Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  Wing Shooting

  When she was in her twenties, Roy’s mother enjoyed shooting skeet at a club on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. This is a form of trapshooting in which clay targets are sprung upwards in such a way as to duplicate the angles of flight found in wing shooting. Skeet was a very popular pastime in the 1940s and ’50s, and Kitty often went shooting with one or another of her boyfriends when Roy was a young boy, occasionally taking him along.

  When she shot skeet Roy’s mother wore a club jacket with a padded right shoulder that afforded protection from the kick of her shotgun. “Pull!” she’d shout, and the clay bird would be launched into the sky. Kitty was a pretty fair shot, regularly outscoring her mostly male partners. Roy would watch her for a little while, then wander off by himself and walk on the nearby beach.

  He was seven years old on a Saturday afternoon while his mother was plugging pigeons with projectiles when Roy came upon a woman standing knee deep in the water staring into the distance. Roy guessed the woman was younger than his mother but not too much younger. She let the waves roll gently over her legs, she hardly moved. It was a sunny day in late September, Indian summer, still warm with as yet no hint of the violent winter certain to come. Before the first snow, Roy knew, he and his mother would head south to spend the cold months in Key West, Florida, the southernmost point in the United States.

  Roy stood on the sand and watched the woman. She was wearing a thin black dress, the lower half of which was already wet, but she did not seem to mind. Two coastwise freighters and a barge were visible in the distance; the freighters, Roy figured, were headed north toward the St. Lawrence seaway. He had gone sailing on Lake Michigan several times with his Uncle Buck, his mother’s brother, on Buck’s sailboat, the Friendship, before it split almost in half during a severe storm. The wreck occurred while Buck and his wife, Marguerite, were competing in the annual race to Michigan. A large wave crashed into the Friendship’s bow as the boat approached the apex of a preceding swell at an angle that caused its hull to crack. Buck and Marguerite were rescued by a passing freighter after taking down the sails and spending twelve hours below deck wrapped in blankets, but the Friendship was lost. It had been a beautiful yawl, built in Sweden, and Roy missed going sailing with his uncle.

  “Your dress is getting wet,” Roy shouted to the woman.

  She turned and said, “It feels good. Take off your shoes and socks and roll up your pantlegs and come in. You’ll like it.”

  She motioned with her left arm for Roy to join her, so he did as she suggested and stood near her in the water allowing the waves to soak him from the waist down.

  “Do you live around here?” he asked.

  The woman shook her head. “No, honey, I don’t live anywhere at the moment. I’m free as a bird. What about you?”

  “I live with my mother. She’s shooting skeet over there.”

  Roy pointed toward the club.

  “You’re very pretty,” he said. “So is my mother. Your hair is dark red, like hers.”

  The woman looked more closely at him and smiled.

  “I’m sure she is. What’s your name?”

  “Roy.”

  “My name is Florence, like the city in Italy.”

  “Where do you sleep at night?” he asked.

  “Oh, I have many choices, Roy. I suppose it depends on my mood.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend? My mother has a lot of boyfriends. They buy her lots of things and sometimes take her on trips to other countries. She can speak French and some Spanish. I can speak some Spanish, too.”

  “Your mother sounds like an interesting woman. What’s her name?”

  “Kitty. Everybody calls her Kitty but her real name is Katherine.”

  “Roy! Roy! Time to go, boy! Get out of the water!”

  Roy and Florence both looked behind them and saw a man with thick, shiny black hair and a big black mustache standing on the beach. When he saw Florence’s face he came closer.

  “I hope he wasn’t bothering you, miss,” he said.

  “This is Rome,” Roy told Florence. “He drove us here.”

  Roy walked onto the dry sand and picked up his shoes and socks.

  “Her name is Florence,” he said, “that’s a city in Italy.”

  Rome smiled at her and said, “We have something in common, then, both of us being named after Italian cities. Do you live around here?”

  “She doesn’t live anywhere.”

  “You’re quite beautiful, Florence,” Rome said, still smiling.

