“This is a canal,” said Sally, “not a river.”
“You mean real pirates?” asked Matthew. “With swords and patches over one eye and a black flag with a skull and crossbones on it?”
“Probably just kids in a rowboat who live around here,” said Sally.
“We’ll find out,” Roy said. “Come on.”
“Come on where?” Sally asked.
“Talk to the neighbors. Somebody might have an idea about who the thieves are.”
None of the residents on the block had any suggestions about who could be responsible for the thefts, so Roy, Sally and Matthew decided to camp out at night in the yard and surprise the pirates if and when they came by again. As before, they hung their new bathing suits over the back fence after they had ended swimming for the day, and as soon as it was dark outside prepared their bedding on the grass. Ellie and Roy and Matthew’s father both agreed that it was a good plan but asked what the kids intended to do if the thieves returned.
“Shoot ’em!” said Matthew. “I’ve got my bow and arrow set.”
“The arrows have rubber tips,” said Sally.
“We can describe ’em and get the name of their boat and track them down,” Roy added.
“We’ll give the information to the cops,” Matthew said.
“No cops,” said his father. “Handle it yourselves.”
Roy and Sally and Mathew camped out in the yard several nights in a row but the river pirates did not appear. Of the three, Matthew was the most obviously disappointed. Roy was disappointed, too, but he enjoyed sleeping on the ground next to Sally. Early in the morning after what they decided would be their last night camping out, Mathew shot a few of his arrows over the fence into the canal.
“What did you do that for?” Roy asked him.
“I was pretending the pirates were there. They were probably afraid to come back.”
Matthew walked over to the fence and shouted, “Chickens!”
For the remaining few weeks, Roy stole looks at Sally whenever he thought she wouldn’t notice. She was always nice to him but this was not enough for Roy; he made up his mind that before they returned to Chicago he would try to kiss her.
Roy waited until the night before they had to leave, when Sally was alone in the yard standing by the back fence. He went out and stood next to her. His father and Ellie and Matthew were inside the house, packing.
“What are you doing out here?” Roy asked her.
“Oh, just looking at the water,” she said. “I like seeing the reflection of the moon in it.”
“It’s too bad we never caught the pirates,” said Roy,
Sally didn’t seem so tall to him now; Roy figured he must have grown two or three inches since they’d been in Florida. He leaned over and kissed Sally on the corner of the right side of her mouth.
“What did you do that for?” she asked.
Sally was calm and smiled at Roy, as if she were not surprised.
“I like you a lot,” he said.
“I like you a lot, too. I’m going to miss being down here with you and Matthew and your dad and Ellie.”
“We’ll see each other in Chicago.”
“Sure, but it’s not the same as Florida. The air is sweet and warm here, and the sky is always beautiful, especially at night.”
“You’re beautiful, too,” said Roy.
Sally looked directly into his eyes. She was not smiling.
“Thank you, Roy,” she said.
“I wish I were older,” Roy said, “so I could be your boyfriend.”
Sally looked back at the water, then up at the moon.
“There aren’t any river pirates,” she said. “Your father took the bathing suits and made me promise not to tell you and Matthew.”
Roy didn’t say anything. A large white bird flapped past them.
“You’re not angry at me, are you?”
Roy walked back into the house.
“Come on, son,” his father said, “give us a hand.”
Dingoes
Roy liked to ride his bike up to Indian Boundary Park to look at the dingoes. There was a little outdoor zoo with a variety of smaller animals at the northern edge of the park, among them llamas, monkeys, ostriches and a patchy-furred, old brown bear. But it was the wild dogs of Australia that interested Roy the most. The dingoes were feisty, beige- or dun-colored knee-high canines that constantly fought among themselves and bared their fangs at the zoogoers who stared at them for more than a few seconds. Roy wondered why dogs were in a zoo, even supposedly wild ones. He guessed that in Australia dingoes ran in packs across a vast desert in the western part of the continent. He’d read about Australia in his fourth grade geography book which only mentioned dingoes in passing; most of the information about fauna in Australia was about kangaroos.
