Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  “The persons who suffered the most, of course, were the parents of the murdered child. As I said, I knew the father and considered him a friend. He was a good fellow, we belonged to the same club. He died of a broken heart not very long after the trial. His wife lived a few more years before she, too, had a heart attack. She survived but remained an invalid until her death. The boy was their only child.”

  Rain was pounding the roof and the windows harder now. Roy shivered, even though the radiators were turned on all the way.

  “That’s really a terrible story,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. Books and plays have been written about the case. I read recently that a movie about it is in the works now. People just could not understand why these outstanding young men, both of whom were otherwise destined for great careers, would have risked everything by committing such a despicable act.”

  “Maybe that’s why they did it,” said Roy. “I mean, if school was so easy for them, if they were so smart and came from rich families so they had everything they wanted, maybe taking that chance gave them a kind of excitement they couldn’t get any other way.”

  “You’re right, Roy. The papers called it a ‘thrill’ killing.”

  “Did they ever say they were sorry?”

  “One of them did, the one who eventually got out of prison. He said he wanted to try to make up for his crime by allowing himself to be used by medical researchers to discover drugs that could save lives.”

  That night, before Roy fell asleep, he thought about why people did terrible things. It wasn’t enough to just say that people who do something awful are sick in the head, there had to be something more, a kind of evil force that exists inside them. Maybe it exists in everyone, Roy thought, but some people have more evil in them than others. Roy wondered when he would find out how much of this force he had in himself, and what he would do about it if he had too much. Perhaps there wouldn’t be anything he could do, that the evil power would just take over his brain and use him as an agent or instrument of destruction. He was only nine years old, but Roy knew that this thought would be in his head for the rest of his life.

  The Choice

  Buckshot was scattered throughout the clouds, but no snow had fallen. In less than an hour the sky would be black and moonless, so Roy walked quickly. It was election day and he was headed to the ward office on Western Avenue to help count votes. Roy’s friend Elmo’s mother worked there for every election, and this year she had arranged for the boys, both of whom had recently turned fourteen, to assist her.

  The presidential race had been hotly contested and everyone agreed that it was impossible to guarantee the outcome. The differences between the two candidates were substantial; the result of this election, both sides promised, would dramatically affect the direction of the country. For the first time in his young life, Roy felt engaged politically, and he was excited to be a part of the process.

  However, as Roy walked toward the office, his thoughts were about the movie he’d just been watching on television, White Cargo, with Hedy Lamarr as a native temptress who drives all of the white men who oversee a British rubber plantation in Nigeria crazy. When a new man shows up, the artificially darkened Hedy slithers up to him half-naked in the shadows, flaps her false eyelashes, plants one knee gently into his crotch, and whispers, “I am Tondelayo.”

  Tondelayo is notorious in this region for leading men not only on but to their doom, and the head man, played edgily by Walter Pidgeon, having at one time himself succumbed to her wiles but survived, does all he can to prevent the newcomer from becoming infatuated and inevitably victimized by the dusky vixen. Nonetheless, she succeeds in seducing and then, to the collective dismay and even horror of the other white men, marrying him. Tondelayo is easily bored and within a very short time, despite her callow husband having bought her all the silks and jewels she desires, the devil girl pursues other men and tortures the poor wretch with vividly described revelations of her sordid history. Tondelayo slowly poisons the besotted fellow until he is on the brink of death, at which point the perpetually inebriated plantation doctor, who is at a loss as to what could be causing Tondelayo’s husband’s precipitous decline, and Boss Pidgeon arrange for him to be shipped back to England, listing him on the freighter’s manifest as “white cargo.”

  Roy had to leave his house before finding out what happens to Tondelayo after the planters discover she’s been poisoning her spouse. She would try to get to Lagos, Roy guessed, carrying with her as many of her jewels and precious silks as she could, and lose herself in the big city. Roy imagined Lagos was an African version of Chicago, a place where a devastating beauty such as Tondelayo would have no difficulty enticing, destroying and dispensing of countless men.

