by Stuart Dybek
“Still where? What are you doing here?”
“Come here, Joey, and put your finger in. You’ll feel what the bee’s born for. They’re so drunk on flower juice!” She walks to the car and leans in through the window on the passenger side, and the straps of her black gown slip off her shoulders, and from its décolletage breasts dangle fuller than he remembers from that one night after a birthday party at Fabio’s when he danced with her and they sneaked out to the parking lot and necked in his car. She’d looked pretty that night, made up like a doll, pearls in her hair, and wearing a silky dress with spaghetti straps. That was what she called them when he slipped them down and kissed her breasts. She wanted to go further, pleaded with him to take her virginity, but he didn’t have a rubber and it wasn’t worth messing with her connected old man.
“Know what was on the radio?”
“When?” Joe asks. He’s aware that he’s staring, but apparently still stoned on that hash oil, he can’t take his eyes off her breasts. His reactions feel sluggish; he has to will them. He realizes he’s been in a fog … he’s not sure how long, but it’s getting worse.
She opens the door and sinks into the leather seat and humming tunelessly flicks on the car radio. “I Only Have Eyes for You” is playing. “Our song, Joey!”
“Grace, we don’t have a song.”
“The night we became lovers.”
“Why’d you tell people that?”
“You got me in trouble, Joey, and in the Carmelites I had to confess it to the bishop. We weren’t supposed to talk, but he made me show and tell.”
Joe flicks off the radio. It’s like turning on the afternoon: birdsong, pigeons cooing, flies buzzing trash, the bass of bees from a thousand blue gramophones.
“All the sisters were jealous. They called me Walkie-Talkie behind my back. They thought I didn’t understand the sacredness of silence, but that’s not true. They think silence is golden, but real silence is terrifying. We’re not made for it. I could tell you things, Joey, but they’re secrets.”
“Like what, Grace? Things somebody told you not to tell me?”
“Things God whispers to me. Joey, you smell like a girl.”
“I think you can’t tell ’cause you don’t know. Tell me one secret God said just so I see if either of you knows anything.”
“I know words to an accordion. If you turn on your radio you’ll hear stars singing the song of a thousand crackles. I know about you and girls. I know what’s in your gym bag.”
“Yeah, what?”
“They’re your way of being totally alone.”
“What’s in the gym bag, Grace?”
“I know you can’t stop staring at my tits. I don’t mind, you can see. Oh, God! Windshields glorify the sun! Feel.”
“Not here, Grace.”
“Okay, at your place.”
“That’s not a good idea,” Joe says, but he can’t stay here with her either, so he eases the car into gear and drives slowly up the alley. The top of her dress is down, and against his better judgment—almost against his will—he turns onto Twenty-fifth, crosses Rockwell, the boundary between two-flats and truck docks. He drives carefully, his eyes on a street potholed by semis, but aware of her beside him with her dirty feet bloody and her bare breasts in plain view. Rockwell is empty, not unusual for this time of day. They’re approaching a railroad viaduct that floods during rainstorms. A block beyond the viaduct is Western Avenue, a busy street that in grade school he learned is the longest street in the world, just like the Amazon is the longest river, so they called it Amazon Avenue. Western won’t be deserted, and across Western is the little Franciscan church of St. Michael’s and the old Italian parish where he lives.
“I’m a Sister of Silence, so you need to be nice to me like I always was to you.”
“I’ve always been nice to you, too, Grace.”
“I could have had men hurt you, Joey, but I didn’t.”
They’re halfway through the streaky tunnel of the railroad viaduct and he hits the brakes and juts his arm out to brace her from smacking the windshield. “I don’t like when people threaten me, Grace. It really makes me crazy.”
“Let’s go to your place, Joey. Please drive. I hate when the trains go over. All those tons of steel on top of you, and the echoes don’t stop in your head even after the train is gone.”
“There’s no train.”
