Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

So around three in the afternoon, Joe parked beside the rundown one-car garage behind Sovereign’s house. The busted garage door gaped open, and he saw that Sovereign’s Pontiac Bonneville was gone. Bonnevilles with their 347-cubic-inch engines that could do zero to sixty in 8.1 seconds were the current bad-ass cars — in Little Village, they called them Panchos. Sovereign’s splurging on that car was what made Whitey suspect he was skimming on the numbers. New wheels and already leaking oil, Joe thought, as he looked at the fresh spots on the warped, birdshit-crusted floorboards of the garage. If Sovereign wasn’t careless and all for show, he’d have taken that Pancho to the Indian.

Johnny Sovereign’s back fence was warped, too, and overgrown with morning glories. His wife must have planted them. She’d made an impression on Joe the one time he’d been inside their house. Johnny had invited him, and they’d gone the back way, the entrance Joe figures it was Johnny’s habit to use. Johnny didn’t bother to announce their arrival, and they caught his wife — Vi, that was her name — vacuuming in her slip. When she saw Joe standing there, a blush heated her bare shoulders before she ran into the bedroom. She was wearing a pale yellow slip. Joe had never seen a slip like that before. He would have liked to slide its thin straps down her skinny arms to see if her blush mottled her breasts the way some women flush when they come. Sovereign’s Pontiac was yellow, too, but canary yellow, and Joe wondered if there was some connection between Vi’s slip and the car.

He sat in the Bluebird and lit a cigarette, then unscrewed the top from a pinch bottle of scotch and washed down a couple of painkillers. Sparrows twittered on the wires and pigeons did owl imitations inside Sovereign’s shitty garage. The alley was empty except for a humped, hooded figure of a woman slowly approaching in his rearview mirror — a bag lady in a black winter coat and babushka, stopping to inspect each garbage can. Except for the stink of trash, Joe didn’t mind waiting. He needed time to think through his next moves. From where he’d parked, he could watch the gangway and intercept Sovereign before he entered the house. He’d ask Sovereign to have a drink, and Sovereign would want to know where. “Somewhere private,” Joe would tell him. And then — wham — it came to Joe, as it always did, how he’d work it. He’d tell Sovereign, “Let’s take your wheels. I want to ride in a new yellow Bonneville.” He’d bring the bottle of scotch, a friendly touch, and suggest they kill it on the deserted side street where the dragsters raced, a place where Sovereign could show him what the Pancho could do. He couldn’t think of a way to get the shotgun into Sovereign’s car, so he’d have to forget about that. Joe was scolding himself for not thinking all this through earlier when a woman’s voice startled him.

“Hi, Joe, got an extra smoke?”

“What are you doing here?” Joe asked.

“Trying to bum a Pall Mall off an old lover,” April said. “You still smoke Pall Malls, don’tcha?”

Her hair was bleached corn-silk blond and she wore a dress the shade of morning glories. Joe wondered how she’d come down the alley without his seeing her. The scooped neckline exposed enough cleavage so that he could see a wing tip from the blue seagull tattooed on her left breast. She looked more beautiful than he’d remembered.

“I thought you went to Vegas,” he said. “I heard you got married to some dealer at Caesar’s.” He didn’t add that he’d also heard she’d OD’d.

“Married? Me ?” She showed him her left hand: nails silvery pink, a cat’s-eye on her index finger going from gray to green the way her eyes did. Joe leaned to kiss the pale band of flesh where a wedding ring would have been, but he paused when sunlight hit her hand in a way that made it momentarily appear freckled and old with dirty, broken nails. She lifted her hand the rest of the way and sighed when it met his lips.

“You used to do that thing with my hand that would drive me crazy,” April said.

“Hey, we were kids,” Joe said.

He worked back then for a towing service Whitey ran, and he’d met April when he went to tow her Chevy from a private lot off Rush Street. He’d traded not towing her car for a date. She was a senior at Our Lady of Lourdes High, still a virgin, and on their first date she informed him that she was sorry, but she didn’t put out. That was the phrase she used. Joe had laughed and told her, “Sweetheart, it’s not like I even asked you. And anyway, there’s other things than putting out. ” “Such as?” April asked, and from that single question, Joe knew he had her. It was nothing about him in particular, she was just ready. “Imagine the knuckles on your fingers are knees and the knuckles on your hands are breasts,” Joe had told her, extending her index and middle fingers into a V and outlining an imaginary torso with his finger. “Okay, I see. So?” she asked. “So this,” he whispered and kissed the insides of her fingers, then licked their webbing. She watched him as if amused, then closed her eyes. Even after she was putting out three times a day, nothing got her more excited than when he kissed her hand. “Lover,” she’d once told him, “that goes right to my pussy.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m still using?” April asked. “I’m clean. And I been thinking about you ever since I’ve been back in the neighborhood. I’m staying with my sister, Renee. Remember her? She had a crush on you, too. I dreamed last night I’d find you here, and when I woke I thought, Forget it, you can’t trust dreams, but then I thought, What the hell, all that will happen is I’ll feel foolish.”

“You dreamed of meeting me here ?”

“Amazing, huh? Like that commercial, you know? ‘I dreamed I met my old boyfriend in an alley, wearing my Maidenform bra.’ Nice ride,” she said, gliding her fingertips along the Bluebird as if stroking a cat. She came around to the passenger side, climbed in, leaned back into the leather seat, and sighed. “Just you, me, and a thousand morning glories.”

Joe flicked away his cigarette and kissed her.

“You taste like scotch,” she said.

He reached for the pinch bottle and she took a sip and kissed him, letting the hot liquor trickle from her mouth into his.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“That information wasn’t in your dream?”

“In my dream you were a lonely void waiting for your soul mate.” April took another sip of scotch and swallowed it this time. “Maybe we should have a private homecoming party,” she said.

He remembers driving with April down the alleys back to his place, stopping on the way at Bruno’s for a fifth of Bacardi and a cold six-pack of tonic water, and later, covering his kitchen table with Reynolds Wrap and laying out lines of coke. He remembers the plink of blood on foil when her nose began to bleed, and April calling from the bathroom, “Joe, where’s all the towels?”

“Forgot to pick them up at the Chink’s.”

“No towels, no sheets. Are you sure you live here? What’s in the fridge? Anything at all? I dread to look.”

They lay kissing on the bare mattress while darkness edged up his bedroom walls. How still the city sounded. Between shrieks of nighthawks, an accordion faintly wheezed from some open window. Joe’s bedroom window was open, too, and the breeze that tingled the blinds seemed blued with the glow of the new arc lights the city had erected. Before the mirror, April, streaked by the same glow, undid her ponytail. Mimicked by a reflection deep in the dark glass, she slipped her dress over her head. No Maid-enform bra, she was naked. He came up behind her and bit her shoulders. He could see what appeared to be disembodied blue hands — his hands — cupping her luminous breasts. Otherwise he was a shadow. His thumb traced the tiny seagull flying across her breast. In the mirror it looked graceless, like an insignia a gang punk might have India-inked on his forearm. Her reflection appeared suddenly to surge to the surface of the glass, and he saw that the mirror was blemished with hairline fractures superimposed on her face like wrinkles. She flipped the dress she was still holding over the mirror as if to snuff a chemical reaction. It snuffed the residual light, and in the darkness he could feel something flying wildly around the room, and they lost their balance, banged off a wall, and fell to the bed. She took his cock, fit it in, then brought her hand, smelling of herself, to his lips.