by Stuart Dybek
“Used to be,” Teo says.
With his long-neck beer bottle, Joe parts Teo’s open shirt to get a look at his tank top. “Who’d you fight as, the Blue Titman? Jesus, Mr. Zip, check the boobs out on this guy. That’s some beery-looking bosom you’re sporting, hombre. They squirt Hamm’s? This might be the best tit in Little Village.” Joe lights a smoke, offers one to Teo, who refuses. “Mr. Zip, hit me again, and Knockers here, too,” Joe says. He’s holding Teo’s glass so that Teo can’t turn it over. Zip pours and Joe takes a sip of beer. Then his hand snakes along the bar and into Teo’s bag of pretzels. Joe munches down a pretzel, and his hand snakes back for another, except this time it snakes inside Teo’s shirt for a quick feel before Teo pulls away.
Zip appears to be busy rinsing out a glass.
“Ever go home after a hard day’s wrestling and just spend a quiet evening getting some off yourself, or does there have to be a commitment first?” Joe asks. “I’m just fucking with you, friend. I used to love to watch wrestling when I was a kid. I didn’t know it was a fake. You know, I didn’t mind finding out Santa Claus was bullshit, but Gorgeous George and Zuma the Man from Mars—he wrestled in a mask, too—that hurt.”
“It’s not always fake,” Teo says.
“What fucken planet are you from? How do you think Gorgeous George could have done against Marciano? Would you consider a little private contest that wasn’t fixed?”
“I don’t wrestle anymore,” Teo says.
“See, but this may be my only chance to say I wrestled a pro. I’m just talking arm wrestling here,” Joe says, and assumes the position, with his elbow on the bar. “We’ll wrestle for a drink, or a twenty, or the world championship of the Zip Inn, whatever you want.”
“I’m retired,” Teo says.
“Come on,” Joe says, “beside experience you got forty pounds on me. If your friend Lefty can jump out of the bleachers and take on the Andy Frain ushers, you and me can have a friendly little match. Mr. Zip has winner. Left-handed, of course. You can referee, Mr. Zip, and hey, that little matter of business for today, let’s forget it. Another time, maybe. Who you betting on, or do you not bet on arm wrestling, either?”
“Twenty on El Kohlrabi,” Zip says.
Teo looks at Zip, surprised.
“Purely theoretical,” Zip, says, “but you can take him.”
“Purely,” Teo says, and smiles, then leans his arm on the bar and he and Joe Ditto clench hands.
“Una momento,” Joe says. He removes his sport coat and folds it over his gym bag, takes a puff of Pall Mall, then drops to the floor and does ten quick push-ups with a hand clap after each. “Needed to warm up.”
Teo removes his shirt to free up his shoulder. Both men, now in tank tops, clench hands again. Joe is still wearing his sunglasses, and his half-smoked cigarette dangles from his lip. Zip counts one, two, wrestle! and they strain against each other, muscle and tendon surfacing along their forearms. Joe gives slightly, then struggles back to even, seems to gain leverage, and gradually forces Teo’s arm downward.
The crowd at Wrigley is cheering, and Jack Brickhouse breaks into his home-run call: “Back she goes, back, back, way back …”
“Goddamn, come on, luchador,” Zip urges; his left hand slaps the bar with a force that sends the red clothespin flying off the sleeve folded over the stump of his right arm.
Gripping the edge of the bar with his left hand and grunting, Teo heaves his right arm up until it’s back even, but his surge of momentum stalls. He and Joe Ditto lean into each other. They’ve both begun to sweat, their locked hands are turning white, arms straining, faces close together, separated by the smoke of Joe’s dangling Pall Mall. “My friend,” Joe says from the side of his mouth, “you smell like pigeons.”
Out on the street, sirens wail as if every cop, ambulance, and fire truck in Little Village is rushing past. The lengthening ash of Joe’s cigarette tumbles to the bar. Joe spits out the butt, and it rolls across the bar top onto the floor, where Zip grinds it out. Their arms have begun trembling in time to each other, but neither budges. Teo turns his face from Joe and finds himself looking into the mirror. A man in a blue mask looks back reproachfully; he won’t allow another defeat. Teo closes his eyes and concentrates on breathing, resolved to ignore the pain, to welcome it, and to endure until Joe tires and he makes one last, desperate move. Teo knows that final assault will be a sign of weakness; if he can hold it off, he’ll win.