“Nasty little critters, aren’t they?” a man said to Roy. “Now they’re cooped up in this hoosegow.”
Both Roy and the man were standing in front of the dingo enclosure on a cloudy day in August. Roy was nine years old and the man looked to Roy to be in his thirties or forties. Roy straddled his bicycle and watched and listened to the dingoes nip and yip at one another.
“The cage is too small for them,” Roy said. “They need to be out running around in a desert.”
The man was only slightly taller than Roy and thin with a grayish-brown mustache. He lit a cigarette then flicked the match through the bars at the dingoes.
“Wild dogs,” the man said. “In China they’d be beaten to death. They’ve got police squads over there that do nothin’ but run down stray dogs and club ’em over the head, then throw the bodies in a pile and burn ’em.”
“These dogs are from Australia,” said Roy. “They’re not domesticated.”
The man gave a little laugh with a hiccup in the middle of it. Roy had never heard anyone with a strange laugh like that before.
“Pretty fancy word you got there, kid. Domesticated. You learn that one in school?”
“Dingoes aren’t meant to be pets,” Roy said.
“Neither is that fat, scabby bear,” said the man. “He shouldn’t be in durance vile, either. These cages here are like cells in the Chateau d’If.”
“What’s that?” Roy asked.
“Prison island off the coast of Marseilles, in France. Like Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Nobody escapes from there.”
“These animals can’t escape from here, either. You seen the Chateau Deaf? Is it for deaf criminals?”
“Nope. It’s d’If, not deaf. Name of the island is If. I read about it in The Count of Monte Cristo, a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Man named Edmond Dantes gets put away for life but after sixteen years digs a tunnel to the sea and swims away.”
“I thought you said nobody escapes from there.”
“Not in real life they don’t. The Count of Monte Cristo is a story takes place in the nineteenth century. Edmond Dantes is an innocent man and after he gets out he finds a treasure a dying inmate at the Chateau d’If told him about and changes his name to Monte Cristo before taking revenge on the three wrong customers who were responsible for having him take the fall for a crime he didn’t commit.”
The man dropped his butt then lit up another cig and again flicked his match at the dingoes.
“How come you’re not in school, kid?”
“Summer vacation.”
“I’m kind of on vacation, too.”
Roy looked at the man again: his pale blue shirt had dark brown stains on it, as did his khaki trousers. When the man turned his head Roy saw that his left ear was missing; there was only a misshapen lump of skin where an ear should have been.
Roy climbed onto his bicycle seat and started to ride away but the man took hold of the handlebars with both of his hands.
“If you’re clever,” said the man, “you won’t ever let an
ybody take advantage of you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“There are evil spirits haunt this earth who beguile good men and women and render them useless.”
Not only was the man missing an ear but Roy noticed the mean-looking red and blue-black scar that ran almost the entire length of his hairline.
“I’ve got to go, mister. Let go of my bike.”
The man released the handlebars, removed his cigarette from the right corner of his mouth and flicked it into the dingo cage.
As he was riding Roy remembered his grandfather telling him to listen carefully to what even crazy people said because the information might be useful later. When he got home Roy would ask him what in durance vile meant.
The King of Vajra Dornei
One of Roy’s most interesting childhood friends was Ignaz Rigó, who, following high school, had vanished into the greater world. Ignaz Rigó was a Gypsy kid whose family owned a two-story building on Pulaski Road next to the tuberculosis sanitarium. Roy had been to Ignaz’s house a few times between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and there never seemed to be fewer than twenty people, apparently all related, living there. The Rigó clan also occupied a storefront on Diversey, where the women, including Ignaz’s mother and sisters, gave “psychic readings” and sold herbal remedies for a variety of complaints.