“It’s coming. I can feel it in my heart. My heart is crying.” She squeezes a nipple and catches a milky tear on a fingertip and offers it to him, reaching up to brush it across his lips, but Joe turns his face away. When he does, she slaps him. He catches her arm before she can slap him again, and under the viaduct, minus the glare of sun in his eyes, he sees her morning-glory-vine bracelets are scars welted across her wrists. Whistle wailing, a freight hurtles over, vibrating the car. He releases her arm, and she clamps her hands over her ears. Her bare feet stamp a tantrum of bloody imprints on the floor mat.
“Get out!” Joe yells over the concussions of boxcars, and he reaches across her body to open the door. She looks at him in amazement, then mournfully steps out into the gutter, her breasts still exposed. Without looking back, he guns into the daylight on the other side, catches the green going yellow on Western, veers into traffic, rattles across the bridge wheeled by pigeons that spans the Sanitary Canal. He isn’t going back to his place, he’s not heading to pick up his laundry, and until he finishes this job he’s not going to Fabio’s or any of the hangouts where he might run into Whitey. It’s Thursday, and Joe’s been seeing Gloria Candido on the sly on Thursdays, when Julio goes to his grandmother’s after school, but Joe isn’t going to Gloria’s either. He’s in the flow of Amazon Avenue, popping painkillers, Grace’s handprint still hot on his face. He heads south to see what’s at the end of the longest street in the world. The radio is off as if he’s broken contact, and he’d drive all night if not for hallucinations of headlights coming head-on. Finally he has to pull over and close his eyes. When he wakes, not sure he was ever really asleep, he’s parked on a shoulder separated from a field by rusty barbed wire netted in spider silk suspending pink droplets of sun. The blank highway is webbed like that as far as he can see. He thinks, I could just keep going, and at the next gas station, on an impulse, Joe decides he will keep going if she doesn’t answer the phone. But then he doesn’t have enough change to make the call. “Make it collect, for Vi Sovereign,” he tells the operator.
“Who should I say is calling?” the operator asks.
“Tell her a friend who’s been calling, she’ll know.” And when the operator does, Vi accepts the call. “Where you calling from?” Vi asks. “I hear cars.”
“A phone booth off Western Avenue. Johnny home?”
“You’re calling early,” she says. “He’ll be home around noon or so for lunch.”
“You don’t know where he is or what he’s doing? I can hear it in your voice. Did he even come home last night?”
“What do you keep calling for? If you’re trying to tell me something about Johnny, just say it. You somebody’s husband? What’s your name?”
“Maybe we’ll meet sometime. I’d pay you back for the phone call, but then you’d know it was me.”
“I’ll recognize your voice.”
“Better you don’t,” Joe says, and hangs up.
Before noon, he pulls up behind Johnny Sovereign’s. From the longest street in the world, he’s back to idling in a blocklength alley, and yet it’s oddly peaceful there, private, a place that’s come to feel familiar, and he’s so tired and wired at the same time that he’d be content just to drowse awhile with the sun soothing his eyelids. He lights a smoke, chucks the crushed, empty pack out the window, checks the empty alley in the rearview mirror, and notices the handprint still visible on his face. He catches his own eyes glancing uncomfortably back, embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment, as if neither he nor his reflection wants anything to do with each other. He puts on a pair of sunglasses he keeps in t
he visor, and when he looks up through their green lenses, a tanned blonde with slender legs, in a halter top and short turquoise shorts, stands beside the morning glories. She’s wearing sunglasses, too.
“Hi, Joe, they told me I’d find you here. I been waiting all morning, thinking how it would be when I saw you. I missed you so much, baby. I thought I could live without you, but I can’t.”
“Capri,” he says.
She smiles at the sound of her name. “My guy, my baby.”
“Oh fuck, fuck, not you, baby. I didn’t care about the others, but not you, too.” He hasn’t realized until now that he’s been waiting for this moment ever since, without warning, her letters had stopped, leaving a silence that has grown increasingly ominous. Her last letter ended: “Sometimes I read the weather in your city, so that I can imagine you waking up to it, living your life without me.” After a month with no word, he’d asked Sal if he’d heard anything about her, but he hadn’t. In all likelihood she’d met someone, and Joe thought he’d be making a fool of himself getting in touch. Even so, he tried calling, but her number was disconnected.
