The Roy Stories

by Barry Gifford

  “You liked Kabir,” Jimmy Boyle said to Roy. “You surprised he’d do somethin’ like that?”

  “I didn’t know him so good,” said Roy. “Just talked to him around school. He’s only lived here a few months.”

  “I seen him once with his mother,” the Viper said. “They were goin’ in the door next to Victory Cleaners.”

  “He told me they lived over it with his aunt,” said Roy. “I never met her or his mother.”

  “Kabir’s mother’s real tall,” said the Viper. “She was dressed all in black and had a scarf around her head. I couldn’t hardly see her face.”

  It was a Friday after school and Jimmy Boyle, the Viper and Roy were walking to Lucky’s El Paso to shoot pool. Roy did not know exactly why, but he felt sorry for Bobby Kabir. An icy rain started to fall. Roy stopped on the sidewalk.

  “I’m goin’ home,” he said. “I don’t feel good. See you guys tomorrow.”

  Roy turned around and headed the other way. He knew he couldn’t do anything to help Bobby Kabir, nor was there any reason he should. Kabir wasn’t really even a friend of his. Roy walked faster. His head was already wet.

  Since Bobby Kabir was a minor, he was sentenced to the Boys Reformatory at St. Charles for a year. Roy never saw him again. He figured Kabir’s mother must have moved away because nobody he knew ever saw her again, either.

  Diezmo Blanks, however, turned up in the news about three years later. He and a fellow inmate named Marvellis Nubarrón escaped from prison and murdered a gas station attendant in Johnson City, Illinois. They stole his car, a parakeet yellow 1961 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove to Wyoming, where they were apparently forced off the road during a blizzard. Highway patrolmen found Diezmo Blanks and his partner dead from exposure in a snowdrift next to Route 80, sixteen miles outside of Laramie. They had abandoned the Pontiac and attempted to walk into town during the storm. Photographs of Blanks and Nubarron were in the newspaper. The article said that Diezmo Blanks was a three-time loser who had been convicted once for indecent behavior with a child and twice for armed robbery. Bobby Kabir’s name was not mentioned.

  Victory Cleaners was sold and renamed for its new owner, Jet Wing. Roy’s mother began bringing her dry cleaning there, and whenever Roy walked over to Chippewa Street to pick it up for her he couldn’t help but think about Bobby Kabir. One time he asked Jet Wing if an older woman named Nardis still lived upstairs.

  “Wing family live up,” he said. “No Nardis.”

  Roy’s First Car

  “She’s gone, she’s solid gone, that’s what the guy said just before he knocked back a shot of Wild Turkey and walked out of The Four Horsemen into the damn blizzard and got hit by a bus.”

  “That’s how it goes sometimes,” said Heavenly Wurtzel, a waitress at The Broken Arrow. “My dad says once your name’s up there on that wall, that’s it, game over.”

  Roy and Marvin Varnish were in a booth at the diner drinking Green Rivers. Marvin, a diesel mechanic for the Chicago Fire Department, was six years older than Roy, who was almost sixteen. Roy had met Marvin, who was a friend of Roy’s cousin, Kip, to talk about getting a car from him. Varnish’s side job was buying old cars that didn’t or couldn’t run, fixing them up and selling them. He had a 1955 Buick Century with Dyna-flo about ready to go, he told Roy, that he could let Roy have for three hundred dollars.

  “Who’s your dad say puts the names up on that wall?” Marvin Varnish asked the waitress.

  Heavenly Wurtzel was twenty-six, a peroxide blonde, decidedly on the portly side. She still lived with her parents. Her father, Barney Wurtzel, owned a plumbing company that he advertised on the radio during White Sox games. Between innings a woman’s voice promised, “Nobody lays pipe like Wurtzel.” Heavenly told Marvin Varnish that her mother told her father that this sounded dirty and Barney Wurtzel said, “Plumbing’s a dirty business, Ruth.”

  “God, I guess,” Heavenly said.

  “And where’s this wall?” asked Roy. “I’d like to see it to know if my name or the name of anyone I know is on it.”

  “Bethlehem, probably,” said Heavenly. “Jerusalem, maybe. Around where the Garden of Eden was.”

