The Roy Stories (12 page)

 

Sundays and Tibor

Roy hated Sundays. Sunday was the day his mother usually chose to pick a fight with her husband or boyfriend of the moment, to express in no unquiet way her dissatisfaction and disappointment with her current situation, making certain that the man in question was left in no doubt as to his responsibility for her distress.

Sunday was also the day his mother insisted on the family, such as it was, going out to dinner. Nothing ever pleased her on these occasions: the route her husband or boyfriend chose to drive to their destination; the service and food at the restaurant; everyone else's bad manners, etc. Roy dreaded these outings. Many times he purposely stayed away from his house, even when he had nobody to play with, there were no games going on at the park, or the weather was particularly foul. He'd walk the streets until he was certain his mother, her husband and his sister had left the house before returning, guaranteeing him two or three hours of solitude. Of course when his mother got home, Roy knew, she would yell at him for missing the family affair, but he had time to prepare an excuse: the game he was playing in went into overtime, or somebody got hurt and Roy had to help him get home.

Holidays were also potential trouble, time bombs set to Roy's mother's internal clock. The bigger the occasion, the louder the ticking. Once, Christmas fell on a Sunday. Christmas also happened to be the anniversary of his mother's marriage to her third husband, the father of Roy's little sister. This triple-barreled day of disaster resulted in his sister's father's belongings being thrown by Roy's mother down the front steps and scattered over the lawn in front of their house. As Roy's soon-no-longer-to-be stepfather picked up his soggy undershorts and other personal items from the snow, Roy, who bore the man no particular affection, felt something close to compassion for him. That day, Roy swore to himself that he would never get married.

For a period of time when his mother was between marriages, when Roy was nine years old, she kept company with a Hungarian named Tibor. Tibor worked as a concierge or receptionist at an elegant little hotel on the near north side of Chicago. He was a short, skinny, hawk-nosed man in his mid-thirties with a mane of unruly brown hair. Where and under what circumstances his mother had made Tibor's acquaintance, Roy never knew. Tibor had fled Budapest at the beginning of the Hungarian revolution. In his home country, apparently, he had been a musician of some kind, although Roy had never heard him play an instrument. Tibor never approached Roy's mother's piano.

One rainy Sunday afternoon in late autumn, Roy returned to his house from playing in a particularly bruising tackle football game. He was looking forward to collapsing on his bed, which was really a fold-out couch, but when he arrived, Tibor was stretched out on it with his shoes and socks off, asleep. Roy's little Admiral portable television set was on. His mother was making something in the kitchen.

“Hey, Ma, Tibor's on my bed.”

“He had a long night at the hotel,” she said, “it was very busy. He's tired.”

“So am I. I wanted to lie down. Why can't Tibor sleep in your room, or on the couch in the living room?”

“He was watching television, Roy. And your room is closer to the kitchen. I'm making him a goulash.”

“What's a goulash?”

“A ragout of beef with vegetables cooked with lots of paprika. It's the national dish of Hungary.”

“Why don't you wake him up now so he can come in here and eat it?”

“The goulash isn't ready yet. I'll call him when it's done. Tibor had a hard time in Hungary, Roy. He had to escape.”

Roy's mother turned and looked at him for the first time since he'd entered the kitchen.

“Your face is filthy,” she said. “So are your clothes.”

“I was playing football. The field was muddy.”

“Roy's mother returned her attention to the goulash. Roy walked out the back door and sat down on the porch stairs.

“Close the door when you go out!” said his mother. “It's cold!”

She closed it.

On another Sunday, Roy was walking behind his mother and Tibor next to Lake Michigan. Tibor was wearing a long, gray overcoat that was too big for him. Roy recognized it as one having belonged to his mother's second husband, Lucious O'Toole, a handsome drunkard she had divorced after six months. Lucious had a metal plate in his head from being wounded in the war and he couldn't hold a job. Years later, when Roy was in high school, he saw Lucious staggering along a downtown street, unshaven, wearing a torn and dirty trenchcoat. It was snowing but Lucious was hatless and, Roy noticed, now mostly bald.

