I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  Joe remembers all that, but none of it—the booze, the coke, the Demerol, the waking up repeatedly in the dark already fucking —explains how it can be afternoon, or what her morning-glory dress is doing left behind. He yanks the dress off the mirror and is surprised to find a crack zigzagging down the center. Maybe it was the mirror they’d staggered into. He staggers into the kitchen and washes down a couple of painkillers with what’s left in a bottle of flat tonic water, then palms Old Spice onto his face and under his arms, tugs on his clothes, and dials Sovereign’s number. He knows it’s not a good idea to be calling from his place, but that can’t be helped. When Vi answers on the third ring, he asks, “Johnny there?”

  “He’ll be home around four,” she says. “Can I tell him who’s calling?”

  Joe hangs up.

  From the closet, he digs out a gym bag stuffed with dirty gym gear and canvas gloves for hitting the heavy bag. He lifts the mirror from the bedroom wall, bundles it up in the dress, totes it into the alley, and sets it beside the garbage cans, then throws the gym bag into the Bluebird. Joe drives down the alleys, formulating a plan for how to get the shotgun into Sovereign’s car. Off Twenty-fifth, he scatters a cloud of pigeons and nearly sideswipes a blind old bag lady in a babushka and dark glasses who’s feeding them. When he pulls up behind Sovereign’s, Joe can smell the baking motor oil spotting the floorboards of the empty garage. Demerol tends to heighten his sense of smell. Wind rustling down the alley leaves an aftertaste of rotten food and the mildewed junk people throw away. He makes sure the alley is empty, then slips the sawed-off shotgun from under the seat and buries it in the gym bag, beneath his workout gear. The scotch bottle rests on top, and when he zips up the bag, the ghost of old gym sweat transforms into a familiar fragrance.

  Marisol stands in the alley as if she’s emerged from the morning glories. She has a white flower in her auburn hair. Her perfume obliterates the scent of pigeons, garbage, and motor oil he’s come to associate with Johnny Sovereign. She’s dressed in white cotton X-rayed by sunlight: a shirt opened a button beyond modest, tied in a knot above her exposed navel, and white toreador pants. The laces of the wedged shoes he used to call her goddess sandals snake around her ankles. Her oversize shades seem necessary to shield her from her own brightness.

  “See you’re still driving the B-bird,” she says, sauntering to the car. “That’s cute how you name your cars. Kind of boyish of you, Joe, though when you first told me your car had a name, know what? I thought, Oh no, don’t let this be one of those pathetic wankers who names his penis, too. Hey, I like the color coordination with the sport coat. That splash pattern is perfect for eating spaghetti with tomato sauce. Recognize this shirt? It’s yours. Want it back?”

  She still speaks in the fake accent that when they first met had Joe believing she was from London. He’s not sure he’s ever heard her real voice, if she has one. He’d heard she broke her Audrey Hepburn neck in Europe when she blew off the back of some Romeo’s BSA on the Autobahn. Who starts these rumors about dead babes? Maybe Sal told him; Sal’s a know-it-all with a rep for spreading bullshit. Well, fucking allora, Sallie, if a very much alive Marisol, trailing perfume, doesn’t get into the Bluebird, help herself to a smoke from the pack on the dash, and ask, “Know where a girl can get a drink around here?”

  Joe unzips the gym bag, hands her the bottle of scotch, and she asks as if she already knows, “What else you got in that bag, Joe?”

  “Whataya mean, what else? Gym stuff.”

  “Whew! Smells like your athletic supporter’s got balls of scomorza,” Marisol says. “But what do I know about the secret lives of jockstraps.”

  Joe looks at her and laughs. She always could break him up, and not many beautiful women dare to be clowns. Capri was funny like that, too, and no matter who he’s with he misses her. Where’s Capri now, with who, and are they laughing? Marisol laughs, then quenches her laughter with a belt of scotch and turns to be kissed, and Joe kisses her, expecting the fire of alcohol to flow from her mouth into his, but it’s just her tongue sweeping his.

  “What?” Marisol says.

  “I thought you were going to share.”

  “Dahlink,” she says in her Zsa Zsa accent, “you don’t remember I’m a swallower?”

  Joe remembers. Remembers a blow job doing eighty down the Outer Drive on the first night he met her at the Surf, a bar on Rush where she worked as a cocktail waitress; remembers the improv theater he’d go see her in at a crummy little beatnik space in Old Town where sometimes there were more people onstage than in the audience; just say something obscene about Ike or Nixon or McCarthy and you’d get a laugh—shit, he laughed, too. He remembers the weekend right after he got the Bluebird when they dropped its top and drove the dune highway along the coast of Indiana to Whitey’s so-called chalet on the lake, water indigo to the horizon, and night lit by the foundries in Gary.

