“Did your mother say what they call Omar’s condition?” I asked Jimmy.
“She don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she just made up the part about him being put away in an institution to make me behave better.”
Six Million and One
Israel Rostov was a high school dropout who worked as a fur cart pusher in the State and Lake building. Roy was eight years old when he first saw him. Roy often accompanied his grandfather, Jack Colby, whom he called Pops, on Saturdays to the furriers’ office that Pops shared with his brothers, Ike and Nate. Their brother Louie, who was the president of the Chicago Furriers Association, which he had founded, kept his office on the sixth floor of the building. The other Colby brothers’ office was on the eighth floor.
Roy would sit on a high stool and cut up pelts with a stiletto-like knife Pops had taught him to use, while his grandfather and great-uncles sat around a marble-topped table and played cards. When Louie joined them, the game was bridge; otherwise, they played three-handed gin rummy.
Izzy Rostov delivered furs on carts from floor to floor. He was a short kid with thick, curly black hair and bushy eyebrows, small dark brown eyes and a huge hook nose that seemed to be trying to escape from his face. Rostov’s thick red lips curved upwards at the corners so that it looked as if he were always smiling, except that his smile more resembled a sneer. He perpetually had a burning unfiltered Lucky Strike dripping from his mouth. Roy was fascinated by Izzy’s ability to talk while never removing the cigarette from his lips, as if the butt end was glued between them.
Rostov called Roy “my little pal,” and stopped his cart to talk to him whenever he encountered Roy in the hallways or in the freight elevator. This usually occurred when Roy was going to or from the eighth floor and the sixth floor to visit with his Uncle Louie. The delivery boy always had a future plan for himself that he told Roy about. Most of the time it had to do with his moving to Miami Beach to hang out in the luxury hotels so that he could “hook up with rich, lazy broads.”
One afternoon, Rostov told Roy he had something special to show him but he couldn’t do it in the hallway. Roy followed Izzy into the eighth floor men’s room. After making sure that nobody else was in the bathroom, Rostov removed from one of his coat pockets a small, black handgun and held it out for Roy to look at.
“This is a .38 caliber snub-nose revolver,” Rostov said. “A very accurate piece of hardware. I bought it from a spook on Maxwell Street.”
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Roy.
“Stick up a few gas stations, what else? I gotta get a stake together before I travel, buy some slick clothes to impress the broads, you know. I can’t make it on the peanuts these penny-pinchin’ Hebes pay me around here.”
Izzy Rostov tapped the tip of his prodigious nose with the barrel of his revolver, and said, “I might even have enough dough to get my beak fixed.”
Then he laughed and put the gun back into his coat pocket. The ash from Rostov’s cigarette dangled dangerously and Roy was certain it would fall off, but it didn’t. Roy moved further away from him.
“Don’t be frightened, little pal,” said Izzy. “I ain’t gonna shoot anyone. The piece is just to throw a scare into ’em, let the suckers know Israel Rostov means business. I could change my name, too, once I get down South. How does Guy DeMarco sound? Smooth, huh? The broads’ll go for a name like that. Guy DeMarco.”
“You think gas stations keep a lot of cash around?” Roy asked.
“Depends,” said Rostov. “But I got bigger ideas.”
Rostov came close to Roy, mussed up his hair and then walked out of the men’s room. Roy waited for a minute before returning to his grandfather’s office. Jack, Ike and Nate were playing gin.
“Hey, babe,” said Pops, “I thought you were going to see your Uncle Louie.”
“I decided not to. I just went to the washroom.” Roy went over to his stool, climbed on and resumed cutting up pelts.
The next time Roy ran into Izzy Rostov, the delivery boy winked at him but did not stop to talk. His cart was loaded with mink and fox stoles.
“Gotta get these on a truck goin’ to the Merchandise Mart,” Izzy said, and pushed on toward the freight elevator.
A couple of Saturdays after that, all four of the brothers were playing bridge when Louie said, “You hear the Rostov boy got killed?”