Following his mother and Tibor, Roy thought about pushing Tibor into the lake. Roy didn't hate him, but he wanted Tibor to just disappear and for his mother never to mention Hungary or goulash again.

After Roy saw Lucious O'Toole downtown that day, he told his mother, who showed no emotion.

“He looked like a bum,” said Roy.

“You never know what's going to happen to a person,” she said. “Sometimes it's better that way.”

 

Poor Children of Israel

“They got Harry the Butcher last night,” the Viper told Roy. “Only after he piped a cop, though. I heard it on the radio.”

The city had been terrorized for days by a gang of six escapees from the Poor Children of Israel Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Roy had read about them in the headlines of the
Tribune
all week. MADMEN STILL AT LARGE was one. Others were LUNATICS ON CRIME SPREE and TERROR GRIPS THE CITY AS CRAZY KILLERS ELUDE CAPTURE!

Roy and the Viper trudged through slush on their way to school. After two days of snow, the temperature had risen suddenly, turning the streets into a sloppy mess.

“Where'd they find him?” Roy asked.

“The Butcher and the other five broke into a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. A husband and wife were in there. Swede Wolf strangled the guy. The woman ran out to the balcony and tried to climb down from the fourth floor. She was screamin' and yellin' for help. That's how the cops found 'em.”

“Did she get away?”

“No, they grabbed her and kept her prisoner for a few hours. The radio didn't say, but I bet those maniacs put it to her. Most of 'em had been locked up for years.”

“How'd a bunch like that get upstairs in a big fancy hotel?”

A bus sped through a puddle and splashed muddy water on the boys' coats and pants.

“God damn it!” the Viper shouted. “I'll get that driver with an iceball, you'll see.”

“They must have snuck in during the night,” said Roy.

“Who was gonna stop 'em? Swede Wolf had murdered all kinds of people. Harry the Butcher, too.”

“Did they have guns?”

“No, just crowbars and tire irons. The cops shot the Mahoney twins, the ones who raped and decapitated their mother.”

“They cut her head off before they had sex with the body,” said Roy. “I remember when it happened.”

“Yeah, that's right. Anyway, those two are dead. The rest of 'em were captured. The cop the Butcher laid out is in the hospital. He might not make it.”

The other big news Roy heard about that day was that the governor of the state of Georgia had forbidden the Georgia Tech football team to play in the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day because their opponent, the University of Pittsburgh, had a Negro fullback. Students rioted on the Georgia Tech campus and were hosed down and beaten by Atlanta police.

When Roy got home after school, his mother was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine.

“Hey, Ma, you hear they caught those escaped mental patients at the Edgewater Beach Hotel? They murdered a guy and the cops shot and killed two of them.”

“How terrible, Roy,” she said, without looking up. “There's some chicken left from last night in the refrigerator, if you're hungry.”

Roy looked at the calendar on the wall next to the sink. The date was December 11, 1955. The calendar was from Nelson's Meat Market on Ojibway Boulevard. The top part was a photograph of the Nelson brothers: Ernie, Dave and Phil. The three of them had white aprons on and they were smiling. Ernie and Phil had mustaches. Dave was the youngest, still in his twenties. His right eye was glass. He'd popped it out and shown it to Roy once and told him Phil had poked his real eye with a toy sword when they were kids.

“What a shame,” said Roy's mother. “The Edgewater Beach used to be such a nice hotel.”

 

The Man Who Wanted to Get the Bad Taste of the World Out of His Mouth

Roy got thrown out of school on the same day the bodies of the Grimes sisters were found in the Forest Preserve. The Grimes girls were twelve and thirteen, one and two years older than Roy. It was a rainy April afternoon when Roy heard about the murders over the radio while waiting for an order of French fries with gravy at the take-out window of The Cottage. Marvin Fish, who had dropped out of school the year before at the age of sixteen, having not gotten past the eighth grade, was working the window.

“Jesus on a pony,” said Marvin, when he heard the news. “I ain't lettin' my little sister outta the house alone no more.”

