The Roy Stories

by Barry Gifford

  “Murphy, yeah, I had her a couple times. Whenever there was a loud noise she’d say, ‘Set ’em up in the other alley.’”

  “Still does.”

  It was too early for Roy to go home, so he walked slowly toward the park, eating his fries with gravy. The rain had diminished to a cold drizzle. Roy had on a White Sox cap and a dark blue tanker jacket that according to the label was water repellent. He did not understand the difference between water proof and water repellent. Roy thought that they should mean the same thing but apparently they did not. Elephant or rhinoceros hides were water proof, he figured, like alligators and crocodiles, as opposed to swan, goose and duck feathers, which were merely water repellent. Ducks and geese flew sometimes, so perhaps that’s how they dried off. Roy didn’t remember if swans could fly or not.

  When he got to the park, Roy perched on the top slat of a bench and looked at the muddy baseball field. What had happened to the Grimes sisters could happen to any kid, he decided, even if a kid didn’t accept a ride in a car from a stranger. Someone who was bigger and stronger could grab a kid, or even two kids, especially if they were girls, and force them into a car.

  The bottom of the bag was so wet from all the gravy that there was a hole in it. Roy had to keep one hand underneath the bag to keep the few remaining fries from falling out. The Grimes girls had been assaulted, the man on the radio said. Roy wondered if being assaulted and being molested were the same thing, or if there was some kind of difference, like between water proof and water repellent. It began raining harder again. Nobody would be playing ball today, that was for sure.

  Johnny Across

  Marcel Proust wrote, “One slowly grows indifferent to death.” To one’s own, perhaps, but not, Roy was discovering, to the deaths of others. Almost daily now, it seemed, certainly weekly, he heard or read of the death of someone he knew or used to know, however briefly, at some time during the course of his fifty-plus years. This, combined with the noticeable passing of various public persons who had made a particular impression upon him, had begun to affect him in a way he could not have predicted. What disturbed Roy most, of course, were the deaths of people he cared for or upon whom he looked favorably. The others—former adversaries, political despots, or murderers languishing behind bars—had been as good as dead to him already. Early on in Roy’s life he had developed a facility for excising certain people from his consciousness. He simply ceased to care about those individuals he felt were unworthy of his friendship and trust. He really did not care if they lived or died; what they did or did not do concerned him not at all.

  During the winters when Roy attended grammar school in Chicago, the boys played a game called Johnny Across Tackle. Often upwards of thirty kids aged nine to thirteen would gather in the gravel schoolyard, which was covered with snow, during recess or lunch break or after classes were over, and decide who would be the first designated tackler. The rest of the boys would line up against the brick wall of the school building, a dirty brown edifice undoubtedly modeled after the factories of Victorian England, which was perhaps fifty feet long. This would be the width of the field. Sixty yards or so across the schoolyard was a chain link fence. The object was to run from the wall to the fence and back again as many times as possible without being tackled. The wall and the fence were “safe.” Nobody could be tackled if they were touching with some part of their body—usually a hand, sometimes as little as a toe—the wall or the fence.

  Somebody would volunteer to be “it,” the first designated tackler. The object, of course, was to be the last man standing. They mostly played when there was a thick layer of snow over the gravel, to protect them from being cut by the stones. Even so, boys would be bruised and battered during this game; broken arms, wrists, ankles and fingers and the occasional broken leg were not uncommon. Girls would play a tag version of the same game, a more sensible exercise. Roy thought he should have taken this as an early sign that women were, if not superior, the more sensible sex.

  The boy who was “it” would survey the lineup, pick out his quarry—usually one of the weaker kids, an easy target—and shout, “Johnny Across!” All of the Johnnys would then take off for the opposite safety of the fence. Each participant wanted to be the last survivor, the “winner,” except that whoever won knew he would be piled on by however many of the tacklers as possible.

