by Stuart Dybek
“They get you inside there and shlish,” he said, drawing a finger across his throat. “Girls like that carry a disease that’ll make you walk like Charlie Chaplin.”
It was the first advice he ever gave me about sex and, thankfully, the last.
We saw the Chickenman that day, stilt-legged, balanced on a hydrant above the passing crowds, with the chicken rising from his head like a weather vane. The bird hopped to his shoulder, and the man’s mouth widened to a gaping hole in which the chicken bobbed his head. The mouth closed, and when the chicken slowly spread its wings, it looked as if the man’s head might fly from his body.
I’d described the whole scene more than once to Mick on nights when I’d lie in the dark and think about the girl before I went to sleep, wondering where the gypsies had gone. Mick especially liked the part about her grabbing Sir by the balls.
We knew we were close when we passed Donnelly’s, a block-long factory where telephone books were printed. I could feel the pneumatic exhalation of its giant, racketing presses, smell the scorched ink of all those compressed names and numbers and the sweat of the night shift, who stared out like convicts behind mesh screens. Then traffic accelerated, and as we pulled onto the Outer Drive the sudden coolness made my head light. Soldier Field rose on the left, and the lake stretched past the breakwater and farthest sailboats, shimmering pink under a sun that glazed the park trees.
“Workin on the railroad, workin on the farm, all I got to show for it’s the muscle in my arm,” Sir sang in a voice he lowered to a baritone he considered operatic. He often sang when he drove. “I had a Caruso-quality voice as a kid,” he’d tell us, “but ruined it imitating trains.”
Mick was rolling around in the backseat with his hands over his ears, groaning as if having convulsions.
“At least he’s not singing ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime?’” I said.
“And it looks like I’m never gonna cease my wanderin.”
“He’s never gonna cease his wanderin,” I said to Mick.
Mick and a black kid in the backseat of a car in the lane beside us were giving each other the finger. The kid tried to spit into our Kaiser, but his spit blew back on him. We all busted up, including the kid.
Sir was pumping the brakes as cars weaved in front of him.
“Da-damn nuts,” he yelled, jockeying for the turning lane. “It’s really dog eat dog on this thing.”
Brakes grinding, we shimmied off the exit for Twelfth Street Beach and crawled along the aisles of the parking lot looking for a space. Finally, Sir had to drive over the sidewalk and park on the grass. There were a lot of other cars parked on the grass.
“Can’t give us all tickets,” he said.
We slipped our jeans off. Sir hid his watch and wallet under the seat.
“Leave the windows open a crack, so when we come back it’s not like a da-damn oven in here.”
“Where’s the door opener?” Mick asked.
“Just climb out this way,” Sir said.
“No,” Mick insisted, “I demand the door opener.”
I handed it to him over the seat, and he began to mash at the buffalo. Only the door on the Kaiser’s driver side opened, so we carried around a sawed-off broom handle we called the door opener. The Kaiser had no inside door handles. Before the Kaiser-Frazer company went out of business, it had advertised its designs as the automobiles of the future. To their engineers, the future meant push buttons, so they’d replaced door handles with push buttons embossed with the Kaiser trademark, a buffalo. By mashing the buffalo with just the right amount of force, we sometimes got the passenger door to open. We’d turned it into a competition. This time Mick got it on five tries—average.
Sir checked to make sure everything was locked while Mick and I hopped barefoot across scorching asphalt to the beach.
“Don’t step on any da-damn broken glass or we’ll have a real mess,” Sir hollered behind us. “I don’t know why the punks have to break the bottles instead of throwing them in the trash.” He paused to kick a bottle neck through a sewer grate. He was still wearing his socks and unlaced factory shoes, though he’d stripped down to his old maroon bathing trunks with the gold buckle and the leaping aqua blue swordfish over the coin pocket. People didn’t wear swimsuits like that anymore. Sometimes seeing it made me weak inside with a feeling that I couldn’t name but that had to do with all the times I’d seen him wear it before, times when I was little—younger than Mick was now—when Moms would always come with us to the beach, times before she got nervous, before we’d hear her pacing the house in the dark in the middle of the night crying to herself. Seeing the maroon bathing suit made me think of the old maroon Chevy, the first car I remembered. I thought my father had driven home from the Army in it. It had a running board he’d let me ride on while he parked.
