The Cuban Club

by Barry Gifford

“You didn’t hear him approaching?”

  “No, the washing machine was filling with water. I’d just put in a second load, and I was putting the wet things from the first load into the dryer, so I couldn’t hear over the noise.”

  “Do you always leave the basement door open when you’re doing laundry?”

  “Yes, to have some fresh air, unless it’s cold and raining or snowing. The ventilation down there isn’t very good, and it was a warm, sunny day.”

  “You were loading up the dryer. Then what happened?”

  “A hand came over my mouth and he wrapped his other arm around my chest. The knife was in his left hand.”

  “Left-handed. Go on.”

  “The man said, ‘Don’t try to scream or I’ll cut your throat.’ Then he dragged me away from the washing machine and dryer into the passageway by the storage area. He forced me to the ground and took his hands away. That’s when he saw that I’m pregnant and cursed.”

  “What did he say exactly?”

  “God damn it. He said it three or four times. I kept saying, ‘Don’t hurt my baby, don’t hurt my baby.’ He took out a piece of rope and cut it with his knife, then turned me onto my left side, facing away from him, and tied my hands behind my back. He told me to shut up and I heard him making sounds.”

  “What kinds of sounds?”

  “I think he was masturbating.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “You mean his masturbating?”

  “Yes.”

  “It couldn’t have been for very long, maybe a minute or two.”

  “You didn’t scream or call for help?”

  “He would have stabbed me or cut my throat if I had, I’m sure of it. When he was finished he walked out of the basement, out the back door. He didn’t run. I didn’t try to look at him, I didn’t want to see his face. I stayed on the ground for several minutes before I got to my feet. It was difficult because my balance isn’t good. I’m in my eighth month.”

  “It sounds like the same guy who attacked the other women. None of them were pregnant.”

  “Did he rape them?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He cut one.”

  “Did she die?”

  “No, she’s recovering.”

  “Nobody could recover from that.”

  Roy’s mother and two men were seated at the kitchen table when he came home from school. Roy stood and looked at the men, both of whom were wearing coats and ties and hats and were clean shaven. One of them wore glasses and the other had a bluish scar on the right side of his chin.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said, “are these guys friends of Dad’s?”

  She hugged him and said to the men, “This is my son, Roy. He’s seven.”

  “Hello, son,” said the man wearing glasses.

  “No, Roy,” said his mother, “they’re detectives. They’re investigating a case, something that happened nearby. They’re asking me if I know anything about it.”

  “Do you?” Roy asked.

  “The boy wasn’t home when it happened?” said the man with the scar.

  “No, he was at school.”

  The detectives stood up.

  “We’ll get back to you about this. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”

  “No, I’m all right. I’ll call my doctor myself.”

  “Thank you for your cooperation, ma’am,” said the man wearing glasses.

  “We’ll find our way out,” said the other detective.

  The men left and Roy sat down in the chair in which the man with the blue scar had been sitting.

  “Mom, are you okay? Why did they ask if you wanted to go to the hospital?”

  “They were being kind because I’m pregnant.”

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  “Not now, sweetheart. I’m going to take a sponge bath and then I’ve got to finish the laundry. You can help me carry the baskets upstairs when it’s dry.”

  “What kind of case are they investigating?”

  Roy’s mother placed her hands flat on the table and pushed herself up.

  “I’ll tell you later,” she said, “How was school today?”

