by Stuart Dybek
“Cross my heart … ,” Sovereign says.
“No, you got to actually cross your heart,” Joe says, crossing his own heart, and when, to illustrate further, Joe reaches with his left hand to open Sovereign’s sport coat, Sovereign flinches, then smiles, chagrined at being so jumpy. Instead of making a move to resist Joe touching him, Sovereign drags on his cigarette. “Nice pricey sport coat, nice monogrammed shirt,” Joe says, holding Sovereign by the lapel. “Sure there’s a heart in here to cross, Johnny?” Joe brings his right hand up to check for a heartbeat. “Relax, I’m just fucking with you.” Joe smiles, then touches the trigger on the stiletto he’s palmed from his argyle sock, the blade darting out as he thrusts, slamming Sovereign back against the car door, the cigarette shooting from his mouth as he groans uuuhhh.
Sovereign’s hands are pressed to where the blade is buried. He looks down at the bloodied pearl handle of the stiletto sticking from his chest, his eyes bulging, teeth gritted so that the muscles knot out from his jaw.
“Don’t move, it’s in clean,” Joe says. “Just let it go.”
“Oh, my God, oh, oh,” Sovereign exhales, and an atomized spray of blood hangs in the sunlit air between them. The 3 V’s birds raise a junglish chatter against the everyday chirp of sparrows. The hot car fills with Sovereign’s gasping for breath and with the smell of garlic, of the mortadella sausage on the blade, and then an acrid smell, calling to Joe’s mind a line of kindergartners. Sovereign has peed his pants. His right hand, smeared with the blood soaking through his monogrammed shirt, slips down his body, weakly feeling as if to brush away a burning cigarette. There’s no cigarette, his cigarette has slipped between the seats. Joe guides Sovereign’s hand back to his chest and Sovereign grits his teeth again and groans from the soul, then closes his eyes. Tears well out from under his red lashes. His skin has gone translucent white, making his liverish freckles stand out like beads of blood forced through his pores.
“Not Vi,” Sovereign says. “Oh, please, not Vi. I got little kids.” Blood gurgles in his throat, he tries to clear it and begins to choke and Joe clamps a handkerchief over his mouth and Sovereign keeps swallowing, breathing hard, but otherwise not struggling, as if the pain of the knife has pinned him to the door.
“I told you not to talk. Just let it go. I tried to do you a favor, man. Whitey wants you turned into hamburger. I let you off easy,” Joe says, removing his bloodied handkerchief from Sovereign’s mouth.
Sovereign is shaking his head no-no, trying to form words with his open mouth. A bubble of bloody spit breaks on his lips. All he can do is whisper. His body has slouched so that Joe looks into Sovereign’s dilated nostrils, which are throwing cavernous shadows. Joe leans closer to hear what Sovereign’s trying to say.
“Bullshit,” Johnny Sovereign manages. The word sends up a hanging, reddish spray. “You just wanted to see if it worked.”
“Fuck you,” Joe says. “You got a reprieve you didn’t even know you had. What did you do with the time?” But even as he says it, Joe realizes Sovereign is right. He wanted to see what the knife could do, and how stupid was that, because now he’s stuck talking with a dying mook. He should have just put a couple into Sovereign’s brain and walked the fuck away instead of getting cute, sitting here listening to birds chatter, beside a guy with his jaw grinding and red eyelashes pasted shut by the tears leaking down his cheeks as his life hemorrhages away, the muscle that once pumped five quarts a minute, a hundred thousand heartbeats a day—how many in a life?—no longer keeping time. Joe’s not sure how long they’ve been here. He wants the knife back but worries that if he pulls it out Sovereign will start to thrash and yell, and the wound will gush. Sovereign makes a sound as if he’s gargling, syrupy blood dribbles from the corner of his mouth as his head rolls to the side, and then he’s quiet. Tears dry on his cheeks.
“Sovereign,” Joe says. “Johnny? You still here?” Joe can hardly speak for the dryness of his own mouth. He’s aware of how terribly thirsty he is, and of how suddenly alone. Heat rays in as if the windshield of the Pancho is God’s magnifying glass. Now Joe can hear the name Sovereign was talking about—some 3 V’s bird repeating betty betty betty. He can’t sit any longer listening to the nonstop jabber of the last sounds Sovereign heard.
“Johnny.”
