The Roy Stories by Barry Gifford Page A

slid slowly to a stop alongside the police cars. Two attendants got out and went into Talon’s carrying a stretcher.
    A man came up beside me and asked what was going on. I looked at him and saw that he had on an overcoat over his pajamas and probably slippers on under his galoshes.
    â€œI was just going for a paper,” he said.
    When I told him I didn’t know, he crossed over and spoke to one of the women standing by the door of the butcher shop. The man looked in the doorway and then walked away. I waited, standing in a warm shaft of sunlight, and in a couple of minutes the man came up to me again. He had a rolled-up Tribune under his arm.
    â€œHe hanged himself,” the man said. “Talon, the butcher. They found him hanging in his shop this morning.”
    The man looked across the street for a moment, then walked down Washtenaw.
    Nobody came out of the butcher shop. I went to the corner and bought a Sun-Times . I stopped for a few seconds on my way back to see if anything was happening but nothing was so I turned into the alley, carefully stepping in the tracks I’d made before.

 
    The Origin of Truth
    When Roy was in the fourth grade, his class was taken on a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. Aboard the school bus on the way to the museum, Bobby Kazmeier and Jimmy Portis both said they couldn’t wait to go down into the coal mine.
    â€œThey got a real working coal mine there,” Portis told Roy and Big Art Tuth, Roy’s seatmate, “like in West Virginia, where my daddy’s family’s from.”
    â€œIt ain’t real,” said Big Art, “it’s a reenactment.”
    â€œNot a reenactment,” Roy said, “a reproduction, or a replica. It’s to show what a coal mine is like.”
    â€œWhat’s the difference?” asked Kazmeier. I heard you go down a mine shaft in an elevator.”
    â€œAn open air one, Kaz,” said Portis, “not like an elevator in the Wrigley Building.”
    â€œThey’ve got open ones in the State and Lake Building,” Roy said, “to deliver furs. My grandfather works there. Also in the Merchandise Mart. They’re in the back; customers take the regular elevators.”
    â€œI hope we don’t have to squeeze through any narrow places in the caves,” said Big Art. “I don’t want to get stuck.”
    Delbert Swaim, the dumbest kid in the class, who was sitting behind Roy, said, “I bet it’s like in Flash Gordon, where the clay people blend into the walls and attack when nobody’s looking.”
    In the museum, the class looked at outer space exhibits and architectural displays, which were pretty interesting, but the boys were anxious to go down into the coal mine. This was left for last. The class teacher, Mrs. Rudinsky, instructed the students to keep together.
    â€œWe’ll descend in groups of ten,” she announced. “That means three groups. When you reach the bottom, stay right there with your group until the others arrive. I will be with the third group.”
    Mrs. Rudinsky was not quite five feet tall, she was very skinny and wore thick glasses and a big black wig. She was forty-five years old. The story was that she had lost all of her hair as a teenager due to an attack of scarlet fever. Roy didn’t know what scarlet fever was, so he asked Mary Margaret Grubart, the smartest girl in the class, about it.
    â€œFevers come in all colors,” she told Roy. “Scarlet’s one of the worst, it can kill a person. A man wrote a famous novel about it where a girl had to wear a scarlet letter on her dress to warn people not to get near her so they wouldn’t get sick. In historical times, sick people were burned alive.”
    In the coal mine, the kids were shown around by a museum guide wearing a hard hat with a flashlight attached to the front of it, the kind that miners wear. There were blue flames that indicated gas