I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  At the annual school talent show, where “Lady of Spain” pumped from accordions and virtuosos pounded “Heart and Soul” on the out-of-tune upright to the clatter of tap dancers, Camille would read an original poem written for the occasion. She wasn’t a dramatic reader, but there was something inherently dramatic about her standing before the boomy mike, without a costume or an instrument to hide behind, her eyes glued to the page while she read in a quiet, clear voice.

  I liked it when she read aloud because I could watch her without seeming to stare. I’d always been fascinated by the way her myopic eyes illuminated her thin face. Her long lashes drew attention like those on a doll. Beneath them, her liquid, dark eyes gazed out unblinking, serious, enormous. Her voice was colored with a slight Spanish accent. She spoke in a formal way that sounded as if she was cautiously considering each word in English, a language in which she was so fluent on the page. Her reserve made her seem older, though not physically older, like some of the boys who already had faint mustaches, guys like Brad Norky, who actually was older, having been held back. Once, at a talent show, I overheard two elderly women talking about the way Camille had read her poem about the ecstasy of St. Teresa.

  “She has an old soul,” one of the women observed, and the other said, “I know what you mean.”

  Even back then, in a way, I knew what she meant, too.

  From seventh grade on Camille wore rouge that looked artificial against the caramel shade of her skin and made her appear feverish. She got glasses that year: ivory-sparkle cat frames that matched the barrettes clamping back the thick black hair she’d previously worn in braids. She was no longer quite flatchested, though the rose-colored bra outlined beneath the white blouse of her school uniform hardly seemed necessary. She could have used braces.

  In seventh grade, a gang of us proudly calling ourselves the Insane Fuckups would sneak off at lunch to our boys’ club—the doorway of an abandoned dry cleaner’s where we’d smoke Luckies, spit, and discuss things like the rumor that some of the girls were washing their school blouses over and over to make the fabric thin in order to show off their underclothes. I made the mistake of mentioning that even Camille Estrada’s bra was showing, and, as if dumbfounded, Norky asked, “No shit? Estrada has titties! You think she might have a hairy pussy, too?” Then he burst into mocking laughter.

  Even my best friend, Angel Falcone, couldn’t resist breaking up. “Instead of BB’s she’s got bb’s—bbitas,” he said, making his voice tiny. “Hey, maybe she’ll publish the news in her paper.”

  “Headline!” Norky shouted. “Stop the presses!” and with the chalk he carried to graffiti up our doorway, he printed in huge letters on the sidewalk: ESTRADA HAS bb’s.

  He chalked it on the graffitied tunnel wall of the viaduct on Rockwell, and along the bricks of the buildings we passed, and on the asphalt of the street where the little girls drew hopscotch courts alongside the school. It was one of those phrases that inexplicably catches on, and for the next couple of weeks it was everywhere—in the boys’ bathroom, at the Washtenaw playground, on the concrete basketball court at the center of the projects: ESTRADA HAS bb’s.

  In class, when I’d sneak a glance at her, it seemed her rouged cheeks burned, but perhaps that was only a projection of my secret shame.

  Near the end of seventh grade, my desk was moved out into the corridor, where I was banished after topping one hundred demerits in conduct. Then, our teacher that year, Sister Mary Donatille—the only nun who insisted we say the Mary in her name—introduced Partners in Christ. It was an experimental program, borrowing, perhaps, from AA, in that it teamed habitual bad boys with sponsors—good girls—so as to give the boys a taste of the rewards of behaving. I can’t say what it was for the girls, torture probably; for the boys it was a subtle form of humiliation. Camille was assigned to be my Partner in Christ.

