The Cuban Club

by Barry Gifford

  “I don’t know, Dad. I like when we’re driving and we’re not anywhere yet.”

  “So do I, son. Maybe, now that you’re older, we’re beginning to think alike.”

  THE HISTORY AND PROOF OF THE SPOTS ON THE SUN

  Roy accompanied his friend Frank to see a foreign movie Frank wanted to see at a little theater near The Loop.

  “What language is it in?” Roy asked him.

  “French. It’ll have the translation in English on the bottom of the screen, but the words are only on for a few seconds so most of the time I can’t finish reading it.”

  “I know. My mother likes to see foreign movies. I used to go with her when I was younger.”

  Both of the boys were thirteen years old. They had been close friends since the age of nine. Frank lived with his mother and two older brothers in a tenement on the same block as Roy and his mother. Frank’s mother worked selling vacuum cleaners door to door. She slept in a bed that folded down from a wall in their livingroom, and the three boys shared a room with two beds in it. Roy and his mother lived in a larger apartment that she had inherited from one of her grandfathers. She worked as a receptionist in a hospital. Both Roy and Frank’s fathers were dead, Frank’s from a heart attack when Frank was seven, and Roy’s from cancer when Roy was ten. Roy was an only child, his mother had been married and divorced twice; Frank’s mother remained a widow.

  Once Roy had heard her say to Frank and his brothers, “Men are like spots on the sun. Who knows what they are or how they got there? A woman can’t even be sure they’ll still be there the next day.”

  “But Ma,” Frank’s oldest brother, Ronnie, who was sixteen, said, “we’ll all be men soon.”

  “I suppose you’ll take care of me when I’m old, won’t you?” she asked.

  “Of course we will,” answered Arnie, the middle brother.

  “Proof! I don’t have any proof!” their mother shouted, then put on a coat, picked up her purse and left the apartment.

  The theater was only half full. Roy and Frank were the youngest people there. The movie’s title was Cela ne fait rien (It Makes No Difference). The actors did not do anything much except talk and smoke cigarettes, and at the very end a woman took off her clothes, walked into the ocean and disappeared.

  When they were back outside, Roy asked Frank, “Why did you want to see that movie?”

  “My brother Ronnie’s girlfriend, Rhonda, said her cousin, Lisa, who’s studying to be an actress, told her it was smart and sexy.”

  “The woman who drowned herself kept her back to the camera,” Roy said, “so we didn’t even get to see her tits. In most of the foreign movies my mother took me to the women always showed their tits.”

  “Yeah, that was disappointing,” said Frank, “and the translation went by so fast I couldn’t get it all.”

  “There was too much talking,” Roy said, “but the part where the boy found a gun under his mother’s pillow was interesting.”

  “I wouldn’t have put it back,” Frank said. “I thought he should have shot her boyfriend when the guy hit her.”

  “After the guy walked out and she was lying on the floor, did you catch what she said to her son?”

  “Yes,” said Frank, “the boy asked why he’d hit her and she said, ‘Because he loves me.’ I would’ve gone into her bedroom, gotten the gun and run after the guy and plugged him. All she did was put a cigarette in her mouth and tell the boy to get a match and light it.”

  It was already dark and beginning to snow when Roy and Frank came out of the movie theater, but they walked slowly anyway. The top of the head of the statue in front of Our Lady of Insufferable Insolence was white. As Roy and Frank passed the church Roy remembered his grandmother Rose telling him that Saint Pantera had been born in Africa but the archdiocese would not allow her face and hands to be painted black.

  “Do you think the kid was better off after his mother committed suicide?” Roy asked.

  “I don’t know. We never got to see his father, who lived in a different country. Switzerland, someone said. Maybe the kid went to live there with him.”

  “One thing about European movies,” said Roy, “there’s always more to think about afterwards than with American movies.”

  “Probably because they’ve got more history there,” Frank said. “That’s why more stuff happens in our movies. Americans don’t like to think so much.”

