“He’s in the construction business.”
“Like my uncle.”
Alfredito nodded, and said, “It’s a good business to be in.”
Roy returned his attention to the girls. Music came from a tape recorder because the band was there only at night. Alfredito told Roy the musicians slept during the day.
Suddenly, there was a loud popping sound, and the dancers stopped. Roy looked around and saw Chino Valdes hand a revolver to a man in a green seersucker suit, who walked quickly out of the club. Cherry Dos Rios sat slumped in his chair, a large, dark stain spreading under his mauve guayabera. His Panama was on the table. He still had on the dark glasses. Someone turned off the music.
Roy’s uncle came over to him and said, “Vamonos, sobrino.”
Chino stood up and came over, too.
“Chico,” he said to Roy, placing a hand on the boy’s left shoulder, “your uncle and I know that we can depend on your not having witnessed this unfortunate little accident.”
Roy looked at Chino and nodded.
“Buck tells me that tomorrow is your birthday. Here’s something from me.”
Chino handed Roy a hundred dollar bill. Roy had never held one before.
“If you’re anything like your uncle,” Chino said, “I know you’ll use it well.”
“Thank you,” said Roy. “I will.”
The dancers had disappeared. Two men were dragging Cherry Dos Rios’s limp corpse into a back room. As Roy and his uncle walked together out of El Paraíso, Roy saw Alfredito pick up Cherry Dos Rios’s hat off the table at which he’d been sitting. Alfredito waved it at Roy and smiled.
As Buck pulled his white 1958 Eldorado convertible onto Gasparilla Road, he asked, “Would you like me to put the top down?”
“Sure,” said Roy.
His uncle unhooked the latch on his side and Roy undid the one on his, then Buck flipped a switch on the dashboard and the top peeled back. The warm Gulf air felt good on Roy’s face and in his hair.
“It’s time you started to think about what profession you want to go into when you get older,” said his uncle. “Do you have any ideas?”
“Not yet,” said Roy.
“You can’t go wrong in the construction business.”
“Alfredito told me the guy who accidentally got shot was in the construction business.”
Roy’s uncle picked a cigar out of a box he kept on the front seat next to him, bit off one end, spit the leaves out his window and pushed in the dash lighter.
“Forget about him, Roy,” said Buck. “He was the exception.”
Close Encounters of the Right Kind
Oleg Bodanski owned and operated the Odessa Grill, a four-stool, two-booth diner on Kedzie Avenue next to the canal that separated the city of Chicago from its northwestern suburbs. He was a widower whose fifteen-year-old daughter, Fátima, had a reputation at her high school for being a fast girl. Roy, who was two years younger, shared the opinion of most of the boys he knew that she was, if not conventionally beautiful, certainly exotic looking, almost oriental, and undeniably sexy with her large black eyes, high-arched eyebrows and ample figure. Fátima was often seen with older guys, men who picked her up in their cars after school. She did not seem to be a part of any particular group of girls, though she was polite to everyone; Roy had never heard anyone say a bad word about her. Fátima was an average student, she participated in class but not in any extracurricular activities. Roy never saw her at any of the school athletic events, but he always kept an eye out for her in the hallways between classes.
Roy’s friend Jimmy Boyle’s father worked at a plumbing supply house near the Odessa Grill and he went in there from time to time. Jimmy, who had a long-distance crush on Fátima Bodanski the same as Roy, asked his father if he ever saw Fátima in there and he said only once. She had come in around three thirty in the afternoon, when Mr. Boyle was on a coffee break, spoken briefly to her father, stashed her school books on a shelf behind the counter and then went out again. Mr. Boyle said he saw her get into the front passenger side of a late-model Chevy and be driven away. He hadn’t seen the driver.
Mr. Boyle told Jimmy that the girl’s mother had supposedly run off with a knife thrower from a travelling carnival when Fátima was eight or nine years old. According to a pal of Mr. Boyle’s who had been in a bowling league with Oleg Bodanski, the diner owner’s wife was killed in an accident a few months later when the knife thrower’s car went off an icy road and plunged into Lake Superior near Grand Marais, Minnesota. Both she and her paramour drowned before rescuers could pry open the doors of his automobile and extricate the bodies.
