Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

Nothing’s more natural than sky.

From here railroad tracks look like stitching that binds the city together. If shadows can be trusted, the buildings are growing taller. From up here, gliding, it’s clear there’s a design: the gaps of streets and alleys are for the expansion of shadow the way lines in a sidewalk allow for the expansion of pavement in the heat.

With a message to carry, there isn’t time to ride a thermal of blazing roses, to fade briefly from existence like a daylight moon. What vandal cracked its pane? The boy whose slingshot shoots cat’s-eye marbles? The old man with a cane, who baits a tar roof with hard corn then waits with his pellet gun, camouflaged by a yellowed curtain of Bohemian lace?

Falcons that roost among gargoyles, feral cats, high-voltage wires, plate glass that mirrors sky — so many ways to fall from blue. When men fly they know by instinct they defy.

It’s not angels the Angelus summons but iridescent mongrels with blue corkers in the history of their genes, and carriers, fantails, pouters, mondains — marbled, ring-necked, crested — tipplers, tumblers, rollers, homers homeless as prodigals, all circling counterclockwise around the tolling belfry of St. Pius as if flying against time. Home lost, but not the instinct to home. Message lost, but not the instinct to deliver.

From up here it’s clear the saxophone emitting dusk on a rooftop doesn’t know it plays in harmony with the violin breaking hearts on the platform of an El, or with the blind man’s accordion on an empty corner, breaking no heart other than its own. Or with the chorus of a thousand blackbirds. Love can’t keep silent, and this is its song.

“You need a fucken ark to get through that shit,” Johnny Sovereign says.

The flooded side street is a dare: sewers plugged, hydrants uncapped, scrap wood wedged against each gushing hydrant mouth to fashion makeshift fountains.

“Think of it as a free car wash,” Joe says.

“I don’t see you driving your T-bird through.”

“I might if it was whitewashed with baked pigeon shit. Go, man!”

They crank up the windows and Sovereign guns the engine and drops the canary yellow Pancho into first. By second gear, water sheets from the tires like transparent wings, then the blast of the first hydrant cascades over the windshield, and Sovereign, driving blind, flicks the wipers on and leans on the horn. By the end of the block they’re both laughing.

“You can turn your wipers off now,” Joe says. He can hear the tires leaving a trail of wet treads as they turn down Cermak. “Where you going, man?” Joe asks.

“Expressway,” Sovereign says. “I thought you wanted to see what this muther can do opened up. You sure you don’t want to drive?”

“I’m too wiped.”

“You look wiped. Rough night?” Sovereign smirks. “Come on, you drive. A ride like this’ll get the blood pumping.”

“Yo, it ain’t like I’m driving a fucken Rambler.”

“No, no, your T-bird’s cool, but this is a fucking bomb.”

“I’ll ride shotgun. But I want to see what it does from jump. I heard zero to sixty in eight-point-one. Go where the dragsters go.”

“By three V’s?”

“Yeah, three V’s is good,” Joe says. “Private. We can talk a little business there, too.”

The 3 V’s Birdseed Company, a five-story dark brick factory with grated windows, stands at the end of an otherwise deserted block. The east side of the street is a stretch of abandoned factories; the west side is rubble, mounds of bricks like collapsed pyramids where factories stood before they were condemned. Both sides of the street are lined with dumped cars too junky to be repoed or sold, some stripped, some burned. Summer nights kids drag race here.

“Park a sec. We’ll oil up,” Joe says. They’ve driven blocks, but he can still hear the wet treads of the tires as Sovereign pulls into a space among the junkers along the curb. Joe unzips the gym bag he’s lugged with him into Sovereign’s Bonneville and hoists out the scotch bottle. There’s not more than a couple swallows left. “Haig pinch. Better than Chivas.”

Sovereign takes a swig. “Chivas is smoother,” he says. He offers Joe a Marlboro. Joe nips off the filter, Sovereign lights them up and flicks on the radio to the Cubs’ station. “I just want to make sure it’s Drabowsky pitching. I took bets.”

“Who’d bet on the fucken Cubs?”

“Die-hard fans, some loser who woke up from a dream with a hunch, the DP’s around here bet on Drabowsky. Who else but the Cubs would have a pitcher from Poland? Suckers always find a way to figure the odds are in their favor.”

It’s Moe Drabowsky against the Giants’ Johnny Antonelli. Sovereign flashes an in-the-know smile, flicks the radio off, then takes a victorious belt of scotch and passes it to Joe. “Kill it,” Joe says, and when Sovereign does, Joe lobs the empty pinch bottle out the window and it cracks on a sidewalk already glittering with shards of muscatel pints and shattered fifths of rotgut whiskey. Sun cascades over the yellow Bonneville. “Man, those mynahs scream,” Sovereign says. “Sounds like goddamn Brookfield Zoo. Hear that one saying a name?”

In summer, the windows behind the grates on the fifth floor of 3 V’s are open. The lower floors of the factory are offices and stockrooms. The top floor houses exotic birds — parakeets, Java birds, finches, canaries, mynahs. Sometimes there’s an escape, and tropical birds, pecked by territorial sparrows, flit through the neighborhood trees while people chase beneath with fishing nets, hoping to snag a free canary.

“It’s the sparrows,” Joe says. “They come and torment the fancy-ass birds. ‘Cheep-cheep, asshole, you’re jackin off on the mirror in a fucken cage while I’m out here singing and flying around.’ Drives the 3 V’s birds crazy and they start screeching and plucking out their feathers. You ever felt that way?”

“What? In a cage?” Sovereign asks. “No fucken way, and I don’t intend to. So, what’s the deal?” He actually checks his jeweled Bulova as if suddenly realizing it’s time in his big-shot day for him to stop gabbing about birds and get down to business. “Whitey say something about me getting a little more of the local action? Setting craps up on weekends?”

“Yeah, local action,” Joe says. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“I’m in,” Johnny says. “I’m up for whatever moves you guys have in mind, Joe.”

“There’s just one minor problem to work out,” Joe says. “Whitey thinks you’re skimming.”

“Huh?” Sovereign says.

“You heard me,” Joe says. “Look, I know your mind is going from fucken zero to sixty, but the best thing is to forget trying to come up with bullshit no one’s going to believe anyway and to work this situation out.”

“Joe, what you talking about? I keep books. I always give an honest count. No way I would pull that.”

“See, that’s pussy-ass bullshit. A waste of our precious time. Whitey checked your books. He had Vince, the guy who set the numbers up in the first place, check them. They double-checked. You fucked up, Johnny, so don’t bullshit me.”

“I never took a nickel beyond my percentage. There gotta be a mistake.”

“You saying you may have made a miscalculation? That your arithmetic is bad?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Where’d you get the scratch for this car?”

“Hey, I’m doing all right. I mean, and I owe on it. The bank fucking owns it.”

“More bullshit, you paid cash. Whitey checked. You been making book here, gambling it Uptown and losing, drinking hard, cheating on Vi …”

“Vi? What you talking about? She’s got nothing to do with nothing.”