The Roy Stories (29 page)

 

The Man Who Swallowed the World

Sid Roman, Roy's mother's first cousin, was a kind, handsome, intelligent man who dropped his marbles at the age of forty-six. Cousin Sid, as Roy and his mother and her brother, Buck, always referred to him, worked for many years as a clothing salesman, specializing in men's suits, at one of Chicago's most exclusive and expensive haberdasheries. This mode of employment lasted, as Roy's mother phrased it, “until Cousin Sid lost his looks.”

Actually, Cousin Sid's loss of his looks coincided with the loss of his mind. One day Sid could not find the silver cigarette lighter with his initials inscribed on it, a gift from his wife, Norma, for his fortieth birthday, and he decided that he had swallowed it. Cousin Norma was an equally kind, intelligent woman, who was “high strung” (again, Roy's mother's words), with a history of nervous breakdowns. Cousin Norma, an unhealthily thin woman with stringy red hair, who chain-smoked unfiltered Chesterfields, told her husband that he must simply have misplaced the lighter.

“Look in the pockets of your charcoal suit jacket,” she told Sid. “It's in the pile to go to the dry cleaners.”

“I already did,” he answered, and pointed to his neck. “Look at my throat. There's where my lighter is, I can feel it.”

“That's your Adam's apple,” said his wife.

“I'm going to the emergency room,” said Cousin Sid, “to have it removed.”

He walked out of the house and did not return until six months later, when he was released from the psychiatric ward at Pafko Hospital.

After this, Cousin Sid behaved normally for a while; although, as Roy's mother observed, his looks were gone. Before his breakdown, he had resembled the actor William Powell, except for his hair, which Sid wore slicked back in the style of the day, and was silver and thicker than Powell's. During his residence at Pafko Hospital, however, Cousin Sid's teeth went bad, resulting in his having quite a large number of them removed. This gave him the appearance of his cheeks having caved in. Also, his color had changed: no longer glowing and golden, his face was now bloodlessly pale, bordering on unearthly. His mustache was gone, too, exposing a wrinkled and shrunken or shriveled upper lip that no longer covered completely his front teeth, of which one was missing. For some reason, he could not grow his mustache back, freezing his mouth in an expression somewhere between a sneer and a contemptuous grin.

Cousin Sid lost his job at the clothing store. Norma supported them and their fifteen-year-old son, Larry, who was disabled by polio and confined to a wheelchair, by working as a secretary for a law firm. It was months before Sid found work at a discount shoe store on the south side of the city. The job required that he travel almost two hours on the elevated and two buses each way.

Four weeks after her husband began selling shoes, Norma received a call at the law office from the police informing her that Sid was in their custody at the Cottage Grove precinct. Sid had told a bus driver that he'd swallowed his transfer. When the driver ordered Sid to pay an additional fare, Sid refused, insisting that he was in possession of the transfer, it was in his stomach, and that he had also swallowed all of the money he'd had in his pockets so that it could not be stolen. The driver told him to get off the bus, but Sid took a seat and would not get up. The driver then radioed for the police, who came and removed him forcefully. Following this incident, Cousin Sid became convinced that he had swallowed everything from kitchen utensils to clocks, and Norma had him committed to an asylum in Indiana run by a nondenominational organization called Angels of Victims of Unfathomable Behavior.

Roy was nine when he accompanied his mother, Uncle Buck and Cousin Norma to visit Cousin Sid in Indiana. It was a sunny, early October day, and Roy enjoyed riding in the backseat of his uncle's 1955 Cadillac Coupe Deville as they cruised through the Indiana dunes. Roy wondered how different they could be from the deserts of Egypt or Arabia, and imagined himself mounted on a camel among Bedouin tribesmen, his face shielded from blowing sand and intense sun by robes and gauzy scarves.

At the asylum, which was a huge black-and-gray stone building in the middle of nowhere that looked to him as if it should have been surrounded by a moat infested with crocodiles, Roy was made to sit alone in a waiting room while the others were taken by a woman wearing a gray nun's habit to see Cousin Sid. There was only one high window in the waiting room which admitted a narrow shaft of sunlight. It would be difficult to escape from this room, Roy thought, if the door were locked, especially because the six metal chairs were bolted to the floor and would have to be pried loose before they could be stacked high enough to reach the window. Roy remained there for an hour and was beginning to feel like the Count of Monte Cristo imprisoned in the Chateau d'If before the door opened and his Uncle Buck said, “Let's go, champ.”

Seeing that his uncle was by himself, Roy asked, “Where are my mother and Cousin Norma?”

“Norma's pretty upset,” said Buck. “Your mother is with her, taking a walk around the grounds.”

Roy followed his uncle outside and they stood next to the Cadillac. Buck removed a cigar from an inside pocket of his navy blue sportcoat, bit off one end and felt in his other pockets for a book of matches.

“How's Cousin Sid?”

Buck located his matches and lit the cigar.

“He thinks he's swallowed everything he can't see.”

“What do you mean everything? You mean including the Pacific Ocean and the Empire State Building?”

Buck took a few puffs. The smoke quickly disappeared into the crisp air.

