Cover
ROY’S WORLD
STORIES 1973–2020
Barry Gifford
Seven Stories Press
New York • Oakland • Liverpool
Copyright © 2000, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2018, and 2020 by Barry Gifford
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
LCCN: 2020032405
ISBN: 978-1-64421-022-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-64421-023-9 (ebook)
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Drawings by Barry Gifford.
Acknowledgements
A number of these stories have appeared in the following magazines, newspapers, books or anthologies:
A Boy’s Novel (Santa Barbara), A Good Man to Know (Livingston, Montana), Amerarcana (San Francisco), Another Magazine (London), Arizona Republic (Phoenix), Brick (Toronto), Bridge (Chicago), The Chicagoist (Chicago), City Lights Review (San Francisco), Confabulario (Mexico City), Dazed and Confused (London), El Angel de la Reforma (Mexico City), El País, (Madrid), Film Comment (New York), The Fireside Book of Baseball (New York), Flash Fiction Forward (New York), The Independent (London), L’Immature (Paris), La Nouvelle Revue Française (Paris), La Repubblica delle Donne (Milan), The Lifelovers ABC No. 3 (Madrid), Max (Milan), Memories from a Sinking Ship (New York), Narrative (San Francisco), New Sudden Fiction: Short Stories from America and Beyond (New York) Nude (London), The PEN Short Story Collection (New York), The Phantom Father (New York), Plan V (Buenos Aires), Ploughshares (Boston), Positif (Paris), Post Road (New York), Sad Stories of the Death of Kings (New York), San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Santa Monica Review (Los Angeles), Southwest Review (Dallas), Speak (San Francisco), Vice (New York) and Wyoming (New York).
“Roy and the River Pirates” and “Lost Monkey” originally appeared in Vice magazine (New York). “The King of Vajra Dornei” appeared, in different form, in The Up-Down (New York, 2015). “A Long Day’s Night in the Naked City (Take Two)” originally appeared, in different form, in The 2nd Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction (Berkeley). “Mules in the Wilderness” appeared in The Collagist (Ann Arbor). “Dingoes” appeared in Contrapasso (Sydney). “The Colony of the Sun” appeared in the Santa Monica Review (Los Angeles). “The Religious Experience” and “The Cuban Club” appeared in Narrative (San Francisco). Several of these stories also appeared in Confabulario, the cultural supplement of El Universal (Mexico City). “The Best Part of the Story” originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. “Tell Him I’m Dangerous” appeared in Zoetrope All-Story (San Francisco).
The following stories were published in The Chicagoist (Chicago): “Mona,” “Mud,” “King and Country,” “Dark and Black and Strange,” “Sick,” “The Italian Hat,” “I Also Deal in Fury,” “Creeps,” “Dingoes,” “Chicago, Illinois, 1953,” and “Role Model.”
“Bar Room Butterfly” appeared, in different form, in the anthologies Berkeley Noir (New York) and Noir Journal (Philadelphia).
To the memory of Jack Colby
“I listened and looked at them—there they were: the ones who would yet raise hell and kill a lot of bad people . . . I remember them all, I assure you. They pass and pass again through my memory, and I call them by their names as they go by.”
—João Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas
“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
—Arthur Rimbaud
Contents
Preface
Memories from a Sinking Ship
Memories from a Sinking Ship
A Good Man to Know
The Forgotten
Mrs. Kashfi
The Old Country
The Monster
The Ciné
Dark Mink
Nanny
Island in the Sun
An Eye on the Alligators
The Piano Lesson
The Lost Tribe
The Lost Christmas
My Catechism
Sunday Paper
The Origin of Truth
The Trophy
The Aerodynamics of an Irishman
A Rainy Day at the Nortown Theater
Renoir’s Chemin montant dans
les hautes herbes
Forever After
The Mason-Dixon Line
The Wedding
The Pitcher
A Place in the Sun
The Winner
The God of Birds
Sundays and Tibor
Poor Children of Israel
The Man Who Wanted to
Get the Bad Taste of the World
Out of His Mouth
Johnny Across
The Secret of Little White Dove
The Delivery
The Deep Blue See
Radio Goldberg
Why Skull Dorfman Went to Arkansas
Wanted Man
The Bucharest Prize
Blows with Sticks Raining Hard
The Chinaman
The End of Racism
Way Down in Egypt Land
Bad Things Wrong
Detente at the Flying Horse
Shattered
A Day’s Worth of Beauty
The Peterson Fire
Door to the River
