Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  That’s awful, Pops,” said Roy.

  “Yes, Roy, it is. And for Amos, it’s not the end of the story.”

  Innocent of the Blood

  From the first time he met him, Roy disliked Buddy Dobler. Dobler had an identical twin named Marty, so kids called them Buddy and Marty Double. It was easy to tell them apart because Buddy was taller and heavier and was more assertive than his brother. Marty was quiet and good-natured, whereas Buddy was abrasive and mean-spirited. The twins attended a different grammar school than Roy, but they lived not too far away from Roy’s neighborhood, and hung out with his friends Johnny Murphy and Tommy Cunningham, whose families were members of the same church as the Doblers.

  Buddy and Marty were in the eighth grade and Roy was in the seventh, as were Johnny and Tommy.

  “Buddy beat up a grown man by himself,” Johnny Murphy told Roy. “Tommy saw him do it.”

  Johnny and Roy were walking on Ojibway Avenue going to meet Tommy and the Doblers at Blood of Our Savior Park. It was the first day of December but no snow had fallen yet in Chicago. The temperature was just above freezing and wind was gusting hard off the lake. Both boys were wearing leather jackets, earmuffs and gloves.

  “Who’d he beat up?”

  “A wino on Clark Street was bummin’ for change. Tommy said Double clobbered the guy with a garbage can lid.”

  “Was the guy big?”

  “Tommy didn’t say. He was just a regular-sized wino.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Who? Buddy Dobler?”

  “Yeah. I think he’s a jerk. He likes to push people around.”

  “He do somethin’ to you?”

  “I don’t hardly know him. His brother’s okay, though.”

  “Their mother was in a mental hospital.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard my parents talkin’ about it. My dad said Mrs. Dobler cut her wrists and her throat and almost died.”

  “When was this?”

  “She got out of the bin two or three months ago. Maybe Buddy’s angry about his mother so he takes it out on other people.”

  At Blood of Our Savior the Dobler twins were kneeling on the ground next to the basketball court shooting craps with Tommy Cunningham and another kid Roy didn’t recognize.

  “Who’s that?” Roy asked Johnny. “The guy with the right side of his head shaved.”

  “Harley Fox. He’s fourteen or fifteen. Remember him? He got sent to St. Charles after he set his five year old cousin on fire. They kept him in a year. He goes to a special school now.”

  Buddy Dobler was holding the dice. Coins and a few dollar bills were on the ground. Buddy kissed the dice, said, “Come on, eight,” and threw them.

  One die rolled off the concrete into the dirt. It turned up three. The other die showed four.

  “You lose,” said Harley Fox.

  “It don’t count,” said Buddy, and scooped up both dice. “One of ’em fell off.”

  “The hell it don’t,” said Harley. He picked up the money. “Pass the dice.”

  Buddy Dobler chucked the dice hard at Fox’s face and jumped on him. Both Tommy and Marty Dobler stood up quickly, got out of the way, and watched Buddy and Harley wrestle, as did Roy and Johnny Murphy.

  Buddy got to his feet, grabbed hold of Harley’s left leg and dragged him around in the dirt. Fox was on his back and Roy could see that on the shaved side of his head were several stitches. Fox was trying to twist away but he couldn’t until Buddy tripped backwards over the low curb bordering a footpath. Harley Fox sprang to his feet and kicked Buddy in the head. He was wearing motorcycle boots and Dobler stayed down. Fox kicked him a few more times and then stomped down as hard as he could with the heel of his left boot on Buddy’s face.

  Harley was shorter than Buddy but he outweighed him by twenty pounds. Dobler wasn’t moving or saying anything. Blood ran out of his nose and the sides of his mouth and his eyes were closed. Fox took a book of matches out of the right pocket of his bomber jacket, struck one, lit the matchbook, bent down and set fire to Buddy’s hair. Marty took off his coat and tried to smother the flames but Harley stopped him, wrenched the coat out of Marty’s hands and tossed it aside.