Joe digs the shotgun out of the gym bag. His handkerchief is bloody so he uses his jockstrap to wipe down the sawed-off shotgun he’ll leave behind, jammed in Sovereign’s piss-soaked crotch. He tries to ease out the stiletto. Blood wells up without gushing. Joe tugs harder but can’t dislodge the knife, maybe because his hands have started to shake. He’s drenched with sweat, and takes his jacket off. How did his white shirt get spattered with blood? He removes his shirt. The lapels of his powder blue sport coat are speckled, too, but the splash pattern that’s good for eating spaghetti makes it look as if the blood might be part of the coat. He wipes the car and knife handle down with the shirt. In the gym bag, there’s a wrinkled gray tank top with the faded maroon lettering CHAMPS over an insignia of crossed boxing gloves. Joe pulls that on and slips his jacket over it, and then, for no reason, fits the jockstrap over Sovereign’s face so that it looks as if he’s wearing a mask or a blindfold. At the shotgun blast, flocks rise, detonated from the factory roofs, and Joe imagines how on the top floor of 3 V’s the spooked birds batter their cages.
Friday afternoon, a red clothespin day at the Zip Inn. Ball game on the TV, Drabowsky against the Giants’ Johnny Antonelli, top of the fifth and the Cubs down 2-0 on a Willie Mays homer. The jukebox, Zip apologizes, is on the fritz. No “Ebb Tide,” no “Sing, Sing, Sing,” no “Cucurrucucu Paloma.”
Teo sits on a stool, balancing the quarters that he was going to feed to the jukebox on the wooden bar.
“One more, on the house,” Zip says. His white shirt looks slept in, his bow tie askew, his furrowed face stubbled, eyes bloodshot. It’s clear he’s continued the pace from yesterday. Teo turns his shot glass upside down. Zip turns it back up. “To Friday,” Zip says.
“We already drank to Friday.” Teo turns his shot glass back down. “We drank to Friday yesterday, and to Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.”
“We missed Thursday.”
“Yesterday was Thursday, we started out drinking to Thursday.”
“Yeah, but today’s fucking special.”
“Every day’s special. Isn’t that the point of drinking to them?” Teo asks.
“There is no point,” Zip says. “That’s the point.”
Teo shrugs. “So why’s today special? An anniversary?”
“Special’s the wrong word,” Zip says. He looks as if the right word might be doomed.
Something is eating at Zip, but Teo doesn’t know how to ask what. Yesterday, Teo stayed drinking with him until the afterwork crowd started filtering in. By then, Teo was half-loaded. He put the wounded Spanish pigeon back in his bowling bag and went home, tended to the coop, then fell into bed and, for the first night in weeks, slept undisturbed by dreams. “Look, compadre, if there’s something I can do …”
“Have a brew,” Zip says. He sets a Hamm’s before Teo, and a bag of pretzels, and rings up one of the quarters that Teo has balanced on the bar. “You bring your feathered friend with the bum wing?”
“No,” Teo says, “but I got something you been asking about.” From the bowling bag on the barstool beside him, Teo lifts out a blue head mask and sets it faceup, flat on the bar. The face has the design of a golden beak and iridescent white feathers that fan into flames around flame-shaped eyes. The luminous colors are veined with brownish bloodstains. “You wanted to see, so I brought it.”
“Goddamn.” Zip smiles, looking for a moment, like his old self. “This is what you wrestled in? Pretty wild. So, what was your ring name?”
“La Colibrí.”
“Like the vegetable?”
“It’s a kind of bird,” Teo says.
“You got the rest of the outfit in there?”
T
eo unfolds the matching blue tights, and Zip holds them up, smiling skeptically at Teo.
“They stretch,” Teo says.
“Not that much they don’t.”
“Yeah, they do. I’m wearing the top. Same material.” Teo unbuttons his checked short-sleeved shirt. Underneath, he’s wearing an iridescent blue tank top. Its bulgy front is spotted with faded blood, like the canvas of a ring.
“I wish I could of seen you in the ring, amigo, must have been something.” Zip picks up the mask. He looks as if he’d like to try it on if he had two hands to pull it over his head. “Can you actually see to fight out of this?”
“Sure,” Teo says, “it’s got holes for the eyes.”
“Let’s see.” Zip hands the mask to Teo, and when Teo hesitates, Zip says, “Come on. What the hell?”
“What the hell,” Teo agrees, and pulls it over his head. It’s the first time in years that he’s worn it, and he’s amazed to feel a reminiscent surge of energy, but maybe that’s merely the whiskey kicking in on an empty stomach.
