Roy joined his friends, who were occupying a booth in the back.
“How much he tip you?” asked the Viper.
“A buck.”
“He pinch you on the cheek?” asked Jimmy Boyle. “I hate when he does that.”
Roy shook his head no.
“He’s a fat fuck,” said the Viper.
“Arnie the Arm says Skull isn’t fat,” Roy said. “He says he’s fat.”
“Takes the Arm twice as long to eat since the accident at Pocilga’s,” said Jimmy Boyle. “His appetite ain’t changed, just his velocity.”
“What are you,” the Viper said, “a fuckin’ scientist?”
“My old man says Mancanza and Bruno Benzinger were feeding a stiff through the grinder is how it happened. Arnie got careless and caught his sleeve. By the time Benzinger turned off the machine, Mancanza’s right arm was in slices.”
“What happened to the stiff?” asked the Viper.
“Benzinger was a medic in Korea, so he tied a tourniquet onto what was left of Arnie’s right arm to stop the bleedin’, then finished off the stiff before takin’ Mancanza to the hospital. My old man says if fuckin’ Benzinger had taken the cut off parts of the arm, the doctors might have been able to reattach it, but he ground them up, too.”
The next time Roy was in Meschina’s, Skull Dorfman’s booth was empty.
“Hey, Viper,” Roy said, as he slid into a booth. “It’s past midnight. Where’s Skull?”
“You ain’t heard what happened?”
“No.”
“The Arm told Cool Phil Skull messed up. He got two jobs, you know, one tendin’ a bridge on the river, the other as a parimutuel clerk at Sportsman’s.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You work for the city, you ain’t supposed to work at the racetrack. It’s a law.”
“What happened?”
“Skull was at the track when he was supposed to be tending the bridge, and the fuckin’ Queen Mary come through.”
“The Queen Mary on the Chicago River?”
“One of them big god damn passenger liners. People want to see a river that flows backwards, I guess. Anyway, Skull’s got his key on him, the one unlocks the switch raises the bridge. They’re goin’ nuts, nobody’ll squeal on Skull, so the river pilot and the police don’t know where he is. The Queen Mary’s bobbin’ up and down, can’t go nowhere. Everybody and their mother’s pissed as hell. Takes ’em forever to find another key or break the lock. Finally, they get the bridge up. Skull gets back there, they put his ass in a sling.”
“What did they do to him?”
“The Arm says Skull’s suspended indefinitely from the bridge job without pay, and for sure he can’t work the track no more unless he quits the city, which’d mean he’d forfeit his pension, which he got more’n twenty years in.”
Jimmy Boyle came in and sat down next to Roy.
“I just told Roy about what happened to Skull,” said the Viper.
“Yeah, the Arm’s out front on the sidewalk,” Jimmy Boyle said. “Heard him tellin’ Oscar Meschina that Skull’s in Hot Springs, workin’ at a dog track.”
“Where’s Hot Springs?” the Viper asked.
“Arkansas,” said Roy. “I was there once with my mother. Gambling’s legal.”
A couple came in and sat down in Skull Dorfman’s booth.
“I guess it’s true,” said the Viper. “Don’t look like Skull’s comin’ in.”
Jimmy Boyle nodded. “Nope,” he said, “not tonight, anyway.”
Wanted Man
The summer I was thirteen years old I worked in Cocoa Beach, Florida, building roads and houses for my uncle’s construction company. One afternoon when we were paving a street in one hundred and five degree heat, a police car pulled up to the site, stopped, and two cops got out, guns drawn. They moved swiftly toward the steam roller, which was being operated by Boo Ruffert, a former Georgia sheriff. The cops proceeded without a word and grabbed Boo, dragging him down from his perch atop the steam roller. I was shoveling limerock off of a curb directly across from the action, and I watched the cops handcuff Ruffert and begin double-timing him toward their beige and white. Jake Farkas, who had been sweeping behind Boo, jumped up onto the steam roller and shut it down before the machine went out of control and careened off the road. My uncle came running out of the trailer he used as an office and intercepted the policemen before they locked Boo Ruffert into the patrol car.