Sailing in the Sea of Red
He Sees a Black Ship on the Horizon
Wyoming
Cobratown
Chinese Down the Amazon
Bandages
Soul Talk
Skylark
Flamingos
Wyoming
Saving the Planet
A Nice Day on the Ocean
Perfect Spanish
Seconds
Roy’s World
Nomads
Ducks on the Pond
Sound of the River
Red Highway
Lucky
K.C. So Far
(Seconds/Alternate Take)
Concertina Locomotion
Imagine
The Geography of Heaven
Man and Fate
Where Osceola Lives
The Crime of Pass Christian
Cool Breeze
Night Owl
Islamorada
On the Arm
Look Out Below
The Up and Up
Black Space
Fear and Desire
God’s Tornado
Sad Stories of the Death of Kings
The Age of Fable
The Great Failure
Irredeemable
Sad Stories of the Death of Kings
The Sultan
The Liberian Condition
Six Million and One
War and Peace
Chop Suey Joint
Significance
Einstein’s Son
The Albanian Florist
The Weeper
The Swedish Bakery
The Man Who Swallowed the World
Ghost Ship
Caca Negra
Roy’s First Car
El Carterista
Crime and Punishment
The American Language
Lonely Are the Brave
Force of Evil
The Choice
Bad Girls
Portrait of the Artist with Four Other Guys
The Starving Dogs of Little Croatia
In the Land of the Dead
The Secret of the Universe
Far from Anywhere
Rain in the Distance
Bad Night at the Del Prado
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Innamorata
The Exception
Close Encounters of the Right Kind
Blue People
Call of the Wild
Arabian Nights
Last Plane out of Chungking
The Vanished Gardens of Córdoba
Benediction
The Red Studebaker
Alligator Story
The Vast Difference
The Birdbath
Storybook Time
The Red Studebaker
The Trumpet
Unspoken
Haircut
The Invention of Rock ’n’ Roll
Infantry
Drifting Down the Old Whangpoo
The Wicked of the Earth
Christmas Is Not For Everyone
The Cuban Club
Roy and the River Pirates
Dingoes
The King of Vajra Dornei
Real Bandits
Haitian Fight Song (Take Two)
The Cuban Club
Appreciation
The Awful Country
Deep in the Heart
Unopened Letters
Chicago, Illinois, 1953
The Colony of the Sun
Creeps
Achilles and the Beautiful Land
Men in the Kitchen
Anna Louise
Mules in the Wilderness
The Boy Whose Mother May Have
Married a Leopard
Stung
El almuerzo por poco
Vultures
I Also Deal in Fury
Hour of the Wolf
Lost Monkey
When Benny Lost His Meaning
Sick
The Best Part of the Story
Tell Him I’m Dangerous
The Shadow Going Forward
Feeling the Heat
The Sharks
Smart Guys
Apacheria
Dark and Black and Strange
The Vagaries of Incompleteness
King and Country
House of Bamboo
The Unexpected
The Way of All Flesh
Some Products of the Imagination
Lament for a Daughter of Egypt
The Old West
Incurable
Shrimpers
Learning the Game
The Fifth Angel
A Long Day’s Night in the
Naked City (Take Two)
The Religious Experience
The Familiar Face of Darkness
Las Vegas, 1949
In Dreams
Lucky
Danger in the Air
Child’s Play
The Message
River Woods
The History and Proof of the
Spots on the Sun
War is Merely Another Kind of
Writing and Language
The End of the Story
Innocent of the Blood
The Italian Hat
The Senegalese Twist
Kidnapped
The Dolphins
Dragonland
Role Model
Mona
Mud
The Phantom Father
Roy’s Letter
The World in the Afternoon
The World in the Afternoon
Wing Shooting
Acapulco
His Truth
Disappointment
The Navajo Kid
In My Own Country
Rinky Dink
Where the Dead Hide
Bar Room Butterfly
Absolution
The Goose
Spooky Spiegelman and
The Night Time Killer
Constantinople
The Same Place in Space
The Good Listener
The Garden Apartment
Kitty’s World
Preface
In the company of eighteen new ones, which comprise the section “The World in the Afternoon,” Roy’s World is a compilation of my previously published Roy stories, an effort to evoke a portrait of a time and place that no longer exist, one I’ve been crafting for the better part of a half century. This is history on my own terms, a series of intertwined episodes based on events real and imagined, dosed with sense impressions designed to enable the reader to both visualize and, most important, feel them as does Roy and other inhabitants of this fictional universe. That said, the Roy stories come closer to comprising an autobiography than any other form I might have chosen. People have often remarked that I have a very good memory; perhaps, but memory is subjective beyond doubt or control and therefore unreliable, insufficient to present a viable or even acceptable, let alone accurate, compendium. My hope is that they prove entertaining and suggestive, perhaps even meaningful. Just as the real world keeps spinning, so does Roy’s.