  “Her hair is the same as my mother’s, isn’t it?”

  “Can I help you with anything?” Rome asked her.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m fine just as I am. It was nice meeting and standing in the water with you, Roy.”

  “I liked meeting you, too. Maybe you’ll be here the next time I come back.”

  Florence smiled at Roy and waved at him.

  Rome kept smiling and said, “I hope to see you again sometime, too.”

  Florence turned away and looked out at the lake. The freighters had disappeared but the barge was still in sight.

  Roy walked barefooted toward the shooting club with Rome, who no longer was smiling.

  “Florence didn’t tell you her last name, did she? Or where she lives?”

  “I told you, she doesn’t live anywhere. She said where she sleeps depends on her mood.”

  “I’m sure it does,” said Rome. “These beautiful dolls are all a little mixed up in their heads, some more than a little.”

  “Is my mother mixed up in her head?”

  “Here’s a bench. Sit down and put your socks and shoes back on.”

  Acapulco

  Roy was eight years old when he and his Uncle Buck, his mother’s brother, flew from Chicago to Mexico City. They were going to visit Buck’s former father-in-law, Doc Wurtzel, at his house in Cuernavaca. Roy’s cousin Kip, Buck’s son by his first wife, Doc’s daughter Juliet, had been living with his grandfather and his housekeeper, Pilar, for the past ten months, ever since his parents divorced. Kip was twelve now, and neither Roy nor Buck had seen him for a year. Juliet had had a nervous breakdown before the divorce, and Buck travelled often for his work as a structural engineer, mainly as a consultant on designing or reinforcing bridges, so Doc suggested that until a more suitable situation could be arranged, Kip come to live with him at his villa. Doc Wurtzel was a widower, a retired mineralogist; he and Buck had much in common and were fond of one another. It would be beneficial, both men agreed, for Kip to learn Spanish and to be away from his mother, whose instability prevented her from paying proper attention to her son. Buck told Doc he thought the best solution would be for Kip to be sent when he turned thirteen to a military academy; until then, Doc could provide the boy with valuable life experience.

  It was January of 1954 when Roy and his uncle left freezing cold Chicago for sunny Mexico. Roy had been to Cuba, where his father had business, he spoke a little Spanish, and he looked forward to being in another Latin American country. Despite the four year difference in their ages, Kip and Roy had always gotten along well, as had Roy’s mother, Kitty, and Juliet. Both women were beautiful and smart, said Buck, but troubled.

  “Your mother and Kip’s mother aren’t really suited to raising children,” Buck told Roy on the plane. “They’re too self-absorbed to be responsible for others. Kip is better off for now with his grandfather and you with your father.”

  “What are we going to do at Doc’s?”

  “We’ll stay at his place in Cuernavaca for a couple of days, it’s not far from Mexico City; he’s got a beautiful swimming pool lined with big white rocks, surrounded by flamboyana trees. I designed his patio and helped him build the pool. Then the four of us will drive cross-country to Puerto Vallarta and go fishing. Doc has a special place he likes to hunt for marlin. Af
ter that maybe we’ll stop over in Acapulco for a day or two.

  “My mom and dad went to Acapulco on their honeymoon, I’ve seen pictures of them there.”

  “We’ll rough it most of the way. Your dad tells me you’re a good traveler.”

  “We once drove to Oriente from Havana, a lot of the way over mountains. It was kind of spooky sometimes. My dad kept a gun on the front seat between us, a .38. He showed me how to hold it with both hands and aim just below the target before I pulled the trigger.”

  “Did you have to shoot anybody?”

  “No. Dad said there were bandits in the hills but all of the people we met were very nice. They were mostly black on that side of the island, different from in Havana. There are lots of pretty girls there.”

  Buck laughed and said, “There are pretty girls everywhere, Roy.”

  Doc’s house was simply furnished and comfortable, with rattan chairs big enough for two people to sit in at the same time, and lots of doors to the outside that were always left open. Roy and Kip were happy to see each other again and Doc was a friendly, large man with a white beard and big hands. Kip told Roy that his grandfather could fix or build anything and that he was a championship fisherman. Pilar, Doc’s live-in housekeeper, was a short, stout young woman with very long, shiny black hair.

