Thirty-six hours following the robbery and murder Regis Furtwanger was apprehended outside of The Red Hot Ranch carrying a bag containing a dozen hot dogs with the trimmings and three bottles of Coca Cola. Against the advice of his co-worker, Roy, Spooky Spiegelman, a teenage employee of the Ranch, called the cops and identified Furtwanger as one of the Halsted Street Huns who were suspected of having knocked over the liquor store.
“My father told me to never call the cops,” Roy told Spooky. “Something bad may have happened, but it will get worse once the police are involved.” When confronted by six of Chicago’s Finest with their guns drawn, Regis Furtwanger, whose father, Adolph, played poker on Wednesday nights with the group of men who until that week had included Paddy Flannery, immediately blurted: “They’re hidin’ out in the belfry of The Church of Blood on Their Houses on Southport next to the Nazi beer joint.”
Within minutes of Furtwanger’s capture, a police squadron surrounded the church. It was just past five o’clock in the morning. When H.T. and his cohort Cornelius Slivka heard a voice over a bullhorn order them to come out with their hands high, Cornelius began moving toward the stairway. H.T. did not follow suit. He held tightly to the gun with which he had plugged the Irishman and thought of his heroes: Attila had died of alcoholism; Alaric, Hannibal and Alexander from malaria. He heard someone coming up the stairs, then a woman’s voice, his mother’s.
“H.T., it’s me. Please give yourself up. The cops’ll kill you if you don’t.”
Thelma Booth stepped into the belfry and saw her only child standing in a corner holding the .22 pistol. Suddenly, he sprang forward and used it to break the glass in a window overlooking Southport Street, leaned out, and rapidly fired four shots before receiving a rifle bullet between his eyes.
Thelma did not approach her boy’s body. She stood still for a few moments, then slowly began descending the stairs. Police officers rushed past her on their way up to the belfry. Once back on Southport Street in front of The Church of Blood on Their Houses, a cop said to Thelma, “We didn’t want to shoot him, lady. That’s God’s truth.”
“His, too,” she replied.
Disappointment
Bernie Zegma could hardly complain about business. His Mohawk gas station on the northeast corner of Ojibway and Thebes on the northwest side of Chicago had kept up a steady trade ever since he’d purchased it seventeen years before with his wife Helen’s money. Their marriage of twenty-one years was uneventful, a generally calm alliance based not on passion but respectful understanding. Having married relatively late in their lives—Bernie’s age kept him out of the war—by mutual agreement they had no children. Now in their fifties, Bernie and Helen enjoyed their individual privacy, he with his reading and she with her music. Bernie harbored a desire to someday write a novel, and Helen was a competent, devoted classical pianist.
Bernie retained only two employees at the station, high school kids named Roy and Ralph, who came to work after school to pump gas and change tires. Bernie took care of the gasoline trade in the morning hours and read books in his office in the afternoons. He no longer provided mechanical services as he had during the first fifteen years, doing only oil changes, replacing windshield wipers, headlamp and taillight bulbs.
One afternoon Bernie read about a remote part of French Polynesia called The Islands of Disappointment. Comprised of two small islands with a combined population of approximately three hundred, they had been named in 1752 by the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, also named Byron, captain of an English trading ship that had been refused landing by the islanders. Byron applied the word “disappointment” to these bodies of land because of his displeasure at having been unable to explore the possibility of farming coconuts for the copra trade, coconut oil being a valuable commodity in Europe. Drawings of the islands made them seem a veritable paradise, unbothered by strife in the greater world, protected by their isolation. Bernie decided to go there.
That he murdered his wife could not be positively determined. The official reason given for Helen’s death was a heart attack, but Ralph told Roy that his parents suspected Bernie had done away with her in order to inherit her family money.
“She was lying on the kitchen floor,” Bernie told investigators. “I thought she was sleeping so I went out to buy cigarettes. When I came back she was still lying there. That’s when I called the police.”