  “So, luvvy, is here where we’re spending our precious time?” Marisol asked, turning on the radio.

  Joe shifted through the gears as if the alleys were the Indianapolis Speedway and pulled up to Bruno’s. He left Marisol in his idling car, singing along with Madame Butterfly on the opera station, while he ran in for a fifth of Rémy, her drink of choice, then brought her back to his place.

  “Where’s all the sheets and towels?” she asked. “Joe, how the bloody hell can you live like this?”

  “They’re at the Chink’s. I been meaning to get them, but I been busy.”

  “You better watch it before you turn into an eccentric old bachelor, luv. I think maybe you’re missing a woman’s touch.”

  That was all she had to say, touch, and they were on the bare mattress.

  Her blouse, an old white shirt of his, came undone, and he pressed his face to her breasts, anointed with layers of scent, lavender, jasmine, areolas daubed with oil of bergamot, nipples tipped with a tincture of roses. He recalled the single time she’d invited him to her place on Sedgwick and how, in her bedroom, a dressing table cluttered with vials and stoppered bottles smelled like a garden and looked like the laboratory of a witch. Touch, she said, and he straddled her rib cage, thrusting slicked with a bouquet of sweat, spit, and sperm between perfumed breasts she mounded together with her hands. A woman’s touch.

  When he woke with Marisol beside him it was night and his room musky with her body—low tide beneath the roses. An accordion was playing. It sounded close, as if someone in the alley below was squeezing out a tune from long ago. “Hear that?” he asked, not sure she was awake.

  “They’re loud enough to wake the dead,” Marisol said. “When I was little I used to think they were bats and their squawks were the sonar they flew by.”

  “I didn’t mean the nighthawks,” Joe said. “Those new mercury vapor lights bring the bugs and the bugs bring the birds. Supposed to cut down muggings. Or at least line the pockets of a few contractors. I had to buy fucking venetian blinds to sleep.”

  “You need earplugs, too,” Marisol said. She rose from the dark bed and crossed through the streaky bluish beams, then raised the blinds. The glare bestowed on her bare body the luster of a statue. “Liking the view in the vapor lights?” she asked. “Ever think of a window as an erogenous zone?”

  “Always the exhibitionist,” Joe said. “But why not? You’re beautiful as a statue.”

  “Statues are by nature exhibitionists, even when they’ve lost their arms or boobs or penises. Where’s your mirror? I want to watch statues doing it in mercury vapor.”

  “No mirror.”

  “You don’t have a mirror? Don’t tell me—it’s at the Chink’s.”

  “It’s in the alley.”

  “That’s a novel place to keep it. I may be an exhibitionist but I’m not going to screw in the alley.”

  “It’s broken.”

  “Seven years’ bad luck, Joe. Poor unlucky bloke doesn’t get to watch the statues with their shameless minds.”

  “Allora!” Joe said. “It’s not that broke.�
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  He went down the back stairs into the alley. The mirror was still where he’d set it beside a trash can. April’s morning-glory dress was gone; some size-six bag lady must have had a lucky day. The mirror no longer appeared to be cracked, as if it had healed itself. It reflected an arc light. Nighthawks screeched. No one was playing an accordion in the alley, not that Joe thought there would be, but he could still hear it, a song he’d heard as a child, something about blackbirds doing the tango that his grandpa played on Sundays when he’d accompany scratchy 78s on his red accordion. Joe listened, trying to identify the open window from which the song wafted. Every window was dark. The music was coming from his window. He saw the flare of a lighter, and a silhouette with its head at an awkward angle, gazing silently down at him.

  Marisol was still at the window, smoking a reefer, her back to him, when he returned to the room. “You didn’t get mugged. See, those new streetlights must be doing their job,” she said.

  He propped the mirror against the wall.

  “I’ll share,” she said, and exhaled smoke into his mouth. He felt her breath smoldering along the corridors of his mind. She handed him the reefer, and the crackle of paper as he inhaled echoed off the ceiling. “That paper’s soaked in hash oil,” she said. The accordion pumped louder, as if it tangoed in the next room. Lyrics surfaced in his mind and dissolved back into melody. “E nell’oscurita ognuno vuol godere … in the darkness everyone wants pleasure.” When he opened his eyes, he could see in the dark. “L’amor non sa tacere … love can’t keep silent …” She was in his arms, and he smoothed his hands over her shoulders, down her spine, over her hips, lingering on and parting the cheeks of her sculpted ass.

