“It might snow, huh?”
“I think it’s more likely to rain, honey. It’s not cold enough to snow.”
“Mom, if you had a choice between freezing to death or burning up, which one would you choose?”
“I’d take freezing, definitely, because once your body is numb all over, you can’t feel anything. You die, sure, but it’s better than feeling your flesh melt off the bones. How about you?”
“I like being in hot weather a lot more than cold weather, but I guess you’re right. I saw in a movie where a guy who was lost in the wilderness made a blanket of snow for himself and survived until the rescuers came because his body stayed warm under the snow.”
“I didn’t know about that, Roy. Let’s remember it, just in case we get stranded sometime in the mountains in a blizzard.”
“You were right, Mom, here comes the rain. All the tiny black spots in the sky were raindrops ready to fall. I never saw rain that looked so black before. It’s like being bombed by billions of ants.”
“Yes, baby, it is strange, isn’t it? Roll up your window all the way. I hope we can make it to A Little Bit O’ Heaven before it gets too bad.”
“Mom, is there a religion of geography?”
“Not really, unless you consider the ones where people worship places they believe an extraordinary event occurred.”
“Probably something important to someone happened just about everywhere, and some people made more of a big deal about it than others.”
“Yes, baby, you’ve got it right.”
Man and Fate
“Vicksburg is really a sad place, Mom, I’ve never seen so many graves.”
“It’s spooky here, baby, I agree. It breaks my heart to think about all the young boys, many not too much older than you, who’re buried here. You know, Roy, some people would think we’re crazy, driving around like this in a cemetery in Mississippi in the rain. I can’t help but imagine the lives these boys might have had if there hadn’t been a War Between the States. A civil war is the worst kind of war. It’s been almost one hundred years since this one ended, and the South still hasn’t recovered.”
“Soldiers from the North are buried here, too, Mom. Hundreds of ’em.”
“How can a place be so dreary and beautiful at the same time?”
“I’ll bet there are ghosts here who come out and fight the war all over again every night.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, baby. Somebody could make a terrific movie of ghosts or even corpses rising from their graves and not fighting but talking with one another peacefully about how horribly wrong it was to have a war in the first place.”
“That wouldn’t be so exciting, Mom, not if they were just talking. It would be cool to see the corpses, though.”
“The only real reasons people go to war anymore are religion and money, and often it’s a combination of the two. In the Civil War, cheap labor in the form of slaves was the main issue. In World War II, Hitler used the Jews as scapegoats for Germany’s economic problems, which were a result of World War I. He had to go to war to get Germany out of debt. Do you understand any of this, Roy?”
“Not everything. I know that sometimes people want the land that other people are on.”
“That has to do with money. One piece of land might be better than another to grow crops on, or there’s oil or gas or diamonds and gold or other valuable minerals in it. And as far as religion is concerned, everybody should be left alone and leave others alone to worship as they please.”
“Why don’t they?”
“Most do, Roy, but some people get carried away. They believe their way should be the only way. It’s when people think they’ve got an exclusive on being right that the world goes ape.”
“I once heard Dad say to a guy, ‘If I had to get a job done right and I had to choose between you and an ape to do it, I’d take the ape.’”
“I’ve had enough of Vicksburg, baby. How about you?”
Where Osceola Lives
“Mom, did you know that the Seminoles are the only Indian tribe that never gave up? They hid out here in the Everglades and the soldiers couldn’t defeat them.”
“I know that the Glades was much larger then, so the Indians had more room to move around and evade the army.”
“The Seminoles weren’t really a regular tribe, either. They were made up of renegades and survivors of several different tribes who banded together for a last stand in what they called the Terrible Place. Their leader was Osceola, whose real name was Billy Powell, and he was mostly a white man.”
“If I’m not mistaken, Roy, the road to Miami that we’re on now was originally a Micosukee Indian trail. Imagine how difficult it must have been to build the highway here.”
“Really dangerous, too. There’s alligators and panthers and water moccasins all around. The Seminoles somehow survived everything, even swamp fevers that killed dozens of soldiers.”
“In the movie Key Largo, there are two Seminole brothers who’ve escaped from jail and the cops are looking for them. Even though he’s seen them passing in a canoe, the hotel owner doesn’t tell the cops because he likes the brothers and believes they were treated unfairly. Later, just before a hurricane is about to hit, the Seminole brothers and other Indians come to the hotel for shelter, as they’d always done during a big storm, but a gangster who’s taken over the hotel refuses to let them in.”
“What happens to them?”
“They huddle together on the porch of the hotel and ride it out. The Seminole brothers survive.”
“Remember Johnny Sugarland, my favorite alligator wrestler at the reptile farm up in St. Augustine?”
“Sure, baby. The boy with three fingers on one hand and the thumb missing on the other.”
“He’s a Seminole. Johnny told me about Osceola, so I got a book about him from the school library. Nobody except the Seminoles knows where Osceola’s body is buried. Some of them say that Osceola is still alive and hunting with an eagle, an owl, and a one-eyed dog as old as he is way back in a part of the Terrible Place that no white man has ever seen.”
