The Cuban Club

by Barry Gifford

  “Dolphins are smart, Roy, they know when and how to escape from the weather and other cetaceans. Human beings are the biggest threat to their existence. I told Goodnight Morgan about the dolphins in Callao, and you know what he said?”

  Roy shook his head.

  “That’s why you never see any dolphins walking down the street in Tegucigalpa.”

  DRAGONLAND

  Roy’s mother was having trouble sleeping. When she mentioned this to her friend Kay, she recommended that Kitty make an appointment to see Dr. Flynn.

  “Is he a sleep expert?” Kitty asked.

  “He has a medical degree in orthopedics,” said Kay, “but he specializes in hypnotherapy now.”

  “I don’t want to be hypnotized. I just need a scrip for sleeping pills until I’m myself again.”

  “Better to see Flynn than take pills. You’ll get strung out on them and have a bigger problem. Dr. Flynn is kind of a genius. He uses hypnotism to correct bodily deformities based on his theory that malformations of the body are caused by psychological conditions.”

  “You mean he cures cripples by hypnosis?”

  “I know it sounds daffy, but apparently he’s had great success.”

  “Where did he go to medical school, in Tibet?”

  “Go see him, Kitty. Try it once, then tell me if you think he’s a quack. And even if he is, if what he does cures your insomnia what difference will it make?”

  The day after Roy’s mother saw Dr. Flynn she called Kay to give her the report.

  “He’s a nice man with good manners. Dyes his hair. We talked for a while, and he asked me if anything in particular had been bothering me lately. I told him I’ve had trouble sleeping periodically since I was a child. Now, since my divorce, I’ve been having difficulty again, and that when I do fall asleep I often have bad dreams.”

  “Did he hypnotize you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “What do you mean ‘suppose’? Did he or didn’t he?”

  “He said he did. He didn’t swing a watch or anything in front of my eyes. He just spoke to me and then I felt a little dizzy. I guess I passed out for a few minutes. Afterwards I felt relaxed. That’s all.”

  “Did you sleep better last night?”

  “Roy had to wake me up this morning to get his breakfast. I’m always up before he is.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Like I didn’t get enough sleep. Not exhausted but vague. I think yesterday tired me out.”

  “What did Flynn say? Are you going to see him again?”

  “I don’t know, Kay. He left it up to me. I had a strange dream last night.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “I was walking alone on a city street in the middle of the night. I had no destination, I was just walking. There were other women like me, walking, because they were crazy and couldn’t stop. I was afraid and some of them laughed at me. One of the women said, ‘Welcome to Dragonland.’ I wanted to go home but I was lost and only these crazy women were there.”

  “Did you ever have this dream before?”

  “It wasn’t only a dream, Kay. I did this for real lots of times. I never told anyone.”

  “Rudy didn’t know?”

  “It happened once when he and I were first together. I told him I was restless and needed to get some fresh air. We were in a hotel room, three o’clock in the morning. I told him not to worry, to go back to sleep, and I went out.”

  “What about Dr. Flynn? Did you tell him?”

  “Maybe, when I was hypnotized.”

  “What about Roy?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you want him to stay with me and Marvin for a couple of days? Until you’re feeling better.”

  “I feel all right. Thanks for offering. Roy’s no trouble.”

  That night Kitty couldn’t sleep. She had an urge to leave the house, to walk, but she was afraid to leave Roy alone. She looked at herself in the bedroom mirror and thought about what Dr. Flynn had told her before she left his office.

  “There’s nothing terribly wrong with you,” he said, “Go back to work.”

  “I used to be a model,” she told him.

  Kitty went into the livingroom and turned on the TV. Ava Gardner was dancing barefoot in the rain. She didn’t look happy, either.

  ROLE MODEL

  On Roy’s fourteenth birthday he came home from school and found his mother sitting alone at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee and reading Holiday magazine.

  “Hi, Ma,” he said. “What are you reading?”

  “An article about Brazil. You know I was there once.”