  Marvin studied Heavenly as she walked away.

  “She wouldn’t be too bad lookin’,” he said, “she cut down on the sweets. Some men like ’em big, though. Eugene Kornheiser was that way. He worked hook and ladder out of Station Fifteen ’til he fell off a building and broke his back.”

  “Why do you think Heavenly’s not married yet?” Roy asked.

  “She had a kid when she was seventeen, gave it away. Pinky French told me.”

  “So? What’s that got to do with somebody marryin’ her now?”

  Marvin shrugged and drained the remainder of his Green River through the straw.

  “Guys find out about her havin’ a kid already, it bugs ’em,” he said. “They want a clean slate. Heavenly’d be better off movin’ away, snaggin’ a guy in another city won’t find out so easy.”

  Roy walked with Marvin Varnish over to the firehouse to take a look at the Buick, which was parked in the alley behind the station. Snow was piled up a foot deep around it. The car was burgundy with dark green upholstery. Roy looked in the front passenger side window.

  “The seats are pretty ripped up,” he said.

  “I’ll throw in a roll of tape,” said Marvin. “It’s got Dyna-flo, like I said. You know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “You turn the key in the ignition, then step on the starter button before you step on the accelerator pedal, then you goose it. Everything works. You smoke?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Good, ’cause the lighter don’t work.”

  Roy agreed to buy the car as soon as he turned sixteen and could get a driver’s license.

  “When’s your birthday?” asked Marvin.

  “Next month. I’ve got the money,” Roy said. “I’ve been savin’ up. Do you want me to give you somethin’ now?”

  Marvin shook his head. “It’s okay, I trust you. I won’t sell it to nobody else.”

  It was snowing like crazy as Roy trudged down Minnetonka Street. A red panel truck was parked in front of The Broken Arrow, its motor running. Roy saw Heavenly Wurtzel come running out of the diner, a black scarf covering her head, and climb into the truck on the passenger side. A big man smoking a cigar was in the driver’s seat. Painted on the side of the truck in yellow block letters were the words NOBODY LAYS PIPE LIKE WURTZEL. Under the words was a telephone number, SOUTH SHORE 6-6000. The driver rolled down his window and stuck out his head to see if it was safe to pull out. He was wearing a short-brimmed brown hunter’s cap with earflaps. A hard wind blew snow in his face, causing him to squint. He kept the cigar clenched in his teeth. Roy guessed that the driver was Barney Wurtzel.

  Heavenly was only twenty-six, but unless she got out of town soon, like Marvin Varnish said, her life was pretty much over. Roy hated thinking this, so he did his best to imagine himself behind the steering wheel of the ’55 Buick Century. Then he remembered Marvin’s story about a guy stumbling out of The Four Horsemen tavern into the path of a bus. It was probably better, Roy thought, to not know if your name is on the wall.

  El Carterista

  When Roy was fifteen, he worked for the summer at WTVT, a television station in Tampa, Florida, assisting in-studio hosts of the morning and evening movies, and occasionally reporters or film crews in the field.

  One morning, Roy was assigned to a freelance photographer named Ernie Walls, a man in his late forties or early fifties, whose claim to fame, the station manager told Roy, was that while working for Life magazine he had spent several weeks with Fidel Castro and his rebel army in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba before the ouster of Fulgencio Batista.

  Ernie Walls was hired to direct filming of the groundbreaking ceremony for the University of South Florida
. Roy rode with the photographer in Walls’s 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible from the television station to the ceremonial site in North Tampa. They were followed by a WTVT van carrying remote equipment and the camera crew.

  On the way, Ernie Walls regaled Roy with tales of his adventures taking pictures around the world, the highlight being his sojourn with the 26th of July Movement in Cuba.

  “You don’t mind riding with the top down, do you, son?” Ernie Walls asked. “I like to feel the breeze blowing through my hair, what little I’ve got left.”

  “No, sir, Mr. Walls,” said Roy. “I like it, too.”

  “Call me Ernie.”

