by Stuart Dybek
“Installation was fifty for the box I got. Service is fifteen a month.”
Joe, the guy in the sharkskin suit, rose from his barstool and walked over to the jukebox. He read some of the selections aloud: “Harbor Lights,” “Blue Moon,” the “Too Fat Polka,” “Cucurrucucu Paloma,” “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
“These songs are moldy, man,” Joe said. “Where’s Sinatra, where’s Elvis the Pelvis? Your current jukebox dealer’s a loser. They’re gonna be out of business in a year. Their machines ain’t dependable. Sallie, got a coin?”
“Here, on me,” Zip said, reaching into the till.
“No, no, Sallie’s got it.”
“Yeah, I got it,” Sal said, flipping a coin to Joe.
“Requests, Mr. Zip?” Joe asked.
“I hear it anytime I want.”
“So, what’s your favorite song?”
“Play, ‘Sing, Sing, Sing,’” Sal said, yolk spitting from his mouth. “Did you know Benny Goodman’s a yid from Lawndale? Lived on Francisco before the tutsones moved in.”
Joe dropped in the coin and punched some buttons. Zip could hear from the dull clunk that the coin was a slug.
“Goddamn thing ate my quarter!” Joe exclaimed. “I fucken hate when machines snitch from me. Newspaper boxes are the worst. Selling papers used to be a job for blind guys and crips. No offense, Mr. Zip, I’m just saying a paper stand was decent work for these people, and then they put in newspaper boxes. I’m trying to buy a Trib the other day and the box eats my quarter. Know what I did to that newspaper box?”
“Here,” Zip said. “Here’s a refund.”
“But, see, Mr. Zip, it’s bad business to be covering for these lousy fucking jukes. You know if you whack them just right it’s like hitting the jackpot.” Joe kicked the jukebox knee high and its lights blinked out. From the crunch, Zip knew he’d kicked in the speaker. “No jackpot? Well, guess it ain’t my lucky day.” Joe laughed. “So, listen, Mr. Zip, we got a deal to shake hands on?” Joe extended his hand. Then, eyeing Zip’s clothespinned sleeve, Joe withdrew his right hand and extended his left.
“Let me think it over,” Zip said. He didn’t offer his hand. He wasn’t trying to make a statement. It was the only hand he had.
“No problem,” Joe said. “No pressure. Give it some careful thought. I’ll come by next week, maybe Friday, and you can give me your answer.” He pulled out a roll of bills, snapped off a twenty, and set it on the mess of eggshells Sal had left on the bar. “For the egg.”
Big shots leaving a tip stolen from the pocket of some workingman. After they walked out of his bar, Zip snapped open his lighter and watched the burning twenty turn the eggshells sooty. In the war, he’d operated an M2 flamethrower. They must have figured a kid his size could heft it, lug the napalm-filled jugs, and brace against the backward thrust of the jetting flame. Its range was only thirty yards, so Zip had to get in close to the mouths of caves and pillboxes that honeycombed the ridges where the Japs were dug in ready to fight to the death. He had to get close enough to smell the bodies burning. A flamethrower operator was an easy target and always worked with a buddy, whose job it was to cover him. Zip’s buddy on Pelelui was Dominic Morales, from L.A. They called him Domino. During a tropical downpour on a ridge named Half Moon Hill, Domino was killed by the same mortar blast that took off Zip’s right arm. They were both nineteen years old, and all these years later that astonishes Zip more than it ever did at the time. Nineteen, the same age as kids in the neighborhood shooting each other over who’s wearing what gang colors in some crazy, private war. He thought he’d paid his price and was beyond all that, but now Zip stands behind the bar waiting for the days to tick down to Friday, when Joe Ditto comes back. Zip could call the cops, but he can’t prove anything, and besides, hoods wouldn’t be canvasing taverns if the cops weren’t on the take. Calling the cops would be stupid. What if he simply closed down the bar, packed his Ford, drove north into the mist of sky-blue waters?
