Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  My dad drove me home and talked to me but I didn’t hear what he said. I was thinking about the kid who would be running after Shane in about ten more minutes. I kissed my dad good-bye and went in to eat dinner but I stood in the hall and watched him drive off before I did.

  Renoir’s Chemin montant dans

  les hautes herbes

  The path on the hillside is a stripe of light, a three-dimensional effect. There is nothing theoretical about this: everything is where it is supposed to be. Not merely light and shadow and balance and color but the unprepared for, the element that informs as well as verifies the work. As the light in the Salle Caillebotte in the Jeu de Paume changes the painting changes, too—like the sun slowly emerging from behind a cloud, it opens and displays more of itself.

  The people and the setting are from a previous century: women and children descending the path. There is absolutely nothing savage about the picture. Flowers, fruit trees, foot-worn path, wooden fence—nothing to disturb. The element of feeling is calm; difficulty disappears.

  An early summer afternoon in the house in Chicago. I’m ten years old. The sky is very dark. A thunderstorm. I’m sitting on the floor in my room, the cool tiles. The rain comes, at first very hard, then soft. I’m playing a game by myself. Nobody else is around, except, perhaps, my mother, in another part of the house. There is and will be for a while nothing to disturb me. This is my most beloved childhood memory, an absolutely inviolable moment, totally devoid of difficulty. It’s the same feeling I have when I look at Renoir’s Chemin montant dans les hautes herbes. I doubt very seriously if my father would have understood this feeling.

  Forever After

  Riding in a car on a highway late at night was one of Roy’s greatest pleasures. In between towns, on dark, sparsely populated roads, Roy enjoyed imagining the lives of these isolated inhabitants, their looks, clothes, and habits. He also liked listening to the radio when his mother or father did not feel like talking. Roy and one or the other of his parents spent a considerable amount of time traveling, mostly on the road between Chicago, New Orleans and Miami, the three cities in which they alternately resided.

  Roy did not mind this peripatetic existence because it was the only life he knew. When he grew up, Roy thought, he might prefer to remain in one place for more than a couple of months at a time; but for now, being always “on the go,” as his mother phrased it, did not displease him. Roy liked meeting new people at the hotels at which they stayed, hearing stories about these strangers’ lives in Cincinnati or Houston or Indianapolis. Roy often memorized the names of their dogs and horses, the names of the streets on which they lived, even the numbers on their houses. The only numbers of this nature Roy owned were room numbers at the hotels. When someone asked him where he lived, Roy would respond: “The Roosevelt, room 504,” or “The Ambassador, room 309,” or “The Delmonico, room 406.”

  One night when Roy and his father were in southern Georgia, headed for Ocala, Florida, a report came over the car radio about a manhunt being conducted for a thirty-two year old Negro male named Lavern Rope. Lavern Rope, an unemployed catfish farm worker who until recently had been living in Belzoni, Mississippi, had apparently murdered his mother, then kidnapped a nun, whose car he had stolen. Most of the nun’s body was found in the bathtub of a hotel room in Valdosta, not far from where Roy and his father were driving. The nun’s left arm was missing, police said, and was assumed to still be in the possession of Lavern Rope, who was last reported seen leaving Vic and Flo’s Forever After Drive-in, a popular Valdosta hamburger stand, just past midnight in Sister Mary Alice Gogarty’s 1957 red and beige Chrysler Newport convertible.

  Roy immediately went on the lookout for the stolen car, though the stretch of highway they were on was pretty lonely at three o’clock in the morning. Only one car had passed them, going the other way, in the last half hour or so, and Roy had not noticed what model it was.

  “Dad,” said Roy, “why would Lavern Rope keep the nun’s left arm?”

  “Probably thought it would make the body harder to identify,” Roy’s father answered. “Maybe she had a tattoo on it.”

  “I didn’t think nuns had tattoos.”

  “She could have got it before she became a nun.”

