The wind came hard off the lake. Lights were on in the big houses as Rinky Dink roared by, his Harley nudging the white line between the inner lanes. The party he’d been to in Milwaukee had lasted four days past New Year’s and he was looking forward to telling the gang about it. He knew they’d be at The Torch on Paulina and wanted to get there before midnight, while Bo Crawford and Johnny Kay and the others were still there. Rinky Dink cut in and out of the slowgoing traffic, skidding slightly every so often on an icy patch, but he was too crack a rider to let that bother him, and he was only twenty minutes away.
The woman who hit him with her brand new 1962 Packard Caribbean never looked in her side view mirror, only the rear, and knocked him sideways off the bike into the path of oncoming traffic. His head hit the ground an instant before a Buick ran over his back. Rink wasn’t big, about five-eight or nine and slender, and he had a three inch long scar on his forehead that turned red whenever he laughed or was angry. The accident did not leave a mark on his face, only a bruise on his right temple that would never heal. When she saw him in his coffin Bonnie Hodiak said, “Why he looks cuter now than ever.”
Fifty-five years after Rinky Dink was killed he appeared in Roy’s dreams. Why now? Roy wondered. He had been in his last year of high school then. Rinky Dink, Bonnie Hodiak, Bo Crawford and the rest of that crowd were Roy’s cousin Kip’s friends, all of them several years older than Roy. None of them had ever gone to college, the boys worked as automobile mechanics or at other blue collar jobs, the girls as waitresses or counter clerks in department or dime stores. A few of the girls did a little hooking on the side— “soft” hookers Kip called them, meaning they were independents who worked the local bars whenever they needed extra cash for a new dress or coat or pair of shoes.
Roy was fourteen or fifteen when he began hanging out with Kip’s pals. They interested him because they didn’t live straight lives, kept irregular hours and occasionally committed crimes, usually holdups, thefts of some kind, sometimes got caught and did time. The girls were sexy, they smoked and drank hard liquor even if they were underage, and talked tough. In the places they hung out the bartenders never checked to see how old they were. The beat cops who came in never bothered anybody, just took their payoff, knocked back a shot or two and left quietly.
One of Bo Crawford’s girlfriends, Cindy Purdy, twice gave Roy a blow job in Bo’s car while he was in a bar. Cindy was nineteen then, four years older than Roy. She was a pretty little blonde who’d come up to Chicago from Oklahoma, sipped grain alcohol cut with orange juice from a flask she kept in her purse, and carried a switchblade knife. Cindy disappeared about a year later. Roy asked his cousin what happened to her and Kip said she’d taken off with “a gray hair” who worked in the oil business and was living with him somewhere in Texas, so Roy never saw her again.
Kip told Roy that Rinky Dink used to “run errands,” as Rink called them, for Johnny Kay and a cohort of Johnny’s named Teddy Fitts. Kay would scope out a target, figure the best time of day or night to hit a retail store, usually the day before a bank armored car picked up the week’s receipts, and send in Teddy Fitts to knock it off. After Fitts came out of the place, Rinky Dink, who’d been waiting nearby on his Harley, would swoop in, grab the swag and speed away. Johnny Kay then pulled up in a stolen car he’d changed the plates on, Teddy jumped in, and Johnny drove off in the direction opposite to the one Rinky Dink headed in. This gambit worked well until the bandit trio chose to rob a grocery store in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a sixteen year old bag boy got the drop on Teddy Fitts and drilled him three times with a .22 caliber handgun he carried in a back pocket. When Teddy didn’t come out of the store right away both Rink and Johnny split. Teddy didn’t die until the next day and never said a word to the authorities before he did. After that, Rinky Dink quit the holdup business, telling Johnny Kay, “I had a bad feelin’ in the morning. There was a cold, noisy wind blowin’, what the Apaches call the devil’s breath. We shoulda called it off.”
Rinky Dink worked part time in a salvage yard pulling parts out of wrecked cars and trucks. All he really cared about was his motorcycle, which he had painted bright red and kept in perfect running condition. Cindy Purdy told Roy she had a “ditch deep” crush on Rinky Dink but that he just pushed her away when she went for his fly. Rink hung out with the group but kept quiet most of the time, just grinned and drank beer from the bottle. In Roy’s dream, Rinky Dink was leaning against a parked car at nightfall in front of a bar with an orange neon sign in the window that blinked the name “Armando’s” on and off. He was wearing an unzipped navy blue windbreaker and his caramel-colored pompadour rippled in the breeze. As usual, he was grinning. There was a blonde-haired girl sitting in the front seat of the car on the passenger side. Roy could not see her face but he thought it might have been Cindy Purdy.