  “You told me. Who were you there with?”

  “Oh, a boyfriend. It was before I met your father. We spent a week in Rio. The beaches were lovely, the sand was so white, but very crowded, as crowded as Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The Carioca girls were almost naked, brown and slithery and beautiful. I had a wonderful time.”

  “Why haven’t you ever gone back?”

  “Rio’s not the kind of place your father would have liked, and since he died I’ve not had the opportunity.”

  It was a dreary day, drizzly and gray and colder than usual for the time of year. Roy knew his mother preferred warm weather.

  “It’s my birthday today.”

  “I know, Roy. Are you going out with your friends?”

  “Later, maybe. Right now I’m going to work. I just came home to change my clothes.”

  “Your father always dressed well. People used to dress better in the old days.”

  “You mean in the 1940s?”

  “Yes. Before then, too.”

  “Well, I’m going to be boiling hot dogs and frying hamburgers. It wouldn’t be a good idea for me to wear a suit.”

  “No, Roy, of course not. That’s not what I mean. It’s just that people cared more for their appearance when I was young.”

  “This is 1961, Ma, and you’re only thirty-four. You’re still young.”

  Roy was standing next to the table. His mother looked up at him and smiled. She really is still beautiful, he thought. She had long auburn hair, dark brown eyes, perfect teeth and very red lips.

  “I know you miss your father, Roy. It’s a shame he died so young.”

  “He was a strong person,” Roy said. “People liked and respected him, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. He handled things his own way. People trusted him. You know your father never gave me more than twenty-five dollars a week spending money, but I could go into any department store or good restaurant and charge whatever I wanted. I’ll tell you something that happened not long after he and I were married. We were living in the Seneca Hotel, where you were born, and there was another couple in the hotel we were friends with, Ricky and Rosita Danillo. Rosita was a little older than I—she was from Puerto Rico—and Ricky was a few years younger than your dad, who was nineteen years older than me.”

  “What business was Ricky in?”

  “Oh, the rackets, like everybody in Chicago, but he wasn’t in your father’s league. He looked up to Rudy. Anyway, late one afternoon your father came home and I was wearing a new hat, blood red with a veil, and he said it looked good on me. I told him I was just trying it on. He asked me where I’d gotten it and I said it was a gift from Ricky Danillo, that I’d come back to the hotel after having lunch with Peggy Spain and the concierge handed me a hatbox with a note from Ricky.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “I don’t remember exactly, something about how he hoped I’d like it, that when he saw it in a shop window he thought it suited my style. Your dad didn’t say anything but the next day when I went down to the lobby I saw that one of the plate glass windows in the front was boarded up. I asked the concierge what happened and he told me that Rudy had punched Ricky Danillo and knocked him through the window, then told the hotel manager to put the cost of replacing it on his bill. That night I said to your dad, ‘You knocked Ricky through a plate glass
window just because he bought me a hat?’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘No, Kitty, I did it because he didn’t ask me first.’ That’s the kind of guy your father was. I didn’t say another word about it.”

  “What happened to the hat?”

  “I never wore it. I gave it away to someone.”

  Roy did not tell anyone at work that it was his birthday and afterwards he was too tired to go anywhere. When he got home there was a chocolate cake on the kitchen table with fifteen yellow candles stuck in it. His mother wasn’t home. He picked up a book of matches that was on the stove and lit the candles, then took off his wet jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. Roy thought about making a wish but he couldn’t think of one. He blew out the candles anyway.

  MONA

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Two guys held up the Black Hawk Savings and Loan. A teller set off the alarm and the cops showed up just as the robbers were comin’ out. They shot the first one out the door, he’s dead, but the other one ran across the street into the Uptown. He’s holed up in there.”

  “What’s playin’?”

  “Tell Him I’m Dangerous. You seen it?”

  “No. How long’s he been in the theater?”

  “Twenty minutes, half hour. The cops got the exits covered. They don’t want a shootout inside, innocent people get hurt.”

