I Sailed with Magellan Read online

  The third message arrived in a rainstorm. “Lone Star.” Teo woke Lefty Antic out of a drunken stupor. They pored over the harness races, but the only possibility was a driver named T. North whose first name, Lefty thought, was Tex, and whose last name suggested the North Star. Then they checked the thoroughbreds at Arlington, and found a long shot named Bright Venus. “The Evening Star!” Lefty said, smiling. Track conditions would be sloppy, and Bright Venus was a mudder. Lefty had the shakes so bad he could barely get dressed, but, convinced it was the score they’d been building to, he went off to lay their bets with Sovereign. Teo bet a thousand to win.

  That night he had a nightmare that he was in El Paso, where he’d begun his career as a luchador, wrestling on the Lucha Libre circuit at fiestas and rodeos. In the dream he was wrestling the famous Ernesto “La Culebra” Aguirre, the Snake, named for the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of human sacrifice. Lucha Libre wrestlers often took the names of superheroes and Aztec warriors, and Teo once really had wrestled the Snake, though not in El Paso. That match was in Amarillo, back in the days when Teo was making a name for himself as a masked luchador called the Hummingbird. He’d come upon his identity in an illustrated encyclopedia of the gods of Mexico. The Hummingbird was Huitzilopochtli, the Mayan sun god; the illustration showed a hawklike warrior bird rising from a thorny maguey plant. According to the caption, the thorns symbolized the Hummingbird’s beak, and after Spain destroyed the Mayan empire, the thorns of the Hummingbird became the crown Jesus wore. Huitzilopochtli’s sacred colors were sun white and sky blue, so those were the colors of the costume—mask, tank top, and tights—that Teo wore. When Teo put on the mask, he’d feel transformed by a surge of energy and strength. As the Hummingbird, he defied the limitations of his body and performed feats that marveled the crowds. He flew from ropes, survived punishing falls, lifted potbellied fighters twice his size high off their feet and slammed them into submission. To keep his identity secret, he would put on his mask miles from the ring, and afterward he wore it home. The nights before bouts he took to sleeping in his mask.

  It was at a carnival in El Paso that he saw Alaina again, standing ringside with a group of high school friends, mostly boys. It had been three years since his uncle had thrown him out without giving him a chance to say goodbye to her. The boys must have come to see the rudo billed as El Huracán—the Hurricane—but known to fans as El Flatoso—Windy—for his flatulence in the ring. El Flatoso, with his patented move of applying a head scissors, then gassing his opponent into unconsciousness, was beloved by high school boys and drunks. Teo had been prepared to be part of the farce of fighting him until he saw Alaina in the crowd. He could feel her secretly watching him through her halflowered eyelashes with the same intensity that he knew she’d watched him when he’d spied on her through the skylight. Suddenly, the vulgar spectacle he was about to enact was intolerable. The match was supposed to last for half an hour, but when El Flatoso came clownishly propelling himself with farts across the ring, the Hummingbird whirled up and delivered a spinning kick that knocked the rudo senseless. He didn’t further humiliate El Flatoso by stripping off his mask, and the boys at ringside cursed, demanding their money back, before dejectedly dragging Alaina off with them. But he saw her look back and wave, and he bowed to her. Later that night, there was a light rap on the door of the trailer that served as his dressing room. Alaina stood holding an open bottle of mescal. “Don’t take it off,” she whispered as he began to remove his mask. Though they’d yet to touch, she stood unbuttoning her blouse. “I don’t believe this is happening,” he said, and she answered, “Unbelievable things happen to people on the edge.” She spoke like a woman, not a girl, and when she unhooked her bra, her breasts were a woman’s, full, tipped with nipples the shade of roses going brown, not the buds of the girl he’d spied on. He knelt before her and kissed her dusty feet. She raised her skirt, and he buried his face in her woman smell. He wanted the mask off so he could smear his cheeks with her. “Leave it on,” she commanded, “or I’ll have to go.” He rose, kissing up her body, until his lips suckled her breasts and their warm, sweet-sour sweat coated his tongue, and suddenly her sighs turned to a cry. “No, too sensitive,” she whispered, pushing him gently away, then she opened his shirt and kissed him back hard, fiercely biting and sucking his nipples as if he were a woman. “My guainambi,” she said, using the Indian word for hummingbird.

