The Roy Stories by Barry Gifford Page B

rear of the house and saw rats running through the backyard. A few of them were sitting in and climbing over the red fire truck his grandmother had bought for him to pedal around the yard and on the sidewalk in front of her house. “Nanny, look!” Roy shouted. “Rats are in our yard!”
    His grandmother came into the room and looked out the window. The rats were climbing up the wall. She grabbed a broom, leaned out the window with it and began knocking the rats off the yellow bricks. They fell down onto the cement but quickly recovered and headed back up the side of the house. Roy’s grandmother dropped the broom into the yard and slammed the window shut. Rats ran up the windows. Roy thought that they must have tiny suction cups attached to their feet to be able to hold on to the glass. He could hear the rats scampering across the gravel on the roof. A flamethrower would stop them, Roy thought. If the mayor really did call in the army, like Big Cicero said he might, they could use flamethrowers to fry the rats. Roy closed his eyes and saw hundreds of blackened rodents sizzling on the sidewalks.
    By the time Roy’s mother returned, the garbage strike was over. Roy told her about the rats sitting in his fire truck and climbing up the wall and his grandmother swatting them with a broom. “Not all the rats are in Chicago, Roy,” she said. “They got ’em in Minnesota, too.”
    â€œAnd in Venezuela,” Roy started to say, but he didn’t.

 
    A Good Man to Know
    I was seven years old in June of 1954 when my dad and I drove from Miami to New Orleans to visit his friend Albert Thibodeaux. It was a cloudy, humid morning when we rolled into town in my dad’s powder-blue Cadillac. The river smell mixed with malt from the Jax brewery and the smoke from my dad’s chain of Lucky Strikes to give the air an odor of toasted heat. We parked the car by Jackson Square and walked over a block to Tujague’s bar to meet Albert. “It feels like it’s going to rain,” I said to Dad. “It always feels like this in New Orleans,” he said.
    Albert Thibodeaux was a gambler. In the evenings he presided over cockfight and pit-bull matches across the river in Gretna or Algiers but during the day he hung out at Tujague’s on Decatur Street with the railroad men and phony artists from the Quarter. He and my dad knew each other from the old days in Cuba, which I knew nothing about except that they’d both lived at the Nacional in Havana.
    According to Nanny, my mother’s mother, my dad didn’t even speak to me until I was five years old. He apparently didn’t consider a child capable of understanding him or a friendship worth cultivating until that age and he may have been correct in his judgment. I certainly never felt deprived as a result of this policy. If my grandmother hadn’t told me about it I would have never known the difference.
    My dad never really told me about what he did or had done before I was old enough to go around with him. I picked up information as I went, listening to guys like Albert and some of my dad’s other friends like Willie Nero in Chicago and Dummy Fish in New York. We supposedly lived in Chicago but my dad had places in Miami, New York, and Acapulco. We traveled, mostly without my mother, who stayed at the house in Chicago and went to church a lot. Once I asked my dad if we were any particular religion and he said, “Your mother’s a Catholic.”
    Albert was a short, fat man with a handlebar mustache. He looked like a Maxwell Street organ-grinder without the organ or the monkey. He and my dad drank Irish whiskey from ten in the morning until lunchtime, which was around one thirty, when they sent me down to the Central Grocery on Decatur or to Johnny’s on St. Louis Street for muffaletas. I brought back three of them but Albert and Dad didn’t eat theirs. They just talked and once in a while Albert