“Crazy Horse, the Sioux warrior, is another Indian whose burial place is kept secret. Supposedly, no white man knows where his grave is, either.”
“I’d go into the swamp with Johnny, if he’d take me. It would be great to see where Osceola lives.”
“I’m sure he’s dead now, Roy. For the Seminoles, it’s Osceola’s spirit that’s still alive.”
“I think I like the Everglades more than any other place I’ve been.”
“Why is that, baby?”
“It’s got the most hiding places of anywhere. If you don’t get eaten by a gator or a snake, or get swallowed up in quicksand or die of a fever, you could disappear from everyone for as long as you wanted.”
“Roy, there’s a reason the Indians called this the Terrible Place.”
“I know, Mom, but I think I’d be okay, as long as I remembered the way out.”
The Crime of Pass Christian
“You know, Mom, the best time for me is when we’re moving in the car. I like it when we’re between the places we’re coming from and going to.”
“Don’t you miss your friends, or sleeping in your own bed?”
“Sometimes. But right now we’re not in New Orleans yet and it’s kind of great that nobody else knows exactly where we are. Where are we, anyway?”
“Comin’ up on Pass Christian, honey. Remember once we stayed in a house here for a week when your dad had business in Biloxi? An old two-story house with a big screened-in porch that wrapped all around the second floor.”
“It’s where I trapped a big brown scorpion under a glass and left it there overnight. In the morning the glass was still upside down but the scorpion was gone. You let it go when I was asleep, didn’t you, Mom?”
“No, baby, I told y
ou I didn’t. I don’t know how it got out. And your dad was away that night in New Orleans. It was a real mystery.”
“I like that we don’t know what happened. Maybe there’s a ghost living in the house who picked up the glass, or somehow the scorpion did it with his poison tail.”
“This part of the Gulf Coast always seems haunted to me. If the scorpion had gotten out by itself, the glass would have fallen over, or at least moved. As I recall, it was in exactly the same place the next morning when we looked.”
“What kind of ghost do you think lives in that house?”
“Oh, probably the old lady who lived there all of her life. Someone told me she was almost a hundred years old when she died. She never married, and lived alone after her parents passed away.”
“What was her name?”
“Baby, I don’t remember. Mabel something, I think. There was a story about a kidnapping involving the woman. I can’t recall exactly what happened, but she had been kidnapped when she was a child and held for ransom. The family was quite wealthy. It was a famous case.”
“Did the police catch the kidnappers?”
“I guess so. Oh, wait, Roy, here’s the sharp curve in the highway I hate. I always forget when it’s coming up.”
“You’re a great driver, Mom. I always feel safe in the car with you.”
“You shouldn’t ever worry when we’re driving, baby. Now, look, the road stays pretty straight from here on. Yes, the men who kidnapped Mabel Wildrose—that was the family’s name, Wildrose—were caught and sent to prison.”
“Did they hurt her?”
“Something bad happened, but it was strange. Mabel Wildrose was nine years old when she was kidnapped.”
“The same age as me.”
“Yes, your age. They cut off some of little Mabel’s hair and sent it to her parents.”
“She must have been really scared.”
“I’m sure she was. But other than that, I don’t think she was harmed. Her parents paid the money and the cops found Mabel wherever it was the kidnappers said she would be.”
“You said the men were caught.”
“Uh-huh, in New Orleans, when they tried to get on a freighter bound for South America. There was one crazy part of the deal I remember now: The men had left her wrapped in a blanket, and when they were caught trying to board the boat at the dock in New Orleans, one of them was discovered to be carrying Mabel’s clothes, including her shoes, in his suitcase. The man had polished the shoes and asked the police if he could keep them with him in his jail cell. He was a nut.”
“I wouldn’t want to be kidnapped.”
“Baby, nobody’s going to steal you. Everyone knows who your dad is. They wouldn’t want to get into trouble with him.”
“What if they didn’t want money? What if someone wanted to keep me?”
“It won’t happen, Roy, really. Don’t worry.”
“One day I thought I saw a ghost in the house in Pass Christian, but I don’t think it was Mabel Wildrose. It was too big to be her. I was lying on the floor in the front room, playing with my soldiers. It was rainy and kind of dark and cold, and a shadow ran through the room and went out the door. I didn’t really see it, it was more like I felt it. The screen door flew open and banged shut behind the shadow.”
“Probably only the wind, baby, blowing through the house.”
“It might have been the ghost of one of the kidnappers, maybe the guy with Mabel’s shoes. Do you think they’re dead now?”
“Who, honey?”
“The men who stole Mabel Wildrose when she was nine.”
“Oh, they’ve been dead a long time. They probably died in prison.”
“I’d stab someone with my knife if he tried to take me. I’d try to get him in the eye. Probably Mabel didn’t have a knife on her, huh, Mom?”
