The Roy Stories (31 page)

 

The American Language

Djibouti “Jib” Bufera was one guy in the neighborhood of whom everyone was afraid. Roy was twelve when he first saw him, getting out of the driver's side of a black Cadillac in front of Phil and Leonard's restaurant on Bavaria Avenue. Jib was forty-four years old then, five foot eight-and-a-half, stocky, clean-shaven. He was wearing a black overcoat and a dark gray, medium brim Borsalino hat. Accompanying him was a shorter man about the same age who was very wide around the middle, had a mustache, also wearing a black overcoat but hatless, smoking a long, dark brown cigar. Bufera allowed this man to precede him into Phil and Leonard's. The Cadillac was parked in a space next to a sign marked Fire and Police Only.

“You see who that was?” said Chick Ceccarelli.

“Who?” said Roy. “Guys got out of the black Caddy?”

“Yeah. Jib Bufera and some goomba. Bufera's the guy tried to kill Castro.”

The two boys were standing across the street from Phil and Leonard's. It was four o'clock on a Saturday in December and they were on their way home following a football game at Queen of All Saints, which boys from other schools called Queers of All Sorts.

“How do you know he tried to kill Castro?” Roy asked.

“My Uncle Paul, he's a federal judge. He told my dad the government gave the contract to The Outfit.”

“Probably be impossible to get near Fidel in Havana.”

“Uncle Paul says nothing's impossible, but Jib tried to hit him in New York, after he took control of Cuba and came to speak at the UN. Castro stayed at a hotel up in Harlem. There was always a big crowd outside and when he leaned out an open window to wave to people, Bufera took a crack at him with a rifle from a window in a building across the street. He missed and didn't get another shot.”

Chick and Roy stood on the sidewalk with their hands in their coat pockets. The temperature was dropping as the sky faded from light gray to dark gray. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Phil and Leonard's was where the wiseguys hung out. Most of the men who came in and out of there, or stood around in front when the weather was better, were friendly to the local kids, but not Jib Bufera. Roy heard that Jib's muscle shoved aside anyone who was in their path and that Jib never spoke to strangers.

“My dad says Uncle Paul told him Jib has trouble with the American language,” said Chick.

“You mean he can't speak English?”

“He only talks Sicilian, keeps someone around to translate for him.”

“How'd he get to be a U.S. citizen?”

“He ain't. A lot of them guys come over on a lost boat, like Lucky Luciano.”

“I'm gettin' cold,” said Roy.

A beat cop came around the corner by Phil and Leonard's and saw the black Cadillac parked there. Roy and Chick watched him give the car a once over, then glance at the entrance to the restaurant before walking on down Bavaria Avenue.

“Okay,” said Chick, “let's go.”

Roy only saw Jib Bufera once more. It was on a warm day about six months later. Jib was in the back seat of the black Cadillac, which was stopped for a red light at the corner of Sycamore and Racine. The window on Jib's side was down and he was blowing his nose into a white handkerchief. Roy stood on the corner waiting for the light to change so that he could cross. Just as it did, Jib Bufera threw the white handkerchief out the window and his car sped away. Roy stepped around it. When he got to the other side of the street, he looked back and watched a powder blue Impala run over the handkerchief.

When he was fifty-two, Jib Bufera was killed. An eighteen-wheeler rear-ended the car he was riding in and sent it over an embankment on Interstate 55 halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. At the time of his death, Bufera was fighting a deportation order. At his funeral, Jib's lawyer gave this statement to reporters: “Djibouti Bufera loved his adopted land and performed services on behalf of this country for which he should have been honored and decorated, instead of being deported. Despite the fact that he never did learn to speak our language, Jib was a great, if unofficial, citizen.”

At the request of his mother, Jib Bufera's body was later disinterred from the Chicago cemetery in which he had been buried, and shipped to the little town in Sicily where he had been born and reburied there. Engraved on his tombstone, in English, were the words: He loved America more than she loved him.

Chick Ceccarelli died a month after Jib Bufera. He fell to his death from a balcony on the tenth floor of an apartment building on Marine Drive. According to his girlfriend, Loretta Vampa, who witnessed the accident, Chick was attempting to walk on top of the railing when he lost his balance. The apartment belonged to Loretta Vampa's mother's third husband, Dominic Nequizia, who had been Jib Bufera's lawyer.

