I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  What blue was that gravestone emerging from the dirty snow in spring? As blue as the blue light in Sam Evans’s basement? The ghostly blue of Blue Island rising from the lake? Or the cold blue of the lake itself? Norky once described it as “turn-your-balls-blue” in an oral presentation. For a time after that we referred to Lake Michigan as Lake Blueballs.

  It had actually offended Camille. “Sometimes people look but don’t see what’s beautiful all around us, like the lake,” she wrote in To Change the World. “It’s a melted glacier, an Ice Age turned to sweet water. I love its taste.”

  I slipped my jacket on and went out the back way and walked down the alley that led to an Ice Age so fierce the air felt crystallized, as if the snow tailing off the roofs might be flecks of frozen oxygen. It took a conscious effort to inhale its sharpness, yet instead of cursing the cold, I had a thought that maybe the purpose of winter was to make you realize with every breath that you were alive and wanted to stay that way. I thought about Ralphie and the other kids I knew who already were dead, some from accidents, some, like Peanuts Bizzaro, murdered. Peanuts had seemed indestructible. In winter, we’d all go to watch him fight at the steamy Boys’ Club gym. He was a boxer who’d prided himself on not getting hit. He made boxing something daringly beautiful, like diving off a high board. One night I stood in an audience of guys outside the Cyclone fence surrounding the warehouse lot on Rockwell—a lot with floodlights mounted too high to bust with rocks—where Peanuts was dancing, jabbing, throwing combinations, and repeating, “I’m fast, I’m flashy,” though under those lights and the bluish shadows they threw he appeared to move in slow motion as he methodically beat the piss out of a much beefier kid from the Ambros. The kid, called Dropout by the gang buddies cheering him on, had wanted to box at the Boys’ Club, but he was obviously heavier than Peanuts’s welterweight class, and when the boxing coach refused to let them put the gloves on, Peanuts offered to take it outside. Dropout wasn’t even trying to box anymore. He was grabbing and kicking, and Peanuts was nicking him with his fists, calm and cool as a matador, asking, “Am I fast or what?” Then, from outside the fence, came a single pop that echoed off the stacks of oil drums. Guard still up, Peanuts went down to one knee. Dropout kicked him over, then scaled the fence and took off with his buddies.

  Peanuts tried to climb the fence but slid back. Out of nowhere, his older brother, Tony, came running and nearly cleared the eight-foot fence in a jump. He wrapped his Levi’s jacket around Peanuts, who was shivering, turning blue under the lighting, and repeating, “No fair, no fucken fair.”

  Ralphie never had a fighting chance. I thought of him, and of Peanuts, of Gino Folloni and the others all buried under earth frozen too hard to break with a spade. They couldn’t feel the cold because they were the cold. Maybe they could hear the wind, but they couldn’t see how even colder than earth the boulder of moon looked through the flocked branches of back yard trees. I stopped, made a snowball, hurled it, and the snow knocked from the tree maintained the shape of branches in midair for a moment before disintegrating. I wasn’t wearing gloves, and my hands burned numb. Suddenly, I felt choked up, and I started to run as if I could outrun the feeling—which, in fact, was what I did, sprinting down three blocks of alleys without stopping to check the cross streets for traffic, but there weren’t any cars and finally, when my nostrils and lungs felt at once frostbitten and on fire and I could no longer remember why I was running or if there even was a reason, I stopped and turned around, jogging home under streetlights that looked as if they, too, should have been exhaling steam.

  The kitchen was filled with a dizzying warmth. It would have felt warm if the only sources of heat were the overhead light and the humming refrigerator motor. There, on the gray Formica table, lay my smeary blue ballpoint pen and three-holed loose-leaf papers, my story, and the scratch paper on which I’d listed various kinds of blue. I tried to reread my story and couldn’t. The only thing left to make it feel right was to compress it in both hands like a snowball before throwing it into the trash bag under the sink.

  Everyone handed in compositions but Chester and me. Sister Lucy didn’t say anything to Chester, but she told me to sign my name on a blank sheet of paper, title it “Christmas Composition,” and below that to write “Dedicated to Ralphie.”