  WAR IS MERELY ANOTHER KIND OF WRITING AND LANGUAGE

  Walking into the A&P to buy a quart of milk, Roy spotted a tall, thin guy wearing an oversized hooded sweatshirt with the hood up and floppy pants watching a bunch of little kids playing in an empty lot. The guy had his back toward him but even though Roy could not see his face, Roy thought there was something peculiar about the way he was standing there, slightly slumped over, bent, not moving. The kids were very young, four, five and six years old, running and jumping around in the dirt and weeds. Roy was nine. He knew a few of the kids, one of whom was his friend Jimmy Boyle’s younger brother, Paulie, who was six and a half.

  Roy stopped and watched the guy frozen at the edge of the lot. It was a boiling hot day in July. The guy shouldn’t be wearing a big sweatshirt with the hood up over his head, Roy thought. If he made a move toward the kids, Roy figured he could brain him with a rock. The empty lot was full of rocks and leftover half-bricks from when an addition to the Rogers house next door was built. Roy picked up a broken broom handle from the gutter in front of where he was standing. It had a sharp point on it.

  The guy watched the kids for about two minutes more before he began shuffling away in the opposite direction from where Roy was headed. The kids probably had not even noticed him. When the guy turned the corner and was out of sight, Roy tossed the broom stick back into the gutter, then walked to the store.

  When Roy came back carrying the milk, the kids were no longer in the empty lot. He walked to the corner the hooded guy had turned and Roy saw him about a quarter of the way down the block sitting at the edge of the sidewalk with his feet in the gutter. Roy still could not see his face. Nobody else was around. It was dinner time so the kids had gone to their houses. Roy stood looking at the curved figure on the sidewalk. He thought about going back for the broken broom handle, taking it and poking the guy and telling him to get up and keep moving. Just after he had this thought, the guy toppled forward and his entire body collapsed into the gutter.

  A woman came out of a house next to where the guy was lying. She had a small dog on a leash, a black, brown and white mutt. The dog strained at the leash, trying to sniff the body, but the woman jerked him away. She walked the dog toward Roy.

  “I saw that guy a little while ago watching some little kids playing in a vacant lot around the corner,” Roy told her. “I thought he might be a child molester.”

  “It’s Arthur Ray, Grace Lonergan’s boy,” said the woman. “He’s not right in his head. I’ll knock on her door and tell her to come and get him. He was hurt in Korea.”

  Roy knew there had been a war in Korea, which was a country near Japan and China, but he was not really sure where those countries were, only that they were very far from Chicago. Arthur Ray Lonergan probably had not known where or just how far away Korea was either until he went there.

  THE END OF THE STORY

  The dead man lying in the alley behind the Anderson house was identified by the police as James “Tornado” Thompson, a lone wolf stick-up man from Gary, Indiana. After robbing the currency exchange on Ojibway Boulevard in Chicago, he had gone out the front door holding a gun in one hand and was confronted on the sidewalk by two beat cops who were shooting the breeze before one of them went off duty. A clerk from the currency exchange appeared in the doorway and shouted, “Stop that man! He just robbed us!” Thompson pivoted and shot him. The cops pulled their guns but the thief dashed next door into the Green Harp Tavern and ran through the bar out the back door. One of the cops followed him; the other called for back up and for an ambulance to attend the wou
nded clerk, who was lying on the sidewalk.

  Tornado Thompson ran down the alley. Roy and Jimmy Boyle and two of the McLaughlin brothers were playing ball when they saw Thompson speeding toward them holding a gun, followed by a cop.

  “Holy shit!” yelled Jimmy Boyle. “Get down!”

  The cop shouted, “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  Thompson did not stop but stumbled over a crack in the uneven pavement and fell down, still gripping the gun. He twisted around and fired once at the cop, who stopped, dropped to one knee, aimed, and shot Tornado Thompson in the head.

  “Stay down, boys!” said the cop.

  He crept forward in a crouch, keeping his revolver trained on the robber. When he got to the body he determined the man was dead, then took the gun out of Thompson’s hand and replaced his revolver in its holster.

  Jimmy Boyle got up and rushed over to the body.

  “Wow,” he said, “you plugged him right in the forehead.”

  Roy and Johnny and Billy McLaughlin stood up and walked over. The cop stood up, too. A patrol car entered the alley from the Hammond Street end.