“Did your wife often fall asleep on the kitchen floor?” an investigator asked.
“I don’t know,” Bernie answered. “I’m at work every day from five o’clock in the morning until eight p.m., when I close up the station. During the winter our kitchen is the warmest room in the house.”
Once Helen’s estate was settled, Bernie sold both their house and the Mohawk station. He gave each of the boys a twenty dollar bill and disappeared from the neighborhood.
“Remember when Bernie told us about those disappearing islands in the South Pacific?” Ralph asked Roy.
“Islands of Disappointment,” said Roy. “Yeah, why?”
“Maybe that’s where he went, to get away from the lousy Chicago weather. It don’t snow out there. I seen what they look like in that dumb movie South Pacific my mother made me go with her to see.”
“Hurricanes,” Roy said. “There’s floods and winds hundreds of miles an hour. Even worse than Chicago.”
“Probably that’s when the natives harvest the coconuts. They wait until the big winds blow ’em off the trees, then they pick ’em off the ground. Easier than climbin’ up to get ’em.
“Could be. Do you think your parents are right, that Bernie killed his wife?”
“Who knows? I never heard him say nothin’ about her. He was always the same, with that Gloomy Gus expression on his face. You know. I bet nobody around here ever hears from him again.”
“He was a good enough guy to us,” said Roy.
“I think he should have given us more than a double sawbuck,” Ralph said. “He must have got plenty for sellin’ the gas station.”
A little more than a year after Bernie Zegma left Chicago, Roy got on a bus at the corner of Minnetonka and Western and saw him sitting in the last row. Roy walked back and sat down next to him.
“Hi, Bernie. I thought you were camped out with a bunch of beautiful brown island girls like in those paintings in the Art Institute.”
“Hello, Roy. I was, but then I got sick, very sick, so I came back. I just got out of the hospital. I’m still not completely well.”
“Are you going to buy another gas station?”
“No, I’m not going to stay in Chicago.”
“Where are you going to?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Roy looked closely at Bernie’s face. He wore the same gloomy expression as always but his face was pale, not bronzed by the Polynesian sun.
“I guess it’s not paradise out there,” Roy said.
“I’m getting off here. It’s nice to see you. Say hello to Ralph.”
Before the bus stopped, Bernie stood by the rear door. He looked back at Roy and said, barely loud enough for Roy to hear him, “Paradise is a dark forest.”
Then he got off.
The Navajo Kid
“How old was The Navajo Kid when the Apaches killed his father?”
“Two or three, I think.”
“Then the Navajos found him and he was raised by them?”
“Right. His father was the Indian agent for the Arizona territory. The Apaches moved back and forth across the border with Mexico. Mescaleros, I think.”
Roy and Jimmy Boyle were walking to school together discussing the movie they’d seen on TV the night before. They were in the same fourth grade class.
“The guy who played the Kid after he was grown up also played a killer in a Bogart movie. He punched Bogey in the face holdin’ a bunch of nickels in his fist.”
“T
hat must hurt.”
“Knocked Bogey out.”
“Didn’t The Navajo Kid have a mother?”
“She was never mentioned. Maybe she was already dead.”
“I read a book about a white boy who lived with an Indian tribe but his mother was an Indian. He had blue eyes and blonde hair so he always felt like he didn’t belong.”
“I bet. The full blood kids musta picked on him.”
“Yeah. When he got old enough he went away to find out the truth about what happened to his father.”
When Roy got home late that afternoon he found his mother in bed with bandages wrapped around her neck. He’d seen her this way numerous times applying ointments prescribed to treat her frequent outbreaks of eczema.
“Hi, Ma, your skin’s bothering you again, huh?”
“It’s pretty bad, Roy. I’ve been upset ever since I heard about cousin Norma having to go back into the sanitarium. I’m sure that’s what triggered this attack. Norma’s always been good to me, especially in the time after your father died.”
“Do you need me to bring you anything?”
