Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

That’s where I found him one morning, stretched out, wearing his Ray Charles shades, a single purple flower resting on the middle of his chest.

“What’s with the corsage?” I asked.

“I walked into the jungle, Willy, when I was seventeen, and when I walked out I was twenty-one and, by God, I was rich!” Stosh said, quoting the line we both loved from Death of a Salesman , which we’d read in senior English class. He raised his sunglasses, and I noticed a welt under one eye as if he’d stepped into a left hook.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Orchids”—he smiled—“I found fucking wild orchids.”

There wasn’t time for instant coffee.

“Screw the landscaping,” Stosh said. “Come on, ese, we may never have to work again.”

“What are you on anyway?”

“Hey, how much did you waste on that orchid for your illfated prom night? Eighteen bucks a pop! Every spring my uncle Hunky goes to the cemetery and picks morel mushrooms off the graves. A pound of them dried goes for twenty bucks, so what do you think a pound of orchids goes for? Fuck pills and pot; we’ll be orchid dealers.”

We jumped into the Merc and riding on fumes sped six blocks and swerved into the Marvel gas station on Western.

“I thought orchids only grew in the tropics,” I said.

“Obviously not,” Stosh said, spitting out the orchid that he held between his teeth. “Here, don’t let Bigbo get a whiff of this or he’ll get carried away.” He handed me the orchid, and I inhaled expecting perfume, but its scent was too faint to compete with the smell of gas. I fit it in with the pink dice dangling from the rearview mirror.

Bigbo was standing by the gas pumps, blowing his nose into a paper towel that looked as if he’d just used it to wipe a dipstick. With his free hand he felt for his balls, lost in the folds of his greasy coveralls. No matter what else he was doing, the Bo always kept one hand checking his balls. His shaggy head barged into the window before Stosh came to a stop.

“How she runnin, man?” Bigbo wanted to know.

He’d helped Stosh cram the 383 into the old Merc body and was in love with the idea of something that looked like a primered junker being able to fly.

“Needs a fuel pump,” Stosh said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Bigbo told him. No one mentioned it, but we all knew the Bo was connected with the Perido brothers, who ran a chop shop in a deserted lumberyard off Ashland Avenue. Gordo, Stosh’s motorpsycho younger brother, had been getting involved with the Peridos, too.

The engine was too big for the hood to close completely, and Bigbo unwired the hood while Stosh pumped the gas.

“Look at this fucken bomb,” Bigbo crooned, massaging his balls. “Rev the muther, Kat,” he said to me.

I toed the pedal, and the Merc began to percolate.

“More!” Bigbo hollered over the thunder, pulling on his crotch as if headed for an orgasm.

I pressed the pedal halfway, and it felt as if the Merc would shake apart if it couldn’t squeal off. Stosh vanished in the blue cloud of exhaust smoke. I could hear him yelling, but not what.

“Lemme,” Bigbo demanded, tugging himself balls first into the driver’s seat and stomping the accelerator. “Had to cut through the fire wall to cram in this monster, pushed back the trannie, drilled through the floor for the Hurst, braced the front end, installed a Bendix, quads, headers …”

Mouth against my ear, which was the only way he could make himself heard over the engine, he recited the inventory of parts as if chanting a litany. I didn’t know if it was the engine roar flushing them, but I could see a cloud of blackbirds rising from the viaduct where the strip of wilderness that bordered train tracks passed unnoticed through the neighborhood. There was a marsh hidden back there alive with turtles, frogs, dragonflies, where once we’d seen a blue heron lifting off; a pterodactyl couldn’t have filled us with more wonder. Stosh, Angel, and I discovered it back in grade school when we hung out on the tracks, hitching rides, clinging to the ladders on the sides of boxcars rocking through the neighborhoods and prairies behind factories, destination unknown.

“Bo, you fucken demento!” Stosh yelled, reaching in to switch off the ignition. Even the semis barreling toward the expressway and the freight train that had rousted the blackbirds and now racketed over the viaduct sounded peaceful by comparison.

“You need some weight to hold the ass end down, babe,” Bigbo said.

“I need a goddamn fuel pump,” Stosh said, shaking his head dismally. “Keeps dying on me. Not to mention that everything I eat lately tastes like gas from sucking on the fuel pump to get it running again.”

“As long as it’s just fuel pumps you’re sucking,” the Bo said, winking at Stosh and rapping his shoulder.

“I was making out the other night and the girl kept complaining my breath smelled like Texaco,” Stosh complained.

Bigbo rolled out of the Merc chuckling, holding himself as if he’d been kicked in the groin. “She even knew the flavor, huh?”

“No, it was Marvel. Sometimes she can be so wrong.”

“Chicks! Too fucken much! Here, man,” he said, digging deep in his coveralls and extracting a thin, grease-imprinted twist of paper that he slipped into Stosh’s shirt pocket. “A little taste for later … dynamite shit, babe. Don’t say I never gave you nothin.”

“Hey, I’m afraid to light matches around my mouth, but thanks anyway,” Stosh said, ducking under a Bigbo embracio — so Bigbo gave his ass a pat instead.

Stosh slid into the car, handed the gas money out the window, adjusting his shades.

“Hey, man,” the Bo asked, catching a glimpse of Stosh’s bruised eye. “Who coldcocked you?”

Stosh merely shrugged.

“So where you guys off to this early? Scare up some puzzy?” He pronounced it “puzzy,” the way some guys in the neighborhood called sewers “zewers.”

“Picking orchids … here, don’t say I never gave you nothin,” Stosh said, tossing him our orchid, then popping the Merc into first so we shimmied off on a streak of rubber.

We were in third doing fifty through the pinging dust along the curb, passing semis on the right.

“Does need some weight in the ass end,” Stosh said.

I slid a few bucks across the dash.

“What’s this?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“For gas.” Since Stosh had the wheels, Angel and I kicked in for gas whenever we went riding.

“Has it come to this?” Stosh asked, pushing the money back with distaste as if he was through honoring a tradition that was beneath us. Ever since getting out of high school he’d been in some higher gear: Beethoven, the sleep fast, Mexico, now no gas money was all part of it. “The bullshit is over,” he’d said into the microphone when they’d handed him his diploma, then added ominously, “You must change your life.” He’d read that somewhere. Stosh had been reading a lot. The backseat of the Merc was a clutter of paperbacks.

We fishtailed left on Thirty-first, gunning past the Hospital for Contagious Diseases.

“I always hold my breath when I go by so I don’t inhale the plague or something,” Stosh said.

By the next block we’d slowed to a crawl, hugging the curb as we passed the city auto pound. Stosh checked the pound regularly for parts we’d strip at night.

“I’d rather luck into a pump here than get one from the Bo,” he said.

“He’d like to give you a pump all right.” I leered with a Bigbo-like wink and tugged at my crotch.

“Just as long as it’s your own balls you’re grabbing, babe.”

Halfway down the three-block span of wrecks we spotted a black Chrysler, or what was left of one. Scorched, front end mangled, it appeared to have collided head on with a train.