“Pull the head away,” said his uncle, “and stand back.”
Buck knelt on the gator’s back from the opposite end and began cutting at the hide. Roy stood with the two boys and observed as Buck swiftly but carefully skinned the ancient-looking reptile. Sweat streamed down Roy’s uncle’s face as he worked, cutting evenly as he progressed from neck to tail, taking particular care not to mutilate the feet. The sun had been down for three hours before Buck completed the job. Roy and the two boys, who were cousins named Rupe and Rhett, were seated cross-legged on the pier.
“That was tough, huh?” Rupe said.
“Alligators have survived for tens of thousands of years,” said Buck. “They don’t live in houses, like people do, so they have to be protected from the elements.”
“God made ’em tough,” said Rhett.
“What you gonna do with the head?” asked Rupe.
“You can take it, if you like,” Buck said.
Rupe and Rhett stood up and together they lifted the head.
“Whoa, it’s heavy,” said Rupe, and they dropped it. “We can’t carry it all the way to my house.”
“Your mama wouldn’t let you keep it anyhow,” said Rhett.
“Shove it into the river,” said Buck.
The cousins slid the head to the end of the pier and pushed it over. There was a small splash when the head hit the water. It floated on the surface for a few seconds, then tilted backwards so that the mouth half opened and grinned at them before the head sank out of sight.
“Them were some terrible lookin’ teeth,” said Rhett.
Buck kicked what was left of the gator’s guts, bones and intestines into the river, then lifted the hide under the front legs.
“Grab the tail with two hands,” he told Roy. “Put your arms underneath. Adiós, muchachos.”
Rupe and Rhett watched Roy and his uncle carry off the hide.
Back at the house, Buck brought out from the garage a board about six feet long and three feet wide. He and Roy centered the hide on top of it, then Buck tacked it down so that it was stable. He went into the house and came back out with a box of salt and sprinkled the salt liberally all over the hide.
“Pick up the other end,” Buck said, and he and Roy carried the board with the gator skin tacked to it around to the backyard and set it down on the ground. Buck took two cinder blocks and placed them down five and a half feet apart, then he and Roy picked up the board and set it down end to end on the blocks.
“It’ll be all right here for now,” said Buck. “The sun will hit it first thing in the morning, then we’ll hoist it up onto the garage roof in the afternoon to dry out.”
Buck looped his right arm around Roy’s shoulders.
“You did a great job, nephew. I know that head didn’t come off easily.”
“You did the real work, Unk. You skinned the gator like a Seminole would.”
Both Roy and his uncle were covered with blood and gristle.
“How is it you were able to keep your concentration the way you did while you were skinning him?” asked Roy. “I mean, you hardly said a word for two hours.”
Buck pulled his blood-stained shirt off over his head and threw it down.
“I started thinking about your grandmother’s second husband, the one who raised your mother. He hated me and I hated him and so I imagined that I was skinning him instead of the alligator.”
“Why did he hate you?”
“For no good reason, really. I’m almost fourteen years older than your mother. He disliked the fact that my mother had been married before, so he resented my existence. Some men are like that; some women, too.”
“Did he hate my mother?”
“No, she was a young girl, and he sent her away to school when she was old enough. I was almost a man, it was easier for him to hate me.”
“My mother never talks about him; all I know is that he died.”
“He had a heart attack after he and your grandmother were married for ten years; then she remarried my father.”
“You must have really hated the guy to imagine that you were skinning him.”
“I pretended that he was still alive but barely conscious and that he knew what I was doing but was too weak to do anything about it. I imagined that he didn’t die until after I skinned him entirely.”
“Did he do anything terrible to you?”
“He banished me from his house, even though my mother and sister lived there. To see me, your grandmother had to meet me somewhere else, in a park or at a restaurant. Whenever she gave me money she made me promise that he would never know that she had.”
“That’s crazy, Unk. How could she allow that to happen?”
“I don’t know, Roy. People do all sorts of crazy things.”
Buck unfastened his belt and let his pants drop to the ground. His skinning knife was in its sheath which was still strung on the belt.
“I’m glad I never had to meet him,” said Roy.
“He wouldn’t have hated you, nephew. What’s terrible is that I still harbor such awful feelings for a man who’s been dead for twenty-five years. It’s no good to keep that kind of poison in you because after awhile the poison starts to work on you. I hope you never have to hate anyone like that.”
“I hope I won’t, either.”
“All right, let’s wash up and get some dinner.”
“Why didn’t we save the head?”
“The only way to preserve it would be to soak it in formaldehyde. Too much trouble. The catfish are feasting on it.”
“I bet those cousins are telling their folks about the alligator now.”
“Come on, Roy, get your clothes off.”
The head was scary, Roy thought, but it was beautiful, too. It was too bad that Rupe or Rhett hadn’t kept it.
The Vast Difference
“My Uncle Laszlo told me sex controls a man,” Harvey Orszag said, “a man can’t control it.”