  The photographer was five foot eight, portly, pink-faced, with thinning red hair and bloodshot eyes. As he drove he removed from the left hip pocket of his dirty tan sportcoat a silver flask. He unscrewed the cap and took a long swig.

  “Hope you don’t mind my having breakfast while I tool along,” said Ernie. “A screwdriver’s the healthiest way to start the day. I’ll pick up some orange juice later, I get the chance. Until then, the vodka will have to do.”

  It was shortly after 10:00 a.m. when Roy and Ernie Walls left the station. The photographer pulled steadily on his flask during the twenty-five minute trip. When he wasn’t sipping, he talked.

  “Castro wasn’t a commie when I was with him. I think he figured he could cut a deal with the Mob. Made a mistake there. Batista was their boy, they could control him. Fidel was a wild card and the Mob only plays with a marked deck. Both the Mob and the United States government knew Castro couldn’t be trusted, but he wasn’t a hater. Che, though, now he’s a hater. He could, he’d execute Kennedy and everyone in Washington. You watch, there’ll come a time Fidel will have to get rid of him.”

  “Did you meet Che?” asked Roy. Ernie Walls sucked again on his flask before he answered.

  “Slept in the same tent with him once. Man stinks. Doesn’t bathe. Smokes cigars or a pipe to cover his fox. Always reading: Goethe, Nietzsche, Marx.”

  “Who are they?”

  “German writers. You ever see that movie The Stranger, where Orson Welles plays a Nazi on the run after the war?”

  “No.”

  “He’s hiding in Connecticut, about to marry a professor’s daughter, played by Loretta Young, and at dinner one evening someone mentions Karl Marx’s name in company with other German thinkers and Welles says, ‘But Marx wasn’t a German, he was a Jew.’ That’s what tips off Edward G. Robinson, who plays a Nazi hunter, that Welles is the man he’s after.”

  The shoot at the groundbreaking took about an hour, after which Ernie Walls invited Roy, who had done nothing more for the photographer than hold his camera case while he shot stills, to have lunch with him. Walls drove to Ybor City and parked his Continental in front of Las Novedades.

  “They mix an honest drink here,” he said, “and the food’s good.”

  “I’ve been here a couple of times,” said Roy, “with my uncle.”

  Ernie Walls and Roy got out of the car. Ernie took a cigar from an inside pocket of his coat, bit off one end, spit out the leaves and rested his small right hand on Roy’s left shoulder.

  “We’ll order you up some pollo asado, son,” he said. “Or do you prefer lechon? With black beans and yellow rice.”

  “I like them both,” said Roy.

  In the restaurant, Ernie Walls ordered two vodka martinis for himself. Roy ordered a Cuban sandwich and a Coke.

  “That all you want?”

  “I’m not real hungry,” Roy said.

  Ernie lit his cigar and puffed life into it.

  “There was an Americano with the Escambray Brigade. William Morgan. Che never liked him. He poisoned Fidel against Morgan, said he was a CIA infiltrator, and they put him in front of a firing squad.”

  “Was Morgan working for the CIA?” Roy asked.

  “No. He just didn’t agree with Che, and Che hates Americans. There was some chatter about how Morgan cuddled up with Trujillo after Batista skipped to the DR, but nothing they could prove.”

  “Did Che hate you?”

  “I’m sure he did, but at that point Castro needed all the good publicity he could get, so he kept Che in check. A reporter from the New York Times was there, too.”

  The martinis arrived. Ernie Walls immediately lifted one, said, “Death to all tyrants!” and drank it. He put down the empty glass and lifted the other.

  “Death to all tyrants!” he said, and polished off the second martini.

  “Know what Che called me?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “El Carterista, the pickpocket.”

  “Why?”

  “He said I was stealing images from them with the camera, taking something that didn’t belong to me. Curtis said some plains Indians said the same thing.”

  “Why didn’t he call you El Ladrón?”

  Ernie looked at Roy and smiled.

  “You speak Spanish?”

  “Un poquito,” said Roy.

  The waiter brought Roy’s Cuban sandwich and a Coca-Cola.

  “Two more of these, por favor,” the photographer said, motioning to the two empty martini glasses.