Roy knew that his chances of getting to know Fátima Bodanski better were slim, but he held out hope for the future, when their age difference would not matter so much. One rainy Saturday afternoon in August, Roy found himself near the Odessa Grill and decided to go in and get something to drink. He had been playing in a baseball game that ended prematurely due to the weather; he was dirty and wet and glad to get inside for a little while before walking the rest of the way to his house.
Oleg Bodanski was sitting on a high stool behind the counter reading a newspaper; there were no customers in the diner. Roy sat down on the stool nearest the front door. Oleg Bodanski was forty-two years old, slightly built, a couple of inches under six feet tall. He wore wire-rim glasses, was clean-shaven, and his bushy brown hair was graying at the temples. Fátima, Roy decided, must favor her mother as far as her looks were concerned. He noticed that the paper Bodanski was reading was the Christian Science Monitor.
“Hi,” said Roy.
Oleg Bodanski looked up and said, “Do you know what you want?”
Before Roy could answer, Bodanski added, “Does anyone?”
The diner owner put down the Monitor and slid off his stool.
“I’ll have a chocolate phosphate,” Roy said.
Bodanski made the drink and set it down on the counter in front of Roy.
“Tell me if there’s enough syrup in it,” said Bodanski. “I’ll put in more if you want.”
Roy took a sip through the straw in the glass.
“It’s okay,” he said.
Bodanski nodded. “Sometimes people want it sweeter. Me, I don’t like so much chocolate that it overpowers the seltzer.”
Oleg Bodanski stood behind the counter and watched Roy sip the phosphate.
“You look like an intelligent boy,” he said.
“How can you tell?” asked Roy.
“What would you think if I told you that I’ve had encounters with visitors from other planets?” said Bodanski. “And that you might have, too, even if you don’t realize it.”
“What happened to you?” said Roy.
Oleg Bodanski hovered over Roy from the other side of the counter, leaning more than a little in the boy’s direction.
“They nabbed me once while I was driving my old Ford, the ’51, and twice while I was asleep. Each time they kept me for exactly two hours.”
“How do you know?”
“Lost the time. I was drivin’ home from Racine one night, my cousin Boris lives there, and arrived two hours later than I should have. Lost two hours of sleep twice. Checked the Westclox next to my bed. Know what they wanted?”
Roy shook his head.
“My sperm. They milked me, then put me back where I’d been.”
“How did the car keep driving without you at the wheel?”
“Don’t really know,” said Bodanski. “Didn’t feel a thing other than a weakness in my groin. They got methods our scientists haven’t thought up yet.”
“Where were they from? I mean, what planet?”
Bodanski did not answer. He had a faraway look on his face, so Roy didn’t ask him again. He did not want to know how Oleg Bodanski knew the aliens had deprived him of his sperm. Just then the door to t
he diner opened and in walked Fátima Bodanski.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Can I borrow five bucks?”
Her father emerged from his reverie and said, “What for?”
“Francine and Donna are waitin’ outside in Donna’s mother’s car. They want me to go to the movies with ’em. I told ’em sure since it’s so hot and rainin’ and I don’t have anything to do until eight when Ronnie’s comin’ to get me.”
Oleg Bodanski turned around and punched open the cash register.
“Hi,” Fátima said to Roy, and gave him a big smile.
She had perfectly straight, small teeth, and she was chewing Juicy Fruit gum. Roy could smell it.
Her father handed her a fin and said, “Have a good time, baby.”
“Oh, Daddy, you’re the tops!” said Fátima, as she took the money, then blew him a kiss and left the diner.
Roy looked out the window and saw Fátima climb into the back seat of a tan 1955 Dodge Lancer and close the door as the car pulled away from the curb.