Zip recalls putt-putting out just after dawn in his aluminum boat into a mist that hadn’t burned off the water yet. The lake looked like a setting for an Arthurian legend, the shore nearly invisible. Zip felt invisible. He’d packed a cane pole, a couple brews in a cooler of ice, and a cottage cheese container of night crawlers he’d dug the night before. He was going bluegill fishing. Fresh from the icy water of Lac Courte Oreilles they were delicious. Even in the mist, he located his secret spot and quietly slid in the cement anchor. But when he opened the container of night crawlers, he found cottage cheese. If he went all the way back for his bait, he’d lose the first light and the best fishing of the day. Defeated, he raised anchor, and the boat drifted into acres of lily pads, nosing sluggish bullfrogs into the water. Zip noticed tiny green frogs camouflaged on the broad leaves, waiting for the sun to warm them into life. He caught a few and put them in the ice cooler. He’d seen bluegills come into mere inches of water alongshore for frogs. Once they were paralyzed by cold, Zip had no trouble baiting a frog on a hook one-handed. Returned to water, the frog would revive. Zip swung his pole out, and his bobber settled on the smoldering water. He watched for the dip of the bobber, the signal to set the hook, while the mist thinned. Zip was wondering where the bluegills were when the bobber vanished. He’d never seen one disappear underwater. Before he could puzzle out what happened, the water churned and the pole nearly jerked from his hand. The bamboo bent double, and he locked it between his thighs and hung on. The fish leaped, and if Zip hadn’t known it was a muskie, he might have thought it was an alligator. It wagged in midair and appeared to take the measure of Zip, then belly-flopped back into the lake and torpedoed beneath the boat. Zip braced, tried horsing it out, and the pole snapped, knocking him off balance onto his butt, crushing the Styrofoam cooler, but he still clung to the broken pole. The fish leaped again beside the boat, swashing in water. It seemed to levitate above Zip—he smelled its weediness—and when it splashed down, the broken pole tore from his hand and snagged on the gunwale. He lunged for it, almost capsizing the boat, then watched the stub of bamboo, tangled in line and bobber, shoot away as if caught in an undertow. It was too big a fish for a cane pole. Too big a fish for a one-armed man.
Zip drains the last of his Hamm’s, sets the bottle on the bar, and stares at his left hand, the hand Joe Ditto wanted to shake. Blood pulses in his temples and a current of pain traces his right arm, and the thought occurs to Zip that if he ever has a heart attack, he’ll sense it first in his phantom arm.
Whitey calls in the middle of a dream:
Little Julio is supposed to be in his room practicing, but he’s playing his flute in the bedroom doorway. Julio’s mother, Gloria Candido, is wearing a pink see-through nightie, and Joe can’t believe she lets Little Julio see her like that because Little Julio is not that little and he’s just caught Joe circumnavigating Gloria’s nipples with his tongue and Little Julio wants some, too. “He’s playing his nursing song,” Gloria says. The flute amplifies the kid’s breath until it’s as piercing as an alarm. To shut him up, Joe gropes for the phone.
“Joe,” Whitey says. “What’s going on?”
Drugged on dream, Joe wakes to his racing heart. “What?” he says, even though he hates guys who say what? or huh? It’s a response that reveals weakness.
“Whatayou mean what? What the fuck? You know what. What’s with you?”
What day is this? Joe wants to ask, but he knows that’s the wrong thing to say, so he says, “I had a weird night.”
“Joe, are you fucken on drugs?”
“No,” Joe says. He’s coming out of his fog, and it occurs to him that Whitey can’t possibly be calling about Gloria Candido. A confrontation on the phone is not how Whitey would handle something like that. Whitey wouldn’t let on he knew.
“Well, what’s the problem then?” Whitey demands.
It’s Johnny Sovereign that Whitey is calling about, and as soon as Joe realizes that, his heart stops racing. “Ran into a minor complication. I went to see
him yesterday and—”
“Maronn’!” Whitey yells. “Joe, we’re on the fucking phone here. I don’t care what the dipshit excuses are, just fucking get it done.”
“Hey, Whitey, suck this,” Joe says and puts the receiver to his crotch. “Who the fuck do you think you’re yelling at, you vain old sack of shit with your wrinkled minchia? Your girlfriend’s slutting around behind your back making a fucking cornuto of you. You don’t like it I’ll cut you, I’ll bleed you like a stuck pig.”
