The Cuban Club

by Barry Gifford

“Fine, Earl.”

  “You’ll tell her I asked.”

  Dick put down the paper and took off his glasses.

  “Nothing yet,” he said.

  “If it’s not here by tonight, I’ll call. Not before then.”

  Earl LaDuke opened his eyes and stood up. He was a big, ungainly man. Rudy wondered how he could have outrun the hussars in the old country when his name was Sackgasse.

  “I’ll be home. Your Aunt Sofia would like it if you and Kitty came for dinner.”

  “We will, Uncle Earl. Not tonight, but soon. Kiss her for me.”

  “I can still kiss her for myself, I want to. I can still do that.”

  Earl walked slowly up the stairs.

  “You’re not worried?” Dick asked.

  “The roads are icy.”

  “Emily wants to leave Chicago. Her sister’s in Atlanta.”

  “Earl and I can cover your share.”

  Dick was thirty-two, ten years younger than Rudy and twenty-seven years younger than Earl LaDuke. He had bought into Lake Shore five years before and his third was worth twice as much now.

  “I could be your man down there.”

  “Atlanta belongs to Lozano.”

  There were footsteps on the stairs. The two men looked up and saw Lola Wilson, a dancer from the Club Alabam next door, coming down. She was wearing a fur coat over her rehearsal costume. When the front of the coat swung to either side, they could see her legs. Lola descended cautiously, placing her high heels delicately on each of the rickety wooden steps. She came over and stood behind the chair on which Rudy’s uncle had been sitting.

  Dick got up, said, “Hello, Lola. See you later, Rudy,” and started up the stairs.

  Lola sat down, took out a crumpled pack of Camels and a book of matches from a pocket of her coat, then changed her mind and replaced them in the pocket.

  “You don’t like it that I smoke. Sometimes I forget. Kitty doesn’t smoke, does she?”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “I saw Roy down here with her the other day. He’s getting big. He must be about ten now.”

  “Eight. What can I do for you, Lola?”

  Lola had a sharply upturned nose, rose-colored full lips, dark brown swampy eyes and blonde hair translucent at the ends. Her face fascinated most men and women, especially women, very few of whom were gifted with such dramatically contrasting features that so exquisitely combined. Lola’s teeth were crooked and tobacco-stained; they embarrassed her so when she smiled she determinedly pressed her lips together. Before he married Kitty, when Lola was eighteen, fresh off the bus from West Virginia, Rudy had offered to pay to have her teeth straightened but she had demurred, and then it was too late.

  “You’ll hate me,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “I picked up a dose. Can you give me a shot?”

  Rudy got up, walked to the rear of the room, opened the door of a small refrigerator and took out a little round bottle. He opened a drawer in a cabinet next to the refrigerator and removed a hypodermic syringe and a thin packet containing needles, one of which he shook out and fitted to the syringe, then drew fluid from the bottle before replacing it in the refrigerator. Rudy picked up a brown bottle, took a cotton ball from a box and walked back to the table.

  Lola stood, turned her back to Rudy and held one side of the fur coat away from her body. Rudy sat down, daubed the exposed part of her left buttock with the piece of cotton he’d soaked in alcohol from the brown bottle, then inserted the needle into the sanitized spot and injected the penicillin, after which he again brushed the spot with the cotton ball before standing up and walking back to a sink next to the cabinet and placing the items he had employed into it.

  “How long were you in medical school, Rudy?”

  “A year and a half. I’ve told you this. When they rolled the cadaver in, they rolled me out. After that I transferred to pharmacy school.”

  “Do I need a band-aid?”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  Lola sat down again, as did Rudy. She balanced herself carefully on her right buttock.

  “Really, I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t in my life.”

  “I thought you were going to marry Manny Shore.”

  “I can’t go on dancing forever. I figured at least it would get me off my feet, but no. I realized it wasn’t going to work. I haven’t seen him in months. Weeks, anyway. Rudy, do you think I’m a trollop?”

  “Where did you learn that word?”

  “Monique said somebody called her one and I asked her what it meant. She didn’t know exactly, so I looked it up. Did you think I was a trollop when we met?”

