I Sailed with Magellan (15 page)

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Authors: Stuart Dybek

BOOK: I Sailed with Magellan
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Recharged with morning-glory power, Mick snuck past the back fence into the small patch of grassless back yard that led into a shadowy gangway. Instead of going to the back door, he sidled along the house, crouching under the back windows. He'd approached this way several times before to ambush JJ. He liked to catch JJ when he was least expecting it—still in his pajamas, eating Sugar Pops at the breakfast table.
The curtained kitchen window was partially opened, and Mick slowly rose and slid the barrel of the shotgun through the slit between the drawn curtains. He was into the make-believe of the game, and his heart pounded with a combination of tension and repressed laughter. When he heard the scream, he froze.
“Oh, God, no, please, please, I beg you,” a woman's voice cried. “I don't know anything about what Johnny did. Please, I won't say anything. I have two little kids.” It was JJ's mother, Vi, who'd always been nice to Mick. She was weeping hysterically, repeating, “Please, please, I wouldn't recognize your voice, you never called, I don't know who you are, it was all Johnny, for the love of Jesus, I'm begging you don't, please, I'm still young.”
Mick will drop the shotgun and, crying hysterically himself, race through the alleys back home, but not before peering
through a crack in the curtains and seeing JJ's mother on her knees on the kitchen linoleum, tears streaming down her face as she pleads for her life, unaware perhaps that the straps of her yellow slip have slid down her shoulders, spilling forth my brother's first glimpse of a woman's naked breasts.
Chester Poskozim's younger brother, Ralphie, was born a blue baby, and though not expected to survive Ralphie miraculously grew into a blue boy. The blue was plainly visible beneath his blue-green eyes, smudges darker than shadows, as if he'd been in a fistfight or gotten into his mother's mascara. Even in summer his lips looked cold. The first time I saw him, before I knew about his illness, I thought that he must have been sucking on a ballpoint pen. His fingers were smeared with the same blue ink.
On Sundays, the blueness seemed all the more prominent for the white shirt he wore to church. You could imagine that his body was covered with bruises, as if he was in far worse shape than Leon Szabo or Milton Pinero, whose drunken fathers regularly beat them. Unlike Szabo, who'd become vicious, a cat torturer, or Milton, who hung his head to avoid meeting your eyes and hardly ever spoke in order to hide his stammer, Ralphie seemed delighted to be alive. His smile, blue against his white teeth, made you grin back even if you hardly knew him and say, “Hey, how's it going?”
“Going good.” Ralphie would nod, giving the thumbs-up.
When he made it to his eighth birthday, it was a big deal in our neighborhood, Little Village; it meant he'd get his wish, which was to make it to his First Holy Communion later that year, and whether Ralphie ever realized it or not, a lot of people
celebrated with him. At corner taverns, like Juanita's and the Zip Inn, men still wearing their factory steel-toes hoisted boilermakers to the Blue Boy. At St. Roman Church, women said an extra rosary or lit a vigil candle and prayed in English or Polish or Spanish to St. Jude, Patron of Impossible Causes.
And why not hope for the miracle to continue? In a way, Ralphie was what our parish had instead of a plaster statue of the Madonna that wept real tears or a crucified Christ that dripped blood on Good Friday.
For Ralphie's birthday, I stopped by Pedro's, the little candy store where we gathered on our way home from school whenever any of us had any money, and spent my allowance on a Felix the Cat comic, which I recalled had been my favorite comic book when I was eight, and gave it to his brother, Chester, to pass along.
Chester and I were in the same grade at St. Roman. We'd never really hung out together, though. He was a quiet guy, dressed as if his mother still picked out his clothes. He didn't go in much for sports and wasn't a brain either, just an average student who behaved himself and got his schoolwork done. If it wasn't for his brother, the Blue Boy, no one would have paid Chester much attention, and probably I wouldn't be remembering him now.
Looking back, I think Chester not only understood but accepted that his normal life would always seem inconsequential beside his little brother's death sentence. He loved Ralphie and never tried to hide it. When Ralphie would have to enter the hospital, Chester would ask our class to pray for his brother, and we'd stop whatever we were doing to kneel beside our desks and pray with uncharacteristic earnestness. They were the same blood type, and sometimes Ralphie received Chester's blood. Chester would be absent on those mornings and return to school in the
afternoon with a Band-Aid over a vein and a pint carton of orange juice, with permission to sip it at his desk.
Outside the classroom, the two of them were inseparable. I'd see them heading home from Sunday mass, talking as if sharing secrets, laughing at some private joke. Once, passing by their house on Twenty-second Place, a side street whose special drowsy light came from having more than its share of trees, I noticed them sitting together on the front steps: Ralphie, leaning against his brother's knees, his eyes closed, listening with what looked like rapture while Chester read aloud from a comic book. That was the reason I chose a comic as a gift instead of getting him something like bubble-gum baseball cards. His bruised, shivery-looking lips made me wonder if Ralphie was even allowed to chew gum.
 
