I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  Stosh and Dahl were already gone. Apparently, we’d missed the high point of the evening: Stosh’s first fistfight since freshman year. He’d gotten into it with a guy named Lusk, a wiseass on the basketball team who mostly rode the bench. The story I heard that night was that Stosh and Dahl, who looked like a model in her filmy low-cut gown, had showed up already high. Stosh had been threatening to mix up some special pre-prom cocktail at the Rexall. Dahl had stripped off her high heels and, clapping them overhead like castanets, danced barefoot in the parking lot. With the headlights blazing through her dress, it was clear that she wasn’t wearing underclothes. The other dancers opened a space for her. She was dancing alone for Stosh when Lusk drunkenly cut in and tried copping a look up her dress by doing the limbo between her legs. Dahl nailed him with one of her spiky heels. Lusk scrambled to his feet, said something to Stosh about controlling his crazy bitch, and Stosh hit him with a combination that knocked him down. Like most of the daily fistfights at St. A’s, that was the end of it. Or should have been, except that Lusk came back with his buddies, snuck up on the Merc, where Dahl was giving Stosh a blow job, and started rocking the car. Stosh put it in reverse, drove over their feet, and just kept going. Later, I found out from Stosh that he’d broken his hand on Lusk’s jaw and finished prom night in the emergency room while Dahl slept passed out in the Merc.

  It was one of those nights: puke spattered on rented patent-leather shoes, guys who were buddies one second duking it out the next.

  “You know what’s gross?” somebody’s date commented. “A nosebleed on a cream-colored tux.”

  “That about sums it up,” Laurel said.

  Before the cops came, Ken Guletta, the class valedictorian, climbed up on the hood of a car to give a speech about how our class was disgracing the tradition of St. Augustine.

  “This is the only senior prom we’re ever going to have,” he shouted. “Is this how you want to leave high school? Is this how you want to remember it?”

  The question hung in a momentary lapse of any sound other than the bass throb of car radios. Then the cry went up, “Pants him!” They were on Guletta before he could escape inside, dragging him twisting and pleading into the arena of headlights and tearing off his trousers.

  “I can see why this place has the reputation of the Beast School,” Laurel said. A tendril of her hair had come undone. Ever since she’d seen my tails she’d wanted to dance, and we’d been swaying against each other in our own little space between cars, sipping from the steady round of bottles being passed, and from the silver flask that I’d found empty in the jacket of Uncle Lefty’s suit and filled with Bacardi. Laurel was a little drunk, calling me Freddy, and I was calling her Gin.

  “Take me to the Blue Note, Freddy,” she said, and handed me the keys to her mother’s Olds.

  I had a fake New York driver’s license I hoped would get me in. But I never got to test it out. It hadn’t occurred to me that seating was by reservation only. “Come back for the late show at one a.m.,” the doorman told us.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Laurel. I could see she was disappointed. “Want to get something to eat?”

  “I’m too tipsy. Just drive us somewhere neat. Where’s this Baha’i I keep hearing about? It sounds like an island in the Pacific.”

  Baha‘i was too far if we were going to try the Blue Note later, but there must have been dozens of places I could have taken her, and yet, with an entire city to choose from, I suddenly couldn’t think of anywhere to go. I found myself driving through Little Village. I’d meant only to turn off briefly and cruise by with a beautiful, slightly drunk girl beside me. But once back on those streets I had the impulse to show her the river, where the factories billowed veils of smoke across floodlights as if they were manufacturing fog. I wanted her to see the reflections that the furnaces scorched across oily water, the fireworks of acetylene blue splashing into red-hot sparks behind smudged foundry windows, all the incredible places where Angel and I had walked at night. In a way that I couldn’t explain to her, or to myself for that matter, it was preparation for Baha’i.

  We ended up at the Fire Truck Graveyard, the car parked so that its front bumper almost touched the Cyclone fence, its headlights spraying across the battered shapes of old fire trucks. I stepped out and shook the flask. It felt as if only a couple swigs were left. Laurel’s eyes looked enormous, as if they’d grown in order to see in the dark.

