Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

“Let me think it over,” Zip said. He didn’t offer his hand. He wasn’t trying to make a statement. It was the only hand he had.

“No problem,” Joe said. “No pressure. Give it some careful thought. I’ll come by next week, maybe Friday, and you can give me your answer.” He pulled out a roll of bills, snapped off a twenty, and set it on the mess of eggshells Sal had left on the bar. “For the egg.”

Big shots leaving a tip stolen from the pocket of some workingman. After they walked out of his bar, Zip snapped open his lighter and watched the burning twenty turn the eggshells sooty. In the war, he’d operated an M2 flamethrower. They must have figured a kid his size could heft it, lug the napalm-filled jugs, and brace against the backward thrust of the jetting flame. Its range was only thirty yards, so Zip had to get in close to the mouths of caves and pillboxes that honeycombed the ridges where the Japs were dug in ready to fight to the death. He had to get close enough to smell the bodies burning. A flamethrower operator was an easy target and always worked with a buddy, whose job it was to cover him. Zip’s buddy on Pelelui was Dominic Morales, from L.A. They called him Domino. During a tropical downpour on a ridge named Half Moon Hill, Domino was killed by the same mortar blast that took off Zip’s right arm. They were both nineteen years old, and all these years later that astonishes Zip more than it ever did at the time. Nineteen, the same age as kids in the neighborhood shooting each other over who’s wearing what gang colors in some crazy, private war. He thought he’d paid his price and was beyond all that, but now Zip stands behind the bar waiting for the days to tick down to Friday, when Joe Ditto comes back. Zip could call the cops, but he can’t prove anything, and besides, hoods wouldn’t be canvasing taverns if the cops weren’t on the take. Calling the cops would be stupid. What if he simply closed down the bar, packed his Ford, drove north into the mist of sky-blue waters?

Zip recalls putt-putting out just after dawn in his aluminum boat into a mist that hadn’t burned off the water yet. The lake looked like a setting for an Arthurian legend, the shore nearly invisible. Zip felt invisible. He’d packed a cane pole, a couple brews in a cooler of ice, and a cottage cheese container of night crawlers he’d dug the night before. He was going bluegill fishing. Fresh from the icy water of Lac Courte Oreilles they were delicious. Even in the mist, he located his secret spot and quietly slid in the cement anchor. But when he opened the container of night crawlers, he found cottage cheese. If he went all the way back for his bait, he’d lose the first light and the best fishing of the day. Defeated, he raised anchor, and the boat drifted into acres of lily pads, nosing sluggish bullfrogs into the water. Zip noticed tiny green frogs camouflaged on the broad leaves, waiting for the sun to warm them into life. He caught a few and put them in the ice cooler. He’d seen bluegills come into mere inches of water alongshore for frogs. Once they were paralyzed by cold, Zip had no trouble baiting a frog on a hook one-handed. Returned to water, the frog would revive. Zip swung his pole out, and his bobber settled on the smoldering water. He watched for the dip of the bobber, the signal to set the hook, while the mist thinned. Zip was wondering where the bluegills were when the bobber vanished. He’d never seen one disappear underwater. Before he could puzzle out what happened, the water churned and the pole nearly jerked from his hand. The bamboo bent double, and he locked it between his thighs and hung on. The fish leaped, and if Zip hadn’t known it was a muskie, he might have thought it was an alligator. It wagged in midair and appeared to take the measure of Zip, then belly-flopped back into the lake and torpedoed beneath the boat. Zip braced, tried horsing it out, and the pole snapped, knocking him off balance onto his butt, crushing the Styrofoam cooler, but he still clung to the broken pole. The fish leaped again beside the boat, swashing in water. It seemed to levitate above Zip — he smelled its weediness — and when it splashed down, the broken pole tore from his hand and snagged on the gunwale. He lunged for it, almost capsizing the boat, then watched the stub of bamboo, tangled in line and bobber, shoot away as if caught in an undertow. It was too big a fish for a cane pole. Too big a fish for a one-armed man.

Zip drains the last of his Hamm’s, sets the bottle on the bar, and stares at his left hand, the hand Joe Ditto wanted to shake. Blood pulses in his temples and a current of pain traces his right arm, and the thought occurs to Zip that if he ever has a heart attack, he’ll sense it first in his phantom arm.

Whitey calls in the middle of a dream:

Little Julio is supposed to be in his room practicing, but he’s playing his flute in the bedroom doorway. Julio’s mother, Gloria Candido, is wearing a pink see-through nightie, and Joe can’t believe she lets Little Julio see her like that because Little Julio is not that little and he’s just caught Joe circumnavigating Gloria’s nipples with his tongue and Little Julio wants some, too. “He’s playing his nursing song,” Gloria says. The flute amplifies the kid’s breath until it’s as piercing as an alarm. To shut him up, Joe gropes for the phone.

“Joe,” Whitey says. “What’s going on?”

Drugged on dream, Joe wakes to his racing heart. “What?” he says, even though he hates guys who say what? or huh? It’s a response that reveals weakness.

“Whatayou mean what? What the fuck? You know what. What’s with you?”

What day is this? Joe wants to ask, but he knows that’s the wrong thing to say, so he says, “I had a weird night.”

“Joe, are you fucken on drugs?”

“No,” Joe says. He’s coming out of his fog, and it occurs to him that Whitey can’t possibly be calling about Gloria Candido. A confrontation on the phone is not how Whitey would handle something like that. Whitey wouldn’t let on he knew.

“Well, what’s the problem then?” Whitey demands.

It’s Johnny Sovereign that Whitey is calling about, and as soon as Joe realizes that, his heart stops racing. “Ran into a minor complication. I went to see him yesterday and—”

“Maronn’!” Whitey yells. “Joe, we’re on the fucking phone here. I don’t care what the dipshit excuses are, just fucking get it done.”

“Hey, Whitey, suck this,” Joe says and puts the receiver to his crotch. “Who the fuck do you think you’re yelling at, you vain old sack of shit with your wrinkled minchia? Your girlfriend’s slutting around behind your back making a fucking cornuto of you. You don’t like it I’ll cut you, I’ll bleed you like a stuck pig.”

Joe says all that to the dial tone. Telling off the dial tone doesn’t leave him feeling better, just the opposite, and he makes a rule on the spot: never again talk to dial tones after someone’s hung up on you. It’s like talking to mirrors. Mirrors have been making him nervous lately. There’s a dress draped over his bedroom mirror, and Joe gets out of bed and looks through his apartment for the woman to go with it. That would be April. She’s nowhere to be found, and for a moment Joe wonders if she’s taken his clothes and left him her dress. But his clothes are piled on the chair beside the bed where he stripped them off-shoes, trousers with keys and wallet, sport coat with the.22 weighting one pocket. He’s naked except for his mismatched socks. The stiletto is still sheathed in the black-and-pink argyle.

Yesterday was supposed to have been a cleanup day. His plan was to pitch the trash, drop his laundry at the Chink’s, and then stop by Johnny Sovereign’s house on Twenty-fifth Street. The plan depended on Sovereign not being home, so Joe called from a pay phone, and Sovereign’s good-looking young wife answered and said Johnny would be back around four. Okay, things were falling into place. Joe would wait in the gangway behind Sovereign’s house for him to come home, and suggest they go for a drink in order to discuss Johnny setting up gambling nights in the back rooms of some of the local taverns. Once Joe got Sovereign alone in the car, well, he’d improvise from there.