  At St. Roman, two kinds of kids stayed after school, those in detention and the teachers’ pets who were invited to help the nuns clean the classrooms. Detention time was spent copying chapters from the New Testament, but thanks to Sister Mary Donatille’s experiment, instead of rewriting the Apocalypse, I got to clean the blackboard erasers with Camille. It was an honorary task: only pets were entrusted to take the erasers out behind the school and beat them clean against the wall. Although I’d been reassigned a seat beside Camille in class, we still hadn’t spoken. We stood together, engulfed in chalk dust and an uncomfortable silence relieved only by the muffled thud of felt against brick. In blocky chalk impressions I pounded out F-U-

  “I really like your vocabulary,” Camille said.

  “Real funny.”

  “No, I mean it,” she said. “You have a neat imagination.”

  I looked at her, too puzzled to respond. I didn’t know if she was putting me down or putting me on or applying some kind of condescending psychology, or if she was just spacey.

  “That story you wrote for Christmas. About the ant. It was so cool. I wanted to publish it in the paper, but it was too long.”

  She was referring to “The Enormous Gift,” which I’d written back in sixth grade for the Christmas competition. I frequently missed getting my homework in, but I’d found myself writing the story with an excited concentration I hadn’t associated with schoolwork. The assignment that year had been to write a story about a gift brought to the baby Jesus in his stable at Bethlehem. In my story, the gift was a crumb of bread that weighed a thousand times more than my narrator, an ant, but he hoisted it nonetheless, and after narrow escapes involving spiders, sparrows, the hooves of oxen, and soles of sandals, he finally crept into the manger to offer his gift.

  “After you read it I kept thinking about it and saw what you meant,” Camille said. “How it was like a little miracle for the ant to bring the first bread to Jesus, who’d later make the big miracles of the loaves and fishes, and turn bread and wine into his body and blood.”

  I’d never thought about any of that. To me it was just the adventure of an ant.

  “The Enormous Gift” had been chosen to be read aloud in class, but it didn’t win the school competition. Camille won with “O Little Star of Centaurus,” a story in which the Christmas star was revealed to be a spaceship in the shape of a winged horse. I couldn’t help visualizing it as the fiery red Pegasus trademark for Mobil gasoline. It had traveled from the constellation Centaurus, where light-years ago Christ had appeared to redeem an advanced but brutal race of hooved aliens. The Centaurians, now converted to brotherhood and peace, had learned that Christ was traveling through the universe, redeeming world after world, and so in homage they followed him through time and space to witness each reappearance. The gleam of their ship was the star that guided the Wise Men, who in each new world came bringing gifts on each new night of Christ’s infinitely repeated birth.

  “Your story knocked my socks off,” I said, not adding that, ever since I’d heard her read it, I’d wondered if the Christ on Centaurus had hooves like the other Centaurians. Her story didn’t say, but it posed problems for his crucifixion.

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I thought yours should have won.”

  “No way. They should make yours into a movie. How’d you make that up?”

  “How’d you think of the ant?”

  “I don’t know. I like to read about bugs and stuff,” I said, not mentioning how during the summers I’d sneak off down the railroad tracks to the Sanitary Canal, where I hid a homemade net for collecting butterflies.

  “I never purposely try to make things up,” Camille said, sounding suddenly proper, the way she did when she spoke in class. “It just happens. It’s not about made-up anyway, it’s about feeling.”

  She looked at me for agreement, but the transformation in her voice put me on guard.

  “It’s about feeling, you know?” she repeated. “That’s what’s important,” she insisted, as if I’d disagreed.

  She went back to cleaning the erasers, clapping them together like cymbals, the poofs of chalky
smoke surrounding her bronzed by the rays that shafted through the clouds massed over the convent. She stared at the two chalk-dust letters I’d pounded on the bricks, and back at me, then beat in a blocky C.

  “Want to collaborate?” she asked.

  I stood there, confused again, refusing to admit to myself that she intimidated me, but feeling hopelessly immature beside her all the same.

  “So, come on,” she said and beat out the slanted upper bar of the missing K.

  I beat an impression of the straight staff. She added the lower slanted bar. Not much chalk remained on the erasers, and they left only the faded ghost of the word. I became conscious that my heart was beating.

  She read our collaboration aloud as if it were composed of air flowing across her overbite, as if a whisper re-created its faintness on the bricks.