“The Grimes sisters weren't alone,” Roy said. “They were with each other.”

“Wait a second.”

Marvin Fish turned up the volume on an oil-spattered Philco portable that was on a shelf above the deep fryer.

“The sisters were reported missing on March fifteenth, three weeks ago,” said the man on the radio, “one day after they did not return home after school.”

“Nobody woulda never reported me missin',” said Marvin. “I didn't used to go home after school, which I hardly ever went to anyway.”

“Authorities believe that the girls were kidnapped,” the radio voice reported, “then driven to the woods, where they were assaulted and killed. Their decomposing bodies were discovered by a transient who apparently stumbled over the shallow graves. The transient, whose name was not released, is being held as a suspect. Police say he may have committed the murders and for some reason returned to the scene of the crime.”

“What's a transit?” asked Marvin Fish.

“Transient, a bum,” said Spud Ganos, who with his wife, Ida, owned The Cottage. He had come out from the back and was standing next to the fryer. “Just another friggin' guy tryin' the wrong way to get the bad taste of the world out of his mouth.”

“Here's your fries,” Marvin said to Roy, “with extra gravy. No charge for the extra gravy.”

Roy put seven nickels on the counter.

“Thanks, Marvin,” he said, and picked up the soggy bag.

“Where'd you get all the buffaloes?”

“Won 'em laggin' baseball cards.”

“School ain't dismissed for two hours yet,” Marvin said. “What're you doin' out?”

“Mrs. Murphy said the next time I was late she wouldn't let me into class. Told her I had to take a whiz was why I was late today, but she said I shoulda planned better and to take a hike.”

“Murphy, yeah, I had her a couple times. Whenever there was a loud noise she'd say, ‘Set 'em up in the other alley.'”

“Still does.”

It was too early for Roy to go home, so he walked slowly toward the park, eating his fries with gravy. The rain had diminished to a cold drizzle. Roy had on a White Sox cap and a dark blue tanker jacket that according to the label was water repellent. He did not understand the difference between water proof and water repellent. Roy thought that they should mean the same thing but apparently they did not. Elephant or rhinoceros hides were water proof, he figured, like alligators and crocodiles, as opposed to swan, goose and duck feathers, which were merely water repellent. Ducks and geese flew sometimes, so perhaps that's how they dried off. Roy didn't remember if swans could fly or not.

When he got to the park, Roy perched on the top slat of a bench and looked at the muddy baseball field. What had happened to the Grimes sisters could happen to any kid, he decided, even if a kid didn't accept a ride in a car from a stranger. Someone who was bigger and stronger could grab a kid, or even two kids, especially if they were girls, and force them into a car.

The bottom of the bag was so wet from all the gravy that there was a hole in it. Roy had to keep one hand underneath the bag to keep the few remaining fries from falling out. The Grimes girls had been assaulted, the man on the radio said. Roy wondered if being assaulted and being molested were the same thing, or if there was some kind of difference, like between water proof and water repellent. It began raining harder again. Nobody would be playing ball today, that was for sure.

 

Johnny Across

Marcel Proust wrote, “One slowly grows indifferent to death.” To one's own, perhaps, but not, Roy was discovering, to the deaths of others. Almost daily now, it seemed, certainly weekly, he heard or read of the death of someone he knew or used to know, however briefly, at some time during the course of his fifty-plus years. This, combined with the noticeable passing of various public persons who had made a particular impression upon him, had begun to affect him in a way he could not have predicted. What disturbed Roy most, of course, were the deaths of people he cared for or upon whom he looked favorably. The others—former adversaries, political despots, or murderers languishing behind bars—had been as good as dead to him already. Early on in Roy's life he had developed a facility for excising certain people from his consciousness. He simply ceased to care about those individuals he felt were unworthy of his friendship and trust. He really did not care if they lived or died; what they did or did not do concerned him not at all.

