Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  “Rudy, good to see you,” he said. “This is your boy?”

  “Hello, Lou. Roy, this is Lou Napoli. He works with Mr. Mosca.”

  Lou Napoli was not a large man but he had very big hands. He shook hands with Roy and smiled at him.

  “You’re fortunate to have a son, Rudy. And one handsome enough to be Italian. Quanti anni ha?” he asked Roy.

  “He wants to know how old you are,” said Roy’s father.

  “I’ll be seven tomorrow.”

  “A lucky number,” said Lou. “Let’s go in.”

  They descended three steps into an enormous living room. The ceiling was very high with little sparkling lights in it. The walls were made of stone. There were five or six couches, several armchairs, lots of tables and lamps and a stone fireplace that ran nearly the entire length of one wall. A swimming pool snaked under a glass door into the rear of the room.

  “I’ve never seen a swimming pool in a living room before,” Roy said.

  “This is only part of the pool,” said Lou. “The rest of it is outside, on the other side of that glass door. It’s heated. You want to take a dip?”

  “I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”

  “If you want to go in, let me know and we’ll find you one. I’ll tell Jocko you’re here.”

  “Pretty swank, isn’t it, son?”

  “Jocko must be really rich.”

  “Call him Mr. Mosca. Yes, he’s done well for himself. When his family came to America, from Sicily, they had nothing.”

  “Your parents didn’t have anything when they came to America, either, Dad, and you were ten years old. How old was Mr. Mosca when his family came?”

  “Probably about the same age I was. None of that matters now. We’re Americans.”

  “Jocko is here,” announced Lou Napoli.

  Jocko Mosca was wearing a dark gray suit, a light blue shirt and a black tie. He was tall, had a big nose and full head of silver hair. He entered the room from a door behind a bend in the pool. Roy noticed that there was no knob on the door. Roy’s father waited for Jocko to walk over to him. They embraced, then shook hands, each man using both of their hands.

  “It’s good of you to come all the way out here, Rudy,” Jocko said.

  “We enjoyed the drive. This is my son, Roy.”

  Jocko Mosca leaned down as he shook hands with Roy. His nose was covered with small holes and tiny red bumps.

  “Benvenuto, Roy. That means welcome in Italian.”

  “I know. Angelo taught me some Italian words.”

  “Who is Angelo?”

  “He’s an organ grinder. He has a monkey named Dopo. They come into my dad’s store and have coffee and Dopo dunks doughnuts in the cup with me. Dopo means after.”

  Jocko stood up straight and said, “Rudy, you didn’t tell me your boy’s a paesan’.”

  They laughed, then Jocko said to Roy, “I hope you’ll be comfortable in here while your father and I go into another room to talk.”

  “I’ll be okay, Mr. Mosca.”

  “Call me Jocko. We’re paesanos, after all.”

  The two men left the room and Roy sat down on a couch. A pretty young woman with long black hair, wearing a maid’s uniform, came in carrying a tray, which she set down on a low table.

  “This is a ham sandwich, sweet pickles and a Coca-Cola for you,” she said. “If you need something, press that button on the wall behind you.”

  Roy felt sleepy, so he lay down and closed his eyes. When he reopened them, Lou Napoli was standing in front of him, holding a cake with eight candles on it.

  “Did you have a nice nap, Roy?” he asked.

  Jocko Mosca and Roy’s father were there, as was the maid.

  “He must have been tired from the drive,” said Roy’s father. “We got up very early today.”

  Lou passed the cake to the maid, who put it on a table and lit the candles. Lou, the maid, Jocko and Roy’s father sang “Happy Birthday”, then Lou said, “Make a wish and blow out the candles. The eighth one is for good luck.”

  Roy silently wished that his father would come back to live with him and his mother. He blew out all of the candles with one try.

  Later, while his father was putting what was left of the cake, which the maid had put into a blue box, in the trunk of the Cadillac, Jocko Mosca handed Roy a little white card.

  “This is my telephone number, Roy,” he said. “If you ever have a problem, or anything you want to talk about, call me. Keep the card in a safe place, keep it for yourself. Don’t show it to anyone.”