“You are one fierce-looking warrior,” Zip says. “You should come in here wearing the whole outfit, just amble in and sit down, open up your book, and if somebody asks, ‘Who’s that?’ I’ll tell them: ‘Him? The new security. Guards the hard-boiled eggs—which are now a buck apiece in order to pay for security. Salt’s still free.’”
On the TV, the Hamm’s commercial, “From the land of sky blue waters,” plays between innings.
“Can you drink beer through that?” Zip asks.
When Teo laughs, it’s the mask itself that seems to be laughing, the mask that chugs down a bottle of Hamm’s.
“Why’s Goldblatt’s got you disguised in a dress when they could have a goddamn superhero patrolling the aisles? You’re wasting your talent. You could be a rent-a-wrestler, make up business cards. Headlocks for Hire, Half nelsons fifty percent off. I need an autographed picture for the wall. Hey, I could sponsor you, advertise on your jersey.”
“Have a Nip at the Inn of Zip,” Teo says.
“You’re a poet!” Zip sets them up with two more cold ones and rings up another of the quarters Teo has balanced on the bar. “Can the Kohlrabi still kick ass?” Zip asks.
“Fight again?” Teo asks. Even wearing the blue tank top and the mask, even after the first good night’s sleep in a long time, even with the sunlight streaming through the door and whiskey through his veins, on a Friday afternoon, and nowhere to be but here, drinking cold beer and joking with his new friend, Teo knows that’s impossible.
“What if there was no choice?” Zip asks. “If it was him or you? Say you catch somebody stealing and he pulls a knife? Could you do whatever it took? Is it worth it? Purely theoretical, what if somebody hired you to watch their back in a situation like that?”
The undisguised undercurrent of desperation in these questions makes Teo recall the message from the Spanish pigeon: “Asesino.” Murder. The slip of paper is still in Teo’s pocket. There’s an eerie feeling of premonition about it. He’d been thinking maybe of showing it to Zip to see what he made of it, but not now. “Purely theoretical, you keep protection back there?” Teo asks.
“Funny you should ask, I was just looking through my purely theoretical ordnance last night,” Zip says. “Swiss Army knife, USMC forty-five missing the clip. Ever seen one of these?” Zip reaches beneath the bar and sets a short, gleaming sword in front of Teo.
Teo runs his finger along the Oriental lettering engraved on the blade.
“Careful, it’s razor sharp,” Zip says. “Never found out what the letters mean, probably something about honor that gets young men killed. Guys said the Japs used to sharpen these with silk. I don’t know if that’s true, but all the dead Jap soldiers had silk flags their families gave them when they went to war. Made good souvenirs. GI’s took everything you could imagine for souvenirs. Bloody flags, weapons, gold teeth, polished skulls until there was an order against those. Wonder what happened to all that shit? Probably stuffed away forgotten in boxes in basements and attics all over the country. Only thing I took was this. It’s a samurai knife used for hari-kari. They’d sneak in at night and cut your throat, so we slept two in a foxhole, me and Domino Morales, one dozing, the other doing sentry. You’d close your eyes dead tired knowing your life depended on your buddy staying awake.” Zip weighs the sword in his hand, then sets it back under the bar and lifts a length of sawed-off hickory bat handle that dangles by a rawhide loop from a hook beside the cash register. “This used to be enough,” he says, “but the way things are these days you gotta get serious if you want to defend yourself. Whoa!” Zip exclaims, gesturing with the bat at the TV screen. “Banks got all of that one.”
On the TV, Jack Brickhouse is into his home-run call: “Back she goes … way back … back! … back! Hey! Hey!”
“Hey! Hey!” Joe Ditto says. He stands in the emblazoned doorway in his sunglasses and factory steel-toes, his powder-blue sport coat looking lopsided and pouchy where the gun weighs down his right pocket. He’s wearing the sport coat over a wrinkled gym top, and in his left hand he holds a gym bag. He’s sweating as if he’s just come from a workout. “Didn’t mean to startle you, Mr. Zip. I thought you were going to brain your customer here. This masked marauder didn’t pay his bar tab? You want I should speak to him?”
Zip hangs the bat back on its hook, and Joe sets the gym bag down and straddles a stool beside Teo. No introductions are made. On the right side of Joe’s face, beneath a four-day growth of beard, there’s a hot-looking handprint. “What’s so interesting?” Joe asks, when he catches Zip staring. “You don’t like the new look from the other side of Western?” He tucks in his Champs tank top as if it’s his gym shirt-sport coat combination that Zip was staring at. “Fucken hot out there,” Joe says. “I need a cold one. You need an air conditioner in here, Mr. Zip.”
