Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

“This feels like we’re in some kind of joke,” Zip says, opening his palm and allowing the pigeon to step from Teo’s hand to his.

“What do you mean?” Teo asks.

“You know,” Zip says, “there’s all these jokes that start: A man walks into a bar with a parrot, or a man walks into a bar with a dog, or a gorilla, or a cockroach. You know, all these guys walking into all these bars with every animal on the ark. So in this one, a man — no, a wrestler, a masked wrestler — walks into a bar with a pigeon.”

“So, what’s the punch line?” Teo asks.

“You’re asking me?” Zip says. “It’s your pigeon.”

“No, not one of mine.”

“Yeah, but you brought it in here.”

“But the joke is your idea.”

“Jesus, we got no punch line,” Zip says. “You know what that means?”

“What?”

“We’ll never get out of the joke.”

Whitey calls.

Joe, lying on the bare mattress, naked but for mismatched socks, doesn’t answer. He knows it’s Whitey on the phone. Joe can almost smell his cigar.

What day is it? Must be Thursday, because yesterday was Wednesday, a day’s reprieve Johnny Sovereign never knew he had. Joe can have the conversation with Whitey without bothering to lift the receiver.

— Joe, what the fuck’s going on with you?

— Hey, Whitey, you ball-buster, vaffancul !

Are these ball-busting calls some kind of psychological warfare? Maybe Whitey knows about Gloria Candido, and the whole thing with Johnny Sovereign is a setup. Maybe it’s Whitey arranging for these women to distract Joe from doing his job, giving Whitey an excuse other than being a fucking cornuto to have Joe clipped. Could Whitey be that smart, that devious? Maybe Whitey has tipped off Sovereign to watch his back around Joe and Sovereign is waiting for Joe to make his move. Or maybe the women are good luck, guardian angels protecting him from some scheme of Whitey’s.

Joe quietly lifts the receiver from the cradle. He listens for Whitey to begin blaring, Yo, Joe, whatthefuck? but whoever is on the line is listening, too. Joe can hear the pursy breathing. It could be Whitey’s cigar-sucking, emphysemic huff. Joe slides the stiletto from his right sock, holds it to the mouthpiece, thumbs off the safety, touches the trigger button, and the blade hisses open: Ssswap! Then he gently sets down the receiver.

Joe dresses quickly. The shirt he’s been wearing since Tuesday reeks, so he switches to the white shirt Marisol left behind even though it smells of perfume. She’s left a trail of rusty footprints down the hall from the kitchen as if she stepped on broken glass, and Joe splashes them with Rémy and mops them with the dirty shirt he won’t be wearing, then kills the bottle, washing down a mix of painkillers. There’s a soft wheeze from his closet, as if an accordion is shuddering in its sleep. When he dials Johnny Sovereign’s number, Vi answers on the third ring.

“Johnny home?”

“He’ll be back around six or so,” Vi says. “Can I take a message?”

“So where is he?”

“Can I take your number and have him call you back?”

“Do you even know?”

“Know what?” Vi asks. “Who’s calling?”

“An acquaintance.”

“You called yesterday and the day before.”

Joe hangs up.

The Bluebird is doing fifty down the cracked alleys, and when a bag lady steps from between two garbage cans, she has to drop her bag to get out of the way. Joe rolls over her shopping bag, bulging from a day’s foraging, and in the rearview mirror sees her throwing hex signs in his wake. He pulls up behind Sovereign’s, and there’s that smell of trash, oil, and pigeons, compounded by a summer breeze. Joe can sense someone eyeing him from inside the empty garage, and he eases his right hand into the pocket of his sport coat and flicks the safety off the.22, uncomfortably aware of how useless the small-caliber pistol is at anything but point-blank range. A gray cat emerges from Sovereign’s garage, carrying in its mouth a pigeon still waving a wing. The cat looks furtively at Joe, then slinks into the morning glories, and from the spot where the cat disappeared, Grace steps out. Morning glories are clipped to her tangled black curls. She’s wearing a morning-glory-vine necklace, vine bracelets, and what looks like a bedraggled bridesmaid’s gown, if bridesmaids wore black. Her bare feet are bloody, probably from walking on glass. “Long time, no see, Joey,” she says. “I been with the Carmelites.”

Joe recalls Sal asking if he was going to her closed-casket wake. “You had a thing with her, didn’t you?” Sal had asked.

“No way!” Joe told him. “A little kissyface after a party once. I don’t know why she made up all those stories.”

“That whole Fandetti family is bonkers,” Sal said.

Nelo, her father, a Sicilian from Taylor Street, operates an escort service, massage parlors, and a strip bar on South Wabash, but he brought his four daughters up in convent school. The official story was that Grace wasted away with leukemia, but rumor had it that it was a botched abortion. Now, Joe realizes old man Fandetti is even crazier than he thought, faking his daughter’s death in order to avoid the humiliation of an illegitimate pregnancy. No surprise she’s a nutcase. He wonders if they collected insurance on her while they were at it.

“If you stick your finger inside, you can feel the electric,” Grace says and demonstrates by poking her finger into a flower. “That hum isn’t bees. Electric’s what gives them their blue. You should feel it. Come here and put your finger in.”

“Where’s your shoes, Grace?”

“Under the bed, so they think I’m still there.”

“Still where? What are you doing here?”

“Come here, Joey, and put your finger in. You’ll feel what the bee’s born for. They’re so drunk on flower juice!” She walks to the car and leans in through the window on the passenger side, and the straps of her black gown slip off her shoulders, and from its décolletage breasts dangle fuller than he remembers from that one night after a birthday party at Fabio’s when he danced with her and they sneaked out to the parking lot and necked in his car. She’d looked pretty that night, made up like a doll, pearls in her hair, and wearing a silky dress with spaghetti straps. That was what she called them when he slipped them down and kissed her breasts. She wanted to go further, pleaded with him to take her virginity, but he didn’t have a rubber and it wasn’t worth messing with her connected old man.

“Know what was on the radio?”

“When?” Joe asks. He’s aware that he’s staring, but apparently still stoned on that hash oil, he can’t take his eyes off her breasts. His reactions feel sluggish; he has to will them. He realizes he’s been in a fog … he’s not sure how long, but it’s getting worse.

She opens the door and sinks into the leather seat and humming tunelessly flicks on the car radio. “I Only Have Eyes for You” is playing. “Our song, Joey!”

“Grace, we don’t have a song.”

“The night we became lovers.”

“Why’d you tell people that?”

“You got me in trouble, Joey, and in the Carmelites I had to confess it to the bishop. We weren’t supposed to talk, but he made me show and tell.”

Joe flicks off the radio. It’s like turning on the afternoon: birdsong, pigeons cooing, flies buzzing trash, the bass of bees from a thousand blue gramophones.

“All the sisters were jealous. They called me Walkie-Talkie behind my back. They thought I didn’t understand the sacredness of silence, but that’s not true. They think silence is golden, but real silence is terrifying. We’re not made for it. I could tell you things, Joey, but they’re secrets.”