The Roy Stories

by Barry Gifford

  Roy immediately went on the lookout for the stolen car, though the stretch of highway they were on was pretty lonely at three o’clock in the morning. Only one car had passed them, going the other way, in the last half hour or so, and Roy had not noticed what model it was.

  “Dad,” said Roy, “why would Lavern Rope keep the nun’s left arm?”

  “Probably thought it would make the body harder to identify,” Roy’s father answered. “Maybe she had a tattoo on it.”

  “I didn’t think nuns had tattoos.”

  “She could have got it before she became a nun.”

  “He’ll probably dump the arm somewhere, Dad, don’t you think?”

  “I guess. Don’t ever get a tattoo, son. There might come a day you won’t want to be recognized. It’s better if you don’t have any identifying marks on your body.”

  By the time they reached Ocala, the sun was coming up. Roy’s father checked them into a hotel and when they got to their room he asked Roy if he wanted to use the bathroom.

  “No, Dad, you can go first.”

  Roy’s father laughed. “What’s the matter, son? Afraid there’ll be a body in the bathtub?”

  “No,” said Roy, “just a left arm.”

  While his father was in the bathroom, Roy thought about Lavern Rope cutting off Sister Mary Alice Gogarty’s arm in a Valdosta hotel room. If he had used a pocket knife, it would have taken a very long time. He had probably brought along a kitchen knife from his mother’s house to do the job, Roy decided.

  When his father came out, Roy asked him, “Do you think the cops will find Lavern Rope?”

  “Sure, they’ll catch him.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “I bet they never find the nun’s arm.”

  “Won’t make much difference, will it? Come on, boy, take your clothes off. We need to sleep.”

  Roy undressed and got into one of the two beds. Before Roy could ask another question, his father was snoring in the other bed. Roy lay there with his eyes open for several minutes; then he realized that he needed to go to the bathroom.

  Suddenly, his father stopped snoring.

  “Son, you still awake?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  Roy’s father sat up in his bed.

  “It just occurred to me that a brand new red and beige Chrysler Newport convertible is a damn unusual automobile for a nun to be driving.”

  The Mason-Dixon Line

  One Sunday I accompanied my dad on an automobile trip up from Chicago to Dixon, Illinois. It was a sunny January morning, and it must have been when I was ten years old because I remember that I wore the black leather motorcycle jacket I’d received that Christmas. I was very fond of that jacket with its multitude of bright silver zippers and two silver stars on each epaulet. I also wore a blue cashmere scarf of my dad’s and an old pair of brown leather gloves he’d given me after my mother gave him a new pair of calfskins for Christmas.

  I liked watching the snowy fields as we sped past them on the narrow, two-lane northern Illinois roads. We passed through a number of little towns, each of them with seemingly identical centers: a Rexall, hardware store, First State Bank of Illinois, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Catholic churches with snowcapped steeples, and a statue of Black Hawk, the heroic Sauk and Fox chief.

  When my dad had asked me if I wanted to take a ride with him that morning I’d said sure, without asking where to or why. My dad never asked twice and he never made any promises about when we’d be back. I liked the uncertainty of those situations, the open-endedness about them. Anything could happen, I figured; it was more fun not knowing what to expect.

  “We’re going to Dixon,” Dad said after we’d been driving for about forty-five minutes. “To see a man named Mason.” I’d recently read a Young Readers biography of Robert E. Lee, so I knew all about the Civil War. “We’re on the Mason-Dixon line,” I said, and laughed, pleased with my little kid’s idea of a joke. “That’s it, boy,” said my dad. “We’re going to get a line on Mason in Dixon.”

  The town of Dixon appeared to be one street long, like in a Western movie: the hardware store, bank, church, and drugstore. I didn’t see a statue. We went into a tiny café next to the bank that was empty except for a counterman. Dad told me to sit in one of the booths and told the counterman to give me a hot chocolate and whatever else I wanted.