It was a car we’d pack once a year with shopping bags full of old clothes and jars of jam and the dill pickles Moms canned. Leaving Moms behind, my father and I would drive a long time into what seemed to me to be countryside because the streets were shadowy with trees. We’d arrive at a high iron gate and follow a road that curved through park-like grounds where people in wheelchairs were pushed by attendants in white. We’d park and enter a cavernous building of gray stone, tote our shopping bags down corridors acrid with disinfectant, and wait before a bank of windows that looked out on lawn. An old man with stunned eyes and a jawline grizzled in gray would be wheeled in to where we waited. The three of us would sit silently together. There was never any talk, not even in Polish, a language my father relied on for secrecy. My father took the old man’s veined, stony hand and traced its battered knuckles. Before we left he’d kiss that hand. We never stayed long, and I’d forget about our trip until a year later, when we’d again load shopping bags into the maroon Chevy and drive into what felt like a déjà vu.
After a few such visits I asked, “Dad, who is that old guy?”
“Grandpa,” he answered, the only time I ever heard him use the word. After that we never went back. If my father continued to visit, he did so secretly. Only later did I learn that the place to which we drove was Dunning, the state mental hospital that people then commonly called the insane asylum.
The beach house was shaped like an ocean liner with a huge orange smokestack. Lights glowed from its portholes; the air smelled like red hots and popcorn. People padded barefoot through sandy puddles slopped along the concrete decks, shouting in different languages. Men showered in open stalls in front of changing rooms, spraying sand off kids little enough to go naked.
As always, Mick and I stopped at a huge concrete drinking fountain where water gurgled from a dozen metal pipes, water rusty tasting and cold as if pumped straight from the lake. When he leaned for a drink, I plugged two of the pipes with my fingers and water shot up Mick’s nose. He chased me down to the lake, his cheeks bulging with a mouthful of water to spit.
“Doesn’t it feel kinda stupid running into the lake with your mouth full of water?”
He opened his mouth for a comeback, and the water dribbled out, breaking me up. I waded out laughing, and he came after me, both of us splashing sheets of water at each other. I dove under, and when I came up, Mick was chest deep, jogging up and down in time to the waves while milling his arms through the air as if he were doing the Australian crawl. His cheeks bulged; he’d gulped a mouthful of lake water to spit.
“You really think you’re swimming?” I yelled, recalling how I’d once done the same thing. But the Army helicopter whirring in overhead drowned out my voice. Everyone stopped and stood looking up as the helicopter hovered in to land behind the barbed wire of Meigs field, an airstrip that bordered the beach.
We’d always come here to Twelfth Street Beach. It was where Sir taught me to swim. But tonight he was going to take us off the Rocks, where the water was deep.
“The Rocks is where we used to swim when I was a kid,” he said, “me and my friends. We used to get out there around eight in the morning and not ta
ke the streetcar home till after dark. That was the life. Johnny Weissmuller used to swim off the Rocks with us.”
“Who’s Johnny Weissmuller?” Mick asked.
“Who’s Johnny Weissmuller? You never seen Tarzan of the Apes?” Sir beat his chest and gave an ape call. People on the blankets glanced at him and laughed in a friendly way. He was different whenever he got around water—younger, grinning, kidding around.
“So who were you guys? The Apes?” Mick asked, always quick to get one in on Sir. Mick had made up the nickname Sir one night when we were all watching Leave It to Beaver and Dad said how nice it was that Wally and Beaver called their father “Sir.”
“Apes is right—you shoulda seen us. Talk about tan! Italians would call me paisano. You shoulda seen this lake. People don’t realize how da-damn dirty it’s getting. When I was a kid you could see the bottom off the Rocks.”
“What’s down there?” I asked.