Ignaz, Senior, Roy’s friend’s father, called Popa, was always at the house on Pulaski whenever Roy went there. Regardless of the weather, Popa and an old man, Ignaz’s maternal grandfather, named Grapellino, sat out on a second floor balcony on lawn chairs overlooking the street, talking and smoking. Both men were always wearing gray or brown Fedora hats, long-sleeved white shirts with gold cuff links buttoned at the neck, black trousers and brown sandals. Roy asked Ignaz what Popa’s work was and Ignaz said that his father kept the family in order; and that Grapellino was a king in Vajra Dornei, which was in the old country. Roy asked Ignaz why, if his grandfather was a king in Vajra Dornei, he was living in Chicago. Ignaz told Roy that Lupo Bobino, a bad king from Moldova, had poisoned Grapellino’s first wife, Queen Nardis, and one of his daughters, and commanded a band of cutthroats that drove the Rigó clan out of Romania. Grapellino and Popa were planning to return soon to the old country to get their revenge and take back the kingdom stolen from them by Bobino’s brigands.
“I’m goin’ with them,” Ignaz said. “We’re gonna cut the throats of Lupo Bobino and everyone in his family, including the women and children. Last July, when I turned thirteen, Popa showed me the knife I’m gonna use. It once belonged to Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled the Turks back when they kicked ass all over Asia. The handle’s got precious jewels on it, rubies and emeralds, and the blade is made from the finest Spanish steel. Popa keeps it locked in a cabinet in his room. It’s priceless.”
Roy lost contact with Ignaz, who did not finish high school with him. Just before Christmas when Roy was twenty-one and back in Chicago on a visit from San Francisco, where he was then living, he went into the storefront on Diversey and asked one of Ignaz’s older sisters, Arabella, who told fortunes and gave advice to women about how to please their husbands, where her brother was and what he was doing. Arabella, who was not married, had big brown eyes with dancing green flames in them, a hook nose, a mustache, and a thin, scraggly beard, as well as the largest hands Roy had ever seen on a woman. She told him that Ignaz was on a great journey, the destination of which she was forbidden to reveal. Arabella then offered Roy an herb called Night Tail she said would bring him good fortune with women, which he declined with thanks. Looking into Arabella’s eyes, Roy remembered, made him feel weak, as did the thought of what she could do to him with her huge hands.
A year or so later, another former high school classmate of his, Enos Bidou, who worked for his father’s house painting business in Calumet City, called Roy and told him that he’d run into Ignaz in East Chicacgo, Indiana, where Ignaz was repairing roofs and paving driveways with his uncle, Repozo Rigó.
“Remember him?” Enos Bidou asked. Roy did not, so Enos said, “He went to jail when we were still at St. Tim the Impostor. Got clipped for sellin’ fake Congo crocodile heads and phony Chinese panda paws.”
“When we were thirteen or fourteen, Ignaz told me he would go one day to Romania or Moldova with his father and grandfather Grapellino to take back Grapellino’s lost kingdom.”
“Well, I seen him a month ago in Indiana,” Enos said. “He’s got a beard now.”
“So does his sister,” said Roy.
Real Bandits
Roy was fourteen when he read a story about the Brazilian bandit Lampião in a book entitled Famous Desperados. Baseball practice had been called off because of rain, and he did not want to go home and have to listen to his mother complain about the shortcomings of her current husband, so Roy went to the neighborhood library and found the book lying by itself on a table. He sat down and looked at the contents page; there were chapters about Jesse James, the Dalton Gang, Baby Face Nelson, even Robin Hood, among others, all of whom he already knew something about, but Lampião––whose real name was Virgolino Ferreira da Silva––Roy had never heard of.
Lampião, it said in the book, means lantern, or lamp, in Portuguese. He lived and marauded with his gang in the 1920s and ’30s in Northeastern Brazil, in the back country, or backlands, called the sertão. After his father was killed by police, when Virgolino was nineteen years old, he vowed to become a bandit and was given the nickname Lampião because he was the light that led the way for his followers, who included both men and woman. His girlfriend’s name was Maria Bonita; she left her rancher husband to go with Lampião and ride with his band of outlaws, leaving her daughter, Expedita, to be raised by Lampião’s brother, João.
