I Sailed with Magellan Read online

  “Me Tarzan!” they shouted, howling ape calls across the water.

  I was still coughing and spitting up, ears plugged and ringing.

  “Don’t swallow too much water,” Sir said, looking at me. “People do their business in it.”

  “I’m going in for a while.” I dog-paddled away, then hung in the water, letting a warm jet of pee run through my suit. Then I timed a wave and let it boost me up the rusty metal rungs sticking from the concrete. The sides went straight down, scarred with watermarks. It wasn’t hollow under the walkway after all.

  I sat on the edge of the Rocks watching the beacons from Meigs field crisscross as winking planes cranked in for the night.

  “How’s it goin?” The same young Mexican kid squatted down beside me. His lips were still chattering. He was dragging at a wet cigarette.

  “I thought that big ship out there came in.”

  “Those red lights way out there, man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the pumping station,” he said, and before I could say I know he whirled and called something in rapid Spanish to his brother.

  His brother came over, grinning.

  “See that guy in the water?” I said quickly. “He swam all the way out there once.”

  The kid passed me the cigarette, wet paper sticking to his fingertips. I glanced over at Sir. He was propelling on his back, holding the soap over his head while the others thrashed after him trying to catch it.

  “Tarzan! Me Tarzan!” they were yelling.

  I took a drag and passed it to the older brother.

  “Man,” he said, “even the real Tarzan ain’t gonna swim out there.” He inhaled deeply, squinting out past the glowing ash.

  The red lights blinked on and off in the descending darkness. They seemed to be slowly moving.

  Breasts

  Sundays have always been depressing enough without having to do a job. Besides, he’s hungover, so fuck Sunday. Taking somebody out on Sunday is probably bad luck.

  And Monday: no wheels. He’s got an appointment with the Indian at the Marvel station on Western. That man’s a pro—can listen to an engine idle and tell you the wear on the belts, can hear stuff already going bad that won’t break for months. The Indian is the only one he lets touch the Bluebird, his powder blue, 312 Y-block, Twin Holley, four-barrel T-bird.

  Tuesday, it’s between Sovereign and hauling more than a month’s laundry to the Chink’s. Not to mention another hangover. He strips the sheets, balls them into the pillowcases, stuffs in the towels. He’s tired of their stink, his stink, of dirty clothes all over the floor, all over the apartment. He’s been wearing the same underwear how long? He strips naked and stares at himself in the bedroom mirror. His reflection looks smudged, and he wipes the mirror with a sock, then drops to the carpet to do a hundred push-ups—that always sharpens the focus.

  He manages only seventy, and then, chest pounding hard enough to remind him that his father’s heart gave out at age forty-five, lights a cigarette. He slaps on some Old Spice, slips back into his trousers and shirt without bothering to check the mirror, stuffs another pillowcase with dirty clothes, and since he’s cleaning, starts on the heaps of dishes unwashed for weeks. Then, wham, it hits him like a revelation: who needs all this shit? Into trash bags go not only pizza cardboards and Chinese food cartons but bottles, cans, cereal boxes, plates, bowls, glasses, dirty pots. The silverware can stay. Next, it’s the refrigerator’s turn: sour milk, moldy cheese, rancid butter, all the scummy, half-empty bottles of mustard, mayo, pickles, jam, until the fridge is completely empty except for its cruddy shelves.

  He removes the shelves.

  Now he’s got room for the giant mortadella that Sal brought from Italy. Sal came back from his trip bearing gifts and saying, “Allora!” whatever that means. The mortadella is scarred with wounds from another souvenir Sallie brought him, a stiletto. He’s wanted an authentic stiletto for his knife collection, and this one is a piece of work, a slender pearl handle contoured to slide the thumb directly to the switch, and the most powerful spring he’s ever seen on a knife. When the six-inch blade darted out, the knife actually recoiled in his hand. It felt as if the blade could shoot through Sheetrock, let alone flesh. He tested it on the mortadella, a thick sausage more muscular than Charles F-ing Atlas. He wondered if the knife could penetrate the rind, and was amazed when the thrust of the spring buried the blade to the hilt. It was a test he found himself repeating, and the mortadella, now propped in the empty refrigerator, looks as if it’s seen gladiatorial combat, like Julius F-ing Caesar after Brutus got done with him.