“The delivery cart kid?” asked Ike.
“Yes. Apparently he tried to rob a liquor store on Huron the other night and the clerk shot him in the back before he could get away.”
“You know about his parents?” asked Nate.
“What about them?” Jack asked.
“They were survivors of Auschwitz.”
“Horrible,” said Ike. “Imagine how they must feel.”
“What’s Auschwitz?” asked Roy.
The men were silent for a few moments before Nate spoke.
“It was a concentration camp, a prison death camp during the war where the Germans murdered Jews.”
“They also murdered Gypsies and Communists,” said Ike, “but mostly Jews.”
“But Rostov’s parents are still alive,” Roy said.
“Some prisoners were rescued by the Allies before the Nazis could kill them,” said Louie.
“How many people did they kill?” asked Roy.
“Too many to count,” said his grandfather. “The accepted figure is six million.”
“More,” said Louie. “They murdered more.”
“To think that the parents escaped the Holocaust,” Nate said, “they come to America and their child is shot down in the street like a wild animal.”
“He had a gun,” Roy said. “He showed it to me.”
The men all looked at Roy.
“It was a snub-nose .38,” he said. “Izzy told me he was going to stick up a gas station and move to Miami Beach.”
“What kind of home life could the boy have had?” said Nate.
Roy looked out a window onto State Street. The Chicago Theater was showing Alan Ladd in The Badlanders. Clumps of brown dirt the size of pigeons were blowing through the gray air.
“Let’s play cards,” said Ike.
War and Peace
Lots of guys went into the service from Roy’s neighborhood. Most of them got drafted into the army and were sent to Germany or Korea. This was during the 1950s, between World War II and the Vietnam War, after the cease-fire of the police action in Korea, so the only guys who got killed bought it by accident. Stuffy Foster drowned during basic training in South Carolina. Little Goose Wentworth’s older brother, Big Goose, went AWOL from Fort Polk, in Louisiana, and disappeared into a swamp; his body was found two weeks later covered with snake bites, his corpse half-devoured by varmints. Woody Crow drove a tank over a cliff while on maneuvers in Düsseldorf and broke his neck. The biggest success story came after Moe Israel stole a general’s jeep in Belgium and drove it to Monte Carlo where he was arrested in a casino and then sent to prison. Moe’s cousin Artie told Roy that Moe set up a book-making operation in the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, that was so successful he was able to send money to his mother every month.
When Phil Flynn told Roy that as soon as he could drop out of high school he was going to enlist in the navy, Roy asked him why. Both boys were eleven years old; they were sitting on upturned milk bottle crates in the alley behind Phil’s house swapping drags on a Lucky Strike. Phil lived with his parents and two older sisters in a one-bedroom apartment above a meat market. His sisters slept in the bedroom and their parents slept in a Murphy bed that came down from the living room wall. Phil slept on a cot in the apartment’s only hallway; every time someone had to use the bathroom during the night he or she invariably bumped into Phil’s cot and woke him up.
“I figure it’s the only way I’m gonna get to Tahiti,” Phil said. “If I let the army draft me, they�
�ll stick me up on the DMZ in Korea where I’ll fuckin’ freeze to death, or in Germany where I’ll also fuckin’ freeze to death.”
It was cold sitting outside in the alley. Brownish snow was piled up against garage doors and a thin layer of ice covered the cracked and potholed pavement. This was early March in Chicago and more bad weather was on the way.
“What’s the DMZ?” asked Roy.
“Demilitarized zone,” said Phil. “It’s supposed to be the scariest place on earth, where the commies and our guys stand day and night with their rifles pointed at each other.”
“Does the U.S. Navy go to Tahiti?”
“I went into the recruitin’ office upstairs of the currency exchange,” Phil said, “and the Chief Petty Officer in charge told me the navy would send me to the south seas if that’s where I wanted to go.”
“Why do you want to go there?”
Phil finished off the cigarette and flicked the butt away.