  “Can I show it to my dad?”

  “He knows the number.”

  Roy’s father started the car. Roy and Jocko shook hands, then Jocko opened the front passenger side door for him.

  “Remember, Roy, I’m here for you, even just to talk. I like to talk.”

  Jocko closed the door and waved. He and Lou Napoli watched as Roy’s father navigated the driveway.

  “You all right, son? Wasn’t it a nice surprise that they had a cake for you?”

  “Do you want to know my wish?”

  “No. You should keep what you wish for to yourself. Remember that you can’t depend only on wishing for something to come true. It will always be up to you to make it happen.”

  “Always?”

  “Always.”

  The gate in front of one of the houses had a metal sculpture of a fire-breathing dragon’s head on it.

  “River Woods is a beautiful place, isn’t it, Roy? Would you rather live out here or in the city?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. I like when we’re driving and we’re not anywhere yet.”

  “So do I, son. Maybe, now that you’re older, we’re beginning to think alike.”

  The History and Proof of the

  Spots on the Sun

  Roy accompanied his friend Frank to see a foreign movie Frank wanted to see at a little theater near The Loop.

  “What language is it in?” Roy asked him.

  “French. It’ll have the translation in English on the bottom of the screen, but the words are only on for a few seconds so most of the time I can’t finish reading it.”

  “I know. My mother likes to see foreign movies. I used to go with her when I was younger.”

  Both of the boys were thirteen years old. They had been close friends since the age of nine. Frank lived with his mother and two older brothers in a tenement on the same block as Roy and his mother. Frank’s mother worked selling vacuum cleaners door to door. She slept in a bed that folded down from a wall in their livingroom, and the three boys shared a room with two beds in it. Roy and his mother lived in a larger apartment that she had inherited from one of her grandfathers. She worked as a receptionist in a hospital. Both Roy and Frank’s fathers were dead, Frank’s from a heart attack when Frank was seven, and Roy’s from cancer when Roy was ten. Roy was an only child, his mother had been married and divorced twice; Frank’s mother remained a widow.

  Once Roy had heard her say to Frank and his brothers, “Men are like spots on the sun. Who knows what they are or how they got there? A woman can’t even be sure they’ll still be there the next day.”

  “But Ma,” Frank’s oldest brother, Ronnie, who was sixteen, said, “we’ll all be men soon.”

  “I suppose you’ll take care of me when I’m old, won’t you?” she asked.

  “Of course we will,” answered Arnie, the middle brother.

  “Proof! I don’t have any proof!” their mother shouted, then put on a coat, picked up her purse and left the apartment.

  The theater was only half full. Roy and Frank were the youngest people there. The movie’s title was Cela ne fait rien (It Makes No Difference). The actors did not do anything much except talk and smoke cigarettes, and at the very end a woman took off her clothes, walked into the ocean and disa
ppeared.

  When they were back outside, Roy asked Frank, “Why did you want to see that movie?”

  “My brother Ronnie’s girlfriend, Rhonda, said her cousin, Lisa, who’s studying to be an actress, told her it was smart and sexy.”

  “The woman who drowned herself kept her back to the camera,” Roy said, “so we didn’t even get to see her tits. In most of the foreign movies my mother took me to the women always showed their tits.”

  “Yeah, that was disappointing,” said Frank, “and the translation went by so fast I couldn’t get it all.”

  “There was too much talking,” Roy said, “but the part where the boy found a gun under his mother’s pillow was interesting.”

  “I wouldn’t have put it back,” Frank said. “I thought he should have shot her boyfriend when the guy hit her.”

  “After the guy walked out and she was lying on the floor, did you catch what she said to her son?”

  “Yes,” said Frank, “the boy asked why he’d hit her and she said, ‘Because he loves me.’ I would’ve gone into her bedroom, gotten the gun and run after the guy and plugged him. All she did was put a cigarette in her mouth and tell the boy to get a match and light it.”