  “He’ll probably dump the arm somewhere, Dad, don’t you think?”

  “I guess. Don’t ever get a tattoo, son. There might come a day you won’t want to be recognized. It’s better if you don’t have any identifying marks on your body.”

  By the time they reached Ocala, the sun was coming up. Roy’s father checked them into a hotel and when they got to their room he asked Roy if he wanted to use the bathroom.

  “No, Dad, you can go first.”

  Roy’s father laughed. “What’s the matter, son? Afraid there’ll be a body in the bathtub?”

  “No,” said Roy, “just a left arm.”

  While his father was in the bathroom, Roy thought about Lavern Rope cutting off Sister Mary Alice Gogarty’s arm in a Valdosta hotel room. If he had used a pocket knife, it would have taken a very long time. He had probably brought along a kitchen knife from his mother’s house to do the job, Roy decided.

  When his father came out, Roy asked him, “Do you think the cops will find Lavern Rope?”

  “Sure, they’ll catch him.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “I bet they never find the nun’s arm.”

  “Won’t make much difference, will it? Come on, boy, take your clothes off. We need to sleep.”

  Roy undressed and got into one of the two beds. Before Roy could ask another question, his father was snoring in the other bed. Roy lay there with his eyes open for several minutes; then he realized that he needed to go to the bathroom.

  Suddenly, his father stopped snoring.

  “Son, you still awake?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  Roy’s father sat up in his bed.

  “It just occurred to me that a brand new red and beige Chrysler Newport convertible is a damn unusual automobile for a nun to be driving.”

  The Mason-Dixon Line

  One Sunday I accompanied my dad on an automobile trip up from Chicago to Dixon, Illinois. It was a sunny January morning, and it must have been when I was ten years old because I remember that I wore the black leather motorcycle jacket I’d received that Christmas. I was very fond of that jacket with its multitude of bright silver zippers and two silver stars on each epaulet. I also wore a blue cashmere scarf of my dad’s and an old pair of brown leather gloves he’d given me after my mother gave him a new pair of calfskins for Christmas.

  I liked watching the snowy fields as we sped past them on the narrow, two-lane northern Illinois roads. We passed through a number of little towns, each of them with seemingly identical centers: a Rexall, hardware store, First State Bank of Illinois, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Catholic churches with snowcapped steeples, and a statue of Black Hawk, the heroic Sauk and Fox chief.

  When my dad had asked me if I wanted to take a ride with him that morning I’d said sure, without asking where to or why. My dad never asked twice and he never made any promises about when we’d be back. I liked the uncertainty of those situations, the open-endedness about them. Anything could happen, I figured; it was more fun not knowing what to expect.

  “We’re going to Dixon,” Dad said after we’d been driving for about forty-five minutes. “To see a man named Mason.” I’d recently read a Young Readers biography of Robert E. Lee, so I knew all about the Civil War. “We’re on the Mason-Dixon line,” I said, and laughed, pleased with my little kid’s idea of a joke. “That’s it, boy,” said my dad. “We’re going to get a line on Mason in Dixon.”

  The town of Dixon appeared to be one street long, like in a Western movie: the hardware store, bank, church, and drugstore. I didn’t see a statue. We went into a tiny café next to the bank that was empt
y except for a counterman. Dad told me to sit in one of the booths and told the counterman to give me a hot chocolate and whatever else I wanted.

  “I’ll be back in an hour, son,” said Dad. He gave the counterman a twenty-dollar bill and walked out. When the counterman brought over the hot chocolate he asked if there was anything else he could get for me. “A hamburger,” I said, “and an order of fries.” “You got it,” he said.

