I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  Their eyes follow his, looking into the gangway. Perhaps something back there has meaning for them, too. Surely one of them must have descended the back stairs some winter night, maybe lugging a sack of garbage out to the alley, and stopped to stand looking up into the random patterns of snow, letting the flakes melt against his face. Están cayendo hojas blancas … white leaves are falling … Perhaps he imagined them as cold flecks of soot that had floated through infinite space from burned-out stars, or imagined how, above the cloudy snow, the gorgeous, terrifying blizzard of the cosmos wheeled over the back yard. Mick remembers such nights, when he gazed up aware that he was just another speck adrift in stardust on the absolute zero breath of God, and yet that lonely awareness made him feel more intensely alive and, in a strange way, free—a freedom by which he’s determined to live his life. But when he looks from the gangway to the gang staring at him, Mick loses any desire to step off the street into its shadow.

  “Qué quieres?” the Disciple demands.

  “Qué trais, pendejo?” a heavyset guy, the oldest-looking of the group, with a rat-tail braid of the kind favored by featherweight boxers, adds in an exaggerated drawl of Mexican Spanish: What do you bring, asshole?

  “A dildo para te metas, pinche puto,” a kid with a scholarly, Indian face mutters. He’s the only one besides my brother wearing glasses. His comment draws snickers.

  Mick catches that they’re joking about how he might abuse himself with the kielbasa and tries joking back. “Es mi amigo,” he tells them, brandishing the kielbasa. He’s begun slowly backing away, talking as he does: “Mi amigo and I go everywhere together and now it’s time for us to catch a bus to Memphis, Tennessee. Hasta la vista.”

  “Está hablando español boricua chingau. Aqui es un barrio Mexicano,” the heavyset guy says: You talk like a fucking PR. He stands and flicks the lit butt of his cigarette at Mick, and the other guys on the stairs spark theirs at him, too.

  And only now does my brother realize what he should have picked up on immediately—his accent is Puerto Rican, not the best impression to make on Mexican guys wary of rival Puerto Rican gangs. He can’t explain his theory that the way to learn a language is to fall in love with a woman who speaks it. He can’t tell them how the language becomes indistinguishable from her, internalized, permanent as any gang tattoo, that even when she’s gone for good she’s there in the feel of the words in his mouth. He knows what they’d say to that or anything else he might tell them.

  “Qué quieres?” the Disciple asks, and takes a step toward Mick.

  They’re all standing now, representing as if practicing some spastic tai chi, throwing gang hand signs as if hexing Mick or warding off evil, speaking as if one in a mute language whose lexicon, if their facial expressions are any indication, consists entirely of obscenities.

  “You know what I conveniently forgot?” my brother asks in English, moving off faster, still walking backward so as not to turn his back, “I forgot how sometimes I fucking hated it here.”

  “Qué quieres?” the kid barks, following after Mick, with his homies behind him.

  “Nada,” my brother answers.

  As soon as he rounds the corner, he begins to run down Twenty-fifth Street, through a boozy blast of conjuntos nortentos from an open bar that used to be Metric’s—in memory everything seems to happen to music—past JJ’s and the driveway where, in summer, Señor Hot Tamale, the name painted in flames on his little white cart, sold incendiary tamales. He kept an iguana on a leash, and his beautiful wild daughter, known on the street as Tamalita, could be momentarily glimpsed clinging to the backs of motorcycles that Mick, eight years old and madly in love with her, would chase for blocks.

  Qué quieres?

  I want to be wringing the throttle, winding through gears, saddled to the chromed sky-rocket of a Triumph 650.

  He turns down Rockwell, past the defunct 3 V’s Birdseed Factory, whose windows once broadcast the cries of caged exotic birds. Its walls are spray-painted in the style of Siqueiros. The peeling murals make the factory appear to be disintegrating along with its superimposed bandoliered angels and peons who ride rearing Quetzalcoatls auraed in fire, its mariachi whose guitars gush at their center holes into rivers of blood and orchids, and its olive-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe. Mick’s reflection flees across her enormous, mournful eyes.

