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The Roy Stories

Author Barry Gifford

Paperback

$16.95 US

Seven Stories Press

On sale Oct 01, 2013 | 432 Pages | 9781609804978

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Barry Gifford has been writing gritty, American tales for the past forty years. His novels, stories, poetry, and films have helped shape the American neo-noir genre. The New York Times Book Review says that he, “can sum up in a few words the cruelty, horror, and crushing banality that shape an entire life.”

Andrei Codrescu calls Gifford “a great comic realist,” while Pedro Almodóvar likens him to the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and Jonathan Lethem describes his style as “William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records rockabilly.”

In The Roy Stories Gifford brings his signature style to a collection of tales following the character of Roy, who has made appearances in a number of Gifford’s previous story collections. Roy lives a mystical kind of life, skinning crocodiles in Southern Florida at age nine in the 1940s and playing in the back alleys of Chicago in the 1950s. This deep-feeling boy observes every detail in his surroundings with a sense of dark humor and an openness that will clutch readers tightly by the heart and lead them on a historical journey.

“Gifford, a master of the short story and nasty vignette, can sum up in a few words the cruelty, horror, and crushing banality that shape an entire life.” —New York Times Book Review

“The way Barry Gifford lets people talk articulates everything about their unfamiliar inner lives, and ours.” —Boston Globe

“Gifford is a master.” —Los Angeles Times

“Gifford cuts right through the heart of what makes a good novel readable and entertaining. . . . The way Barry Gifford does it, it’s high art.” —Elmore Leonard

“Gifford is an anomaly in both his influence and recognition. His prose is as straightforward as it is avant-garde, and can turn an ashtray into a flower petal right there on the page.”–Sarah Wambold, Arts and Entertainment

“Barry Gifford was, is, and always shall be an American Original. His work evokes so many sensibilities, from the Beats to noir to social realism to post modernism to cinematic, both stirring up ghosts and invoking the future.” –Richard Price, author of Lush Life and Clockers

“Like Hemingway, Saroyan, Kerouac, and Salinger…Gifford has a style. He is a great comic realist who does with the turn of a phrase what a Zen master does with a brushstroke. Gifford is an original who has seized the still-live vein of that American realism which began with Mark Twain.” –Andrei Codrescu, National Public Radio

CONTENTS

Preface.................................................................... 15

The Vast Difference....................................... 17

Alligator Story ............................................................................. 19
The Vast Difference.................................................................. 25
The Birdbath ............................................................................... 29
Real Bandits ................................................................................ 33
The Red Stuebaker ................................................................ 36
The Trumpet................................................................................40
Unspoken ..................................................................................... 44
Haircut ........................................................................................... 48
The Invention of Rock ’n’ Roll................................................ 51 Infantry.......................................................................................... 54
Drifting Down the Old Whangpoo......................................57
The Wicked of the Earth........................................................60
Christmas Is Not For Everyone............................................ 63

Memories from a Sinking Ship.............. 65

Memories from a Sinking Ship ............................................. 67
A Good Man to Know..............................................................70
The Forgotten .............................................................................73
Mrs. Kashfi.................................................................................... 76
The Old Country........................................................................ 79
The Monster ................................................................................. 81
The Ciné........................................................................................ 82
Dark Mink ..................................................................................... 86
Nanny ............................................................................................ 89
Island in the Sun ......................................................................... 91
An Eye on the Alligators ........................................................ 94
The Piano Lesson......................................................................96
The Lost Tribe............................................................................. 97
The Lost Christmas...................................................................101
My Catechism............................................................................103
Sunday Paper ........................................................................... 106
The Origin of Truth ................................................................. 108
The Trophy...................................................................................112
The Aerodynamics of an Irishman......................................117
A Rainy Day at the Nortown Theater................................119
Renoir’s Chemin montant dans les hautes herbes ....... 121
Forever After ............................................................................. 122
The Mason-Dixon Line............................................................125
The Wedding ............................................................................. 128
The Pitcher .................................................................................129
A Place in the Sun.....................................................................131
The Winner.................................................................................133
The God of Birds ...................................................................... 137
Sundays and Tibor.................................................................. 140
Poor Children of Israel ...........................................................143
The Man Who Wanted to Get the Bad Taste
of the World Out of His Mouth.....................................145
Johnny Across...........................................................................148
The Secret of Little White Dove.........................................154
The Delivery...............................................................................158
The Deep Blue See ................................................................. 160
Radio Goldberg ........................................................................162
Why Skull Dorfman Went to Arkansas............................166
Wanted Man...............................................................................170
10 the roy stories
The Bucharest Prize ................................................................ 174
Blows with Sticks Raining Hard..........................................177
The Chinaman ............................................................................181
The End of Racism...................................................................183
Way Down in Egypt Land.....................................................187
Bad Things Wrong....................................................................191
Detente at the Flying Horse.................................................194 Shattered.....................................................................................198
A Day’s Worth of Beauty .................................................... 200
The Peterson Fire................................................................... 204
Door to the River ................................................................... 206
Sailing in the Sea of Red He Sees a
Black Ship on the Horizon..............................................210

