The Cuban Club

by Barry Gifford

  “Here’s the dime I was gonna use,” Johnny said, digging it out of his right front pants pocket and handing it to him. “Talk to Mr. Dobler. You know his wife’s not right in the head.”

  “What do you think’ll happen to Harley?” asked Tommy.

  “Buddy started the fight,” said Roy.

  “True,” said Tommy, “but Harley torched him. Walk over to the drugstore with me. After I make the call we can get somethin’ to eat.”

  As they passed the sign Blood of Our Savior Park, Roy thought about why he did not feel bad or upset about Buddy Dobler being hurt; he wondered if he should, even though he didn’t like him. When Tommy went into the drugstore, Johnny and Roy waited outside.

  “I guess Buddy deserved a beatin’,” Johnny said. “None of us jumped in to help him until Marty tried to put out the fire on his head. Maybe Buddy is a jerk, like you said.”

  “When Jesus was carrying the cross,” said Roy, “nobody jumped in to help him, either.”

  THE ITALIAN HAT

  Roy’s mother’s friend June DeLisa was the kind of woman who would fly from Chicago to Venice, Italy, just to buy a hat. She did this in September of 1956, and when she returned Roy’s mother asked her what was so special about the hat.

  “It’s handmade, of course, and designed by a man named Tito Verdi, who claims to be related to the famous composer. He’s very old, in his late eighties or early nineties. The materials he uses are woven by crones in the hills of Puglia. Anyway, how do you like it?”

  The hat perched perilously on the right side of June DeLisa’s head. Other than an extraordinarily brilliant yellow-green feather attached to the radically raked left side of the tri-corner, Kitty thought the hat unremarkable; even the crumpled blue material that formed the construction looked like it could have been purchased for a dollar ninety-eight at Woolworth’s.

  “I like the feather. I’ve never seen such a radiant yellow before.”

  “Plucked from a rare species in the Belgian Congo.”

  “Dare I ask what you paid for it?”

  “You daren’t.”

  June DeLisa’s husband had made a fortune on the commodities market. Kitty and June had met before either of them had gotten married, when they both modelled fur coats at the Merchandise Mart.

  “How was Venice?”

  “It’s always lovely at this time of year, unless there’s a hot spell. You’ve never been, have you? Crowded, but still like being in a dream, especially just after dawn.”

  “Did Lloyd go with you?”

  “Oh, no. He has his polo to occupy him. And Mrs. Gringold.”

  “I thought he’d ended it with her.”

  Roy came into the livingroom, where his mother and June DeLisa were seated on the sofa.

  “Goodness, Roy,” June said, “you’re growing up so fast. How old are you now?”

  “I’ll be eight next month.”

  “Mrs. DeLisa has just returned from Italy. She’s telling me about her trip.”

  “Do you like my new hat, Roy? I had it made for me over there.”

  “It looks like the one Robin Hood wears, only his is brown, not blue.”

  “What is it, sweetheart? I thought you were going to play outside with the Murphy boys.”

  “It’s raining, so I’m going to build a model in my room.”

  “Let me know if you need anything. If June and I decide to go out, I’ll tell you.”

  Roy left the room. He did not dislike June DeLisa, but seeing her made him think that she was going to go home and jump out a window from her apartment on the 30th floor of the building she lived in on Lake Shore Drive.

  “So he’s seeing Anastasia again.”

  “He never really stopped. I’ll probably have to kill her, or get a divorce. If I decide to have her killed, would you mind if I asked Rudy about getting someone to do it? You and he are still on good terms, aren’t you?”

  “Stop it, June. Don’t even talk like that. Of course Rudy and I are on good terms. We’re very close, and he sees Roy once or twice a week. Rudy loves his son more than anything.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’s too sick now to do anything about it.”

  “As if she hasn’t already done enough.”

  “Since I divorced Rudy, she’s actually begun to be more respectful of him.”

  “Rose respects what he can do, or have done, you mean.”

  “He provides very well for Roy.”

  “And for you, too, I hope.”

  “I can’t complain.”