  “Move away, boys,” the cop said.

  The car stopped and two cops got out. Another police car entered from the same direction and pulled up behind the first car. Two cops got out of it, too. They surrounded the body and the cop who’d shot Thompson told them what happened. A few neighbors, including Mr. Anderson, came out of the gangways of their houses. Three more police cars approached from the Ojibway Boulevard end of the alley. They stopped and six more cops joined the others.

  “There ain’t been so many people in the alley since Otto Polsky’s garage burned down,” said Johnny.

  “He was refinishing a rowboat he’d built,” Roy said, “and the shellac caught fire.”

  A few minutes later, an ambulance, its siren off, drove in off Hammond Street, stopped, and two men in white coats got out. One of them removed a stretcher from the rear of the ambulance, then they both walked over. After exchanging a few words with one of the cops, they lifted Thompson’s body onto the stretcher, carried it to the ambulance, slid it in, and backed the ambulance out of the alley.

  “What happened?” Mr. Anderson asked the boys.

  “A guy come runnin’ down the alley,” said Jimmy, “with a cop chasin’ him. The guy fired at the cop, the cop fired back and killed him.”

  “Hit him in the forehead,” said Billy.

  “Who was the guy?”

  “I heard one of the cops say his name was Tornado Thompson, from Gary,” Roy said. “He held up the currency exchange next to The Green Harp.”

  “He was a black guy,” said Billy. “Why would he come all the way from Gary, Indiana, to Chicago to pull a hold up?”

  The neighbors went back to their houses and all of the police cars left. Two cops remained in the alley, the cop who’d shot Tornado Thompson and the beat cop who’d stayed on Ojibway Boulevard.

  “The detectives are at the currency exchange,” said the beat cop.

  “How’s the clerk?”

  “Dead.”

  “You fellas all right?” asked the cop who’d done the shooting.

  The boys all nodded.

  “Come on, Dom,” said the other cop. “We got time to stop in the tavern, have a shot and a beer.”

  “Why was he called Tornado?” asked Roy.

  “He was a halfback at the University of Indiana, eight, nine years ago,” said Dom. “I saw him run back a kick-off ninety-four yards against Northwestern. It’s how he got his nickname. I wish I hadn’t had to shoot him.”

  The two cops walked up the alley. They boys watched them go through the back door of The Green Harp.

  “I think I’d like to be a cop,” said Billy.

  The next afternoon, Roy’s grandfather read to him from an article in the Chicago Daily News about the incident. The basic facts were there along with the additional information that a four year old Negro boy was found alone in a 1952 Plymouth parked a block away from the currency exchange. The boy was Tornado Thompson’s son, Amos, who had been told by his father to wait in the car until he came back. A woman walking by had seen Amos Thompson sitting in the back seat of the Plymouth, crying. When she asked him what was wrong, the boy told her his father had been gone for a long time, that he didn’t know where he was. The woman told a cop about the child in the car and he took Amos to the precinct station, where he informed the sergeant in charge that his mother and both of his grandmothers were dead and that he and his father had been living in their car because they didn’t have any money. Amos was given over to The Simon the Cyrenian Refuge for Colored Children.

  That’s awful, Pops,” said Roy.

  “Yes, Roy, it is. And for Amos, it’s not the end of the story.”

  INNOCENT OF THE BLOOD

  From the first time he met him, Roy disliked Buddy Dobler. Dobler had an identical twin named Marty, so kids called them Buddy and Marty Double. It was easy to tell them apart because Buddy was taller and heavier and was more assertive than his brother. Marty was quiet and good-natured, whereas Buddy was abrasive and mean-spirited. The twins attended a different grammar school than Roy, but they lived not too far away from Roy’s neighborhood, and hung out with his friends Johnny Murphy and Tommy Cunningham, whose families were members of the same church as the Doblers.

  Buddy and Marty were in the eighth grade and Roy was in the seventh, as were Johnny and Tommy.

  “Buddy beat up a grown man by himself,” Johnny Murphy told Roy. “Tommy saw him do it.”