“From the land of sky blue waters” tom-toms from the TV, and Joe’s left hand slowly snakes across the bar to Teo’s tank top. At its touch, Teo pushes back harder, but Joe won’t give. His right arm resists Teo’s concentrated force while his left hand gently brushes, then fondles Teo’s chest.
“Got you where I want you now,” Joe says. “Cootchie-cootchie-coo, motherfucker.”
Our father figured that we’d want to see the sewer rat he’d captured, and he was right about that, so he waited to kill it until Mick and I came home. It was a Saturday in summer, and I’d taken Mick to the icy swimming pool at Harrison High. Our hair, towels, and the wet swimsuits we wore beneath our jeans still smelled of chlorine as we walked down the gangway into the sunny backyard where Sir had an enormous rat imprisoned in a glass canister. It had a wide-angled mouth and metal lid, the kind of rounded jar that’s often used for storing flour or sugar. The rat filled it up and behind the thick convex glass appeared distorted and even larger, with magnified beady eyes, buck teeth, handlike rodent feet, and a scaly bald tail. I looked for rabies foam around its whiskers. Sir had used the canister to store dago bombs. Every few weeks, he’d lift the sewer cover over the pipe in the basement, light a dago bomb, and drop it down the sewer. The echoey sewer amplified the explosion. Sir said the noise chased off rats. The fireworks from the canister were gone; I’d been planning to pilfer a few for Fourth of July, but I never saw them again. I don’t know what Sir did with them, or how he managed to catch the rat in the jar. I didn’t ask at the time, maybe because we were too involved with preparations for its execution.
My father had me take the garden hose and fill the large galvanized metal washtub that he always referred to in Polish as the balja. We used the balja for mixing cement and, sometimes, for rinsing the mud out of crayfish we caught with string and chicken livers at the Douglas Park lagoon. When the balja was brim full, Sir brought over the rat-in-a-jar, as we’d begun to call it. I stood on one side of the tub and Mick on the other. Mick had stripped down to his bathing suit and cowboy boots as if he planned a dip in the balja himself. He’d put on his cowboy hat and was holding his favorite toy, a cork-shooting shotgun. Mick’s toy box was an arsenal: matched six-shooters that shot caps, a Davy Crockett musket to go with a coonskin cap, squirt guns of various calibers, pirate swords and flintlock pistols, a Buck Rogers ray gun. They were mostly made of plastic, but not the shotgun. It had a blued metal barrel and a wooden stock, and broke at the center like a real shotgun. Breaking it was how one pumped it up enough to shoot the corks that came with it. If you jammed the muzzle into the dirt after a rain, it would shoot clots of mud. Holding the rat-in-a-jar with one hand on the bottom and the other on the lid, Sir lowered it into the balja. The rat looked worried. When the glass canister was entirely immersed, Sir slowly raised the metal lid so that water could seep in. Mick and I moved in closer on either side of him, trying to see. Sir lifted the lid a little more, and the rat shot straight up out of the tub and splashed back down into the water. Mick and I jumped back, but Sir grabbed the shotgun by the barrel out of Mick’s hand, and as the wet rat scrambled over the side of the washtub, Sir knocked it back into the water. “Da-dammit!” Sir yelled. He was thwacking at the balja, sending up swooshes of water, and the rat squirted out between blows and ran for the homemade board fence separating our yard from the woodpiles and uncooped chickens in Kashka’s yard next door. We scrambled after it, and Sir managed to hack the rat one more time as it squeezed through the fence and crawled off into a woodpile.
; We stood peering through the fence.
“Da-damn,” Sir muttered.
“My gun!” Mick said. Sir handed it back to him. “You ruined my gun.” A piece of the wooden stock had splintered off, and the connection between the barrel and stock was noticeably loose. One more good whack would have snapped it in two.
“Is that rat blood?” I said. There was a red, sticky smear along the side of the stock.
“I nailed it a couple good ones,” Sir said.
Mick dropped the shotgun as if it might be carrying rabies and walked away, fighting back tears.
