“I’ll see how things go,” his mother had said. “I don’t think any of Danielito’s family speaks English, other than Danielito, of course, so it probably won’t be very long since I can’t speak Spanish. You’ll be fine with your dad and Evie, she’s a nice girl. You won’t even miss me.”
Roy asked her where Santo Domingo was and she told him, “The Dominican Republic, it’s on half of an island in the Caribbean Sea. The other half is a different country called Haiti. Danielito says the people there speak French. He told me the two countries are separated by a big forest and high mountains. He says the Haitians are very poor and are constantly trying to sneak into the DR, which is a richer country, so Dominican soldiers are permanently on guard along the border to keep them out.”
“Probably a lot of the Haiti people hide in the forest until night when it’s harder for the soldiers to see them and then sneak across,” Roy said.
“Maybe, Roy. I’m sure I’ll hear all about it when I’m there. Danielito says the Haitians are no good, that they don’t like to work.”
It was pouring when school let out. He did not have an umbrella or even a hood on his coat to pull up over his head so he hoped the person who was picking him up would not be late. Roy stood on the steps in the rain watching the other kids head for home or wherever they were going until he was the only one left. He waited for half an hour before he decided to walk to his father’s house, which was more than two miles away. His own house, where he lived with his mother, was only a few blocks from the school, but nobody was there and he didn’t have the key. He thought about going to one of his friends’ houses but he knew that Evie was expecting him so he kept walking, hoping the rain would stop.
The rain did not stop. Other than for a few short intervals it continued in a steady downpour. On Ojibway Avenue, the main shopping street that led directly to his father and Evie’s house, people hurried past him. Had he the fare, Roy would have taken a bus but he had not asked his dad for any money when he had dropped him off at school that morning. At the intersection of Ojibway and Western, in front of Wabansia’s sporting goods store, where Roy had bought his first baseball glove, a Billy Cox model, a maroon Buick clipped a woman as she was stepping off the curb. She fell down in the street and the car’s right rear tire ran over her black umbrella. The Buick turned the corner onto Western and kept going. The woman, who was wearing a red cloth coat, got up by herself. She bent down and picked up her umbrella, saw that it was broken and tossed it next to the curb. Roy was across the street from her when the accident happened. Nobody came to help her or ask her if she was all right and she walked across Ojibway and went into Hilda’s Modern Dress Shop. Her right leg wobbled and Roy figured she’d been injured or the heel of her right shoe had broken off.
It took Roy a very long time to get to his dad and Evie’s house and by the time he knocked on the front door the rain had weakened to a steady drizzle. When Evie opened the door and saw him looking like a drowned rat, she was horrified.
“Roy, what happened? Didn’t Ernie Lento pick you up?”
“No, I walked. I didn’t see anyone in a car at my school.”
“You should have called me,” said Evie. “I would have called a cab and come for you.”
“I didn’t have any money, or I would have taken a bus.”
Evie took Roy in, helped him take off his wet clothes and wrapped two big towels around him.
“I’ll make you some soup,” she said, and headed for the kitchen.
Roy sat on the couch in the livingroom, covering his head with one of the towels. He looked around and for the first time noticed that there were no pictures on any of the walls, no paintings or photographs.
Evie came in and said, “The soup is heating up. I called your father and he said that Ernie Lento told him he was a few minutes late getting to the school but that you weren’t where you were supposed to be.”
“He must have been more than a little late,” said Roy. “I waited on the front steps for around a half hour. Evie, how come you don’t have any pictures on the walls in this room?”
“We have some framed photos on the dresser in our bedroom,” she said. “Family photos. You’ve seen them. My parents and grandparents. Your grandparents, too, taken in the old country.”