  At the ward office, Roy and Elmo and several other boys stacked and unstacked boxes of ballots until two thirty in the morning, then loaded them onto a truck for delivery to election headquarters downtown. On the way home, Roy told Elmo about Tondelayo. As the boys walked through the quiet streets, snow began to fall.

  “So she was good-lookin’, huh?” said Elmo.

  “Really good-lookin’,” said Roy. “But she didn’t look black, just kind of dusty, like she’d been down in a coal mine. It’s hard to tell when the picture’s not in color.”

  “Was she as pretty as your mother?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Roy. “Maybe even prettier.”

  “How many times has your mother been married?”

  “Four.”

  “How many times was Tondelayo married?” Elmo asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Roy. “Probably more than four.”

  Just as Elmo turned off Ojibway and cut down the alley between Mohican and Darrow to get to his house, he said, “When we wake up we’ll find out who won the election.”

  Roy felt a little guilty that he didn’t care so much any more about the election. His mind was on Tondelayo. He was surprised when he got home that his grandfather was still up, sitting in the living room reading a book.

  “Hey, Pops,” said Roy, “how come you’re awake?”

  “When you get old,” Pops said, “you don’t need so much sleep. How did it go?”

  “Okay. Mostly we moved around a lot of boxes. They don’t know who won yet.”

  “Neither of these fellows is a genius or a madman, I don’t think,” said Pops, “so things won’t change much, no matter who wins.”

  “I thought this election was going to change the direction of the country.”

  Pops put down his book and looked at his grandson.

  “I hate to sound cynical, Roy,” he said, “but unless the Russians drop an atomic bomb on New York, or we drop one on Moscow, nothing is going to change. Not even the reprobate Quaker being elected president, God forbid, will derail the economy. The United States won the war, so we own both the groceries and the grocery. You understand?”

  Roy nodded, then asked, “What do you know about Hedy Lamarr?”

  “Her first husband was an Austrian Jew,” said Pops, “who was Hitler’s armaments manufacturer, an honorary Nazi. He married Hedy when she was fifteen or sixteen and kept her locked up in a castle, but she escaped and went to Czechoslovakia where she appeared naked in a movie. Her husband attempted to suppress it by buying up all of the prints, but the film got released anyway and created a scandal. After that she got on an ocean liner and sailed to New York. On the boat she met Otto Preminger, another Viennese Jew, the movie producer and director, who set her up in Hollywood. Hedy Lamarr was choice. For a while she was considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Why do you ask?”

  “I just watched her in a movie called White Cargo.”

  “Isn’t that the one where she’s a native girl who says, ‘I am Tondelayo’?”

  “Yeah, she says it to a white guy who comes to Africa to run a rubber plantation. He marries her and then she poisons him
.”

  “He was a fool to marry her,” Pops said, “but some men are fools when it comes to women.”

  “Aren’t women sometimes fools when it comes to men?”

  “If you’re thinking of your mother, Roy, you’ve got to remember that, depending on the circumstances, anybody can make a bad decision.”

  “Who did you vote for?” Roy asked.

  “The Catholic fellow,” said Pops.

  “I thought so,” said Roy.

  Bad Girls

  Jimmy Boyle asked Roy to go with him to Uptown to see a girl Jimmy had met the Saturday before at the Riviera theater.

  “Why don’t you just go by yourself?” asked Roy.

  “She said she was gonna be with a girlfriend,” said Jimmy. “I need you to help me out and talk to her friend.”

  “Are they hillbilly chicks?”

  “I guess so. Babylonia told me her family moved here from West Virginia.”

  “Babylonia? Her name’s Babylonia?”

  “Yeah, but she says everyone calls her Babs.”

  “Most of the people who move here from the Appalachian Mountains live in Uptown,” said Roy.

