The Roy Stories (16 page)

 

Way Down in Egypt Land

There was a one-legged pool hustler named The Pharaoh who used to eat his dinner every day at four o'clock in a diner under the el tracks on Blackhawk Avenue called The Pantry. The neighborhood kids didn't know his real name, he just went by The Pharaoh because he said he came from Cairo, the tail of Little Egypt between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

“It's the asshole of Illinois,” The Pharaoh told Roy and his friends, none of whom had ever been there.

“My mother had a cousin named Phil Webster was murdered in a bar in Paducah,” said Ralph McGirr. “That's near there, ain't it?”

“Paducah's in Kentucky,” The Viper said, “across the Ohio. It's pretty close.”

The Pharaoh said nothing, just finished his meatloaf and mashed potatoes and dug into a slice of blueberry pie. The boys sat on stools in The Pantry or stood around, waiting for The Pharaoh to be done with his meal so that they could follow him down the street to Lucky's El Paso and watch him shoot pool. The El Paso was an old poolhall that had been closed down for years until Lucky Schmidt took it over. He renamed it Lucky's but everybody around there still called it the El Paso, so he changed it to Lucky's El Paso to pacify the old-timers. The Pharaoh didn't care what the place was called as long as it had a five by ten foot table to play one-pocket on. The Pharaoh always dressed the same: he wore a red and black checkered flannel shirt buttoned up to the neck and dark gray trousers held up by black suspenders. Once Roy had seen what looked like part of a thick blue scar below The Pharaoh's Adam's apple; Roy guessed that was why he kept his shirt buttoned to the top.

After The Pharaoh had polished off the pie, he propped himself up on his crutches and swung out of The Pantry. Jimmy Boyle held open the door and The Pharaoh turned right, followed by six boys aged twelve to fifteen. He didn't wear a coat. Nobody knew exactly how old The Pharaoh was or how he lost his left leg. Roy figured The Pharaoh was around forty or fifty years old because his curly brown hair was thinning and his forehead and cheeks were pretty wrinkled. The Viper said he'd heard Lucky ask The Pharaoh about how his leg went missing. This was while The Pharaoh was sitting down waiting for Ike the Kike to miss and without looking at Lucky The Pharaoh told him maybe someday he'd tell him but first Lucky should go fuck himself and his sister. After that, said The Pharaoh, they could talk about it.

The Pharaoh did not use his crutches when he shot; he supported himself by balancing his weight between his right leg and the table. The boys closely studied every move The Pharaoh made. His practice routine never varied: he lined up four balls at one end of the felt, hit them one after the other only just hard enough off the rail so that they came back to exactly the same spot at which he'd placed them. The Pharaoh did this three times with each ball unfailingly, then he was ready to play. Roy and his friends tried to emulate The Pharaoh's warm-up but none of them could do it right more than once or twice. The only advice The Pharaoh would offer anyone was to tell them to tap the ball as if they were kissing their dead mother in her coffin.

The Pharaoh preferred one-pocket but occasionally indulged someone at nine ball. He never played straight pool, which he said was for stiffs. “If I'd bought into boredom,” he told Roy, “I'd have stayed in school.”

The only time Roy ever saw The Pharaoh lose was the last time he saw him, on a February night when he and The Viper went together to Lucky's El Paso. The boys came in out of the beginning of a blizzard around nine o'clock and saw a very tall, skinny guy bent low over the match table, the one Lucky kept covered even when the place was full of customers. The other tables he sometimes let bums sleep on after closing but not this one. There were about fifteen men sitting or standing in close proximity to the match table, watching this tower of bones beating the bejesus out of The Pharaoh at his own game. The Pharaoh sat perfectly still in the ratty red armchair he always used, his lone leg stretched out in front of him, an inch and a half of white cotton sock exposed between his trouser cuff and a beat up brown brogan. He was smoking an unfiltered Old Gold, staring at his imperturbable opponent.