  “Have any oil?” she whispered.

  “What kind of oil?”

  “Like you don’t want me that way. Almond oil, baby oil, bath oil, Oil of Olay, Vaseline if that’s all you got.”

  “Hoppe’s Number Nine,” he said.

  “That’s a new one on me.”

  He gestured with the reefer to the bottle in the ashtray next to the Old Spice on the bureau top. She picked it up and sniffed. By the lighter’s flame, she read the label aloud: “‘Do not swallow. Solvent frees gun bores of corrosive primer fouling and residue. Preserves accuracy.’ Jesus, Joe! Don’t you have some good, old-fashioned olive oil? What-a kinda Day-Glo are you?”

  “Maybe in the kitchen,” Joe said.

  Brandishing the lighter like a torch, she went to the kitchen. Joe waited on the bed, listening to the accordion playing with the mesmerizing intensity that marijuana imparts to music … “Love can’t keep silent and this is its song … la canzon di mille capinere … the song of a thousand blackbirds …” when Marisol screamed. “God, what am I stepping in? What’s leaking out of your fridge, Joe? You have a body in there?”

  Wounded wing, how strange to fall from blue. Like a fish that suddenly forgets the way to swim. When men fly, they know, by instinct, they defy. But to a bird, as to a god, nothing’s more natural than sky …

  Needing somewhere to think about the words forming to a nonstop percussion in his mind, not to mention needing a cold brew, Teo gimps out of daylight into the Zip Inn. A slab of sunshine extends from the doorway. Beyond it, the dimness of the narrow, shotgun barroom makes the flowing blue water of the illuminated Hamm’s beer sign on the back wall look like a mirage. The TV screen flickers with white static that reflects off the photos of the local softball teams that decorate the walls. Teo doesn’t remove his dark glasses. Zip, the folded right sleeve of his white shirt fastened with a yellow clothespin, stands behind the bar before a bottle of whiskey and raises a shot glass.

  “Qué pasa, amigo!” Zip says, a little loudly given there’s just the two of them.

  “Nada, hombre.” Teo is surprised to see him drinking alone in the afternoon, an occupational hazard of bartending to which Zip has always seemed immune.

  “Knee acting up? Have one with me,” Zip says, filling a second shot glass.

  “What’s the occasion?” Teo hooks his cane on the lip of the bar, carefully sets the bowling bag he’s carrying onto a stool, and eases onto the stool beside it.

  “Today is Thursday,” Zip says, “and if you ask me, and I know nobody did, Thursday’s a reason for celebrating.”

  “To Thursday,” Teo says. “Salud!”

  “Na zdrowie,” Zip answers. He draws a couple of beer chasers.

  “Let me get the beers,” Teo says, laying some bills on the bar. Zip ignores his money. After a meditative swallow, Teo asks, “TV broke?”

  “No game today,” Zip says. “Giants are in tomorrow. You work Goldblatt’s?”

  “No, Leader Store,” Teo says. He pushes a dollar at Zip. “At least let me buy a bag of pretzels.”

  “I heard Leader’s is going under. Any shoplifters even there to pinch?” Zip asks, ringing up the pretzels.

  “A kid in Pets trying to steal one of those hand-painted turtles. A pink polka-dotted turtle.”

  “Give him the full nelson?” Zip asks.

  “Only the half nelson. He was just a grade-schooler.”

  “I think the dress disguise actually reduces your effectiveness, my friend. I mean, if there was a problem in my tavern, you know, say, theoretically speaking, somebody pocketing eggs—”

  “The eggs are free,” Teo says.

  “Then pretzels. Say I got a problem with some pretzel sneakthief, so I hire you and you’re sitting here, supposedly undercover, in a polka-dot dress wearing a wig and dark glasses and a cane and maybe smoking a cigar. I mean, you wouldn’t be fooling nobody. It might be a deterrent, but not a disguise. You might as well be sitting there in your secret wrestler’s getup. Whatever the hell it is.”

  “Amigo, you really want to see the wrestler’s outfit?”

  “Why not?” Zip says. “Liven things up. This place could use a little muscle.”

  “You’d be disappointed. And, by the way, it was the turtle with the polka dots, not the dress.”