  “I’ll be back in an hour, son,” said Dad. He gave the counterman a twenty-dollar bill and walked out. When the counterman brought over the hot chocolate he asked if there was anything else he could get for me. “A hamburger,” I said, “and an order of fries.” “You got it,” he said.

  I sipped slowly at the hot chocolate until he brought me the hamburger and fries. The counterman sat on a stool near the booth and looked at me. “That your old man?” he asked. “He’s my dad,” I said, between bites of the hamburger. “Any special reason he’s here?” he asked. I didn’t say anything and the counterman said, “You are from Chi, aren’t ya?” I nodded yes and kept chewing. “You must be here for a reason,” he said. “My dad needs to see someone,” I said. “Thought so,” said the counterman. “Know his name?” I took a big bite of the hamburger before I answered. “No,” I said. The counterman looked at me, then out the window again. After a minute he walked over behind the counter. “Let me know if ya need anything else,” he said.

  While my dad was gone I tried to imagine who this fellow Mason was. I figured he must be some guy hiding out from the Chicago cops, and that his real name probably wasn’t Mason. My dad came back in less than an hour, picked up his change from the counterman, tipped him, and said to me, “Had enough to eat?” I said yes and followed him out to the car.

  “This is an awfully small town,” I said to my dad as we drove away. “Does Mason live here?” “Who?” he asked. Then he said, “Oh yeah, Mason.” Dad didn’t say anything else for a while. He took a cigar out of his overcoat pocket, bit off the tip, rolled down his window, and spit it out before saying, “No, he doesn’t live here. Just visiting.”

  We drove along for a few miles before Dad lit his cigar, leaving the window open. I put the scarf up around my face to keep warm and settled back in the seat. My dad drove and didn’t talk for about a half hour. Around Marengo he said, “Did that counterman back there ask you any questions?” “He asked me if you were my dad and if we were from Chicago,” I said. “What did you tell him?” “I said yes.” “Anything else?” “He asked if you were there for any special reason and I said you were there to see someone.” “Did you tell him who?” Dad asked. “I said I didn’t know his name.”

  Dad nodded and threw his dead cigar out the window, then rolled it up. “You tired?” he asked. “No,” I said. “What do you think,” he said, “would you rather live out here or in the city?” “The city,” I said. “I think it’s more interesting there.” “So do I,” said Dad. “Relax, son, and we’ll be home before you know it.”

  The Wedding

  When my mother married her third husband, I, at the age of eleven, was given the duty, or privilege, of proposing a toast at the banquet following the wedding. My uncle Buck coached me—“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,” I was to begin.

  I kept going over it in my head. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .” until the moment arrived and I found myself standing with a glass in my hand saying, “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking—” I stopped. I couldn’t remember what else my uncle had told me to say, so I said, “I want to propose a toast to my new father”—I paused—“and my old mother.”

  Everybody laughed and applauded. I could hear my uncle’s high-pitched twitter. It wasn’t what I was supposed to have said, that last part. My mother wasn’t old, she was about thirty, and that wasn’t what I’d meant by “old.” I’d meant she was my same mother, that hadn’t changed. No matter how often the father changed th
e mother did not.

  I was afraid I’d insulted her. Everybody laughing was no insurance against that. I didn’t want this new father, and a few months later, neither did my mother.

  The Pitcher

  One night when I was eleven I was playing baseball in the alley behind my house. I was batting left-handed when I hit a tremendous home run that rolled all the way to the end of the alley and would have gone into the street but an old man turning the corner picked it up. The old man came walking up the alley toward me and my friends, flipping the baseball up in the air and catching it. When he got to where we stood, the old man asked us who’d hit that ball.

  “I did,” I said.

  “It was sure a wallop,” said the old man, and he stood there, grinning. “I used to play ball,” he said, and my friends and I looked at each other. “With the Cardinals, and the Cubs.”

  My friends and I looked at the ground or down the alley where the cars went by on Rosemont Avenue.