“Wait!” my uncle shouted at the cops. “What are you doing with him?”
“This man is wanted on a charge of child molestation in Georgia,” said one of them. “We have a warrant for his arrest.”
“Want to see it?” asked the other cop. He was holding the nose of his revolver against Ruffert’s right temple.
“Listen,” said my uncle, “Boo here is my best heavy equipment operator. He’s almost finished with this street.”
My uncle pulled out a roll of bills from one of his trouser pockets.
“Let me buy you fellows some lunch. Ruffert won’t go anywhere, I’ll keep an eye on him. You boys have something to eat while he finishes up here.”
He held two fifties out toward them. “How about it?”
The cops looked at the money in my uncle’s hand, then stuffed Ruffert into the back seat.
“Sorry,” said one, “you’ll have to get yourself another man. This one’s headed to the hoosegow.”
I had walked over and stood watching and listening to this exchange. I looked at Ruffert through the left side rear window. Boo grinned at me, exposing several brown teeth, and winked his right eye, the one with the heart-shaped blood spot on the lower outside corner of the white. I guessed Boo’s age to be about forty. Jake Farkas came up and stood next to me. Jake always had the stub of a dead Indian, as he called cigars, in his mouth, usually a Crook, and three or four days’ worth of whiskers on his face. He was in his early thirties but had already fathered, he told me, approximately thirteen children.
“You think you can ride her down the rest of the way?” my uncle asked Jake.
“Sure thing,” Jake said.
My uncle turned and walked back to the trailer.
“Did you know about Boo?” I asked. “That he was a wanted man?”
Jake chuckled and said, “My dear old Mama used to say it’s always good to be wanted, but I’m older now and I know that my dear old Mama weren’t always right.”
Jake strode to the steam roller, hopped up into the seat and cranked it over. I went back to shoveling limerock.
That evening, after my uncle dropped me off at a local movie theater while he went off to play cards, a bizarre incident occurred. I figured he was going to see a woman and that he knew I knew but seeing as how he had a wife in Miami, I assumed he thought it prudent not to tell me any more than he had to. I was not particularly fond of my aunt; my uncle knew this and most probably also knew I would never have betrayed his confidence had he chosen to tell me the truth, but this way neither of us had to compromise ourselves.
The movie was Zulu, which depicted red-jacketed, heavily-armed British soldiers in South Africa battling against Shaka’s spear-throwing warriors. The theater was segregated; white patrons were seated downstairs and black patrons were seated in the balcony. This was in 1964, so some small progress had been made regarding racial equality in Florida in that both whites and blacks were at least allowed to be in the movie theater together.
The redcoats were vastly outnumbered by the Zulus, but their highly-disciplined British square defense—one line kneeling and firing as the line behind them stood and cleaned and reloaded their rifles—kept the natives at bay. The outcome, however, was inevitable; at some point the Zulus would overwhelm them. As the battle raged, there came from the balcony increasing shouts of exhortation directed at the Zulus, which incited equally fervent vocalizing
by the white members of the audience below. The din inside the theater grew louder and more and more heated, practically drowning out the soundtrack of the picture.
Suddenly, the lights in the theater came on and the film stopped. The cinema manager jumped up onstage and stood in front of the screen. He was a large, mostly bald, clean-shaven white man wearing a baggy green suit. He held a lit cigarette between the second and third fingers of his right hand, the one he used to gesticulate and point toward the balcony. The crowd was silent.
“Listen up!” he shouted. “Any further ruckus and I’m throwin’ all you niggers out of here!”
The manager kept his two cigarette fingers pointed at the balcony section for at least twenty seconds longer; then he put them to his mouth, took a long drag on the cigarette, exhaled smoke so that it curlicued slowly away from him and vanished in the lights, and dropped the butt to the floor where he ground it out with his right shoe. He did not lower his eyes from the cheap seats until he jumped down from the stage and unhurriedly proceeded up the center aisle and out into the lobby. The sound of the doors swinging shut was the only noise in the theater until the house lights blinked out and the projector resumed rolling.
