Ghost years, p.4
Ghost Years, page 4
Morgan laughed.
“So what’s the solution?”
“God didn’t intend there to be one. Men and women are not meant to be friends.”
“I thought we were friends,” said Morgan.
Kitty looked at him.
“I’ve always hated parties,” she said.
Detective Story
Roy had never before met a private detective. Jimmy Boyle told him that Wendy Delmonico’s father had been a cop for a few years, then quit and opened up his own detective agency. The Delmonicos had recently moved into the neighborhood, a bungalow on Maplewood Street, two blocks away from Roy’s house. Wendy was eleven years old, the same age as Jimmy and Roy, but she attended a private school in a suburb of Chicago so they did not see her very often.
“How do you know?” Roy asked Jimmy.
“My old man told my mother a couple of days ago. ‘You know that family just bought Pat Sheehan’s old house?’ she said. ‘What about ’em?’ my old man asked. ‘The father’s a private dick, a detective. His name is Al Delmonico. Bob Johnson knew him when they was both on the force. They protected President Eisenhower when he came here.’ ”
“Wendy Delmonico’s sister invited my sister to her birthday party. She’ll be six on Saturday. My mother wants me to walk Margie over there and pick her up when the party’s over.”
“How’d Margie meet her?”
“At the park.”
“Maybe you’ll get to meet her old man. I bet he carries a rod. Ask him to show it to you.”
“He probably won’t even be there.”
On Saturday Roy accompanied his sister to the Delmonico house; they climbed the front steps and Roy rang the doorbell. Mrs. Delmonico opened the door. She had a high pile of jet-black hair on her head, big dangling silver earrings, and bloodred lipstick spread on and around her mouth.
“Hi, Margie,” she said, “the girls are in the dining room.”
Margie ran past her into the house.
“And you must be her brother.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Roy.”
“Hello, Roy. It’s noon now. The party will be over by four. Will you be coming back for Margie?”
Roy nodded.
“Well, thank you, Roy. See you then.”
She closed the door and Roy went back down the stairs. As he did, a dark green Chrysler sedan pulled up in front of the house and a tall man wearing a blue suit and tie and a wide-brimmed gray hat got out.
“Hello, son,” he said as he approached the front steps.
Four hours later Roy returned to the house and again rang the doorbell. This time the tall man, now hatless and coatless, in his shirtsleeves with his tie loosened, opened the door.
“I’m here to pick up my sister Margie,” Roy said.
“Come in. The girls are still opening presents.”
The man, whom Roy assumed was the birthday girl’s father, followed Roy into the house. Roy stood next to him in the living room listening to the girls squeal and chatter. Mrs. Delmonico appeared and quickly came over to Roy.
“As you can hear,” she said, “the festivities are still in progress, but I believe Trudy has just opened her last gift. Would you like a piece of cake? It’s angel food, Trudy’s favorite.”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Delmonico. I’ll just wait here.”
Roy noticed that attached to the tall man’s belt was a small brown leather holster from which the black handle of a gun protruded. The holster was snapped shut and rode high on the man’s right hip. Mr. Delmonico went into the dining room and began gathering up discarded wrapping paper and cardboard boxes. He crumpled up the torn paper and ribbons then walked back past Roy and out the front door. He came back in and stood next to Roy. The detective’s holster was on a level with Roy’s head. He looked at it and noticed that it was unsnapped. Roy figured the snap must have been dislodged by accident, perhaps when Trudy’s father had bent down while crumpling and folding the wrapping papers.
“Mr. Delmonico?”
“Yes, son?”
“Your holster is open.”
The detective looked down, saw that it was and snapped it closed just as Margie came over to Roy and said, “The party’s over now. I can go.”
“Did you thank Mrs. Delmonico?”
Margie nodded and walked out the front door. When they were on the sidewalk Roy asked her if she had had a good time.