“I’m back, baby. Aren’t you glad to see me?” She steps toward the car and removes her sunglasses. He can’t meet her eyes any more than he can meet his own in the mirror. If he could speak, the words he’d say—“I’m crying in my heart”—wouldn’t be his, and when she reaches her arms out, Joe slams the car into reverse, floors it, and halfway down the alley, skidding along garbage cans, hits a bag lady. He can hear her groan as the air goes out of her. He sees her sausage legs kicking spasmodically from where he’s knocked her, pinned and thrashing between two garbage cans. Joe keeps going.
Nothing’s more natural than sky.
From here railroad tracks look like stitching that binds the city together. If shadows can be trusted, the buildings are growing taller. From up here, gliding, it’s clear there’s a design: the gaps of streets and alleys are for the expansion of shadow the way lines in a sidewalk allow for the expansion of pavement in the heat.
With a message to carry, there isn’t time to ride a thermal of blazing roses, to fade briefly from existence like a daylight moon. What vandal cracked its pane? The boy whose slingshot shoots cat’s-eye marbles? The old man with a cane, who baits a tar roof with hard corn then waits with his pellet gun, camouflaged by a yellowed curtain of Bohemian lace?
Falcons that roost among gargoyles, feral cats, high-voltage wires, plate glass that mirrors sky—so many ways to fall from blue. When men fly they know by instinct they defy.
It’s not angels the Angelus summons but iridescent mongrels with blue corkers in the history of their genes, and carriers, fantails, pouters, mondains—marbled, ring-necked, crested—tipplers, tumblers, rollers, homers homeless as prodigals, all circling counterclockwise around the tolling belfry of St. Pius as if flying against time. Home lost, but not the instinct to home. Message lost, but not the instinct to deliver.
From up here it’s clear the saxophone emitting dusk on a rooftop doesn’t know it plays in harmony with the violin breaking hearts on the platform of an El, or with the blind man’s accordion on an empty corner, breaking no heart other than its own. Or with the chorus of a thousand blackbirds. Love can’t keep silent, and this is its song.
“You need a fucken ark to get through that shit,” Johnny Sovereign says.
The flooded side street is a dare: sewers plugged, hydrants uncapped, scrap wood wedged against each gushing hydrant mouth to fashion makeshift fountains.
“Think of it as a free car wash,” Joe says.
“I don’t see you driving your T-bird through.”
“I might if it was whitewashed with baked pigeon shit. Go, man!”
They crank up the windows and Sovereign guns the engine and drops the canary yellow Pancho into first. By second gear, water sheets from the tires like transparent wings, then the blast of the first hydrant cascades over the windshield, and Sovereign, driving blind, flicks the wipers on and leans on the horn. By the end of the block they’re both laughing.
“You can turn your wipers off now,” Joe says. He can hear the tires leaving a trail of wet treads as they turn down Cermak. “Where you going, man?” Joe asks.
“Expressway,” Sovereign says. “I thought you wanted to see what this muther can do opened up. You sure you don’t want to drive?”
“I’m too wiped.”
“You look wiped. Rough night?” Sovereign smirks. “Come on, you drive. A ride like this’ll get the blood pumping.”
“Yo, it ain’t like I’m driving a fucken Rambler.”
“No, no, your T-bird’s cool, but this is a fucking bomb.”
“I’ll ride shotgun. But I want to see what it does from jump. I heard zero to sixty in eight-point-one. Go where the dragsters go.”
“By three V’s?”
“Yeah, three V’s is good,” Joe says. “Private. We can talk a little business there, too.”
The 3 V’s Birdseed Company, a five-story dark brick factory with grated windows, stands at the end of an otherwise deserted block. The east side of the street is a stretch of abandoned factories; the west side is rubble, mounds of bricks like collapsed pyramids where factories stood before they were condemned. Both sides of the street are lined with dumped cars too junky to be repoed or sold, some stripped, some burned. Summer nights kids drag race here.
“Park a sec. We’ll oil up,” Joe says. They’ve driven blocks, but he can still hear the wet treads of the tires as Sovereign pulls into a space among the junkers along the curb. Joe unzips the gym bag he’s lugged with him into Sovereign’s Bonneville and hoists out the scotch bottle. There’s not more than a couple swallows left. “Haig pinch. Better than Chivas.”
