“You need somethin’, Mr. Derwood?” the attendant said.
Eddie squawked like a crow.
“Caw! Caw!” he said.
The attendant straightened up and turned back to Roy.
“Visit’s over,” he said.
The attendant took Roy firmly by his right arm and led him out of the room, closing the door behind him. In the elevator going down were two men besides Roy and the attendant. Both of them wore thick-lensed eyeglasses and had wild, curly hair like Larry Fine of the Three Stooges.
“Don’t ever say that again,” one of them said to the other.
“Say what?” said his companion.
“That you run this place.”
“But I do.”
“No, you don’t. I do.”
The elevator stopped at the ground floor, the door opened and Roy got off. The attendant and the two curly-haired passengers stayed on. The door closed and the elevator started going back up.
The old man and the younger woman were no longer in the waiting room. Roy walked out of the building. It was snowing harder and the air seemed colder, but Roy decided to walk for a while before taking a bus back to his neighborhood.
The only time Roy could remember Eddie Derwood losing his temper was once when they were fifteen at Eddie’s house and his mother told Eddie that he was not as smart as his older brother, Burton. Eddie sprang from his chair like a leopard catapulting out of a tree onto an unsuspecting passing animal and grabbed his mother with both hands around her throat, pinning her against a wall. Eddie held her there for several seconds before letting go. He did not say a word and neither did his mother. Eddie sat down and his mother left the room. Roy did not go back to Eddie’s house again for a long time after that.
Arabian Nights
Roy, the Viper, and Jimmy Boyle were sitting on top of the back of a bench at Heart-of-Jesus Park drinking grape Nehis after playing a football game. Their team had lost that afternoon to Our Father of Fearful Consequences, a school from Kankakee, and they were not happy about it.
“We shouldn’ta run the ball so much,” said Jimmy. “We needed to throw it more.”
“Three yards and a cloud of dust,” said Roy. “Except we could only get two.”
“It’s what worked in ancient times,” said the Viper, “when Coach was playin’, but not no more.”
It was a little windy and cold, but the boys didn’t want to go home yet. Stan Yemen, the park janitor, came out of the fieldhouse carrying a long-handled rake and walked over to them. Yemen was in his midthirties and had been a janitor at Heart-of-Jesus ever since he had dropped out of high school at sixteen. He always wore a dark brown windbreaker zipped up to his neck, dark brown trousers, white socks and dark brown clodhopper shoes. He never wore a hat, even in winter and even though he had a crewcut. Yemen’s most outstanding feature was his missing left ear. His family was from Arabia and Yemen said they were desert people. He had lived over there until he was nine.
The Viper had once gotten up the nerve to ask him how come he didn’t have a left ear, and Yemen said, “When I was seven, an elder of our tribe tried to circumcise me, but I dodged his dagger and he sliced off my ear instead.”
The boys didn’t know whether or not to believe him, but all Yemen had where his ear should have been was a small lump of congealed flesh that looked like somebody had thrown a mudball at his head and part of it had stuck there.
“Hey, fellas,” Stan Yemen said.
“Hi, Stan,” said Jimmy Boyle. “You see our game?”
“No, I had to work. Lots of leaves to clean out of the gutters and rake up this time of year. I heard you tried to run on ’em and got beat.”
“It was ugly,” said Roy.
“Tell the truth, Stan,” said the Viper. “You really lost your ear when they tried to circumcise you?”
Yemen smiled at him. The janitor had big brown eyes that matched his clothing; they jiggled in their sockets as he spoke.
“All Arab boys are expected to submit to circumcision in order to pass into manhood,” he said, “but I had witnessed this ceremony performed on my two older brothers and seen and heard their suffering, and I vowed then not to allow it to happen to me.”
“Didn’t your father or mother try to make you?” asked Jimmy.
“Not really. They had already decided to try to leave the country, and my mother, especially, was not a true believer in many traditional Muslim customs. It is thanks to her, not Allah, that I still have my foreskin.”
“What about your ear?” Roy said.