  If the last boy was well-liked, the others would take him down tenderly, with respect for his toughness and athleticism. If, however, “Lonely Johnny,” as Crazy Jimmy K., an older friend of Roy’s who claimed to have achieved that distinction more than twenty times, called him, was unpopular with the majority of the rest of the players, the result could be decidedly ugly. Often, in order to avoid an animalistic conclusion, a kid who knew he was going to get it if he managed to make it through to the end would go down on purpose early in the game and get in his licks on the tackles.

  When Roy was eleven years old, he was troubled by frequent nosebleeds. As his doctor explained, this was a not uncommon occurrence during rapid growth spurts. Blood vessels in Roy’s nose would burst at any time, even when he wasn’t exerting himself. One weekday morning in the middle of February, Roy went to the doctor’s office to have his nose cauterized. The doctor inserted what looked to Roy like a soldering iron up each of his nostrils and burned the ends of the broken blood vessels. He then lubricated Roy’s nasal passages, packed them with gauze, and instructed him to avoid contact sports for ten days. He handed Roy a tube of Vaseline and said he should not let his nostrils dry out, not blow his nose, and not pick at the scabs that would form, even if they itched. Then Roy took a bus to school.

  Just as he arrived, the guys were gathering in the schoolyard to begin a game of Johnny Across. Roy ran over and joined them. The first designated tackler had already been chosen, Large Jensen, a Swedish kid who volunteered to start at tackle almost every time he played. Large, whose real name was Lars, was, at six feet tall and two hundred pounds, the biggest twelve-year-old on the Northwest side of the city. At least none of the kids at Roy’s school had heard of or encountered anyone able to dispute this claim. Large said he had recently run into a kid at Eugene Field Park who was an inch taller and almost as heavy, but that kid was already thirteen, which Large would not be until June. Large’s mother, whom the boys called Mrs. Large, had the widest hands Roy had ever seen on a woman. He was sure she could hold two basketballs in each one if she tried. Mrs. Large was wide all over but not very tall. Large’s father—Mr. Large—was six feet six and probably weighed around 350. He worked over in Whiting or Gary, Indiana, for U.S. Steel. Large told the boys that as soon as he was sixteen he was going to quit school and go to work for U.S. Steel, too. His father already had a silver lunchbox with LARS stenciled on it in black block letters, just like his own, which was labeled OLAF.

  Roy kept to the edges of the field, holding his head steady as he could and running at moderate speed. For some reason Roy thought that if he ran fast the intensity might disrupt the healing process. For a while, he was able to avoid any serious contact, and in particular kept away from Large Jensen and his mob. When Roy found himself one of only twelve remaining boys, he knew he had to either allow himself to be brought down without a struggle or risk serious damage.

  On the next across, two of the tacklers, Thomas Palmer and Don Repulski, targeted Roy. Palmer was cross-eyed and couldn’t tackle worth a damn. A straight arm would fend him off. Repulski worried Roy, however. He was bigger than Roy, six months older, a little fat but strong. Roy was faster, so he knew he had to make a good fake and hope Repulski would go for it, then Roy could beat both of them to the wall.

  The rule was that the tacklers yelled “Johnny Across” three times. If a kid didn’t move off the safe—the fence or the wall—after three calls, he was automatically caught. Roy waited through two calls, then, just as Palmer and Repulski started to shout “Johnny Across!” for the last time, he broke to his left, toward the eastern
boundary of the schoolyard. This gave him more room to maneuver and would, perhaps, even enable him to outrun them to the boundary before he cut downfield toward the wall.

  Roy slugged Thomas Palmer right between his crossed eyes with the flat of his right hand just as he reached the edge of the field. Palmer’s glasses flew off and he went down on his knees. Roy didn’t wait to see if he had made Palmer cry or if the busted frame had gashed his forehead. Roy had Repulski to beat, and as Roy made a hard cut his left foot gave way on the wet snow. Roy’s left knee touched the ground and Don Repulski, unable to brake, barreled past him out of bounds. Roy recovered his balance and hightailed it to the wall. He was safe.