  “Don’t look so surprised. You don’t know what I think,” she said, then added, “I have stories I don’t show anyone.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t think someone should be blamed for stories any more than they should have to confess their dreams. Boys don’t have to confess their dreams. Do you?”

  It was something I’d never thought about, and I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. If she was referring to wet dreams, they were something I’d yet to experience. Later, in high school, I’d think back to the two of us behind the school and realize that was what she probably meant, but at the time all I did was shrug.

  She hunched her skinny shoulders, mimicking me. “Maybe I’d tell you if I thought you could keep a secret,” she said.

  “Sure I can;” I told her.

  “It would have to be a trade. First you have to tell me something you want me to keep secret.”

  “What if I don’t have a secret?”

  “Everybody has. But if you’re an exception then make one up.”

  I knew that collecting butterflies wasn’t the kind of secret she was after. Even at the time, it seemed strange to me that we’d been in school together for years and hardly talked and now suddenly we were having a conversation of the kind I’d never had before with a girl or anyone, a conversation that, whether Camille knew it or not, was already a secret I would keep. I laughed as a way out of answering.

  “What do you have to do penance for?” she asked.

  “You mean the old five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys?” I said. In my experience that was the penance no matter what you confessed. I didn’t know if it was the same for girls or not.

  Camille looked at me unamused. “Have you ever written a story that was a sin, one you had to do penance for?”

  “Penance for a story?”

  She gathered the erasers into an unbalanced stack and turned to go inside, leaving me to pick up the erasers that dropped behind her. “You’re a big help,” she said sarcastically but added, “Honest. I knew you weren’t a loser.”

  That night, I went to sleep thinking about her—another secret—and looking forward to the following day, when we’d go out together to beat the erasers. I didn’t know what I’d tell her, but I’d tell her something. But next morning, during the Pledge of Allegiance, before class even began, Diane Kunzel, Norky’s Partner in Christ, let out a scream. Norky had Magic-Markered a smiley face on a white sausage-shaped balloon he’d worked through his open fly as if exposing himself. Sister Mary Donatille attacked him, slashing at his greasy d.a. haircut and stabbing at his balloon with the pointer she used during geography when she stood before the pull-down map that was green for Christian countries and pink for Communist ones. Partners in Christ came to a bitter end that morning.

  “Don’t cry, girls, these boys would try the patience of an angel,” Sister Mary Donatille said.

  Camille wasn’t crying. She showed her teeth in a quick, regretful overbite smile and fluttered her fingers goodbye as I packed up. We boys were reassigned to seats at the perimeter of class, and for the remainder of seventh grade I never really spoke with Camille again.

  But I still thought about her when in eighth grade we were asked to write our last Christmas composition and dedicate it to Ralphie. I wanted to write a story, not a composition, one that would be read aloud, so that Camille would hear it.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a story to write. I wanted a story that came out of nowhere, one I could get excited about the way I had when I’d written from the viewpoint of an ant, although writing about an ant seemed wimpy now. Sister Lucy had made it clear that dedicating our compositions to Ralphie didn’t mean we were to write about him. Simply writing, as usual, about the true meaning of Christmas was all that was required. Yet, when I thought about Ralphie, already dead a year, tales about an ant or a red-nosed reindeer or a snowman come to life seemed the childish fantasies of a daydreamer, a term my father applied to me when he was feeling particularly contemptuous of my behavior.

  “You better wake up and smell the coffee,” he’d warn.