  “The old lady nurses at St. Charles are tougher than your brother,” Harley Fox said to him.

  Fox turned and walked away. The back of his head and jacket were covered with mud. Marty picked up his coat and went to cover his brother’s hair, but the fire was already out. Buddy’s forehead was singed and the front of his hair had been burned off. He still was not moving.

  “We gotta call an ambulance,” said Tommy.

  Johnny Murphy picked a dime out of the dirt and said, “There’s a pay phone in the drugstore next to the park. I’ll go call.”

  Marty Dobler was sitting on the ground, staring at Buddy. Tommy came over and stood by Roy.

  “I guess Fox learned how to fight like that in the reformatory,” he said.

  “Setting someone on fire is his own idea,” said Roy.

  Johnny Murphy came back and said, “I told the drugstore owner what happened, so he called.”

  When the emergency medical crew lifted Buddy onto a stretcher, he groaned a little, but he did not move or open his eyes. Marty went along with him in the ambulance.

  “I should go tell Buddy’s parents so they can meet him at the hospital,” said Tommy.

  “Here’s the dime I was gonna use,” Johnny said, digging it out of his right front pants pocket and handing it to him. “Talk to Mr. Dobler. You know his wife’s not right in the head.”

  “What do you think’ll happen to Harley?” asked Tommy.

  “Buddy started the fight,” said Roy.

  “True,” said Tommy, “but Harley torched him. Walk over to the drugstore with me. After I make the call we can get somethin’ to eat.”

  As they passed the sign Blood of Our Savior Park, Roy thought about why he did not feel bad or upset about Buddy Dobler being hurt; he wondered if he should, even though he didn’t like him. When Tommy went into the drugstore, Johnny and Roy waited outside.

  “I guess Buddy deserved a beatin’,” Johnny said. “None of us jumped in to help him until Marty tried to put out the fire on his head. Maybe Buddy is a jerk, like you said.”

  “When Jesus was carrying the cross,” said Roy, “nobody jumped in to help him, either.”

  The Italian Hat

  Roy’s mother’s friend June DeLisa was the kind of woman who would fly from Chicago to Venice, Italy, just to buy a hat. She did this in September of 1956, and when she returned Roy’s mother asked her what was so special about the hat.

  “It’s handmade, of course, and designed by a man named Tito Verdi, who claims to be related to the famous composer. He’s very old, in his late eighties or early nineties. The materials he uses are woven by crones in the hills of Puglia. Anyway, how do you like it?”

  The hat perched perilously on the right side of June DeLisa’s head. Other than an extraordinarily brilliant yellow-green feather attached to the radically raked left side of the tri-corner, Kitty thought the hat unremarkable; even the crumpled blue material that formed the construction looked like it could have been purchased for a dollar ninety-eight at Woolworth’s.

  “I like the feather. I’ve never seen such a radiant yellow before.”

  “Plucked from a rare species in the Belgian Congo.”

  “Dare I ask what you paid for it?”

  “You daren’t.”

  June DeLisa’s husband had made a fortune on the commodities market. Kitty and June had met before either of them had gotten married, when they both modelled fur coats at the Merchandise Mart.

  “How was Venice?”

  “It’s always lovely at this time of year, unless there’s a hot spell. You’ve never been, have you? Crowded, but still li
ke being in a dream, especially just after dawn.”

  “Did Lloyd go with you?”

  “Oh, no. He has his polo to occupy him. And Mrs. Gringold.”

  “I thought he’d ended it with her.”

  Roy came into the livingroom, where his mother and June DeLisa were seated on the sofa.

  “Goodness, Roy,” June said, “you’re growing up so fast. How old are you now?”

  “I’ll be eight next month.”

  “Mrs. DeLisa has just returned from Italy. She’s telling me about her trip.”

  “Do you like my new hat, Roy? I had it made for me over there.”