Joe says all that to the dial tone. Telling off the dial tone doesn’t leave him feeling better, just the opposite, and he makes a rule on the spot: never again talk to dial tones after someone’s hung up on you. It’s like talking to mirrors. Mirrors have been making him nervous lately. There’s a dress draped over his bedroom mirror, and Joe gets out of bed and looks through his apartment for the woman to go with it. That would be April. She’s nowhere to be found, and for a moment Joe wonders if she’s taken his clothes and left him her dress. But his clothes are piled on the chair beside the bed where he stripped them off-shoes, trousers with keys and wallet, sport coat with the .22 weighting one pocket. He’s naked except for his mismatched socks. The stiletto is still sheathed in the black-and-pink argyle.
Yesterday was supposed to have been a cleanup day. His plan was to pitch the trash, drop his laundry at the Chink’s, and then stop by Johnny Sovereign’s house on Twenty-fifth Street. The plan depended on Sovereign not being home, so Joe called from a pay phone, and Sovereign’s good-looking young wife answered and said Johnny would be back around four. Okay, things were falling into place. Joe would wait in the gangway behind Sovereign’s house for him to come home, and suggest they go for a drink in order to discuss Johnny setting up gambling nights in the back rooms of some of the local taverns. Once Joe got Sovereign alone in the car, well, he’d improvise from there.
So around three in the afternoon, Joe parked beside the rundown one-car garage behind Sovereign’s house. The busted garage door gaped open, and he saw that Sovereign’s Pontiac Bonneville was gone. Bonnevilles with their 347-cubic-inch engines that could do zero to sixty in 8.1 seconds were the current bad-ass cars—in Little Village, they called them Panchos. Sovereign’s splurging on that car was what made Whitey suspect he was skimming on the numbers. New wheels and already leaking oil, Joe thought, as he looked at the fresh spots on the warped, birdshit-crusted floorboards of the garage. If Sovereign wasn’t careless and all for show, he’d have taken that Pancho to the Indian.
Johnny Sovereign’s back fence was warped, too, and overgrown with morning glories. His wife must have planted them. She’d made an impression on Joe the one time he’d been inside their house. Johnny had invited him, and they’d gone the back way, the entrance Joe figures it was Johnny’s habit to use. Johnny didn’t bother to announce their arrival, and they caught his wife—Vi, that was her name—vacuuming in her slip. When she saw Joe standing there, a blush heated her bare shoulders before she ran into the bedroom. She was wearing a pale yellow slip. Joe had never seen a slip like that before. He would have liked to slide its thin straps down her skinny arms to see if her blush mottled her breasts the way some women flush when they come. Sovereign’s Pontiac was yellow, too, but canary yellow, and Joe wondered if there was some connection between Vi’s slip and the car.
He sat in the Bluebird and lit a cigarette, then unscrewed the top from a pinch bottle of scotch and washed down a couple of painkillers. Sparrows twittered on the wires and pigeons did owl imitations inside Sovereign’s shitty garage. The alley was empty except for a humped, hooded figure of a woman slowly approaching in his rearview mirror—a bag lady in a black winter coat and babushka, stopping to inspect each garbage can. Except for the stink of trash, Joe didn’t mind waiting. He needed time to think through his next moves. From where he’d parked, he could watch the gangway and intercept Sovereign before he entered the house. He’d ask Sovereign to have a drink, and Sovereign would want to know where. “Somewhere private,” Joe would tell him. And then—wham—it came to Joe, as it always did, how he’d work it. He’d tell Sovereign, “Let’s take your wheels. I want to ride in a new yellow Bonneville.” He’d bring the bottle of scotch, a friendly touch, and suggest they kill it on the deserted side street where the dragsters raced, a place where Sovereign could show him what the Pancho could do. He couldn’t think of a way to get the shotgun into Sovereign’s car, so he’d have to forget about that. Joe was scolding himself for not thinking all this through earlier when a woman’s voice startled him.
“Hi, Joe, got an extra smoke?”
“What are you doing here?” Joe asked.
“Trying to bum a Pall Mall off an old lover,” April said. “You still smoke Pall Malls, don’tcha?”
Her hair was bleached corn-silk blond and she wore a dress the shade of morning glories. Joe wondered how she’d come down the alley without his seeing her. The scooped neckline exposed enough cleavage so that he could see a wing tip from the blue seagull tattooed on her left breast. She looked more beautiful than he’d remembered.
“I thought you went to Vegas,” he said. “I heard you got married to some dealer at Caesar’s.” He didn’t add that he’d also heard she’d OD’d.
