The Roy Stories (35 page)

 

The Theory of the Leisure Class

Roy did not so much mind the two feet of new snow that had fallen overnight, but ice had hardened during the early morning hours and created a carapace upon the sidewalks that made them dangerous to negotiate. The elderly and enfeebled were advised to stay home. Stepping cautiously on his way to school, Roy stopped in front of Walsh's drugstore on Blackhawk to take a copy of that day's
Sun-Times
from the bundle on the ground in front of the entrance. Walsh's would not open for another hour, so Roy left a dime on the bundle, rolled up the paper, stuck it under his arm and continued toward the school.

He wished he could be with his father right now in Havana, Cuba, where the temperature was in the mid-80s and the trade winds were blowing. His dad had gone to Cuba on business and was staying at the Hotel Nacional, his regular place of residence when he was on the island. Roy enjoyed sitting out on the terrace there early in the morning, when it was coolest, drinking lemonade and munching lightly toasted and sweet-buttered Cuban bread. After breakfast at the Nacional, Roy would usually go swimming in the hotel pool, then he would get dressed and walk by himself over to the Sevilla Biltmore to have lunch with his father. Most of the time, Roy's father would be there already, seated in a booth at the rooftop restaurant with two or three other men. There were framed black and white photographs on the walls of the restaurant, in two of which his dad could be seen smiling and holding a cigar. Roy's mother was in one of the photos, taken at Oriental Park Racetrack in Marianao, her long, auburn hair pulled back tightly, wearing the calico jacket Roy liked so much. Often when he thought about his mother, he pictured her wearing that jacket.

Roy's parents had been divorced for five years. He was ten now, and he lived with his mother most of the time, but his parents remained close friends. Roy had never seen or heard them argue or say a harsh word to or about one another. It seemed to him that they got along better than many of his friends' parents who were still married and lived together.

Roy took a seat in the last row of his classroom and opened the newspaper on his desk. The first thing he looked at was the sports section, which was full of news about the Dodgers and Giants abandoning Brooklyn and New York City and moving to the West Coast. Both owners of those teams, Walter O'Malley and Horace Stoneham, had received dozens of death threats from furious and forlorn fans. Roy did not blame them for being angry; he would be, too, he knew, if the Cubs and White Sox left. On the front page of the paper was a story about a shooting on a river bridge in rural Wisconsin. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, had been parked in a car with the motor running on the bridge at night when a man wearing an orange cap with earflaps came out of the nearby woods carrying a shotgun, walked up to the car and ordered the girl, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, to roll down her window. He then pushed the barrel of the gun into the car and fired it at the boy, blowing away most of his face. The girl fainted. When she woke up and saw the boy, she screamed, then got out of the car, its motor still running, and hiked three miles back to their hometown and told the sheriff what happened. She didn't know where the man who had shot the boy had gone, but he was not there when she regained consciousness.

The next morning, at first light, the sheriff organized a manhunt. His posse gathered on the river bridge, and as the sheriff was giving them their instructions, a man wearing an orange hat walked out of the woods holding a shotgun above his head with both hands and surrendered. The man gave his name, age and place of residence as Gunnar Hamsun, thirty-eight, from Duluth, Minnesota. The girl later identified Hamsun as the killer. No motive for the murder had been determined. One member of the posse was quoted as saying that the man taken into custody had a tattoo of a cross with a snake wrapped around it in the center of his forehead.

Roy's teacher told him to put away the newspaper and pay attention to what she was saying.

“School is for learning,” she said, “not for leisure.”

Roy pictured his father and his cronies sitting in a booth at the Sevilla Biltmore, smoking Montecristos and drinking mojitos or sipping the strong Cuban coffee that smelled so good. Roy did not like the taste of coffee so much as he loved the odor. The next time his father was going to Havana, Roy would ask him to take him along, even if it was during the school year. He could learn what he needed to in Cuba, Roy figured, as well or probably better than he could in Chicago. His father and his friends did business, but they conducted it, it seemed to Roy, at their leisure. They had the right idea, he decided, and the weather undoubtedly had something to do with it.

 

Innamorata

Roy's mother liked to go to foreign films.

“They're more realistic than American movies,” she said to him. “Maybe realistic isn't the right word. Honest is probably better. Also, the actors and actresses seem more like real people, people you could meet on the street. Most of all, though, I like their faces because they're not perfect.”