“Ronnie,” Bodanski said. “You know who Ronnie is?”
“No,” said Roy.
“Neither do I.”
Oleg Bodanski stood still. For a moment Roy thought the man might have gone back into his reverie.
“My daughter,” said Bodanski. “I named her Fátima Portugal Bodanski because of the flying saucer sightings near Fátima, Portugal, in 1917. Called the ‘miracle of Fátima.’ Thousands of people saw ’em. One of the aliens, a tiny, woman-like creature, appeared, walked right out of a spaceship while it was still in the air and said she’d descended from Heaven, and declared that the only way further suffering on Earth could be averted was if people stopped offending God. Catholic Church verified the events. You can look it up.”
Roy put a quarter on the counter.
“I enjoyed the chocolate phosphate,” he said, and got down off the stool.
“Come again,” said Oleg Bodanski. “You’re a bright boy.”
Walking home in the rain, Roy thought about Fátima Bodanski standing next to him, cracking her Juicy Fruit. He could still smell it. It was as close an encounter with her as he was likely to have, but if he did run into her, Roy decided, he would say hello and remind her that they’d sort of met in the Odessa Grill. He could tell her that her father had told him what he’d named her after and ask her what she thought about it. And he wouldn’t say anything to Fátima about how spacemen had drained her father’s sperm. Roy figured she didn’t know anything about that.
Blue People
Roy’s fascination with maps began before he was eight years old. His curiosity about what people in distant lands looked like, what languages they spoke, and their customs, accelerated the more he read about countries whose names and geography he discovered in the Great World Atlas.
In school one day, a substitute teacher named Arvid Scranton mentioned that just after the war he had been stationed in North Africa, and had traveled extensively in that region. In Morocco, he told Roy’s class, he had been in a place called Goulimime, at the edge of the Sahara desert, where he had encountered the Blue People, a nomadic tribe called the Tuareg, who wore blue robes dyed with natural indigo that was absorbed by their skin and turned it blue. Many people believed, said Arvid Scranton, that the dye had become so pervasive over time that it entered the Tuaregs’ bloodstream to the degree that their babies were born with a decidedly blue tinge to their otherwise black skin.
Roy was eleven when he learned of the existence of the Tuareg. A year later, he was playing in a basketball tournament at Our Fathers Out of Egypt when he saw a blue person. The center on the team from Kings of Assyria had skin that was exactly as Arvid Scranton had described: deep, dark blue that glowed under and despite the dull yellow gymnasium lights. The kid on Kings of Assyria was taller than anyone else on either team and extremely thin, so thin that he was easily pushed around and brutalized by shorter but stockier opponents. Occasionally, he lofted a shot high over a defender’s head that was impossible to block, but more often than not it clanged harmlessly off the rim of the basket, or banged too hard against the backboard. The kid had no touch, as well as not enough strength, and his team was easily defeated. After the game, Roy was tempted to ask him if he was related to the Tuareg of the Sahara, but he was afraid the kid would be offended, so he did not.
Later, at Meschina’s Restaurant, Roy and Jimmy Boyle were sitting at the counter eating club sandwiches and drinking Dad’s root beers, when Roy told Jimmy about the Blue People, and how he figured the kid on Kings of Assyria must be related to them.
“You ever seen anyone else with skin dark blue like that?” Roy said.
Jimmy’s mouth was too full to speak, so he just shook his head.
Lorraine, a waitress who had worked at Meschina’s for forever, stopped in front of the boys and said, “My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.”
“What’s that?” asked Jimmy. “You ain’t black, and it’s freezin’ outside.”
“Job, 30:30,” said Lorraine. “I heard you talkin’. Kid must be descended from those desert people, the ones move around all the time.”
“Nomads,” said Roy.
“Roy says they turn blue because of the dye on their robes,” said Jimmy.
“Very clever,” Lorraine said. “I wish I could just wear a red babushka over my hair to make it stay red, then I wouldn’t have to pay the beauty parlor no more.”