  It was months before he saw her again, this time at a rodeo in Amarillo—a long way from El Paso—where he stood in the outdoor ring waiting for his bout with the Snake. The loose white shirt she wore didn’t conceal her pregnancy, and for a moment he wondered if the child could be his, then realized she’d already been with child when she’d knocked on his trailer door. La Culebra, in his plumed sombrero, rainbow-sequined cape, and feathered boa, was the star of the Lucha Libre circuit, and it had been agreed that the Hummingbird was to go down to his first defeat in a close match that would leave his honor intact so that a rivalry could be built. But when Teo saw Alaina there at ringside, he couldn’t accept defeat. He and the Snake slammed each other about the ring, grappling for the better part of an hour under a scorching sun with Teo refusing to be pinned, and finally in a clinch the Snake told him, “It’s time, pendejo, stop fucking around,” and locked him in his signature move, the boa constrictor. But the Hummingbird slipped it, and when the Snake slingshotted at him off the ropes, the Hummingbird spun up into a helicopter kick. The collision dropped them both on their backs in the center of the ring. “Cocksucker, this isn’t El Flatoso you’re fucking with,” the Snake told him as he rose spitting blood. The legend surrounding La Culebra was that he’d once been a heavyweight boxer. He’d become a luchador only after he’d killed another boxer in the ring, and now, when he realized they weren’t following the script, he began using his fists. The first punch broke Teo’s nose, and blood discolored his white and blue mask, swelling like a blood blister beneath the fabric. The usual theatrics disappeared, and the match became a street fight that had the fans on their feet cheering, a battle that ended with the Snake flinging the Hummingbird out of the ring. The fall fractured Teo’s kneecap, his head bounced off the pavement, and as he lay stunned, unable to move for dizziness and pain, the Snake leaped down onto his chest from the height of the ring, stomping the breath from his body, and tore off the bloodied mask of the Hummingbird as if skinning him, then spit in his flattened face. Teo, his face a mask of blood, looked up into the jeering crowd, but he never saw Alaina again.

  In Teo’s nightmare, the Snake humiliated him not only by tearing off his Hummingbird mask and exposing his identity to the crowd but by derisively shouting “Las tetas!” and tearing off Teo’s tank top, exposing a woman’s breasts weeping milky tears. At dawn, when Teo groaned out of his dream, with his stomped, body-slammed chest aching and his heart a throbbing bruise, there was no envelope of winnings waiting. That morning Teo knocked repeatedly on Lefty Antic’s door without an answer. The thought occurred to him that the saxophone player had taken off with their money, not out of crookedness but on a drunken binge. It was only in the afternoon, when Teo bought a newspaper and checked the racing scores at Arlington, that he learned Bright Venus had finished dead last. He checked the harness results at Sportsman’s, and there was a story about a buggy overturning in the third race and its driver, Toby North, being critically injured when a trotting horse crushed his chest.

  It seemed as if a vicious practical joke had been played on them all, but when the next message came, Teo knocked again on Lefty Antic’s door. He hadn’t seen the saxophone player since Lefty had staggered out to place their bets on Bright Venus. There still was no answer, and Teo, filled with a terrible sense of abandonment and foreboding, sure that Lefty Antic was dead inside, got the landlord to open the door, only to find the room empty and orderly. Alone, feeling too apprehensive simply to ignore the message, Teo studied the racing pages looking for clues as he’d seen Lefty Antic do. It seemed to him that the
new rain-smudged message, “delay plaza,” referred to the mayor, Richard Daley, and when he could find no connection whatsoever at any of the race tracks, he took the El train downtown. There wasn’t a Daley Plaza in Chicago, but there was an open square near City Hall, and Teo walked there, not sure what he was looking for, yet hoping to recognize it when he saw it. But no sign presented itself, nothing was going on in the square but a rally for a young senator from Massachusetts, an Irish Catholic like the mayor, who was running for president in a country that Teo figured would never elect a Catholic.