—B.G.
Memories from a Sinking Ship
ROY’S FATHER
Memories from a Sinking Ship
When Roy was five years old his mother took him to Chicago to stay with his grandmother while she went to Acapulco with her new boyfriend, Rafaelito Faz. Roy had been told that hell was boiling but when he and his mother flew up from Miami and arrived in Chicago during the dead of winter he decided this was a lie. Hell was cold, not hot, and he was horrified that his mother had delivered him to such a place. My mother must hate me, Roy thought, to have brought me here. I must have done something terribly wrong. The fact that his grandmother was there already was proof to Roy that she, too, had committed an unforgivable sin.
Roy’s mother stayed in hell only long enough to hand him over. Rafaelito Faz would meet her in Mexico. “He’s very rich,” Roy’s grandmother informed him. “The Faz family owns a chain of department stores in Venezuela.” Rich people, Roy concluded, did not have to go to hell. His mother had shown him a picture of Rafaelito Faz clipped from the Miami Herald. His hair was parted down the middle and he had a wispy mustache that looked as if it might blow off in the Chicago wind. Underneath the photograph was the caption, “Faz heir visits city.”
When Roy’s mother returned from her holiday, she was wearing a white coat and her skin was as brown as Chico Carrasquel’s, the shortstop for the Chicago White Sox. Roy did not tell his mother that he was angry at her for dropping him off in hell while she went to a fabulous beach in another country because he was afraid that if he did she would do it again. Roy asked her if Rafaelito Faz had come to Chicago with her. “Forget that one, Roy,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see the rat again.”
The next time Roy went to Chicago to visit his grandmother, he was almost seven and it was during the summer. His mother disappeared after two or three days. Roy’s grandmother said that she had gone to see a friend who had a house on a lake in Minnesota. “Which one?” Roy asked. “There are 10,0
00 lakes in Minnesota, Roy,” his grandmother told him, “if you can believe what it says on their license plate, but the only one I can name is Superior.”
While Roy’s mother was in the land of 10,000 lakes, there was a sanitation workers strike in Chicago. Garbage piled up in the streets and alleys. Now the weather was very warm and humid and the city started to stink. Big Cicero, the hunchback with a twisted nose who once wrestled Killer Kowalski at Marigold Arena and now worked at the newsstand on the corner near the house, said to Roy’s grandmother, “May they rot in hell, them garbagemen. They get a king’s ransom as it is just for throwin’ bags. Cops oughta kneecap ’em, put ’em on the rails. The mayor’ll call in the troops soon it don’t end, you’ll see.” Roy’s grandmother said, “Don’t have a heart attack, Cicero.” “Already had one,” he said.
One afternoon Roy looked out a window at the rear of the house and saw rats running through the backyard. A few of them were sitting in and climbing over the red fire truck his grandmother had bought for him to pedal around the yard and on the sidewalk in front of her house. “Nanny, look!” Roy shouted. “Rats are in our yard!”
His grandmother came into the room and looked out the window. The rats were climbing up the wall. She grabbed a broom, leaned out the window with it and began knocking the rats off the yellow bricks. They fell down onto the cement but quickly recovered and headed back up the side of the house. Roy’s grandmother dropped the broom into the yard and slammed the window shut. Rats ran up the windows. Roy thought that they must have tiny suction cups attached to their feet to be able to hold on to the glass. He could hear the rats scampering across the gravel on the roof. A flamethrower would stop them, Roy thought. If the mayor really did call in the army, like Big Cicero said he might, they could use flamethrowers to fry the rats. Roy closed his eyes and saw hundreds of blackened rodents sizzling on the sidewalks.
By the time Roy’s mother returned, the garbage strike was over. Roy told her about the rats sitting in his fire truck and climbing up the wall and his grandmother swatting them with a broom. “Not all the rats are in Chicago, Roy,” she said. “They got ’em in Minnesota, too.”
“And in Venezuela,” Roy started to say, but he didn’t.
A Good Man to Know
I was seven years old in June of 1954 when my dad and I drove from Miami to New Orleans to visit his friend Albert Thibodeaux. It was a cloudy, humid morning when we rolled into town in my dad’s powder-blue Cadillac. The river smell mixed with malt from the Jax brewery and the smoke from my dad’s chain of Lucky Strikes to give the air an odor of toasted heat. We parked the car by Jackson Square and walked over a block to Tujague’s bar to meet Albert. “It feels like it’s going to rain,” I said to Dad. “It always feels like this in New Orleans,” he said.