“It was okay. I didn’t really know any of the other girls. A colored man came in while we were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and said something to Trudy’s father. Mr. Delmonico took his gun out of its holster, so did the other man, and followed him outside. They were gone for a while, then Mr. Delmonico came back in.”
“Did you hear any shots being fired?”
Margie shook her head.
The next day Roy told Jimmy Boyle what Margie had told him.
“My old man says a cop pulls his weapon only when he’s going to use it. Do you think the colored guy is Mr. Delmonico’s partner?”
“How would I know?”
“I didn’t think colored guys were allowed to be private eyes.”
“Why wouldn’t they be? They can be cops and soldiers.”
A week later Roy saw Wendy Delmonico walking on Maplewood toward her house. He said hello to her.
“Hi, Roy. Did your sister have fun at Trudy’s party?”
“I guess so. I thought maybe you would be there.”
“I was at my school, taking a French lesson for extra credit.”
“Is your father really a private detective?”
“Yes. He used to be a policeman.”
“Does he have a partner? A colored man?”
“Johnny Bright. He used to be a policeman, too. How did you know he works with my father?”
“He came into your house for a couple of minutes while my sister was there, then he and your dad went out together.”
“Johnny’s really nice, and he’s very smart. My father told me that he was the first Negro to graduate from Northwestern University. One of the first, anyway.”
That night at dinner Roy told his mother what Wendy had said about Johnny Bright.
“He must be an extraordinary man,” said Kitty. “It’s unusual for a black man and a white man to be in business together. You say they’re private detectives?”
“Uh huh. They carry guns.”
“I went to Mexico City once with your father. I didn’t like it. Everybody there carries a gun. People get murdered all the time. Your father said the killers hardly ever go to jail because they pay off the cops and the judges.”
“Jimmy’s father told him a policeman takes out his gun only if he’s going to use it.”
“I’ve only met Mrs. Delmonico once. She had her hair piled high on her head.”
“She still does.”
Roy did not tell his mother about Mr. Delmonico and Johnny Bright running out of the house during the birthday party with guns in their hands.
One afternoon four months later Al Delmonico’s and Johnny Bright’s bodies were found riddled with bullets seated in Delmonico’s Chrysler parked on an abandoned pier on the Calumet River. Mrs. Delmonico and her daughters moved out of the house on Maplewood Street that night.
“Nobody I’ve talked to knows where they are now,” Kitty told Roy. “We might as well be living in Mexico City.”
The Old Graveyard
Roy passed by or cut through the old graveyard every day on his way to and from grammar school. There were two graves side by side that he stopped at frequently, pausing to read the names of the interred and the epitaphs inscribed on their tombstones. Tendresse and Pierre Raffolet were buried in Chicago in 1913. Tendresse had been born in 1895, Pierre in 1894, both in Paris, France. Their epitaphs were: for Pierre, “La mort passe, mais il reste”; and for Tendresse, “La mort passe, mais elle reste.” The second time he noticed these graves, Roy copied the epitaphs into his school notebook.
His mother had taken French in high school and kept a French-English dictionary on a bookshelf in the living room of their apartment. Roy looked up the words and translated them as “Death passes by, but he remains” and “Death passes by, but she remains.” When his mother came home from work that afternoon Roy showed her the epitaphs and his renderings and asked her if the translations were correct.
“I’m pretty rusty with my French now, Roy,” she said, “but I think you’ve got it right.”
“I looked up the meanings of their names, too. Raffolet means ‘to be passionately fond.’ ”
“Crazy about,” said his mother.
“And Tendresse means ‘tenderness.’ ”
“Or ‘caresses.’ ”
“Pierre means ‘stone.’ ”
“Roy, you’ve really done a great job!”
“They were both from France and died very young, Pierre at nineteen and Tendresse at eighteen. I’d like to know why they came to Chicago and how come they died so young.”
“They may have been in an accident, in a car or on a train. I don’t know, Roy, unless of course they wanted to get married and their parents wouldn’t let them. It’s possible that they committed suicide together. What puzzles me is their names. Were those their real names or were they given to each other. It’s a mystery. They must have been madly in love.”