  Palmer was yelling his head off. He claimed that Roy had gone down as a result of their contact. Roy’s knee had hit the ground, Palmer said, so he was caught. Palmer had an inch-long cut on the bridge of his nose and was holding the two pieces that were his glasses. “No way!” Roy shouted. “I hit Palmer before I made my cut. He went down and then I turned—that’s when my knee touched the snow.” Repulski backed Roy up, he’d seen what happened. He started to say something else but then he—and everybody else—stopped talking. They were all just staring at Roy.

  Roy had forgotten about his nose. He looked down and saw that the snow directly below him was turning bright red. Blood was streaming from both of his nostrils. He pulled the packet of tissues out of his coat pocket, tore it open, took a wad and jammed it up against his face. Blood soaked through the tissues in a few seconds, so he threw that wad away and made another. Slowly, the bleeding subsided. Holding a third bunch of tissues to his nose, Roy leaned back against the wall. He took out the tube of Vaseline, unscrewed the cap, squeezed ribbons of it up his nostrils and set himself for the next Johnny Across.

  There were only four kids left on safe. Four against thirty. Repulski and about seven other guys stood directly in Roy’s path. Palmer was not among them but Large Jensen was. At the second call, Roy took off, faked left, went right and banged against Large Jensen’s stomach. Roy hit the ground hard and sat still. He glanced down without moving his head much; a few crimson drops dotted the snow. Large and the rest of the gang ran off to tackle someone else.

  The school bell rang, signaling the end of the lunch break. “Who’s Lonely Johnny?” Roy asked Small Eddie Small. “Nobody,” he said, as he walked by. Roy got up and followed him. All four of the remaining Johnnys had been tackled before making it to the fence, the last two or three at about the same moment, so there was no winner. Repulski came trotting by and punched Roy’s right shoulder.

  “Good game,” he said. Vaseline had congealed in Roy’s throat. He hawked it up and expectorated a mixture of clotted blood and petroleum jelly, then walked into the building.

  What Roy didn’t realize until much later was that Johnny Across had been a valuable learning experience for life—and death. This business of living and dying, Roy concluded, was just one big game of Johnny Across, with everyone scampering to avoid being tackled. Back then, though, his biggest concern was how to stop his nose from bleeding. Ten days after Roy’s nostrils were cauterized, he returned to the doctor to have him remove the scabs so that Roy could resume breathing properly. By this time Roy had swallowed enough Vaseline to have lubricated his mother’s Oldsmobile for the next six months.

  Roy had played Johnny Across several times during this “healing” period, and had luckily avoided direct contact involving his nose except for one sharp blow by Small Eddie Small’s left elbow that engendered only a brief trickle. The guys, Roy thought, did not want to witness another vermilion snow painting, so they mostly took it easy on him. He took it easy on himself, too, but Roy knew, even then, that if he kept playing it safe, in the long run he would never become Lonely Johnny.

  The Secret of Little White Dove

  The morning after Thanksgiving, Roy went to meet the Viper and Jimmy Boyle on the corner of Blackhawk and Dupré. The weather was miserable; icy rain sputtered out of a dark gray sky but there was no school and the boys didn’t want to spend any more time than they had to cooped up inside with their families.

  Roy had the hood of his blue parka up and he wore the pair of oversized Air Force gloves his cousin Bink had given him the last time Bink had been home on leave. Roy loved these gloves. They were supposed to keep a pilot’s hands warm even if the temperature dropped to fifty below. The gloves were silver-blue and shiny; they almost glowed in the dark. Roy didn’t mind the lousy weather so much now that he could wear his Air Force gloves.

  He saw Jimmy Boyle talking to Red Fellows, a washed up prizefighter in his late thirties who hung out at Beebs and Glen’s Tavern. Roy had never seen Fellows box but the Viper said he’d heard Skull Dorfman tell Larry the Leg that Red had a left hook like his sister’s and a right hand like his other sister’s. Pops, Roy’s grandfather, told him that Rocky Marciano had the best right hand in the business. “After his match with Marciano,” Pops told Roy, “Joe Louis said, ‘That boy don’t fight by the book, but tonight I got hit by a library.’”

  Roy arrived at the corner the same moment the Viper appeared from the opposite direction, just in time to see Red Fellows extract his left arm from his pea coat and roll up his shirtsleeve.

