The Roy Stories (26 page)

 

The Liberian Condition

The day Omar Buell appeared in the schoolyard wearing only a pair of worn brown combat boots and holding a deer rifle is a day nobody who was there will ever forget. It was a windy, cloudy afternoon in late February or early March, just before the bell rang signaling the end of lunch hour. Dirty snow was piled up around the edges of the schoolyard and kids were running around playing tag or, like my friends and I, playing touch football. I was eleven years old and had known Omar Buell since we had both been in first grade. He always wore a wash-faded, longsleeved, checkered flannel shirt buttoned up to his neck, baggy green or gray trousers and raggedy, black and white high-top gym shoes. He didn't talk much to other kids and never hung around the playground after school. Buell was not an outstanding student, either; he always got passing grades but consistently placed near or at the bottom of the class. There was nothing to really distinguish him except, perhaps, for his hair, which he wore longer than most and was the color of August wheat. Once I heard Heidi Dilg, a girl in our fourth grade class, say she wished she had hair that color.

Omar Buell, naked except for combat boots and holding a Winchester .30-30, shocked everyone. All of the kids stopped playing and stared at him. Omar stood still without shivering even though the temperature was a smidge above freezing. Mrs. Polansky, who taught health and home economics and was a schoolyard monitor, ran into the building right after Raymond Drain, a sixth grader who was infamous for once having taken a shit on the floor in the back of a classroom in front of everybody, pointed him out to her. None of the kids approached Buell, but nobody ran away. He just stood there looking at us, but not at anyone in particular.

“You're gonna freeze your pecker off!” Jimmy Groat shouted.

A few of the kids laughed, but Omar Buell did not budge, not even his face muscles moved. I put on my gloves, which I'd stuffed into my coat pockets before we'd begun playing football. Several teachers, including Mrs. Polansky, and the school janitor, Bronko Schulz, came out of the school building and stood off to one side, sizing up the situation. Bronko Schulz was a big, easygoing guy who liked to tell the boys what he considered to be dirty jokes. He once asked me why a penis was the lightest thing in the world. I told him I didn't know and Bronko said, “Just a thought can lift it.” The bell rang but we all stayed where we were.

“What's wrong, Omar?” said Mr. Brady, an eighth grade English teacher.

Everybody thought Brady was a pretty nice guy. He didn't shout at kids or tell them to take off their hats or pull up their pants and never told anyone to shut up. If he wanted a kid to stop talking, Mr. Brady would just pat him or her on the shoulder and go on with what he was saying.

When Omar did not respond to Mr. Brady, or even look over at him, Mr. Brady said, “Son, what do you need?”

Miss Riordan, the school nurse, whose father was the head priest at St. Tim's, handed a red blanket to Mr. Brady.

“You must be cold, Omar,” he said.

The late bell rang. I could see that Bronko Schulz was holding something behind his back that looked like a tire iron.

Mr. Brady walked up to Omar and draped the blanket around his shoulders. Brady did not attempt to take the rifle away from Omar but he put one arm around him and together they walked into the school, followed closely by Bronko Schulz and the other teachers. Nobody said anything to the kids, so we just went back to playing tag and touch football.

I can still see Omar Buell and Mr. Brady walking in the schoolyard with Omar wrapped in a red blanket carrying the deer rifle. I never saw Omar Buell again, but a couple of weeks after the incident Jimmy Groat said that his mother told him Omar had an incurable condition so he had to be locked up in an institution with other incurable nut cases.

The other day I read an article in the newspaper about a Liberian rebel leader who made his men march into battle completely naked carrying only their guns in order to frighten the enemy. He claimed to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 people, and said that before a fight he made a human sacrifice to the devil, usually killing a child and plucking out the heart, which was divided into pieces for his men to eat.

“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.