Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  After that Pinna hung out on the corner of Diversey and Blackhawk in the afternoons and worked as a night janitor at a downtown office building. Roy and his friends would often stop and talk to him after they got out of school. Pinna had always been nice to them; Roy never understood why so many adults considered Louie Pinna to be a rotten apple. In the 1950s, the concept of learning disabilities was not widely discussed, so a kid like Pinna was considered dumb and labelled a loser, earmarked for a bleak future as a bum or a criminal.

  By the time Roy was in high school, Pinna had disappeared from the neighborhood. Roy asked around about him but nobody he talked to seemed to know where Pinna had gone. Then one day when Roy was fifteen Pinna’s face appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. Under a photograph of the now twenty-three-year-old Louie Pinna, who had grown a fruit peddler mustache, were the words: no bail for suspect in killings. The article accompanying the photo said that Pinna worked at a meat processing plant on the West Side of the city and was accused of feeding bodies of murder victims through a grinder, after which the remains were mixed with food products and packaged as pork sausage. Pinna had not actually been charged with committing any murders, only with disposing of corpses provided, investigators theorized, by The Outfit, Chicago’s organized crime syndicate.

  Alberto Pinna, Louie’s father, a retired plumber, was quoted in the newspaper as saying that his son had “a slow brain,” and that, “if Louie done such a thing, he was used by those type people who do bad things wrong.” Louie’s mother, Maria Cecilia, was quoted as following her husband’s statement with the remark, “And there ain’t no shortage of them in Chicago.”

  “You believe this?” Roy asked the Viper.

  “Pinna goes to prison,” the Viper said, “at least he won’t have to worry about taking care of himself no more.”

  “Do you think he did it? Ground bodies up for the Mob?”

  “What makes you think he wouldn’t?”

  Roy and the Viper were on a bus passing the lake, which was frozen over. Roy remembered seeing Louie Pinna with Jump Garcia and Terry the Whip, both of whom had done time in the reformatory at St. Charles, going into Rizzo and Phil’s, a bar on Ravenswood Avenue, a couple of years before. The cuffs of Pinna’s trousers came down only to the tops of his ankles and he was wearing white socks with badly scuffed brown shoes. Rizzo and Phil’s, Roy had heard, was supposedly a hangout for Mob guys.

  “Pinna never picked on younger kids,” Roy said. “He wasn’t a bully.”

  “He did the thing,” said the Viper, “ain’t no character witnesses from grammar school gonna do him no good.”

  “Can’t see what good it’d do to put Pinna away. He didn’t harm a living person.”

  That night, Roy’s mother’s husband, her third, a jazz drummer who used the name Sid “Spanky” Wade—his real name was Czeslaw Wanchovsky—almost drowned in the bathtub. He had been smoking marijuana, fallen asleep and gone under. Spanky woke up just in time to regurgitate the water he’d inhaled through his nostrils. Roy’s mother heard him splashing and coughing, went into the bathroom and tried to pull Spanky out of the tub, but he was too heavy for her to lift by herself.

  “Roy!” she yelled. “Come help me!”

  Roy and his mother managed to drag Spanky over the side and onto the floor, where he lay puking and gagging. Roy saw the remains of the reefer floating in the tub. Spanky was short and stout. Lying there on the bathroom floor, to Roy he resembled a big red hog, the kind of animal Louie Pinna had shoved into an industrial sausage maker. Roy began to laugh. He tried to stop but he could not. His mother shouted at him. Roy looked at her. She kept shouting. Suddenly, he could no longer hear or see anything.

