Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

Mick will drop the shotgun and, crying hysterically himself, race through the alleys back home, but not before peering through a crack in the curtains and seeing JJ’s mother on her knees on the kitchen linoleum, tears streaming down her face as she pleads for her life, unaware perhaps that the straps of her yellow slip have slid down her shoulders, spilling forth my brother’s first glimpse of a woman’s naked breasts.

Chester Poskozim’s younger brother, Ralphie, was born a blue baby, and though not expected to survive Ralphie miraculously grew into a blue boy. The blue was plainly visible beneath his blue-green eyes, smudges darker than shadows, as if he’d been in a fistfight or gotten into his mother’s mascara. Even in summer his lips looked cold. The first time I saw him, before I knew about his illness, I thought that he must have been sucking on a ballpoint pen. His fingers were smeared with the same blue ink.

On Sundays, the blueness seemed all the more prominent for the white shirt he wore to church. You could imagine that his body was covered with bruises, as if he was in far worse shape than Leon Szabo or Milton Pinero, whose drunken fathers regularly beat them. Unlike Szabo, who’d become vicious, a cat torturer, or Milton, who hung his head to avoid meeting your eyes and hardly ever spoke in order to hide his stammer, Ralphie seemed delighted to be alive. His smile, blue against his white teeth, made you grin back even if you hardly knew him and say, “Hey, how’s it going?”

“Going good.” Ralphie would nod, giving the thumbs-up.

When he made it to his eighth birthday, it was a big deal in our neighborhood, Little Village; it meant he’d get his wish, which was to make it to his First Holy Communion later that year, and whether Ralphie ever realized it or not, a lot of people celebrated with him. At corner taverns, like Juanita’s and the Zip Inn, men still wearing their factory steel-toes hoisted boilermakers to the Blue Boy. At St. Roman Church, women said an extra rosary or lit a vigil candle and prayed in English or Polish or Spanish to St. Jude, Patron of Impossible Causes.

And why not hope for the miracle to continue? In a way, Ralphie was what our parish had instead of a plaster statue of the Madonna that wept real tears or a crucified Christ that dripped blood on Good Friday.

For Ralphie’s birthday, I stopped by Pedro’s, the little candy store where we gathered on our way home from school whenever any of us had any money, and spent my allowance on a Felix the Cat comic, which I recalled had been my favorite comic book when I was eight, and gave it to his brother, Chester, to pass along.

Chester and I were in the same grade at St. Roman. We’d never really hung out together, though. He was a quiet guy, dressed as if his mother still picked out his clothes. He didn’t go in much for sports and wasn’t a brain either, just an average student who behaved himself and got his schoolwork done. If it wasn’t for his brother, the Blue Boy, no one would have paid Chester much attention, and probably I wouldn’t be remembering him now.

Looking back, I think Chester not only understood but accepted that his normal life would always seem inconsequential beside his little brother’s death sentence. He loved Ralphie and never tried to hide it. When Ralphie would have to enter the hospital, Chester would ask our class to pray for his brother, and we’d stop whatever we were doing to kneel beside our desks and pray with uncharacteristic earnestness. They were the same blood type, and sometimes Ralphie received Chester’s blood. Chester would be absent on those mornings and return to school in the afternoon with a Band-Aid over a vein and a pint carton of orange juice, with permission to sip it at his desk.

Outside the classroom, the two of them were inseparable. I’d see them heading home from Sunday mass, talking as if sharing secrets, laughing at some private joke. Once, passing by their house on Twenty-second Place, a side street whose special drowsy light came from having more than its share of trees, I noticed them sitting together on the front steps: Ralphie, leaning against his brother’s knees, his eyes closed, listening with what looked like rapture while Chester read aloud from a comic book. That was the reason I chose a comic as a gift instead of getting him something like bubble-gum baseball cards. His bruised, shivery-looking lips made me wonder if Ralphie was even allowed to chew gum.

The open affection between Chester and Ralphie wasn’t typical of the rough-and-tumble relationships between brothers in the neighborhood. Not that guys didn’t look out for their brothers, but there was often trouble between them, too. Across the street in the projects, Junior Gomez had put out the eye of his brother Nestor on Nestor’s birthday, playing Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Nestor’s birthday present, a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. In the apartment house just next door to ours, Terry Vandel’s baby brother, JoJo, wrapped in a blanket, fell from the second-story window to the pavement. Terry was supposed to have been baby-sitting for JoJo while their mother was at work. Mrs. Hobel, walking below, looked up to see the falling child. For weeks afterward, while JoJo was in the hospital with a fractured skull, Mrs. Hobel would break into tears repeating to anyone who would listen, “I could have caught him but I thought the other boy was throwing down a sack of garbage.”

As in the Bible, having a brother could be hazardous to your health.

For a while, the mention of twins or jealousy or even pizza would trigger a recounting of how, just across Western Avenue, in St. Michael’s parish, the Folloni twins, Gino and Dino — identically handsome, people said, as matinee idols — dueled one afternoon over a girl. It was fungo bat against weed sickle, until Gino went down and never got up. Dino, his face permanently rearranged, was still in jail. Their father owned Stromboli’s, a pizza parlor that was a mob hangout. Every time I’d ride my bike past the closed pizzeria on Oakley, and then past the sunken front yard where they’d fought, it would seem as if the street, the sidewalk, the light itself, had turned the maroon of an old bloodstain. I’d wonder how anyone knew for sure which twin had killed the other, if maybe it was really Dino who was dead and Gino doing time, ashamed to admit he was the one still alive. If they ever let him out, he’d go to visit his own grave to beg for forgiveness. Shadows the shade of mourning draped the brick buildings along that street, and finally I avoided riding there altogether.

Out on the streets, I kept an eye out for my brother, Mick, but at home our relationship was characterized by constant kidding and practical jokes that would sometimes escalate into fights. I was older and responsible for things getting out of control.

Once, on an impulse, while riding my bike with my brother perched dangerously on the handlebars the way friends rode — in fact, we called the handlebars the buddy seat — I hit the brakes without warning, launching Mick into midair. One second he was cruising and the next he was on the pavement. It would have been a comical bit of slapstick if he’d landed in whipped cream or even mud. I wasn’t laughing. I was horrified when I saw the way he hit the concrete — an impact like that would have killed Ralphie. Mick got up, stunned, bloody, crying.

“Jeez, you okay?” I asked. “Sorry, it was an accident.”

“You did that on purpose, you sonofabitch!” He was crying as much with outrage at how I’d betrayed the trust implicit in riding on the buddy seat as with pain.

I denied the accusation so strongly that I almost convinced myself what happened was an accident. But it was my fault, even though I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I’d done it out of the same wildness that made for an alliance between us — a bond that turned life comic at the expense of anything gentle. An impulsiveness that permitted a stupid, callous curiosity, the same dangerous lack of sense that had made me ride one day down Luther, a sunless side street that ran only a block, and, peddling at full speed, attempt to jump off my J. C. Higgins bike and back on in a single bounce.