“Married? Me?” She showed him her left hand: nails silvery pink, a cat’s-eye on her index finger going from gray to green the way her eyes did. Joe leaned to kiss the pale band of flesh where a wedding ring would have been, but he paused when sunlight hit her hand in a way that made it momentarily appear freckled and old with dirty, broken nails. She lifted her hand the rest of the way and sighed when it met his lips.
“You used to do that thing with my hand that would drive me crazy,” April said.
“Hey, we were kids,” Joe said.
He worked back then for a towing service Whitey ran, and he’d met April when he went to tow her Chevy from a private lot off Rush Street. He’d traded not towing her car for a date. She was a senior at Our Lady of Lourdes High, still a virgin, and on their first date she informed him that she was sorry, but she didn’t put out. That was the phrase she used. Joe had laughed and told her, “Sweetheart, it’s not like I even asked you. And anyway, there’s other things than putting out.” “Such as?” April asked, and from that single question, Joe knew he had her. It was nothing about him in particular, she was just ready. “Imagine the knuckles on your fingers are knees and the knuckles on your hands are breasts,” Joe had told her, extending her index and middle fingers into a V and outlining an imaginary torso with his finger. “Okay, I see. So?” she asked. “So this,” he whispered and kissed the insides of her fingers, then licked their webbing. She watched him as if amused, then closed her eyes. Even after she was putting out three times a day, nothing got her more excited than when he kissed her hand. “Lover,” she’d once told him, “that goes right to my pussy.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m still using?” April asked. “I’m clean. And I been thinking about you ever since I’ve been back in the neighborhood. I’m staying with my sister, Renee. Remember her? She had a crush on you, too. I dreamed last night I’d find you here, and when I woke I thought, Forget it, you can’t trust dreams, but then I thought, What the hell, all that will happen is I’ll feel foolish.”
“You dreamed of meeting me here?”
“Amazing, huh? Like that commercial, you know? ‘I dreamed I met my old boyfriend in an alley, wearing my Maidenform bra.’ Nice ride,” she said, gliding her fingertips along the Bluebird as if stroking a cat. She came around to the passenger side, climbed in, leaned back into the leather seat, and sighed. “Just you, me, and a thousand morning glories.”
Joe flicked away his cigarette and kissed her.
“You taste like scotch,” she said.
He reached for the pinch bottle and she took a sip and kissed him, letting the hot liquor trickle from her mouth into his.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“That information wasn’t in your drea
m?”
“In my dream you were a lonely void waiting for your soul mate.” April took another sip of scotch and swallowed it this time. “Maybe we should have a private homecoming party,” she said.
He remembers driving with April down the alleys back to his place, stopping on the way at Bruno’s for a fifth of Bacardi and a cold six-pack of tonic water, and later, covering his kitchen table with Reynolds Wrap and laying out lines of coke. He remembers the plink of blood on foil when her nose began to bleed, and April calling from the bathroom, “Joe, where’s all the towels?”
“Forgot to pick them up at the Chink’s.”
“No towels, no sheets. Are you sure you live here? What’s in the fridge? Anything at all? I dread to look.”
They lay kissing on the bare mattress while darkness edged up his bedroom walls. How still the city sounded. Between shrieks of nighthawks, an accordion faintly wheezed from some open window. Joe’s bedroom window was open, too, and the breeze that tingled the blinds seemed blued with the glow of the new arc lights the city had erected. Before the mirror, April, streaked by the same glow, undid her ponytail. Mimicked by a reflection deep in the dark glass, she slipped her dress over her head. No Maidenform bra, she was naked. He came up behind her and bit her shoulders. He could see what appeared to be disembodied blue hands—his hands—cupping her luminous breasts. Otherwise he was a shadow. His thumb traced the tiny seagull flying across her breast. In the mirror it looked graceless, like an insignia a gang punk might have India-inked on his forearm. Her reflection appeared suddenly to surge to the surface of the glass, and he saw that the mirror was blemished with hairline fractures superimposed on her face like wrinkles. She flipped the dress she was still holding over the mirror as if to snuff a chemical reaction. It snuffed the residual light, and in the darkness he could feel something flying wildly around the room, and they lost their balance, banged off a wall, and fell to the bed. She took his cock, fit it in, then brought her hand, smelling of herself, to his lips.