  Whitey calls. “Joey, you take care of business?”

  “Still in the planning stage.”

  “Well, the decision’s been made, you know? Let’s not be indecisive on this.”

  “No problem, Whitey.”

  Taking care of business. Last Saturday night at Fabio’s what Whitey said was “Blow the little skimming fuck’s balls off and leave him for the birds.”

  “Not like there’s vultures circling the neighborhood,” he told Whitey, and Whitey said, “Joey, it was a manner of fucken speaking.”

  Okay, allora! motherfucker, no more procrastination. He can haul out the garbage, drop his laundry at the Chink’s, and take care of Johnny Sovereign. Let’s get this fucking thing over with even though he hasn’t made a plan yet and that’s not like him. Things are chancy enough without leaving them to chance. The man who’s prepared, who knows exactly what he’s going to do, always has the advantage. What seems inevitable as fate to such a man, to others seems like a surprise. Problems invariably arise, and he wants to be able to anticipate them, like the Indian who can listen to an engine and hear what will go bad. He wants to see the scars that appear before the wounds that caused them.

  With a cotton swab he oils the .22, then sets the Hoppe oil on a glass ashtray on his dresser beside the Old Spice so it doesn’t leave a ring, and tests the firing mechanism. He fills the clip with hollow-point shells and slides it into the Astra Cub, a Spanish-made Saturday night special that fits into the pocket of his sport coat. The sport coat is a two-button, powder-blue splash—same shade as the Bluebird. He’d conceal the stiletto in his sock, but he’s stuffed all his socks into the dirty laundry, which forces him to dig inside the pillowcases until he comes up with a black-and-pink argyle with a good elastic grip to it. He can’t find the match, so he puts the argyle on his right foot and a green Gold Toe on the left—nobody’s going to be checking his fucking socks—then slides the stiletto along his ankle.

  From his bedroom closet he drags out the locked accordion case that belonged to his grandfather. There’s a lacquered red accordion inside that came from Lucca, where Puccini lived. In a cache Joe made by carefully detaching the bellows from the keyboard is an emergency roll of bills—seven G’s—and uppers, downers, Demerol, codeine, a pharmacopoeia he calls his painkillers. In a way, they’re for emergencies, too. Inside the accordion case there’s also a sawed-off shotgun, a Walther PPK like the one James Bond uses, except this one is stolen and has the serial number filed off, and a Luger stamped with a swastika, supposedly taken off a dead German officer, which his father kept unloaded and locked away. After his father’s death, Joe found ammo for it at a gun show. There’s a rubber-banded cigarillo box with photos of girlfriends baring their breasts, breasts of all sizes, shapes, and shades of skin, a collection that currently features Whitey’s girlfriend, Gloria Candido, and her silver-dollar nipples. She told Joe the size of her nipples prevented her from wearing a bikini. It’s a photo that could get Joe clipped, but he’s gambling that Gloria Candido is clever enough to play Whitey. Whitey’s getting old, otherwise a punk-ass like Johnny Sovereign wouldn’t be robbing him blind.

  Capri St. Clair is in the cigarillo box, too, not that she belongs with the others. Her letters he keeps in his bureau drawer. She was shy about her breasts because the left was wine-stained. No matter that they were beautiful. To her, it was the single flaw
that gives a person something to hide. Joe understood that, though he didn’t understand her. There’s always some vulnerability that a personality is reorganized to protect, a secret that can make a person unpredictable, devious, mysterious. Capri was all those, and still he misses her, misses her in a way that threatens to become his own secret weakness. Her very unpredictability is what he misses. Often enough it seemed like spontaneity. He doesn’t have a photo of her breasts, but one surprising afternoon he shot a roll of her blond muff. He’d been kidding her about being a bottle blonde, and with uncharacteristic swagger she hiked her skirt, thumbed down her panties, and said, “Next time you want to know is it real or is it Clairol, ask them to show you this.” She’d been sitting on his windowsill, drinking a Heineken, and when she stood the sun streamed across her body, light adhering not just to her bush but to the golden down on her stomach and thighs, each hair a prism, and a crazy inspiration possessed him with the force of desire, so strong he almost told her. He wanted to wake to that sight, to start his day to it, to restart his life to it, and maybe end his life to it, too. The breasts could stay stashed in the cigarillo box, but he wanted a blowup on his bedroom wall of her hands, the right lifting her bunched skirt and the left thumbing down her turquoise panties. He took the roll of film to Walgreens to be developed, and when he picked it up, photos were missing. He could tell from the weight of the envelope, but went down the Tooth Care aisle to open it and be sure. He returned to the photo counter and asked the pimply kid with “Stevorino” on his name tag who’d waited on him, “You opened these, didn’t you? You got something that belongs to me.”