The tall, skinny guy was about the same age as The Pharaoh but he was better dressed. He wore a dark blue blazer over an open-necked pale yellow shirt and chino pants. His few strands of black hair were greased back on his skull. Everything about him was long: his fingers, nose, even his eyelashes. Nobody spoke. Roy and The Viper stood and watched what were the final moments of the match, and when it was over the other witnesses to the slaying of The Pharaoh dropped their cash on the table and marched out of the poolhall into the storm.

The victor picked up his winnings, folded the bills into a thick roll, wrapped a blue rubber band around it and stuffed it into a pants pocket. Then he went over to The Pharaoh and said softly, but not so softly that Roy and The Viper could not hear the words, “You're washed up in Chi, Freddie, and don't never go back to Cairo, neither.”

The Pharaoh sat and let his Old Gold smolder while the thin man unscrewed his cue, packed it into his case, pulled on a shabby beige trenchcoat, shook loose a Chesterfield from its pack to his lips, lit it, and without looking back at The Pharaoh left the El Paso. Lucky was sweeping up butts and putting the folding chairs away. He did not speak to The Pharaoh, nor did the boys, though they stood and waited for him. Roy thought maybe he'd need help walking in the snow.

After a half hour, The Viper elbowed Roy and they headed for the door. Before facing the blizzard Roy stopped and glanced over at The Pharaoh.

“Come on,” said The Viper, “I'm hungry. Let's get some Chinks.”

“Think he can make it to his crib?” Roy asked. “Where do you think he'll go?”

“I don't know,” said The Viper, “but it probably won't be Little Egypt.”

 

Bad Things Wrong

Louie Pinna was a bad kid, everybody said so: his neighbors, relatives, teachers. He was a bad student, that was certain. Pinna never really learned to read or write, so he was stuck in the third grade until he quit school legally at the age of sixteen. Roy had been in that third grade class with Pinna, a situation that was embarrassing not only for Louie but for his classmates, as well. At fifteen Pinna was already six feet tall. His legs did not fit under the small desk he was assigned to, so he sat in the last seat of the last row and splayed his legs to either side. Everyone was relieved when Pinna was finally allowed to leave.

After that Pinna hung out on the corner of Diversey and Blackhawk in the afternoons and worked as a night janitor at a downtown office building. Roy and his friends would often stop and talk to him after they got out of school. Pinna had always been nice to them; Roy never understood why so many adults considered Louie Pinna to be a rotten apple. In the 1950s, the concept of learning disabilities was not widely discussed, so a kid like Pinna was considered dumb and labelled a loser, earmarked for a bleak future as a bum or a criminal.

By the time Roy was in high school, Pinna had disappeared from the neighborhood. Roy asked around about him but nobody he talked to seemed to know where Pinna had gone. Then one day when Roy was fifteen Pinna's face appeared on the front page of the
Chicago Tribune
. Under a photograph of the now twenty-three-year-old Louie Pinna, who had grown a fruit peddler mustache, were the words: NO BAIL FOR SUSPECT IN KILLINGS. The article accompanying the photo said that Pinna worked at a meat processing plant on the West Side of the city and was accused of feeding bodies of murder victims through a grinder, after which the remains were mixed with food products and packaged as pork sausage. Pinna had not actually been charged with committing any murders, only with disposing of corpses provided, investigators theorized, by The Outfit, Chicago's organized crime syndicate.

Alberto Pinna, Louie's father, a retired plumber, was quoted in the newspaper as saying that his son had “a slow brain,” and that, “if Louie done such a thing, he was used by those type people who do bad things wrong.” Louie's mother, Maria Cecilia, was quoted as following her husband's statement with the remark, “And there ain't no shortage of them in Chicago.”

“You believe this?” Roy asked the Viper.

“Pinna goes to prison,” the Viper said, “at least he won't have to worry about taking care of himself no more.”

“Do you think he did it? Ground bodies up for the Mob?”