  “You’re not Monique. You have to take better care of yourself.”

  Lola stood up.

  “I have to get back to rehearsal.”

  She leaned down and kissed Rudy behind his right ear.

  “Am I still pretty? Not as pretty as your wife, I know, but tell me.”

  Rudy stood and looked into her murky eyes.

  “Yes,” he said, “you are.”

  Lola turned and walked up the stairs. When she reached the top step she paused and said, loud enough for him to hear, “I’m twenty-nine.”

  LAS VEGAS, 1949

  “Mr. Randolph is very nice, Rudy. He offered to let us use his house in the Bahamas any time we want.”

  “It’s all right for you to be polite to Mr. Ruggiano, Kitty. Or anyone else, for that matter. Just keep your distance.”

  “Who’s Mr. Ruggiano?”

  “Ralph Randolph is the name he uses when it suits his purpose.”

  “What about Marshall Gottlieb?”

  “What about him?”

  “Is that his real name?”

  “It was something else when his family came from Poland or Russia.”

  “Like yours.”

  Kitty stood up and put on her candy-striped terrycloth robe.

  “I’m going to the room to call my mother and talk to Roy,” she said, and walked around the pool into the hotel.

  Kitty and Rudy were staying at El Rancho Vegas. Their son, Roy, who was almost three years old, was being looked after by his grandmother in Chicago. Luchino Benedetti came over and sat down in the chair Kitty had been using.

  “Your wife is a real doll, Rudy,” he said. “Everybody likes her, even the other wives.”

  “Thanks, Lucky. She’s having a swell time. We both appreciate your hospitality. You keep a good house.”

  “Kitty got a lot to show, but she don’t show it. She has class.”

  “She was raised right.”

  “Leave it to the sisters. How is your boy?”

  “Growing up fast. He’s back home with Kitty’s mother.”

  “My Rocco joined the Air Force. He wants to be a pilot.”

  “I heard. I’m sure he’ll do well.”

  “So, our thing with the Diamond brothers.”

  “All I know is, the goods are always on time, and they’re always what Sam and Moses say they are.”

  “They move.”

  “If they didn’t, Rugs would know.”

  “Did you hear about Sam’s wife?”

  “Dolores. A nice woman.”

  “She run off with Solly Banks’s son, Victor.”

  “Run off? Where to?”

  “New York. Sam’s there now, it’s why he ain’t here. Rugs is afraid this will interfere with our business, and that can’t happen.”

  “I’ll talk to Moses.”

  “Do it now.”

  Kitty came back and Lucky jumped up.

  “Hello, Kitty. I was just telling Rudy what a hit you are with everyone.”

  “Thank you, Lucky,” she said, and sat down in the chair.

  “See you at dinner,” said Lucky, and walked away.

  “Did you speak to Roy?”

  “Yes, he’s fine. The janitor found a dead rat in his fire truck and showed it to him. The tail was as long as Roy’s arm.”

  �
��Did they bury the rat in the yard?”

  “No, the janitor burned it in the furnace. Roy was about to take his nap. He told me to kiss his daddy for him.”

  Kitty kissed her husband on the cheek.

  “And Rose?”

  “I’m worried about her heart condition. She doesn’t have the energy she used to.”

  “Has she seen Dr. Martell?”

  “Unless he’s operating, he comes to the house every evening to have a glass of wine.”

  “Your mother will be all right. Martell would leave his wife for her in a minute if Rose gave him some encouragement.”

  “My mother says he has a tax problem. He could lose his hospital.”

  Marshall Gottlieb and his wife, Sarah, came over.

  “Come with me, Kitty,” Sarah said. “We’re going to have our fingernails and toenails done.”

  Kitty got up and went with her. Marshall sat down.

  “Lucky told you?”

  “About Sam Diamond? I told him I’ll talk to Moses.”

  “Moses just called Mr. Randolph two minutes ago. His brother shot and killed Dolores and Victor Banks in their room at the Waldorf, then he phoned Moses to tell him what he’d done and that he was going to kill himself. Next thing, Moses hears a shot.”