“Not right now. My back is getting itchy. I might ask you to apply the salve to my back and shoulders if it gets any worse.”
“Sure, Mom. I’ll leave the door to my room open. Just call me, I’ll hear you.”
“I didn’t have a chance to go to the grocery store, Roy. If you want to get something take money out of my purse, it’s on the dresser.”
Kitty often talked about moving back to Florida to get away from the freezing cold Chicago winters. Her eczema bothered her in Florida, as well, but the sun made her feel better, she said, as if it were caressing her skin. Roy and his mother had lived in Key West from soon after his birth in Chicago until he was six. They had moved north so that Kitty could take care of her mother, Rose. Rose died the following year from heart trouble and Kitty decided to stay to be closer to Norma and a few other members of their family. Roy missed his friends in Key West, mostly Cuban kids, and being able to play outside year round, but he had good friends in Chicago now and didn’t want to leave.
About an hour after he’d returned, Roy got hungry. He went into his mother’s bedroom and saw that she was sleeping, so he quietly removed two dollars from her purse and left the house.
Roy’s father died when Roy was five but Roy had never been given a satisfactory explanation as to how or why. Rudy had been twenty years older than Kitty, Roy knew that, but his mother told him only that his father had just collapsed one day and not recovered. Roy identified with The Navajo Kid. He had not been adopted by an Idian tribe but he needed to know more about his father’s life, in particular what he did for a living. His mother said that Rudy was a businessman who helped out other people in their businesses, and that as a child he had come to America from a faraway corner of Eastern Europe when he was ten years old.
“Your dad didn’t go to school, Roy,” Kitty told him, “he always worked, doing all kinds of jobs because his family was very poor. I think it was because he had to work so hard that he died young.”
Roy had light brown hair and blue eyes, unlike his father, who had black hair and brown eyes. Roy looked more like his mother. The Navajo Kid did not resemble the Navajo boys and girls, he knew he was different, and he wanted to know what his real parents looked like and where they had come from before they—or at least his father—were in Arizona.
On his way to Pooky’s hot dog and hamburger stand it began to rain, lightly at first, then harder, so Roy stopped under the awning in front of a Chinese laundry. A heavyset, middleaged woman came out of the laundry carrying a green duffel bag. She took a look at the rain and stood next to Roy.
“Wattaya think, kid, this a real storm or only a passin’ cloud?”
“Probably if I were an Indian, I’d know,” said Roy, “but I’m not.”
The woman looked at him. Her hair was tied up on the top of her head with a pink bandana and she had bright red lipstick smeared unevenly around her mouth.
“I just get through arguin’ with them overchargin’ charmers and then I get a smartass punk answer from you. Am I in hell yet or only dreamin’?”
The woman slung the duffel bag over her right shoulder and walked off in the downpour. Roy had not meant to be rude to her, he didn’t know why he had spoken to the woman that way. The rain continued coming down hard. Did it rain like this in Arizona? Or in the part of Europe his father had come from? He wondered why he had wound up here in Chicago standing in front of a Chinese laundry watching raindrops the size of bullets beat into the sidewalk. What if he just kept going and never saw his mother again? What would happen to him? Suddenly the rain slacked off, then stopped entirely. Roy put up the collar of his jacket and continued on his way to Pooky’s.
Roy remembered when he was little and used to stand next to the piano in the livingroom and sing while his mother played. One of her favorites was Autumn Leaves. “The autumn leaves/drift by my window/the autumn leaves/of red and gold.” Roy sang the words softly out loud as he walked. His mother didn’t play the piano often any more; sores on her fingers made it too painful, she said. Roy’s grandmother used to play the piano and sing, too. Rose and Kitty sometimes played duets and Rose taught Roy how to read notes on the sheet music. He missed singing along with them. From now on, Roy decided, whenever anyone asked him about his parents he’d tell them his father had been murdered by Apaches in Mexico and that his mother was part Navajo.