“A bunch of rocks. But who knows how old? They coulda been there when this was Indian country. Hell! Maybe rocks from back when it was all glacier with saber-tooths and mammoths. We used to dive down to see who could bring up the biggest rock. Weissmuller could swim faster and farther than any of us—one time I tried to swim to the pumping station with him, but hell, more than halfway I gave up. I coulda made it out there, but I was afraid about getting back. He didn’t tell me a boat was gonna pick him up. But I could dive deeper and stay down longer than anyone, even old Tarzan. Things were so clean then we used to swim in the Chicago River.”
“You mean the Drainage Canal!”
“With the floating turds?” Mick asked.
“It was still a river in some places, not a sewer. It was beautiful.”
The breeze off the Rocks felt almost chilly. It blew straight in over a horizon that was a blinding gleam, and beyond the horizon I could picture the forests of Michigan. I tried to recapture the daydreams I’d had all week about coming out to the lake; I tried to remember how stuffy it would be tonight when we got back home.
There weren’t any women. Men and teenagers plunged and swam in the deep green swells. Water bucked over the lip of the concrete walkway. I stared into the lake and couldn’t imagine touching bottom.
“Want me to lower you in by the arms and cool you off?” Sir asked Mick. Mick was watching the swells hump in, standing well back from the edge.
“No, I’m gonna climb the rocks.”
Just behind the concrete walk, enormous limestone blocks were piled in jagged, steplike tumbles as if some ancient city lay in ruins after a tidal wave.
“Okay, you do that”—Sir laughed—“and keep an eye on the towels.” He slipped his shoes and socks off, put his car keys in one heel and shook them into the toe.
Spray showered over the concrete. I felt like going with Mick. The walkway vibrated when the waves whumped in as if it were hollow underneath. The sun was slipping lower in the hazy lilac sky. Mexican teenagers with gang tattoos whapped at each other with wet towels, their gold crosses swinging from their necks as they pushed each other in.
Sir gave an ape call.
Everyone turned for a moment and looked at him.
He backed up against the limestones and sprinted toward the water, hurtling off the concrete edge. His body arced like that of a man shot from a cannon—legs together, arms against his sides, so that when he hit the water it was headfirst, arms still pressed to his body. A spume thumped up, then showered back around his point of entry.
The guys standing next to me cheered.
We waited. Mick gathered up the towels and his shoes. Sir hadn’t come up. People began to stare at us. I studied his socks stuffed in his shoes, then looked at Mick. He glanced away. Go find a lifeguard, I was getting ready to say, when Sir’s head shot up, hair flattened slick as a seal.
“The old torpedo dive!” he shouted. “Come on in, Perry! Don’t ever try the old torpedo unless you know there’s nothing sticking up underwater.”
Two Mexican guys who’d cheered raced for the water and torpedoed in on either side of Sir. They came up snorting and coughing and rubbing their eyes.
Sir sidestroked around them, laughing.
“Come on, sonnyboy!”
I’d never dived into deep water before. I was shivering and wasn’t sure I remembered how to swim.
A Mexican kid, not much older than Mick, stood beside me. He was drying himself off with his shirt and shivering too, except he was dripping wet.
“Cold?” I asked, gesturing at the water.
“Muy, muy.”
“Strong undertow today,” a guy with a mustache said. He looked like he could be the shivering kid’s older brother. “Somebody drowned this morning and they still ain’t found his body, man.”
I’d heard of the undertow off the Rocks, of people being pulled out into the lake, sucked under. I watched the bobbing swimmers for anyone being drawn away.
Sir was backstroking along the concrete edge, waves boosting him almost level with the walkway.
“Gimmie the soap!”
I got the bar of laundry soap and flipped it out to him. He floated on his back, lifting his toes and ankles high out of the water as if he were rocking on a hammock, and soaped his feet and legs, then rubbed the soap into lather in his black chest hair. I’d never seen anyone else bring soap to the lake, and for the first time a possible reason occurred to me: maybe when he was a boy they didn’t have a bathtub. Whatever the reason, he didn’t seem concerned that it looked weird to see a man washing while he was swimming.