  “It looks like the one Robin Hood wears, only his is brown, not blue.”

  “What is it, sweetheart? I thought you were going to play outside with the Murphy boys.”

  “It’s raining, so I’m going to build a model in my room.”

  “Let me know if you need anything. If June and I decide to go out, I’ll tell you.”

  Roy left the room. He did not dislike June DeLisa, but seeing her made him think that she was going to go home and jump out a window from her apartment on the 30th floor of the building she lived in on Lake Shore Drive.

  “So he’s seeing Anastasia again.”

  “He never really stopped. I’ll probably have to kill her, or get a divorce. If I decide to have her killed, would you mind if I asked Rudy about getting someone to do it? You and he are still on good terms, aren’t you?”

  “Stop it, June. Don’t even talk like that. Of course Rudy and I are on good terms. We’re very close, and he sees Roy once or twice a week. Rudy loves his son more than anything.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’s too sick now to do anything about it.”

  “As if she hasn’t already done enough.”

  “Since I divorced Rudy, she’s actually begun to be more respectful of him.”

  “Rose respects what he can do, or have done, you mean.”

  “He provides very well for Roy.”

  “And for you, too, I hope.”

  “I can’t complain.”

  “He still loves you, Kitty. He always will. You’re luckier for that. Lloyd never cared for me the way Rudy does you.”

  “He doesn’t love Anastasia, I don’t think. Does she love Lloyd?”

  “If Maurice Gringold didn’t own two banks and half the state of Ohio, I doubt she would stay married to him.”

  “Take off that hat, June. Just looking at it makes me nervous.”

  June removed her hat and put it down on the coffee table.

  “I feel useless, Kitty. If Lloyd and I had children I don’t suppose I would.”

  Rain was coming down hard. The two women sat without talking and listened to it bang against the windows and the roof.

  “I asked old Signore Verdi how he had come to be a hat maker and he told me it was because he was a lousy violinist. Isn’t that funny?”

  Kitty looked at June’s hat.

  “Did Verdi tell you that feather came from the Belgian Congo?”

  The Senegalese Twist

  Roy had walked for several blocks before he realized he was lost. His friend Danny Luna had moved with his family to a new neighborhood and Roy was looking for their house. Danny had told him it was on the edge of Chinatown on Rhinelander Avenue, an apartment above the Far East Laundromat, a few blocks south of Superior. Danny’s father worked as a drover in the Stockyards pens and his mother, a seamstress, was from Tell City, Indiana, a Swiss community. Danny said she had run away from Tell City when she was sixteen and come to Chicago, where she met his father, an illegal immigrant from Juarez, Mexico.

  Since Danny was born, the Luna family had moved twelve times, one for each year of his life. He and Roy had played together on baseball teams for the past two years and Roy wanted to get him to play second base on the Tecumseh Cubs, for whom Roy was going to be the shortstop. The Lunas did not have a telephone, otherwise Roy would have called him.

  Roy found himself on the corner of Menominee and Van Buren streets. He had no idea where Rhinelander Avenue was, so he decided to ask someone. He went into a beauty shop called Miss Racy’s Powder Room, figuring there had to be a woman in there who could give him directions. Roy was surprised to see that all of the women in Miss Racy’s Powder Room, both the customers and hair stylists, were black.

  A slender girl with skin the color of maple syrup came up to Roy and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Don’t tell me you’re lookin’ for your mama, baby, ’cause she ain’t been here.”

  All of the women laughed, and the girl, who looked to Roy to be about eighteen, poked Roy on his chest with the long, purple painted nails on the two middle fingers of her right hand. She had red hair that stood up at least eight inches from her head, brown eyes with blue shadow on the lids, and freckles all over her face.

  “What’s your problem, sweetness?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Rhinelander Avenue. A friend of mine lives there over the Far East Laundromat.”

  “What your friend can do for you I can’t?”