  ANNA LOUISE

  Roy’s cousin Skip’s mother, Anna Louise, was an alcoholic. The first thing she did every morning after she got out of bed was go into the kitchen and put a teaspoon of sugar into a chimney size glass, fill it with gin, stir it up and drink half of it. Then she lit a gold-papered, unfiltered cigarette and took a long drag before finishing off her glass of gin. She was a natural platinum blonde with unblemished ghost-white skin. Anna Louise was Roy’s Uncle Buck’s first wife; after him, she married Karl von Sydow, a Swedish construction magnate. Von Sydow died of a heart attack six years after marrying Anna Louise and left his fortune to her. She and Skip, who was fifteen when von Sydow died, lived north of Chicago on an estate fronted by a high brick wall. A stream ran through thick woods that bordered the other three sides of the property. Anna Louise owned the land the woods and stream were on. She was forty-two and still beautiful when her second husband died. After she’d drunk the glassful of gin, she puffed on her cigarette for a minute or two before returning to the bathroom that adjoined the master bedroom and began running water into the sunken tub. She remained entirely nude during this routine no matter who else was in the house. Roy was thirteen when he first witnessed his aunt’s diurnal performance. Anna Louise had perfect posture, having as a girl and young woman been a dancer and an actress before working briefly as a teacher of calculus and poetry at a private girls’ school. She was twenty-two when she married Roy’s uncle, who, Anna Louise unembarrassedly informed Roy, had not been her first lover, though she had let him believe so.

  “Your uncle was good to me and an ardent paramour,” she said, “until he impregnated me. After that, I seldom saw him. It wasn’t much of a marriage. Von Sydow was consistently hands on, shall I say. I don’t know which was worse. I should have married a Jew.”

  Roy’s aunt delivered this information to him while he and his cousin Skip were seated at the breakfast table eating cereal, the only food Anna Louise kept in the house. She had yet to run her bath.

  Roy saw her infrequently during his teenage years, the last time being when he was seventeen and she was living in a motel in an unfashionable suburb of the city. This was after she had unintentionally set fire to her house, which burned to the ground. Anna Louise had passed out drunk in her bedroom, where firemen found her collapsed on the floor and carried her out just before the roof caved in.

  According to Skip, most of his mother’s money was gone, swindled by von Sydow’s attorney whom she had trusted to manage her financial affairs, and she spent the majority of her waking hours drinking gin out of the bottle from a case on the floor next to her bed positioned so that to extract a new bottle all she had to do was reach down and lift it up to her lips.

  The last Roy heard of Anna Louise was that she had been admitted to an assisted living facility in Indiana, where she had relatives. By that time, however, her mind was gone, as well as what little money she had left, and she died sober and fully dressed sitting in a wheelchair. Skip was overseas in the army at the time and did not come back for the funeral, which was paid for by his father.

  Roy always remembered Anna Louise naked in the morning in her big house standing in the kitchen holding her tall glass of sugared gin and a golden cigarette; but he never understood what she meant when she said she should have married a Jew.

  MULES IN THE WILDERNESS

  Bruno and Lily had moved to a new house since Roy had last seen them, which had been at the funeral of Grandpa Joseph, his dad and Bruno’s father, five years before, when Roy was fourteen. Roy’s uncle and aunt had not made an effort to keep in touch with him since his dad died, two years before the death of Grandpa Joseph. Roy had been living in Europe for the last two years and was visiting his mother in Chicago before continuing on to the West Coast. He decided to stop by Bruno and Lily’s just to say hello and see
their house. He had always liked his aunt Lily, a lively, attractive woman who at one time had been quite friendly with his mother, even after his parents divorced. “Give my best to Lily,” Roy’s mother said to him.

  Bruno was another story, as were Roy’s cousins Daria and Delilah. Daria was a year younger than Roy and Delilah five years younger. Ever since Roy could remember both Daria and her father seemed always to be in a bad mood, and Delilah uncommunicative, keeping very much to herself. Roy’s mother told him that his Uncle Bruno had wanted sons, not daughters, and made his feelings obvious in his behavior toward Daria and Delilah; he remained cold and distant, leaving Lily with the responsibility of raising them. Besides this and catering to her husband, Lily devoted much of her time to work on behalf of Mother Wolfram’s Mission for the Misshapen and other charitable organizations.

  When his uncle answered the front door, he did so by peering through a narrow slit. Not recognizing Roy, he asked who he was. Roy identified himself, which caused Bruno to pause for several seconds before informing him that there were too many locks to undo on the door and instructing him to come around the side of the house where he would be admitted through the servants’ entrance.