“Hot and breezy,” he said, “and fabulous brown babes with big tits and almost no clothes. I saw ’em in my sister Mary’s art book. Standin’ around with flowers in their long black hair and lyin’ down by a lagoon without tops on and nothin’ to do. You gotta be on a ship to get there.”
“You told your parents?”
“Nah. My old man wants me to go to college. He talks about it all the time, about how me and Mary and Wanda are all gonna graduate from college. It’s a big thing with him since he never went past the third or fourth grade and works in a bottle factory.”
“Was he in the service?”
“Uh-uh. He gets fits, so they wouldn’t take him. Wanda gets fits, too. Next time you’re around ask her to show you her tongue where she bit off part of it.”
Roy stood up. “I’m goin’,” he said.
Phil took a cigarette out of a pocket of his blue tanker jacket.
“I got another Lucky. You wanna share?”
Roy shook his head and put up his coat collar.
“You oughta join the navy with me,” said Phil.
He took out a book of matches and lit his cigarette.
“Warm breezes, naked women and no wars. Nobody would fight if they could lay by a lagoon all day with a girl with titties like coconuts and flowers behind her ears.”
Roy grinned and nodded his head then turned and started walking toward his house. His nose was running and he wiped it with the back of his left hand. Roy had seen Phil’s sister Wanda twice, once walking with another girl on Ojibway Boulevard, and once waiting for a bus on Blackhawk. Her skin, he recalled, was much darker than Phil’s, and her hair was black, not ginger colored like her brother’s or Mary’s, and her eyes were big and brown, theirs were small and blue. She was probably the prettiest girl Roy had ever seen.
Chop Suey Joint
When Roy was eleven years old, he got a job delivering Chinese food on a bicycle. He was paid twenty-five cents an hour and a dime for each delivery, plus tips. He worked three nights a week from five o’clock until eight, and from four to eight on Sundays. Kow Kow Restaurant provided the bicycle, which was equipped with baskets attached to the handlebars and mounted on the rear fender. Roy was also fed dinner, for which he usually requested a hamburger on toast, vegetable chow mein and egg foo yung. He enjoyed this job except when the weather was really foul, which was when he often had the most deliveries. Riding in traffic over icy streets or in driving rain was difficult, but he was skillful enough to avoid any serious mishaps during the year or so that he worked as a delivery boy.
Every Sunday night a man came into Kow Kow at eight twenty, ten minutes before closing. This was also the time when Roy ate his dinner. The man always sat in one of the two red leather booths on either side of the front window and ordered the same items: won ton soup with extra dumplings, served extra hot; shrimp fried rice; and two pots of tea, also extra hot. He was in his late forties or early fifties, had a three or four day beard, was of medium height and size, wore the same brown sportcoat, a black shirt buttoned up to his neck and a weather-punished brown Fedora, which he did not remove while he ate.
Don Soon, the owner’s son, always waited on him. Don was twenty-three, he smiled a lot and Roy liked him the best of anyone at Kow Kow, although all of the guys who worked there—waiters, cooks and kitchen help—were nice to him. No women worked at Kow Kow. Mr. Soon, the owner, tended the cash register while seated on a high stool behind a counter near the entrance.
He said the same thing to every customer after ringing up the bill: “You come back. We waiting for you.” Mr. Soon spoke Cantonese to his employees but when speaking to his son and to Roy he used perfect English. When Roy asked Don why his father spoke pidgin to non-Asian customers, Don said, “He thinks they expect it, so he does his Charlie Chan act. This is a chop suey joint—you get egg roll and atmosphere.”
One Sunday night, when Don was in the kitchen and Mr. Soon had left early, the man in the hat, as the employees called him, looked over at Roy, who was eating his dinner at a nearby table, and said, “Hey, kid, you work here, don’t you?”
Roy nodded. “I do deliveries.”
“You suppose you could go in the kitchen and tell ’em I’m ready for my second pot of tea?”
“Sure,” Roy said, and stood up.
“Make sure you tell ’em ‘extra hot.’”
“Okay.”