The open affection between Chester and Ralphie wasn't typical of the rough-and-tumble relationships between brothers in the neighborhood. Not that guys didn't look out for their brothers, but there was often trouble between them, too. Across the street in the projects, Junior Gomez had put out the eye of his brother Nestor on Nestor's birthday, playing Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Nestor's birthday present, a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. In the apartment house just next door to ours, Terry Vandel's baby brother, JoJo, wrapped in a blanket, fell from the second-story window to the pavement. Terry was supposed to have been baby-sitting for JoJo while their mother was at work. Mrs. Hobel, walking below, looked up to see the falling child. For weeks afterward, while JoJo was in the hospital with a fractured skull, Mrs. Hobel would break into tears repeating to anyone who would listen, “I could have caught him but I thought the other boy was throwing down a sack of garbage.”
As in the Bible, having a brother could be hazardous to your health.
For a while, the mention of twins or jealousy or even pizza would trigger a recounting of how, just across Western Avenue, in St. Michael's parish, the Folloni twins, Gino and Dino—identically handsome, people said, as matinee idols—dueled one afternoon over a girl. It was fungo bat against weed sickle, until Gino went down and never got up. Dino, his face permanently rearranged, was still in jail. Their father owned Stromboli's, a pizza parlor that was a mob hangout. Every time I'd ride my bike past the closed pizzeria on Oakley, and then past the sunken front yard where they'd fought, it would seem as if the street, the sidewalk, the light itself, had turned the maroon of an old bloodstain. I'd wonder how anyone knew for sure which twin had killed the other, if maybe it was really Dino who was dead and Gino doing time, ashamed to admit he was the one still alive. If they ever let him out, he'd go to visit his own grave to beg for forgiveness. Shadows the shade of mourning draped the brick buildings along that street, and finally I avoided riding there altogether.
Out on the streets, I kept an eye out for my brother, Mick, but at home our relationship was characterized by constant kidding and practical jokes that would sometimes escalate into fights. I was older and responsible for things getting out of control.
Once, on an impulse, while riding my bike with my brother perched dangerously on the handlebars the way friends rode—in fact, we called the handlebars the buddy seat—I hit the brakes without warning, launching Mick into midair. One second he was cruising and the next he was on the pavement. It would have been a comical bit of slapstick if he'd landed in whipped cream or even mud. I wasn't laughing. I was horrified when I saw the way he hit the concrete—an impact like that would have killed Ralphie. Mick got up, stunned, bloody, crying.
“Jeez, you okay?” I asked. “Sorry, it was an accident.”
“You did that on purpose, you sonofabitch!” He was crying as much with outrage at how I'd betrayed the trust implicit in riding on the buddy seat as with pain.
I denied the accusation so strongly that I almost convinced myself what happened was an accident. But it was my fault, even though I hadn't meant to hurt him. I'd done it out of the same wildness that made for an alliance between us—a bond that turned life comic at the expense of anything gentle. An impulsiveness that permitted a stupid, callous curiosity, the same dangerous lack of sense that had made me ride one day down Luther, a sunless side street that ran only a block, and, peddling at full speed, attempt to jump off my J. C. Higgins bike and back on in a single bounce.
It was a daredevil stunt I'd seen in Westerns when, to avoid gunfire, the cowboy hero, at full gallop, grabs the saddle horn, swings from the stirrups, and in a fluid movement hits the ground boots first and immediately bounds back into the saddle. As soon as I touched one foot to the street, the spinning pedal slammed into the back of my leg and I tumbled and skidded for what seemed half a block while the bike turned cartwheels over my body. Skin burned off my knees and palms. I'd purposely picked a street that was deserted to practice on. But a lady who could barely speak English poked her head out of a third-floor window and yelled, “Kid, you ho-kay?” She'd just witnessed what must have looked like some maniac trying to kill himself. I waved to her, smiled, and forced myself up. Amazingly, nothing was broken, not even my teeth, although I had a knot on my jaw from where the handlebars had clipped me with an uppercut. I collected my twisted bike from where it had embedded itself under a parked car. Had it been a horse, as I'd been pretending, I'd have had to shoot it. If someone had done to me what I'd just done to myself, I would have got the bastard back one way or another. My brother let me off easy.
But years later, when he was living in New York, studying acting with Brando's famous teacher Lee Strasberg, Mick and I spent an evening together, drinking and watching a video of
On the Waterfront.
During the famous “I could have been a contender” scene, when Brando complains about his “one-way ticket to Palookaville” and tells his older brother, “Charley, it was you … . You was my brother, Charley. You should have looked out for me,” Mick turned to me, nodded, and smiled knowingly.
 