  Getting desperate, I tried to write a story my father had told once about the first Christmas he’d spent as a child after his father had been sent to the state mental hospital, and how on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve he met a boy named Teddy Kanik, who became his best friend for life. It wasn’t like any story my father had told me before. He told it after I’d accused him of being a Scrooge because of his cheapskate way of shopping for a Christmas tree. Before I could get to the story as my father told it to me, it seemed necessary to explain the annual ordeal that shopping with him for a Christmas tree had become. Each Christmas season, Mick and I would trudge after him from one tree lot to another in the cold. He was a comparison shopper. He insisted we drag along a sled for hauling back the tree, the way we had when we were little kids. Mick and I would argue over who got stuck pulling the old red Flexible Flyer, its rusted runners rattling over the partially shoveled sidewalks. It had become our family tradition—a terribly embarrassing one. My father loved to bargain, and everything, including the way he’d browse the rows of Christmas trees, shaking his head at their overpriced and undernourished condition, was part of a master strategy. His opening gambit on anything he bought, Christmas trees not excluded, was always the phrase “So how much you soak for it …”

  That phrase was as far as I got in writing my father’s story, because it occurred to me that if the story was read aloud in class, it would be as embarrassing as shopping for a tree with my father. Worse, each sentence I wrote about the shopping seemed to take me further away from the story as my father told it, and I knew why I was disgressing, treating it as a joke: his story about meeting Teddy Kanik one Christmas Eve so long ago depressed me. It seemed to have happened in a different world—the Chicago where my father had grown up as an immigrant, only blocks away but in an alternative universe, one forever sunk in a Great Depression. That wasn’t a feeling I wanted to bring into a class where I had a reputation to uphold as a clown. I thought about Camille confiding that she’d written stories she kept secret, and realized my father’s story was better kept a secret, too.

  By now it was late. I probably would have given up if all I’d wanted was to impress Camille, but writing a story was the only way I could imagine communicating with her. Despite what Sister Lucy had said about simply writing about the meaning of Christmas, I didn’t seem able to concentrate on a story dedicated to Ralphie if he wasn’t in it, so I tried writing about the funeral.

  I hadn’t ridden in the line of cars that left for the cemetery after Ralphie’s requiem mass, but I’d stood on the church steps and watched the confusion of spinning tires and men in dark topcoats rocking a hearse piled with snow and flowers out of a rut along the curb. Then, the taillights of the cortege slowly disappeared down Washtenaw into a whiteout. I envisioned their headlights burrowing through the blizzard as they followed the hearse up Milwaukee Avenue, way out to the Northwest Side, where I imagined the snow was even deeper. I’d heard how, when they finally reached St. Adalbert Cemetery, they had trouble finding the grave site. In my story, the drifts were so deep that all b
ut the crosses of the tallest monuments were buried. In that expanse of white, it was impossible to find Ralphie’s plot, but as the procession of cars wound along a plowed road, they came to a place I described as “an oasis of green in a Sahara of snow.” There, gaping from exposed grass, was a freshly dug grave. At my grandfather Mike’s funeral I’d noticed a robin with a worm in its beak fly from his open grave, so in my story birds—robins, doves, seagulls—flew out of the hole as if a cage door had opened, and circled cawing overhead. When I reread that sentence, I scratched out “robins” and wrote in “blue jays.” Only after the graveside service did snow drift over Ralphie’s plot, which was marked—as I’d heard it actually was—with a simple gray stone that made no mention of his being a blue boy. But in my story, when the snow melted in spring, his gravestone had turned blue. I tried different shades: turquoise, cornflower, Prussian, all the blues in a giant 104 box of Crayolas. None seemed right.

  It was long past my bedtime. Mick had gone to sleep in the room we shared, where I’d been writing cross-legged on my bed, so I’d relocated to the kitchen table. My father looked in on me before he turned in, obviously amazed to see me slaving over homework.

  “Don’t burn that midnight oil too late, sonnyboy,” he cautioned.

  Quiet in our flat was when the motor of the refrigerator grew audible. I could hear its hum, and the toilet trickling, the crinkle of cooling radiators and, from down the hall, a harmonica, maybe Shakey Horton or Junior Wells still faintly playing on the bedroom radio tuned to the black rhythm and blues station that Mick and I listened to on the sly before we went to sleep.

  “I’m going down to the basement and put my blue light on,” Sam Evans, the DJ, would announce at midnight.