  Roy had been on his way home from Minnetonka Park when he saw a crowd on the sidewalk on Broadway. He spotted Bobby Dorp right away because Dorp was six foot six and towered over everybody. Bobby was a junior in high school, two years ahead of Roy, who knew him from pick-up basketball games.

  “I was goin’ into Lingenberg’s to get a cake for my mother when I heard the shots,” said Dorp. “I come over here and saw a body lyin’ in front of the bank with blood pourin’ out of it. He musta been drilled twenty times. The other robber was already in the theater. He might be wounded.”

  “It’s a matinee, so there probably aren’t too many people in there,” said Roy. “It’ll be dark in less than an hour. I think the cops’ll wait him out.”

  By now the street was clogged with police cars and patrolmen had the theater surrounded.

  Dorp said, “I gotta get my mother’s cake before Lingenberg’s closes. Don’t let the shootin’ start until I get back.”

  Marksmen with high-powered rifles were positioning themselves on the roofs of buildings around the Uptown. The only way the robber could escape, Roy figured, was to pretend he was a patron. To do that, the guy would have to ditch his weapon and the bank money, if he had any. Hiding a bullet wound might be tough, though, depending on where he’d been hit.

  As darkness fell, spotlights were set up on nearby rooftops. No traffic was moving in the immediate vicinity. Bobby Dorp came back carrying a cake box.

  “I got there just in time,” he said, “or they woulda sold this cake, too. Lingenberg’s is sellin’ out the place. Seein’ men die makes people hungry, I guess. I never seen it so crowded.”

  “I wonder if they’re sellin’ popcorn and candy in the Uptown,” said Roy.

  A middleaged woman in front of the boys fainted and fell off the curb. Two men helped her to her feet and led her away. The sun was gone.

  “I can’t stay no longer,” said Dorp. “Gotta get the cake home. Anyway, it’s gettin’ cold. Maybe I’ll come back after dinner.”

  After Bobby Dorp left, Roy moved closer to the front, so that he had an unobstructed view of the theater entrance. Sawhorses had been lined up along the curb. Every cop in sight had his gun drawn.

  Men and women began walking out of the theater with their hands held above their heads. Some of them were crying. Police took each person into custody as soon as they reached the sidewalk. Thirty or forty people came out and were loaded into paddy wagons. The cops kept their guns trained on the entrance.

  “He’s still inside,” a man said.

  “Go in and get him!” yelled another man.

  “There he is!” screamed a woman, pointing at the roof of the theater.

  Everyone looked up. A man was standing near the edge of the roof, directly over the marquee. He was bareheaded and was wearing a brown hunter’s vest over a red and black checkered shirt and dark green trousers. He looked to be about twenty-five or thirty years old.

  “Put your hands on your head!” a policeman ordered through a bullhorn.

  The man did not comply. He just stood there with his hands by his sides.

  “Place your hands over your head or you will be shot!” warned the cop with the horn.

  The man said something but Roy could not make out the words.

  “What did he say?” asked the woman who’d spotted him on the roof.

  The man spoke again and this time Roy heard him say “Mona.”

  “Mona?” the woman said. “Did he say Mona?”

  The riflemen fired, hitting him from sixteen directions. The man fell forward into the well of the marquee. A dozen pigeons fluttered out. All Roy could see now was the theater sign, black letters on a white background: TELL HIM I’M DANGEROUS PLUS CARTOONS.

  Roy elbowed his way out of the crowd and started walking. All that was missing, he thought, was snow falling on the thief’s lifeless body. Lingenberg’s Bakery was still open. Roy went inside.

  “Do you have any doughnuts left?” he asked a pink-faced, blonde woman behind the counter.

  “Yust one,” she said. “Chocolate.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “I hear many noises together. Something happen?”

  “The police shot and killed a man.”

  Roy gave the woman a dime. She took it and handed him the doughnut wrapped in wax paper.

  “What reason for?” she asked.

  Roy took a bite, chewed and swallowed it.