When Roy was nine years old, he went with his mother to see an Italian film at the Esquire theater called
Innamorata
. Sometimes he had difficulty reading fast enough to keep up with the subtitles, but he managed to get most of it. The story was about a girl of fifteen who loses everyone in her family during bombing raids on her town in Italy at the beginning of World War II. She wanders through the countryside trying to stay alive, to find food and shelter. Some of the people she meets are kind and generous, but others, especially men, treat her badly. She loses her virginity to a one-armed Italian soldier who deserted the army and is then maimed by a hand grenade thrown by a six-year-old boy. The girl helps nurse the wounded soldier until he regains his strength, at which point he rips off the girl's clothes, rapes her and runs away.

The girl is saved from drowning in a river during a torrential storm by a farmer, who then takes her home to stay with him and his wife. The wife hates the girl because she is young and beautiful, and the wife is middle-aged and worn down from years of laboring on the land. The wife compares her gnarled, scarred hands to the girl's lovely ones and is so upset that she attempts to chop off the girl's fingers with a hatchet. The girl escapes and hides in a cave where she cries and asks God why He created people if all He wants them to do is to suffer and then die.

The war ends two years later, when the girl is seventeen. She is very thin and dressed in rags when an American soldier with a patch over one eye driving a Jeep sees her sleeping near the side of a dirt road. He stops and carries her to the Jeep. She is only half-conscious and weak and unable to resist. He takes her to a hospital and visits her every day for several weeks. She slowly recovers her health and he is beguiled by her beauty. One morning he brings her flowers and a nurse tells him that his innamorata is now strong enough to leave the hospital. He asks the girl what innamorata means. “It's my name,” she tells him, and the movie ends.

Outside the theater, Roy's mother said, “That one wasn't so good.”

“I wish somebody had shot and killed the one-armed soldier,” said Roy.

“Oh, I'm sure something bad happened to him later,” said his mother. “But that's what I like about these European movies, Roy, they don't always tie the story up so neatly and explain everything. They leave you with something to think about.”

Roy was thinking about the girl's naked breasts, which he'd gotten to see a lot. He also thought about the American soldier's eye patch, which was over his left eye when he was driving the Jeep but over his right eye when he brought flowers to the girl in the hospital. Roy was in the car with his mother when he told her about the eye patch.

“Good, Roy,” she said. “I didn't notice that.”

“And was her name really what they said at the end?” Roy asked.

“Innamorata,” said his mother. “It means beloved.”

“At the beginning,” said Roy, “everybody calls her Lucia.”

His mother drove for a few minutes without talking, then she said, “War changes everybody, Roy. Nobody is the same after a war as they were before the war started. Maybe that's the point. I just hope you never have to be in one.”

“Have you ever asked God a question,” he said, “like the girl did when she was in the cave?”

“No, Roy, I haven't.”

“How come?”

Roy's mother laughed, and said, “Because I know I wouldn't get an answer, either.”

 

The Exception

Tampa, Florida, was a quiet, sleepy fishing and cigar manufacturing city in the 1950s, when Roy's Uncle Buck, his mother's brother, moved there and went into the construction business. Roy enjoyed visiting Tampa, which was easy to do from either Key West or Havana, the two places Roy's mother preferred spending time when Roy was a boy, before they went to live in Chicago. Roy's mother would often leave him with her brother while she traveled elsewhere. Roy was happiest when he got to hang out with his Uncle Buck, taking fishing trips in the Gulf of Mexico or just accompanying him while he did business in Tampa.

One of Buck's closest associates was his poker buddy, Chino Valdes, who owned the Oriente Bank in Ybor City. Chino's real first name was Nestor, but everyone, including Roy, called him Chino because his narrow, slanted eyes gave him an Asian appearance.

“Know why I'm called Chino?” he asked Roy.

“No, why?”

“'Cause my grandmother had a little yen.”

Chino was a partner in a nightclub on the outskirts of Tampa named El Paraíso Bajo las Estrellas, where he and Roy's uncle often met. Buck took Roy along with him to El Paraíso several times in the afternoons, letting his nephew sit at the bar and order Coca-Colas and watch the showgirls rehearse while he and Chino discussed matters of mutual importance.

It was on one of these afternoons at El Paraíso that Roy was present during a murder, an event about which he was sworn to secrecy by his uncle and Chino Valdes.

This incident occurred the day before Roy's twelfth birthday. He and his uncle arrived at El Paraíso shortly after two in the afternoon. Chino was already there, sitting at a table by himself, sipping Methusalem rum on the rocks. Roy and Buck walked over to Chino, who stood up and shook hands with both of them, then sat down, as did Buck.

