Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

“Hey, Clarinet Boy,” she singsonged, and I stopped and stood, catching my breath. “Play something,” she said and gestured for me to come through a curtain of spray. And, as if I belonged there, I stepped to the shelter of where she waited beneath a cascading canopy of water.

“What you want to hear?” I asked, as if I could play anything.

Their voices floated across the musty mud smell of the gangway into our room. Mick and I sat at the edges of our beds and listened, laughing until we were afraid we might be heard, then burying our faces in our pillows to muffle the laughter. Next door, Jano was drunk and cursing. His gravelly voice slurred from some cavity deep within the dilapidated frame house.

“Hurry up the goddamn food,” he kept repeating, and every time he said it, Kashka would fire back, “Don’t get a hard-on.”

“Hurry up the goddamn food.”

“Don’t get a hard-on!”

We got a whiff of food frying in the smoky crackle of lard.

“Phewee!” Mick whispered. “It smells like they’re cooking a rat.”

We both dove for our pillows, choking with laughter. I buried my face until it got sweaty and I could smell the feather ticking. Mick was still laughing; it sounded as if he was being strangled.

“Cool it,” I said, “or Sir’ll hear us.”

“Don’t get a hard-on,” Mick said.

We pushed our faces against the screen, trying to peer into Kashka’s house. Her window was a little below ours and off to the right so that we couldn’t see much beyond the torn bedspread half-draped across it. Even where we could see, the windowpane was the color of soot. A bare lightbulb gleamed through blackened glass. There were crickets in the gangway among the ragweed, trilling louder than the distant sirens rushing to some calamity.

Mick climbed onto the inside windowsill, squatting to get a better look. We were sleeping in our underwear because it was hot, though despite the heat we both resolutely wore homemade nightcaps cut from one of Mom’s old nylons. They fit tightly over our heads to hold our Brylcreemed d.a.’s in place. I reached up and pinched his ass.

“Ow!” he yelled, and banged his head on the sash.

“Shut up, you want Sir to hear? Get down, ya lubber.”

“Where’s the goddamn food?” Jano demanded, his voice getting louder, moving toward us.

“Don’t get a hard-on.”

“How can I without you?”

We tried very hard to stifle our laughter because we wanted to hear what would happen next.

“Don’t tear my goddamn dress … for crissakes take it easy, Janush.” Kashka’s rough voice sounded different than I’d ever heard it when she called him Janush. We heard a heavy thunk and then a clank like a pot falling from a table.

“You’re hurtin my titties.” She moaned. “Suck ‘em, don’t bite ’em, Janush.”

Then, except for an occasional groan, they got quiet, and we lay straining to hear, the word titties still hanging in the gangway like an echo that refused to fade. I’d always figured women, even Kashka, referred to them as their bosom or breasts, words more dignified than titties. Titties were for girls, something blossoming, maybe the size of tangerines. Kashka was built like a squat sumo wrestler. She had the heaviest upper arms I’d ever seen, rolls of flab wider than most people’s thighs, folding like sleeves over her elbows. She didn’t have titties, she had watermelons, and Jano, missing half his teeth, was sucking them. I listened for the slurping but heard nothing. I wondered what Mick was making of it all. I wasn’t sure how much he really understood about sex yet. The creaking of their house became audible, as if a galleon was anchored beside our window, and the moans resumed, louder and more frequent, though no sexier than those that came from behind the frosted glass of Dr. Garcia’s office, sounds we always regretted overhearing as we waited our turns in the dental chair. Then, mercifully, they fell silent.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Mick asked.

I thought of different possibilities but said nothing.

“Hey,” he asked, “you going to sleep?”

I lay listening to him tossing in his bed, flapping his sheets.

“I know you’re up, ya swab. You’re just fakin,” he said.

My eyes were closed, though he couldn’t see me in the dark.

“If you’re sleeping, then you won’t hear me calling you Toes. I won’t lose any points. Ha-ha, Toes! Hey, Toes? Toesush?”

I totaled up his lost points, grinning in the dark. Minus five for each time he called me Toes. Those were the rules according to the Point System. Mick wasn’t old enough yet to go alone to the movie theater on Marshall Boulevard, and if he wanted to tag along with me on Saturdays, he had to lose less than a hundred points during the week. He could gain points for doing things for me, too, like folding my papers before I delivered them. Or sometimes he’d get something on me and blackmail me for points not to tell Sir. He’d just lost fifteen and was already a hundred and twenty in the hole.

“Hey, Toes, you eat boogers.”

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was coming this weekend, and Mick really wanted to see that.

I heard him getting out of bed, and I tensed, keeping my eyes closed and trying not to break up. I could feel him standing over me.

“Hey, Toesush,” he whispered.

I heard him rubbing his fingers together near my face, beneath my nose. He was chuckling maniacally. “I guess you really are sleeping,” he said, then got back in bed.

We lay there completely quiet for a while.

“I’m sure glad you’re sleeping, because you know what I did? I cleaned my kregs and sprinkled the toe-jam on your face.”

My not saying anything was really driving him nuts. He shut up for a long time after that. When I figured he was about to drop off to sleep, I started to snore.

“Shut up! I know you’re fakin.”

I mumbled in my sleep and snored louder, and he bounced up again and gave my bed a shake. I rolled over with a groan as if in the middle of a dream. He gave me a jab in the back, then threw himself into bed.

He was turned toward the wall, convinced against his best judgment that I really was asleep, and trying now to sleep himself. Except for the ding of a freight train blocks away and a single cricket still trilling in the gangway, it was very quiet.

“You just lost a hundred points, matey,” I said.

He kind of flinched, then pretended he was sleeping.

“You might as well forget about that movie. I bet it’s really gonna be great, too. The coming attractions were fantastic. Oh well, I guess you didn’t want to see it anyway. That’s why you’re not saying anything. At least you ain’t gonna beg. Which is smart because there’s no way I’m changing my mind. Not after having toe-jam sprinkled in my face. And getting socked in the back. That was a test. Now I know what kind of stuff goes on when I really am sleeping. Well, okay, good night, I’m going to Dreamsville.”

I tucked the sheet over my head and curled up in the middle of the mattress. Both of us knew he no longer believed in Dreamsville, but neither of us was about to admit it. A year ago he’d still been convinced I had a secret trapdoor in my bed that led to a clubhouse full of sodas, malts, popcorn, candy, a place where the stray dogs and cats in the neighborhood gathered at night. In Dreamsville, animals could talk. Sometimes celebrities like Bugs Bunny would drop in.

Mick would hear fragments of our merrymaking, muffled as if the trapdoor had been left ajar: my voice saying, “Hi, Whiskers. Hi, Topsy. Oh, hi there, Mousie Brown, you here tonight?”