Evie left the room. Roy thought about Haitians creeping through a thick forest and waiting until night fell before hiking over a mountain range to get to the Dominican Republic. They probably didn’t have umbrellas or any money on them, either. Danielito Castro had told Roy’s mother that the Haitians didn’t like to work but it had to be really hard work just to get from their side of the island to Santo Domingo or wherever they tried to get to in the Dominican Republic; and once they got there, if they survived beasts in the forest and bad weather in the mountains, the people spoke a different language.
Evie came into the livingroom carrying a bowl of tomato soup and a plate with Saltine crackers, a spoon and a napkin on it.
“Here’s your soup, Roy. Blow on it because it’s hot.”
“Evie, what do you know about Haiti?”
“Why?” she asked. “Is that where your mother is?”
“No, she’s in the Dominican Republic, another country that shares an island with Haiti. Are the people in Haiti really poor?”
“I think so, Roy. Most of them, anyway, certainly not all of them. There’s always a ruling class who have more of everything. The only thing I know about Haiti is that it’s the only country that was taken over by people who once were slaves. They had to fight for their freedom.”
“My mother’s friend Danielito Castro says the Haitians are no good and don’t like to work.”
“I’ll tell you who’s no good,” Evie said. “I’ll bet that crumb bum Ernie Lento stopped in a bar and was drinking with his racetrack buddies. That’s why he wasn’t at your school on time, if he even got there. Your dad will find out. Eat your soup.”
The Cuban Club
Roy met Tina at the Cuban Brotherhood Club and Dance Hall in Tampa, Florida, when he was fourteen. Roy was spending the summer with his uncle Buck working construction on weekdays, resting on Saturdays and fishing on Sundays. Tina was a local girl who went with her girlfriends to the dances at the Cuban Club on Saturday nights.
Roy and his friend Ralph were fascinated by the big-eyed, dusky Cuban girls who had come to Florida with their families in the first wave of emigrés who fled the island following the revolution. These girls wore make-up, bright red lipstick, large gold hoop earrings and short skirts. They danced only with one another and did not speak to white boys. Mostly they sat together in folding chairs in a corner of the dance hall and never stopped chattering and gesturing dramatically. Roy spoke some Spanish but when he got close enough to overhear their conversations they spoke so rapidly and without fully pronouncing most of their words that he could not understand anything they were saying.
Tina didn’t like the Cuban girls. She was tall and blonde, as was her friend, LaDonna. When Roy asked Tina to dance she asked him what he thought of the Cuban girls. Before he could answer, Tina said, “They’re cheap. They have big asses and dress like whores. LaDonna says her mother told her that their fathers have sex with them starting when they’re five.”
Roy found this hard to believe. He worked laying sewer pipe and shooting streets with Cuban men and liked them. They were good workers, glad to have a job, and they laughed a lot. Most of the time Roy didn’t get their jokes—they spoke as rapidly as the girls at the dances—but they always offered to share their homemade lunches with Roy. He loved the Cuban food: lechon and pollo asado, platanos maduros, black beans and yellow rice.
Tina had blue eyes with yellow spots in them, an almost pretty face and a terrific figure. She and LaDonna wore as much or more make-up as the Cuban girls.
“Are you from around here?” Tina asked Roy. “You don’t talk like you are.”
“I’m almost seventeen,” said Tina. “How old are you?”
“I’ll be sixteen in October,” Roy lied.
Tina was a little taller than Roy. She had slender, muscular arms and held him tightly, pulling him around during a slow dance. Her new breasts were as hard as her arms. She pushed herself against Roy and he got excited.
“I can tell you like me, Roy,” Tina said, and smiled. Her teeth were crooked and up close Roy could see the pimples beneath cracks in her make-up.
Ralph was trying to get one of the Cuban girls to talk to him and LaDonna was dancing with a big, heavyset guy whose ears were perpendicular to his head. Tina told Roy that his name was Woody and that he was one of LaDonna’s exes. “She’s got a lot of ’em,” Tina said.
After the slow dance Roy and Tina got cups of lemonade at the host table and stood off to the side.