  “No way,” the kid said, his acne blazing up.

  “Zit-head, I should smash your face in now, but I don’t want pus on my shirt. It’s a nice shirt, right? So, see this?” Joe opened his hand, and a black switchblade the width of a garter snake flicked out a silver fang. “I’m going to count to five, and if I don’t have the pictures by then, I’m going to cut off Stevo’s dickorino right here to break him of the habit of yanking it over another man’s intimate moments.”

  “Okay,” the kid said, “I’m sorry.” He reached into the pocket of his Walgreens smock and slid the pictures over, facedown.

  “How many of my boob shots have you been snitching, Stevorino? What is it? You think of me as the Abominable Titman, the fucken Hugh Hefner of St. Michael’s parish? See me coming with a roll of Kodak and you get an instant woodie?”

  “No, sir,” the kid said.

  Joe went outside and sat in his idling car, studying the photos, thinking of Capri, of the intensity of being alone with her, of her endless inventions and surprises, but then he thought of her deceptions, their arguments, and of her talk of leaving for L.A. It was there, in the car with her photos on the dashboard, that he let her go, accepted, as he hadn’t until that moment, that she had to want to stay or it wasn’t worth it. He didn’t let thinking of her distract him from his plan of action, which required watching the Walgreens exit. A plan was the distinction between a man with a purpose and some joker sitting in a car, working himself into a helpless rage. Two hours passed before the kid came out. He was unlocking his bicycle when he saw Joe Ditto.

  “Mister, I said I was sorry,” the kid pleaded.

  “Stevo, when they ask how it happened say you fell off your bike,” Joe said, and with an economically short blur of a kick, a move practiced in steel-toed factory shoes on a heavy bag, and on buckets and wooden planks, hundreds, maybe thousands of times until it was automatic, took out the kid’s knee.

  Joe never did get around to making that blowup of Capri. He hasn’t heard from her in months, which is unlike her, but he knows she’ll get in touch, there’s too much left unfinished between them for her not to, and, until she’s back, he doesn’t need her muff on the wall.

  Tuesday afternoon at the Zip Inn is a blue clothespin day. That’s the color that Roman Ziprinski, owner and one-armed bartender, selects from the plastic clothespins clamped to the wire of Christmas lights that hangs year-round above the cash register. With the blue clothespin, Zip fastens the empty right sleeve of his white shirt that he’s folded as neatly as one folds a flag.

  It’s an afternoon when the place is empty. Just Zip and, on the TV above the bar, Jack Brickhouse, the play-by-play announcer for the Cubs. The Cubbies are losing again, this time to the Pirates. It’s between innings, and Brickhouse says, It’s a good time for a Hamm’s, the official beer of the Chicago Cubs.

  “Official,” Zip says to Brickhouse, “that’s pretty impressive, Jack.”

  To the tom-tom of a tribal drum, the Hamm’s theme song plays: “From the land of sky blue waters,” and Zip hums along, “from the land of pines, lofty balsam comes the beer refreshing, Hamm’s the beer refreshing …”

  Hamm’s is brewed in Wisconsin. Zip has a place there, way up on Lac Courte Oreilles in the Chain of Lakes region famous for muskies. It’s a little fisherman’s cottage no one knows he has, where he goes to get away from the city. A land of sky blue waters is what Zip dreamed about during the war. Daydreamed, that is. If Zip could have controlled his night dreams, those would have been of sky blue water, too, instead of the nightmares and insomnia that began after he was wounded and continued for years. Sometimes, like last night, Zip still wakes in a sweat as sticky as blood, with the stench of burning flesh lingering in his nostrils, to the tremors of a fist hammering a chest—a medic’s desperate attempt to jump-start a dead body. No matter how often that dream recurs, Zip continues to feel shocked when in the dark he realizes the chest is his, and the fist pounding it is attached to his missing right arm.

