Roy’s Uncle Buck and his friend Tony Grimaldi, who owned the Abeja Bank in Ybor City, played poker with two or three other men on Thursday nights. This was in the 1960s when Tampa, Florida, was still a relatively small city, a shrimp and cigar town, as Grimaldi called it. Ybor City was the center of the Cuban-American community, which it had been since the mid-19th century. Tony Grimaldi wasn’t Cuban but, having grown up there, spoke Spanish like one.
“C’mon, Gus, you want cards or not?”
“Tony, you know how much time it takes you to okay or refuse a loan?”
“No time. You need a loan or cards?”
“One.”
“Buck?”
“I’m good.”
“Art?”
“Dos.”
“Ralph?”
“I’m out.”
“Speakin’ of loans?”
“Art?”
“What about Don Kay? You know he’s goin’ away for torchin’ the Riviera Terrace.”
“Don Kay don’t worry me. You worry me, always takin’ two cards.”
Buck, Art, Tony and Gus showed their hands. Buck scraped up the pot. After the game ended and only Tony and Buck were still seated at the table, Buck asked Tony about Sam Lowiski.
“He’s in Dallas with that puta, the counterfeit rubia makes stag films.”
“You like her, Tony, don’t you?”
Tony lit a Chesterfield, puffed on it a few times, then said, “Mary Duckworth is her real name.”
“Lowiski calls her Deronda LeMay. Anyhow, he come through?”
Grimaldi stubbed out his cigarette.
“I could use another beer.”
“Gus killed the last one.”
“If he don’t show by tomorrow, we’ll go get him. I can send Izzy.”
“You mean Lefty, whose left arm got shot off by that runt Martinelli?”
“Israel Izquierda, yeah.”
“Funny he’s called Lefty when it’s his left arm’s the one missing.”
“To remind him be more cuidado how he goes about his business. Unless you want to go. We could drive up together Saturday.”
“Can’t. Taking my nephew fishing.”
“Roy’s a smart boy. How old’s he now?”
“Twelve.”
“Good you’re there for him. His mother’s still got her looks but she’s a wreck.”
“My sister’s never recovered from the break-up of her second marriage. She had a nervous breakdown, plus she has a skin condition puts her in the hospital.”
“You teachin’ Roy the construction business?”
“He wants to be a writer.”
Tony laughed. “He’s just a kid, he needs to learn how to make a livin’. Writin’ what?”
“Stories.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“He’s got his own mind, like his father.”
“When my old man died, I was fifteen,” Tony said. “He was from Trapani, in Sicily. He had old country rules. They still apply.”
Two days later, when Buck and Roy were on Buck’s boat in the Gulf of Mexico, Buck said, “You ought to go see Tony Grimaldi, he likes you. You could get some good stories from him.”
“I like Tony, too. He lets me sit in the chair behind his desk when I go in the bank. One thing I know already is that to be a writer it’s important to be a good listener.”
“Your dad had plenty of stories.”
“He told me some things that happened in Romania when he was a boy, about people who lived in his village that believed in magic. There was an older boy who talked to pigs and the pigs talked to him. One of the pigs predicted everybody’s future, how some of them would have accidents like falling off a roof or drowning when they were drunk, or being stabbed by their wife. But somehow the way my dad told the stories, even though the fortune-telling pig predicted someone being torn apart by wild dogs or run over by a train, they were funny. Those are the kinds of stories I want to write, funny tragedies. If death is the worst thing that can happen to a person but there’s something funny about it then it might not be so bad. What do you think, Unk?”
“Well, I’ve seen men die with smiles on their faces. Not many, a few. When I was with the Seabees, stationed on an island in the South Pacific, Vanua Levu, we built Quonset huts to house the men. It was my idea, modelled on Narragansett tribal construction, that I studied in engineering school. One of the men fell off a ladder and broke his neck. He died, but not right away. His name was Bentley, from Alabama. Bentley asked me why we were building Quonset huts and I told him the Indians built them for protection from freezing cold winters. ‘There’s no winter here, Commander,’ he said. I explained that the long, high ceilings not only kept heat in during the cold months but kept the temperature down in the hot months. ‘The Indians figured that out, did they?’ he asked. I said yes, in Rhode Island. ‘My granny Calwallader was right,’ Bentley said. I asked him what she was right about, and he said, ‘If you got some curiosity in you, you can learn something new near every day.’ Then Bentley died, smiling. Calwallader must have been his mother’s family name.”
“What do you think happens to a person after he dies?”
“Nothing. There’s just no person anymore.”
“Dead people live in other people’s memories, Unk, like my dad. He’ll always be there in my mind.”
Years later, after Tony Grimaldi, Roy’s Uncle Buck and Roy’s mother were dead, Roy refused to forget them. Instead, he wrote about them as they were, as he imagined they were, and as they never were or even could have been. He figured if he had known them as well as he thought he’d known them then what he wrote would be as close as he would ever come to the truth.