  “You don’t believe me,” said the old man. “Well, look here.” And he held out a gold ring in the palm of his hand. “Go on, look at it,” he said. I took it. “Read it,” said the old man.

  “World Series, 1931,” I said.

  “I was with the Cardinals then,” the old guy said, smiling now. “Was a pitcher. These days I’m just an old bird dog, a scout.”

  I looked up at the old man. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Tony Kaufmann,” he said. I gave him his ring back. “You just keep hitting ’em like that, young fella, and you’ll be a big leaguer.” The old man tossed my friend Billy the ball. “So long,” he said, and walked on up to the end of the alley, where he went in the back door of Beebs and Glen’s Tavern.

  “Think he was tellin’ the truth or is he a nut?” one of the kids asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “let’s go ask my grandfather. He’d remember him if he really played.”

  Billy and I ran into my house and found Pops watching TV in his room.

  “Do you remember a guy named Tony Kaufmann?” I asked him. “An old guy in the alley just told us he pitched in the World Series.”

  “He showed us his ring,” said Billy.

  My grandfather raised his eyebrows. “Tony Kaufmann? In the alley? I remember him. Sure, he used to pitch for the Cubs.”

  Billy and I looked at each other.

  “Where’s he now?” asked my grandfather.

  “We saw him go into Beebs and Glen’s,” said Billy.

  “Well,” said Pops, getting out of his chair, “let’s go see what the old-timer has to say.”

  “You mean you’ll take us in the tavern with you?” I asked.

  “Come on,” said Pops, not even bothering to put on his hat, “never knew a pitcher who could hold his liquor.”

  A Place in the Sun

  The final memory I have of my dad is the time we attended a Chicago Bears football game at Wrigley Field about a month before he died. It was in November of 1958, a cold day, cold even for November on the shore of Lake Michigan. I don’t remember what team the Bears were playing that afternoon; mostly I recall the overcast sky, the freezing temperature and visible breath of the players curling out from beneath their helmets like smoke from dragons’ nostrils.

  My dad was in good spirits despite the fact that the colostomy he’d undergone that previous summer had measurably curtailed his physical activities. He ate heartily at the game, the way he always had: two or three hot dogs, coffee, beer, a few shots of Bushmill’s from a flask he kept in an overcoat pocket. He shook hands with a number of men on our way to our seats and again on our way out of the stadium, talking briefly with each of them, laughing and patting them on the back or arm.

  Later, however, on our way home, he had to stop the car and get out to vomit on the side of the road. After he’d finished it took him several minutes to compose himself, leaning back against the door until he felt well enough to climb back in behind the wheel. “Don’t worry, son,” he said to me. “Just a bad stomach, that’s all.”

  During the summer, after my dad got out of the hospital, we’d gone to Florida, where we stayed for a few weeks in a house on Key Biscayne. I had a good time there, swimming in the pool in the yard and watching the boats navigate the narrow canal that ran behind the fence at the rear of the property. I liked waving to and being waved at by the skippers as they guided their sleek white powerboats carefully through the inlet. One afternoon, though, I went into my dad’s bedroom to ask him something and I saw him in the bathroom holding the rubber pouch by the hole in his side through which he was forced to evacuate his bowels. He grimaced as he performed the necessary machinations and told me to wait for him outside. He closed the bathroom door and I went back to the pool.

  I sat in a beach chair looking out across the inland waterway in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean. I didn’t like seeing my dad look so uncomfortable, but I knew there was nothing I could do for him. I tried to remember his stomach the way it was before, before there was a red hole in the side of it, but I couldn’t. I could only picture him as he stood in the bathroom moments before with the pain showing in his face.

  When he came out he was dressed and smiling. “What do you think, son?” he said. “Should I buy this house? Do you like it here?”

  I wanted to ask him how he was feeling now, but I didn’t. “Sure, Dad,” I said. “It’s a great place.”