“Maybe their ghosts rise from their graves after dark so they can be together again, curling around each other like Casper the Friendly Ghost does with other ghosts sometimes.”
The idea of the couple’s double suicide bothered Roy, he really couldn’t understand it. If their families forbade them from marrying, they could have run away to another city, or even back to France. Roy also wondered what France was like, what people did there that was different from life in America. They spoke French, of course, used words Roy could not pronounce properly. Why didn’t everyone in the world speak the same language? Once his mother was watching a French movie on TV and Roy watched a few minutes of it. A beautiful girl wearing only a white slip was sitting on a chair in front of a mirror brushing her hair while she was smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone. Nothing else happened while Roy watched, the camera never moved and the girl did not remove the cigarette from her mouth. Her lips were like two fat snails crawling so slowly atop one another that even though she was speaking it seemed that they did not move, either. Her hair was light-colored, probably blonde, and fell almost to her shoulders. Did Tendresse have blonde hair?
The old graveyard, Roy decided, was a foreign country, too.
Yukon Story
Roy’s Uncle Buck, his mother’s brother, who was fourteen years older than Kitty, had been working in Alaska building a railroad through the Yukon Territory when he got pleurisy and came to stay with his sister, mother, and Roy at their apartment in Chicago while he recuperated. Buck was forty years old then, a civil and mechanical engineer. He’d been in the Yukon for three months through the late fall and early winter of 1952. Roy was seven and enjoyed listening to his uncle’s stories about clearing forests and laying down tracks, hearing moose calls and wolf howls during the long frigid nights, and the occasional fights among the laborers that sometimes involved gun battles.
“Were any of the men killed?” Roy asked him.
“Only one that I know of, nephew. Almost everybody up there carries a gun or a knife.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, a .357. It’s in my duffel bag.”
“I don’t want a gun in my house,” said Rose, Roy’s grandmother.
“Don’t worry, Ma,” Buck said, “it’s locked in a case and unloaded.”
They were all in the kitchen. Roy’s mother was frying eggs and bacon on the stove for breakfast.
“Put on a shirt, son,” Rose told Buck, “it’s freezing cold in here.”
Buck was wearing only pajama bottoms and his feet were bare.
He laughed and said, “Cold? This isn’t cold. It was thirty below in the Yukon.”
Buck picked up a strip of bacon from a wrapper on the counter, held it in front of his face, and took a bite.
“Buck!” Kitty shouted. “You can’t eat raw bacon! You’ll get sick.”
“All the boys up north eat it right out of the package.”
Buck nibbled the bacon until he’d devoured the entire strip.
“Your uncle’s crazy, Roy,” said Kitty. “Don’t do what he does.”
“Did you see any wolves, Unk?”
“A few, but they mostly kept their distance from our camp. Noise from the trucks, skinners, and bulldozers frightened them away.”
“Are you going back after you feel better?”
“I don’t think so, Roy. It’s already the middle of January and the job is scheduled to wrap up in March.”
Buck was divorced; his eleven–year-old son, Kip, had been sent by his mother, Katarina, to live with her father, Doc Wurtzel, in Mexico until she was resettled. Katarina was an alcoholic, so Buck thought it was better for Kip to live for now at Doc’s hacienda in Cuernavaca.
“Are you going to live in Chicago?”
“I’m going to open an office downtown, nephew, and start my own engineering firm. I want to work for myself from now on.”
“Come on,” said Kitty, “let’s all sit down and eat. The coffee’s ready, Buck.”
“One of our sled dogs bit a thermos in half one morning and scalded himself so bad that he was blinded and had to be shot. Big husky named Bulletproof. The ground was frozen so hard he couldn’t be buried, so the Eskimo boys skinned and ate him.”
“Did you eat dog, Unk? How did it taste?”