Roy was walking to school with Orszag and another kid, Demetrious Atlas, who had recently moved to Chicago from New York City. Atlas talked a lot and was not shy about expressing his opinions even though he was new in the neighborhood. Roy had heard that was how people behaved in New York, that they weren’t afraid to chime in whenever they felt like it. Atlas was thirteen, a year older than Roy and Harvey; he was supposed to be in the eighth grade but was being made to repeat seventh grade because the Chicago school system was different than the one in New York.
“Yeah,” said Demetrious Atlas, “a man’s sex comes from the vast difference. We learned about it in Personal Hygiene at Brother Ray, the junior high I went to in the Bronx. The school’s name used to be Daniel Boone but because of civil rights or somethin’ it got renamed after Ray Charles the year before I got there.”
Atlas was shorter than both Harvey and Roy but he was wider and heavier. He said his father had once been a professional wrestler who was called Tiny Atlas, the Little Man Who Can Lift the World.
“What’s the vast difference?” Roy asked.
“Vast means big, don’t it?” said Harvey.
“It’s the tube goes from a man’s balls carries the juice. A guy gets a boner and shoots a girl the goods. Didn’t you learn about it already?”
“They don’t teach Personal Hygiene in Chicago,” said Orszag.
“I get a boner every morning at ten o’clock,” Atlas told them. “I can set my watch by it.”
It was the kind of day Roy almost did not mind going to school. The sky was dark gray so he figured there was rain in it but there were no drops falling yet. Sometimes he could see faces in the clouds but today, even though it was the beginning of May, there weren’t even wrinkles in them.
Roy and the other students took their seats in the classroom just as the bell rang but Mrs. Barbarossa was not there. Mrs. Barbarossa was a h
eavyset, middleaged woman who wore thick glasses with frames like television sets and an orange wig. The students knew it was a wig because often when Mrs. Barbarossa returned to the room after a bathroom break her hair was on crooked. Once, the wig was even on backwards and Mrs. Barbarossa had to keep pushing the orange hair out of her eyes. Finally she excused herself and presumably went back to the teachers’ bathroom and readjusted the wig because when she returned it was on straight. Mrs. Barbarossa claimed that her husband, Barney Barbarossa, the Kitchen King, who appeared in commercials for his kitchen appliance store during the Midnight Movie on local television, was a descendant of an Algerian pirate from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, only she didn’t call him a pirate, she called him a corsair, which is how Roy learned that word.
After a couple of minutes the door opened and a young woman walked in, closed the door behind her and set down the books and papers she was carrying on Mrs. Barbarossa’s desk. She stood still for a few moments, looking over the students before she spoke. Roy stared hard at her. She was probably the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with wavy black hair that fell to her shoulders, unblemished tan skin, large brown eyes and full red lips with sparkling white teeth under them that gleamed like a beam from a ray gun when she opened her mouth.
“Good morning, students,” she said. “Or, as they say in my native country of Mexico, buenos dias. Mrs. Barbarossa is ill today so I will be substituting for her. My name is Señorita Rita Gomez, or Miss Gomez, if you prefer.”
She turned around and wrote the name Miss Gomez with chalk on the blackboard behind the desk. Miss Gomez was slim and not very tall but Roy thought she was perfect. When she turned back around and began to speak, Roy could not hear what she was saying, especially once he noticed that she was wearing a sleeveless white blouse that permitted tufts of puffy black hair to protrude from her armpits. Roy had never seen hair exploding from underneath a woman’s arms like this before. He looked over at Demetrious Atlas, whose eyes were glued to the coffee-colored substitute teacher. It was not yet ten o’clock but Roy guessed that like himself and most of the other boys in the room Atlas had a boner already.
By the time school ended that day, Roy was exhausted. He was tired even though he had done nothing other than study Miss Gomez. Her every movement mesmerized him and walking to his house he felt as if he were in a kind of trance. Even her voice captivated him; instead of speaking it sounded to Roy as if she were singing like Julie London only with a Spanish accent.
When Roy got home his grandfather, whom he called Pops, was sitting in an armchair in the livingroom reading the afternoon newspaper.
“Hello, boy,” Pops said, “did you have a good day at school?”
“Mrs. Barbarossa was out sick. We had a substitute so we didn’t have to do much. Her name was Rita Gomez and she’s from Mexico.”
Roy sat down on the sofa. He could see that Pops had the newspaper folded open to the sports section.
“If you want something to eat, Roy, there’s ham and Swiss in the refrigerator.”
“Pops, have you ever heard of the vast difference? A kid who moved here from New York says every guy’s got one. It has something to do with sex.”
“He must mean the vas deferens. It’s a duct that carries sperm from a man’s testicles into his penis in order to impregnate a woman.”
“Can a man control it? Harvey Orszag’s Uncle Laszlo says you can’t.”
“Well, Roy, that’s a good question. I don’t know how much Harvey Orszag’s Uncle Laszlo knows about biology but I suppose the answer is that some men are better at controlling it than others.”
“Señorita Gomez is from Mexico,” Roy said. “She’s very pretty and she doesn’t shave the hair under her arms.”
“There are a lot of pretty girls in Mexico,” said Pops.
