I Sailed with Magellan (22 page)

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Authors: Stuart Dybek

BOOK: I Sailed with Magellan
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That's where I found him one morning, stretched out, wearing
his Ray Charles shades, a single purple flower resting on the middle of his chest.
“What's with the corsage?” I asked.
“I walked into the jungle, Willy, when I was seventeen, and when I walked out I was twenty-one and, by God, I was rich!” Stosh said, quoting the line we both loved from
Death of a Salesman
, which we'd read in senior English class. He raised his sunglasses, and I noticed a welt under one eye as if he'd stepped into a left hook.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Orchids”—he smiled—“I found fucking wild orchids.”
 
There wasn't time for instant coffee.
“Screw the landscaping,” Stosh said. “Come on,
ese,
we may never have to work again.”
“What are you on anyway?”
“Hey, how much did you waste on that orchid for your illfated prom night? Eighteen bucks a pop! Every spring my uncle Hunky goes to the cemetery and picks morel mushrooms off the graves. A pound of them dried goes for twenty bucks, so what do you think a pound of orchids goes for? Fuck pills and pot; we'll be orchid dealers.”
We jumped into the Merc and riding on fumes sped six blocks and swerved into the Marvel gas station on Western.
“I thought orchids only grew in the tropics,” I said.
“Obviously not,” Stosh said, spitting out the orchid that he held between his teeth. “Here, don't let Bigbo get a whiff of this or he'll get carried away.” He handed me the orchid, and I inhaled expecting perfume, but its scent was too faint to compete with the smell of gas. I fit it in with the pink dice dangling from the rearview mirror.
Bigbo was standing by the gas pumps, blowing his nose into a paper towel that looked as if he'd just used it to wipe a dipstick. With his free hand he felt for his balls, lost in the folds of his greasy coveralls. No matter what else he was doing, the Bo always kept one hand checking his balls. His shaggy head barged into the window before Stosh came to a stop.
“How she runnin, man?” Bigbo wanted to know.
He'd helped Stosh cram the 383 into the old Merc body and was in love with the idea of something that looked like a primered junker being able to fly.
“Needs a fuel pump,” Stosh said.
“I'll see what I can do,” Bigbo told him. No one mentioned it, but we all knew the Bo was connected with the Perido brothers, who ran a chop shop in a deserted lumberyard off Ashland Avenue. Gordo, Stosh's motorpsycho younger brother, had been getting involved with the Peridos, too.
The engine was too big for the hood to close completely, and Bigbo unwired the hood while Stosh pumped the gas.
“Look at this fucken bomb,” Bigbo crooned, massaging his balls. “Rev the muther, Kat,” he said to me.
I toed the pedal, and the Merc began to percolate.
“More!” Bigbo hollered over the thunder, pulling on his crotch as if headed for an orgasm.
I pressed the pedal halfway, and it felt as if the Merc would shake apart if it couldn't squeal off. Stosh vanished in the blue cloud of exhaust smoke. I could hear him yelling, but not what.
“Lemme,” Bigbo demanded, tugging himself balls first into the driver's seat and stomping the accelerator. “Had to cut through the fire wall to cram in this monster, pushed back the trannie, drilled through the floor for the Hurst, braced the front end, installed a Bendix, quads, headers …”
Mouth against my ear, which was the only way he could make himself heard over the engine, he recited the inventory of parts as
if chanting a litany. I didn't know if it was the engine roar flushing them, but I could see a cloud of blackbirds rising from the viaduct where the strip of wilderness that bordered train tracks passed unnoticed through the neighborhood. There was a marsh hidden back there alive with turtles, frogs, dragonflies, where once we'd seen a blue heron lifting off; a pterodactyl couldn't have filled us with more wonder. Stosh, Angel, and I discovered it back in grade school when we hung out on the tracks, hitching rides, clinging to the ladders on the sides of boxcars rocking through the neighborhoods and prairies behind factories, destination unknown.
“Bo, you fucken demento!” Stosh yelled, reaching in to switch off the ignition. Even the semis barreling toward the expressway and the freight train that had rousted the blackbirds and now racketed over the viaduct sounded peaceful by comparison.
“You need some weight to hold the ass end down, babe,” Bigbo said.
“I need a goddamn fuel pump,” Stosh said, shaking his head dismally. “Keeps dying on me. Not to mention that everything I eat lately tastes like gas from sucking on the fuel pump to get it running again.”
“As long as it's just fuel pumps you're sucking,” the Bo said, winking at Stosh and rapping his shoulder.
“I was making out the other night and the girl kept complaining my breath smelled like Texaco,” Stosh complained.
Bigbo rolled out of the Merc chuckling, holding himself as if he'd been kicked in the groin. “She even knew the flavor, huh?”
“No, it was Marvel. Sometimes she can be so wrong.”
“Chicks! Too fucken much! Here, man,” he said, digging deep in his coveralls and extracting a thin, grease-imprinted twist of paper that he slipped into Stosh's shirt pocket. “A little taste for later … dynamite shit, babe. Don't say I never gave you nothin.”
“Hey, I'm afraid to light matches around my mouth, but
thanks anyway,” Stosh said, ducking under a Bigbo embracio—so Bigbo gave his ass a pat instead.
Stosh slid into the car, handed the gas money out the window, adjusting his shades.
“Hey, man,” the Bo asked, catching a glimpse of Stosh's bruised eye. “Who coldcocked you?”
Stosh merely shrugged.
“So where you guys off to this early? Scare up some puzzy?” He pronounced it “puzzy,” the way some guys in the neighborhood called sewers “zewers.”
“Picking orchids … here, don't say I never gave you nothin,” Stosh said, tossing him our orchid, then popping the Merc into first so we shimmied off on a streak of rubber.
 