“What makes you think he wouldn't?”

Roy and the Viper were on a bus passing the lake, which was frozen over. Roy remembered seeing Louie Pinna with Jump Garcia and Terry the Whip, both of whom had done time in the reformatory at St. Charles, going into Rizzo and Phil's, a bar on Ravenswood Avenue, a couple of years before. The cuffs of Pinna's trousers came down only to the tops of his ankles and he was wearing white socks with badly scuffed brown shoes. Rizzo and Phil's, Roy had heard, was supposedly a hangout for Mob guys.

“Pinna never picked on younger kids,” Roy said. “He wasn't a bully.”

“He did the thing,” said the Viper, “ain't no character witnesses from grammar school gonna do him no good.”

“Can't see what good it'd do to put Pinna away. He didn't harm a living person.”

That night, Roy's mother's husband, her third, a jazz drummer who used the name Sid “Spanky” Wade—his real name was Czeslaw Wanchovsky—almost drowned in the bathtub. He had been smoking marijuana, fallen asleep and gone under. Spanky woke up just in time to regurgitate the water he'd inhaled through his nostrils. Roy's mother heard him splashing and coughing, went into the bathroom and tried to pull Spanky out of the tub, but he was too heavy for her to lift by herself.

“Roy!” she yelled. “Come help me!”

Roy and his mother managed to drag Spanky over the side and onto the floor, where he lay puking and gagging. Roy saw the remains of the reefer floating in the tub. Spanky was short and stout. Lying there on the bathroom floor, to Roy he resembled a big red hog, the kind of animal Louie Pinna had shoved into an industrial sausage maker. Roy began to laugh. He tried to stop but he could not. His mother shouted at him. Roy looked at her. She kept shouting. Suddenly, he could no longer hear or see anything.

 

Detente at the Flying Horse

Roy had a job changing tires and pumping gas two days a week after school at the Flying Horse service station on the corner of Peterson and Western. This was during the winter when he was sixteen. The three other weekday afternoons and also on Saturdays he worked at the Red Hot Ranch, a hot dog and hamburger joint. Roy had taken the gas station job in addition to his long-standing employment at the Ranch because his mother had had her hours reduced as a receptionist at Winnemac Hospital. His sister had just begun grammar school and they needed the money. Roy knew that his mother was considering getting married again—for what would be the fourth time—as a way to support them, a move he wanted desperately to avert or, at the least, delay. None of his mother's marriages had been successful, as even she would admit, other than two of them having produced Roy and his little sister. They were her treasures, she assured them; their existence had made her otherwise unfortunate forays into matrimony worthwhile.

Domingo and Damaso Parlanchín, two Puerto Rican brothers, owned the Flying Horse. They were good mechanics, originally from San Juan, who had worked for other people for fifteen years and saved their money so that they could buy their own station. They were short, chubby, good-humored men in their forties, constantly chattering to each other in rapid Spanish. The Parlanchín brothers paid Roy a dollar an hour and fifty cents for each tire he changed, half of what it cost the customer. Damaso could patch a flat faster than Roy could get it off the car and back on again, and do it without missing a beat in the running conversation with his brother. Domingo was the better mechanic of the two, the more analytically adept. Damaso was superior at handling the customers, able to convince them they needed an oil change or an upgrade of their tires.

It was no fun changing tires in January in Chicago. The temperature often fell well below zero degrees Fahrenheit and icy winds off the lake scorched Roy's perpetually scraped knuckles and cut fingers. Prying loose frozen lug nuts was Roy's greatest difficulty until Domingo showed him how to use an acetylene torch to heat the bolts before attempting to turn them with a tire iron. “Cuidado con la lanzallamas,” Domingo told Roy.