  Qué quieres?

  I want to hide among the martyrs and heroes; I wish this factory, bankrupt of birds, was a cathedral that offered sanctuary.

  Down the flooded side street where Johnny Sovereign had his balls blown off, a street that might have issued from the mural, Mick splashes upstream through the current of an open fire hydrant, scattering gulls lured from garbage dumps by the water. The street is deserted but for a young girl in a wet dress who utters aloud the name of God as a loco blond man races past with a drooping, wind-resisting Polish sausage.

  Run, Jimmy Delacroix, breath ragged, a stitch in your side. Don’t look back to see what’s gaining. Run until the city beneath your feet becomes a blur, run propelled by fear, familiar fear—the fear by which you know you’re home. Don’t stop for traffic, stop signs, red lights, don’t stop for shrines or to kneel beside the pauper’s gravestone where your name’s inscribed in the Seaside Cemetery, a graveyard where the sprinklers throw salt spray and the markers are seabirds that fly away at night.

  Qué quieres?

  I want winged shoes, my old PF Flyers, I want to be wearing the invisible clothes of wind, to be trailing a comet tail of songs: “A love supreme, a love supreme … Those redskin boys couldn’t get my blood cause I was a-ridin’ on a Tennessee Stud …”

  Qué quieres?

  I want to change smoke into a perfume of gardenias.

  A Minor Mood

  The concertina sleeping beside Lefty has started to wheeze. It’s the middle of the night, even the streetlights have their misty blinders on, and the concertina can’t seem to catch her breath. In the dark Lefty listens to her ragged sighs. He can’t sleep to the concertina’s labored breathing. He’s worried. He can’t help thinking about what happened with the glockenspiel, how he would wake to find her place beside him on the bed empty, and then, from the other side of the locked bathroom door, he’d hear her heart hammering arrhythmically and flat, a dissonant rise and fall of scales. Once it began, it went on like that night after night. The neighbors complained; finally, he lost his lease. And one day at dusk, he found himself standing on a street of pawnshops and tattoo parlors, with nowhere to go and only a pawn ticket to show for what had been his life. He’d wandered out with a tattoo—not a rose or an anchor or a snake or a heart, but a single note of indelible blue, a nameless note without a staff, only an eighth note, really—stung onto his shoulder.

  Afterward, he spent a long and, in retrospect, mournful time alone before becoming entangled with the tuba. He met her at a tuba fest, and for a while it seemed as if they were destined for each other, until the dreams started. Disturbing dreams in which he ran lost and breathless through twisting corridors, dreams he’d wake from in the dark to a borborygmus of gurgled moans, blats, grunts, drones, which seemed drawn out longer each night, like the vowels of whales—melancholy whales. At first, he tried to tell himself that it was only gas. But the signs and symptoms were undeniably clear, and this time he didn’t wait for landlords or court orders to tell him it was over. He’d already been evicted from sleep. One afternoon, while the tuba was away for a valve job, Lefty, groggy with insomnia, packed what he could fit into a suitcase that once cushioned a saxophone and left the rest behind.

  In the years that followed, home was wherever he set that suitcase down—a sad succession of flophouses and transient hotels, dumps that seemed tenanted by fugitives from the collective unconscious: Depression Deco lobbies; ill-lit corridors lined with doors emitting smells like whispers and whispers like smells; restless, rheumatic rooms that creaked and groaned under their own dingy weight, rooms that came furnished with desperation, and wallpapered wit
h worn, fitful dreams. He carried a sax case but was past his time for saxophones and their slinky, sultry, seductive ways; their nocturnal predilections and swanky pretensions were for breaking the hearts of younger men. On his deathbed, his father had gestured him closer and before dying whispered in his ear, “The wallflowers, son, go for the wallflowers. They’ll appreciate it.” But his father was wrong about that as he was about everything else. The wallflowers were a vain, angry, neurotic, and anything but appreciative lot. Sometimes, in a fog, down by the docks, he’d hear sounds echoing the warning that lights could not convey—buoys dinging their bells, the moody moans of foghorns—and he’d think about the glockenspiel, recalling the sensitive touch of her mallets, and the patterns her glittering vertebrae left along his skin. He’d feel the blue tattoo ache like a bruise from bite marks on his shoulder. He’d think about the tuba until he could feel again a ghostly impression of her hard, cool mouthpiece and taste the brass against his lips (a taste not unlike that of his own blood after a fistfight), and then he’d recall the way his breath flowed into her, as if there was no filling her up, as if she was sucking it from the deepest pocket of his body, leaving him hollow. He had carried that hollowness within him for years; he didn’t want to feel hollow any longer. Whatever came after the tuba would have to arrive on a breath of its own.

