Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

Whitey calls. “Joey, you take care of business?”

“Still in the planning stage.”

“Well, the decision’s been made, you know? Let’s not be indecisive on this.”

“No problem, Whitey.”

Taking care of business. Last Saturday night at Fabio’s what Whitey said was “Blow the little skimming fuck’s balls off and leave him for the birds.”

“Not like there’s vultures circling the neighborhood,” he told Whitey, and Whitey said, “Joey, it was a manner of fucken speaking.”

Okay, allora! motherfucker, no more procrastination. He can haul out the garbage, drop his laundry at the Chink’s, and take care of Johnny Sovereign. Let’s get this fucking thing over with even though he hasn’t made a plan yet and that’s not like him. Things are chancy enough without leaving them to chance. The man who’s prepared, who knows exactly what he’s going to do, always has the advantage. What seems inevitable as fate to such a man, to others seems like a surprise. Problems invariably arise, and he wants to be able to anticipate them, like the Indian who can listen to an engine and hear what will go bad. He wants to see the scars that appear before the wounds that caused them.

With a cotton swab he oils the.22, then sets the Hoppe oil on a glass ashtray on his dresser beside the Old Spice so it doesn’t leave a ring, and tests the firing mechanism. He fills the clip with hollow-point shells and slides it into the Astra Cub, a Spanish-made Saturday night special that fits into the pocket of his sport coat. The sport coat is a two-button, powder-blue splash — same shade as the Bluebird. He’d conceal the stiletto in his sock, but he’s stuffed all his socks into the dirty laundry, which forces him to dig inside the pillowcases until he comes up with a black-and-pink argyle with a good elastic grip to it. He can’t find the match, so he puts the argyle on his right foot and a green Gold Toe on the left — nobody’s going to be checking his fucking socks — then slides the stiletto along his ankle.

From his bedroom closet he drags out the locked accordion case that belonged to his grandfather. There’s a lacquered red accordion inside that came from Lucca, where Puccini lived. In a cache Joe made by carefully detaching the bellows from the keyboard is an emergency roll of bills — seven G’s — and uppers, downers, Demerol, codeine, a pharmacopoeia he calls his painkillers. In a way, they’re for emergencies, too. Inside the accordion case there’s also a sawed-off shotgun, a Walther PPK like the one James Bond uses, except this one is stolen and has the serial number filed off, and a Luger stamped with a swastika, supposedly taken off a dead German officer, which his father kept unloaded and locked away. After his father’s death, Joe found ammo for it at a gun show. There’s a rubber-banded cigarillo box with photos of girlfriends baring their breasts, breasts of all sizes, shapes, and shades of skin, a collection that currently features Whitey’s girlfriend, Gloria Candido, and her silver-dollar nipples. She told Joe the size of her nipples prevented her from wearing a bikini. It’s a photo that could get Joe clipped, but he’s gambling that Gloria Candido is clever enough to play Whitey. Whitey’s getting old, otherwise a punk-ass like Johnny Sovereign wouldn’t be robbing him blind.

Capri St. Clair is in the cigarillo box, too, not that she belongs with the others. Her letters he keeps in his bureau drawer. She was shy about her breasts because the left was wine-stained. No matter that they were beautiful. To her, it was the single flaw that gives a person something to hide. Joe understood that, though he didn’t understand her. There’s always some vulnerability that a personality is reorganized to protect, a secret that can make a person unpredictable, devious, mysterious. Capri was all those, and still he misses her, misses her in a way that threatens to become his own secret weakness. Her very unpredictability is what he misses. Often enough it seemed like spontaneity. He doesn’t have a photo of her breasts, but one surprising afternoon he shot a roll of her blond muff. He’d been kidding her about being a bottle blonde, and with uncharacteristic swagger she hiked her skirt, thumbed down her panties, and said, “Next time you want to know is it real or is it Clairol, ask them to show you this.” She’d been sitting on his windowsill, drinking a Heineken, and when she stood the sun streamed across her body, light adhering not just to her bush but to the golden down on her stomach and thighs, each hair a prism, and a crazy inspiration possessed him with the force of desire, so strong he almost told her. He wanted to wake to that sight, to start his day to it, to restart his life to it, and maybe end his life to it, too. The breasts could stay stashed in the cigarillo box, but he wanted a blowup on his bedroom wall of her hands, the right lifting her bunched skirt and the left thumbing down her turquoise panties. He took the roll of film to Walgreens to be developed, and when he picked it up, photos were missing. He could tell from the weight of the envelope, but went down the Tooth Care aisle to open it and be sure. He returned to the photo counter and asked the pimply kid with “Stevorino” on his name tag who’d waited on him, “You opened these, didn’t you? You got something that belongs to me.”

“No way,” the kid said, his acne blazing up.

“Zit-head, I should smash your face in now, but I don’t want pus on my shirt. It’s a nice shirt, right? So, see this?” Joe opened his hand, and a black switchblade the width of a garter snake flicked out a silver fang. “I’m going to count to five, and if I don’t have the pictures by then, I’m going to cut off Stevo’s dickorino right here to break him of the habit of yanking it over another man’s intimate moments.”

“Okay,” the kid said, “I’m sorry.” He reached into the pocket of his Walgreens smock and slid the pictures over, facedown.

“How many of my boob shots have you been snitching, Stevorino? What is it? You think of me as the Abominable Titman, the fucken Hugh Hefner of St. Michael’s parish? See me coming with a roll of Kodak and you get an instant woodie?”

“No, sir,” the kid said.

Joe went outside and sat in his idling car, studying the photos, thinking of Capri, of the intensity of being alone with her, of her endless inventions and surprises, but then he thought of her deceptions, their arguments, and of her talk of leaving for L.A. It was there, in the car with her photos on the dashboard, that he let her go, accepted, as he hadn’t until that moment, that she had to want to stay or it wasn’t worth it. He didn’t let thinking of her distract him from his plan of action, which required watching the Walgreens exit. A plan was the distinction between a man with a purpose and some joker sitting in a car, working himself into a helpless rage. Two hours passed before the kid came out. He was unlocking his bicycle when he saw Joe Ditto.

“Mister, I said I was sorry,” the kid pleaded.

“Stevo, when they ask how it happened say you fell off your bike,” Joe said, and with an economically short blur of a kick, a move practiced in steel-toed factory shoes on a heavy bag, and on buckets and wooden planks, hundreds, maybe thousands of times until it was automatic, took out the kid’s knee.

Joe never did get around to making that blowup of Capri. He hasn’t heard from her in months, which is unlike her, but he knows she’ll get in touch, there’s too much left unfinished between them for her not to, and, until she’s back, he doesn’t need her muff on the wall.

Tuesday afternoon at the Zip Inn is a blue clothespin day. That’s the color that Roman Ziprinski, owner and one-armed bartender, selects from the plastic clothespins clamped to the wire of Christmas lights that hangs year-round above the cash register. With the blue clothespin, Zip fastens the empty right sleeve of his white shirt that he’s folded as neatly as one folds a flag.