  “Pilar grew up in a small village near here,” said Kip. “She’s never even been to Mexico City and doesn’t speak English. She doesn’t speak good Spanish, either, mostly a local lingo Doc has trouble understanding. She’s twenty-four. Doc sleeps with her sometimes, he says he does it to keep her happy because she’s never been married and doesn’t have any boyfriends.”

  “What if she gets pregnant?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the kid would live here with us. Pilar’s parents never leave the village. Her sister, Tentación, comes to see her sometimes. She’s only eighteen and has two kids already, a boy and a girl. Her husband, Pablo, breaks horses for ranchers around here. I’ve only met him once. He’s shorter than I am but Doc says he knows how to sit a horse better than any man he’s ever seen. Tentación told me Pablo’s busted every bone in his body at least once.”

  “What does Tentación mean?”

  “Temptation.”

  Doc and Buck sat and talked for two days, then the four of them loaded fishing and camping gear into the back of Doc’s station wagon and headed for the west coast. The trip was uneventful but Roy enjoyed seeing what Mexico looked like. The country they drove through was not as verdant as Cuba; Doc said you had to go further south, to the state of Chiapas, to get into the forest.

  “There’s some serious jungle down that way,” Doc said. “The Lacandon Indians live there and keep pretty much to themselves. They don’t welcome outsiders. I hear they’re tough folks to tangle with.”

  The men traded off driving and Roy got a little nervous when Doc drove because he sipped tequila all the time, but Kip told Roy Doc’s secret to staying sober was to suck on venenoso limes while he drank. After a while Roy believed him because Doc was always steady on his feet and handled his customized, reinforced steel-bellied Willys expertly over bad roads.

  “What’s in the limes that keep him from getting drunk?” Roy asked Kip.

  “Poison. That’s what venenoso means.”

  The fishing at Puerto Vallarta wasn’t so good. The marlin weren’t running because of what Doc said was an unexpected cold spell, but he and Buck didn’t seem to mind. All of the roads around the town were unpaved and the good weather didn’t hold. Rather than camp out they stayed at a guest house that wasn’t much more than a glorified lean-to. Kip taught Roy how to carve a resortera, a slingshot, out of a tree branch and they used stones to kill lizards. After three days of windy, wet weather and bad luck hunting marlin, Doc declared they should pack it in and make for Acapulco. There was a casino there, he said, and good restaurants.

  In Acapulco, Doc decided they should check into a good hotel and clean up, then find the best place in town for martinis and steaks. After dinner, Kip and Roy walked with the men to a building next to the ocean with lots of steps leading up to the entrance.

  “You boys wait here,” Buck ordered when they were halfway up the steps. “Doc and I will be back in a little while.”

  The men continued up to the front door and Kip and Roy sat down on the steps and looked out at the Pacific. The sun was down but there was still a stripe of green light in the sky. The waves were gray-black and kicking up.

  “Is this a casino?” Roy asked Kip.

  “No, it’s a prostibulo, a whorehouse. They’re going to get laid.”

  A few men went up and came down the steps while the boys sat there.

  “Do you miss your mother?” Roy asked.

  “Sometimes, but only when she’s not drinking, and she was always drinking before I got shipped down here to Doc’s. Does your mother drink?”

  “No, not really. She says if she has more than one drink she falls asleep. She has other problems, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “She faints a lot. Sometimes she screams for no good reason and her body shakes. My grandmother gives her pills and puts her to bed.”

  “Remember that time she showed us how to play craps on the sidewalk in front of my house and my mother came out and yelled at her and made me go inside? Your mother just laughed and picked up the dice then got into her car and drove away.”

  “Her maroon Roadmaster convertible.”

  “Yeah. Doc says she’s as beautiful as Gene Tierney, maybe even more beautiful.”

  “Who’s Gene Tierney?”