  Now, he listens to the concertina wheeze, and perhaps to find a little respite from his worries, Lefty remembers nights as a child when his lungs sounded like wind blowing past a tattered shade, and his bronchial tubes gave recitals of the croup. While his father was God knows where, and his mother was at work, his grandmother would come to nurse him. It was a large family on his father’s side, and his grandmother managed to love them all and yet showed such special affection toward Lefty—maybe because his father was always God knows where—that everyone called her Lefty’s Gran, even if she was their grandmother, too.

  Lefty’s Gran would show up whenever he was sick, carrying her green mesh shopping bag. She always carried that bag in case she suddenly had to do some shopping, or on the chance she stumbled upon something valuable lying in the street. Even if it served no other purpose, it was good for carrying her purse in. When she came to see Lefty, the shopping bag would also contain the chartreuse protrusions of a half dozen lemons and the blue-green bulge of an economy-size jar of Vicks VapoRub, against which other, lesser bottles clinked.

  The sight of her would set Lefty coughing.

  “So, Louis,” his gran would say—oddly Lefty’s Gran refused to call her grandson Lefty—“So, Louis, I hear you got the Krupa again.”

  The lemons and Vicks were part of her cure for the Krupa. But before unloading the shopping bag, before doing anything else, Lefty’s Gran would fill the apartment with steam. She’d go from room to room, balancing pie pans and cookie trays on the tops of radiators, and as she set them up they’d bang like cymbals punctuating her stream of muttering: “Kid’s got the Krupa (Bang!) the Gene (Bam!) the drummer man (Boom!) Krupa (Crash!).

  “Hey, Louis (Wham!), whatayou got?”

  “The Gene Krupa.”

  “You can say that again (Blam!).”

  “The Gene Krupa.”

  “Ha!” Lefty’s Gran would expel a laugh resounding like a cymbal clap, as if he’d just said something surprisingly hilarious even though she had taught him the you-can-say-that-again routine. “You can bet your dupa (Bing!) you got the Krupa (Bong!).”

  She’d fill the pie pans and cookie trays to the brim with water; she’d set kettles and pots on every burner of the stove and let them boil; she’d turn the shower on hot in the bathroom and let it pour down clouds of steam; she’d hook the vaporizer up beside Lefty’s bed, fuel it with a glob of Vicks, and aim its snorky exhalations in his direction. The entire flat began to heave with breath.

  While the steam rose like genies rushing out of bottles, Lefty’s Gran would rub camphor oil on his chest and on his neck, where his glands were swollen; she’d dab a streak of Vicks along his upper lip as if she was drawing a mustache. Then, she’d undo the babushka that she wore whether she was outside or in. She’d whisk it off with the flourish of a magician doing a trick, and years would disappear. When he saw her blurred in steam, minus her babushka, Lefty could imagine his grandmother as a girl. He wondered if she kept her head covered because her hair looked younger than she did. It was a lustrous ash blond, so springy with curls that it looked fake, as if she might be wearing a wig. This girlishness that she kept hidden was like a secret between them.

  She’d twine her satiny babushka around his throat, and over the babushka she would wrap a rough woolen scarf that was reserved for these occasions and known as the croup scarf. The scarf, a clashing maroon-and-pea-green plaid anchored at one end by a big safety pin, retained past smells of camphor and Vicks. Its scratchy wool chapped his chin where his skin wasn’t protected by the babushka.