“Go watch the girls, Roy,” said Chino, and handed the boy a five dollar bill. “It's educational. The drinks are on me.”

Roy smiled at Chino, thanked him, and went over to the bar and climbed up on a stool. He placed the fin down in front of him and when Alfredito, the bartender, came over, said hello and ordered a Coke. Roy liked Alfredito, a short, thin, baldheaded man with a mustache that looked like two caterpillars crawling towards one another. Alfredito never charged Roy for his drinks. The five dollar bill that Chino gave Roy, as he did every time Roy came in, was to be left on the bar as a tip for Alfredito.

The dancers were on the stage, practicing their routines. Most of them were coffee-colored Cuban girls. They wore short shorts and little tops that left their midriffs bare. Roy thought they were all beautiful.

“How come you never look at the dancers?” Roy asked Alfredito. “You always keep your back to them.”

“I'm an old man, chico,” said Alfredito. “I have grandchildren older than some of these girls. It is for their sake that I don't turn around. When they look at me, I see pity in their eyes. I want to spare them the pain.”

Roy remembered a story his uncle had told him after the first time they'd gone together to El Paraíso. It was about one of the dancers, a brunette originally from Matanzas named Soslaya Zancera, who was billed as the Ava Gardner of Cuba. Soslaya was the star of the show, and the girlfriend of one of the owners, Morris Perlstein. One night Perlstein caught her in an unnatural embrace with the club bouncer, Roberto Bulto, in her dressing room, and shot Bulto dead. Perlstein then fired two bullets into the girl's buttocks when she attempted to flee. The owner was subsequently convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years in prison. His mistress survived, but her injuries put an end to her career as a dancer. Roy's uncle told him that Soslaya now walked with the aid of two canes and worked as a manicurist at the Hotel Khartoum in Miami Beach.

“It was a tragedy,” said Buck. “Soslaya Zancera was exceptional.”

Roy looked over at the table where his Uncle and Chino Valdes were sitting. A third man had joined them, a large, pale-faced person wearing a mauve guayabera, a Panama hat and dark glasses. Roy noticed that the man's fingernails were painted blood red. He had never before seen a man wearing nail polish.

“Who's that guy?” Roy asked Alfredito.

“Cherry Dos Rios,” said Alfredito, “from Fort Lauderdale.”

“What does he do?”

“He's in the construction business.”

“Like my uncle.”

Alfredito nodded, and said, “It's a good business to be in.”

Roy returned his attention to the girls. Music came from a tape recorder because the band was there only at night. Alfredito told Roy the musicians slept during the day.

Suddenly, there was a loud popping sound, and the dancers stopped. Roy looked around and saw Chino Valdes hand a revolver to a man in a green seersucker suit, who walked quickly out of the club. Cherry Dos Rios sat slumped in his chair, a large, dark stain spreading under his mauve guayabera. His Panama was on the table. He still had on the dark glasses. Someone turned off the music.

Roy's uncle came over to him and said, “Vamonos, sobrino.”

Chino stood up and came over, too.

“Chico,” he said to Roy, placing a hand on the boy's left shoulder, “your uncle and I know that we can depend on your not having witnessed this unfortunate little accident.”

Roy looked at Chino and nodded.

“Buck tells me that tomorrow is your birthday. Here's something from me.”

Chino handed Roy a hundred dollar bill. Roy had never held one before.

“If you're anything like your uncle,” Chino said, “I know you'll use it well.”

“Thank you,” said Roy. “I will.”

The dancers had disappeared. Two men were dragging Cherry Dos Rios's limp corpse into a back room. As Roy and his uncle walked together out of El Paraíso, Roy saw Alfredito pick up Cherry Dos Rios's hat off the table at which he'd been sitting. Alfredito waved it at Roy and smiled.

As Buck pulled his white 1958 Eldorado convertible onto Gasparilla Road, he asked, “Would you like me to put the top down?”

“Sure,” said Roy.

His uncle unhooked the latch on his side and Roy undid the one on his, then Buck flipped a switch on the dashboard and the top peeled back. The warm Gulf air felt good on Roy's face and in his hair.

“It's time you started to think about what profession you want to go into when you get older,” said his uncle. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Not yet,” said Roy.

“You can't go wrong in the construction business.”

“Alfredito told me the guy who accidentally got shot was in the construction business.”

Roy's uncle picked a cigar out of a box he kept on the front seat next to him, bit off one end, spit the leaves out his window and pushed in the dash lighter.

“Forget about him, Roy,” said Buck. “He was the exception.”