  Arlene Silverman, Art and Edith Silverman’s seventeen year old daughter, dove into the pool. Rudy and Marshall Gottlieb watched her swim.

  “Arlene’s a lovely girl, isn’t she?” said Marshall. “How is it she has gorgeous blonde hair when neither of her parents do?”

  “She’s adopted,” said Rudy.

  “Oh yeah? I didn’t know.”

  Arlene Silverman swam the length of the pool twice before Ralph Randolph helped her climb out.

  “Lotsa times,” Marshall said, “after you get what you want, you don’t want it. That ever happen to you?”

  IN DREAMS

  Roy’s grandfather was watching a baseball game on television when his grandson came home from school.

  “What’s on, Pops?” Roy asked.

  “The White Sox are playing the Senators. Two outs in the ninth. Billy Pierce is pitching a perfect game.”

  Roy sat down on the floor next to his grandfather’s chair. Ed Fitzgerald, Washington’s catcher, was the last chance for them to break up the no-hitter.

  “Fitzgerald bats left-handed,” Roy said. “Since Pierce is a southpaw, shouldn’t he just throw breaking balls?”

  “He might hang one, Roy, but Pierce is crafty. He’d probably do better to start him off with a fastball high and outside, then go to the curve.”

  Fitzgerald lined one off the right field fence for a double.

  “Pierce went with the fast ball, Pops.”

  “It caught too much of the plate. He should have gone away with it.”

  The game ended when the next batter made an out. Roy’s grandfather turned off the set.

  “Too bad,” said Roy. “A pitcher doesn’t get many chances to throw a perfect game.”

  “There have only been about twenty perfect games in the history of major league baseball. How was school, boy? What grade are you in now?”

  “Fourth. I don’t know, Pops. I think I learn more important things talking to you and some other people. I like it when you tell me stories about your life.”

  “Don’t ignore dreams, Roy. You can learn a lot from them.”

  “I don’t always remember what I dream.”

  “Write them down as soon as you wake up, even if you’re groggy and only half awake. For me, the most interesting dreams are the ones in which people who have died appear.”

  “Like who?”

  “I recently had a dream about a very old, close friend of mine who died about twelve or thirteen years ago, before you were born. His name was Warren Winslow. In my dream someone told me he heard that Warren was living in Chicago in the house of a person I didn’t know. He gave me the address so I went there and found Warren, looking much as he had when both of us were younger. He was calm, sitting on a couch with a blanket across his legs. I asked him how this could have happened, how he had recovered, why he hadn’t told me and let me know he was here in Chicago.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that he had died but come back to life and was rather embarrassed to have done so. He asked the doctors in the hospital where he had been treated not to tell anyone, and he left everything he owned and came to stay with a fellow he did not know very well who was willing to keep his existence and whereabouts a secret.”

  “Why?”

  “Warren himself was not entirely certain other than he felt satisfied that at the time of his death he was not displeased by the state of his affairs and his relations with those closest to him. I told him I had missed him and Warren said he had always valued our friendship highly. Now that I knew where he was, Warren told me, I could visit him if I chose to, but warned me that he didn’t know how much longer he would be there. It wasn’t so much that his attitude was one of indifference—at least I didn’t take it that way—so much as his having moved on from the past.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I left the house, then I woke up. This is the way the dead visit us, Roy, in dreams. It’s the only way we can be with them again.”

  “That’s pretty spooky, Pops. See, this is the kind of stuff they don’t teach us in school.”

  LUCKY

  “You sure the coal man’s comin’ this mornin’?”

  “He usually comes around nine or ten every other Saturday during the winter. Depends on how many deliveries he has.”

  Roy and his friend Johnny Murphy were standing in the alley behind Roy’s house waiting for the coal truck to arrive. Two feet of snow had fallen during the night, then the temperature had dropped, so the ground was covered by a frozen crust. The boys, who were both eight years old, liked to slide down the coal chute into the pile in front of the furnace in the basement. The best time to do it was on delivery day, when the pile was highest.