  “Babs said she lived in some little town that didn’t even have a stoplight until she was ten, then they moved to Wheeling and stayed there until a year ago. They came to Chicago the day after her thirteenth birthday.”

  “What does she look like?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I don’t know. Light brown hair, blue eyes, kind of skinny. But her skin is white like on a statue. Whiter than milk.”

  “Where are you supposed to meet her?”

  “On Kenmore, behind Graceland Cemetery, at one o’clock. She’s tellin’ her folks she and her girlfriend are goin’ to the movies.”

  “Why the cemetery?”

  “I guess she lives near there.”

  It was mid-November but not too cold. The sky was entirely gray without birds of any kind, a condition that made Roy feel as if he were among the last survivors on a dying planet. He and Jimmy Boyle walked down Ravenswood to Montrose, turned left and headed toward Kenmore Avenue. The streets were as empty as the sky.

  “What if they don’t come?” Jimmy said.

  “Then we’ll go hang around the Loop, maybe meet some girls there.”

  Nobody was on the corner of Kenmore and Montrose, so the boys turned south and walked along the east side of the cemetery.

  “Know anybody who’s buried in there?” asked Jimmy.

  “No. My dad’s buried in Rosedale.”

  “There they are,” Jimmy said. “I told you she’d be here.”

  Standing halfway down the block were two girls, both wearing black scarves around their heads, navy blue pea coats, short black skirts with black tights and black fruit boots. One of them was smoking a cigarette.

  “Bad girls,” said Roy.

  “I hope so,” said Jimmy Boyle.

  When the boys got closer, Roy could see that the girl who was smoking was also chewing gum. She had dark hair and dark eyes. The other one was Jimmy’s.

  “Hi, Babs,” Jimmy Boyle said. “This is Roy.”

  “Hi, Jimmy,” Babs said. “Hi, Roy. This is Sunny.”

  “Is that Sunny with a u or an o?” said Roy.

  Sunny cradled her right elbow in her left hand. She held her cigarette in her right hand and did not smile. She cracked her gum.

  “She spells it with a u,” said Babs.

  “Roy like in Roy Rogers,” said Sunny.

  “Roy Rogers is cute,” Babs said. “My mother says he’s part Indian.”

  Sunny was wearing makeup to conceal some pimples on her chin and cheeks, but Roy thought she was good-looking, maybe even beautiful like Gene Tierney. He’d heard his friend Frankie’s mother, who read a lot of Hollywood fan magazines, say that Gene Tierney was crazy and had to be put in a nuthouse on a regular basis. In any case, Sunny was a lot cuter than Babs, though what Jimmy had said about Babs’s skin was true.

  “We gonna go somewhere?” asked Babs.

  “Where do you want to go?” said Jimmy.

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s go to Billy the Greek’s on Irving Park. We can cut through the cemetery.”

  Jimmy and Babs walked off first and Roy and Sunny followed. After a minute, Sunny said to Roy, “I’m Greek. My folks come from Piraeus. They had me here, though, so I’m Greek-American.”

  “I’m first-generation American, too,” said Roy. “My father was from Vienna, Austria.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from Austria.”

  Sunny tossed away her cigarette. She was about the same height as Roy.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Fourteen, same as Babs. What about you?”

  “I’m fourteen and a half.”

  They walked for another minute without talking, then Sunny said, “Do you like cemeteries?”

  “Not since my dad died,” said Roy.

  Sunny stopped and put her right hand on Roy’s left forearm. He stopped, too.

  “Oh, Roy, I’m sorry I asked you that.”

  Roy looked into her eyes. They were dark brown with a tinge of red in them.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “He died a couple of years ago.”

  Sunny curled her right arm through Roy’s left and they began walking again. She took the chewing gum out of her mouth with her left hand and threw it on the ground.

  “My mother died a year ago,” Sunny said, “when I was in Chicago Parental.”