“Perry, you’re not coming in?”
“How come it’s so wavy?”
“Must be the wake of that big ship passing by.” He laughed and pointed. “Way out there.”
There was a massive shadowy form against the dusky horizon, vaguely outlined by the light dying around its edges, and I recalled my uncle Lefty telling me about Blue Island, a ghost island Indian burial ground.
“Murciélago! Murciélago!” the Mexican guys started yelling.
Everyone was diving for the water.
“What is it?”
“Bat.” The kid next to me grinned, then jumped in.
It boomeranged out of the bug-clouded floodlights, leathery, soaring at forehead level, and I dove.
For a moment, the foam of my dive felt like crushed ice. When I shot up, a wave broke over my head and I snorted some water, but I was swimming. Sir’s head splashed up from underwater right beside me.
“Want the soap?”
I shook my head no. “It’s great! Terrific!”
“Sure, just takes making the plunge and a little getting used to.”
I felt used to it already, clean and hard, letting the cold wash away a week of sweat. The water seemed more and more comfortable so that, when a breeze skimmed over, I sank deeper, breaststroking, riding the waves. Like Sir had told me, it was easier to swim in deep water. I could feel it buoying me and practiced the crawl, lifting my arms high and rolling my face in the water, hoping Mick was watching. Sir streaked under me, the white soles of his feet gleaming like fish scales.
“How do you swim underwater so long?”
“Easy—the secret in water is to relax, don’t listen to little nervous voices. Never fight it and you’ll be all right. Take three deep breaths.” He demonstrated, huffing in and out slowly three times. “And when you dive if your ears start to hurt, swallow like on an elevator. Keep your eyes open.”
He flipped and speared down.
I inhaled three times quick and ducked under, trying to follow him. When I surfaced, he was still under. I knew I’d wimped out, and could have stayed down longer if I hadn’t listened to the frightened voice urging me to come up for air.
“Hey, Mick!” I hollered.
I slowly inhaled six breaths and dove. The water was silvery green, and my hands finned before me like two perch. I was drawing my body through layers, each colder than the last, my eyes blurrily peering through increasing dimness, and my ears starting to ache wi
th pressure. I swallowed, which helped some, kicked deeper, and as I heard the inner voice begin prompting me to shoot back up, I saw bottom, the same bottom Sir had seen when he swam with Johnny Weissmuller. There were no Mastodon tusks. It was gray, littered with mossy rocks, rolling beer cans, swaying silty seaweed.
I kicked hard and wrenched a slimy rock out of the mud, and the bottom clouded up so that I couldn’t see. My ears were roaring, and instead of ascending, I was being carried along the bottom, my head near to exploding from holding my breath, and even though I couldn’t see I was suddenly sure that the ocean liner on the horizon was passing overhead, its enormous hull turning the water dark, diesel churning the shaft of the great propeller that swept me along the bottom until I dropped the rock. Within the dreamlike moment that breath-holding expands, I could feel the current along the bottom rushing into the cavern under the walkway and realized the undertow didn’t pull you out, it sucked you in, under the city, into the pipes, that was why they couldn’t find the bodies. I knew the boy who’d drowned was curled in a fetal position, ghastly white, hair swaying as he pitched under the Rocks. It was me. I was going to die choosing numbness rather than panic. My Adam’s apple swelled in my throat, forcing my mouth open. A hand was pushing on the seat of my suit, I opened my eyes, my father stared at me underwater, bubbles came from his mouth as he moved his lips like he was trying to tell me something important.
Stars were out over the lake. The bronzed dome of the Planetarium glowed otherworldly over the ridges of limestone. Mick stood at the edge of the Rocks waving and yelling, “Come on in … I wanna go home … mosquitoes!”
Behind him floodlights were enveloped in bugs. They landed drowning in kicking circles on the oily troughs of swells. The surface glistened, rocking with moonlit suds. Sir was surrounded by Mexican kids, all shampooing with the laundry soap, laughing, dunking, flinging handfuls of lather.