Wyoming............................................................. 213

Cobratown .................................................................................. 215
Chinese Down the Amazon..................................................218
Bandages ....................................................................................219
Soul Talk ..................................................................................... 223 Skylark......................................................................................... 225
Flamingos ..................................................................................228
Wyoming ....................................................................................230
Saving the Planet....................................................................232
A Nice Day on the Ocean .................................................... 233
Perfect Spanish........................................................................235
Seconds ...................................................................................... 237
Roy’s World...............................................................................239 Nomads....................................................................................... 242
Ducks on the Pond.................................................................245
Sound of the River..................................................................247
Red Highway.............................................................................249
Lucky ............................................................................................ 251
K.C. So Far (Seconds/Alternate Take).............................253
Concertina Locomotion........................................................255
Imagine .......................................................................................256
The Geography of Heaven...................................................258
Man and Fate ........................................................................... 260
Where Osceola Lives.............................................................262
The Crime of Pass Christian................................................264
Cool Breeze...............................................................................267
Night Owl...................................................................................269
Islamorada .................................................................................270
On the Arm................................................................................ 273
Look Out Below....................................................................... 275
The Up and Up.........................................................................277
Black Space.............................................................................. 280
Fear and Desire........................................................................282
God’s Tornado..........................................................................284

Sad Stories of the Death of Kings.... 287

The Age of Fable.....................................................................289
The Great Failure......................................................................291 Irredeemable............................................................................. 293
Sad Stories of the Death of Kings ....................................296
The Sultan.................................................................................300
The Liberian Condition ........................................................ 304
Six Million and One.................................................................307
War and Peace...........................................................................311
Chop Suey Joint .......................................................................314
Significance ................................................................................ 318
Einstein’s Son............................................................................320
The Albanian Florist...............................................................324
The Weeper...............................................................................328
The Swedish Bakery................................................................331
The Man Who Swallowed the World...............................335
Ghost Ship ................................................................................ 340
Caca Negra................................................................................343
Roy’s First Car..........................................................................347
El Carterista...............................................................................350
Crime and Punishment .........................................................354
The American Language......................................................357
Lonely Are the Brave ............................................................ 360
Force of Evil..............................................................................364
The Choice.................................................................................367
Bad Girls ...................................................................................... 371
The Sudden Demise of Sharkface Bensky.....................376
Portrait of the Artist with Four Other Guys................. 380
The Starving Dogs of Little Croatia.................................383
In the Land of the Dead........................................................387
The Secret of the Universe..................................................389
Far from Anywhere .................................................................391
Rain in the Distance ...............................................................395
Bad Night at the Del Prado.................................................398
The Theory of the Leisure Class ....................................... 403
Innamorata ............................................................................... 406
The Exception ......................................................................... 409
Close Encounters of the Right Kind .................................413
Blue People ................................................................................418
Call of the Wild ....................................................................... 420
Arabian Nights .........................................................................424
Last Plane out of Chungking..............................................426
The Vanished Gardens of Córdoba..................................428
Benediction ...............................................................................429

Excerpt from The Roy Stories:

Alligator story

A kid wearing a Tampa Tarpons t-shirt came running up the street shouting, “Some cracker just shot a gator!”
Roy and his uncle Buck were in the driveway of the house on Oakview Terrace, rinsing down the boat. They had just come in from fishing out of Oldsmar and had been gone since five o’clock that morning; it was now six thirty in the evening. They hadn’t had much luck, having boated several kingfish and a few mackerel, but they’d run on sharks everywhere and had to cut lines to get rid of them. The weather had been spotty, the water in the Gulf was cloudy, and there were periodic brief showers. It was just the two of them, so they’d had a lot of time to talk. Roy was twelve and a half years old and he loved to listen to Buck, who was forty-five. Buck was full of information on almost any subject. He was well- traveled and well-read and today he had been teaching Roy about navigation, explaining a rhumb line, which is a course that makes the same angle with each meridian which it crosses; it is constant in direction throughout and always appears as a straight line on charts.
“But the curve of shortest distance between any two points on the earth is always an arc of a great circle,” Roy’s uncle told him, “the sort of circle which would be marked out if we were to slice the earth into two halves, passing the cut through the ends of the course and the center of the earth. The shortest path will always be a great circle course.”
Buck had been a Lieutenant Commander in the navy during the war and he was a civil and mechanical engineer; sometimes his explanations were too esoteric or complicated for Roy to absorb, but his uncle was always careful to show Roy what he was talking about.