“Do you want to walk me home?” Tina asked him. “I live four blocks from here. I don’t much like the music they’re playing tonight and my parents make me come home early.”
When they got to her house, a white, wooden bungalow set on concrete blocks with a wide front porch with a swing on it, Tina said, “Come in with me. My parents go to bed right after Perry Mason and then we can sneak out and go down to the river.”
Tina introduced Roy to Ed and Irma, both of whom Tina addressed by their given names, not Mom and Dad, which Roy had never heard a kid do before. Ed and Irma sat in separate armchairs in the small livingroom watching Raymond Burr be a lawyer on their black and white Motorola. Roy and Tina sat slightly apart from each other on a lumpy couch. Ed and Irma did not say anything until the program was over. Ed stood up and turned off the television set after the theme music finished playing over the end credits.
“Man never loses a case,” he said.
Ed had a huge belly and big arms. So did Irma. They both said goodnight and left the room. Tina put her right hand on Roy’s left leg and squeezed his thigh. As soon as Tina heard the door to her parents’ bedroom close and lock click, she turned to Roy and kissed him hard on the mouth.
Tina stood, took Roy’s left hand and said, “Let’s go down to the river and sit on the pier.”
The river was at the end of Tina’s street. She led him past a dwarf palm tree that was bent halfway over to a short pier and pulled him down onto the planks.
“Lie back,” she said.
There were no boats moving on the water and except for insect noises it was quiet. Tina lay on top of Roy and rubbed her body against his. They kissed a few times with their mouths closed, then Tina rolled onto her side and with one hand unzipped his fly. Roy’s cock popped up like a jack-in-the-box and Tina wrapped her right hand around it. He stared at the crescent moon as she stroked him slowly for a minute or so and then Roy tried to get up and lie on top of her. Tina pushed him back down, held him prostrate with her ropey arms, straddled his legs and put his cock into her mouth. Roy came immediately.
Tina rolled off of him and spat into the water, turned back to Roy and said, “You have a good dick, I think.”
She stood up, so Roy did, too. He zipped up his pants. Tina had already begun walking back off the pier. They walked to her house without saying anything. Tina stopped in front of her porch steps. No lights were on. She stretched out her arms and rested them on Roy’s shoulders.
“I won’t be at the Cuban Club next Saturday,” she said. “I’m going with Ed and Irma to Milwaukee on Monday. That’s where Mamie, Irma’s mother, lives. I have a cousin there, Ronnie. He’s the only boy I let fuck me. He’s twenty-one.”
“How long have you been letting him do it?” Roy asked.
“Since a couple of months before my thirteenth birthday. This will be the fifth year. I only see Ronnie in the summer when we visit Mamie. Ronnie’s getting married in September.”
Tina kissed Roy on the mouth and this time she stuck her tongue in. Roy watched her go up the steps and into the house. He saw Irma sitting on the swing in the dark, smoking a cigarette.
“Go on now, boy,” she said.
Appreciation
It was Roy’s mother’s third husband, Sid Wade, who told Roy that his father had died. Roy and Sid did not get along. Roy’s mother had married Sid two years before, when Roy was ten, and it had since been obvious to Roy that if this husband had a choice, he would prefer Roy were not part of the deal.
Roy had gone home from school to have lunch and Sid took him into what had been Roy’s grandfather’s room before he moved to Florida to live with Roy’s Uncle Buck. Ice coated the windows.
“Listen, Roy, your father died this morning,” Sid said.
Roy knew his father was in the hospital being treated for colon cancer. He’d had an operation a few months before and needed to sit on a rubber pillow at the kitchen table. Also, since then Roy had seen his father’s second wife, Evie, giving his dad shots with a large hypodermic needle. Despite the illness, Roy’s father did not appear to have lost his strength or his sense of humor. The only difference Roy noticed was that his dad was at home more. Usually he was at his liquor store from early afternoon until three or four in the morning, and sometimes he didn’t go home for twenty-four hours.
