The Roy Stories Read Online Free

short and posture that gave him the appearance of angling his body backwards, leaning away from whomever approached him. He did not talk much. As Roy’s friend Magic Frank said, “Cleve lets his hammer do his talking.”
    Cleve was put back in school twice, so he was a year or more older than Roy and Frank and their friends. Cleve did not hesitate to use the hammer in a fight, gaining a reputation for being both dangerous and a little looney. Roy never got to know him well but Cleve acted friendly enough and they played together on their eighth grade football team. All Roy knew about Cleve Love’s family was what Magic Frank, who had been to Cleve’s house a couple of times, told him.
    â€œHis old man was a brakeman on the Illinois Central,” Frank said, “until he disappeared when Cleve was six. His mother’s a hairdresser; so’s his sister, Trudy. She’s eighteen.”
    â€œWhat’s Trudy like?” asked Roy. “Does she carry a hammer, too?”
    â€œCarrot top, like Cleve. Also tall and skinny with a long nose. Freckles. I only seen her once. Cleve told me she knifed a guy when she was in high school, then dropped out and went to work with their mother.”
    â€œMaybe the old lady packs a rod,” said Roy.
    â€œCould be. She smokes Camels and half her left ear’s missing. The top part.”
    Cleve Love played safety on defense for the Clinton School Eagles. To Roy’s knowledge, nobody on the team—for which Roy was a running back and Magic Frank a middle linebacker—had ever seen an eagle.
    â€œMaybe they got eagles up in Wisconsin,” said Jimmy Boyle, their quarterback. “If anybody here in Chicago saw one, he’d probably think it was just a giant pigeon.”
    During a game against the Black Hawk School Young Bucks at Green Briar Park, Cleve Love was beaten twice early for touchdowns by a kid named Jesse Ash, Black Hawk’s best receiver. Midway through the third quarter, Ash caught a long pass and was headed for the end zone when Cleve, who was in full pursuit, pulled a hammer from the back of his pants and clubbed Ash on the head with it, splitting the receiver’s helmet in two. Ash fumbled the ball, fell down on the ground and stayed there.
    Nobody playing in or watching the game from the sidelines could believe what they’d just seen. Cleve Love stood over Jesse Ash’s body for a few seconds, holding the hammer in his right hand, before running off the field and down Washtenaw Street without taking off his helmet. The referee and a couple of adults rushed onto the field and helped Ash stand up, then walked him slowly over to a bench. One of his teammates picked up the pieces of Ash’s helmet. The Black Hawk School coach was shouting at Fat Porter, the Clinton School coach, and the referee declared the game over, giving the victory to the Young Bucks even though the Eagles were ahead twenty-one to fourteen.
    Jimmy Boyle, Magic Frank and Roy took off their cleats, put on their street shoes and, since they lived near one another, began walking home together. A whisper of rain pelted their dusty faces.
    â€œI asked Cleve once why he carried a hammer,” Magic Frank told Roy and Jimmy. “He said that when he was little and went to Storybook Time at the library, he learned that Thor, the Norse god of thunder, used one to defend himself, and that when Thor threw his hammer at someone it returned to him like a boomerang.”
    â€œThey got boomerangs in Australia,” said Jimmy Boyle. “The Vikings must have invaded down there and given ’em some hammers.”
    â€œThor wasn’t a Viking,” Roy said. “He was a mythical figure, part of a legend.”
    â€œThat’s what Cleve’ll be now,” said Jimmy, “a legend.”
    Fifteen years later, when Roy came to Chicago on a visit from San Francisco, where he was then living, he saw Magic Frank and they talked