Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

“Like what, Grace? Things somebody told you not to tell me?”

“Things God whispers to me. Joey, you smell like a girl.”

“I think you can’t tell ’cause you don’t know. Tell me one secret God said just so I see if either of you knows anything.”

“I know words to an accordion. If you turn on your radio you’ll hear stars singing the song of a thousand crackles. I know about you and girls. I know what’s in your gym bag.”

“Yeah, what?”

“They’re your way of being totally alone.”

“What’s in the gym bag, Grace?”

“I know you can’t stop staring at my tits. I don’t mind, you can see. Oh, God! Windshields glorify the sun! Feel.”

“Not here, Grace.”

“Okay, at your place.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Joe says, but he can’t stay here with her either, so he eases the car into gear and drives slowly up the alley. The top of her dress is down, and against his better judgment — almost against his will — he turns onto Twenty-fifth, crosses Rockwell, the boundary between two-flats and truck docks. He drives carefully, his eyes on a street potholed by semis, but aware of her beside him with her dirty feet bloody and her bare breasts in plain view. Rockwell is empty, not unusual for this time of day. They’re approaching a railroad viaduct that floods during rainstorms. A block beyond the viaduct is Western Avenue, a busy street that in grade school he learned is the longest street in the world, just like the Amazon is the longest river, so they called it Amazon Avenue. Western won’t be deserted, and across Western is the little Franciscan church of St. Michael’s and the old Italian parish where he lives.

“I’m a Sister of Silence, so you need to be nice to me like I always was to you.”

“I’ve always been nice to you, too, Grace.”

“I could have had men hurt you, Joey, but I didn’t.”

They’re halfway through the streaky tunnel of the railroad viaduct and he hits the brakes and juts his arm out to brace her from smacking the windshield. “I don’t like when people threaten me, Grace. It really makes me crazy.”

“Let’s go to your place, Joey. Please drive. I hate when the trains go over. All those tons of steel on top of you, and the echoes don’t stop in your head even after the train is gone.”

“There’s no train.”

“It’s coming. I can feel it in my heart. My heart is crying.” She squeezes a nipple and catches a milky tear on a fingertip and offers it to him, reaching up to brush it across his lips, but Joe turns his face away. When he does, she slaps him. He catches her arm before she can slap him again, and under the viaduct, minus the glare of sun in his eyes, he sees her morning-glory-vine bracelets are scars welted across her wrists. Whistle wailing, a freight hurtles over, vibrating the car. He releases her arm, and she clamps her hands over her ears. Her bare feet stamp a tantrum of bloody imprints on the floor mat.

“Get out!” Joe yells over the concussions of boxcars, and he reaches across her body to open the door. She looks at him in amazement, then mournfully steps out into the gutter, her breasts still exposed. Without looking back, he guns into the daylight on the other side, catches the green going yellow on Western, veers into traffic, rattles across the bridge wheeled by pigeons that spans the Sanitary Canal. He isn’t going back to his place, he’s not heading to pick up his laundry, and until he finishes this job he’s not going to Fabio’s or any of the hangouts where he might run into Whitey. It’s Thursday, and Joe’s been seeing Gloria Candido on the sly on Thursdays, when Julio goes to his grandmother’s after school, but Joe isn’t going to Gloria’s either. He’s in the flow of Amazon Avenue, popping painkillers, Grace’s handprint still hot on his face. He heads south to see what’s at the end of the longest street in the world. The radio is off as if he’s broken contact, and he’d drive all night if not for hallucinations of headlights coming head-on. Finally he has to pull over and close his eyes. When he wakes, not sure he was ever really asleep, he’s parked on a shoulder separated from a field by rusty barbed wire netted in spider silk suspending pink droplets of sun. The blank highway is webbed like that as far as he can see. He thinks, I could just keep going, and at the next gas station, on an impulse, Joe decides he will keep going if she doesn’t answer the phone. But then he doesn’t have enough change to make the call. “Make it collect, for Vi Sovereign,” he tells the operator.

“Who should I say is calling?” the operator asks.

“Tell her a friend who’s been calling, she’ll know.” And when the operator does, Vi accepts the call. “Where you calling from?” Vi asks. “I hear cars.”

“A phone booth off Western Avenue. Johnny home?”

“You’re calling early,” she says. “He’ll be home around noon or so for lunch.”

“You don’t know where he is or what he’s doing? I can hear it in your voice. Did he even come home last night?”

“What do you keep calling for? If you’re trying to tell me something about Johnny, just say it. You somebody’s husband? What’s your name?”

“Maybe we’ll meet sometime. I’d pay you back for the phone call, but then you’d know it was me.”

“I’ll recognize your voice.”

“Better you don’t,” Joe says, and hangs up.

Before noon, he pulls up behind Johnny Sovereign’s. From the longest street in the world, he’s back to idling in a blocklength alley, and yet it’s oddly peaceful there, private, a place that’s come to feel familiar, and he’s so tired and wired at the same time that he’d be content just to drowse awhile with the sun soothing his eyelids. He lights a smoke, chucks the crushed, empty pack out the window, checks the empty alley in the rearview mirror, and notices the handprint still visible on his face. He catches his own eyes glancing uncomfortably back, embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment, as if neither he nor his reflection wants anything to do with each other. He puts on a pair of sunglasses he keeps in the visor, and when he looks up through their green lenses, a tanned blonde with slender legs, in a halter top and short turquoise shorts, stands beside the morning glories. She’s wearing sunglasses, too.

“Hi, Joe, they told me I’d find you here. I been waiting all morning, thinking how it would be when I saw you. I missed you so much, baby. I thought I could live without you, but I can’t.”

“Capri,” he says.

She smiles at the sound of her name. “My guy, my baby.”

“Oh fuck, fuck, not you, baby. I didn’t care about the others, but not you, too.” He hasn’t realized until now that he’s been waiting for this moment ever since, without warning, her letters had stopped, leaving a silence that has grown increasingly ominous. Her last letter ended: “Sometimes I read the weather in your city, so that I can imagine you waking up to it, living your life without me.” After a month with no word, he’d asked Sal if he’d heard anything about her, but he hadn’t. In all likelihood she’d met someone, and Joe thought he’d be making a fool of himself getting in touch. Even so, he tried calling, but her number was disconnected.

“I’m back, baby. Aren’t you glad to see me?” She steps toward the car and removes her sunglasses. He can’t meet her eyes any more than he can meet his own in the mirror. If he could speak, the words he’d say—“I’m crying in my heart”—wouldn’t be his, and when she reaches her arms out, Joe slams the car into reverse, floors it, and halfway down the alley, skidding along garbage cans, hits a bag lady. He can hear her groan as the air goes out of her. He sees her sausage legs kicking spasmodically from where he’s knocked her, pinned and thrashing between two garbage cans. Joe keeps going.