“They’re too noisy,” Zip says. “You can’t hear the ball game.”
“Hey, I’m not trying to sell you one,” Joe says. He drains his beer in three gulps and slams down the bottle. Teo’s remaining two quarters teeter onto their sides. “Hit me again, Mr. Zip. And a shot of whatever you’re drinking. What’s score?”
“Cubs down two to one. Banks just hit one.”
“Drabowsky still pitching? You know where he’s from?”
“Ozanna, Poland,” Zip says like it’s a stupid question. “He’s throwing good.”
“You bet on him?” Joe asks. When he raises the shot glass, his hand is so shaky that he has to bring his mouth to the glass.
“I don’t bet on baseball,” Zip says.
“Hit me again, Mr. Zip. And one for yourself.” From a roll of bills, Joe peels a twenty onto the bar. “What are you drinking, Masked Marvel? Zip, give Zorro here a Hamm’s-the-beer-refreshing.”
Zip sets them up, and the three men sit in silence, looking from their drinks to the ball game as if waiting for some signal to down their whiskeys. Their dark reflections in the long mirror behind the bar wait, too. Teo glances at the mirror, where a man in a blue Hummingbird mask glances back. He knows the guy in the sunglasses beside him is mob, and can’t help noticing that Zip has gone tensely quiet, unfriendlier than he’s ever seen him. It makes him aware of how Zip set the samurai sword within reach, and of the message from the Spanish pigeon.
On the TV, Jack Brickhouse says, “Oh, brother, looks like a fan fell out of the bleachers,” and his fellow sportscaster, Vince Lloyd, adds, “Or jumped down, Jack.” Brickhouse, as if doing play-by-play, announces, “Now, folks, he’s running around the outfield!” and Vince Lloyd adds, “Jack, I think he’s trying to hand Willie Mays a beer!”
“That’s Lefty!” Teo exclaims.
“Lefty? Lefty Antic?” Zip asks. “You sure?”
“The sax player. He’s my neighbor.”
“Here come the Andy Frain ushers out on the field,” Brickhouse announces. “They’ll get things back under control.”
“Look at him run!” Teo says.
&nb
sp; “Go, Lefty!” Zip yells. “He ain’t going down easy.”
Without warning, the TV blinks into a commercial: “From the land of sky blue waters …”
“Shit!” Joe says, “that was better than the fucking game. Guy had some moves.”
“You know Lefty, the sax player?” Teo asks Zip.
“Hell, I got him on the wall,” Zip says, and from among the photo gallery of softball teams with ZipIn lettered on their jerseys he lifts down a picture of a young boxer with eight-ounce gloves cocked. The boxer doesn’t have a mustache, but it’s easy to recognize the sax player. “He made it to the Golden Glove Nationals,” Zip says. “Got robbed on a decision.”
“That southpaw welterweight from Gonzo’s Gym. I remember him from when I was growing up,” Joe Ditto says. “Kid had fast hands.” He raises his shot glass, and they all drink as if to something.
“Well, back to baseball, thank goodness,” Jack Brickhouse says. “Vince, it’s unfortunate, but a few bad apples just don’t belong with the wonderful fans in the friendly confines of beautiful Wrigley field.”
“Best fans in the game, Jack,” Vince says.
“They didn’t want to show him beating the piss out of the Andy Frains,” Joe says.
“Lefty’s good people. Hasn’t put Korea behind him yet, that’s all,” Zip says.
Until yesterday, Teo couldn’t gimp on his bum knee into the Zip Inn without wondering how Zip could put behind him the war that took his arm. Now he knows. Zip hasn’t.
“Hit me again, Mr. Zip,” Joe says. “A double. And get yourself and Masked Man, here.” Joe turns Teo’s shot glass up.
Teo turns it back down.
Joe turns it back up. “Hey, mystery challenger, we’re having a toast.” Joe props Lefty’s photo up against a bottle of Hamm’s. “To a man who knows how to really enjoy a Cubs game.” This time, his hand steadier, Joe clinks each of their glasses.
“Gimme a pack of Pall Malls, Mr. Zip. So, what’s with the mask?” Joe asks Teo. “Off to rob a savings and loan? A nylon’s not good enough? Goddamn, you got the whole outfit here,” he says, examining the tights that Teo hasn’t stuffed back into his bowling bag. “You one of those street wrestlers on Cinco de Mayo or something?”