Chester was anything but a tough, yet despite his quiet way, you got the impression he'd lay his life on the line if anyone messed with Ralphie. You could see it in how he'd step out into a busy street, checking both directions for traffic before signaling Ralphie to cross. Or how, whenever a gang of guys playing keepaway with somebody's hat, or maybe having a rock fight, barreled down the sidewalk, Chester would instinctively step between them and Ralphie.
That willingness to take a blow was an accepted measure of what the gang bangers called
amor—
a word usually accompanied by a thump on the chest to signify the feeling of connection from the heart-although in matters of
amor,
as in everything else, the willingness to
give
a blow was preferred. There were guys in the neighborhood who'd lay their lives on the line over an argument about bumming a smoke, guys capable of killing someone over a parking space or whose turn it was to buy the next round. There was each gang's pursuit of Manifest Destiny: battles merciless and mindless as trench warfare over a block of turf. There was the casual way that mob goons across Western Avenue maimed and killed, a meanness both reflexive and studied—just so people didn't forget that in capitalism on the street, brutality was still the least common denominator.
Not that there weren't ample illustrations of that principle at
the edge of the daily round of life where bag ladies combed alleys and the homeless, sleeping in junked cars, were found frozen to death in winter. Laid-off workmen became wife beaters in their newfound spare time; welfare mothers in the projects turned tricks to supplement the family budget; and it seemed that almost every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars.
The shout would go up—“Fight!”—and kids would flock in anticipation, especially if a couple of alkies were whaling at one another, because invariably loose change would fly from their pockets. The scramble for nickels and dimes would spawn secondary fights among us. And if we weren't quick enough, we'd be scattered by Sharky, a guy who'd lost his legs in Korea, or riding the rails to Alaska, or to sharks off Vera Cruz, depending on which of his stories you wanted to believe. He was a little nuts, and people wondered if he remembered anymore himself where exactly his legs had been misplaced.
Sharky mopped up late at Juanita's bar, but his main source of income was scavenging. He was also known as Gutterball for the way he'd rumble along alleys and curbs on a homemade contraption like a wide skateboard that he propelled with wooden blocks strapped over gloved hands, turning his hands into hooves. Late on summer nights, you could hear him clopping down the middle of deserted streets like a runaway stallion. Call him Gutterball to his face or get in his way, and he'd threaten to crack your kneecap with one of those wooden hooves.
It wasn't an idle threat, he'd been in several brawls. They usually started with a question: “What the fuck you looking at, ostrich-ass?”
Anyone with legs was an ostrich to Sharky.
“Huh?” came the usual response.
But Sharky wouldn't let it go at that. “Admit it, you rude motherfuck, you were staring at my bald spot, weren't you?”
Sharky did have a bald spot. He'd roll slowly toward the confused
ostrich, who'd begin edging backward as Sharky's pace increased.
“You never seen a bald spot on wheels before? That it? I'm very fucken sensitive about my bald spot. Or is it something else about me that attracted your attention? Like, maybe, that I'm at a convenient height for giving head. You the kind of perv that wants a baldy bean doing wheelies while sucking your dick?”
By now, Sharky had gained momentum and was aimed for a collision if the ostrich didn't take off running, which he usually did, with Sharky galloping after him, raging, “Run, you perverted, chickenshit biped!”
Sharky obviously enjoyed these confrontations. What nobody suspected was that such spectacles were only a substitute for what he really craved: a parade.
There was no shortage of parades in Little Village. Most ethnic groups had one, and that must have figured in Sharky's thinking. St. Patrick's brought out the politicians, and St. Joseph's was also known locally as St. Polacik Day since people wore red, the background color for the white eagle on the Polish flag. I never understood what was particularly Polish about St. Joseph, but I bought a pair of fluorescent red socks especially for the occasion.

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