Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  She withdrew her hand.

  “Could I come back to see you sometime?” I asked.

  Princessa smiled. Hedy Lamarr vanished. Princessa had one slightly crooked upper front tooth the sight of which made me want to kiss her. I smiled back, memorizing her face.

  “It was nice to meet you,” I said, and turned to go.

  “Roy?”

  I turned around. Hedy was back.

  “You can call me, if you like. My last name is Paris. I have my own phone, the number’s in the book.”

  I went out with Princessa a couple of times. She talked about her boyfriend, who was already in college; and about Turquoise, who, Cessa told me, was a party girl.

  “What’s a party girl?” I asked.

  “She gets fifty dollars when she goes to the powder room, sometimes more. My parents don’t know.”

  I didn’t ask any more questions about Turquoise, but I did repeat what Princessa told me to Gus Argo.

  “Fifty bucks for the powder room? You’re shittin’ me,” he said.

  “Does that mean she’s a prostitute?” I asked him.

  “I don’t think so,” said Argo. “More like she goes out with visiting firemen who want a good lookin’ date.”

  “Visiting firemen?”

  “Yeah, guys from out of town. Salesmen, conventioneers.”

  Many years later, I read Apuleius’s version of the myth of Psyche and Amor. Venus, Amor’s mother, was so jealous of her son’s love for Psyche that she attempted to seduce Amor in an effort to convince him to destroy his lover, which he would not do. Venus even imprisoned Amor and ordered Psyche to go to the underworld and bring up a casket filled with a day’s worth of beauty. Eventually, Jupiter, Amor’s father, came to his son’s rescue and persuaded Venus to lay off the poor girl.

  I remembered Gus Argo telling me he would have done anything to have had one day’s worth of Turquoise Paris’s beauty. My guess is that he never got it, and I doubt that he knew the story of Psyche and Amor. Gus just didn’t seem to me like the kind of guy who’d spring for the powder room.

  The Peterson Fire

  It was snowing the night the Peterson house burned down. Bud Peterson was seventeen then, two years older than me. Bud got out alive because his room was on the ground floor in the rear of the house. His two sisters and their parents slept upstairs, above the living room, which was where the fire started. An ember jumped from the fireplace and ignited the carpet. Bud’s parents and his ten- and twelve-year-old sisters could not get down the staircase. When they tried to go back up, they were trapped and burned alive. There was nothing Bud Peterson could have done to save any of them. He was lucky, a fireman said, to have survived by crawling out his bedroom window.

  I didn’t see the house until the next afternoon. Snow flurries mixed with the ashes. Most of the structure was gone, only part of the first floor remained, and the chimney. I was surprised to see Bud Peterson standing in the street with his pals, staring at the ruins. Bud was a tall, thin boy, with almost colorless hair. He wore a Navy pea coat but no hat. Black ash was swirling around and some of it had fallen on his head. Nobody was saying much. There were about twenty of us, kids from the neighborhood, standing on the sidewalk or in the street, looking at what was left of the Peterson house.

  I had walked over by myself after school to see it. Big Frank had told me about the fire in Cap’s that morning when we were buying Bismarcks. Frank’s brother, Otto, was a fireman. Frank said Otto had awakened him at five thirty and asked if Frank knew Bud Peterson. Frank told him he did and Otto said, “His house burned down last night. Everybody but him is dead.”

  I heard somebody laugh. A couple of Bud’s friends were whispering to each other and trying not to laugh but one of them couldn’t help himself. I looked at Peterson but he didn’t seem to mind. I remembered that he was a little goofy, maybe not too bright, but a good guy. He always seemed like one of those kids who just went along with the gang, who never really stood out. A bigger kid I didn’t know came up to Bud and patted him on the left shoulder, then said something I couldn’t hear. Peterson smiled a little and nodded his head. Snow started to come down harder. I put up the hood of my coat. We all just kept looking at the burned down house.

  A black and white drove up and we moved aside. It stopped and a cop got out and said a few words to Bud Peterson. Bud got into the back seat of the squad car with the cop and the car drove away. The sky was getting dark pretty fast and the crowd broke up.