  The messages have continued to arrive, and Teo continues to save them, and the cigar box fills with scraps of paper his pigeons have brought home from God knows where. Teo can’t shake the foreboding or the loneliness. His sleep is haunted by the recurrent dream of a funeral that extends the length of a country of ruined castles and burning ghettos. He’s part of the procession following the casket, ascending a pyramid, its steps dark and slippery with the blood of what’s gone before. He doesn’t want to see what’s at the summit. Unable to return to sleep, sometimes he spreads the messages on the table and tries to piece them together, to see if the torn edges fit like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or if the words can be arranged into a coherent sentence. He senses some story, some meaning, connecting them, but the words themselves baffle him: knoll, motorcade, six seconds, bloodstone …

  And it’s not dreams alone that disrupt his sleep. There’s an increasing tenderness in his chest that waking doesn’t dispel. In the darkness, his nipples ache as if they’ve been pinched with tongs; the palpitations of his heart resonate like spasms through soft tissue. His flesh feels foreign to his breastbone. He can feel his inflamed mounds of chest swelling beneath his undershirt, and he brushes his fingertips across his chest, afraid of what he’ll find. He’s put on weight, and his once sculpted chest has grown flabby, his weight lifter’s pectorals drooping to fat. Come morning, he reassures himself that’s all it is—fat, he’s simply getting fat, and this strange pain will also pass. Better to ignore it. He avoids studying the bathroom mirror when he shaves.

  Sometimes, after midnight, he thinks he hears Lefty Antic playing his saxophone softly on the roof, but it’s only wind vibrating the rusted chimney hood, streaming clouds rasping against a rusty moon, the hoot of pigeons. He hasn’t seen the sax player since they lost their stake on “Lone Star.”

  Teo has written his own notes—“Who are you? What do you wants?”—and attached them to those pigeons of his who have brought the strange messages. Noah-like, he’s sent them flying out over the wet rooftops to deliver his questions, but those pigeons haven’t returned home, and it takes a lot to lose a homing pigeon. They fly in a dimension perilous with hawks and the ackack fire of boys armed with rocks, slingshots, and pellet guns. Fog and blizzards disorient them, storms blow them down, and yet instinct brings them home on a single wing, with flight feathers broken, missing a leg or the jewel of an eye.

  Teo has decided that since his communiques go unanswered and his birds don’t return, he will refuse to accept further messages. All week he has kept his remaining pigeons cooped. And now this morning, attached to a strange pigeon, another message, the first in Spanish: asesino. “Murder” or “assassin,” Teo doesn’t know which.

  He’d like to ease the loneliness, if not the foreboding, and tell Zip about the messages. But until this afternoon, when he found Zip drinking alone and obviously needing someone to talk to, Teo has been reluctant to talk about anything more personal than Zip’s favorite subject: fishing. True, Zip was obviously curious about Teo’s wrestling career, but it didn’t seem right to tell the insignificant story of the Hummingbird to a man who is so careful never to speak of war wounds.

  “This feels like we’re in some kind of joke,” Zip says, opening his palm and allowing the pigeon to step from Teo’s hand to his.

  “What do you mean?” Teo asks.

  “You know,” Zip says, “there’s all these jokes that start: A man walks into a bar with a parrot, or a man walks into a bar with a dog, or a gorilla, or a cockroach. You know, all these guys walking into all these bars with every animal on the ark. So in this one, a man—no, a wrestler, a masked wrestler—walks into a bar with a pigeon.”

  “So, what’s the punch line?” Teo asks.

  “You’re asking me?” Zip says. “It’s your pigeon.”

  “No, not one of mine.”

  “Yeah, but you brought it in here.”

  “But the joke is your idea.”

  “Jesus, we got no punch line,” Zip says. “You know what that means?”

  “What?”

  “We’ll never get out of the joke.”

  Whitey calls.

  Joe, lying on the bare mattress, naked but for mismatched socks, doesn’t answer. He knows it’s Whitey on the phone. Joe can almost smell his cigar.

  What day is it? Must be Thursday, because yesterday was Wednesday, a day’s reprieve Johnny Sovereign never knew he had. Joe can have the conversation with Whitey without bothering to lift the receiver.