The film ended with Shaka’s Zulus acknowledging the bravery and ingenuity of the British regulars by saluting them and deciding against slaughtering them wholesale, thereby emerging victorious by having made the grandest and noblest heroic gesture possible before disappearing over a distant rise. I waited until almost every other patron had left the theater before I did. There was no trouble outside. The manager stood in front of the ticket booth, smoking. Up close, I could see several dark stains on the jacket and pants of his suit.
My uncle was parked in front of the theater. I climbed into his white Cadillac convertible and he drove away.
“How was the show?” he asked.
“Good,” I said, “there was lots of fighting. Did you win?”
“Win?”
“Yeah, at the poker game.”
“A little,” said my uncle. “I always win a little.”
We drove for a while without saying anything, then I asked, “What do you think will happen to Boo?”
“He’ll do some hard time, I’m sure,” my uncle said. “It’s a bad business, messing with children.”
“Was it a boy or a girl that he messed with?”
“A girl.”
“How old was she?”
“Jake told me she was ten.”
“How does he know?”
“What difference does it make? Ruffert was a wanted man, you won’t ever see him again. Tell me more about the movie.”
The Bucharest Prize
Roy was closing up the Red Hot Ranch, a hot dog shack where he worked three days a week after school and on Saturdays, when through the front window he saw a white Cadillac pull up to the curb. His mother got out of the passenger side. She was dressed to the nines, wearing a black cocktail dress beneath an ermine stole. Roy went outside to meet her. It was just after seven p.m., the sky was beginning to seriously darken and the air was cool.
“Roy, darling,” said his mother, “I’m glad I caught you.”
She bent a little to kiss him but barely brushed her maroon mouth against his left cheek so as not to smear her lipstick. Before Roy could say anything, she handed him a five dollar bill.
“This is for dinner, baby, and something extra,” she said. “I won’t be home until later tonight.”
Roy looked at the car. A man he didn’t know was seated behind the steering wheel. The man was wearing a midnight blue suitjacket over a tan shirt with a tie that matched his coat.
“Honey, you work so hard. Get some Chinese, the vegetables are good for you.”
His mother’s hair was flaming red, like Rita Hayworth’s. She showed Roy every one of her spectacular teeth and waved goodbye to him as she got back into the Cadillac. The man had kept the motor running.
“Thanks, Ma!” Roy shouted as the car moved away.
Roy went back into the Ranch. He was thirteen years old and in a little more than an hour he would be playing in the city-wide All-Star baseball game. When he’d seen his mother arrive, he thought that she had come to take him to the ballpark, which was about half a mile away. He thought she had remembered his telling her the day before that he had been one of the youngest players chosen for the game; most of the All-Stars were fifteen or sixteen years old. She had never come to one of his games.
Roy did not start in the game that night but he got to pinch-hit in the sixth inning and he banged one off the lower right corner of the scoreboard for a triple, driving in two runs. Because he’d hit the scoreboard, Roy was awarded a case of Coca-Colas from the Bucharest Grocery.
After the game, knowing the case of Cokes would be too heavy to carry home, Roy passed the bottles out to the other players. They sat next to the field drinking Coca-Cola and talking about the game. The air had turned chilly but the boys were still perspiring and excited, so they joked and clowned around until they’d polished off most of the case.
Walking home, Roy felt sticky and cold from where sweat had dried underneath his wool uniform. He was proud to be seen wearing the shirt with the words All-Stars across the chest in big black letters. He hoped his mother would be home by now.
When Roy got there, the white Cadillac was parked in front of his house. He had one bottle of Coca-Cola left, stuffed in the left rear pocket of his baseball pants. Roy took it out and sat down on the steps of the Anderson house across the street. He’d given back the church key the boys had borrowed to open the other bottles to Marge Pavlik, the woman who ran the concession stand at the field. Roy had seen men take caps off bottles with their teeth but he didn’t want to try it. Skip Ryan had lost part of his right front tooth that way; he could spit eight feet through the space.