As Roy and Jimmy walked home from Meschina’s, the sky got dark fast and snow began to fall. A hard wind made them duck their heads.
“The weather in Chicago’ll turn you blue, too,” said Jimmy, “you get stuck out in it too long.”
“Good thing that blue kid couldn’t shoot,” Roy said.
“He could,” said Jimmy, “nobody’d stop him.”
“He’s too skinny,” said Roy, “but if he keeps playin’, he’ll learn how to score and beef up as he gets older. Probably be a pro, he grows more.”
“Good thing for him his family moved here,” said Jimmy. “I bet they don’t play basketball much in the Sahara desert.”
Call of the Wild
When Roy was eighteen years old, he learned that an old friend of his from the neighborhood, Eddie Derwood, had attempted suicide by placing a plastic bag over his head in an effort to asphyxiate himself. Eddie, Roy was told, had been committed to the Illiniwek Psychiatric Institute in Chicago, where he was undergoing treatment for severe depression. Roy was away at school when he received this news in a letter from a mutual friend, and when he returned to Chicago for the Christmas holidays, he went to see Eddie.
Roy did not know why Eddie Derwood, with whom he had been friends all through high school and had played with on many baseball, football, and basketball teams, had tried to kill himself. This was a mystery to Roy and Eddie’s other friends, too, since Eddie had always seemed like a happy guy. Derwood was smart, handsome and well-liked by almost everyone in the neighborhood. He had gone off to college in Wisconsin, and two months into his freshman year his roommate found him unconscious on the floor of their dormitory room with the plastic bag over his head secured by rubber bands around his neck.
The Illiniwek Psychiatric Institute was a large, ugly brown brick building. Snow was falling lightly but insistently as Roy entered, registered at the reception desk as a visitor and was told to wait until an attendant arrived to escort him to the fourth floor, where Eddie Derwood was housed. Two other people were in the waiting room: an old man with a week’s growth of white whiskers on his face, wearing a green hat with earflaps and a dark blue overcoat with a gray, fake fur collar; and a woman who looked to be in her late thirties or early forties, perhaps the old man’s daughter, or even granddaughter, whose bleached blonde hair with black roots showing was partially covered by a bright red scarf, and whose thin, red cloth coat, Roy thought, could hardly succeed in keeping her
warm. She was very skinny and had a long, sharply pointed nose that she kept wiping with a black handkerchief.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked the old man.
“Louise,” he said, “you always ask the most terrible questions.”
A large, powerful-looking man with carrot-colored hair brushed to a point on the crown of his head, wearing a dirty white smock, entered the waiting room and called Roy’s name. Roy walked over to the man and stood in front of him.
“You here to see Derwood?” the man asked.
“I am,” said Roy.
The man turned around and walked away. Roy followed him. They took an elevator to the fourth floor and got off. The attendant walked swiftly ahead without looking back and stopped in front of a door with the number 404 on it. He turned and faced Roy.
“You don’t give him nothin’,” said the attendant. “You don’t take nothin’ he try to give you. Don’t touch him, even if he touch you. Don’t say nothin’ could disturb him. You do, I put you out real fast. You understand?”
Roy nodded.
The man opened the door and entered the room, followed by Roy. Eddie Derwood was standing in front of the only window. There were bars on it.
“Person to see you,” said the attendant.
“Hi, Eddie,” said Roy.
Eddie did not say anything. His eyes were foggy and the corners of his mouth had white crust on them.
“It’s me, Roy. Don’t you recognize me?”
Eddie stared at Roy for thirty seconds before saying, “You’re just a bird, a big, dark bird without wings.”
“I’m your friend, Eddie. I’m Roy.”
Eddie stood still. His eyes did not move and did not blink.
“Is he on drugs?” Roy asked the attendant. “His eyes are messed up.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“That’s why I asked you,” said Roy. “He’s like a zombie.”
The attendant went over to Eddie, bent down and put his face close to Eddie’s. The attendant’s body completely blocked Roy’s view of his friend.
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