  —Joe, what the fuck’s going on with you?

  —Hey, Whitey, you ball-buster, vaffancul!

  Are these ball-busting calls some kind of psychological warfare? Maybe Whitey knows about Gloria Candido, and the whole thing with Johnny Sovereign is a setup. Maybe it’s Whitey arranging for these women to distract Joe from doing his job, giving Whitey an excuse other than being a fucking cornuto to have Joe clipped. Could Whitey be that smart, that devious? Maybe Whitey has tipped off Sovereign to watch his back around Joe and Sovereign is waiting for Joe to make his move. Or maybe the women are good luck, guardian angels protecting him from some scheme of Whitey’s.

  Joe quietly lifts the receiver from the cradle. He listens for Whitey to begin blaring, Yo, Joe, whatthefuck? but whoever is on the line is listening, too. Joe can hear the pursy breathing. It could be Whitey’s cigar-sucking, emphysemic huff. Joe slides the stiletto from his right sock, holds it to the mouthpiece, thumbs off the safety, touches the trigger button, and the blade hisses open: Ssswap! Then he gently sets down the receiver.

  Joe dresses quickly. The shirt he’s been wearing since Tuesday reeks, so he switches to the white shirt Marisol left behind even though it smells of perfume. She’s left a trail of rusty footprints down the hall from the kitchen as if she stepped on broken glass, and Joe splashes them with Rémy and mops them with the dirty shirt he won’t be wearing, then kills the bottle, washing down a mix of painkillers. There’s a soft wheeze from his closet, as if an accordion is shuddering in its sleep. When he dials Johnny Sovereign’s number, Vi answers on the third ring.

  “Johnny home?”

  “He’ll be back around six or so,” Vi says. “Can I take a message?”

  “So where is he?”

  “Can I take your number and have him call you back?”

  “Do you even know?”

  “Know what?” Vi asks. “Who’s calling?”

  “An acquaintance.”

  “You called yesterday and the day before.”

  Joe hangs up.

  The Bluebird is doing fifty down the cracked alleys, and when a bag lady steps from between two garbage cans, she has to drop her bag to get out of the way. Joe rolls over her shopping bag, bulging from a day’s foraging, and in the rearview mirror sees her throwing hex signs in his wake. He pulls up behind Sovereign’s, and there’s that smell of trash, oil, and pigeons, compounded by a summer breeze. Joe can sense someone eyeing him from inside the empty garage, and he eases his right hand into the pocket of his sport coat and flicks the safety off the .22, uncomfortably aware of how useless the small-caliber pistol is at anything but point-blank range. A gray cat emerges from Sovereign’s garage, carrying in its mouth a pigeon still waving a wing. The cat looks furtively at Joe, then slinks into the morning glories, and from the spot where the cat disappeared, Grace steps out. Morning glories are clipped to her tangled black curls. She’s wearing a morning-glory-vine necklace, vine bracelets
, and what looks like a bedraggled bridesmaid’s gown, if bridesmaids wore black. Her bare feet are bloody, probably from walking on glass. “Long time, no see, Joey,” she says. “I been with the Carmelites.”

  Joe recalls Sal asking if he was going to her closed-casket wake. “You had a thing with her, didn’t you?” Sal had asked.

  “No way!” Joe told him. “A little kissyface after a party once. I don’t know why she made up all those stories.”

  “That whole Fandetti family is bonkers,” Sal said.

  Nelo, her father, a Sicilian from Taylor Street, operates an escort service, massage parlors, and a strip bar on South Wabash, but he brought his four daughters up in convent school. The official story was that Grace wasted away with leukemia, but rumor had it that it was a botched abortion. Now, Joe realizes old man Fandetti is even crazier than he thought, faking his daughter’s death in order to avoid the humiliation of an illegitimate pregnancy. No surprise she’s a nutcase. He wonders if they collected insurance on her while they were at it.

  “If you stick your finger inside, you can feel the electric,” Grace says and demonstrates by poking her finger into a flower. “That hum isn’t bees. Electric’s what gives them their blue. You should feel it. Come here and put your finger in.”

  “Where’s your shoes, Grace?”

  “Under the bed, so they think I’m still there.”