Again, Stan Yemen smiled.
“I confess,” he said, “about that I lied. The truth is, it was bitten off by a lion one night when I was sleeping in the desert. In fact, on the same night I ran away from the circumcision ceremony to hide.”
The janitor walked away, holding his rake over his right shoulder like a rifle.
“No way,” said Jimmy Boyle. “A lion would have bitten off his whole head, not just an ear.”
“You think he can hear out of the left side of his head,” said the Viper, “even though he don’t got an ear there?”
The wind picked up and suddenly the sky darkened. Roy jumped off the bench.
“Ask him next time,” he said.
Last Plane out of Chungking
The little plane was barely visible through dense night fog as it sat on the ground. Then the engine turned over and the single propeller started to rotate, scattering mist as the plane nudged forward, feeling its way toward the runway. Chinese soldiers suddenly burst out of the airport terminal and began firing their rifles furiously in an attempt to prevent the plane from taking off. Tiny lights from the aircraft’s cabin winked weakly from within its whitish shroud while the plane taxied, desperately attempting to gather speed sufficient for takeoff. The soldiers stood confused, firing blindly and futilely until the aircraft lifted into blackness and escape.
Roy fell asleep with the television on after watching this opening scene of the film Lost Horizon. He liked to watch old movies late at night and in the early morning hours, even though he had to be up by seven a.m. in order to be at school by eight. On this particular night, Roy dreamed about four boys his age, fourteen, in Africa, who discover a large crocodile bound by rope to a board hidden in bushes, abandoned by the side of a dusty dirt road. A stout stick was placed vertically in the crocodile’s mouth between its upper and lower jaws in order to keep the mouth open as widely as possible and prevent its jaws from snapping shut.
The crocodile could not move or bite, so the boys decided to drag it by the tail end of the board to a nearby river and release it. As they approached the river’s edge, it began raining hard and the ground suddenly became mushy and very slippery. To free the crocodile, they placed the board so that the croc’s head faced the river. One of the boys tore a long, sinewy vine from a plant and cautiously wound it around the stick. Another boy had a knife and prepared to cut the rope. The other two boys kept a safe distance. The boy with the knife sliced the rope in two at the same time the other boy tugged forcefully on one end of the vine, pulling out the stick. The crocodile did not immediately move or close its enormous mouth. The boys stood well away from it, watching. After a few moments, the crocodile hissed loudly and slowly slithered off the board and wobbled to the water’s edge, slid into the dark river and disappeared from view. The boys ran off as the downpour continued.
When Roy woke up, it was a few minutes before seven. He turned off the alarm before it could ring and thought about both the plane fleeing Chungking and the African boys rescuing the crocodile. What was the difference, he wondered, between waking life and dream life? Which, if any, was more valid or real? Roy could not make a clear distinction between the two. He decided then that both were of equal value, two-thirds of human consciousness, the third part being imagination. The last plane out of Chungking took off with Roy
aboard, bound for the land of dreams. What happened there only he could imagine.
The Vanished Gardens of Córdoba
Roy was a Chicago White Sox fan until 1956, when the Sox traded their shortstop, Chico Carrasquel, who was Roy’s favorite player, to the Cleveland Indians, to make room for a rookie, Luis Aparicio. Roy switched his allegiance to the Chicago Cubs, who had the home run–hitting newcomer Ernie Banks at shortstop, and he never forgave the White Sox for getting rid of Carrasquel. Aparicio, like Chico, was from Venezuela, and the Sox proved correct in exchanging one Venezuelan for another, since Little Looie, as he came to be called, went on to a Hall of Fame career, while Carrasquel quickly faded into obscurity. But Chico had been the first flashy Latin infielder in the major leagues and Roy, who was then a nine-year-old shortstop on his Little League team, never forgot him. Chico and Looie were the vanguard of Venezuelan star shortstops, to be followed by Davey Concepcion and Omar Vizquel, the latter being perhaps the best of them all. Roy became enamored of Ernie Banks, too, but more for his power stroke than his fielding. Banks had good hands—he set the major league record for fewest errors in a season (since broken)—but limited range. Carrasquel made more errors but he got to more balls, as did Aparicio, whom Roy eventually came to respect and admire. Alfonso “Chico” Carrasquel, whose father, Alex, had been a legendary pitcher in his native Venezuela, would remain Roy’s baseball hero. When he grew up, Roy decided, he would write a biography of Chico Carrasquel even if nobody else remembered him. Many years later, when Roy read in a book about Prince Faisal saying to Lawrence of Arabia, “And I . . . I long for the vanished gardens of Córdoba,” he pictured Chico Carrasquel on the vanished infield of old, since demolished Comiskey Park in Chicago, snagging a hard ground ball on the short hop and firing it to first base just in time to nail the runner. Roy knew exactly how Faisal felt.