Sovereign takes a swig. “Chivas is smoother,” he says. He offers Joe a Marlboro. Joe nips off the filter, Sovereign lights them up and flicks on the radio to the Cubs’ station. “I just want to make sure it’s Drabowsky pitching. I took bets.”
“Who’d bet on the fucken Cubs?”
“Die-hard fans, some loser who woke up from a dream with a hunch, the DP’s around here bet on Drabowsky. Who else but the Cubs would have a pitcher from Poland? Suckers always find a way to figure the odds are in their favor.”
It’s Moe Drabowsky against the Giants’ Johnny Antonelli. Sovereign flashes an in-the-know smile, flicks the radio off, then takes a victorious belt of scotch and passes it to Joe. “Kill it,” Joe says, and when Sovereign does, Joe lobs the empty pinch bottle out the window and it cracks on a sidewalk already glittering with shards of muscatel pints and shattered fifths of rotgut whiskey. Sun cascades over the yellow Bonneville. “Man, those mynahs scream,” Sovereign says. “Sounds like goddamn Brookfield Zoo. Hear that one saying a name?”
In summer, the windows behind the grates on the fifth floor of 3 V’s are open. The lower floors of the factory are offices and stockrooms. The top floor houses exotic birds—parakeets, Java birds, finches, canaries, mynahs. Sometimes there’s an escape, and tropical birds, pecked by territorial sparrows, flit through the neighborhood trees while people chase beneath with fishing nets, hoping to snag a free canary.
“It’s the sparrows,” Joe says. “They come and torment the fancy-ass birds. ‘Cheep-cheep, asshole, you’re jackin off on the mirror in a fucken cage while I’m out here singing and flying around.’ Drives the 3 V’s birds crazy and they start screeching and plucking out their feathers. You ever felt that way?”
“What? In a cage?” Sovereign asks. “No fucken way, and I don’t intend to. So, what’s the deal?” He actually checks his jeweled Bulova as if suddenly realizing it’s time in his big-shot day for him to stop gabbing about birds and get down to business. “Whitey say something about me getting a little more of the local action? Setting craps up on weekends?”
“Yeah, local action,” Joe says. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“I’m in,” Johnny says. “I’m up for whatever moves you guys have in mind, Joe.”
&n
bsp; “There’s just one minor problem to work out,” Joe says. “Whitey thinks you’re skimming.”
“Huh?” Sovereign says.
“You heard me,” Joe says. “Look, I know your mind is going from fucken zero to sixty, but the best thing is to forget trying to come up with bullshit no one’s going to believe anyway and to work this situation out.”
“Joe, what you talking about? I keep books. I always give an honest count. No way I would pull that.”
“See, that’s pussy-ass bullshit. A waste of our precious time. Whitey checked your books. He had Vince, the guy who set the numbers up in the first place, check them. They double-checked. You fucked up, Johnny, so don’t bullshit me.”
“I never took a nickel beyond my percentage. There gotta be a mistake.”
“You saying you may have made a miscalculation? That your arithmetic is bad?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Where’d you get the scratch for this car?”
“Hey, I’m doing all right. I mean, and I owe on it. The bank fucking owns it.”
“More bullshit, you paid cash. Whitey checked. You been making book here, gambling it Uptown and losing, drinking hard, cheating on Vi …”
“Vi? What you talking about? She’s got nothing to do with nothing.”
“Why wouldn’t you stay home with a primo lady like that? You’re out of control, man. Your fucken Pancho’s leaking oil. With your fear of cages, next you’ll be talking to the wrong people. You’re a punk-ass bullshitter and a bad risk.”
“Joe, I swear to you—”
“You swear?”
“On my mother’s grave. Swear it on my children.”
“You cross your heart and hope to die, too?”
“Huh?”
“Like little kids say.”
“I know how kids talk, Joe. I got a baby girl and a little boy, Johnny Junior.”
“So, swear it like you mean it,” Joe says, exhaling smoke and flicking his cigarette out the window. “I cross my heart …” Sovereign looks at Joe as if he can’t be serious, and Joe stares him down.