“I doubt that she did, Roy, but sometimes there’s not much you can do to stop a person, especially if they’re bigger than you.”
“I’d wait until they weren’t looking and then stab my knife in their eye and run away. They wouldn’t catch me if I got outside.”
“Forget about it, baby. Nobody is going to kidnap you.”
“Sure, Mom, I know. But I’m gonna keep my knife on me anyway.”
Cool Breeze
“What would you do if one of the men on the chain gang broke away and jumped in our car?”
“That won’t happen, Roy. We won’t be stopped much longer. Their leg irons are too tough to bust, and these prisoners are swinging bush hooks, not sledgehammers.”
“The air is so smoky here. It must be really hard for the men to breathe when it’s so hot.”
“We’re in the Bessemer Cutoff, baby. This part of Alabama is full of steel mills. If these men weren’t prisoners, most of them would be working in the mills or mines or blast furnaces somewhere in Jefferson County.”
“There are more black guys than white guys on this chain gang. On the last one we passed, in Georgia, there were more white prisoners.”
“We’re going to move now, honey. Get your head back in.”
“Uncle Jack had two brothers working construction for him who’d been on a chain gang. Their names were Royal and Rayal.”
“They told you they were in jail?”
“Uh-huh. They didn’t murder anybody, only robbed a bank. Tried to, anyway. Rayal, I think it was, told me the reason they got caught was because they didn’t have a car. They got the money, then tried to take a bus to get away.”
“Where was this?”
“Jacksonville, I think. The bus didn’t arrive when it was supposed to, so the cops arrested them.”
“I’ll never forget that movie with Paul Muni, I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. At the end he escapes, and when he meets his old girlfriend, she asks him how he survives. As he disappears into the shadows, he whispers, ‘I steal.’ It’s pretty spooky.”
“I feel kind of bad waving back at the chain-gang guys, you know? We get to leave and they don’t.”
“Here we go. Oh, baby, doesn’t it feel good to have a breeze?”
Night Owl
“It’s dangerous to drive in the fog like this, isn’t it, Mom?”
“We’re going slowly, baby, in case we have to stop on a dime.”
“Do you know how many bridges there are that connect the islands between Key West and Miami?”
“About forty, I think, maybe more.”
“Does everyone have secrets?”
“Oh, yes, certainly they do.”
“Do you?”
“One or two.”
“Would you die if anybody found them out?”
“I wouldn’t die, no. There are just a few things I’d rather other people didn’t know.”
“Even me?”
“Even you what?”
“You have secrets you wouldn’t tell me?”
“Roy, there are things I don’t want to think about or remember, things I try to keep secret even from myself.”
“It must be hard to keep a secret from yourself.”
“Gee, baby, I can’t see a thing.”
Islamorada
“Listen, baby, tonight when we get to the hotel I want you to call your dad.”
“Is he coming to Miami?”
“No, he has to stay in Chicago. Your dad is sick, Roy, he’s in the hospital. It’ll cheer him up if you call him there.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s got a problem with his stomach. I think he needs to have an operation.”
“I remember when I was in the hospital to have my tonsils out. You stayed in the room with me on a little bed.”
“You were such a good patient. After the surgery you opened your mouth to talk but you couldn’t. All you could do was whisper.”
“The nu
rse gave me ice cream.”
“Poor baby, when the doctor came in you asked him if he would do another operation and put your voice back in.”
“Is Dad scared?”
“Your dad doesn’t scare easily, honey. He’s a pretty tough guy.”
“The doctor said I was brave. I didn’t cry or anything.”
“You were great, Roy. I was the one who was frightened.”
“Can we stop at Mozo’s in Islamorada and get squid rings?”
“Sure. Oh, there’s a big sailboat, Roy. Look! She’s a real beauty.”
“It’s a ketch.”
“I never can tell the difference between a ketch and a yawl.”
“The mizzenmast is farther forward on a ketch, and the mizzen sail is larger than on a yawl. Uncle Jack taught me.”
“You know, I don’t think your dad has ever been on a boat in his life, except when he was a little boy and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with his family from Europe to America.”
“How old was he?”
“About eight, I think.”
“Did they come on a sailboat?”
“No, baby, on a big ship with lots of people.”
“Why did they come?”
“To have a better life. After the big war, the first one, things were very bad where your dad’s family lived.”
“Were they poor?”
“I guess it was difficult to make a decent living. There were more opportunities over here. The United States was a young country and people from all over, not just Europe but Asia and Africa, too, felt they could build a new life for themselves. Everyone came to America this way, for work and religious reasons. They still do.”
“Were you already here when Dad came?”
“I wasn’t born yet. Your dad had been here for almost thirty years before we met.”
“Dad didn’t tell me he was sick.”
“He’ll pull through, Roy, don’t worry. We’ll call him as soon as we get to Miami. You’ll see, he’ll tell you he’s going to be all right.”
The Roy Stories Page 21