  The waiter took them away. Ernie Walls puffed on his cigar. Roy bit into his sandwich.

  “They were special days,” said Walls, “up there in the mountains with those brave, desperate men. I can honestly say I’ve been a witness to history.”

  The waiter returned with two more martinis and set them down on the table. Ernie stared at the twin glasses for a few moments before picking up the one closest to him.

  “Lift your glass,” he said to Roy.

  Roy raised his Coke and said, “Death to all tyrants!”

  Ernie Walls nodded. His nose resembled a red ping-pong ball.

  “Where would we little people be without them?” he said.

  Crime and Punishment

  Roy and Jimmy Boyle had just reached the landing of the staircase leading to the second floor of the school when the Viper, who was coming down the stairs, stopped them and said, “You hear about the guy went to the gas chamber at midnight last night in San Quentin? They killed him even though he didn’t murder anybody.”

  “I thought they couldn’t do that,” said Jimmy. “I thought only killers got executed.”

  “Maybe he had a bad lawyer,” said Roy.

  He and Jimmy Boyle were twelve years old, the Viper was thirteen. The Viper’s uncle, Charlie Ah Ah, his mother’s brother, was doing seven years at Joliet for armed robbery, so the Viper kept up on prison news. His uncle stuttered badly, so he was called Charlie Ah Ah because he always said “Ah, ah” before he could get a whole word out.

  “The Red Light Bandit,” said the Viper. “He raped and robbed people parked on lovers’ lanes. The newspapers named him the Red Light Bandit because he pretended to be a cop by using a revolving red light on his car.”

  “When you’re in the gas chamber you’re supposed to take a deep breath right away so you pass out and don’t suffer so much,” Jimmy said to Roy as they continued up the stairs.

  “Probably the gas chamber is a better way to go than the electric chair,” said Roy. “I heard on the news once about how a guy’s hair caught on fire when he got a jolt.”

  That evening, Roy’s grandfather was reading the newspaper and Roy asked him if there was anything in it about the execution at San Quentin.

  “Yes,” said Pops, “the man they killed was actually quite bright. He wrote two books while he was in prison appealing his sentence.”

  “Jimmy Boyle said he thought only murderers could be executed. Charlie Ah Ah’s nephew told us this guy just raped and robbed.”

  “It depends on the law in the state in which a crime is committed,” said Pops. “This case was in California. The law is different there than it is here in Illinois
.”

  “Do you think a person should be executed even if he hasn’t killed anybody?”

  “Many people believe there should be no capital punishment no matter what crime has been committed, even murder. I believe there are some crimes so unforgivable that the world is undoubtedly better off if the person or persons who committed them will never again be able to repeat them, and there is, of course, only one way to be certain of that. It isn’t just that they should be eliminated for what they’ve already done but what they may do in the future.

  “In India, people believe that once a tiger has killed and eaten a human being, he develops a craving for human flesh and will then go after people almost exclusively. Usually it’s older tigers who do this because they’re too slow to chase down other animals.”

  “Like in the movie Man-Eater of Kumaon, with Sabu,” said Roy.

  “Just like those man-eating tigers,” Pops said, “people can get used to doing things they’ve never done before, previously unimaginable things, even if those things are terrible and cause great suffering. They can get to like doing them.”

  It was drizzling the next morning in the schoolyard when Roy told Jimmy Boyle and the Viper what his grandfather had said.

  “The Golden Rule is to do to others as they did to you,” said Jimmy.

  “Charlie Ah Ah says get the other guy before he gets you,” said the Viper. “And James Cagney said, ‘Get ’em in the eyes, get ’em right in the eyes.’”

  “No,” said Roy, “that was John Garfield in Pride of the Marines, after he gets blinded by the Japanese.”

  “Maybe Cagney’ll play the Red Light Bandit,” said Jimmy Boyle. “I’d go see that one.”

  “I don’t think he will,” said Roy. “Cagney went to the electric chair as Rocky Sullivan in Angels with Dirty Faces. I don’t think he’d want to be executed twice.”

  “If I had to go,” said the Viper, “and I could choose how, I’d ask for a firing squad. It’d be over quick and I could wear a blindfold.”