  It was already dark and beginning to snow when Roy and Frank came out of the movie theater, but they walked slowly anyway. The top of the head of the statue in front of Our Lady of Insufferable Insolence was white. As Roy and Frank passed the church Roy remembered his grandmother Rose telling him that Saint Pantera had been born in Africa but the archdiocese would not allow her face and hands to be painted black.

  “Do you think the kid was better off after his mother committed suicide?” Roy asked.

  “I don’t know. We never got to see his father, who lived in a different country. Switzerland, someone said. Maybe the kid went to live there with him.”

  “One thing about European movies,” said Roy, “there’s always more to think about afterwards than with American movies.”

  “Probably because they’ve got more history there,” Frank said. “That’s why more stuff happens in our movies. Americans don’t like to think so much.”

  War is Merely Another Kind of

  Writing and Language

  Walking into the A&P to buy a quart of milk, Roy spotted a tall, thin guy wearing an oversized hooded sweatshirt with the hood up and floppy pants watching a bunch of little kids playing in an empty lot. The guy had his back toward him but even though Roy could not see his face, Roy thought there was something peculiar about the way he was standing there, slightly slumped over, bent, not moving. The kids were very young, four, five and six years old, running and jumping around in the dirt and weeds. Roy was nine. He knew a few of the kids, one of whom was his friend Jimmy Boyle’s younger brother, Paulie, who was six and a half.

  Roy stopped and watched the guy frozen at the edge of the lot. It was a boiling hot day in July. The guy shouldn’t be wearing a big sweatshirt with the hood up over his head, Roy thought. If he made a move toward the kids, Roy figured he could brain him with a rock. The empty lot was full of rocks and leftover half-bricks from when an addition to the Rogers house next door was built. Roy picked up a broken broom handle from the gutter in front of where he was standing. It had a sharp point on it.

  The guy watched the kids for about two minutes more before he began shuffling away in the opposite direction from where Roy was headed. The kids probably had not even noticed him. When the guy turned the corner and was out of sight, Roy tossed the broom stick back into the gutter, then walked to the store.

  When Roy came back carrying the milk, the kids were no longer in the empty lot. He walked to the corner the hooded guy had turned and Roy saw him about a quarter of the way down the block sitting at the edge of the sidewalk with his feet in the gutter. Roy still could not see his face. Nobody else was around. It was dinner time so the kids had gone to their houses. Roy stood looking at the curved figure on the sidewalk. He thought about going back for the broken broom handle, taking it and poking the guy and telling him to get up and keep moving. Just after he had this thought, the guy toppled forward and his entire body collapsed into the gutter.

  A woman came out of a house next to where the guy was lying. She had a small dog on a leash, a black, brown and white mutt. The dog strained at the leash, trying to sniff the body, but the woman jerked him away. She walked the dog toward Roy.

  “I saw that guy a little while ago watching some little kids playing in a vacant lot around the corner,” Roy told her. “I thought he might be a child molester.”

  “It’s Arthur Ray, Grace Lonergan’s boy,” said the woman. “He’s not right in his head. I’ll knock on her door and tell her to come and get him. He was hurt in Korea.”

  Roy knew there had been a war in Korea, which was a country near Japan and China, but he was not really sure where those countries were, only that they were very far from Chicago. Arthur Ray Lonergan probably had not known where or just how far away Korea was either until he went there.

  The End of the Story

  The dead man lying in the alley behind the Anderson house was identified by the police as James “Tornado” Thompson, a lone wolf stick-up man from Gary, Indiana. After robbing the currency exchange on Ojibway Boulevard in Chicago, he had gone out the front door holding a gun in one hand and was confronted on the sidewalk by two beat cops who were shooting the breeze before one of them went off duty. A clerk from the currency exchange appeared in the doorway and shouted, “Stop that man! He just robbed us!” Thompson pivoted and shot him. The cops pulled their guns but the thief dashed next door into the Green Harp Tavern and ran through the bar out the back door. One of the cops followed him; the other called for back up and for an ambulance to attend the wounded clerk, who was lying on the sidewalk.