  “We could finish it on the seat of the hook and ladder,” I suggested.

  “Are you serious? Perry, where are we?”

  “I bet you never saw anything like this before.”

  “I have to admit it’s a first. Is that smell the Sanitary Canal?”

  “You honestly don’t think it’s kind of cool?”

  “Maybe if we were here for a drug deal or to dump a body, sure. Oh my God! Is that a rat? I think I saw a rat. I’m terrified of rats.”

  “C’mon,” I said, although now I was feeling jumpy, “no rats. I’ve never seen a rat. There’s probably fire engines here your parents chased as kids.”

  “My parents grew up in New Jersey.” She’d slid over to the open door on the driver’s side and sat facing out with her legs crossed. They seemed to glow with the light of the polished temple. I could see she was thinking it over. “How do you propose to get over the fence? There’s barbed wire on top.”

  “No problem.” I demonstrated, giving myself a boost off the bumper and flipping the fence. It was a maneuver I’d had down since I was a kid, but this time the tails on my tux caught on the barbs, yanking me back in midair, and, jacket shredding as I crashed, slammed me to the ground.

  “Oh my God! Are you all right?” Laurel cried.

  I stood up, brushed the cinders out of my palms, checked my skinned knee through the tear in the trousers, picked up the flask that had clattered off, and raised it in a toast. “Just kidding around. I got a little carried away,” I assured her. “There’s actually a gate you can squeeze through.”

  “No,” Laurel said. “No there isn’t. There’s no gate. There’s no Blue Note, no Baha‘i, and if Baha’i is like this I don’t want to be there.” She swung her legs back into the car, slammed the door, and leaned out the window.

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Perry, and think it means I don’t like you, or that I never want to see you again, because I really do like you, and I know I could get to like you a lot more, and I do want you to call me someday as soon as you get some professional help.” Then, she put the Olds into reverse, swung a U, and I watched the red taillights disappear.

  Stosh and I toweled off with our T-shirts, dressed, and headed up the beach toward the break in the trees where a dry streambed led to the North Branch of the Chicago River. We crashed out of bramble and followed the river, ducking under an old concrete bridge. I’d never been farther upstream than that.

  “Are you sure you can find your way back to these orchids?”

  “I went into the jungle, Willy, and, by God, came out rich. Rich, I tell you, rich!”

  Beyond the bridge the banks got steep. We rolled up our jeans and waded in over the tops of our gym shoes, keeping to the muddy ledge before the water dropped off. Cottonwoods angled out, and we picked our way over fallen trunks. Mosquitoes buzzed from marshy patches of shade.

  At a bend, the river divided around flat, bleached slabs of limestone. We hauled ourselves up on a rock close to the bank. Stosh arranged a pack of matches, a crushed pack of Kools, his knife, and the twisted greasy reefer between us.

  “Do you realize that this joint was made with one hundred percent pure Bigbo spit?” Stosh asked. “Not a pretty idea.” The secluded river seemed far away from Bigbo and the rumble of Western Avenue. Stosh held up his hands as if he’d just scrubbed for brain surgery, then delicately massaged a Kool over the water, letting the threads of tobacco float off until he was left with a hollow tube of cigarette paper.

  “You know what’s spooky,” Stosh said, “is that eve
ry time Dahl and I break up, I know that should be it, but I don’t feel free. It’s like the breaking up is a stronger part of us being together than the actual being together …” He gave up as if it was beyond explaining and continued carefully untwisting the joint, concentrating on his task, not looking up. I’d never heard him talk about Dahl that way before and suddenly realized that things with her were bothering him more than he’d let on, and that of the two of us it was Stosh who was in over his head. He slit the joint with his knife and funneled the weed into the tube of cigarette paper, twisted the end, and handed it to me.

  “The Bo always has dynamite weed, but personally, I’d rather not smoke Bigbo spit,” Stosh said.

  The match flared and the tip of the reefer crackled as I inhaled. I held in the smoke the way I held my breath swimming under water.

  “Did you ever think,” I asked, exhaling, “that it might be Bigbo spit that’s the active ingredient?”