  On the last day of class before Christmas vacation, when she returned the compositions, she handed the blank paper to me marked with a red F. Written in red ink was the comment “I see that your gift this Christmas was an ENORMOUS nothing.”

  After returning the papers, Sister Lucy placed a scratchy record of carols on the portable turntable, and while it played she announced what we all already knew, that Camille’s essay would represent our class at the Christmas Pageant that year. As was customary, Sister Lucy asked Camille to read her story aloud for our class. Camille rose to read at her desk, but Sister motioned her to the front. Camille was to be our valedictorian, too, the first one ever at St. Roman, and Sister Lucy had begun coaching Camille on her oral delivery in preparation for her speech at graduation.

  “A Christmas Carol for Ralphie: A True Story,” Camille read, her quiet voice in competition with the “Ave Maria.” She enunciated carefully, eyes glued to the page, rouge burning on her cheeks. She appeared to be overheating, and she partially unbuttoned the navy blue cardigan she’d taken to wearing over her school uniform.

  “Try looking up at your audience from time to time,” Sister Lucy suggested. “Eye contact, that’s the secret.”

  Camille’s composition opened with the sound of prancing hooves: not reindeer on a rooftop, she told us, but Tito Guizar on the white stallion following the Virgin down Washtenaw. Listening to her re-create the scene, I wondered if she’d been there. I didn’t remember seeing her, but there had been a crowd of people on the sidewalk watching Tito Guizar. When she came to the part about Sharky leading his parade out of the alley, she looked up at us, her audience, and asked, “What if Charles Dickens, the author of A Christmas Carol—one of the greatest writers in the history of the world—was there in the crowd?”

  She dropped her gaze back to her paper. “I think I saw him there that afternoon,” she said, then deliberately making eye contact, asked, “If Dickens can transport us in time back to London, why can’t we transport him to Chicago?”

  Maybe eye contact was the secret, because it seemed as if she was asking me the question.

  “You don’t have to be transported to London on Christmas Eve a century ago to know that, as Dickens wrote, ‘the business of Mankind is Man.’ You don’t have to be visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. But if you were, who would your ghost of Christmas Past be?” she asked. “Each of you has one. What would your spirit of Christmas Present look like?”

  She paused as if waiting for an answer, and though I now realized her technique was to make eye contact whenever she asked a question, the question nonetheless seemed directed at me, as if there were a secret connection between us.

  Before I could think who my ghost might be, Norky turned in his seat a row over and whispered, “Brigitte Bardot,” then shook his fist as if jerking off and made a demented face, which confirmed the ill effects of masturbation. Otherwise, the class was quiet, everyone intent but Chester, who’d buried his head in his arms as if asleep at his desk.

  “Maybe the ghost might be disguised as a blind man who sells newspapers or, instead of dragging chains, comes rattling on a little cart with hooves strapped to his hands,” Camille suggested.

  However different our ghosts might be, she said, she guessed that everyone in our class had the same Tiny Tim—Ralphie—and that we needed to be inspired by his example to change the world. To change the world, we first had to change ourselves. We had to make Christmas in our hearts and love one another.

  Norky turned, caught my attention, and raised a sheet of paper on which in big letters he’d scrawled: “Estrada has BB’s.”

  I hated to admit he was right—maybe it was a
n optical illusion, but whenever Camille paused for breath, her white blouse beneath her blue sweater seemed to strain against the swell of her breasts as if she were developing before our eyes.

  She took a deep, breast-heaving breath and said that a blue boy was not so different from Tiny Tim with his crutch. And that Tiny Tim with his crutch was not so different from Jesus with a cross. She said that on that day last December when he ran to join the band of disabled marchers, Ralphie “mounted the wheelchair like a prince assuming his throne.” She said he raised his blue fist not in triumph or, as some claimed after he died, to wave goodbye, but as if to cheer as Tiny Tim would, “God bless us every one!”

  “That’s not what happened,” Chester said quietly.

  He lifted his head from his arms and, without asking permission, half rose at his front-row desk.

  “Chester, do you want to add something?” Sister Lucy asked, giving him the floor, though it wasn’t necessary, because Camille had immediately stopped reading and now stood as if trapped before the class, more uneasy than I’d ever seen her.

