Free The Roy Stories by Barry Gifford Page B

his father had been sitting, was empty, and an old lady seated on his right did not seem to notice that Roy had urinated. The odor was covered up by the smells of popcorn, candy, and cigarettes.
    Roy sat in his wet trousers and soaked left sock and shoe, watching again as Captain King exhorted his Khyber Rifles to perform heroically. This time after the film was finished Roy got up and walked out with the rest of the audience. He stood under the theater marquee and waited for his father. It felt good to be out of the close, smoky cinema now. The sky was dark, just past dusk, and the people filing in the Ciné were mostly couples on Saturday night dates.
    Roy was getting hungry. He took out the Holloway All-Day, unwrapped it and took a lick. A uniformed policeman came and stood near him. Roy was not tempted to say anything about his situation to the beat cop because he remembered his father saying to him more than once, “The police are not your friends.” The police officer looked once at Roy, smiled at him, then moved away.
    Roy’s mother was in Cincinnati, visiting her sister, Roy’s aunt Theresa. Roy decided to walk to where his father had parked, to see if his powder-blue Cadillac was still there. Maybe his father had gone wherever he had gone on foot, or taken a taxi. A black and gold-trimmed Studebaker Hawk was parked where Roy’s father’s car had been.
    Roy returned to the Ciné. The policeman who had smiled at him was standing again in front of the theater. Roy passed by without looking at the cop, licking his Holloway All-Day. His left pantsleg felt crusty but almost dry and his sock still felt soggy. The cold wind made Roy shiver and he rubbed his arms. A car horn honked. Roy turned and saw the powder-blue Caddy stopped in the street. His father was waving at him out the driver’s side window.
    Roy walked to and around the front of the car, opened the passenger side door and climbed in, pulling the heavy metal door closed. Roy’s father started driving. Roy looked out the window at the cop standing in front of the Ciné: one of his hands rested on the butt of his holstered pistol and the other fingered grooves on the handle of his billy club as his eyes swept the street.
    â€œSorry I’m late, son,” Roy’s father said, “Took me a little longer than I thought it would. Happens sometimes. How was the movie? Did Ty Cupcake take care of business?”

 
    Dark Mink
    Pops, my other grandfather, my mother’s father, and his brothers spent much of their time playing bridge and talking baseball in the back room of their fur coat business. From the time I was four or five Pops would set me up on a high stool at a counter under a window looking down on State Street and give me a furrier’s knife with a few small pelts to cut up. I spent whole afternoons that way, wearing a much-too-large-for-me apron with the tie strings wrapped several times around my waist, cutting up mink, beaver, fox, squirrel, even occasional leopard or seal squares, careful not to slice my finger with the razor-sharp mole-shaped tool, while the wet snow slid down the high, filthy State and Lake Building windows and Pops and my great-uncles Ike, Nate, and Louie played cards.
    They were all great baseball fans, they were gentlemen, and didn’t care much for other sports, so even in winter the card table tended to be hot-stove league speculation about off-season trades or whether or not Sauer’s legs would hold up for another season. Of course there were times customers came in, well-to-do women with their financier husbands, looking as if they’d stepped out of a Peter Arno New Yorker cartoon; or gangsters with their girlfriends, heavy-overcoated guys with thick cigars wedged between leather-gloved fingers. I watched the women model the coats and straighten their stocking seams in the four-sided full-length mirrors. I liked dark mink the best, those ankle-length, full-collar,