  Detente at the Flying Horse

  Roy had a job changing tires and pumping gas two days a week after school at the Flying Horse service station on the corner of Peterson and Western. This was during the winter when he was sixteen. The three other weekday afternoons and also on Saturdays he worked at the Red Hot Ranch, a hot dog and hamburger joint. Roy had taken the gas station job in addition to his long-standing employment at the Ranch because his mother had had her hours reduced as a receptionist at Winnemac Hospital. His sister had just begun grammar school and they needed the money. Roy knew that his mother was considering getting married again—for what would be the fourth time—as a way to support them, a move he wanted desperately to avert or, at the least, delay. None of his mother’s marriages had been successful, as even she would admit, other than two of them having produced Roy and his little sister. They were her treasures, she assured them; their existence had made her otherwise unfortunate forays into matrimony worthwhile.

  Domingo and Damaso Parlanchín, two Puerto Rican brothers, owned the Flying Horse. They were good mechanics, originally from San Juan, who had worked for other people for fifteen years and saved their money so that they could buy their own station. They were short, chubby, good-humored men in their forties, constantly chattering to each other in rapid Spanish. The Parlanchín brothers paid Roy a dollar an hour and fifty cents for each tire he changed, half of what it cost the customer. Damaso could patch a flat faster than Roy could get it off the car and back on again, and do it without missing a beat in the running conversation with his brother. Domingo was the better mechanic of the two, the more analytically adept. Damaso was superior at handling the customers, able to convince them they needed an oil change or an upgrade of their tires.

  It was no fun changing tires in January in Chicago. The temperature often fell well below zero degrees Fahrenheit and icy winds off the lake scorched Roy’s perpetually scraped knuckles and cut fingers. Prying loose frozen lug nuts was Roy’s greatest difficulty until Domingo showed him how to use an acetylene torch to heat the bolts before attempting to turn them with a tire iron. “Cuidado con la lanzallamas,” Domingo told Roy.

  One snowy afternoon about a quarter to four, just before dark, a black and white Buick Century ka-bumped into the station on its rims and stopped. All four tires were flat. Roy could see that they were studded with nails. Two burly men in dark blue overcoats and Homburg hats sat in the front seat. They did not get out, so Roy went over to the driver’s side window and nodded at him. The man rolled down the window. He was about forty-five years old, had a three-day beard and a four inch-long scar across the left side of his lips. The man in the passenger seat looked just like the driver, except for the scar.

  “How fast fix?” asked the driver.

  “It looks like you need four new tires, sir,” said Roy.

  “Not possible fix?”

  “I’ll ask my boss, but I doubt it. You’re riding on your rims. We’ll have to check if they’re bent.”

  “Go ask boss.”

  Roy trudged through the thick, wet snow to the garage, where Domingo and Damaso were working over a transmission on a 1956 Ford Apache pick-up.

  “There’s a guy here who needs four tires replaced. Looks like he drove over a bed of nails.”

  “Tell him he can to leave it,” said Damaso.

  “And coming back at siete horas,” Domingo added.

  The wind ripped into Roy’s face when he removed his muffler from around his mouth to convey this information to the driver of the Buick. Roy’s eyes stung; they watered as he waited for the man to respond.

  “Cannot they fix now?”

  “No,” said Roy, “we’re pretty backed up.”

  The driver spoke to his companion in a language Roy could not readily identify. The wind whined and shrieked, making it difficult for Roy to hear anything else.

  “We wait,” the driver told him. “Can fix sooner.”

  Roy shook his head. “Maybe you’d better try another station. But you’ll damage your wheels.”

  The man produced a fifty dollar bill and shoved it at Roy. He held it between two black leather-gloved fingers. “This extra. Okey dokey?” he said. “You gi
ve boss.”

  Roy accepted the bill, marched back to the garage and handed it to Domingo.

  “The guy says this is on top of the cost of replacing the tires, if we can do it now.”

  “Tell him drive in muy despacio,” said Domingo.

  After the man had done this, following Damaso’s signals to pull up into the other bay and onto the lift, Damaso told the men to get out of the car.

  “We stay in,” said the driver.

  “No es posible raise car with you inside. Insurance no good if you fall.”

  The driver held out another fifty. Damaso took it. He nodded to Domingo, who activated the lift.