  I sipped slowly at the hot chocolate until he brought me the hamburger and fries. The counterman sat on a stool near the booth and looked at me. “That your old man?” he asked. “He’s my dad,” I said, between bites of the hamburger. “Any special reason he’s here?” he asked. I didn’t say anything and the counterman said, “You are from Chi, aren’t ya?” I nodded yes and kept chewing. “You must be here for a reason,” he said. “My dad needs to see someone,” I said. “Thought so,” said the counterman. “Know his name?” I took a big bite of the hamburger before I answered. “No,” I said. The counterman looked at me, then out the window again. After a minute he walked over behind the counter. “Let me know if ya need anything else,” he said.

  While my dad was gone I tried to imagine who this fellow Mason was. I figured he must be some guy hiding out from the Chicago cops, and that his real name probably wasn’t Mason. My dad came back in less than an hour, picked up his change from the counterman, tipped him, and said to me, “Had enough to eat?” I said yes and followed him out to the car.

  “This is an awfully small town,” I said to my dad as we drove away. “Does Mason live here?” “Who?” he asked. Then he said, “Oh yeah, Mason.” Dad didn’t say anything else for a while. He took a cigar out of his overcoat pocket, bit off the tip, rolled down his window, and spit it out before saying, “No, he doesn’t live here. Just visiting.”

  We drove along for a few miles before Dad lit his cigar, leaving the window open. I put the scarf up around my face to keep warm and settled back in the seat. My dad drove and didn’t talk for about a half hour. Around Marengo he said, “Did that counterman back there ask you any questions?” “He asked me if you were my dad and if we were from Chicago,” I said. “What did you tell him?” “I said yes.” “Anything else?” “He asked if you were there for any special reason and I said you were there to see someone.” “Did you tell him who?” Dad asked. “I said I didn’t know his name.”

  Dad nodded and threw his dead cigar out the window, then rolled it up. “You tired?” he asked. “No,” I said. “What do you think,” he said, “would you rather live out here or in the city?” “The city,” I said. “I think it’s more interesting there.” “So do I,” said Dad. “Relax, son, and we’ll be home before you know it.”

  The Wedding

  When my mother married her third husband, I, at the age of eleven, was given the duty, or privilege, of proposing a toast at the banquet following the wedding. My uncle Buck coached me—“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,” I was to begin.

  I kept going over it in my head. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .” until the moment arrived and I found myself standing with a glass in my hand saying, “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking—” I stopped. I couldn’t remember what else my uncle had told me to say, so I said, “I want to propose a toast to my new father”—I paused—“and my old mother.”

  Everybody laughed and applauded. I could hear my uncle’s high-pitched twitter. It wasn’t what I was supposed to have said, that last part. My mother wasn’t old, she was about thirty, and that wasn’t what I’d meant by “old.” I’d meant she was my same mother, that hadn’t changed. No matter how often the father changed the mother did not.

  I was afraid I’d insulted her. Everybody laughing was no insurance against that. I didn’t want this new father, and a few months later, neither did my mother.

  The Pitcher

  One night when I was eleven I was playing baseball in the alley behind my house. I was batting left-handed when I hit a tremendous home run that rolled all the way to the end of the alley and would have gone into the street but an old man turning the corner picked it up. The old man came walking up the alley toward me and my friends, flipping the baseball up in the air and catching it. When he got to where we stood, the old man asked us who’d hit that ball.

  “I did,” I said.

  “It was sure a wallop,” said the old man, and he stood there, grinning. “I used to play ball,” he said, and my friends and I looked at each other. “With the Cardinals, and the Cubs.”

  My friends and I looked at the ground or down the alley where the cars went by on Rosemont Avenue.

  “You don’t believe me,” said the old man. “Well, look here.” And he held out a gold ring in the palm of his hand. “Go on, look at it,” he said. I took it. “Read it,” said the old man.

  “World Series, 1931,” I said.

  “I was with the Cardinals then,” the old guy said, smiling now. “Was a pitcher. These days I’m just an old bird dog, a scout.”

  I looked up at the old man. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Tony Kaufmann,” he said. I gave him his ring back. “You just keep hitting ’em like that, young fella, and you’ll be a big leaguer.” The old man tossed my friend Billy the ball. “So long,” he said, and walked on up to the end of the alley, where he went in the back door of Beebs and Glen’s Tavern.