“It’s the wind you have to pay the closest attention to,” said Uncle Buck. “The winds will control the course more than mathematical considerations.”
As the kid in the Tarpons t-shirt ran by, Buck asked him, “Where’s he got it?”
“On the little pier at the end of Palmetto,” the kid shouted.
Buck cut off the hose and went into the utility shed and came back out with a sheathed knife and a hatchet. He handed the hatchet to Roy and said, “Come on, nephew, let’s go down there.”
Roy and his uncle walked along River Grove under massive hanging moss and cut across the narrow skiff launch to Palmetto Street, which they followed down to the little pier. When they got there they saw a skinny man about forty years old wearing only a pair of gray trousers with the butt of a pistol sticking out of the waistband and a dark brown Remington Ammo cap slicing up the belly side of a six-and-a-half-foot-long alligator. The man’s pants, chest, and arms were spattered with blood.
Buck and Roy watched him work for a minute, then Buck said, “What are you going to do with the hide?”
The man was working fast and he did not look up.
“Throw it away. There’s a five hundred dollar fine you get caught with it. All I need’s the meat.”
Roy and his uncle and two boys who were about eight or nine years old and had been swimming in the Hillsborough River watched the man hack and tear feverishly at the carcass. It was still very hot although the sun had begun to go down. Roy knew that it was against the law to shoot a gator without a permit; he guessed that the man didn’t have permission to kill alligators, so he wanted to take what was edible and get going.
When the man had finished carving up the belly, he crammed the meat into a canvas sack, stood up and wiped his knife on his right trouser leg and said to Buck, “I’ll leave the rest to you, then.”
The man walked off with the sack over his left shoulder. Roy noticed that he was barefoot and his right leg was considerably shorter than his left. The bag full of gator meat seemed to help keep him balanced as he made his way up the pebbly incline from the dock and disappeared behind the hanging moss.
Buck unsheathed his knife, flipped what remained of the alligator onto its stomach and told Roy to chop off the head.
Roy hesitated and his uncle said, “Come on, nephew, we don’t want Fish and Game to find us. Run your fingers along the top of the spine and find the soft spot.”
The ridges along the gator’s back were hard as stones and sharp- edged but not abrasive like a shark’s skin. Roy’s fingers found what felt like a seam two inches behind the head and with both hands wrapped tightly around the handle of the hatchet raised it just above his right shoulder and brought it down into where he judged the seam to be. The blade cut a half-inch into the hide before meeting resistance from muscle and tendon. Roy dropped down from his squatting position and straddled the snout with a knee on either side of the gator’s head resting on the planks. The two boys watched intently as Roy hacked away until the head began to separate from the rest of the body. It took about fifteen or twenty minutes to sever the head entirely. When Roy stood up his legs and arms were trembling and his hands hurt.
“Pull the head away,” said his uncle, “and stand back.”
Buck knelt on the gator’s back from the opposite end and began cutting at the hide. Roy stood with the two boys and observed as Buck swiftly but carefully skinned the ancient- looking reptile. Sweat streamed down Roy’s uncle’s face as he worked, cutting evenly as he progressed from neck to tail, taking particular care not to mutilate the feet. The sun had been down for three hours before Buck completed the job. Roy and the two boys, who were cousins named Rupe and Rhett, were seated cross-legged on the pier.
“That was tough, huh?” Rupe said.
“Alligators have survived for tens of thousands of years,” said Buck. “They don’t live in houses, like people do, so they have to be protected from the elements.”
“God made ’em tough,” said Rhett.
“What you gonna do with the head?” asked Rupe.
“You can take it, if you like,” Buck said.
Rupe and Rhett stood up and together they lifted the head.
“Whoa, it’s heavy,” said Rupe, and they dropped it.
“We can’t carry it all the way to my house.”
“Your mama wouldn’t let you keep it anyhow,” said Rhett.
“Shove it into the river,” said Buck.
The cousins slid the head to the end of the pier and pushed
it over. There was a small splash when the head hit the water. It floated on the surface for a few seconds, then tilted backwards so that the mouth half opened and grinned at them before the head sank out of sight.
“Them were some terrible lookin’ teeth,” said Rhett.
Buck kicked what was left of the gator’s guts, bones and intestines into the river, then lifted the hide under the front legs.