  Doc’s favorite movie star ever since he saw her in The Return of Frank James. He said she went crazy and got put into an insane asylum.”

  After about an hour Doc and Buck came out of the house and walked down to where the boys were sitting. Roy and Kip stood up.

  “How’d it go, Doc?” Kip asked.

  “We got out alive, that’s good enough. Let’s go to the casino, I’ll teach you to play craps.”

  “We know how to play, Roy’s mother taught us.”

  “Kitty’s my kind of woman,” Doc said. “Don’t you think so, Buck?”

  When he got back to Chicago, Roy’s friend Jimmy Boyle asked him if he’d had a good time in Mexico. They were on their way home from school, walking against a strong wind that made their faces feel like apples being sliced into by paring knives.

  “I don’t know,” said Roy. “I liked being with my Uncle Buck and being in better weather than this.”

  “Did anything bad happen?”

  Roy didn’t answer. He lowered his head, bent his body half over and thought about the gentle breezes that ruffled the leaves of the flamboyana trees around Doc Wurtzel’s swimming pool.

  When he and Jimmy got inside the front hall of Roy’s house, Roy rubbed his face with his hands and said, “Nothing bad happened, it was only that I didn’t feel like I belonged there.”

  “Do you feel like you belong here?” Jimmy asked.

  His Truth

  In 1950, when H.T. was born, his mother, Thelma Louise Booth, named him Henry Thomas Booth, after her father. The man who impregnated her, a G.I. on leave whom she very briefly knew only as Monty, had disappeared from her life a few days after their liaison. It was Thelma Booth’s misfortune that she had gotten knocked up at eighteen years old and was forced to fend for herself. Both of her parents had died in a car crash outside Terre Haute one year before she became pregnant. Adrift and alone, Thelma relocated from Indianapolis, where she gave birth in the Hilda Brausen Paupers Hospital, to Chicago. It was there with infant in arms that she joined The Church of Blood on Their Houses and was born again. Shortly thereafter, she renamed her son His Truth. For brevity’s sake most of the time she called him H.T., which is what he came to be familiarly known as he was growing up.

  Thelma Booth worked
weekdays as a typist in the offices of Widerwille Sausage Company and played organ for the choir at The Church of Blood on Their Houses three evenings a week and on Sundays. She told her fellow parishioners that her husband had been killed in combat in Korea. H.T. did not like going to church and hated school but he liked to read. He went often to the Halsted Street public library and read history books and biographies, mostly about military leaders such as Hannibal of Carthage, Alexander of Greece, Alaric of the Visigoths, and Geiseric of the Vandals. His favorite, though, was Attila, commander of the Huns. H.T.’s mother had told him that her father’s family, originally named Boethenius, had emigrated to the United States from a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that had included eastern Ukraine and the northern Caucuses, the largest mountain range in eastern Europe. Thelma’s great-great grandfather, Georgescu, she said, had led a rebel band opposed to the oppressive rulers of his province; according to what her mother had told her, Georgescu was known as The Almighty Destroyer of Pests. Armed with the false belief that his own father had been a warrior slain in battle, the tales of his mother’s ancestors militant history, along with his own studies of great fighters and conquerors, at the age of eleven and a half H.T. organized a neighborhood gang of boys that called themselves the Halsted Street Huns. In their private meetings, members were instructed to address H.T. as His Truth.

  On a late afternoon in February of 1961, H.T. and two other members of the Halsted Street Huns robbed Paddy Flannery’s liquor store on Belmont Avenue. In the process, one of the boys shot the proprietor in the heart with a .22 caliber pistol purchased from a black Jew on Maxwell Street for five dollars, killing Flannery instantly. The three boys absconded with the proceeds from this misguided exercise in villainy and disappeared into the fast-closing winter darkness. Several passersby, however, had observed the miscreant trio as they fled the scene of the crime. One of them told the police that he believed it was a redhaired kid who was holding a gun in his left hand as he ran. The only one of the marauders who was lefthanded and had red hair was H.T.