  “See this?” he asked the boys.

  On his biceps was a tattoo of a naked woman. Written under the legs were the words, “Little White Dove.”

  “I got it done in Germany,” Red said, “when I was in the army. It’s of a girl I met over there in a club in Berlin.”

  “Why does it say ‘Little White Dove’?” asked Jimmy Boyle.

  “I give her the nickname. Her actual name was Ingrid Meister.”

  “Why’d you call her that?”

  Red Fellows grinned. The two teeth to the left of his only remaining front tooth were missing.

  “It’s what I called her most private part,” he said. “Named it after the girl in the song, the Injun broad who fell in love with her brother.”

  Red rolled down his sleeve and put his arm back into his coat.

  “You guys don’t know what I’m talkin’ about, do you?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Didn’t think so. It’s the secret to pleasin’ a woman. She’ll show you what to do with it but you gotta ask. Don’t be afraid to ask.”

  Red Fellows walked away. Roy, Jimmy Boyle and the Viper, none of whom had yet turned twelve years old, stood under the black and orange-striped awning in front of Bompiani’s Bakery and watched the rain turn to ice on the sidewalk.

  “The name of the Indian girl’s brother was Running Bear,” said Roy. “That’s the name of the song. Johnny Horton made the record.”

  “Red’s a man of the world,” Jimmy Boyle said.

  “Where’s he been other than Germany?” asked the Viper. “He never fought no further from Chicago than Fort Wayne.”

  “Red knows his way around,” said Jimmy.

  “He knows how to get to Beebs and Glen’s,” said Roy.

  A hard wind swept water under the awning, soaking the boys’ pants and shoes.

  The Viper said, “Shit, at least Red knows enough to get in out of the rain.”

  That night on his way home, Roy cut through the alley behind Wabansia and Prairie. As he passed a passageway between two of the garages, Roy heard an eerie sound, some terrible combination of sobbing and snorting the way a horse does just after it stops running. Roy stopped and listened. The rain had quit a few hours before and the temperature had fallen. The surface of the alley was almost entirely iced over and glistened in the moonlight. Roy edged closer to the garage nearest him. The snorting noise became punctuated by a guttural sound, then ceased altogether. The sobbing lessened but continued.

  A man walked out of the passageway. Roy flattened himself against the garage door. The man turned up the alley and walked in the direction from which Roy had come. He was average-sized and wore a short, dark
jacket and a dockworker’s cap. Roy heard another noise coming from the passageway, the sound of a person trying to stand up but slipping and falling in the attempt, scraping the wall with his body.

  A second man came from the passageway. He stopped at the entrance to the alley and rubbed his face with both hands. When he dropped them, Roy could see that it was Red Fellows. Red blinked his eyes hard a few times, then worked them over again with his fists. He seemed unsure of where he was or in which direction he should go. Roy knew that he did not want Red to see him, though he was not entirely certain why. Roy had witnessed nothing and he did not even know what it was he had heard. Still, he was afraid. If Red looked his way, Roy decided, he would run and hope Red did not recognize him.

  Red put his right hand against the brick wall to his right and leaned on it. He coughed and brought up some phlegm, then spat it on the ground. Red leaned there for a few moments, then stood up straight, steadied himself, and began walking up the alley in the same direction the other man had gone.

  Roy watched Red negotiate the slippery, cracked concrete with mincing steps, stopping several times as he made his way, until Red was out of sight. Roy then peeled himself off the garage door and headed toward his house. The sky was now so clear that he could plainly see the seven stars that formed either the Big Dipper or the Little Dipper. Roy was not sure if the constellation was Ursa Major or Ursa Minor, but he did remember that the scientific name of the North Star was Polaris.

  The Delivery

  I went up the stairs carrying the two shopping bags full of Chinese food figuring on a fifty-cent tip. It was a good Sunday due to the rain, people stayed in. I had two more deliveries in the bicycle basket. I rang the third-floor doorbell and waited, feeling the sub gum sauce leak on the bottom of one of the bags.