  “He still loves you, Kitty. He always will. You’re luckier for that. Lloyd never cared for me the way Rudy does you.”

  “He doesn’t love Anastasia, I don’t think. Does she love Lloyd?”

  “If Maurice Gringold didn’t own two banks and half the state of Ohio, I doubt she would stay married to him.”

  “Take off that hat, June. Just looking at it makes me nervous.”

  June removed her hat and put it down on the coffee table.

  “I feel useless, Kitty. If Lloyd and I had children I don’t suppose I would.”

  Rain was coming down hard. The two women sat without talking and listened to it bang against the windows and the roof.

  “I asked old Signore Verdi how he had come to be a hat maker and he told me it was because he was a lousy violinist. Isn’t that funny?”

  Kitty looked at June’s hat.

  “Did Verdi tell you that feather came from the Belgian Congo?”

  THE SENEGALESE TWIST

  Roy had walked for several blocks before he realized he was lost. His friend Danny Luna had moved with his family to a new neighborhood and Roy was looking for their house. Danny had told him it was on the edge of Chinatown on Rhinelander Avenue, an apartment above the Far East Laundromat, a few blocks south of Superior. Danny’s father worked as a drover in the Stockyards pens and his mother, a seamstress, was from Tell City, Indiana, a Swiss community. Danny said she had run away from Tell City when she was sixteen and come to Chicago, where she met his father, an illegal immigrant from Juarez, Mexico.

  Since Danny was born, the Luna family had moved twelve times, one for each year of his life. He and Roy had played together on baseball teams for the past two years and Roy wanted to get him to play second base on the Tecumseh Cubs, for whom Roy was going to be the shortstop. The Lunas did not have a telephone, otherwise Roy would have called him.

  Roy found himself on the corner of Menominee and Van Buren streets. He had no idea where Rhinelander Avenue was, so he decided to ask someone. He went into a beauty shop called Miss Racy’s Powder Room, figuring there had to be a woman in there who could give him directions. Roy was surprised to see that all of the women in Miss Racy’s Powder Room, both the customers and hair stylists, were black.

  A slender girl with skin the color of maple syrup came up to Roy and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Don’t tell me you’re lookin’ for your mama, baby, ’cause she ain’t been here.”

  All of the women laughed, and the girl, who looked to Roy to be about eighteen, poked Roy on his chest with the long, purple painted nails on the two middle fingers of her right hand. She had red hair that stood up at least eight inches from her head, brown eyes with blue shadow on the lids, and freckles all over her face.

  “What’s your problem, sweetness?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Rhinelander Avenue. A friend of mine lives there over the Far East Laundromat.”

  “What your friend can do for you I can’t?”

  Most of the women were no longer paying attention to Roy and the girl, but the few who were giggled and shouted, “Rock that cradle, Red!”, “His mama do find her way here, she gonna close us down!” and “Quit scarin’ that boy, Charleen. He ain’t big enough to do you right no how!”

  “How old are you, sugar?” the girl asked Roy.

  “Twelve and a half.”

  “That’s what my milkman delivers every Tuesday and Friday,” s
aid a woman with a scalpful of green paste, which made one woman howl and say, “Uh huh.”

  Roy looked around the walls, which were decorated with posters from the Regal Theater and Aragon Ballroom featuring photographs of Ruth Brown, Chuck Jackson, Sarah Vaughan and Nat “King” Cole. Also tacked up were signs advertising hair straightening, skin lightening, manicures and pedicures. But the one that intrigued Roy read, “We Do Senegalese Twist”.

  “You got good, wavy hair,” the girl said. “Be longer than most boys.”

  “I don’t like getting haircuts,” said Roy.

  She ran her painted fingers through his hair from back to front, then front to back.

  “I could do somethin’ nice with it.”

  “What’s the Senegalese Twist? It sounds like a kind of dance.”

  “Show it to him, Charleen,” crowed Green Paste, “out back!”

  “It’s okay,” said Roy, “I’ll find Rhinelander. Thanks, anyway.”