In My Own Country
Robinson Geronimo was an old man who lived in a two-room apartment above a Mom and Pop grocery store on the West Side of Chicago during the 1940s and ’50s. The entrance to his walk-up was accessible only from the alley behind Nelson Avenue up two flights of rickety porch stairs that had not been painted or repaired for more than forty years. When Joe and Ida Divino bought the building and opened Divino’s Grocery in 1946, Robinson Geronimo was already in residence. Nobody in the neighborhood knew how old he was, and perhaps he did not himself know. Robinson Geronimo claimed that he was a son of the Apache chief Geronimo. He told Ida and Joe that he had been born “in Apacheria before the coming of the White sickness.” Despite his advanced age, Robinson still did odd jobs around the neighborhood, mostly plumbing. The Divinos never raised his rent, which was ten dollars a month. Robinson Geronimo did not talk much. When Ida Divino asked him how it was he had come to live in Chicago, all he said was, “In my own country I was a chief’s son.”
Roy and his friends, who in 1955 ranged in age from seven to ten years old—Roy was eight—were naturally curious about the Apache Indian who lived above Divino’s Grocery. They especially wanted to know if he really was Geronimo’s son, and if so what life had been like for his tribe back in the old days.
“We should go ask him,” suggested Jimmy Boyle.
“You mean go to his apartment over Joe and Ida’s?” asked Chuck Danko.
“Sure, why not? We walk upstairs and knock on his door. Worse can happen is he don’t open it.”
Chuck, Jimmy and Roy cut down the alley between Nelson and Poland streets and stopped behind the grocery building. It was two days before Christmas, cold and cloudy.
“Who’s goin’ up first?” asked Jimmy.
“We should all go up together,” said Roy, who began walking toward the stairs.
The other two boys followed him. Several of the steps were missing, so they had to climb slowly.
“Robinson should replace these broken steps,” said Chuck. “He’s a handyman, isn’t he? What if he’s comin’ home late at night after he’s had a couple pops too many at Beeb’s and Glen’s and puts a foot into a hole? He’d break a leg.”
“He probably already done it,” Jimmy Boyle said. “I know my old man would. He trips all the time on our back porch comin’ in the gangway from Beeb’s and it’s only got six steps which none of ’em are broken.”
Wh
en they reached the apartment door, Chuck said, “Let me knock.”
Roy and Jimmy stood behind him as Chuck knocked twice. Nobody came to the door.
“Knock three times,” said Roy.
“Why three?” asked Jimmy.
“You know that song, ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’? It’s about some guys goin’ to a secret club or bar and they’re supposed to knock three times and whisper low so they’ll be let in. My mother plays that record a lot.”
Chuck knocked three more times. After a few seconds the door opened. Robinson Geronimo stood, tall and still, looking down at the boys. When he spoke his lips did not move.
“Somebody sent you?” he asked.
“No,” said Roy. “We’d like to talk to you.”
Robinson Geronimo’s face was gray, the color of smoke, his narrow eyes were dark and brown without light in them, and his nose was broad, almost round, and had no tip to it. For an old man, his face had very few wrinkles, only pockets like crevices in the smoky skin.
“Talk about what?”
“Was Geronimo really your father?” asked Chuck.
“Did he kill a lot of soldiers?” asked Jimmy.
“How old are you?” asked Roy.
Robinson Geronimo did not say anything for almost a full minute. He stood looking at them, then turned and went back inside his apartment, leaving the door open. The boys waited on the porch without talking. When Robinson Geronimo returned, he was holding a small, black and white photograph which he placed against his chest so they could see it. After each of the boys had examined the picture closely, Robinson spoke.
“My father, forty-eight years ago, 1907, two years before he died. On his horse, Takes Far Away. On horse next to him, my uncle, Wolf Once Was A Man. On other horse behind them, my little brother, nine years old, Nobody Sees Him In Moonlight. He died next year from White man’s sickness. Our mother, too, same year.”
Roy's World Page 56