  Lately, Teo has been stopping at the Zip Inn on weekday afternoons when the bar is mostly empty. Zip seems to know when Teo is in a mood to sit scribbling or simply to sink into his own thoughts, and he leaves him alone then, but other times they swap stories. Zip has told Teo hilarious tales of the world-record muskies he’s lost, and Teo, trying to make his story funny, too, told Zip how his knee was injured when he was thrown from the ring onto the pavement during an outdoor wrestling match.

  “You mean like those masked wrestlers when they set up a ring on Nineteenth Street for Cinco de Mayo?” Zip had asked. “What are they called?”

  “Luchadores,” Teo told him.

  “So, you’re a … luchador … with a secret masked identity?” Zip had sounded genuinely curious.

  “Not anymore,” Teo had answered.

  Now, from the bowling bag, Teo pulls the hem of the dress he dons occasionally as part of his store security job. It’s the dress they gave him when he began working for Goldblatt’s—blue paisley, not polka dots—and, contrary to Zip’s wisecracks, Teo has caught so many shoplifters that he’s begun moonlighting at Leader Store on his days off.

  “Yeah, this one is more you,” Zip says, fingering the fabric, then asks, “What the hell else you got in there?”

  Teo lifts out the pigeon.

  This morning, he tells Zip, on his way to work he found the pigeon, a blue checker cock—columba affinis—dragging its wounded wing down an alley, and took it with him to Leader’s, where he kept it in an empty parrot cage in Pets and fed it water and the hemp seed he carries with him as a treat for his own birds. Teo thinks of it as the Spanish pigeon. He doesn’t mention the message, in Spanish, that he found tied to its unbanded leg.

  “So it ain’t one of your birds?” Zip asks.

  “No.” Teo shakes his head. He’s told Zip how he keeps a palomar, a pigeon loft, on the roof of the three-story building on Blue Island Avenue where he rents a room, but he hasn’t told Zip about the messages arriving there.
Teo hasn’t told anyone but the sax player, and he’s gone missing. Over the last month, Teo’s pigeons have been coming home with scraps of paper fastened with red twine to their banded legs. The first message arrived on a misty day, attached to the leg of one of his bronzed archangels. It wasn’t Teo who first noticed it but the sax player, Lefty Antic, who practiced his saxophone on the roof. Teo untied the message, and he and Lefty read the smeared ink: “Marlin.”

  “Mean anything to you?” Lefty Antic had asked.

  “Just a big fish, man,” Teo had told him.

  “Maybe it’s his name, Marlin the Pigeon,” Lefty Antic said.

  “No,” Teo said. “They don’t tell us their names.”

  The next morning, slipped under his door, Teo found two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp bills rubber-banded in a folded page from a Sportsman’s Park harness-racing form with “Merlin” circled in the fourth race and a note that read, “Thanks for the tip. Lefty.”

  Teo saved the winnings and the message in a White Owl cigar box. A few days later, out of a drizzle, a second, barely legible message arrived fastened to one of his racing homers. As far as Teo could tell, it read: “Tibet.” He took the message and half his winnings and knocked on Lefty Antic’s door. There was no answer, and Teo had turned to go when the door opened, emitting the smell of marijuana. The sax player looked hungover, unshaven, eyes bloodshot, and Teo was sorry he’d disturbed him, but Lefty Antic insisted he come in. Together they studied the harness races in the newspaper and found a seven-to-one shot named Tidbit in the fifth race. There was also a buggy driver, J. Tippets, racing in the third and eighth races. Lefty decided they’d better bet both the horse and the driver and went to book it with Johnny Sovereign.

  That night Teo had a dream in which his cousin Alaina was riding him. She hadn’t aged—the same bronze-skinned, virgin body he had spied on through the birdshit-splattered skylight on the roof in El Paso where his uncle, Jupo, kept a palomar. Uncle Jupo had taken him in when Teo was fourteen after his mother had run off with a cowboy. It became Teo’s job to care for his uncle’s pigeons. He was seventeen when Uncle Jupo caught him on the roof with his trousers open, spying on Alaina in her bath. His uncle knocked him down and smashed Teo’s face into the pebbled roof as if trying to grind out his eyes, then sent him packing with eight dollars in his pocket. In the dream, Alaina still looked so young that Teo was ashamed to have dreamed it. The pain of her love bites woke him at dawn, and even after waking, his nipples ached from the fierce way her small teeth had pulled at his body, as if his flesh was taffy. Waiting under his door was an envelope with eight hundred dollars and a note: “It was the driver. Thanks, Lefty.”