During the winters when Roy attended grammar school in Chicago, the boys played a game called Johnny Across Tackle. Often upwards of thirty kids aged nine to thirteen would gather in the gravel schoolyard, which was covered with snow, during recess or lunch break or after classes were over, and decide who would be the first designated tackler. The rest of the boys would line up against the brick wall of the school building, a dirty brown edifice undoubtedly modeled after the factories of Victorian England, which was perhaps fifty feet long. This would be the width of the field. Sixty yards or so across the schoolyard was a chain link fence. The object was to run from the wall to the fence and back again as many times as possible without being tackled. The wall and the fence were “safe.” Nobody could be tackled if they were touching with some part of their body—usually a hand, sometimes as little as a toe—the wall or the fence.

Somebody would volunteer to be “it,” the first designated tackler. The object, of course, was to be the last man standing. They mostly played when there was a thick layer of snow over the gravel, to protect them from being cut by the stones. Even so, boys would be bruised and battered during this game; broken arms, wrists, ankles and fingers and the occasional broken leg were not uncommon. Girls would play a tag version of the same game, a more sensible exercise. Roy thought he should have taken this as an early sign that women were, if not superior, the more sensible sex.

The boy who was “it” would survey the lineup, pick out his quarry—usually one of the weaker kids, an easy target—and shout, “Johnny Across!” All of the Johnnys would then take off for the opposite safety of the fence. Each participant wanted to be the last survivor, the “winner,” except that whoever won knew he would be piled on by however many of the tacklers as possible.

If the last boy was well-liked, the others would take him down tenderly, with respect for his toughness and athleticism. If, however, “Lonely Johnny,” as Crazy Jimmy K., an older friend of Roy's who claimed to have achieved that distinction more than twenty times, called him, was unpopular with the majority of the rest of the players, the result could be decidedly ugly. Often, in order to avoid an animalistic conclusion, a kid who knew he was going to get it if he managed to make it through to the end would go down on purpose early in the game and get in his licks on the tackles.

When Roy was eleven years old, he was troubled by frequent nosebleeds. As his doctor explained, this was a not uncommon occurrence during rapid growth spurts. Blood vessels in Roy's nose would burst at any time, even when he wasn't exerting himself. One weekday morning in the middle of February, Roy went to the doctor's office to have his nose cauterized. The doctor inserted what looked to Roy like a soldering iron up each of his nostrils and burned the ends of the broken blood vessels. He then lubricated Roy's nasal passages, packed them with gauze, and instructed him to avoid contact sports for ten days. He handed Roy a tube of Vaseline and said he should not let his nostrils dry out, not blow his nose, and not pick at the scabs that would form, even if they itched. Then Roy took a bus to school.

Just as he arrived, the guys were gathering in the schoolyard to begin a game of Johnny Across. Roy ran over and joined them. The first designated tackler had already been chosen, Large Jensen, a Swedish kid who volunteered to start at tackle almost every time he played. Large, whose real name was Lars, was, at six feet tall and two hundred pounds, the biggest twelve-year-old on the Northwest side of the city. At least none of the kids at Roy's school had heard of or encountered anyone able to dispute this claim. Large said he had recently run into a kid at Eugene Field Park who was an inch taller and almost as heavy, but that kid was already thirteen, which Large would not be until June. Large's mother, whom the boys called Mrs. Large, had the widest hands Roy had ever seen on a woman. He was sure she could hold two basketballs in each one if she tried. Mrs. Large was wide all over but not very tall. Large's father—Mr. Large—was six feet six and probably weighed around 350. He worked over in Whiting or Gary, Indiana, for U.S. Steel. Large told the boys that as soon as he was sixteen he was going to quit school and go to work for U.S. Steel, too. His father already had a silver lunchbox with LARS stenciled on it in black block letters, just like his own, which was labeled OLAF.

Roy kept to the edges of the field, holding his head steady as he could and running at moderate speed. For some reason Roy thought that if he ran fast the intensity might disrupt the healing process. For a while, he was able to avoid any serious contact, and in particular kept away from Large Jensen and his mob. When Roy found himself one of only twelve remaining boys, he knew he had to either allow himself to be brought down without a struggle or risk serious damage.