  When he joined the Marines out of high school, his grandmother gave him a rosary blessed in Rome to wear like a charm around his neck and made him promise to pray. But Zip’s true prayer was one that led him into the refuge of a deep northern forest, a place he’d actually been only once, as a child, on a fishing trip with his father. He summoned that place from his heart before landings and on each new day of battle and on patrol as, sick with dysentery, he slogged through what felt like poisonous heat with seventy pounds of flamethrower on his back. He’d escape the stench of shit and the hundreds of rotting corpses that the rocky coral terrain of Peleliu made impossible to bury, into a vision of cool freshwater and blue-green shade scented with pine. When I make it through this, that’s where I’m going, he vowed to himself.

  Sky blue water was the dream he fought for, his private American Dream. And so is the Zip Inn, his tavern in the old neighborhood. He’s his own boss here. Zip uncaps a Hamm’s. It’s on the house. The icy bottle sweats in his left hand. He raises it to his lips, and it suds down his throat: he came back missing an arm, but hell, his buddy Domino, like a lot of guys, didn’t come back at all.

  He can’t control his night dreams, but during the day, Zip makes it a practice not to think about the war. Today, he wishes for a customer to come in and give him something else to think about. Where’s Teo, that odd Mexican guy who stops by in the afternoon and sits with a beer, humming to himself and writing on napkins? The pounding in his temples has Zip worrying about his blood pressure. He has the urge to take a dump but knows his bowels are faking it. The symptoms of stress bring back Peleliu—the way his bowels cramped as the amtrac slammed toward the beach. They lost a third of the platoon on a beachhead called Rocky Point to a butchering mortar barrage that splintered the coral rock into razors of shrapnel. Zip stands wondering, how does a man in a place so far from home summon up whatever one wants to call it—courage, duty, controlled insanity—in the face of that kind of carnage, and then say nothing when two goombahs from across Western Avenue come into his place, the Zip Inn, and tell him it would be good business to rent a new jukebox from them? Instead of throwing those parasites out, he said nothing. Nothing.

  Only a two-hundred-dollar initial installation fee, they told him.

  The two of them smelling of aftershave: a fat guy, Sal, the talker, and Joe—he’d heard of Joe—a psycho for sure with
a Tony Curtis haircut and three-day growth of beard, wearing a sharkskin suit and factory steel-toes. The two hoods together like a pilot fish and a shark.

  “Then every month only fifty for service,” fat Sal said, “and that includes keeping up with all the new hits. And we service the locked coin box so you won’t have to bother. Oh yeah, and to make sure nobody tries to mess with the machine, we guarantee its protection—only twenty-five a month for that—and believe me when we say protection we mean protection. Nobody will fuck with your jukebox. Or your bar.”

  “So you’re saying I pay you seventy-five a month for something I pay fifteen for now. I mean the jukebox don’t net me more than a few bucks,” Zip told them. “It’s for the enjoyment of my customers. You’re asking me to lose money on this.”

  “You ain’t getting protection for no fifteen bucks,” Sal tells him.

  “Protection from what?” Zip asked.

  The hoods looked at each other and smiled. “Allora.” Sal shrugged to Joe, then told Zip, “A nice little setup like you got should be protected.”

  “I got Allstate,” Zip said.

  “See, that kind of insurance pays after something happens, a breakin, vandalism, theft, a fire. The kind we’re talking here guarantees nothing like that is going to happen in the first place. All the other taverns in the neighborhood are getting it too. You don’t want to be the odd man out.”

  “A two-hundred-dollar installation fee?” Zip asked.

  “That covers it.”

  “Some weeks I don’t clear more than that.”

  “Come on, man, you should make that in a night. Start charging for the eggs,” Sal said, helping himself to one. “And what’s with only six bits for a shot and a beer? What kinda businessman are you? Maybe you’d like us to set up a card game in the back room for you on Fridays. And put in a pinball machine. We’re getting those in the bars around here, too.”