  It was Lily who admitted him. She smiled and seemed pleased to see Roy. His aunt had worn heavy pancake makeup ever since he’d known her and dark red, precisely applied lipstick so Roy was not surprised when she air-kissed him on both sides of his face. Lily guided Roy up a winding staircase and through an enormous kitchen into a den that he could see connected to a livingroom. Daria and Delilah, she informed him, were away at boarding school in the East. Bruno was sitting in a high-backed chair and motioned with his right index finger for Roy to sit in an armchair across from him.

  “Is your mother still alive?” Lily asked.

  “She is,” said Roy.

  “Say hello to her for me,” his aunt said, then left the room.

  Roy looked around. There were paintings on the walls of older men in suits, none of whom Roy recognized.

  “What do you want?” asked Bruno.

  Roy’s father’s only brother was a large man, a couple of inches over six feet tall and he weighed in excess of 220 pounds. Bruno wore his pants fastened just below his chest, a blue dress shirt and dark brown tie; he had a bushy mustache and a full head of gray-brown hair that stood up like a stiff brush.

  “I came to say hello to you and Aunt Lily,” said Roy. “I’ve been living abroad for two years.”

  “Do you plan to stay in Chicago now?”

  “No, I’m on my way to California.”

  Bruno was an auctioneer; he handled sales of restaurants, automobile dealerships, private estates and business properties. Roy recalled his mother once commenting that Bruno could for the right price acquire anything anyone wanted. He was Roy’s father’s older brother by four years but he seemed to Roy to belong to an earlier time, a Biblical epoch when kings ruled unchallenged. Bruno scrutinized his nephew as if Roy were a freak in a carnival.

  “I can have the maid make you a sandwich if you’re hungry,” he said.

  Roy shook his head. “Who are the men in these paintings?”

  “Mules in the wilderness, ones who survived.”

  Roy and his uncle sat in silence until Roy stood up.

  “Use the servants’ door,” said Bruno.

  When Roy returned to his mother’s house she asked him if he’d seen Bruno and Lily.

  “Lily says hello. She wasn’t sure you were still alive.”

  “Does she still look the same?”

  “Like a Kabuki actress,” said Roy. “She still wears more makeup than Lon Chaney.”

  “What did Bruno have to say?”

  “He asked me what I wanted.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. We didn’t talk much. He asked me if I was hungry. He said the maid could make me a sandwich.”

  Roy’s mother was sitting on a couch in the livingroom. Roy sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the coffee table.

  “You know that was my father’s favorite chair,” she said.

  “I remember Pops sitting in it in the afternoons reading the Daily News when I came home from school. I sat on the floor next to him and he read to me from the sports section.”

  Rain streaked the windows behind Roy’s mother.

  “Looks like I got home just in time,” he said.

  “When your father died he didn’t leave a will. Intestate, it’s called. He left Bruno in charge of all of his affairs, but he told me you would be taken care of. Bruno said your dad didn’t have anything to leave, that he had to pay off his brother’s debts and there was nothing left for you. My brother knew Bruno was lying and so did I. Your dad kept money in safe deposit boxes in hotels and God knows where else. He didn’t want the government to know what he had and he never trusted the banks. Your Uncle Buck talked to Bruno about it but there was nothing he could do. If your dad left a will my guess is that Bruno burned it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “You were twelve years old, there wasn’t any point. What was done was done.”

  “He acted like I’d come there to kill him.”

  Roy’s mother gave a little laugh. “Bruno was afraid of you, that you knew he’d stolen whatever your father had.”

  “Did Aunt Lily know?”

  “Bruno never told her anything about his business.”