“In my business, there’s always something going on,” he told Roy. “If I don’t pay attention, I’ll end up paying in other ways, and if that happens too many times pretty soon I won’t be in business.”
There were always people coming in and going out of his dad’s store, and men hanging around talking or whispering to each other or just standing and waiting. His dad seemed to know all of them and did not mind that none of them ever bought any liquor. The only times Roy saw a bottle of whiskey or gin change hands with one of them was when his dad gave it to him and did not ask for money. Sometimes a showgirl from the Club Alabam next door came in and without saying anything went down the rickety inside staircase into the basement with Roy’s father. They would come back up a few minutes later and the girl would kiss his dad on his cheek and say, “Thanks a million, Rudy,” or “You’re a swell guy,” before leaving. The showgirls came in on a break from rehearsals wearing only high heels and a skimpy costume under a coat. Roy thought they were all knockouts and he asked his father what they wanted to see him about.
“They need a little help from time to time, Roy,” his dad said, “and I give them something to make ’em feel better.”
“What do you give them?”
“It’s not important, son. They’re poor girls and I like to help people if I can.”
“They always kiss you goodbye.”
Roy’s father smiled and said, “That’s how they show their appreciation.”
Roy wanted to go back to school in the afternoon after Sid Wade told him about his father, but Sid said he couldn’t, that he would drive Roy to his father’s house so he could be with Evie and his father’s relatives. Roy asked his mother if he had to go to Evie’s and she said yes, to show his respect. “She’ll appreciate it,” his mother said.
Years later, long after Sid Wade, his mother and Evie were dead, Roy, in recounting the events of that day for his own son, explained his asking to be allowed to go back to school as his desire to act normally, a way of denying to himself for the moment that his father was dead.
“I didn’t really understand what it meant,” Roy told his son, “that I’d never again see my father hanging out with his cronies or being kissed on the cheek by a showgirl from the Club Alabam. I wanted to help him and I couldn’t.”
“You help a lot of people now, though, Pop,” Roy’s son said. “Have you ever been kissed by a showgirl?”
The Awful Country
When Roy’s mother returned from her birthday trip with her companion Nicky Roznido, Roy asked her how it was and she said, “Everybody in Mexico carries a gun.�
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Roy was eight years old and his mother was twenty-nine for the second time. She didn’t look thirty, she said to her friend Kay, and she saw no reason to admit to her real age until she absolutely had to.
“I was twenty-nine until two years ago,” said Kay, “when I turned thirty-eight. I admitted it to Mario and he told me he didn’t care so long as I looked good to him. I asked him what he would do when that day came and he said he’d have to buy a younger wife.”
Kay and Roy’s mother snickered and Roy, who was in the room with them, asked Kay, “Did Mario buy you?”
“He knew what he was getting when he married me,” she said. “Be smart, Roy, don’t ever get yourself into a situation where you’re paying for more than you can afford.”
“Cut it out, Kay,” said Roy’s mother. “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kay had flaming red hair and green eyes with black dust smudged around them. She was wearing a double strand of tiny pearls and diamond rings on the third fingers of both hands.
“Your mother’s right, Roy,” she said, and smiled, displaying more teeth than he could quickly count accurately. “Don’t listen to me, it won’t matter, anyway. Everyone makes their own mistakes.”
Kay returned her attention to Roy’s mother and said, “Come on, honey, I’m going to buy you a fancy lunch to celebrate your return from that awful country. Did Nicky have to shoot anybody this time?”
After Kay and his mother left the house, Roy went into his room and lay down on the bed. He could hear thunder but it was far away. He thought about what Kay had said about everyone making their own mistakes. He knew she meant something other than giving a wrong answer on a test. Roy remembered the morning his mother threw her second husband, Des Riley, out of the house. He was six then and his mother had said, “We won’t have to listen to his bullcrap any more, Roy. That one was a mistake.”
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