  “I’m freezin’,” said Johnny. “I shoulda worn two pairs of socks.”

  It was almost ten o’clock when they heard and then saw the big red Peterson Coal truck turn into the alley. The truck crunched ahead and skidded to a stop in front of Roy’s garage. Alfonso Rivero, the driver, climbed down from the cab and tromped over to where Roy and Johnny were standing. Alfonso was a short, stocky man in his mid-forties. He was wearing a black knit hat pulled down over his ears, a navy blue tanker jacket and steel-toed work boots. An unfiltered Camel hung from his lips.

  “You waiting go slide?” he said.

  “Hi, Alfonso,” said Roy. “Yeah, I thought you might be late because of the snow and ice.”

  “We been out here since nine,” said Johnny Murphy.

  “I hate the nieve,” Alfonso said. “In Mexico, no hay snow and ices, except in los montañas.”

  “Why do you live in Chicago?” asked Johnny.

  “We don’t have no work in Mexico, also.”

  Roy and Johnny watched Alfonso take down a wheelbarrow mounted on the back of the truck and set it on the ground, then open the two rear doors and hoist himself inside. He pulled a thick glove from each of his side pockets, put them on, picked a shovel out of the coal pile and began shoveling it down into the wheelbarrow. When the barrow was full, he leaned down holding the shovel.

  “Take la pala, chico,” he said to Roy.

  Roy took it and the deliveryman jumped down. Roy handed Alfonso the shovel. He stuck it into the pile of coal in the wheelbarrow and wheeled it through the passageway leading to Roy’s backyard. The boys followed Alfonso, who stopped in front of a pale blue door at the rear of the building, undid the latch on the door and swung it open. He shoveled most of the contents of the wheelbarrow down the chute and dumped in the rest, then headed back to the truck for another load.

  After six trips back and forth, Alfonso said to the boys, “Es todo, muchachos. Okay now for deslizamiento.”

  “Muchas gracias, Alf
onso,” said Roy.

  “Yeah, mucho,” said Johnny.

  Roy went first, sliding all the way down and landing in front of the furnace. As soon as he got up, Johnny did the same. They went out the basement door and ran up the steps into the yard.

  “Once more, Alfonso!” Roy shouted.

  “Si, uno mas,” said the deliveryman, and lit up a fresh cigarette.

  After the boys emerged from the basement, Alfonso closed the door to the chute, latched it, and pushed the wheelbarrow back into the alley. Roy and Johnny trailed him and watched as he tossed in his shovel, closed the doors and re-attached the wheelbarrow.

  “See you dos semanas, amigos,” Alfonso said, then climbed into the cab, started the engine and drove slowly away down the alley.

  Roy and Johnny’s faces were covered with coal dust, as were their hands and clothes. They picked up clean snow, washed their faces and hands with it and rubbed it on their coats and pants.

  “I wouldn’t mind havin’ Alfonso’s job,” said Johnny. “You get to drive a big truck and stand around smokin’ cigarettes in people’s yards.”

  “Alfonso’s a good guy,” said Roy. “He probably lets any kid who wants to slide down the piles.”

  “It don’t seem so cold now,” Johnny said. “You hear about Cunningham’s mother?”

  “No. What about her?”

  “She died yesterday.”

  “Tommy didn’t say anything about her being sick.”

  “My father says she committed suicide. It’s a mortal sin, so now she can’t get into heaven.”

  “Maybe it was an accident.”

  “My father says she ate a bullet.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Shot herself in the mouth. She’s probably already in hell.”

  “Don’t say that to Cunningham.”

  “My mother said she thinks Tommy’s father pulled the trigger.”

  “Why would he murder her?”

  “When husbands and wives are arguin’ they’re always sayin’ how they’re gonna kill each other. I hate hearin’ it when my parents fight. You’re lucky you only got a mother.”

  DANGER IN THE AIR

  Roy liked to fly with his mother. Most of the time they drove between Key West or Miami, Florida, and Chicago, the places in which they lived; but if they needed to be somewhere in a hurry, they took an airplane. Roy’s mother always dressed well when they flew, and she made sure Roy did, too.