 

Lonely Are the Brave

Many men in Roy's neighborhood had tattoos. Most of these tattoos were of military reference, such as USMC, Semper Fidelis, U.S. Navy, 101st Airborne, Dive Bomber or Tailgunner. Some of them were illustrated with an anchor, crossed sabers or rifles. The men who bore these tattoos had fought in World War II, the ink had faded and the men were middle-aged and generally overweight. Every once in a while Roy saw someone who had a woman's name, by itself or under a heart, or, less often, the word Mother or Mom, burned into his skin. A guy from West Virginia named Weevil, who worked the cash register at Rain Bo's Car Wash, had a drawing on his right forearm of a brunette with big eyes and bare breasts and the name Ava in cursive where her stomach might have been.

Most tattoo parlors in Chicago were located on South State Street, close to pawnshops and burlesque houses. Roy had never seen anyone actually getting a tattoo other than a drunken sailor or soldier until Flip Ferguson's older brother, Lefty, got one just before he went away to boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina.

Roy and Flip, who were both fourteen, accompanied Lefty, who was seventeen, to Detroit Art's Tattoo Emporium on the corner of State and Menominee. Lefty had recently been expelled from high school for beating up the vice-principal, who had ordered him to put out his cigarette. Lefty put it out on the vice-principal's forehead, then popped him in the face a few times. Shortly thereafter, Lefty and Flip's father signed a release giving his oldest son permission as a minor to join the Marines. When apprised of this, the Board of Education and the vice-principal agreed to drop the assault charges they had filed against Lefty. By enlisting in the Marines, Lefty saved his father a lot of money in legal fees, and himself a year in the reformatory at St. Charles.

Detroit Art was about sixty, tall and skinny with a pockmarked face Lefty later described to an uncomprehending prostitute in Saigon as resembling a Chicago street after a bad winter. The tattooist wore a green eyeshade and Coke bottle-thick glasses with heavy black frames, and smoked an unfiltered Old Gold in an ebony cigarette holder.

“What'll it be?” he asked Lefty. “You know what you want?”

“Yeah, I want it to say ‘Lefty from Chi.'”

“You want a picture with it?”

“What kind of picture?”

“That's up to you,” said Art. “How about a fist?”

Lefty thought about this for a few seconds, then nodded.

“Okay, a left-handed fist,” he said, and held his up for Art's inspection.

Art peered at it for a moment or two, then asked, “You want upper and lower case or all capital letters?”

“All capitals,” said Lefty.

“Over, under or around the fist?”

“Over.”

“Biceps or forearm?”

“Biceps.”

“Left, right?”

“Right, left,” Lefty said.

He rolled up his left sleeve and presented the designated arm to Detroit Art.

“You're really gonna do it?” said Flip.

Lefty grinned. He wasn't all that big, or even especially tough. He just liked to fight, Flip told Roy, like their father.

“Sure, he is,” said Art, who did not remove the cigarette holder from between his clenched teeth while he worked. “Won't take twenty-five minutes.”

Flip and Lefty's mother had died a couple of years before under mysterious circumstances. According to the newspapers, their mother was found lying in the alley behind their house very early one morning. Her head had been bashed in from behind with a hammer or similar object and she was found dead when a neighbor, taking out his garbage, discovered the body and called the cops. Flip and Lefty and their father were asleep in their house when the police came. No murder weapon was ever found and the case remained unsolved. Nobody knew why Mrs. Ferguson had been in the alley at five thirty that morning, unless she had taken out some garbage, but no fresh garbage was found in the Ferguson family's trash can. Neither Flip nor Lefty had heard any unusual noises, they said, nor did their father. The only strange thing was that Mrs. Ferguson's body was entirely nude when the neighbor found her. It was late March, snow flurries were in the air and she didn't even have slippers on her feet. If the police ever had a suspect or suspects in this case, no mention of it was made public.

A little more than a half hour later, the three boys were back out on State Street. It was windy and cloudy but not cold. An old woman passed them on the sidewalk, pushing a baby carriage filled with empty beer cans.

“Set 'em up in the other alley!” she shouted.

“How does your arm feel?” Flip asked his brother.

“Probably how a calf feels after it just got branded,” said Lefty. “It stings.”

“You were really brave,” Roy said. “You didn't say anything while he was writing and drawing on you.”

Lefty took out a pack of Chesterfields and a book of matches from the right pocket of his navy blue windbreaker. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, then let the smoke out slowly.

“Know why soldiers wear uniforms?” Lefty asked.

“So they'll know who's on the same side,” said Flip.