The Brazilian word for bandits was cangaceiros, which came from the word canga or cangalho, meaning a yoke for oxen, because a cangaceiro carried his rifle over both of his shoulders like a yoke on an ox. Roy was enraptured by the place names of towns and backlands provinces that Lampião and his outfit traversed: Pernambuco, Paraíba, Alagoas, Chorrocho, Barro Vermelho, Campo Formoso, Santana do Ipanema, and many others. Lampião achieved a reputation similar to that of Robin Hood, sharing the spoils with the poor while robbing the rich. There was no real consistency about this, of course, as Lampião’s generosities were often arbitrary, but nonetheless the myth grew over the years that he and his band, which varied in number between ten and thirty, moved freely about the backlands. He was regularly written about in newspapers and magazines throughout Brazil and dubbed the King of the Cangaceiros. A Syrian named Benjamin Abrahão even made a film starring Lampião and Maria Bonita.
Lampião and ten of his bandit gang, including Maria Bonita, came to an ignominious end, however, when they were gunned down by police in their hideout on the São Francisco River. The soldiers cut off hands and feet of the outlaws, to preserve as souvenirs, and each of the dead desperados was decapitated. Their heads were put on display first in Piranhas, and then in the local capital of Maceió. Finally, the heads of Lampião and Maria Bonita were sent to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, where they were exhibited in a museum. A photograph in the book of several of the heads, surrounded by their guns, hats and other belongings, fascinated Roy, especially since one of the faces closely resembled his own.
It was just drizzling when Roy came out of the library and there was very little light left in the sky, which was deep purple. As he walked toward his house, he thought about Lampião and his bandit brother, Ezekiel, nicknamed Ponta Fina, “Sureshot”, escaping on horseback across the São Francisco, pursued by government soldiers, described by a witness as rawboned, dirty and desperately tired-looking. The bandits were constantly on the run, and in addition to their practice of thievery and murder, Lampião and some of his men occasionally castrated, branded or sliced off ears of those who opposed or offended them, believing that these particularly brutal acts of violence would intimidat
e others who would dare refuse to assist them or get in their way.
The rain began again, harder than before, so Roy stopped underneath the awning in front of Nelson’s Meat Market on Ojibway Boulevard. The downpour reminded him of an episode described in the book of the time monsoon rains came suddenly one year near Raso da Catarina when Lampião and several of his cohorts were fleeing after raiding the property of a wealthy rancher. They were caught in open country and forced to take shelter under their standing horses and had to endure it when the horses urinated on him. Lampião was proud of the legend of himself as a rough, roguish, romantic character, glorified by journalists––some of whom he paid to propagate his myth––in the faraway big cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Roy wondered if the dwarfish, skinny, half–blind bandit king had consoled himself with these thoughts as his bedraggled steed pissed on him.
A man and woman came and stood under the awning with Roy. The man was tall and thin and was wearing a brown suit with a red tie. The woman was wearing a green dress and her blonde hair was wet and matted from the rain. She fussed with it a little, then they both lit cigarettes. Roy noticed that the woman had a deep two–inch blue scar under her right eye she tried to conceal with make–up that had been mostly worn away by the rain.
“I heard they tied him to a tree,” she said to the man, “then slit his throat and stole his wallet.”
“No kiddin’,” said the man.
“Yeah,” she said, “took his shoes, too. They were real bandits.”
Haitian Fight Song (Take Two)
Roy stood on the front steps of his school waiting for the car that was supposed to pick him up. An associate of his dad’s, he’d been told, would be there at three o’clock to drive him to his father and his father’s second wife Evie’s house. Roy’s mother, his father’s first wife, from whom he’d been divorced since Roy was five, three years before, was out of town with her current boyfriend, Danielito Castro, so Roy was staying at his dad’s until she came back to Chicago. His mother told Roy that Danielito Castro, whom Roy had briefly met once, wanted her to meet his family in Santo Domingo. She had been gone now for a week and had been uncertain about when she would return.
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