  We passed the joint, surrounded by a stillness in which the birds chirped louder and more musically and the reflections of trees shimmered like a green glaze on the olive river. Sunlight sparkled off floating motes of scum and the drizzle of invisible insects. When we waded off the rock into the reflections of the trees along the bank, it felt as if we were moving like mimes. I could see the wakes of the water spiders we disturbed fanning away from us. I was thirsty. My mouth felt too dry to talk. It seemed we’d been slogging a long time.

  “We’re lost, aren’t we?” I finally asked. “We’ll never find these orchids.”

  “Two braves from the Fugowi tribe go hunting,” Stosh said. “They go for miles, many moons, deep into the forest until they realize they’re lost. ‘Hey, not to worry,’ one of them says and climbs to the top of a towering tree, scans the landscape, and yells, ‘Where the Fugowi?’”

  “Your father tell you that one, too?”

  “As a matter of fact it’s a pharmacy joke.”

  “You’ll probably have a seminar in those when you get to pharmacy school.”

  Stosh sadly hung his head. Although he’d won the Rexall scholarship, he didn’t want to study pharmacy, but it was that or having to work his way through college.

  We both flinched at the shadow of a vampire bat that became a tiger swallowtail gliding over our heads as if leading us upriver before disappearing into a haze of light. It was hard to tell how long we’d actually been slogging. I remembered other times stoned when it seemed to take all night just to walk up a familiar alley.

  “Hey, Katman,” Stosh asked as if we’d been having a conversation, “so what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to Mexico.”

  “Right. But what if we don’t get it together, or even if we do, when we get back wearing our huaraches, then what?”

  “I have my prospects,” I said, “a position in the ice-cream sector.”

  “You mean like pedaling an ice-cream cart?”

  “And then there’s cans. America will always need more cans.” I’d worked on the production line at the American Can Company briefly the summer before. The one thing it taught me was that I didn’t want to spend my life as my father had, on a production line.

  The bank turned increasingly swampy. Cattails and reeds sprouted waist high. We balanced along partially submerged logs and hopped from rock to rock, sending frogs and turtles plopping in. Stosh suddenly sank in ooze up to his thighs. I leapt to the steep bank, grabbed his flailing arm, hoisted hard, and the mud made a smooching sound as he floundered free. His jeans were entirely slimed in mud.

  “Sonofabitch,” he said. “I lost a fucking shoe.”

  “I went into the jungle, Willy, and, by God, I came out without my shoe,” I managed to choke out before doubling over.

  “Oh no, not a fucking laughing fit! You goddamn dope addicts have no compassion,” Stosh said, breaking up, too. We collapsed side by side in the weeds on the bank under the sun, howling while the birds in the trees chittered back.

  “Shhh,” Stosh said. “I hear celestial music.”

  “You’re hallucinating on Bigbo spit.”

  “No, listen.”

  We clawed up the steep bank toward the sound and peered through a screen of brush. An expanse of perfect lawn, bounded by sculpted hedges that would have employed a truckload of Manpower workers to maintain, stretched to a turreted mansion that made the great houses lining the streets of Evanston look like so many bungalows. In a formal garden, a string quartet played beside a fountain. White-gloved butlers in livery that resembled my Gents evening suit transported flashing trays of cocktails to the guests stroking croquet balls. A woman with a sleek, muscled Doberman was strolling across the lawn. The dog broke from its leash, loped in circles, then froze and, from the distance, locked on to my eyes. For the second time that day I felt the fury in a stare.

  “They’re setting the dogs on us,” I whispered.

  We scrambled back down the hill as if we were guilty of trespassing and hurried upriver.

  “You realize who they were?” Stosh asked, limping along on his single shoe.

  “The Fugowi?”

  “The Ruling Class. At play in their back yard. You ever seen anybody that stinking rich? They’re usually too wily to let you see what real money is.”

  “Yeah, but money can’t buy happiness. That look like happiness to you?”

  “Very profound. One thing they don’t know is that while they’re having their lawns trimmed and petunias fertilized there’s fucking orchids sprouting wild under their stuck-up snouts.”