“Buck will tell you later, Roy,” said his grandmother. “Finish your eggs.”
Years later, after his mother, grandmother, and Buck were dead, Roy found the steel-toed boots his uncle had worn when he was in the Yukon in a steamer trunk in the garage of Kitty’s house. The leather was stiff, of course, but Roy tried them on anyway. They were too small for Roy, which surprised him because he always thought of Buck as being bigger than he was. Nothing else in the trunk could Roy identify as having belonged to his uncle. The boots had probably been packed away in there since the winter of ’52.
Roy remembered his uncle telling him that one of the work crew in the Yukon, a man named Morrison, told Buck that when he was nineteen years old, laying track in Nome, he’d gotten frostbite so extreme that he’d had to have all of the toes on his left foot amputated. Morrison learned how to walk by putting most of his weight on his right foot, balancing on the toes. The bones in the small toes of that foot kept breaking, though, so when he was twenty-six, he cut them off himself with a hacksaw. He left the big toe attached. Buck asked Morrison how long ago he’d lopped off four of the toes on his right foot and Morrison said, “Must be eight since I’m thirty-four now.” He went on to tell Buck that getting rid of those toes had improved his balance. He always stuffed a heavy sock inside the front of his boots. Buck asked Morrison why he hadn’t cut off the big toe, too. “Just in case,” said Morrison. “In case of what?” asked Buck. Morrison laughed and said, “You never know when another toe could come in handy.”
Arthur The Wolf Wolf
“You hear about The Wolf?”
“What about him?”
“He got arrested yesterday. Two plainclothes cops dragged him out of Miss Collier’s classroom in front of everybody.”
“For what?”
“Stealin’ Peppy Prezant’s watch out of his locker. My next-door neighbor, Beverly Silva, told me Martha Pettegolo saw him do it while Peppy was at baseball practice. Apparently The Wolf’s been liftin’ stuff from lockers for a long time.”
Arthur “The Wolf” Wolf looked like his name. He had a lopsided grin and his tongue hung out of his mouth even while he was talking.
“He’ll probably get thrown into reform school in St. Charles,” Richie Gates told Roy. “That’s what Beverly said happened to Mickey Stutz when he got nailed coppin’ hubcaps in the teachers’ parking lot.”
Richie and Roy were in the seventh grade at Torquemada Grammar School. Beverly Silva was in the eighth, as was The Wolf.
“I almost got into a fight with him at the softball field, remember?” Roy said. “He got caught goin’ through the pockets of jackets kids playin’ in the game left on the benches. I threatened to kneecap him with a bat.”
“Yeah, I do. I guess we won’t be seein’ him around for a while.”
The Wolf spent six months in St. Charles. Two weeks after he got out he bought a Harrington & Richardson .25 caliber pistol from a Puerto Rican guy on Maxwell Street and shot his stepfather three times in the back, then shot himself in the head. His mother wasn’t home at the time. The cops told her it was probably a good thing; there was one bullet left in the gun that might have been intended for her. She said she didn’t think so and gave them a note her son had left for her.
Dear Mother your husband aint going
to beat me or you up again he was a
bad guy so am I nobody will miss us
I have another weapon in this chamber
it is a sword of Spain
love Arthur
“Why do you think The Wolf knocked himself off?” Richie asked Roy. “He could have just stolen some money out of his mother’s purse and run away. Did you see the note he left for her? It was in the newspaper.”
“My grandfather read it to me,” said Roy. “He told me the part about Spain is from Othello, Shakespeare’s play.”
“Yeah, Beverly says we’ll have to read it next year when we’re in eighth grade.”
Visitors
Roy’s little sister, Sally, began seeing apparitions when she was four or five years old. Roy was fifteen when she first told him about a woman who appeared in her room standing at the foot of her bed. Roy asked her what she looked like.
“She’s about the same age as Mom, but she doesn’t look like her. She has blonde hair, almost white, and she’s wearing a white dress.”