  Chester sat back down. “Lots of little kids chase parades,” he said. His voice trembled. “How come for once in his life Ralphie couldn’t just do what other kids do without somebody making it a big deal?”

  “Of course he could,” Sister Lucy said. “What Camille meant was—”

  “She shouldn’t make stuff up about him,” Chester interrupted, rising to his feet with a force that jarred his desk and sent the needle on Sister’s portable player skipping across vinyl. “He wasn’t joining anything!” he shouted at Camille. “He wasn’t like them. His fist wasn’t blue. That’s bullshit. What do you know?” he demanded. “You don’t know shit! And he hated being called Blue Boy. That wasn’t his goddamn name. He wasn’t some fucking freak. He wasn’t some crip in a story. He didn’t want your fucking feeling sorry for him. We don’t need it. What do you know? You don’t know fucking dogshit! Go fuck your four-eyed self!” he yelled after her as Camille ran from the room.

  “How much you soak for it?” my father asked, studying the tree with a characteristic combination of suspicion and contempt.

  His appraisal was accurate, it wasn’t much of a tree. The lots were already picked over. Each year we’d shop later in December in order to get a better deal. I’d begun to suspect that, if he could, he would buy a tree on sale after Christmas the way he bought Christmas cards.

  “You don’t unload these trees soon and you’ll be stuck with them. You won’t be able to give them away.” As usual, he marshaled his arguments before getting down to talking turkey, applying what he called “psychology,” even though the kid he was bargaining with didn’t own the lot. He was a sullen-looking teenager in a hood who kept his eyes on his own stamping feet. The unclasped buckles of his galoshes jangled; I could smell the resin on his oversize canvas mittens. While we’d wandered through what was left of the tiny pine forest, he hadn’t bothered to leave the flickering, illusory warmth of the garbage can where he stood smoking a cigarette and burning boughs.

  During summer, lots like this were eyesores, clotted with trash, ragweed thrusting from bricks and broken bottles. But each December they were transformed—strung with colored bulbs and plastic pennants like used car lots. A horn speaker, blaring maniacally as any from an ice-cream truck in July, crackled “Here Comes Santa Claus.”

  “Maybe I’d go a fin on this one,” my father grudgingly offered.

  “I don’t make the prices, mo’,” the kid told him.

  “Well, just between us, what do you think it’s really worth?” my father asked. “If you were shopping for it.”

  “Whatever the tag says, mo’.”

  That second mo’ caught my attention. The first time, I’d thought maybe he’d mumbled “man,” but it was mo’ as in mo-fo as in motherfucker. I wondered if he was high. My father seemed not to have noticed. His general obliviousness to gang etiquette in the neighborhood had always alarmed me.

  “Suppose the tag fell off,” my father prodded. “Trees don’t grow in nature with price tags, you know.”

  The kid shrugged as if it wasn’t worth talking about. “Look, mo’, you buy it or you don’t.”

  “I offered a fin … with an extra six bits in it for you if you saw the stump,” my father said, conspiratorially.

  “Why you come here and insult me for, mo’?”

  “What? You want I go see what the competition has to offer? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but they got a very nice selection of trees down the block, and another down the block from that,” my father said, not letting on that we’d already cased every lot in an eight-block radius before he decided this lot had the cheapest trees—no doubt because they were the scruffiest. “There’s more trees out there than customers,” my father informed him, amused by the irrefutable laws of capitalism now working to his advantage.

  “So go fucken waste their time.”

  Mick and I looked at each other and back at the guy.

  “What you looking at? How you like I shove that sled up your ass, kid?” he asked me.

  We walked off, me dragging the sled.

  “I didn’t like his attitude,” my father said.

  I didn’t say anything. I was furious. All the other times my father had embarrassed me returned in a rush: the way he’d stop his beater in traffic to pick a piece of scrap he thought might be worth something off the street; how I’d unpack my lunch in school to find he’d made me what my friends called “a puke on white”—last night’s chop suey on now dissolved slices of Wonder bread; how at Maxwell Street, or Jewtown, as it was called with typical Chicago ethnic sensitivity, at the outdoor market my father haunted where endless haggling was the rule, while I tried on trousers behind the makeshift dressing room of a windblown sheet, he’d yell, “Do they fit in the crotch?” I was banging the sled over curbs as if yanking the leash on a dog I was trying to kill.