On the next across, two of the tacklers, Thomas Palmer and Don Repulski, targeted Roy. Palmer was cross-eyed and couldn't tackle worth a damn. A straight arm would fend him off. Repulski worried Roy, however. He was bigger than Roy, six months older, a little fat but strong. Roy was faster, so he knew he had to make a good fake and hope Repulski would go for it, then Roy could beat both of them to the wall.

The rule was that the tacklers yelled “Johnny Across” three times. If a kid didn't move off the safe—the fence or the wall—after three calls, he was automatically caught. Roy waited through two calls, then, just as Palmer and Repulski started to shout “Johnny Across!” for the last time, he broke to his left, toward the eastern boundary of the schoolyard. This gave him more room to maneuver and would, perhaps, even enable him to outrun them to the boundary before he cut downfield toward the wall.

Roy slugged Thomas Palmer right between his crossed eyes with the flat of his right hand just as he reached the edge of the field. Palmer's glasses flew off and he went down on his knees. Roy didn't wait to see if he had made Palmer cry or if the busted frame had gashed his forehead. Roy had Repulski to beat, and as Roy made a hard cut his left foot gave way on the wet snow. Roy's left knee touched the ground and Don Repulski, unable to brake, barreled past him out of bounds. Roy recovered his balance and hightailed it to the wall. He was safe.

Palmer was yelling his head off. He claimed that Roy had gone down as a result of their contact. Roy's knee had hit the ground, Palmer said, so he was caught. Palmer had an inch-long cut on the bridge of his nose and was holding the two pieces that were his glasses. “No way!” Roy shouted. “I hit Palmer before I made my cut. He went down and then I turned—that's when my knee touched the snow.” Repulski backed Roy up, he'd seen what happened. He started to say something else but then he—and everybody else—stopped talking. They were all just staring at Roy.

Roy had forgotten about his nose. He looked down and saw that the snow directly below him was turning bright red. Blood was streaming from both of his nostrils. He pulled the packet of tissues out of his coat pocket, tore it open, took a wad and jammed it up against his face. Blood soaked through the tissues in a few seconds, so he threw that wad away and made another. Slowly, the bleeding subsided. Holding a third bunch of tissues to his nose, Roy leaned back against the wall. He took out the tube of Vaseline, unscrewed the cap, squeezed ribbons of it up his nostrils and set himself for the next Johnny Across.

There were only four kids left on safe. Four against thirty. Repulski and about seven other guys stood directly in Roy's path. Palmer was not among them but Large Jensen was. At the second call, Roy took off, faked left, went right and banged against Large Jensen's stomach. Roy hit the ground hard and sat still. He glanced down without moving his head much; a few crimson drops dotted the snow. Large and the rest of the gang ran off to tackle someone else.

The school bell rang, signaling the end of the lunch break. “Who's Lonely Johnny?” Roy asked Small Eddie Small. “Nobody,” he said, as he walked by. Roy got up and followed him. All four of the remaining Johnnys had been tackled before making it to the fence, the last two or three at about the same moment, so there was no winner. Repulski came trotting by and punched Roy's right shoulder.

“Good game,” he said. Vaseline had congealed in Roy's throat. He hawked it up and expectorated a mixture of clotted blood and petroleum jelly, then walked into the building.

What Roy didn't realize until much later was that Johnny Across had been a valuable learning experience for life—and death. This business of living and dying, Roy concluded, was just one big game of Johnny Across, with everyone scampering to avoid being tackled. Back then, though, his biggest concern was how to stop his nose from bleeding. Ten days after Roy's nostrils were cauterized, he returned to the doctor to have him remove the scabs so that Roy could resume breathing properly. By this time Roy had swallowed enough Vaseline to have lubricated his mother's Oldsmobile for the next six months.

Roy had played Johnny Across several times during this “healing” period, and had luckily avoided direct contact involving his nose except for one sharp blow by Small Eddie Small's left elbow that engendered only a brief trickle. The guys, Roy thought, did not want to witness another vermilion snow painting, so they mostly took it easy on him. He took it easy on himself, too, but Roy knew, even then, that if he kept playing it safe, in the long run he would never become Lonely Johnny.