“I suppose so,” he said. “Whatever can't fit into his little room. I'm afraid it's the end of the world for Cousin Sid.”

“He swallowed it,” said Roy.

“What?”

“The world. He's got it all inside him.”

Roy's mother and Cousin Norma came around the corner of the big, ugly building and walked slowly over to them. Cousin Norma was crying, a cigarette dangling from the left corner of her mouth. Her lips looked like two long, crimson scratches. Roy's mother was holding Cousin Norma's right elbow. They all got into the car and nobody spoke until after Buck had been driving for fifteen minutes.

“I envy Sid,” said Cousin Norma. “He doesn't have to think anymore.”

“The sisters will take care of him,” said Roy's mother; then she added, “I mean, the Angels.”

“What's unfathomable behavior mean?” asked Roy.

“It's when somebody behaves in a way nobody else can understand,” said his uncle.

Cousin Norma, who was sitting in the backseat with Roy, lit a fresh Chesterfield off a half-inch butt, which she then tossed out the window on her side. Her fingers were stained and wrinkled like a weathered, well-oiled baseball glove.

“Kitty,” she said to Roy's mother, “I remember when I was about Roy's age, maybe a year younger, and my aunt gave me a beautiful girl doll for my birthday. I looked at it and then handed it back to her. My mother said, ‘You can't do that, Norma. Take the doll and say thank you to Aunt Rose.' I ran away and locked myself in my room. I couldn't keep that doll, she was too beautiful and I was too ugly. I didn't want to have her around to haunt me, to constantly remind me of how I looked compared to her. I remember how I felt that day. It's the same way I feel now.”

Roy stared out the window on his side at the sand dunes. He wanted to tell Cousin Norma the same thing he'd said to his uncle, that he thought Cousin Sid's world was inside him now, but he kept looking out the window and thought about the Arabs.

 

Ghost Ship

Roy sometimes cut through Rosedale Cemetery on his way to play ball at Winnebago Park. Jews were not allowed to be buried at Rosedale, so Roy thought it interesting that next to the cemetery, on its western boundary, was the Zion National Home, a residential institution for elderly Jews.

One summer's morning, Roy was cutting across Rosedale when he saw an old woman walking with a cane along the same path ahead of him. As he approached her, the woman suddenly stumbled and fell. Roy ran up to her and took hold of one of her arms.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

The woman was wearing a pink housecoat buttoned up to her neck and fuzzy purple slippers. She wore thick glasses that magnified her hazel eyes.

“I'll survive,” she said, “at least for a little longer. I'm used to this, unfortunately. When you get to be my age—I'm eighty-eight—you never know if your next step will be your last.”

Roy helped the woman to her feet, then picked up the cane and handed it to her. She looked at Roy and smiled. A few of her teeth were missing.

“How old are you, son?” she asked.

“Eleven,” said Roy.

“That's the age my granddaughter, Esther, was when we left Hamburg on the
Caribia
, bound for Cuba. This was in 1938. What year were you born?”

“Nineteen forty-six.”

“Esther would have been thirty now, had she survived.”

“What happened to her?”

“The Cuban government wouldn't allow the
Caribia
to dock because most of its passengers were Jewish. We were fleeing Hitler's Germany. Esther caught the typhoid fever and she died on board. We were forced to bury her at sea. The
Caribia
truly became a ghost ship after that. Esther's ghost was with us as we sailed back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a safe harbor.”

“Why didn't the Cubans want the Jews?”

“They were afraid if they took us, more Jews would come expecting to be taken in, too. This happened in many places, in many countries, on five continents.”

“How long were you on that ship?”

“Four or five months, I think. Finally, we were granted permission to disembark at Baltimore, Maryland. All of the passengers were housed in the same buildings slaves were kept in after they were brought there from Africa. My daughter, Rebecca, Esther's mother, and I waited in those slave quarters for weeks—I can't recall now how many—until we were taken by train to New York City and deposited at the Jewish Orphans and Immigrants Home.”

“Do you live at Zion National?” Roy asked.

“Yes, barely, as you can see.”

“No Jews are allowed to be buried here at Rosedale. Did you know that?”

The old lady smiled again and said, “Even after death there are places Jews are forbidden to go.”

She coughed a few times, very deeply, making a sound so loud it frightened Roy a little.

“Zion stretches out her hands,” the woman said, “but there is none to comfort her; the Lord has commanded against Jacob that his neighbors should be his foes; Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them.”

“What's that?” said Roy.

“One of the lamentations of Jeremiah.”

“Is it from the Bible?”

“Yes. The only words worth repeating are from the Old Testament or Oscar Wilde.”

The woman coughed again and shuddered.

“I have to be getting back now,” she said.

Roy accompanied her to the entrance of the Zion National Home and held her left elbow as she walked up the two front steps and went inside. He decided to walk all the way around Rosedale to get to Winnebago Park, even though he knew that would make him late for the game. On the way there he imagined the little girl's ghost roaming the decks of the
Caribia
as it sailed without a destination. The girl's name was Esther, Roy remembered. She was the only person he knew of who had been buried at sea.

 

Caca Negra

“You know Rubio, worked at Al's Auto Parts?”