  One of Bud’s sisters, Irma, the one who was twelve, had a dog, a brown and black mutt. I couldn’t remember its name. Nobody had said anything about Irma’s dog, if it got out alive or not. I used to see her walking that dog when I was coming home from baseball or football practice.

  Bud Peterson went to live with a relative. Once in a while, in the first few weeks after the fire, I would see him back in the neighborhood, hanging out with the guys, then I didn’t see him anymore. Somebody said he’d moved away from Chicago.

  One morning, more than thirty years later, I was sitting at a bar in Paris drinking a coffee when, for no particular reason, I thought about standing in front of the Peterson house that afternoon and wondering: If it had been snowing hard enough the night before, could the snow have put out the fire? Then I remembered the name of Irma Peterson’s dog.

  Door to the River

  Roy read in a science book about a parasite that lives in water and enters the skin of human beings, goes to the head and causes loss of sight. This condition, Roy learned, was sometimes called river blindness. Soon after he’d read this, Roy was taken on a Friday night by his cousin Ray to Rita’s Can’t Take It With You, a blues club on the West Side. Ray was twenty-two, six years older than Roy. Ray had recently enlisted in the Navy and wanted to celebrate before leaving for boot camp the following Monday. The cousins were accompanied to Rita’s by Ray’s friend Marvin Kitna, an accordionist in a polka band who had been to the club several times before.

  “The Wolf’s playing tonight,” Kitna told Roy and Ray. “He’s gettin’ up there, but he’s still the best.”

  Roy, Ray and Marvin Kitna were the only white patrons that night in Rita’s Can’t Take It With You. Kitna seemed to know almost everybody there, from the two bartenders, Earl and Lee, to many of the customers, as well as the two off-duty Chicago cops, Malcolm and Durrell, who were paid to provide security. Roy let his cousin and Kitna order beers and shots of Jim Beam for the three of them. The waitress, whom Marvin addressed as Dolangela, and who favored them with a dazzling dental display of gold and silver, did not ask any of them, even Roy, for verification of their ages.

  Roy slowly sipped his beer and kept his mouth shut. He did not touch the shot of bourbon. The Wolf put on a great performance, crawling around on the stage, lying on his back while playing guitar and emitting his trademark howl. Ray and Marvin Kitna got up and danced a couple of times with girls Kitna knew. Roy was content to sit still and take in the show.

  After the boys had been there for about an hour, a girl came over to their table, pulled up a chair and sat down between Roy and Ray.

  “Hi,” she said to Roy. “My name’s Esmeraldina. What’s yours?”

  “Roy.”

  “You got beautiful hair, Roy. You mind do I touch it?”

  “No.”

  Esmeraldina ran the fingers of her right hand through Roy’s wavy black hair.

  “You Eyetalian?” she asked him. “You an Eyetalian boy, huh?”

  Roy shook his head. “I’m mostly Irish,” he said.

  “Pretty Eyetalian boy with turquoise eyes.”

  Esmeraldina draped her left arm around Roy’s shoulders while she played with his hair.

  “Just go along with her, Roy,” said Marvin Kitna. “She won’t bite.”

  “Oh yes, I do,” Esmeraldina said. “I surely do can bite when a particular feelin’ comin’ on.
”

  She poured Roy’s shot of Beam into his glass of beer and picked up the glass.

  “You mind do I take a taste?” she asked Roy.

  Roy shook his head no and Esmeraldina drank half of the contents.

  “What’s that particular feelin’ you’re talkin’ about, Esmeraldina?” asked Roy’s cousin.

  She grinned, revealing a perfect row of teeth unadorned by metal, and replied, “When a man get under my skin, crawl all up inside so’s I can’t itch it or see straight. Happens, I ain’t responsible for myself, what I do until the feelin’ wear off.”

  “How long’s that take?” asked Marvin Kitna.

  “Depends on the man,” Esmeraldina said.