  Most of the women were no longer paying attention to Roy and the girl, but the few who were giggled and shouted, “Rock that cradle, Red!”, “His mama do find her way here, she gonna close us down!” and “Quit scarin’ that boy, Charleen. He ain’t big enough to do you right no how!”

  “How old are you, sugar?” the girl asked Roy.

  “Twelve and a half.”

  “That’s what my milkman delivers every Tuesday and Friday,” said a woman with a scalpful of green paste, which made one woman howl and say, “Uh huh.”

  Roy looked around the walls, which were decorated with posters from the Regal Theater and Aragon Ballroom featuring photographs of Ruth Brown, Chuck Jackson, Sarah Vaughan and Nat “King” Cole. Also tacked up were signs advertising hair straightening, skin lightening, manicures and pedicures. But the one that intrigued Roy read, “We Do Senegalese Twist”.

  “You got good, wavy hair,” the girl said. “Be longer than most boys.”

  “I don’t like getting haircuts,” said Roy.

  She ran her painted fingers through his hair from back to front, then front to back.

  “I could do somethin’ nice with it.”

  “What’s the Senegalese Twist? It sounds like a kind of dance.”

  “Show it to him, Charleen,” crowed Green Paste, “out back!”

  “It’s okay,” said Roy, “I’ll find Rhinelander. Thanks, anyway.”

  He opened the door to the street and went out. Before he could walk away, one of Charleen’s hands was on his left shoulder. Roy turned around and looked at her.

  “We call it Chopsticks Street,” she said. “Go up a block on Van Buren, then right until you run into it. What’s your name?”

  “Roy.”

  “Mine is Charleen. C-h-a-r-l-e-e-n. You tall for your age, Roy. Almost tall as me, and I’m seventeen. I be in Miss Racy’s every day but Sunday and Monday you want to take me up on my offer.”

  “I live pretty far away from here.”

  Charleen’s freckles glittered in the sunlight. A butterfly landed on top of her high-piled hair.

  “There’s a butterfly on your head.”

  “Those ladies, they get raunchy, don’t they? Miss Racy say the reason I’m attracted to very young boys is because my stepdaddy messed with me. He’s gone now. Marleen, my sister, she cut off his privates while he was sleepin’ and he bled to death. He was messin’ with her, too. The butterfly still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “He like me. You like me you know me better.”

  She tilted her head and the butterfly flitted off.

  “Thanks, Charleen. I’ve got to go.”

  Later, Roy asked Danny Luna how he liked living in the neighborhood, and
Danny said, “I don’t know anybody yet except for the Chinese kids downstairs.”

  “I know where your mother can get her hair done,” said Roy.

  Kidnapped

  Foster Wildroot disappeared on a Tuesday morning in early November of 1956. He was last seen on his way to school, walking on Minnetonka Street at a quarter to nine as he did every weekday morning. Foster’s mother told police on Wednesday that before he left the house her son, who was ten years old and in the fourth grade, had eaten a piece of rye toast with strawberry jam on it, drunk half a cup of black coffee and taken with him an apple to eat at recess. The weather was unusually warm for November, so Foster wore only a blue peacoat, which he did not button up, and did not take either a hat or gloves. He was small for his age, said Frieda Wildroot, and very shy. Foster did not have many friends, almost none, really, she told them; he kept mostly to himself. He had brown hair, cut short, and wore black-framed glasses to correct his severe near-sightedness. Foster stuttered badly, she said, an impediment that hampered his ability to orally answer questions put to him in the classroom. As a result, Foster disliked school. She did not, however, believe he would run away from home, as that was his sanctuary, where he spent his time alone in his room building model airplanes.

  Foster’s father, Fred Wildroot, did not live in Chicago with his wife and son. At present, Frieda told the authorities, her husband was working in a coal mine in West Virginia, from where he mailed her a support check every month. The police asked if she thought it was possible that Foster would try to go to West Virginia to see his father, and she said that Fred Wildroot had neither seen nor communicated with his son since the boy was six years old.