  The Winner

  My mother and I spent Christmas and New Year’s of 1957 in Chicago. By this time, being ten years old and having experienced portions of the northern winter on several occasions, I was prepared for the worst. On our way to Chicago on the long drive from Florida, I excitedly anticipated playing in deep snow and skating on icy ponds. It turned out to be a mild winter, however, very unusual for Chicago in that by Christmas Day there had been no snow.

  “The first snowfall is always around Thanksgiving,” said Pops, my grandfather. “This year, you didn’t need a coat. It’s been the longest Indian summer ever.”

  I didn’t mind being able to play outside with the kids who lived on Pops’s street, but I couldn’t hide my disappointment in not seeing snow, something we certainly did not get in Key West. The neighborhood boys and girls were friendly enough, though I felt like an outsider, even though I’d known some of them from previous visits for as many as three years.

  By New Year’s Eve it still had not snowed and my mother and I were due to leave on the second of January. I complained to her about this and she said, “Baby, sometimes you just can’t win.”

  I was invited on New Year’s Day to the birthday party of a boy I didn’t know very well, Jimmy Kelly, a policeman’s son who lived in an apartment in a three-flat at the end of the block. Johnny and Billy Duffy, who lived next door to Pops, persuaded me to come with them. Johnny was my age, Billy one year younger; they were good pals of Kelly’s and assured me Kelly and his parents wouldn’t mind if I came along. Just to make sure, the Duffy brothers’ mother called Jimmy Kelly’s mother and she said they’d be happy to have me.

  Since the invitation had come at practically the last minute and all of the toy stores were closed because of the holiday, I didn’t have a proper present to bring for Jimmy Kelly. My mother put some candy in a bag, wrapped Christmas paper around it, tied on a red ribbon and handed it to me.

  “This will be okay,” she said. “Just be polite to his parents and thank them for inviting you.”

  “They didn’t invite me,” I told her, “Johnny and Billy did. Mrs. Duffy called Kelly’s mother.”

  “Thank them anyway. Have a good time.”

  At Kelly’s house, kids of all ages were running around, screaming and yelling, playing tag, knocking over lamps and tables, driving the family’s two black cocker spaniels, Mick and Mack, crazy. The dogs were running with and being trampled by the marauding children. Officer Kelly, in uniform with his
gunbelt on, sat in a chair by the front door drinking beer out of a brown bottle. He was a large man, overweight, almost bald. He didn’t seem to be at all disturbed by the chaos.

  Mrs. Kelly took my gift and the Duffy brothers’ gift for Jimmy, said, “Thanks, boys, go on in,” and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Johnny and Billy and I got going with the others and after a while Mrs. Kelly appeared with a birthday cake and ice cream. The cake had twelve candles on it, eleven for Jimmy’s age and one for good luck. Jimmy was a big fat kid and blew all of the candles out in one try with ease. We each ate a piece of chocolate cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, then Jimmy opened his gifts. He immediately swallowed most of the candy my mother had put into the bag.

  Mrs. Kelly presided over the playing of several games, following each of which she presented the winner with a prize. I won most of these games, and with each successive victory I became increasingly embarrassed. Since I was essentially a stranger, not really a friend of the birthday boy’s, the other kids, including Johnny and Billy Duffy, grew somewhat hostile toward me. I felt badly about this, and after winning a third or fourth game decided that was enough—even if I could win another game, I would lose on purpose so as not to further antagonize anyone else.

  The next contest, however, was to be the last, and the winner was to receive the grand prize, a brand new professional model football autographed by Bobby Layne, quarterback of the champion Detroit Lions. Officer Kelly, Mrs. Kelly told us, had been given this ball personally by Bobby Layne, whom he had met while providing security for him when the Lions came to Chicago to play the Bears.

  The final event was not a game but a raffle. Each child picked a small, folded piece of paper out of Officer Kelly’s police hat. A number had been written on every piece of paper by Mrs. Kelly. Officer Kelly had already decided what the winning number would be and himself would announce it following the children’s choices.