  He opened the door to the street and went out. Before he could walk away, one of Charleen’s hands was on his left shoulder. Roy turned around and looked at her.

  “We call it Chopsticks Street,” she said. “Go up a block on Van Buren, then right until you run into it. What’s your name?”

  “Roy.”

  “Mine is Charleen. C-h-a-r-l-e-e-n. You tall for your age, Roy. Almost tall as me, and I’m seventeen. I be in Miss Racy’s every day but Sunday and Monday you want to take me up on my offer.”

  “I live pretty far away from here.”

  Charleen’s freckles glittered in the sunlight. A butterfly landed on top of her high-piled hair.

  “There’s a butterfly on your head.”

  “Those ladies, they get raunchy, don’t they? Miss Racy say the reason I’m attracted to very young boys is because my stepdaddy messed with me. He’s gone now. Marleen, my sister, she cut off his privates while he was sleepin’ and he bled to death. He was messin’ with her, too. The butterfly still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “He like me. You like me you know me better.”

  She tilted her head and the butterfly flitted off.

  “Thanks, Charleen. I’ve got to go.”

  Later, Roy asked Danny Luna how he liked living in the neighborhood, and Danny said, “I don’t know anybody yet except for the Chinese kids downstairs.”

  “I know where your mother can get her hair done,” said Roy.

  KIDNAPPED

  Foster Wildroot disappeared on a Tuesday morning in early November of 1956. He was last seen on his way to school, walking on Minnetonka Street at a quarter to nine as he did every weekday morning. Foster’s mother told police on Wednesday that before he left the house her son, who was ten years old and in the fourth grade, had eaten a piece of rye toast with strawberry jam on it, drunk half a cup of black coffee and taken with him an apple to eat at recess. The weather was unusually warm for November, so Foster wore only a blue peacoat, which he did not button up, and did not take either a hat or gloves. He was small for his age, said Frieda Wildroot, and very shy. Foster did not have many friends, almost none, really, she told them; he kept mostly to himself. He had brown hair, cut short, and wore black-framed glasses to correct his severe near-sightedness. Foster stuttered badly, she said, an impediment that hampered his ability to orally answer questions put to him in the classroom. As a result, Foster disliked school. She did not, however, believe he would run away from home, as that was his sanctuary, where he spent his time alone in his room building model airplanes.

  Foster’s father, Fred Wildroot, did not live in Chicago with his wife and son. At present, Frieda told the authorities, her husband was working in a coal mine in West Virginia, from where he mailed her a support check every month. The police asked if she thought it was possible that Foster would try to go to West Virginia to see his father, and she said that Fred Wildroot had neither seen nor communicated with his son since the boy was six years old.

  “Fred moves around a lot,” said Frieda. “Foster wouldn’t even know where to go to find him.”

  Foster Wildroot was in Roy’s class but since he did not talk much or participate in sports on the playground, which was Roy’s main interest, they did not really know each other. None of Roy’s friends knew much about Wildroot; like Roy, they saw him only in school, where he sat by choice in the last seat of the back row in the classroom. Foster had been absent from school for a week or more before Roy noticed he was not there. Even after he did, Roy figured the kid was sick or that his family had moved away. Many people left Chicago during the 1950s, most of them relocating to the West Coast, primarily to Los Angeles.

  “Wildroot lives on your block, doesn’t he?” Roy asked Billy Katz. “What do you think happened to him?”

  “My mother thinks he was kidnapped by a pervert,” said Katz. “She says Chicago’s full of perverts. Wildroot’s probably locked in a basement where the perv feeds him steaks and ice cream to keep him happy after he does shit to him.”

  “I just hope they don’t find his body dumped in the forest preserves with his head cut off, like those sisters,” Roy said. “They were our age, too.”

  “He stayed inside his house all the time,” said Billy. “I hardly seen him. He didn’t play with any of the other kids on the block, neither. My mother says his mother works part-time ironing sheets and stuff at the Disciples of Festus House for the Pitiful on Washtenaw, but I don’t know how she knows.”

  “What about his father?”

  “Never around. Maybe he don’t have one.”