  A year after Roy saw his uncle, Bruno died. In a letter Roy’s mother told him an article in the Chicago Tribune said the police suspected foul play, that Bruno had been poisoned and that Daria and Delilah were being held in protective custody on suspicion of murdering their father. In her next letter Roy’s mother enclosed a newspaper clipping featuring a photograph of Lily that said she had committed suicide by ingesting an overdose of sleeping pills and that she had left a note confessing that she, not her daughters, had poisoned her husband. Her estate, she instructed, should be divided equally between her children and Mother Wolfram’s Mission for the Misshapen.

  In her second letter Roy’s mother wrote, “Your dad told me that when he was four years old and Bruno was eight, Bruno hammered a nail through one of his fingers into a piece of wood on purpose to test himself to see if he could do it and not cry. I asked your dad if Bruno cried and he said yes but that his brother promised him if he told anyone he would nail your father’s fingers to a tree.”

  THE BOY WHOSE MOTHER MAY HAVE MARRIED A LEOPARD

  When he was eight years old Roy had a dream in which his mother, who in real life had already been married three times, came home one day with a leopard and told Roy that the leopard was her new husband. The leopard was very big and he was not tawny but black with even darker spots that could be seen only if a person looked closely at his skin.

  “How could you marry a leopard, Mom?” Roy asked. “I didn’t know that human beings and animals could marry each other.”

  In the dream Roy’s mother did not answer his question. The following morning when he told her his dream she laughed and said, “I may have married a leopard when I was younger, before you were born. I can’t remember, my memory’s not so good about those things.”

  “You’d remember if you married a leopard.”

  “Did I have him on a leash?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Figures.” she said.

  Walking to school Roy told his friend Jimmy Boyle about his dream and Jimmy said, “Nobody would ever pick on a kid if they knew his old man was a leopard.”

  Roy did not like the men his mother married. His real father had died when Roy was three years old, so he had not really known him, but Roy convinced himself that these other husbands were different. Maybe, he thought, the leopard in the dream was how he wanted his real father to have been, powerful and beautiful, someone who would always be there to protect him.

  A few days later Roy’s mother’s friend Kay, who wore a lot of make-up and whose bright red lipstick was alw
ays slightly smeared, said to him, “Kitty told me you had a dream that she’d married a wild beast.”

  “A leopard,” said Roy.

  “It was a symbol,” Kay said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Something that represents something else, like a desire or a feeling you didn’t know you had. I’ve got lots of repressed desires. My doctor says it’s why my skin breaks out.”

  “Don’t confuse him, Kay,” said Roy’s mother.

  Kay was holding a lit cigarette in her right hand; she ran the fingers of her left hand through Roy’s hair.

  “Your father had thick dark hair like yours,” she said.

  Roy saw an old black and white movie on TV in which a black leopard escapes from a zoo and turns into a woman who gets hit by a car and dies but before she does she turns back into a leopard. He told Jimmy Boyle about it and Jimmy asked him if he ever had the dream again about his mother marrying a leopard.

  Roy shook his head. “No, it probably got run over, too.”

  A few months later Roy overheard his mother telling someone on the telephone that Kay had divorced her husband and married one of his mother’s ex-husbands, but that had not worked out so Kay was going to divorce him, too. Not long after this Roy came home and found Kay and his mother sitting in the livingroom drinking highballs, smoking cigarettes and talking.

  “Hello, Roy,” said Kay, “how nice to see you. What are you doing with yourself these days? “

  “Playing baseball and going to school. What are you doing?”

  Kay puffed on her cigarette. Her lipstick was smeared more than usual.

  “Waiting for you to grow up,” she said.

  STUNG

  When Roy’s mother swam into a bevy of jellyfish and got stung by them he was walking along the beach smashing men-of-war with a board. He liked hearing them pop and seeing their blue ink spurt onto the white sand. Roy took care to stand a couple of feet away from the cephalopods, not wanting to step on their invisible poisonous tentacles. He heard his mother’s screams and saw her walking unsteadily out of the ocean. She was crying and two teen-age girls who were sunbathing on the beach got up and ran over to her. Roy dropped the board and ran over, too.