“Sorry to disturb your meal.”
“No problem,” Roy said, and walked back to the kitchen.
He came back and sat down.
“Don’s bringing it,” he said to the man in the hat.
“Thanks, kid.”
Thirty seconds later, Don Soon brought the man a pot of tea, smiled at him and walked away.
“These are nice people here,” the man said to Roy.
“They are,” said Roy.
“They pay you good?”
“Enough, I guess.”
“This waiter, he’s always smiling.”
“His name is Don. He’s the owner’s son.”
“He reminds me of an Arab I knew when I worked in the oil fields in Saudi. His name was Rashid bin Rashid. Bin means ‘son of.’ He smiled all the time, too. This Rashid, he captured falcons and sold ’em. He showed me how to do it. Took a pet pigeon and tied a long piece of string to one of its legs and the other one to a stone. We sat and waited until a falcon flew over, then Rashid threw the pigeon up into the air and we took off. The falcon swooped down and killed the pigeon and when he brought it to the ground we ran back and chased the falcon away. Then we dug a shallow pit in the sand downwind of the dead pigeon. Rashid got into the pit holding the end of the string tied to the stone. I covered him with a blanket and he told me to get far away. When the falcon came back to finish picking at its kill, Rashid slowly reeled in the pigeon. As soon as the falcon got close to him, Rashid reached out and grabbed it.”
The front window behind the man was streaked with rain. Roy was glad he had finished his deliveries before it started. The man poured himself a fresh cup of tea and took a long sip.
“The Arabs mostly drank coffee,” he said, “sometimes tea. They like it boiling hot. I got used to drinking it that way.”
“How long were you in Saudi Arabia?” Roy asked.
“Three and a half years. Made a pile. Gone now.”
Roy stood and picked up his dishes to take to the kitchen.
“Nice talking to you,” he said. “I enjoyed the story about catching a falcon in the desert.”
The man in the hat poured more tea.
“If you’re here next Sunday, I’ll tell you about the time I helped save a camel from drowning in quicksand.”
“I’ll be here,” said Roy.
He never saw the man again. A few weeks after their conversation, Roy asked Don Soon if the man had come in at a time when he wasn’t working. Don said no, that as far as he knew th
e man in the hat had not been back since that night.
“You must have told him about a better Chinese restaurant,” said Don.
Roy asked Mr. Soon if he’d seen him, and Mr. Soon shook his head and said, “White ghost all look same.” Then Mr. Soon smiled and messed up Roy’s hair with his right hand. “Just kidding, Roy,” he said. “No, I don’t know what happened to him. He always left a fair tip. I hate to lose a good customer.”
In his second year of high school, four years after he’d stopped working at Kow Kow, Roy came across a book on a shelf in the school library about falcons and falconry. He immediately remembered the man in the hat’s story. Roy looked through the book to see if there was any information on capturing falcons but there was not. Most of the text was about training the birds to hunt, which seemed silly to Roy because it was obvious that a falcon knows how to hunt without a man having to teach it. He put the book back on the shelf. There were millions of pigeons in the city, Roy thought. They shit on everything. Chicago would be a better place, he decided, if more falcons lived there.
Significance
Roy often wondered what the significance was of having a favorite color or number. His favorite color was blue, a common enough preference, he came to learn. His mother’s favorite number was eight: whenever she asked him to guess what number she was thinking of, he always said eight and he was always right. One time she asked him and he guessed eight and his mother said, No, I was thinking of the number four, and Roy said, You’re fibbing, you were thinking of eight, and she laughed and said, You’re right, I was thinking of eight. I can’t help it. You can’t fool me, Roy said, and his mother said, No, Roy, you know me too well.
Roy and his mother played this game often when they were in the car and she was driving. When his mother tried to guess what number Roy was thinking of she usually guessed three or nine and she was correct about half the time, though neither three nor nine were Roy’s favorite number. As Roy grew older, he and his mother played this game less frequently, and by the time he was ten or eleven they stopped playing it for good.
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