Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

As always, Mick and I stopped at a huge concrete drinking fountain where water gurgled from a dozen metal pipes, water rusty tasting and cold as if pumped straight from the lake. When he leaned for a drink, I plugged two of the pipes with my fingers and water shot up Mick’s nose. He chased me down to the lake, his cheeks bulging with a mouthful of water to spit.

“Doesn’t it feel kinda stupid running into the lake with your mouth full of water?”

He opened his mouth for a comeback, and the water dribbled out, breaking me up. I waded out laughing, and he came after me, both of us splashing sheets of water at each other. I dove under, and when I came up, Mick was chest deep, jogging up and down in time to the waves while milling his arms through the air as if he were doing the Australian crawl. His cheeks bulged; he’d gulped a mouthful of lake water to spit.

“You really think you’re swimming?” I yelled, recalling how I’d once done the same thing. But the Army helicopter whirring in overhead drowned out my voice. Everyone stopped and stood looking up as the helicopter hovered in to land behind the barbed wire of Meigs field, an airstrip that bordered the beach.

We’d always come here to Twelfth Street Beach. It was where Sir taught me to swim. But tonight he was going to take us off the Rocks, where the water was deep.

“The Rocks is where we used to swim when I was a kid,” he said, “me and my friends. We used to get out there around eight in the morning and not take the streetcar home till after dark. That was the life. Johnny Weissmuller used to swim off the Rocks with us.”

“Who’s Johnny Weissmuller?” Mick asked.

“Who’s Johnny Weissmuller? You never seen Tarzan of the Apes?” Sir beat his chest and gave an ape call. People on the blankets glanced at him and laughed in a friendly way. He was different whenever he got around water — younger, grinning, kidding around.

“So who were you guys? The Apes?” Mick asked, always quick to get one in on Sir. Mick had made up the nickname Sir one night when we were all watching Leave It to Beaver and Dad said how nice it was that Wally and Beaver called their father “Sir.”

“Apes is right — you shoulda seen us. Talk about tan! Italians would call me paisano. You shoulda seen this lake. People don’t realize how da-damn dirty it’s getting. When I was a kid you could see the bottom off the Rocks.”

“What’s down there?” I asked.

“A bunch of rocks. But who knows how old? They coulda been there when this was Indian country. Hell! Maybe rocks from back when it was all glacier with saber-tooths and mammoths. We used to dive down to see who could bring up the biggest rock. Weissmuller could swim faster and farther than any of us — one time I tried to swim to the pumping station with him, but hell, more than halfway I gave up. I coulda made it out there, but I was afraid about getting back. He didn’t tell me a boat was gonna pick him up. But I could dive deeper and stay down longer than anyone, even old Tarzan. Things were so clean then we used to swim in the Chicago River.”

“You mean the Drainage Canal!”

“With the floating turds?” Mick asked.

“It was still a river in some places, not a sewer. It was beautiful.”

The breeze off the Rocks felt almost chilly. It blew straight in over a horizon that was a blinding gleam, and beyond the horizon I could picture the forests of Michigan. I tried to recapture the daydreams I’d had all week about coming out to the lake; I tried to remember how stuffy it would be tonight when we got back home.

There weren’t any women. Men and teenagers plunged and swam in the deep green swells. Water bucked over the lip of the concrete walkway. I stared into the lake and couldn’t imagine touching bottom.

“Want me to lower you in by the arms and cool you off?” Sir asked Mick. Mick was watching the swells hump in, standing well back from the edge.

“No, I’m gonna climb the rocks.”

Just behind the concrete walk, enormous limestone blocks were piled in jagged, steplike tumbles as if some ancient city lay in ruins after a tidal wave.

“Okay, you do that”—Sir laughed—“and keep an eye on the towels.” He slipped his shoes and socks off, put his car keys in one heel and shook them into the toe.

Spray showered over the concrete. I felt like going with Mick. The walkway vibrated when the waves whumped in as if it were hollow underneath. The sun was slipping lower in the hazy lilac sky. Mexican teenagers with gang tattoos whapped at each other with wet towels, their gold crosses swinging from their necks as they pushed each other in.

Sir gave an ape call.

Everyone turned for a moment and looked at him.

He backed up against the limestones and sprinted toward the water, hurtling off the concrete edge. His body arced like that of a man shot from a cannon — legs together, arms against his sides, so that when he hit the water it was headfirst, arms still pressed to his body. A spume thumped up, then showered back around his point of entry.

The guys standing next to me cheered.

We waited. Mick gathered up the towels and his shoes. Sir hadn’t come up. People began to stare at us. I studied his socks stuffed in his shoes, then looked at Mick. He glanced away. Go find a lifeguard, I was getting ready to say, when Sir’s head shot up, hair flattened slick as a seal.

“The old torpedo dive!” he shouted. “Come on in, Perry! Don’t ever try the old torpedo unless you know there’s nothing sticking up underwater.”

Two Mexican guys who’d cheered raced for the water and torpedoed in on either side of Sir. They came up snorting and coughing and rubbing their eyes.

Sir sidestroked around them, laughing.

“Come on, sonnyboy!”

I’d never dived into deep water before. I was shivering and wasn’t sure I remembered how to swim.

A Mexican kid, not much older than Mick, stood beside me. He was drying himself off with his shirt and shivering too, except he was dripping wet.

“Cold?” I asked, gesturing at the water.

“Muy, muy.”

“Strong undertow today,” a guy with a mustache said. He looked like he could be the shivering kid’s older brother. “Somebody drowned this morning and they still ain’t found his body, man.”

I’d heard of the undertow off the Rocks, of people being pulled out into the lake, sucked under. I watched the bobbing swimmers for anyone being drawn away.

Sir was backstroking along the concrete edge, waves boosting him almost level with the walkway.

“Gimmie the soap!”

I got the bar of laundry soap and flipped it out to him. He floated on his back, lifting his toes and ankles high out of the water as if he were rocking on a hammock, and soaped his feet and legs, then rubbed the soap into lather in his black chest hair. I’d never seen anyone else bring soap to the lake, and for the first time a possible reason occurred to me: maybe when he was a boy they didn’t have a bathtub. Whatever the reason, he didn’t seem concerned that it looked weird to see a man washing while he was swimming.

“Perry, you’re not coming in?”

“How come it’s so wavy?”

“Must be the wake of that big ship passing by.” He laughed and pointed. “Way out there.”

There was a massive shadowy form against the dusky horizon, vaguely outlined by the light dying around its edges, and I recalled my uncle Lefty telling me about Blue Island, a ghost island Indian burial ground.

“Murciélago! Murciélago!” the Mexican guys started yelling.

Everyone was diving for the water.

“What is it?”

“Bat.” The kid next to me grinned, then jumped in.

It boomeranged out of the bug-clouded floodlights, leathery, soaring at forehead level, and I dove.