Ghost Years, page 13
Many years later, Roy thought about this moment and how hard his dad tried to not allow the illness to change the way he related to people, especially his son. Roy’s father was forty-eight years old when he died. When he was told that his dad had passed away, Roy did not understand that death meant not only that he could not forget the final days of his father’s life but that he would not want to.
Uncle Buck’s Last Words
Roy’s Uncle Buck was asleep in bed in a hospital. Roy sat on a chair next to the bed. Suddenly, Buck woke up and saw his nephew.
“Oh, Roy, I didn’t know you were here.”
“It’s almost your birthday, Unk. You’ll be ninety-three tomorrow.”
“When was I born?”
“In 1911, in Chicago.”
“I was dreaming that I was back in Africa, hiking alone through the bush. It must have been in Kenya, or maybe Tanzania. Yes, Tanzania, because Dar es Salaam was also in the dream. I had a small bag strapped over one shoulder, I’d packed a lunch. A native appeared and stood in front of me. He was very tall and half-naked. I greeted him in Swahili, ‘Habari za asubuhi,’ good morning, but he didn’t reply. He stood still and stared down at me. I noticed that he had a knife stuck in his belt.”
“What happened then?”
“I handed him my lunch.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
“No, he took it and disappeared back into the bush.”
Buck closed his eyes.
“So will I,” he said.
La hombrada
She was with another man when Roy met her. Nothing unusual about that but she wouldn’t look him in the eyes. She knew he was staring at her. She shook her long, tangled hair out of her river crocodile eyes but it didn’t do the job. She didn’t want to make it any easier for him. Was she introduced when they sat down at the table? Roy hadn’t paid attention, only looked at her. She pretended that she did not understand English. Later in the evening a stranger at their table said something Roy didn’t like so Roy called him a pendejo. The stranger pulled out a knife and a friend of Roy’s took it away from him. Roy had stood up and was ready to fight but she spat at the man and called him a culero. On their way out of the bar she said to Roy, “Mexican men are cowards, that’s why they carry knives and guns.” They walked together on the pier, there was no moon. She took his hand and held it. Roy thanked her for sticking up for him. “De nada,” she said. “I am Totonac, there are a few women in Mexico like me.”
The Window
Walking alone in Paris on a rainy Sunday, Roy found himself on rue de l’Odeon in the sixth arrondissement in the early morning, only a couple of other solitary walkers on the street, men with berets pulled down over their foreheads. Roy stopped in front of a bookshop window. The year was 1965, he was eighteen years old, destitute and homeless. The night before, having fallen asleep on a bench in the Gare d’Austerlitz, he had been shaken awake by an attendant demanding that he show a ticket for a morning train. Only passengers with valid tickets were allowed to wait inside the station. Since Roy had no ticket to produce, he was ordered to leave. It was after midnight before he found shelter under a bridge among other bums who had sought a place to sleep. This was early October but the weather had already turned cold and now the rain had started. He settled into a vacant spot, separated by several feet from a dozen snoring men. Roy was one of them, les clochards, tramps, lost souls. There was nothing romantic about it. He needed to acquire enough money to take a train and then a ferry across the Channel back to England, to London, where he’d been living before taking off to explore the Continent. His friends there would help him out, at least give him a place to stay while he looked for work.
Roy paused to inspect the books displayed in the window. Being Sunday, the shop was closed. All of the titles were in French, as well as the literary magazines and journals. Several issues of the most prestigious journal, La Nouvelle Revue Française, or NRF, founded by André Gide in 1909, were given the most prominence. There were photographs of contributors on the covers, as well as listings of their works contained in that particular issue. Among them were writers such as Sartre, Camus, Reverdy and Duras. Roy thought of himself as a writer, though he was as yet unpublished. He asked himself, “How do I get from where I am, an indigent vagabond on an unfamiliar street, to there, a person featured on the cover of La Nouvelle Revue Française?”
Twenty-five years later, Roy’s name was on those covers, his stories, essays and poems contained in what would eventually become six issues of the NRF. La Nouvelle Revue Française ceased publication early in the following century. To have been among those contributors to the NRF gave Roy perhaps his greatest gratification, a fulfillment of what more than a quarter of a century before had been a kind of crazy dream. Given the circumstance of his initial recognition of the distance between that teenage boy standing in the rain on the rue de l’Odeon, gazing at what appeared to him evidence of an alien universe, how could it be otherwise? Publishing his work in La Nouvelle Revue Française had remained an enduring symbol of success, one that was and would be no matter of importance to anyone other than himself. Roy was still looking through the window.
epilogue
Strange Cargo
Many readers of the Roy stories have asked what happened to Roy after his adolescence, the point at which the several hundred pages of stories involving him, his family and friends, stopped. Strange Cargo found Roy ten years later, a veteran of the Vietnam War, living in Bangkok, Thailand, with ex–air force buddy Vinnie D., his partner in an air freight company.
Captain Roy and Vinnie D. operated Strange Cargo Air Freight Company out of Bangkok for twenty-seven years. They were compelled to close down due to a combination of factors that included more technically up-to-date competition, difficulties caused by an endemic respiratory virus that impeded expeditious supply, closure of flight routes and an inevitable need to move on with the remainder of their lives.
After Roy and Vinnie D. dismantled and sold the holdings of Strange Cargo, they went back to the United States where they worked for a short time as helicopter pilots for the Bureau of Land Management in Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah, rounding up and aiding in the capture of wild horses. They quit once they discovered that instead of inoculating the horses against equine diseases and releasing them in a preserve where they could continue to roam free, as they had been informed would happen upon being hired, the BLM systematically destroyed the herds and sold their remains to pet food companies.
Vinnie D. returned to Asia and retired to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal and became a monk. Captain Roy bought a small ranch on the Star Route in Mendocino County, California. He wrote a series of novels based on his and Vinnie D.’s experiences during their years operating Strange Cargo that achieved a modest but profitable popularity, several of which were adapted as feature films. He did not marry and after Vinnie D. left for Nepal they never saw each other again.
BARRY GIFFORD is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages. His recent works include The Roy Stories, Writers, How Chet Baker Died, and The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea. Gifford lives in the San Francisco area.
Barry Gifford, Ghost Years