For a week or so the shotgun lay in the back yard where Mick dropped it, rusting in rain, bleaching in sun. Finally, Mick forgave our father enough to pick up the gun again. The bloodstain was now a permanent feature of the splintered stock, and though the gun was the worse for wear, it had acquired a mystique it hadn’t had before its baptism in rat blood. It became Mick’s favorite toy all over again, the weapon he’d always take with him when he went down the alley to play guns with his best friend, JJ—short for Johnny Junior.
Johnny Senior was Johnny Sovereign.
When Johnny Sovereign was found dead in his own car, with a jockstrap on his face and his balls blown off, it was big news in the neighborhood, but Mick knew nothing about the specifics. My parents and I never discussed the murder openly at home. Mick had simply been told that it wasn’t a good time to go play at his friend JJ’s house, that he should wait until JJ called him. But Mick got bored waiting, so after a few days he decided to sneak over to JJ’s for a visit. He pulled on his cowboy boots, armed himself with the rat-blood shotgun, and snuck off down the alley. Alleys were secret thoroughfares for kids, and as long as Mick was sneaking away from our house, he decided he’d also sneak up on JJ. Surprise attack was one of their favorite games. He went past the garage where JJ’s father parked the yellow car, but the garage was empty. As always, pigeons hooted from inside. At the Sovereigns’ back fence, overgrown with morning glories and sizzling with bees, Mick paused, as he and JJ often did, to poke a finger inside a morning glory. He and JJ would pretend the flower was a socket, but unlike an electric socket, a morning glory was safe to stick your finger into. If you held it there long enough, you’d feel connected to the power coming through the tangled green wires of the vines.
Recharged with morning-glory power, Mick snuck past the back fence into the small patch of grassless back yard that led into a shadowy gangway. Instead of going to the back door, he sidled along the house, crouching under the back windows. He’d approached this way several times before to ambush JJ. He liked to catch JJ when he was least expecting it—still in his pajamas, eating Sugar Pops at the breakfast table.
The curtained kitchen window was partially opened, and Mick slowly rose and slid the barrel of the shotgun through the slit between the drawn curtains. He was into the make-believe of the game, and his heart pounded with a combination of tension and repressed laughter. When he heard the scream, he froze.
“Oh, God, no, please, please, I beg you,” a woman’s voice cried. “I don’t know anything about what Johnny did. Please, I won’t say anything. I have two little kids.” It was JJ’s mother, Vi, who’d always been nice to Mick. She was weeping hysterically, repeating, “Please, please, I wouldn’t recognize your voice, you never called, I don’t know who you are, it was all Johnny, for the love of Jesus, I’m begging you don’t, please, I’m still young.”
Mick will drop the shotgun and, crying hysterically himself, race through the alleys back home, but not before peering through a crack in the curtains and seeing JJ’s mother on her knees on the kitchen linoleum, tears streaming down her face as she pleads for her life, unaware perhaps that the straps of her yellow slip have slid down her shoulders, spilling forth my brother’s first glimpse of a woman’s naked breasts.
Blue Boy
Chester Poskozim’s younger brother, Ralphie, was born a blue baby, and though not expected to survive Ralphie miraculously grew into a blue boy. The blue was plainly visible beneath his blue-green eyes, smudges darker than shadows, as if he’d been in a fistfight or gotten into his mother’s mascara. Even in summer his lips looked cold. The first time I saw him, before I knew about his illness, I thought that he must have been sucking on a ballpoint pen. His fingers were smeared with the same blue ink.
On Sundays, the blueness seemed all the more prominent for the white shirt he wore to church. You could imagine that his body was covered with bruises, as if he was in far worse shape than Leon Szabo or Milton Pinero, whose drunken fathers regularly beat them. Unlike Szabo, who’d become vicious, a cat torturer, or Milton, who hung his head to avoid meeting your eyes and hardly ever spoke in order to hide his stammer, Ralphie seemed delighted to be alive. His smile, blue against his white teeth, made you grin back even if you hardly knew him and say, “Hey, how’s it going?”
“Going good.” Ralphie would nod, giving the thumbs-up.
When he made it to his eighth birthday, it was a big deal in our neighborhood, Little Village; it meant he’d get his wish, which was to make it to his First Holy Communion later that year, and whether Ralphie ever realized it or not, a lot of people celebrated with him. At corner taverns, like Juanita’s and the Zip Inn, men still wearing their factory steel-toes hoisted boilermakers to the Blue Boy. At St. Roman Church, women said an extra rosary or lit a vigil candle and prayed in English or Polish or Spanish to St. Jude, Patron of Impossible Causes.