We were in third doing fifty through the pinging dust along the curb, passing semis on the right.
“Does need some weight in the ass end,” Stosh said.
I slid a few bucks across the dash.
“What's this?” he asked, dumbfounded.
“For gas.” Since Stosh had the wheels, Angel and I kicked in for gas whenever we went riding.
“Has it come to this?” Stosh asked, pushing the money back with distaste as if he was through honoring a tradition that was beneath us. Ever since getting out of high school he'd been in some higher gear: Beethoven, the sleep fast, Mexico, now no gas money was all part of it. “The bullshit is over,” he'd said into the microphone when they'd handed him his diploma, then added ominously, “You must change your life.” He'd read that somewhere. Stosh had been reading a lot. The backseat of the Merc was a clutter of paperbacks.
We fishtailed left on Thirty-first, gunning past the Hospital for Contagious Diseases.
“I always hold my breath when I go by so I don't inhale the plague or something,” Stosh said.
By the next block we'd slowed to a crawl, hugging the curb as we passed the city auto pound. Stosh checked the pound regularly for parts we'd strip at night.
“I'd rather luck into a pump here than get one from the Bo,” he said.
“He'd like to give you a pump all right.” I leered with a Bigbo-like wink and tugged at my crotch.
“Just as long as it's your own balls you're grabbing, babe.”
Halfway down the three-block span of wrecks we spotted a black Chrysler, or what was left of one. Scorched, front end mangled, it appeared to have collided head on with a train.
“No fuel pump there …,” I started to say, when a greasy Doberman that looked as if it might have been feeding on the corpses lunged out snarling through the busted windshield. We'd never seen a watchdog at the auto pound before. “Goddamn!” I said, my eyes fused to the dog's, which were hot with fury. “I wouldn't want to be surprised at night by that.”
“Don't look! Don't say anything,” Stosh cautioned. “If the gods don't think we've seen it, then it can't be used against us as a fucking omen.”
He stomped the gas, and we bounced over the rail tracks at Twenty-sixth just as the gates were dinging down. We followed the curving grade of the tracks along a deserted cobblestone street, then pulled into a concrete tunnel that ran under the railroad embankment. I jumped out and lifted a padlocked metal gate off its rusted hinges, and Stosh drove through the tunnel and onto an oiled cinder road that wound among mountains of scrap metal, coal, rock salt, sand, gravel. He stopped beside a cliff of bricks and broken concrete hauled from demolition sites all over the city and dumped here on the shore of what we referred to as the Insanitary Canal or, more simply, Shit Creek.
We hefted hunks of cinder block into the open trunk to balance the back end against the weight of the engine. No matter how we rearranged the blocks, it seemed to me the car was listing, but I didn't mention it. Stosh took setbacks with the Merc too hard.
He was rocking the car, woefully shaking his head. “What it really needs now is goddamn heavy-duty shocks,” he said.
“As long as we're here, we might as well check out the cop cycles,” I suggested, hoping it didn't sound like a vote of no confidence in the Merc.
Stosh's brother, Gordo, had told us that beyond the Fire Truck Graveyard there was another junkyard, the Cop Cycle Burial Ground, where old police three-wheelers went to die. According to Gordo, the three-wheelers were taken off the streets after a certain number of miles and not all of them were burned out. They had big Harley engines, and Gordo figured it might be possible to fire them up and drive off with a couple.
I didn't bother pointing out that tooling around on a stolen three-wheeler with the Chicago Police Department seal on it might be a little conspicuous. But later the idea occurred to me that we could spray-paint them black, drive back streets out of the city in the dead of night, and by dawn have made our getaway to Mexico.
 