  Johnny and Roy were walking on Ojibway Avenue going to meet Tommy and the Doblers at Blood of Our Savior Park. It was the first day of December but no snow had fallen yet in Chicago. The temperature was just above freezing and wind was gusting hard off the lake. Both boys were wearing leather jackets, earmuffs and gloves.

  “Who’d he beat up?”

  “A wino on Clark Street was bummin’ for change. Tommy said Double clobbered the guy with a garbage can lid.”

  “Was the guy big?”

  “Tommy didn’t say. He was just a regular-sized wino.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Who? Buddy Dobler?”

  “Yeah. I think he’s a jerk. He likes to push people around.”

  “He do somethin’ to you?”

  “I don’t hardly know him. His brother’s okay, though.”

  “Their mother was in a mental hospital.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard my parents talkin’ about it. My dad said Mrs. Dobler cut her wrists and her throat and almost died.”

  “When was this?”

  “She got out of the bin two or three months ago. Maybe Buddy’s angry about his mother so he takes it out on other people.”

  At Blood of Our Savior the Dobler twins were kneeling on the ground next to the basketball court shooting craps with Tommy Cunningham and another kid Roy didn’t recognize.

  “Who’s that?” Roy asked Johnny. “The guy with the right side of his head shaved.”

  “Harley Fox. He’s fourteen or fifteen. Remember him? He got sent to St. Charles after he set his five year old cousin on fire. They kept him in a year. He goes to a special school now.”

  Buddy Dobler was holding the dice. Coins and a few dollar bills were on the ground. Buddy kissed the dice, said, “Come on, eight,” and threw them.

  One die rolled off the concrete into the dirt. It turned up three. The other die showed four.

  “You lose,” said Harley Fox.

  “It don’t count,” said Buddy, and scooped up both dice. “One of ’em fell off.”

  “The hell it don’t,” said Harley. He picked up the money. “Pass the dice.”

  Buddy Dobler chucked the dice hard at Fox’s face and jumped on him. Both Tommy and Marty Dobler stood up quickly, got out of the way, and watched Buddy and Harley wrestle, as did Roy and Johnny Murphy.

  Buddy got to his feet, grabbed hold of Harley’s left leg and dragged him around in t
he dirt. Fox was on his back and Roy could see that on the shaved side of his head were several stitches. Fox was trying to twist away but he couldn’t until Buddy tripped backwards over the low curb bordering a footpath. Harley Fox sprang to his feet and kicked Buddy in the head. He was wearing motorcycle boots and Dobler stayed down. Fox kicked him a few more times and then stomped down as hard as he could with the heel of his left boot on Buddy’s face.

  Harley was shorter than Buddy but he outweighed him by twenty pounds. Dobler wasn’t moving or saying anything. Blood ran out of his nose and the sides of his mouth and his eyes were closed. Fox took a book of matches out of the right pocket of his bomber jacket, struck one, lit the matchbook, bent down and set fire to Buddy’s hair. Marty took off his coat and tried to smother the flames but Harley stopped him, wrenched the coat out of Marty’s hands and tossed it aside.

  “The old lady nurses at St. Charles are tougher than your brother,” Harley Fox said to him.

  Fox turned and walked away. The back of his head and jacket were covered with mud. Marty picked up his coat and went to cover his brother’s hair, but the fire was already out. Buddy’s forehead was singed and the front of his hair had been burned off. He still was not moving.

  “We gotta call an ambulance,” said Tommy.

  Johnny Murphy picked a dime out of the dirt and said, “There’s a pay phone in the drugstore next to the park. I’ll go call.”

  Marty Dobler was sitting on the ground, staring at Buddy. Tommy came over and stood by Roy.

  “I guess Fox learned how to fight like that in the reformatory,” he said.

  “Setting someone on fire is his own idea,” said Roy.

  Johnny Murphy came back and said, “I told the drugstore owner what happened, so he called.”

  When the emergency medical crew lifted Buddy onto a stretcher, he groaned a little, but he did not move or open his eyes. Marty went along with him in the ambulance.

  “I should go tell Buddy’s parents so they can meet him at the hospital,” said Tommy.