face and it makes her want to cry.”
Roy stared at the jumpy yellow flames in Polly Crow’s eyes. They got bigger, then smaller, then big again.
“She never told you this before?”
Polly shook her head. The wind whipped her hair around.
“Why do you think she wanted you to know now?”
“She made me promise not to tell my father that she told me. She said Bobby Boles had been her sister’s boyfriend, my Aunt Earlene, who’s older and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. I’ve never met her. My mother says when Earlene found out Bobby Boles fucked my mother she called her a whore and swore she’d never speak to her again, and she hasn’t.”
Roy had never heard a girl say fuck before. Polly started to walk, so he did, too. She didn’t say anything else and when they got to her house Polly went in without saying goodbye.
As far as Roy knew, Gina Crow’s husband never showed up, and a few months after Polly had told Roy about her real father she and her mother moved away without telling Roy or his mother and her husband or Martha Poole to where.
“Gina’s an odd woman,” Roy’s mother said one night at the dinner table. “Her daughter, too. She’ll be trouble when she grows up, if she’s not already. Where do you suppose they went?”
“The Colony of the Sun,” said Roy.
“There’s no such place,” said his mother’s husband.
CREEPS
Roy noticed the creepy little guy following him right after he got off the bus. Roy was on his way to the Riviera theater to see a double feature of The Alligator People and First Man Into Space. His friends Buzzy Riordan and Jimmy Boyle were meeting him there. Buzzy had once been thrown out of the Riviera for shouting “Fire!” and ordered never to return, but that had been more than a year before so he figured the manager and the ushers wouldn’t recognize him, especially since he now had a crewcut and was taller. Buzzy told Roy he’d done it so that he could get a better seat; he’d gotten to the theater late and all the seats except for ones in the first row were taken and he hated sitting so close to the screen because he had to look up all the time and the actors’ heads were too small. Lots of kids ran out into the lobby and Buzzy moved back and sat down in the center seat of a middle row. When the kid who had been sitting there came back after learning it was a false alarm told Buzzy to move Buzzy told him to get lost. The kid called an usher and a girl who’d been sitting in the front row near Buzzy and was now walking back to her seat pointed at him and said, “That’s the creep who yelled fire!”
Buzzy and Jimmy Boyle were in the same fifth grade class at Delvis Erland grammar school, which most of the kids called Devil’s Island. The grades went from kindergarten through eighth so if a student spent the entire time there he or she could say that they’d done nine years of hard labor at Devil’s Island. The school had been built in 1902 and resembled an asylum or prison out of Victorian England. When Roy saw the movie of Jane Eyre on TV he thought the similarity between Lowood Institute and Devil’s Island was unmistakable.
The creep who was following Roy was very short, no more than five feet tall, with splotchy bleached blonde hair, a frog-faced kisser and a pudgy build. Roy guessed his age at about forty. The man trailed Roy from the bus stop toward the theater, keeping a few feet behind him. Roy hurried but did not run, hoping that Buzzy and Jimmy would be in front of the Riv waiting for him.
Roy had to wait across the street from the theater for the light to change. He saw his friends standing under the marquee sharing a smoke. Before Roy stepped off the curb the creep was standing next to him.
“Hello, sonny,” he said, “are you hungry? I’d like to buy you a hamburger.”
Just then the light changed to green and Roy ran over to Buzzy and Jimmy.
“Hey Roy,” said Buzzy, “we thought maybe you weren’t comin’. The Alligator People’s gonna start.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, “Buzzy was just sayin’ how if we couldn’t get good seats right away he’d have to yell ‘Fire!’ again.
“Uh uh, I was gonna shout ‘Rat!’”
When the blonde babe in The Alligator People who’s wandering lost in a spooky southern swamp sees that her husband has turned partly into a gator, she screams, reminding Roy of the creep with bleached hair who had followed him on the street. The skin on the creep’s face was scaly looking, like an alligator’s, and his hair was almost as long as the actress’s. Roy hoped the guy wouldn’t be waiting for him outside the theater when he got out. Buzzy and Jimmy would be with him, though, so he figured the creep wouldn’t try anything. The boys would stay for both movies unless Buzzy pulled some stunt that would get the three of them tossed before First Man Into Space was over. The show wouldn’t let out until dark. Roy was sure the creep would have found another boy to follow around by then.