“That's one reason,” said Lefty. “But it's also so everyone feels equal. Nobody's better than anybody else and each man knows he's not alone, that they're a part of somethin' bigger than just themselves.”

The boys began walking toward the el.

“You gonna show the old man?” asked Flip.

“I ain't that brave,” said Lefty.

 

Force of Evil

Roy was sitting at the kitchen table with his grandfather on a rainy Saturday afternoon in November listening to the radio. Johnny Hodges was blowing the first chorus on “Gone with the Wind.” His grandfather was eating smoked fish and drinking beer while Roy, who was nine years old, watched him wield fork and knife to pick apart the flesh from the bones with surgical precision. Roy hated the smell of the smoked fish but was fascinated by his grandfather's dexterity. Not once, it seemed to Roy, did even a very small bone elude his grandfather's diligence. When the record ended, a man with a deep voice began talking. The news on the radio included a report of an eight-year-old girl having been found behind a row of bushes in a park. Roy's grandfather reached over to the counter where the radio was and turned it off. Roy looked out the window. For some reason, the sky looked more red than gray.

“Terrible,” said his grandfather. “Many years ago, the young son of a friend of mine was kidnapped and murdered by two older boys. The three boys knew each other, they lived in the same neighborhood. All of them came from well-to-do, respectable families.”

“Why did they kill your friend's son?”

“The pair who committed the murder had planned everything carefully. Both of them were twenty years old, brilliant students at the university, and they devised what they thought would be a perfect crime. They considered what they were doing an experiment to prove to themselves that they could get away with it, that they were more clever than the police. Nobody else would ever know that they had done this; they pledged to one another that it would be their secret for the rest of their lives. Just the fact of knowing they had carried out the plan and succeeded in not being found out would be sufficient. It turned out not to be, of course.”

“How did they get caught, Pops?”

Roy's grandfather put down his knife and fork, then took a swallow of beer.

“They couldn't stand the anonymity, Roy, not being given recognition for their ingenuity. After the boy was reported missing, they volunteered, as concerned friends of the family, to help the police find him. Convinced as they were of their own genius, they decided to amplify the experience by witnessing first hand how inept the investigators were, to share a private joke at the expense not only of law enforcement, but the parents of the dead boy and, of course, the public, who were certain to be horrified, frightened and mystified. Eventually, after they slipped up and one of them confessed, they led the police to a culvert by a drainage canal where they had hidden the body.”

“What happened to them?”

“After a spectacular trial that was in the headlines for weeks, thanks to an outstanding defense lawyer who was a crusader against the death penalty, the murderers were given life sentences. One died in prison, knifed by a fellow inmate in a shower stall, and the other served more than thirty years before being paroled under special conditions. He volunteered to participate as a guinea pig in medical experiments, testing antiviral and anticancer drugs. He actually married and lived for many years following his release.

“The persons who suffered the most, of course, were the parents of the murdered child. As I said, I knew the father and considered him a friend. He was a good fellow, we belonged to the same club. He died of a broken heart not very long after the trial. His wife lived a few more years before she, too, had a heart attack. She survived but remained an invalid until her death. The boy was their only child.”

Rain was pounding the roof and the windows harder now. Roy shivered, even though the radiators were turned on all the way.

“That's really a terrible story,” he said.

“Yes, it is. Books and plays have been written about the case. I read recently that a movie about it is in the works now. People just could not understand why these outstanding young men, both of whom were otherwise destined for great careers, would have risked everything by committing such a despicable act.”

“Maybe that's why they did it,” said Roy. “I mean, if school was so easy for them, if they were so smart and came from rich families so they had everything they wanted, maybe taking that chance gave them a kind of excitement they couldn't get any other way.”

“You're right, Roy. The papers called it a ‘thrill' killing.”

“Did they ever say they were sorry?”

“One of them did, the one who eventually got out of prison. He said he wanted to try to make up for his crime by allowing himself to be used by medical researchers to discover drugs that could save lives.”

That night, before Roy fell asleep, he thought about why people did terrible things. It wasn't enough to just say that people who do something awful are sick in the head, there had to be something more, a kind of evil force that exists inside them. Maybe it exists in everyone, Roy thought, but some people have more evil in them than others. Roy wondered when he would find out how much of this force he had in himself, and what he would do about it if he had too much. Perhaps there wouldn't be anything he could do, that the evil power would just take over his brain and use him as an agent or instrument of destruction. He was only nine years old, but Roy knew that this thought would be in his head for the rest of his life.