  “Mona,” he said.

  MUD

  When Leni Haakonen was eight and nine years old she liked playing war or cowboys and Indians with Roy, who was the same age. She was a Swedish girl who lived with her mother in a tenement apartment on the corner of the block, two buildings down from where Roy lived with his mother. Her father had been killed in the war and Roy’s parents were divorced. There was a vacant lot next to the building Leni lived in where she and Roy often played. Leni was as tough as any boy Roy knew, including himself, and she was very pretty. Most of the time she wore her honey-brown hair in two long braids; she had gray-blue eyes and a small red birthmark on her left cheek, and for as long as Roy knew her Leni never wore a dress.

  One afternoon in late August they were pretending to be soldiers, rolling in the dirt and weeds of the vacant lot, when Leni asked Roy to kiss her. She was lying on her back and her face was dusty and smudged.

  “I’m going to be nine tomorrow,” Leni said to Roy, “and I’ve never kissed a boy. I want you to be the first.”

  Roy had kissed girls before but he had not thought even once about kissing Leni. He hesitated and looked at her. She had a fierce expression on her face, the same as when the two of them wrestled.

  “Kiss me, Roy. On the lips.”

  There was mud on her mouth. Roy wiped it off with his right thumb and kissed her. Both of them kept their eyes open.

  “My mother wanted me to only invite girls to my birthday party,” she said. “That’s why you didn’t get an invitation.”

  The kiss had lasted two seconds. Leni rolled away from Roy and stood up. He stood up, too.

  “Which girls did you invite?”

  “None. It’s just going to be me and my mother and her sister, my Aunt Terry, and her daughter, my cousin Lucy. Lucy’s twelve. I don’t like her but my mother says she has to come because of Aunt Terry. I don’t like her, either. I’m getting a new winter coat, a white one with a red collar. I can save a piece of cake and give it to you the day after tomorrow. It’ll be a yellow cake with chocolate frosting.”

  Leni and her mother moved away before she and Roy were ten. Seventeen years later, a few months after
Roy’s first novel was published, he received the following letter in care of his publisher in New York. The name on the return address on the envelope was Mrs. Robert Mitchell.

  Dear Roy, I hope you remember me. We used to play together when we were children and I lived in Chicago. My mother and I moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when I was ten, or almost. Now I live in Detroit with my husband who is a dentist. I work as a receptionist in his office.

  I bought your book and wanted to tell you. I have not read all of it because there are too many parts I do not really understand but I like the photograph of you on the back cover. You look like I thought you would.

  Robert and I do not have children. I don’t want any but he does. My mother lives in Grand Rapids with her sister.

  I probably should not tell you this in writing but I want to. Sometimes I can still feel your thumb on my lips when you wiped off the mud that time. It was on the day before my ninth birthday. I don’t expect you to remember.

  If you ever come to Detroit look me up. On the book it says that you live in Paris, France, so I don’t really think I’ll see you here or ever. You probably get other letters like this.

  Sincerely,

  Leni (Haakonen) Mitchell

  THE PHANTOM FATHER

  Roy’s father was born on August 13, 1910, in the village of Siret, in what following World War II became Romania, close to the border of Ukraine. Soon thereafter, he moved with his family to Vienna, the capital city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They were Austrian citizens. In 1917, the family resided at number five Zirkusgasse in the neighborhood of Leopoldstadt, near the ferris wheel in Luna Park Roy would first glimpse in director Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. Roy’s grandfather’s profession as listed in the Vienna city directory of that year was printer. The Great War ended in December of 1918, at which point the family—father, two sons, one daughter, mother—made their way to Czernowitz, where they remained until April 1921, when they left for Antwerp, Belgium, from which port they took ship on the 14th of that month aboard the S.S. Finland bound for New York. From New York City they continued to Chicago, Illinois, where the family established residence for the remainder of their lives. They were Jews, fortunate to escape Europe before the Nazis perpetrated their murderous campaign to expunge the race from the continent.