Roy put down the bottle, closed his eyes, and thought about the ball he’d hit caroming off the scoreboard. It had rolled behind the rightfielder, who’d overrun it a little. After he’d slid into third base safely, Roy had stood up and looked back at the totals on the board, hoping the official scorer did not charge the outfielder with an error, which would have reduced the hit to a double. The Bucharest prize was given only for triples. No error was posted. The third base coach, Eustache “Stash” Pavlik, Marge’s husband, had come over, said, “Good goin’, kid,” and swatted Roy on the behind.
Roy heard a car door open and close, followed by the sound of an engine starting. He opened his eyes and saw the white Cadillac disappearing around the corner. Roy stood up and headed across the street, then he remembered the Coke, went back and picked it up. Mrs. Anderson opened the front door.
“Roy,” she said, “can I help you?”
“No, thanks, Mrs. Anderson. I was just sitting on your steps for a few minutes. I’m going home now.”
“You look very nice in your uniform, Roy.”
“Thanks.”
“Did your team win?”
“Yes, ma’am, we did.”
“Mr. Anderson and I like baseball. Tell us the next time you’re going to play.”
“I will, Mrs. Anderson.”
Roy started to go, then he turned back.
“Mrs. Anderson, I won a case of Cokes tonight. Would you like one?”
He held the bottle out toward her. She took it.
“Thank you, Roy, how kind of you to offer. Good night.”
“Good night,” said Roy, “say hi to Mr. Anderson.”
“I will.”
Roy stood there.
“Roy,” said Mrs. Anderson, “are you all right?”
Blows with Sticks Raining Hard
Roy wanted to get home before dark, so he decided to hitchhike rather than wait for a bus. At ten past five, when he left Little Louie’s, the sky was gray with black stripes painted on the clouds. Snow began to fall as Roy stood i
n the slush next to the curb with his right thumb out.
He’d been sitting in the back booth at Louie’s reading Joseph Conrad’s Congo Diary, which he’d checked out of the Nortown branch library after having read Heart of Darkness. Roy had decided to write his next book report on Heart of Darkness, and his English teacher, Mr. Brown, had mentioned Conrad’s Congo Diary as being interesting background material for the story. Roy enjoyed reading passages from Conrad’s diary to his friends, especially to the girls, who hung out in Louie’s after school.
“To Congo da Lemba after passing black rocks long ascent,” Roy read to them. “Harou giving up. Bother. Camp bad. Water far. Dirty. At night Harou better.”
After hearing this, Bitsy DiPena said, “Africa sounds icky. Why would anyone want to go there?”
“For jewels and ivory and minerals,” Roy told her, “and slaves, of course.”
“There’s no slavery anymore, I don’t think,” said Susie Worth, as she combed her long, blonde hair, which she did constantly. “Not in 1961.”
“Arabs still have slaves,” Jimmy Boyle said, “and some African tribes, too. I learned it in history.”
“In the evening three women of whom one albino passed our camp,” Roy read aloud. “Horrid chalky white with pink blotches. Red eyes. Red hair. Ugly. Mosquitos. At night when the moon rose heard shouts and drumming in distant villages. Passed a bad night.”
“Spooky,” said Susie Worth, biting on her comb.
“Spooky and icky,” Bitsy DiPena said.
“Row between the carriers and a man about a mat. Blows with sticks raining hard.”
“Stop it, Roy!” said Bitsy. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
It was getting colder as the light disappeared and snow came down harder. Roy kept his thumb out but nobody stopped. People were just off work, hurrying home or to the grocery stores. Roy began walking, turning every few steps to show drivers his thumb. Finally, a car pulled over, a dark green Plymouth sedan. It slowed, then idled a few yards ahead of Roy. He ran up to the Plymouth and opened the front passenger side door. The driver was a middle-aged man wearing an overcoat and a homburg hat. He had wire framed glasses and white hair.
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