The Fire Truck Graveyard was deserted as always. We'd discovered it back in grade school when we'd pedal our bikes to explore along Shit Creek. The faded red enamel of the rusting trucks looked polished in the baking sun. At their sides, weathered wooden ladders still hung at the ready along with frayed, cracked hoses. A few trucks had big chrome bells waiting to clang. There were fire trucks so old you could see the hitches that had attached them to galloping teams of horses. It was a place where the tangible
presence of history inspired a kind of reverence—not a feeling frequently encountered in Chicago—like an outdoor museum but better, because we could clamber around, crank the old hand pumps and winches, sit in the perch on the hook and ladder where the tillerman steered, and no one would bother us.
I could smell the familiar scent of milkweed laced with the creosote reek of the canal, but instead of the usual elation, I was feeling uneasy. The last time I'd been here had been with Laurel, and now it felt as if I'd ruined the place for myself.
I had wanted to sing her song, “Bus Girl,” to her while clanging a fire bell. Just thinking about it made me cringe inside.
I'd shredded the sheet music, not that it erased the scene from my mind. The only thing about the song I'd managed to forget was the original melody, which I'd dreamed one night back in winter. In my dream, she was dancing along the aisle of an empty bus with frosted windows that I was blindly driving, and when I woke I could still remember how lovely the song she was dancing to had been, but the melody itself was vanishing like one of those subatomic particles that decay as soon as they're created.
Maybe everything with Laurel should have remained a dream. Trying to make it real had ruined it. Maybe my instincts had been right: if we'd just kept meeting as if by accident I'd never have had to wake from that private world of frosted windows. Maybe we could have sustained the intimacy of that corner booth, beside a window blurry with steam and rain, at the neighborhood Chinese restaurant where we took to meeting after her dance class. We'd sit sipping little cups of tea and talking. I loved listening to her, watching the expressions flash across her elfin eyes while she talked. I wasn't aware I was staring until she observed, “You know, we've both got green eyes, except yours are a green brown and mine green blue.”
It was in the Chinese restaurant, sharing the garlic shrimp, that I told her how much I detested high school, especially after they'd expelled my buddy Angel, and that I was boycotting the
prom, and Laurel kiddingly said, “Are you sure it's not because you don't have a date?”

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