ACHILLES AND THE BEAUTIFUL LAND
Roy enjoyed listening to the old guy who fixed zippers tell stories. The man would come through the back door into the kitchen of Roy’s house and sit down on the rickety little wooden chair with the left rear leg that was a quarter of an inch shorter than its other three. Roy’s mother kept the crooked chair because it had belonged to her grandmother and when his mother was a little girl she would sit on it. A daffodil had been painted in yellow on the inside back of the chair but it had faded badly over the years and Roy knew the vague shape was once a daffodil only because his mother told him so. Roy asked her why one leg was shorter than the others and she said she didn’t really know but that her grandmother had owned a brown and white mutt named Blackie who liked to chew on the chair’s legs; teeth marks, presumably Blackie’s, decorated all four of them.
The man who fixed zippers called himself Achilles. He was eighty-eight years old, he said, when he first appeared at the back door and asked Roy’s mother if she had any zippers that needed repairing. He spoke English but with a strange accent punctuated by a cloudy cough that sometimes made it difficult for Roy to understand him. Roy was five when he met Achilles, who remained a regular visitor for more than a year. Even when there were no zippers on Roy’s mother’s dresses or jackets to fix Achilles would come in and sit on the crooked chair by the door and talk to her and Roy, often telling stories about his childhood in a place he called the beautiful land. The beautiful land, said Achilles, was in another country, much smaller than America, a half-step from the Orient, where he had been born. Roy asked him what the name of the country was but Achilles said he didn’t know any more; the country had been invaded by soldiers from many other countries over the years and each time the name had been changed. The old man preferred to recall it only as the beautiful land, describing the forests and rivers and hills and villages where a boy such as he had been was welcomed into any hut or house to eat or sleep.
“Why did you leave there?” Roy asked him.
“When an army wearing helmets sporting blue feathers arrived from the East everyone in every village was forced to abandon their homes and belongings and march together for many days and nights to a train station. I was thirteen years old then and I had never seen a train, so I was curious, and even though I did not want to leave the beautiful land, I did not really mind going. I had heard people describe trains and when I finally saw one I was thrilled that I was going to ride on it. The train was puffing white smoke and hissing like a big long dragon.”
“Where did it take you?”
“Far away from the beautiful land to a place I have forgotten.”
“Did your parents bring you to Chicago?”
“My parents were made to travel on a different train. One day I did not see them and ever since there has been another day.”
“What kinds of animals were there in the beautiful land?”
“Deer, tigers and birds, and fish, of course, in the rivers and lakes.”
“Didn’t the tigers eat the deer?”
“Yes, Roy, and hunters killed and ate both of them, a
s well as the fish.”
“Did the tigers ever eat the people who lived in the villages?”
“A tiger once spoke to me. I was walking in the woods, looking for mushrooms, when a magnificent orange and black and white beast appeared in my path.”
“How old were you?”
“No more than ten. I was a small boy, only a bit bigger than you are now.”
“You’re still small, Achilles. For a grown man, I mean.”
“Being small has its advantages. I assumed the tiger was going to eat me but he just stared with his yellow eyes and said, ‘Come back when you are larger and will make a better meal.’ Then he disappeared into the trees.”
Roy told his mother that a tiger had spoken to Achilles and she said, “That was in a time when people and animals were still polite to one another.”
“Achilles said the tiger wouldn’t eat him because he was too small.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said.
Roy did not see Achilles for a while so he asked his mother if she had.
“No, Achilles has gone back to the beautiful land. He told me to tell you that he looks forward to seeing you there in about a hundred years.”
“Can you show me on a map where the beautiful land is?”
“Achilles said, ‘Tell Roy that when the time comes he’ll know how to get there. I’ll be waiting for him.’”
“A hundred years is a long time to wait,” said Roy.
“Maybe not,” said his mother, “not if you’re in the beautiful land. Achilles won’t ever leave there again.”
MEN IN THE KITCHEN
“So you were already in the basement when this man attacked you.”
“Yes, I was doing the laundry.”
The Cuban Club Page 4