  “Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum,” Mick hummed to himself as he had the entire time we’d been out. “Me and my drum.”

  “Hey, take it easy on that sled,” my father said. “If you can’t make something, don’t break it.”

  I gave the sled a jerk that slammed it along a building so its metal runners sparked off the bricks, and my father stopped, challenging me to try it again. “Someone having a problem here?”

  “You are really a Scrooge, mo’,” I told him, and braced for an attack that, this time, didn’t come.

  Later that night, while Mick helped Moms bake gingerbread, my father and I strung the Bubble Lites on a Scotch pine to a burble of carols courtesy of the Lawrence Welk orchestra. It was the first long-needled pine we’d ever had, and it seemed exotic—a pedigreed Persian cat of a tree. It still had pinecones on it. The bushy needles made stringing the lights trickier, my father observed, then we continued working in silence.

  “Be a good night for some homemade eggnog,” he offered. “The real thing made the old-fashioned way.” He prided himself on his eggnog; it was the best I’ve ever had. He began talking about his father—my grandfather—whom he never mentioned and whom I’d never really met. I thought of him as my father’s father rather than as my grandfather. My father remembered how at Christmastime his father would send him to a barrelhouse—a tavern where beer barrels served as a bar—with a pail to bring back a special holiday brew. Everybody at the tavern knew his father. There were local prize fights back then, one tavern’s champ against another’s, and his father, whose name was Michael, fought every Friday night. He fought as the Wild Goral, which sounded like an abbreviation for “gorilla,” but meant the wild man from the Tatra mountains—although, my father added cryptically, Mike might have been half Jewish and no hillbilly at all. He told me how once his father came home late with his front teeth broken and how he sat groaning, slugging from a fifth of whiskey and spitting blood into the beer pail as he worked at his teeth with a pair of pliers, trying to pull the stubs out of his bloody gums so he wouldn’t have to pay a dentist. Finally, he trie
d to get my father to yank out what was left of his teeth, and when my father wouldn’t, Mike got furious and chased him, trying to brain him with the whiskey bottle until he escaped by running out of the house.

  Long past midnight on one of those Friday nights, drunken men brought the Goral home, half-conscious, blood running from his nose, mouth, and ears, his paycheck gone. He lay moaning in bed for a day, then slept for two more, and when he regained consciousness he was dazed, speechless, nearly helpless, and finally, after weeks that way he was taken to Dunning, the state mental hospital, a Palookaville from which he never returned.

  My grandmother Victoria barely spoke English. She worked at home as a seamstress during the day. After they took Mike away, she got a second job at night scrubbing floors in a downtown office building. My father was eleven at the time, the oldest of the six kids, so as the man in the family, he had to work several jobs. He rose at five a.m. to deliver milk, then delivered newspapers, then attended grade school, and immediately after school he headed for the flower shop on Coulter Street, where he worked until suppertime. The shop was closing late on the Christmas Eve of the first year of Mike’s incarceration when the florist told my father there was a rush order on a wreath—not a Christmas wreath but a funeral wreath. They made it from pine boughs anyway, stuffed with wet sphagnum moss and tied with a black ribbon; my father helped work on it and the florist sent him to deliver it. The address was in a neighborhood my father wasn’t familiar with. He went through the city in the dark, half lost on the snow-drifted streets, holding the wreath out before him. He didn’t have gloves, and when he finally found the address, on a street that has since been erased by an expressway, he couldn’t knock because his hands were frozen to the wreath. He had to kick at the door.

  A boy his own age answered, the son of the man who had died. The family couldn’t afford a funeral home so the body, dressed in a Sunday suit, was laid out in a small living room, or parlor, as my father called it—he always referred to living rooms as parlors. When the kid who answered the door saw that my father couldn’t let go of the wreath, he invited him in and sat him down beside the oil stove. There was a pan of water on top of the stove, and the kid, Teddy Kanik, brought a washcloth and towel and bathed my father’s hands until they thawed. He made him a cup of tea. They were best friends from that day on.