  “Like river blindness,” said Roy.

  “What’s that, honey?”

  “A water bug swims in through a person’s pores up to their head and makes them go blind.”

  Esmeraldina stared for a long moment into Roy’s eyes, then she kissed him softly on the mouth.

  “I bet you know all kinds of interestin’ things, Roy,” she said. “You want to dance with me?”

  “Sure.”

  Esmeraldina picked up Roy’s glass and finished off the shot and beer before they headed to the dance floor. Jimmie “Fast Fingers” Dawkins’ “All for Business” was playing on the jukebox. She pressed her skinny body hard against Roy’s and wrapped her arms around his back. Esmeraldina nudged him gently around in response to the slow blues. Roy guessed that Esmeraldina was in her early twenties but he didn’t want to ask for fear she would in turn ask him how old he was and he did not want to have to lie.

  “How old are you, Roy?”

  “Old enough to be here,” he said.

  “You pretty sharp. Sharp and pretty.”

  “You’re very pretty yourself, Esmeraldina.”

  After the record ended, Esmeraldina took Roy by the hand and led him out of the club. It was cold outside, too cold to be in the street without a coat. Roy had left his on the back of his chair at the table. Esmeraldina did not have one, either; she shivered in her short-sleeve blouse as she walked him to the right, around the corner onto Lake Street. A few yards ahead of them, two men, both wearing short-brimmed hats, were arguing with one another. One of them pulled a gun from a pocket and shot the other man in the forehead. The man who had been shot flew off his feet backwards as if he’d been caught off balance by Sugar Ray Robinson’s quick left hook. The shooter ran and disappeared under the el tracks. Roy looked at the man on the ground: his eyes were open and his short-brim was still on his head.

  “Bad timin’,” Esmeraldina said. “We’d best go back indoors.”

  She and Roy hurried into Rita’s Can’t Take It With You, where Esmeraldina let go of him and lost herself in the crowd. Roy went over to the table where he’d been sitting with Ray and Marvin Kitna. They weren’t there. Roy looked for them on the dance floor but he didn’t see them. He took his jacket off the back of his chair and put it on. The music coming from the jukebox was very loud but Roy could hear a police siren. He saw Malcolm and Durrell, the security guards, go out the front door followed by Earl, one of the bartenders, and several customers. Roy ducked out, too, turned left and walked as fast as he could away from Lake Street. He could still see the dead man with a nickel-sized hole above the bridge of his nose.

  “How could his hat have stayed on?” Roy said.

  Sailing in the Sea of Red

  He Sees a Black Ship on the Horizon

  As a boy, Roy dreamed of going to sea, working as a deckhand on an oceangoing freighter, an ambition he was one day to realize. This vision took hold when he began reading the stories of Jack London and, later, those of Melville, Traven and Conrad. For awhile, he had a recurring dream in which he was a lookout positioned on the bow of a large boat at dawn. As the sun rose, the water turned red, and in the farthest distance Roy spotted an unmarked black cargo ship teetering on the lip of the horizon, as if it were precariously navigating a razor’s edge of the planet. Roy felt that at any moment the mysterious freighter could tip over into the unseen and be lost forever.

  When he was twelve years old, Roy’s friend Elmo got his father to pay for him to take trumpet lessons. The old man operated a salvage business and didn’t know much about music but he was proud of Elmo’s desire to play the trumpet. The only tune Elmo ever learned to play all the way through, however, was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Every so often, the old man would come home tired and dirty from the junkyard, plop down with a can of Falstaff in his favorite chair and ask Elmo to play something. Elmo would get his horn and stumble through “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which never failed to delight his father.

  “How’s the trumpet lessons goin’, son?” the old man would ask him. “Makin’ progress, Dad,” Elmo would say. “Makin’ progress.”

  When Elmo quit taking trumpet lessons, the old man was visibly disappointed. “Don’t know why he stopped,” he said, shaking his almost entirely bald head. “He was makin’ progress.”