  We had entered an atmosphere of gnats. Clouds of them reshaped themselves to fit the outlines of our bodies. They stuck to sweat. I was afraid if I inhaled I’d feel them buzzing in my lungs.

  “Where the Fugowi?” I bellowed. It echoed off the river.

  “Cool it,” Stosh cautioned. “If the Rich find out we’re here for orchids they’ll pass an ordinance that says they own them.”

  “Speaking of orchids, where the fuck are they?” I demanded.

  Stosh stopped. The plague of gnats evaporated. We stood knee-deep in ferns at a bend where the river pooled.

  “They’re here, muchacho.” He gestured. “Everywhere.”

  For a moment I thought he was putting me on, then among the reeds along the bank I saw them, vivid slashed violet banners, their funnels striped orange and yellow, tiger-furred bees zooming about them.

  We had our knives out, cutting bouquets. We took off our shirts and piled the orchids onto them, then insulated them in ferns. Cradling our shirts, we sloshed back along the bank.

  The car was sweltering. I was afraid the orchids would wilt. They filled the backseat, where we carefully piled them. Radio blaring the Latin station, we raced to the next stoplight on Sheridan, where the engine died. Stosh tried cranking it, then sat bashing his forehead against the steering wheel.

  “Chinga, chinga, esta caro chingau.” He groaned. “And you, Señor Simpático, had to say something about that poor joker broken down on the Drive. You couldn’t just ignore him like everyone else. I told you the gods wouldn’t let us get away with that. You know what we are to them? Gnats!”

  “Look at it this way, better it happened now than later, in the Yucatán.”

  “Ah! the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining theory beloved by nuns. Very profound!”

  Traffic jammed the lane behind us while we unwired the hood. Stosh leaned into the huge, hot engine with a wrench, unbolting the fuel pump.

  “Move the heap,” a guy in a Beamer hollered as he swung around us.

  I flipped him the finger.

  “You want a fucken orchid up your rectum?” Stosh raged after him. He disconnected one end of the plastic hose from the fuel pump, sniffed for gas, and made a face as if ready to barf. “I can’t go on.”

  “Hurry up before the orchids wilt,” I told him.

  He glanced balefully at me, then sucked on the hose and spit out a mouthful of gas. He was still spitting out the taste when the Porsche with the frat guys swung
even and braked for a moment, all three of them grinning. “Wanna drag?” the driver taunted and spun rubber. Stosh waved at their rear fender with the wrench. There was a crunching sound from the taillight. “Oops!” Stosh said. The Porsche kept going.

  I rewired the hood while Stosh slid behind the wheel, and the engine turned over with an explosive backfire.

  “Tijuana or bust.” Stosh grinned as I jumped in.

  “All that road rollin,” I said, “and all those people dreaming in the immensity of it.”

  Two lights down, an Evanston cop pulled us over.

  He was an older guy with a gray crew cut. His partner sat in the squad car listening to calls.

  “I’m sure you both know the drill. Let’s see some ID. Better yet, get out of the car and assume the position,” the cop said.

  We stood with our legs spread and hands leaning on the hot car while he studied Stosh’s license without bothering to frisk us down. Maybe Stosh’s jeans looked too filthy. “Take those sunglasses off, so I can determine if this is you, Palacz.”

  Stosh propped them up on his forehead.

  “You been fighting, Palacz?” the cop asked, looking at Stosh’s black eye. “You been rolling around in the mud like a pig?”

  Stosh said nothing.

  “What’s with the one shoe?”

  “There a local ordinance against one shoe?” Stosh asked.

  “You know how many laws this vehicle is probably breaking? What are you troublemakers doing up here, anyway?”

  “Worshiping,” I said. “We’re Baha’is.”

  “You smarting off with me, Katzek?” he asked, reading the name off my license. He looked in the car. “What the hell’s in the backseat?”

  “Nothing,” Stosh said at the same time I said, “Orchids.” Stosh gave me a disgusted look as if I was a snitch.

  “Norm, come look at this,” the cop hollered to his partner, but Norm waved him off. Norm looked impatient to get moving.

  “Where’d two characters like you get a carload of orchids?”