  “Think he was tellin’ the truth or is he a nut?” one of the kids asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “let’s go ask my grandfather. He’d remember him if he really played.”

  Billy and I ran into my house and found Pops watching TV in his room.

  “Do you remember a guy named Tony Kaufmann?” I asked him. “An old guy in the alley just told us he pitched in the World Series.”

  “He showed us his ring,” said Billy.

  My grandfather raised his eyebrows. “Tony Kaufmann? In the alley? I remember him. Sure, he used to pitch for the Cubs.”

  Billy and I looked at each other.

  “Where’s he now?” asked my grandfather.

  “We saw him go into Beebs and Glen’s,” said Billy.

  “Well,” said Pops, getting out of his chair, “let’s go see what the old-timer has to say.”

  “You mean you’ll take us in the tavern with you?” I asked.

  “Come on,” said Pops, not even bothering to put on his hat, “never knew a pitcher who could hold his liquor.”

  A Place in the Sun

  The final memory I have of my dad is the time we attended a Chicago Bears football game at Wrigley Field about a month before he died. It was in November of 1958, a cold day, cold even for November on the shore of Lake Michigan. I don’t remember what team the Bears were playing that afternoon; mostly I recall the overcast sky, the freezing temperature and visible breath of the players curling out from beneath their helmets like smoke from dragons’ nostrils.

  My dad was in good spirits despite the fact that the colostomy he’d undergone that previous summer had measurably curtailed his physical activities. He ate heartily at the game, the way he always had: two or three hot dogs, coffee, beer, a few shots of Bushmill’s from a flask he kept in an overcoat pocket. He shook hands with a number of men on our way to our seats and again on our way out of the stadium, talking briefly with each of them, laughing and patting them on the back or arm.

  Later, however, on our way home, he had to stop the car and get out to vomit on the side of the road. After he’d finished it took him several minutes to compose himself, leaning back against the door until he felt well enough to climb back in behind the wheel. “Don’t worry, son,” he said to me. “Just a bad stomach, that’s all.”

  During the summer, after my dad got out of the hospital, we’d gone to Florida, where we stayed for a few weeks in a house on Key Biscayne. I had a good time there, swimming in the pool in the yard and watching the boats navigat
e the narrow canal that ran behind the fence at the rear of the property. I liked waving to and being waved at by the skippers as they guided their sleek white powerboats carefully through the inlet. One afternoon, though, I went into my dad’s bedroom to ask him something and I saw him in the bathroom holding the rubber pouch by the hole in his side through which he was forced to evacuate his bowels. He grimaced as he performed the necessary machinations and told me to wait for him outside. He closed the bathroom door and I went back to the pool.

  I sat in a beach chair looking out across the inland waterway in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean. I didn’t like seeing my dad look so uncomfortable, but I knew there was nothing I could do for him. I tried to remember his stomach the way it was before, before there was a red hole in the side of it, but I couldn’t. I could only picture him as he stood in the bathroom moments before with the pain showing in his face.

  When he came out he was dressed and smiling. “What do you think, son?” he said. “Should I buy this house? Do you like it here?”

  I wanted to ask him how he was feeling now, but I didn’t. “Sure, Dad,” I said. “It’s a great place.”

  The Winner

  My mother and I spent Christmas and New Year’s of 1957 in Chicago. By this time, being ten years old and having experienced portions of the northern winter on several occasions, I was prepared for the worst. On our way to Chicago on the long drive from Florida, I excitedly anticipated playing in deep snow and skating on icy ponds. It turned out to be a mild winter, however, very unusual for Chicago in that by Christmas Day there had been no snow.

  “The first snowfall is always around Thanksgiving,” said Pops, my grandfather. “This year, you didn’t need a coat. It’s been the longest Indian summer ever.”