Benediction
Years later, during the several days preceding her death, in her delirium caused by a stroke, Roy’s mother imagined that her father, whom Roy had called Pops, was with her. Pops, of course, had died fifty years before, but Kitty believed that he was now looking after her and that they were dining together in a great restaurant. In reality, it was Roy’s sister who sat by their mother’s bedside in a hospital, listening to Kitty talk about her father, whom Roy’s sister had never known.
When his sister told Roy about this on the phone, before Roy got on an airplane to see his mother for the last time, he told his sister it was a good thing because Kitty had long felt guilty about having acted coldly, even cruelly, to Pops in the years prior to his own death, believing that he had been entirely to blame for the divorce from her mother when Kitty was ten. Nanny, Roy’s grandmother, had died when Roy was eight, so his sister, who was not born until four years later, had not known Nanny, either. This visitation from Kitty’s father on her deathbed was a miracle of reconciliation, a touching resolution to Kitty’s conflict. How wonderful, Roy told his sister, for their mother to release herself from what clearly had been her most profound regret.
“Well, after all,” said Roy’s sister, “she was raised a Catholic.”
“Pops forgave her,” Roy said, “not a priest.”
As Roy stood in line waiting to board the plane, he remembered Pops standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel he lived in in Chicago, waiting for his daughter to pick him up to go to lunch with her and Roy, who was then nine years old. It was a cold, blustery, overcast Sunday afternoon, and Roy felt sorry for his grandfather, who was almost eighty, waiting there alone in the bad weather, a black woollen scarf wrapped around his neck underneath a long, gray overcoat. Pops always dressed well and Roy had wondered that day why he was not wearing his signature Homburg hat.
After his mother had pulled her car to the curb and stopped, leaving the motor running, Roy, who was sitting in the back seat, opened the right rear passenger door of the midnight blue 4-door Oldsmobile Holiday and got out to greet his grandfather.
“Pops,” Roy said, “it’s really windy. Why aren’t your wearing your hat?”
Pops smiled at Roy and gave him a kiss on the top of his head. Roy loved his grandfather more than any other person in his family. It always disturbed him when his mother spoke harshly to Pops.
“You know what the banker said to the poor farmer who’d come to see him about a loan?” Pops asked.
“No, what?”
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”
After they’d gotten into the back seat of the Oldsmobile and Roy closed the door, Kitty looked at her father in the rear view mirror and said to him, “Where’s your hat?”
Pops put an arm around his grandson and said, “I must have left it in the bank.”
Then he and Roy laughed.
Roy’s sister told him not to expect that their mother would recognize him.
“She’s lost at least thirty years of her memory,” his sister said.
When Roy saw his mother on her deathbed, he asked her if she knew who he was.
Kitty opened her eyes, looked into his and said, “You’re Roy. You run faster than anybody.”
For God’s sake let us sit on the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
The Red Studebaker
ROY’S UNCLE BUCK
Alligator Story
A kid wearing a Tampa Tarpons t-shirt came running up the street shouting, “Some cracker just shot a gator!”