  Many years later, when Elmo’s father learned that he was dying from stomach cancer, the old man refused to have chemotherapy. All he wanted was morphine, to dull the pain. The old man had been a Marine during World War II and had seen combat in the Pacific, where he’d contracted malaria, of which he still suffered occasional bouts. He told Elmo and Roy that war was stupid.

  “War’s a business, boys,” said the old man, “big business, a way for the fat cats to make more coin when things ain’t goin’ so swift. This way they figure the ordinary citizen’ll appreciate what they got and spend more after the shootin’ stops. The fat cats live to make suckers out of us regular Joes.”

  Every day for the last six months of his life, the old man sat in a lawn chair in front of his garage and never complained, even when his burly body shrunk down to the size of a boy’s. He was never mean; all the kids in the neighborhood liked him.

  “I want to go out being who I am,” he said, explaining why he refused to undergo chemotherapy.

  After he passed away, Elmo called up Roy and said, “The old man died today. He’s on that black ship you used to dream about.”

  “He was a great man,” Roy told him.

  “That’s what I always thought,” said Elmo.

  Wyoming

  ROY’S MOTHER

  Cobratown

  “We’re really fine when we’re together, aren’t we? I mean, when it’s just the two of us.”

  “Uh-huh. How long till we get to the reptile farm?”

  “Oh, less than an hour, I think.”

  “Will they have a giant king cobra, like on the sign?”

  “I’m sure they will, sweetheart.”

  “I hope it’s not asleep when we get there. Mom, do cobras sleep?”

  “Of course, snakes have to sleep just like people. At least I think they do.”

  “Do they think?”

  “Who, baby?”

  “Snakes. Do they have a brain?”

  “Yes. They think about food, mostly. What they’re going to eat next in order to survive.”

  “They only think about eating?”

  “That’s the main thing. And finding a warm, safe place to sleep.”

  “Some snakes live in trees, on the branches. That can’t be so safe. Birds can get them.”

  “They wait on the limbs for prey, some smaller creature to come along and the snake can snatch it up, or drop on it and wrap itself around and squeeze it to death or until it passes out from not having enough air to breathe. Then the snake crushes it and devours it.”

  “You’re a good driver, aren’t you, Mom? You like to drive.”

  “I’m a very good driver, Roy. I like to drive when we go on long trips together.”

  “How far is it from Key West to Mississippi?”

  “Well, to Jackson, where we’re
going, it’s a pretty long way. Several hundred miles. We go north through Florida, then across Alabama to Mississippi and up to Jackson, which is about in the middle of the state.”

  “Will Dad be there?”

  “No, honey. Your dad is in Chicago. At least I think he is. He could be away somewhere on business.”

  “Who are we going to see in Mississippi?”

  “A good friend of Mommy’s. A man named Bert.”

  “Why is Bert in Mississippi?”

  “That’s where he lives, baby. He owns a hotel in Jackson.”

  “What’s the name of the hotel?”

  “The Prince Rupert.”

  “Is it like the Casa Azul?”

  “I think Bert’s hotel is bigger.”

  “You’ve never seen it?”

  “No, only a photo of it on a postcard that Bert sent.”

  “How old is Bert?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess about forty.”

  “How old is Dad?”

  “Forty-three. He’ll be forty-four next month, on the tenth of April.”

  “Will he invite me to his birthday party?”

  “I don’t know if your dad will have a birthday party, Roy, but I’m sure he would invite you if he did.”

  “Some dinosaurs had two brains, Mom, do you know that?”

  “Two brains?”

  “Yeah, there’s a picture in my dinosaur book that Dad sent me that shows how the really big ones had a regular-size brain in their head and a small one in their tail. The really big ones. It’s because it was so far from their head to their tail there was too much for only one brain to think about, so God gave them two.”

  “Who told you God gave dinosaurs two brains?”

  “Nanny.”

  “Your grandmother doesn’t know anything about dinosaurs.”

  “What about Bert?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you think he knows about dinosaurs?”

  “You’ll have to ask him, baby. I don’t really know what Bert knows about.”