  “You were in the reformatory?”

  Sunny nodded.

  “What for?”

  “Chronic truancy.”

  “What’s chronic?”

  “It means I cut school too much,” said Sunny. “I was upset about my mom bein’ sick and not bein’ able to do anything to help her. Her husband? He’s not my father. My real dad went to Korea in the army and never came back. He probably went back to Greece.”

  “What about your stepfather?”

  “Oh, yeah. He’s a drunk. Worked loadin’ trucks in South Water Market. He tried to rape my sister on her sixteenth birthday, so now he’s in jail. It was a bad atmosphere at our house, so I mostly just stayed out all the time. I was in Chicago Parental for three months. They let me out after my mother died and her sister, our Aunt Edita, came to live with me and my sister. She’s really nice.”

  “Are you going to school again?”

  “Oh, sure. I got a B average.”

  They walked slowly, letting Jimmy Boyle and Babs get way ahead.

  “We’ve got some things in common, Roy. It’s real important, don’t you think? I mean, if we’re going to be friends.”

  “Did your stepfather ever try to do anything with you?”

  “Uh-uh. Valeria’s prettier than I am, and she’s got big boobs already. So he didn’t pay so much attention to me. He’s Hungarian.”

  “Well, I’m glad your aunt is there to take care of you.”

  “Her husband, my Uncle Ganos, went bughouse one day and wouldn’t come out from a closet. When the cops tried to pull him out he bit one of ’em on his nose, almost tore it off the cop’s face. My aunt said the poor man had to have it sewn back on. I was eight when that happened.”

  “Jesus,” said Roy. “What happened to your uncle?”

  “He’s in Dunning, the state mental hospital out on Foster. He’ll probably be in there for the rest of his life.”

  When Roy and Sunny got to Irving Park, Babs and Jimmy were not in sight.

  “They must already be at Billy the Greek’s,” said Roy.

  Sunny and Roy were facing each other.

  “Roy,” she said, “would you like to kiss me?”

  Sunny leaned forward and pushed her tongue deep into Roy’s mouth, then rolled it around
a few times.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” Roy asked.

  “Valeria taught me,” said Sunny. “She’s a bad girl.”

  The Sudden Demise of Sharkface Bensky

  The guy who cut Sharkface Bensky’s throat in front of Santa Maria Addolorata that Saturday night got away clean. He ran down the alley next to the church so fast nobody going in or coming out of Carnival Night got a good look at him. Only a deaf kid standing on the steps came forward to say he’d seen it happen, and the description he gave to a hand sign reader the next morning at the police station wasn’t much, just that the cutter used a straight razor with what looked like an ivory bone handle and wore a dark brown overcoat. Sharkface crumpled to the sidewalk like a squeeze box out of air and bled to death before anyone thought to call an ambulance. Two teenage girls stepped right around him, the deaf kid told the reader, kept right on talking and went up the steps into the church. A cop said they probably thought Sharkface Bensky was a drunk who’d passed out and was sleeping it off.

  Roy and his friends went by on Sunday to see the bloodstains. It was the first week of December and there hadn’t been any snow yet, though the temperature was below freezing.

  “It don’t look like blood, does it?” said the Viper. “It’s so black.”

  “Maybe they already washed it with somethin’,” said Jimmy Boyle, “to get the red out.”

  “Skull Dorfman says the church makes its living off the blood of others,” Roy said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Jimmy.

  “Means the fathers wouldn’t be cryin’ over a little spilt blood,” said the Viper. “Not after what it says in the Bible. It’s good advertisin’, you ask me.”

  “The priest is probably talkin’ about it right now,” Roy said. “Comparing Bensky’s blood to the blood of Christ.”

  “You coulda fooled me,” said Jimmy Boyle. “I didn’t think Sharkface had any blood in his body. He never let anyone slide.”

  “Skull said he was a kneebreaker who needed his knees broke,” said the Viper.