Roy imagined Rita Gomez standing in front of him in the livingroom.
“I think I’d like to go there,” he said.
The Birdbath
In 1964, when Roy was a student at the University of Missouri, in Columbia, two friends of a recent acquaintance, Tom Booth, who occupied the room next to Roy’s in their dormitory, stopped by to see Tom while he and Roy were in his room playing records. Bill and Bob were from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where they had gone to high school with Tom, and where they still lived. Bill worked in a filling station and Bob in a lumber yard. They told Tom and Roy that they were on their way to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit Elvis Presley.
“He know you’re comin’?” Tom asked.
Bill and Bob both snickered, and Bob said, “Naw, we thought we’d keep it a surprise.”
Bill was a tall, lanky kid with sandy hair and a wispy mustache. Bob was shorter and even skinnier and already losing his hair. Both of them were eighteen, the same age as Tom and Roy.
“How do you know Elvis is at Graceland?” Roy said. “He might be off in Hollywood making a movie.”
Bob removed a pack of Lucky Strikes from the rolled-up left sleeve of his white tee shirt, shook out a cigarette, put it between his lips and lit it. He offered the pack around. Tom took one and stuck it in his mouth. Bob lit it off the same match, then blew out the match.
“We just want to see the place,” said Bill. “Be cool to check out the King’s crib, maybe eyeball his pink Cadillacs. Heard he bought one for each of his Memphis Mafia, and his mama, too.”
“I think she died,” Bob said.
In Bill and Bob’s honor, Tom put on a 45 of Elvis singing “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)”. After it finished playing, Roy said, “I really like Buddy Holly’s version of that one. You ever hear it?”
“Elvis does everything better than anyone else,” said Bob.
“Know who Elvis says is his favorite singer?” Bill asked.
Tom and Roy shook their heads.
“Mario Lanza.”
“I saw him in a movie,” said Tom, “wearin’ a pirate costume or somethin’. He’s pretty fat.”
“He’s fat, yeah,” Bill said, “but he’s got a real deep voice that Elvis likes.”
Bob nodded. “Elvis is startin’ to sound more like Mario Lanza now,” he said. “Like on ‘Devil in Disguise’.”
“ ‘Little Sister’, too,” said Bill.
Bill stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe, stood up and flicked the butt out the window. It was a late afternoon in October and the sky was getting dark.
Bob stood up and so did Tom and Roy.
“We’d best be movin’,” Bob said.
Tom and Roy shook hands with both of them.
“Let me know how it goes with Elvis,” said Tom. “Good to see you guys.”
“Nice to meet you,” Roy said. “Good luck.”
“Say hi to the King for me,” said Tom.
“You bet,” said Bob.
About four thirty the next morning, someone knocked on Roy’s door and woke him up. It was Tom. Roy let him in.
“What’s the matter?” Roy said.
“Bill and Bob were just here again.”
“They’re here?”
Tom shook his head. “No, they’re gone now, but they wanted to show me somethin’ before they headed back to Cape Girardeau.”
“What was it?”
“They got a cement birdbath in the back of Bill’s Apache pick-up. Said they stole it out of Elvis’s garden at Graceland.”
“Why?”
“Elvis wasn’t there. A guard at the gate told ’em the King was away in California or Hawaii makin’ a movie, just like you said.”
Roy got back into bed and Tom Booth stood by the window. The sky was turning pink.
“So they copped his birdbath?”
“Yeah. They snuck in somehow and took it, then drove back here for a pit stop. I went out and saw the birdbath in the bed of Bill’s truck.”
“Anything
special about it?”
“Just looked like a regular old birdbath to me,” said Tom. “Thought you’d like to know. I’m goin’ to bed.”
A week later, Tom told Roy he’d heard from Bill and Bob. Apparently, after they’d gotten home to Cape Girardeau, they called Graceland and told someone there that they were big fans of Elvis’s, that they’d taken the birdbath and would return it if they could meet Elvis in person after he returned from Hollywood. They told whoever it was they spoke to that they would call back the next day, which they did. One of Elvis’s buddies, a guy named Red, told them that he’d called Elvis and Elvis said his movie was finished and that he’d be back in Memphis in a couple of days. Elvis told Red to tell Bill and Bob that if they returned the birdbath he wouldn’t press charges, and he agreed to meet them in person.
“Did they go back?” asked Roy.
Tom nodded. “Yeah, delivered the birdbath and the guard let ’em carry it to where it had stood in the garden and set it down. Elvis and Red came out and Elvis gave both Bill and Bob autographed pictures of himself and had Red take a photograph of the three of them with one arm around Bill’s shoulder and one arm around Bob’s. Bob told me that Elvis said they’d done a good service by showing him how his security at Graceland wasn’t what it should be, that everyone wasn’t as honorable as Bill and Bob. They told Elvis how they’d gotten onto the grounds and smuggled out the birdbath and Elvis said he reckoned as how one of these days they’d be doing bigger things and that he’d be reading about them in the newspapers.”
“They’re lucky he kept his word and didn’t press charges.”
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