“Grab the tail with two hands,” he told Roy. “Put your arms underneath. Adiós, muchachos.”
Rupe and Rhett watched Roy and his uncle carry off the hide.
Back at the house, Buck brought out from the garage a board about six feet long and three feet wide. He and Roy centered the hide on top of it, then Buck tacked it down so that it was stable. He went into the house and came back out with a box of salt and sprinkled the salt liberally all over the hide.
“Pick up the other end,” Buck said, and he and Roy carried the board with the gator skin tacked to it around to the backyard and set it down on the ground. Buck took two cinder blocks and placed them down five and a half feet apart, then he and Roy picked up the board and set it down end to end on the blocks.
“It’ll be all right here for now,” said Buck. “The sun will hit it first thing in the morning, then we’ll hoist it up onto the garage roof in the afternoon to dry out.”
Buck looped his right arm around Roy’s shoulders.
“You did a great job, nephew. I know that head didn’t come off easily.”
“You did the real work, Unk. You skinned the gator like a Seminole would.”
Both Roy and his uncle were covered with blood and gristle.
“How is it you were able to keep your concentration the way you did while you were skinning him?” asked Roy. “I mean, you hardly said a word for two hours.”
Buck pulled his blood-stained shirt off over his head and threw it down.
“I started thinking about your grandmother’s second husband, the one who raised your mother. He hated me and I hated him and so I imagined that I was skinning him instead of the alligator.”
“Why did he hate you?”
“For no good reason, really. I’m almost fourteen years older than your mother. He disliked the fact that my mother had been married before, so he resented my existence. Some men are like that; some women, too.”
“Did he hate my mother?”
“No, she was a young girl, and he sent her away to school when she was old enough. I was almost a man, it was easier for him to hate me.”
“My mother never talks about him; all I know is that he died.”
“He had a heart attack after he and your grandmother were married for ten years; then she remarried my father.”
“You must have really hated the guy to imagine that you were skinning him.”
“I pretended that he was still alive but barely conscious and that he knew what I was doing but was too weak to do anything about it. I imagined that he didn’t die until after I skinned him entirely.”
“Did he do anything terrible to you?”
“He banished me from his house, even though my mother and sister lived there. To see me, your grandmother had to meet me somewhere else, in a park or at a restaurant. Whenever she gave me money she made me promise that he would never know that she had.”
“That’s crazy, Unk. How could she allow that to happen?”
“I don’t know, Roy. People do all sorts of crazy things.”
Buck unfastened his belt and let his pants drop to the ground.
His skinning knife was in its sheath which was still strung on the belt.
“I’m glad I never had to meet him,” said Roy.
“He wouldn’t have hated you, nephew. What’s terrible is that I still harbor such awful feelings for a man who’s been dead for twenty-five years. It’s no good to keep that kind of poison in you because after awhile the poison starts to work on you. I hope you never have to hate anyone like that.”
“I hope I won’t, either.”
“All right, let’s wash up and get some dinner.”
“Why didn’t we save the head?”
“The only way to preserve it would be to soak it in formaldehyde.
Too much trouble. The catfish are feasting on it.”
“I bet those cousins are telling their folks about the alligator
now.”
“Come on, Roy, get your clothes off.”
The head was scary, Roy thought, but it was beautiful, too. It was too bad that Rupe or Rhett hadn’t kept it.

The author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into over twenty-five languages, BARRY GIFFORD writes distinctly American stories for readers around the globe. From screenplays and librettos to his acclaimed Sailor and Lula novels, Gifford’s writing is as distinctive as it is difficult to classify. Born in the Seneca Hotel on Chicago’s Near North Side, he relocated in his adolescence to New Orleans. The move proved significant: throughout his career, Gifford’s fiction—part-noir, part-picaresque, always entertaining—is born of the clash between what he has referred to as his “Northern Side” and “Southern Side.” Gifford has been recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, The American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His novel Wild at Heart was adapted into the 1990 Palme d’Or-winning film of the same name. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. View titles by Barry Gifford