“You remember that guy Mickey Mikalski, used to hang out with Nick DeSantis?”
“Had a split lip.”
“Hare lip. Had an operation to fix it. He’s been tryin’ to grow a mustache to cover up the scar but hair won’t grow there.”
“What about him?”
“He got nabbed boostin’ a car. Drove it through a fence, how the cops caught him. Winky Wicklow says his uncle Bob, who’s a cop, thinks Mikalski’ll get five years at Joliet ’cause he ain’t a minor no more.”
“That’s rough.”
“You know what the Arabs do to a horse thief?”
“What?”
“Cut off one of his hands so he has to eat and wipe his ass with the same hand.”
“Who told you that?”
“My dad. He heard about it when he was in Morocco.”
“Are he and your mother back together?”
“Sort of. He’s been traveling a lot lately.”
Roy and his friend Tommy Cunningham were sitting on the front steps of Tommy’s house on a Saturday morning.
“It’s gonna rain,” said Tommy. “I don’t think we’ll get to play the game this afternoon. Which would you choose, Roy, five years in prison or lose a hand?”
“Be tough to play ball one-handed.”
Tommy nodded. “I’d rather have a car than a horse.”
“What’s that about a horse?”
Tommy’s mother stepped out of the house onto the front porch.
“Morning, Ma. I just told Roy I’d rather have a car to ride around in than a horse.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Cunningham,” said Roy.
“I liked to ride horses back in Ireland when I was a girl.”
“Gee, Ma, you never told me that before.”
“It was a long time ago, in my ghost years, that time in your life you don’t know won’t never come again. I remember my favorite, Princesa. She had Spanish blood, belonged to a farmer down the road from us. He let me ride her after school and on Sundays after church.”
“Not on Saturdays?”
“Saturdays were for marketing and chores. Now it’s every day and it’s only police who ride horses in Chicago. What’re you fellas up to?”
“We’re supposed to play a ballgame against Margaret Mary’s at Heart-of-Jesus, but looks like we’ll be rained out.”
“I could use a hand with the laundry.”
Roy stood up.
“I’ll see you at the park, Tommy, if it clears up. Bye, Mrs. Cunningham.”
On his way home Roy thought about what Tommy’s mother might have been like as a country girl in Ireland before her family moved to Chicago. She was a strong, heavyset woman now, with bright blue eyes and thick red hair. Her face had deep creases on the cheeks. Roy’s mother, who was a few years younger than Mrs. Cunningham, had no lines on her face and she was much slimmer, but she was always nervous and worried about something. Mrs. Cunningham always seemed calm and spoke in a gentle way to Tommy and his brother Colin. Maybe his mother would be calmer if she had spent her childhood in the country and had a horse to ride instead of living in a big city and then being sent away to boarding school.
The sun was trying to break through the clouds. Roy decided to get his glove and go to the park even if it started to rain. On his way there he spotted a powder-blue Cadillac getting gas at the Mohawk station across Ojibway Avenue. His mother was sitting in the front passenger seat next to a man Roy did not recognize. The man was wearing a brown fedora and a beige trench coat, the kind private investigators wore in the movies. He was talking to Roy’s mother and she was looking out the closed window on her side. Roy watched her for a minute until the attendant stopped pumping gas. The driver paid him, started the car, and pulled out of the station. Roy’s mother kept staring through her window.
His baseball cap was wet and water was leaking through into his hair but Roy began walking again toward the park. He was certain his mother had not seen him.
At the park six blue-and-whites were parked at a variety of angles in the street in front of the entrance Roy commonly used. A few people were gathered on the sidewalk in front of a line of several policemen who were blocking the way.
“What’s going on?” Roy asked a man wearing a Cubs hat and a green tanker jacket.
“There’s a dead body lyin’ on the pitcher’s mound. A kid, someone said.”
“Did you hear the kid’s name?”
“No. The cops aren’t givin’ out any information. They might not know yet.”
Tommy Cunningham punched Roy in his left arm.
“All these people here to watch our game?”
“Thought you were helpin’ your mother with the laundry.”
“I did. Somebody get shot?”
“Maybe. There’s a dead kid on the mound.”
“You’re jokin’. Who told you that?”
“Guy over there. Cops won’t let anyone into the park.”
“Let’s go around to Kavanagh’s house and go in through his backyard.”
The boys ran around the block, cut through Terry Kavanagh’s yard into the alley, and crept up a dirt path where there weren’t any cops. A bunch of men were standing around the infield, a couple of whom were taking photos. Tommy and Roy kept their distance and half hid behind a large Dutch elm tree. An ambulance drove into the park and stopped next to the first-base foul line. Two male attendants wearing white coats and trousers jumped out, opened up the back doors of the ambulance, and pulled out a stretcher. The men on the infield parted to let them through but not enough so that Roy and Tommy could see the body on the mound. It was ten minutes before the attendants carried out the stretcher. The corpse was covered with a white sheet, but as it was being loaded into the ambulance the stretcher tilted and the sheet slipped off the face.
“It’s Louie Fortini,” said Tommy, “Artie Fortini’s older brother. Remember him? He must be about twenty years old. He was a pitcher, had a tryout with the Braves but didn’t get signed.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. He and Artie both got big hook noses. It’s Louie for sure.”
The ambulance drove out of the park the way it came in. Rain fell harder and some of the men walked off the infield.
“I wonder if his family knows,” said Roy.
“The cops probably called them. They’ll have to identify the body.”
There was a flash of lightning followed by thunder.
“Let’s get away from this tree,” Roy said.
The next day there was an article in the Sun-Times about the dead boy. Louie Fortini had shot himself in the head with his father’s gun, a Luger Anthony Fortini had taken off a fallen German soldier during the war and kept as a souvenir. Louie had been a day shy of his twenty-first birthday. In the article his father was quoted as saying that his son had been depressed ever since his unsuccessful tryouts for major-league baseball teams.
On their way to school Tommy said to Roy, “I wonder if he tried out for the Cubs. He could throw a screwball. I saw him throw it in high school.”
“Artie would know.”
“Man, I’d never kill myself. What about you, Roy?”
Roy remembered his mother once saying that if things got any worse she’d commit suicide.
Before he could answer, Tommy said, “Do you think Louie told Artie he was thinking about shooting himself?”
“We shouldn’t ask him that,” said Roy. 
Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into thirty languages. His most recent books include Ghost Years, The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea, How Chet Baker Died, Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, and Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels. He cowrote with David Lynch the screenplay for Lost Highway. Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch and based on Gifford’s 1990 novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
The story appears in Gifford’s new book, Ghost Years, out this month from Seven Stories Press.
Illustration: Barry Gifford.