  “Lock doors!” Damaso shouted up at the men. “And no move!”

  Roy pumped gas for several customers while the Parlanchín brothers worked on the Buick. The sky had gone dark and snow kept falling. Before the Buick pulled out of the station on four new Bridgestones, it stopped next to Roy. The driver rolled down his window.

  “Yes, sir?” said Roy. “Is everything okay?”

  “All okey dokey,” replied the driver. “You young boy, work hard bad weather. How much Spanish men pay you?”

  “Buck an hour and two bits a flat.”

  “Slave wage,” said the man. “Now 1962. Take.”

  The driver extended toward Roy his black gloved left hand between two fingers of which protruded another fifty-dollar bill. Roy took the money and stuffed it into one of the snap pockets of his brown leather jacket.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Where are you guys from?”

  “You know Iron Curtain?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “We are from behind.”

  After the Buick had gone, Roy went into the garage.

  “Strange hombres, si?” said Domingo.

  “The driver gave me a tip,” Roy told him. “I don’t know why, though.”

  “He give us a hundred extra,” said Damaso.

  “The Buick had diplomatic license plates,” Roy said. “They’re Russians, I think.”

  “Must be they are trying to be more friendly,” Domingo suggested, “since they been forced to take missiles out of Cuba.”

  When Roy was eleven, he remembered, his mother had had a boyfriend from Havana, a conga drummer named Raul Repilado. She had met him in Coral Gables, Florida, when she and her third husband, Sid Wade, the father of Roy’s sister, were vacationing at the Biltmore. Raul Repilado’s band, the Orquesta Furioso, was appearing at the hotel. Raul had come to Chicago a couple of times to see Roy’s mother, the last time during the winter. Before leaving, the conguero declared that he would never come back to such a terribly cold place, even for a beautiful woman. Roy couldn’t wait to tell his mother that he’d made an extra fifty bucks that day.

  Shattered

  Roy was walking to his after school job at the Red Hot Ranch when a girl about his age, whom he did not know, came up to him and said, “Isn’t it terrible? I just want to scream.”

  Roy looked at her face. The girl was crying but she was still pretty. She had blonde hair and gray eyes. At closer inspection, Roy realized that the girl was older than he’d first thought; she was about eighteen or nineteen.

  “Isn’t what terrible?” he asked.

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “I don’t know,” said Roy. “Hear what?”

  “The president’s been shot. He’s dead.”

  Fresh tears shot out of the girl’s eyes and poured down her cheeks.

  “Can you hold me?” she asked him. “I need to be held, just for a few seconds.”

  Even though he was two or three years younger than the girl, Roy was at least two inches taller. He put his arms around her. She sank her head into his chest and continued sobbing.

  “I’m shattered,” she said. “I never imagined anything so terrible could happen.”

  “Do they know who shot him?”

  The girl moved her head side to side without taking it off of Roy’s chest.

  “A woman shouted it from the window of a bus.”

  “Maybe the woman was crazy,” Roy said. “Maybe it didn’t happen at all.”

  “No, it happened. I’ve been walking for blocks and blocks and other people said it, too.”

  The girl remained in Roy’s embrace for about a minute before she pulled away and wiped her face with the end of her scarf. It was a windy, cold day; the sky was overcast. Roy could feel snow in the air.

  “Thank you,” the girl said. Her gray eyes were bloodshot. “This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  Later that night, after Roy had gotten home from work and watched the news on television, he thought about what the girl had said, that the assassination of the president was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, even though she was not the person who had been murdered.

  When things go wrong, Roy decided, people are shocked by the discovery of their own lack of control over events. Perhaps now the girl would understand just how fragile the appearance of order in the world really was. All Roy wanted to think about was how pretty she was and how good it felt to hold her.