  Foster Wildroot was never seen again, at least not in Roy’s neighborhood. Billy Katz said Mrs. Wildroot still lived in the same house, though, and one day, about six months after Foster went missing, Mr. Wildroot showed up.

  “My mother seen him,” said Billy. “Tall, skinny guy, walked with a cane.”

  “How’d your mother know it was Foster’s father?”

  “He went to every house on the block and handed a card to whoever answered the door, or else he put one in the mailbox if nobody was home, then he went away. My mother said he didn’t talk to anyone.”

  “What does it say on the cards?”

  “If anyone knows what happened to my son, Foster Wildroot, please write to Mr. Fred Wildroot at a post office box in Montana or Utah, someplace like that.”

  A year later, Roy and Billy Katz were playing catch with a football in the alley behind Billy’s house when Billy pointed to a woman dumping the contents of a large, cardboard box into a garbage can behind a garage a few houses away.

  “That’s Mrs. Wildroot,” he told Roy.

  After the woman went back into her house, Billy said, “Let’s go see what she put in there.”

  The garbage can was full of model airplanes, most of them missing wings or with broken propellers.

  “See any you want to take?” asked Billy.

  THE DOLPHINS

  Roy’s Uncle Buck built a house on Utila, one of the Bay Islands of Honduras. It was an octagonal structure with eight doors on a spit of land accessible only by boat when the tide was in. Buck had transported a generator, refrigerator and other appliances on the ship Islander Trader from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Utila, and when he returned on the same boat two and a half months later, Roy met him at the dock.

  “I had to go to Teguci for a few days to renew my residency visa and take care of some other business,” Buck told him, “and I was walking down a street with my friend Goodnight Morgan, who used to live on Utila but now lives on Roatan, when a car came by, slowed down, and someone fired three shots at us, then sped away. Neither of us were hit. Drive-bys are common in Tegucigalpa, it’s the murder capital of Latin America, if not the world, but I didn’t know why anyone would want to kill us. Goodnight Morgan used to be High Sheriff of Utila, so I asked him if he thought he could have been targeted by a political rival or a criminal who held a grudge against him. Goodnight said either was possible, but he didn’t think so. ‘Gangsters in Teguci kill for no re
ason other than to intimidate the population,’ he said. ‘That’s why almost nobody is on the streets. To shop they go to malls where there are security guards with automatic weapons to protect them.’ ”

  Roy and his uncle were driving on the bridge over the bay on their way to Tampa when Buck said, “The Islander Trader started leaking fuel when we were a day from port, and the radio was on the fritz. We barely made it to Roatan. The leak had to be patched up before going on to Utila. Then came the shooting in Teguci. Keep in mind, nephew, when a person walks out the door you might never see him or her again.”

  It was a hot and humid day, which was not unusual, but the exceptionally heavy cloud cover, without wind, portended rain, at the very least.

  “This weather reminds me of the time I was in Callao, waiting for a ship to take me to Panama City, where I could get a plane to Miami,” said Buck. “Hundreds of dolphins invaded the harbor, making it impossible for boats to get in or out. They sensed that a giant storm was coming and they were trying to get out of its way. I’ll never forget the sight of those blue-green dolphins crowded together like cattle in the stockyards in Chicago. Dolphins are big, the adults average seven feet long, and they were jabbering to each other, loud, squealing and honking that drowned out everything else.”

  “Did a big storm hit?”

  “About four hours later, the rain started, then huge waves inundated the Peruvian coast, followed by a hailstorm, the kind you get in Kansas or Oklahoma. Nobody there had even seen hail before. All of the ships tied up or at anchor in and near the harbor were damaged, and a number of boats out at sea capsized.”

  “What about the dolphins?”

  “They dove deeper to avoid the hail. But when the bad weather passed, the dolphins were all gone, no sight or sound of them. They were already miles away in the Pacific.”

  “How long were you stuck in Callao?”

  “About a week. I went to Lima for a couple of days, then went back to get my ship.”

  Rain hit the windshield, so Roy slowed the car down. They were almost across the bridge.