  By then, the flat was expanding with steam. Mirrors disappeared in the mist they reflected. Through the mist, the wallpaper, a pattern of vines and flowers, opened into three dimensions and came alive like flora in a rain forest. The background noise of outside traffic transformed into screeches of monkeys and tropical birds. Steam smoldered along the insides of windows and made them sweat; it condensed on the ceiling into beads that hung like rain above Lefty’s bed. He was sweating, too, sweating out the fever; germs were fleeing his body through the portholes of his pores.

  In the kitchen, lost in steam, Lefty’s Gran was squeezing lemons. He could hear the vigorous, musical rattle of her spoon as she stirred honey and a splash of boiling water into syrup, then added lemon juice, and last, but not least, a dash of whiskey—Jim Beam—which was the brand of choice for all his relatives, by tradition referred to simply as Beam. Beam as in a ray of light.

  Even stuffed up, Lefty could smell its fiery perfume.

  The apartment was filling with aromas: pie tins and cookie trays baking on top of merrily knocking radiators; menthol, eucalyptus, camphor, lemon; and through the steam, like a searchlight glancing through fog: Beam. Lefty’s Gran stirred the lemon and honey concoction together in a coffee mug but served it in jiggersize portions, although they referred to a jigger as a shot glass—another family tradition. It seemed an apt name, as far as Lefty was concerned, for a glass that had the shape, density, and sometimes the wallop of a slug.

  He’d sip his medicinal drink until it was cool enough, then belt it down as if drinking a toast: Na zdrowie, germs, take this! When the shot glass was empty, his gran would bring a refill on the theory that he needed fluids. She’d have a couple belts herself on the theory that she needed fluids, too.

  “Na zdrowie,” she’d say—bottoms up!

  “Na zdrowie,” he’d answer—down the hatch!

  On such white winter mornings—white steam on one side of the pane, white snow on the other—propped on a throne of pillows with the babushka like a raja’s turban wound around his swollen glands; with menthol, eucalyptus, camphor, lemon, and through the steam, his gran materializing with a mug in one hand and a bottle of Beam in the other—on white mornings like that, how could a boy not conclude that being sick might almost be worth the joy of getting well? Those were mornings to be tucked away at the heart of life, so that later, whenever one needed to draw upon a recollection of joy in order to get through troubled times, it would be there, an assurance that once one was happy and one could be happy again.

  Sometimes, on those mornings, Lefty would wonder how his room, its window clouded as if the atmosphere of Venus was pressed against the pane, must have looked from the street. He wondered how it sounded to strangers passing by. Could they hear the vaporizer hissing like a reed instrument missing a reed? Could they hear his gran, who was now sipping Beam straight from the bottle, singing “You Are My Sunshine” in her Polish patois? She loved that song. “Not to be morbid,” she’d say, “but sing ‘Sunshine’ at my funeral.”

  Not to be morbid, but when that time came, Lefty played it on the sax, his b
reath Beamy, played it to heaven, his back braced against the steeple of St. Pius.

  She taught Lefty to play the measuring spoons like castanets in accompaniment to her gypsylike singing. She was playing the radiators with a ladle as if they were marimbas. Lefty was up, out of bed, flushed, but feeling great, and in steam that was fading to wisps, he was dancing with his gran. Her girlish curls tossed as around and around the room they whirled, both of them singing, and one or the other dizzily breaking off the dance in order to beat or plunk or blow some instrument they’d just invented : Lefty strumming the egg slicer; Lefty’s Gran oompahing an empty half gallon of Dad’s old-fashioned root beer; Lefty bugling “Sunshine” through the cardboard clarion at the center of a toilet-paper roll; Lefty’s Gran chiming a closet of empty coat hangers; Lefty shake-rattle-and-rolling the silverware drawer; Lefty’s Gran Spike Jonesing the vacuum cleaner; Lefty, surrounded by pots and lids, drum-soloing with wooden spoons; while Lefty’s Gran, conducting with a potato masher, yelled, “Go, Krupa, go!”