  Tornado Thompson ran down the alley. Roy and Jimmy Boyle and two of the McLaughlin brothers were playing ball when they saw Thompson speeding toward them holding a gun, followed by a cop.

  “Holy shit!” yelled Jimmy Boyle. “Get down!”

  The cop shouted, “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  Thompson did not stop but stumbled over a crack in the uneven pavement and fell down, still gripping the gun. He twisted around and fired once at the cop, who stopped, dropped to one knee, aimed, and shot Tornado Thompson in the head.

  “Stay down, boys!” said the cop.

  He crept forward in a crouch, keeping his revolver trained on the robber. When he got to the body he determined the man was dead, then took the gun out of Thompson’s hand and replaced his revolver in its holster.

  Jimmy Boyle got up and rushed over to the body.

  “Wow,” he said, “you plugged him right in the forehead.”

  Roy and Johnny and Billy McLaughlin stood up and walked over. The cop stood up, too. A patrol car entered the alley from the Hammond Street end.

  “Move away, boys,” the cop said.

  The car stopped and two cops got out. Another police car entered from the same direction and pulled up behind the first car. Two cops got out of it, too. They surrounded the body and the cop who’d shot Thompson told them what happened. A few neighbors, including Mr. Anderson, came out of the gangways of their houses. Three more police cars approached from the Ojibway Boulevard end of the alley. They stopped and six more cops joined the others.

  “There ain’t been so many people in the alley since Otto Polsky’s garage burned down,” said Johnny.

  “He was refinishing a rowboat he’d built,” Roy said, “and the shellac caught fire.”

  A few minutes later, an ambulance, its siren off, drove in off Hammond Street, stopped, and two men in white coats got out. One of them removed a stretcher from the rear of the ambulance, then they both walked over. After exchanging a few words with one of the cops, they lifted Thompson’s body onto the stretcher, carried it to the ambulance, slid it in, and backed the ambulance out of the al
ley.

  “What happened?” Mr. Anderson asked the boys.

  “A guy come runnin’ down the alley,” said Jimmy, “with a cop chasin’ him. The guy fired at the cop, the cop fired back and killed him.”

  “Hit him in the forehead,” said Billy.

  “Who was the guy?”

  “I heard one of the cops say his name was Tornado Thompson, from Gary,” Roy said. “He held up the currency exchange next to The Green Harp.”

  “He was a black guy,” said Billy. “Why would he come all the way from Gary, Indiana, to Chicago to pull a hold up?”

  The neighbors went back to their houses and all of the police cars left. Two cops remained in the alley, the cop who’d shot Tornado Thompson and the beat cop who’d stayed on Ojibway Boulevard.

  “The detectives are at the currency exchange,” said the beat cop.

  “How’s the clerk?”

  “Dead.”

  “You fellas all right?” asked the cop who’d done the shooting.

  The boys all nodded.

  “Come on, Dom,” said the other cop. “We got time to stop in the tavern, have a shot and a beer.”

  “Why was he called Tornado?” asked Roy.

  “He was a halfback at the University of Indiana, eight, nine years ago,” said Dom. “I saw him run back a kick-off ninety-four yards against Northwestern. It’s how he got his nickname. I wish I hadn’t had to shoot him.”

  The two cops walked up the alley. They boys watched them go through the back door of The Green Harp.

  “I think I’d like to be a cop,” said Billy.

  The next afternoon, Roy’s grandfather read to him from an article in the Chicago Daily News about the incident. The basic facts were there along with the additional information that a four year old Negro boy was found alone in a 1952 Plymouth parked a block away from the currency exchange. The boy was Tornado Thompson’s son, Amos, who had been told by his father to wait in the car until he came back. A woman walking by had seen Amos Thompson sitting in the back seat of the Plymouth, crying. When she asked him what was wrong, the boy told her his father had been gone for a long time, that he didn’t know where he was. The woman told a cop about the child in the car and he took Amos to the precinct station, where he informed the sergeant in charge that his mother and both of his grandmothers were dead and that he and his father had been living in their car because they didn’t have any money. Amos was given over to The Simon the Cyrenian Refuge for Colored Children.