Roy and his uncle Buck were in the driveway of the house on Oakview Terrace, rinsing down the boat. They had just come in from fishing out of Oldsmar and had been gone since five o’clock that morning; it was now six thirty in the evening. They hadn’t had much luck, having boated several kingfish and a few mackerel, but they’d run on sharks everywhere and had to cut lines to get rid of them. The weather had been spotty, the water in the Gulf was cloudy, and there were periodic brief showers. It was just the two of them, so they’d had a lot of time to talk. Roy was twelve and a half years old and he loved to listen to Buck, who was forty-five. Buck was full of information on almost any subject. He was well-traveled and well-read and today he had been teaching Roy about navigation, explaining a rhumb line, which is a course that makes the same angle with each meridian which it crosses; it is constant in direction throughout and always appears as a straight line on charts.
“But the curve of shortest distance between any two points on the earth is always an arc of a great circle,” Roy’s uncle told him, “the sort of circle which would be marked out if we were to slice the earth into two halves, passing the cut through the ends of the course and the center of the earth. The shortest path will always be a great circle course.”
Buck had been a Lieutenant Commander in the navy during the war and he was a civil and mechanical engineer; sometimes his explanations were too esoteric or complicated for Roy to absorb, but his uncle was always careful to show Roy what he was talking about.
“It’s the wind you have to pay the closest attention to,” said Uncle Buck. “The winds will control the course more than mathematical considerations.”
As the kid in the Tarpons t-shirt ran by, Buck asked him, “Where’s he got it?”
“On the little pier at the end of Palmetto,” the kid shouted.
Buck cut off the hose and went into the utility shed and came back out with a sheathed knife and a hatchet. He handed the hatchet to Roy and said, “Come on, nephew, let’s go down there.”
Roy and his uncle walked along River Grove under massive hanging moss and cut across the narrow skiff launch to Palmetto Street, which they followed down to the little pier. When they got there they saw a skinny man about forty years old wearing only a pair of gray trousers with the butt of a pistol sticking out of the waistband and a dark brown Remington Ammo cap slicing up the belly side of a six-and-a-hal
f-foot-long alligator. The man’s pants, chest, and arms were spattered with blood.
Buck and Roy watched him work for a minute, then Buck said, “What are you going to do with the hide?”
The man was working fast and he did not look up.
“Throw it away. There’s a five hundred dollar fine you get caught with it. All I need’s the meat.”
Roy and his uncle and two boys who were about eight or nine years old and had been swimming in the Hillsborough River watched the man hack and tear feverishly at the carcass. It was still very hot although the sun had begun to go down. Roy knew that it was against the law to shoot a gator without a permit; he guessed that the man didn’t have permission to kill alligators, so he wanted to take what was edible and get going.
When the man had finished carving up the belly, he crammed the meat into a canvas sack, stood up and wiped his knife on his right trouser leg and said to Buck, “I’ll leave the rest to you, then.”
The man walked off with the sack over his left shoulder. Roy noticed that he was barefoot and his right leg was considerably shorter than his left. The bag full of gator meat seemed to help keep him balanced as he made his way up the pebbly incline from the dock and disappeared behind the hanging moss.
Buck unsheathed his knife, flipped what remained of the alligator onto its stomach and told Roy to chop off the head.
Roy hesitated and his uncle said, “Come on, nephew, we don’t want Fish and Game to find us. Run your fingers along the top of the spine and find the soft spot.”
The ridges along the gator’s back were hard as stones and sharp-edged but not abrasive like a shark’s skin. Roy’s fingers found what felt like a seam two inches behind the head and with both hands wrapped tightly around the handle of the hatchet raised it just above his right shoulder and brought it down into where he judged the seam to be. The blade cut a half-inch into the hide before meeting resistance from muscle and tendon. Roy dropped down from his squatting position and straddled the snout with a knee on either side of the gator’s head resting on the planks. The two boys watched intently as Roy hacked away until the head began to separate from the rest of the body. It took about fifteen or twenty minutes to sever the head entirely. When Roy stood up his legs and arms were trembling and his hands hurt.
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