“Wears thick glasses and sort of snorts after finishing a sentence?”

Bobby Kabir nodded. “Right,” he said.

“What about him?” asked Roy.

“Was sent up on a fake counterfeit scam. Got seven years.”

“Who told you?”

“My Aunt Nardis. She plays canasta with Rubio's old lady.”

Roy and Bobby Kabir were standing and leaning against the north wall of the school building to stay out of the wind, waiting for the afternoon bell to ring. It was a drizzly, dark November day. Nobody was playing ball. Bobby Kabir was smoking a Kool, concealing it in his cupped right hand between puffs so the playground monitor wouldn't see it and report him. Kabir was almost fourteen, a year and a half older than Roy, but they were both in the eighth grade. Bobby was tall and thin, with a light brown pockmarked face. He had moved to Chicago from Detroit over the summer with his mother. They lived with her sister in an apartment above Victory Cleaners on Chippewa Street. Bobby had been set back a year in school, he said, because of his having been expelled from the one he went to in Detroit, for hitting a teacher.

“I didn't really hit him,” Kabir told Roy and his friends, “just kind of threw him down when he put his hands on me. I don't like people puttin' their hands on me.”

Jimmy Boyle asked Kabir why the teacher grabbed him, and Bobby said, “He thought I was botherin' a girl in the hallway and I told him to mind his own business. He got a little cut on his head when he bumped into a locker, then made a big deal out of it. After I got thrown out I didn't transfer to another school like I was supposed to. I got a job as a helper, deliverin' ice. Then we moved here.”

“What kind of scam was Rubio in on?” Roy asked.

“Caca negra. Black money.”

“What's that?”

“Sheets of uncut bills supposedly stolen from the government. They're covered with black ink because of bein' taken out of circulation. The ink's removable by a chemical. Problem was, Rubio's paper was phony. He got caught tryin' to sell it to an undercover cop.”

“He looked dumb,” said Roy. “I only know who he is 'cause the Viper used to work Saturdays in the stock room at Al's. I saw him when I went by there to meet Vipe after he got off.”

About a week after Roy and Bobby Kabir had this conversation about Rubio being busted, Bobby was arrested during a break-in at Al's Auto Parts and charged with attempted burglary. Arrested with him was a thirty-five-year-old black Puerto Rican guy named Diezmo Blanks. Diezmo Blanks worked at the store for a year but had been fired for molesting a customer, a woman who had come in to buy a leather steering wheel cover. Blanks had apparently offered to put it on for the woman, who declined politely, saying her husband would do it. Diezmo Blanks followed her out to her car and tried to kiss her. She complained to Al and he fired Blanks on the spot, gave her money back and told her to keep the steering wheel cover. How Bobby Kabir had gotten mixed up with Diezmo Blanks, Roy didn't know, nor did any of his friends.

“You liked Kabir,” Jimmy Boyle said to Roy. “You surprised he'd do somethin' like that?”

“I didn't know him so good,” said Roy. “Just talked to him around school. He's only lived here a few months.”

“I seen him once with his mother,” the Viper said. “They were goin' in the door next to Victory Cleaners.”

“He told me they lived over it with his aunt,” said Roy. “I never met her or his mother.”

“Kabir's mother's real tall,” said the Viper. “She was dressed all in black and had a scarf around her head. I couldn't hardly see her face.”

It was a Friday after school and Jimmy Boyle, the Viper and Roy were walking to Lucky's El Paso to shoot pool. Roy did not know exactly why, but he felt sorry for Bobby Kabir. An icy rain started to fall. Roy stopped on the sidewalk.

“I'm goin' home,” he said. “I don't feel good. See you guys tomorrow.”

Roy turned around and headed the other way. He knew he couldn't do anything to help Bobby Kabir, nor was there any reason he should. Kabir wasn't really even a friend of his. Roy walked faster. His head was already wet.

Since Bobby Kabir was a minor, he was sentenced to the Boys Reformatory at St. Charles for a year. Roy never saw him again. He figured Kabir's mother must have moved away because nobody he knew ever saw her again, either.

Diezmo Blanks, however, turned up in the news about three years later. He and a fellow inmate named Marvellis Nubarrón escaped from prison and murdered a gas station attendant in Johnson City, Illinois. They stole his car, a parakeet yellow 1961 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove to Wyoming, where they were apparently forced off the road during a blizzard. Highway patrolmen found Diezmo Blanks and his partner dead from exposure in a snowdrift next to Route 80, sixteen miles outside of Laramie. They had abandoned the Pontiac and attempted to walk into town during the storm. Photographs of Blanks and Nubarron were in the newspaper. The article said that Diezmo Blanks was a three-time loser who had been convicted once for indecent behavior with a child and twice for armed robbery. Bobby Kabir's name was not mentioned.

Victory Cleaners was sold and renamed for its new owner, Jet Wing. Roy's mother began bringing her dry cleaning there, and whenever Roy walked over to Chippewa Street to pick it up for her he couldn't help but think about Bobby Kabir. One time he asked Jet Wing if an older woman named Nardis still lived upstairs.

“Wing family live up,” he said. “No Nardis.”