  A Day’s Worth of Beauty

  The most beautiful girl I ever saw was Princessa Paris, when she was seventeen and a half years old. I was almost seventeen when I met her. An older guy I knew from the neighborhood, Gus Argo, introduced me to Princessa—actually, she introduced herself, but Gus got me there—because he had a crush on her older sister, Turquoise, who was twenty-two. This was February of 1963, in Chicago. The street and sidewalks were coated with ice, a crust of hard, two day-old snow covered the lawns. Princessa attended a different high school than I did, but I had heard of the Paris sisters; their beauty was legendary on the Northwest side of the city.

  Argo picked me up while I was walking home from the Red Hot Ranch, a diner I worked at four days a week, three afternoons after school and Saturdays. It was about eight o’clock when Gus spotted me hiking on Western Avenue. He was twenty-one and had worked at Allied Radio on Western for three years, ever since he’d graduated from high school. Argo had been a pretty good left-handed pitcher, I’d played ball with and against him a few times; he was a tough kid, and he had once backed me up in a fight. A gray and black Dodge Lancer pulled over to the curb and honked. I saw that the driver was Gus Argo, and I got in.

  “Hey, Roy, where you headed?”

  “Thanks, Gus, it’s freezing. To my house, I guess. I just got off work.”

  “Yeah, me, too, but I got to make a delivery first, drop off a hi-fi. Want to ride over with me? Won’t take long.”

  “Sure.”

  “Your old lady got dinner waitin’?”

  “No, she’s out.”

  “Okay, maybe we’ll get a burger and coffee at Buffalo’s. I just got paid, so it’s on me.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Ever hear of the Paris sisters?”

  “Yeah, everybody has. You know them?”

  “I’m makin’ the delivery to their house. I been tryin’ to get up the nerve to ask Turquoise Paris to go out with me for two years.”

  “Are they really so good looking?”

  “I’d give anything to spend one day with Turquoise, to have one day’s worth of her beauty.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “Princessa? She’s almost eighteen, four years younger than Turquoise. I only saw her once, at the Granada on a Saturday. She’s a knockout, too.”

  Gus cranked up the blower in the Dodge. The sky was clear black but the temperature was almost zero. The radiator in my room didn’t work very well; I knew I would have to sleep with a couple of sweaters on to stay warm. Argo parked in front of the Paris house and got out.

  “Come in with me,” he said. “You can carry one of the boxes.”

  Princessa opened the front door. She was almos
t my height, slender and small-breasted. Her lustrous chestnut hair hung practically to her waist. Once I was inside, in the light, I took a good look at her face. She reminded me of Hedy Lamarr in Algiers, wearing an expression that warned a man: If you don’t take care of me, someone else certainly will. Princessa’s complexion was porcelain smooth; I’d never before seen skin that looked so clean.

  “You can just leave the boxes on the floor in the living room,” she told us. “My father will set it up when he gets home.”

  “Who’s there, Cessa?”

  Gus Argo and I looked up in the direction from which the voice asking this question had come. Gene Tierney stood at the top of the staircase. Or maybe it was Helen of Troy.

  “The delivery boys,” Princessa answered. “They brought the new hi-fi.”

  “Tell them to just leave the boxes in the living room. Daddy will set it up later.”

  “I just did.”

  The apparition on the staircase disappeared; she wasn’t coming down.

  “Thanks, guys,” said Princessa. “I’d give you a tip but I don’t have any money. I can ask Turquoise if she does.”

  “No,” Gus said, “it’s okay.”

  He glanced at the top of the stairs once more, then walked out of the house.

  “My name is Roy,” I said to Princessa.

  “Hi, Roy.” she said, and held her right hand out to me. “I’m Cessa.”

  I took her hand. It felt like a very small, freshly killed and skinned animal.

  “Your hand is warm,” I said, holding it.

  “My body temperature is always slightly above normal. The doctor says people’s temperatures vary.”

  “It feels good. Mine is cold. I wasn’t wearing any gloves.”