One snowy afternoon about a quarter to four, just before dark, a black and white Buick Century ka-bumped into the station on its rims and stopped. All four tires were flat. Roy could see that they were studded with nails. Two burly men in dark blue overcoats and Homburg hats sat in the front seat. They did not get out, so Roy went over to the driver's side window and nodded at him. The man rolled down the window. He was about forty-five years old, had a three-day beard and a four inch-long scar across the left side of his lips. The man in the passenger seat looked just like the driver, except for the scar.

“How fast fix?” asked the driver.

“It looks like you need four new tires, sir,” said Roy.

“Not possible fix?”

“I'll ask my boss, but I doubt it. You're riding on your rims. We'll have to check if they're bent.”

“Go ask boss.”

Roy trudged through the thick, wet snow to the garage, where Domingo and Damaso were working over a transmission on a 1956 Ford Apache pick-up.

“There's a guy here who needs four tires replaced. Looks like he drove over a bed of nails.”

“Tell him he can to leave it,” said Damaso.

“And coming back at siete horas,” Domingo added.

The wind ripped into Roy's face when he removed his muffler from around his mouth to convey this information to the driver of the Buick. Roy's eyes stung; they watered as he waited for the man to respond.

“Cannot they fix now?”

“No,” said Roy, “we're pretty backed up.”

The driver spoke to his companion in a language Roy could not readily identify. The wind whined and shrieked, making it difficult for Roy to hear anything else.

“We wait,” the driver told him. “Can fix sooner.”

Roy shook his head. “Maybe you'd better try another station. But you'll damage your wheels.”

The man produced a fifty dollar bill and shoved it at Roy. He held it between two black leather-gloved fingers. “This extra. Okey dokey?” he said. “You give boss.”

Roy accepted the bill, marched back to the garage and handed it to Domingo.

“The guy says this is on top of the cost of replacing the tires, if we can do it now.”

“Tell him drive in muy despacio,” said Domingo.

After the man had done this, following Damaso's signals to pull up into the other bay and onto the lift, Damaso told the men to get out of the car.

“We stay in,” said the driver.

“No es posible raise car with you inside. Insurance no good if you fall.”

The driver held out another fifty. Damaso took it. He nodded to Domingo, who activated the lift.

“Lock doors!” Damaso shouted up at the men. “And no move!”

Roy pumped gas for several customers while the Parlanchín brothers worked on the Buick. The sky had gone dark and snow kept falling. Before the Buick pulled out of the station on four new Bridgestones, it stopped next to Roy. The driver rolled down his window.

“Yes, sir?” said Roy. “Is everything okay?”

“All okey dokey,” replied the driver. “You young boy, work hard bad weather. How much Spanish men pay you?”

“Buck an hour and two bits a flat.”

“Slave wage,” said the man. “Now 1962. Take.”

The driver extended toward Roy his black gloved left hand between two fingers of which protruded another fifty-dollar bill. Roy took the money and stuffed it into one of the snap pockets of his brown leather jacket.

“Thank you,” he said. “Where are you guys from?”

“You know Iron Curtain?”

“I've heard of it.”

“We are from behind.”

After the Buick had gone, Roy went into the garage.

“Strange hombres, si?” said Domingo.

“The driver gave me a tip,” Roy told him. “I don't know why, though.”

“He give us a hundred extra,” said Damaso.

“The Buick had diplomatic license plates,” Roy said. “They're Russians, I think.”

“Must be they are trying to be more friendly,” Domingo suggested, “since they been forced to take missiles out of Cuba.”

When Roy was eleven, he remembered, his mother had had a boyfriend from Havana, a conga drummer named Raul Repilado. She had met him in Coral Gables, Florida, when she and her third husband, Sid Wade, the father of Roy's sister, were vacationing at the Biltmore. Raul Repilado's band, the Orquesta Furioso, was appearing at the hotel. Raul had come to Chicago a couple of times to see Roy's mother, the last time during the winter. Before leaving, the conguero declared that he would never come back to such a terribly cold place, even for a beautiful woman. Roy couldn't wait to tell his mother that he'd made an extra fifty bucks that day.