And why not hope for the miracle to continue? In a way, Ralphie was what our parish had instead of a plaster statue of the Madonna that wept real tears or a crucified Christ that dripped blood on Good Friday.
For Ralphie’s birthday, I stopped by Pedro’s, the little candy store where we gathered on our way home from school whenever any of us had any money, and spent my allowance on a Felix the Cat comic, which I recalled had been my favorite comic book when I was eight, and gave it to his brother, Chester, to pass along.
Chester and I were in the same grade at St. Roman. We’d never really hung out together, though. He was a quiet guy, dressed as if his mother still picked out his clothes. He didn’t go in much for sports and wasn’t a brain either, just an average student who behaved himself and got his schoolwork done. If it wasn’t for his brother, the Blue Boy, no one would have paid Chester much attention, and probably I wouldn’t be remembering him now.
Looking back, I think Chester not only understood but accepted that his normal life would always seem inconsequential beside his little brother’s death sentence. He loved Ralphie and never tried to hide it. When Ralphie would have to enter the hospital, Chester would ask our class to pray for his brother, and we’d stop whatever we were doing to kneel beside our desks and pray with uncharacteristic earnestness. They were the same blood type, and sometimes Ralphie received Chester’s blood. Chester would be absent on those mornings and return to school in the afternoon with a Band-Aid over a vein and a pint carton of orange juice, with permission to sip it at his desk.
Outside the classroom, the two of them were inseparable. I’d see them heading home from Sunday mass, talking as if sharing secrets, laughing at some private joke. Once, passing by their house on Twenty-second Place, a side street whose special drowsy light came from having more than its share of trees, I noticed them sitting together on the front steps: Ralphie, leaning against his brother’s knees, his eyes closed, listening with what looked like rapture while Chester read aloud from a comic book. That was the reason I chose a comic as a gift instead of getting him something like bubble-gum baseball cards. His bruised, shivery-looking lips made me wonder if Ralphie was even allowed to chew gum.
The open affection between Chester and Ralphie wasn’t typical of the rough-and-tumble relationships between brothers in the neighborhood. Not that guys didn’t look out for their brothers, but there was often trouble between them, too. Across the street in the projects, Junior Gomez had put out the eye of his brother Nestor on Nestor’s birthday, playing Gunfight at the O.K. Cor
ral with Nestor’s birthday present, a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. In the apartment house just next door to ours, Terry Vandel’s baby brother, JoJo, wrapped in a blanket, fell from the second-story window to the pavement. Terry was supposed to have been baby-sitting for JoJo while their mother was at work. Mrs. Hobel, walking below, looked up to see the falling child. For weeks afterward, while JoJo was in the hospital with a fractured skull, Mrs. Hobel would break into tears repeating to anyone who would listen, “I could have caught him but I thought the other boy was throwing down a sack of garbage.”
As in the Bible, having a brother could be hazardous to your health.
For a while, the mention of twins or jealousy or even pizza would trigger a recounting of how, just across Western Avenue, in St. Michael’s parish, the Folloni twins, Gino and Dino—identically handsome, people said, as matinee idols—dueled one afternoon over a girl. It was fungo bat against weed sickle, until Gino went down and never got up. Dino, his face permanently rearranged, was still in jail. Their father owned Stromboli’s, a pizza parlor that was a mob hangout. Every time I’d ride my bike past the closed pizzeria on Oakley, and then past the sunken front yard where they’d fought, it would seem as if the street, the sidewalk, the light itself, had turned the maroon of an old bloodstain. I’d wonder how anyone knew for sure which twin had killed the other, if maybe it was really Dino who was dead and Gino doing time, ashamed to admit he was the one still alive. If they ever let him out, he’d go to visit his own grave to beg for forgiveness. Shadows the shade of mourning draped the brick buildings along that street, and finally I avoided riding there altogether.
Out on the streets, I kept an eye out for my brother, Mick, but at home our relationship was characterized by constant kidding and practical jokes that would sometimes escalate into fights. I was older and responsible for things getting out of control.
