Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

Whiskers was our cat, supposedly out for the night. Topsy was Kashka’s ginger-colored watchdog. He was supposed to guard the chickens she kept illegally, but he’d let me sneak over her fence, and while he wagged his tail, I’d untie the clothesline noosed around his neck and boost his back end over the fence into the alley. Whenever we managed an escape, he’d spend the rest of the day following Mick and me around the streets until Kashka or one of her demented wino friends caught him again. Though Kashka had never caught me in the act, she knew I was the one springing Topsy, and hated me for it, not that I cared. Mick and I loved Topsy and had planned to steal him for good when we got old enough not to need Sir’s permission to keep him, but a couple of weeks ago I’d sprung him and the dogcatchers caught him. Kashka had just replaced him with a black puppy.

Mousie Brown was the name of Mick’s favorite stuffed animal, one he slept with until a night when, sick with flu, he puked all over it. When Moms tried to clean it, the fur washed off, leaving behind a raggedy, bald lump that reeked of vomit, so she threw it out on the sly.

They’d all bark and meow hello, and Mousie Brown might squeak, “Have a Dad’s old-fashioned root beer, Perry.”

It was during the winter, back before there was a Point System, that Mick still believed in Dreamsville. I’d made it up as a joke, one I didn’t expect he’d take seriously, but he must have wanted to believe, and once he did, he wanted to go to Dreamsville, too. In winter, I slept beneath a piersyna— a big old feather tick our grandmother had brought from Poland — and once I disappeared beneath it into Dreamsville, Mick would get out of bed and try to lift the piersyna up to get at the trapdoor. I’d lie tucked into a ball, holding the piersyna to me, with him on top tugging at it, punching me through the goose feathers, getting worked up so loud sometimes that Sir would hear the noise and charge in swinging a belt or a shoe or whatever was handy, an attack he called a “roop in the dupe.” Seeing the covers ripped and me getting my dupa beat tended to weaken Mick’s belief in Dreamsville. Though for a while I was able to convince him that, in order to preserve the secret, I’d come up through the trapdoor just before Sir whisked off the covers. Since Mick was getting rooped, too, he couldn’t really be sure. Then one night, instead of first yelling down the hall that we better get to sleep, Sir snuck up on us and suddenly stepped into the room, flicking on the light and stripping the piersyna off me where I lay bunched up in the middle of the mattress.

“What the hell do you guys yak about so much in here anyway?” he asked.

As usual we both pretended to be groggy, as if he’d just awakened us from a sound sleep.

“You’re the older guy, Perry,” he said to me. “You should be setting him a good example instead of this fooling around every night. You know he’s like a monkey — copies whatever you do. Then in the morning your mother’s gotta fight with you guys to get up for school and she’s nervous the rest of the day.”

I lay there hoping he’d control his temper, feeling naked in the light, and diminished, like the room made suddenly tiny without its darkness. Finally, he switched the light back off and left. I guess when he was angry enough to come in swinging, he didn’t like the light on any more than I did.

A few nights after that I decided that I’d finish off Dreams-ville before Mick did. He’d already stopped begging me to take him there. I was under the piersyna talking in my pirate accent to the animal crew: “Whiskers, pass the peanuts, matey, and squirt a ducat of catsup on these fries. Yum, tasty! Purr, purr. Squeak, squeak. Hey, Mousie Brown, hoist that case of cold pop off the poop deck, yo-ho-ho, pass that cotton candy, please. Pass the popcorn, pass the pop, pass the poop, me hardies.”

We both exploded into laughter. When the laughter would let up, one of us would say, “Pass the poop, me hardies.” Mick laughed so hard he had to go to the bathroom, but I convinced him it would be a mistake to let them know he was still awake and talked him into pissing out the window.

It was cold and raining. We quietly slid up the window, then the storm window. The radiator was in front of the window, and Mick had to slide over it in order to sit on the sill. I held on to him so he wouldn’t fall.

“I’m getting soaked,” he complained, and I started laughing hysterically again. “What’s so funny?”

“You must be totally crazy hanging out a window and pissing.”

“Okay, get me in,” he demanded.

“Oh-oh, you know what?”

“What?”

“I bet Kashka’s looking out her window and saw what you just did.”

“Get me in, get me in!” He was getting frantic, struggling for leverage.

“She’s probably coming around the back way to grab your legs and pull you outside.”

“Come on, quit fooling around, get me in.” He sounded ready to cry, so I let him in.

“My pajamas are all wet. Now I can’t sleep.” He was wearing his flannel pirate pajamas.

“Let that be a lesson to never piss out a window.”

Even though Mick no longer believed in Dreamsville, it still got to him when I’d disappear under the sheet, like now, describing scenes from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as if I had my own private screening room down there.

“The pods are coming! Aaayyiiii! Everyone’s a pod! This is the scariest movie I ever saw.”

“If you were up, why didn’t you say so? I was just seeing if you were fakin.”

“Almost too horrible to look at!”

“I didn’t really mean it.”

“Hold it. Stop the movie a second. I think I hear something. What? Did you wake up?”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“Didn’t mean what?”

“Whatever I lost points for.”

“Like what?”

“Calling you Toes.”

“Okay, even though I ought to take extra off for ush ing me, you can have the fifteen points back. Anything else?”

“Like sprinkling toe-jam in your face.”

“Jesus Christ! You might as well forget apologizing for that.”

“I swear I didn’t really do it.”

“Don’t lie. I felt it. I smelled it.”

“Honest to God! I didn’t do it! I was just rubbing my fingers together making the noise.”

“His fingers sure smell a lot like his kregs, ladies and gentlemen.” Kregs was a name Mick had coined for the spaces between toes.

“I did it just like you did the peanut butter.”

“Just because I’m laughing don’t mean I believe you,” I said, breaking up just thinking about it. A few days earlier, while Mick was reading a Mad comic, I’d snuck up on him with a glob of peanut butter on a sheet of toilet paper, smeared it on his arm, and told him it was shit. At first he didn’t believe me, so I told him to smell it. He did and started screaming, “You really did it! You’re crazy! I’m telling Moms!” I tackled him before he could get away and began trying to smear the glob off his arm into his mouth. He was fighting back hard, yelling I’d gone completely crazy, wrenching his face away, spitting it out every time I got it near his lips. I thought once he tasted it he’d see the joke, but I had a hard time getting him to believe that it was only peanut butter.

“You only gave me seventy-five points for not telling about that, so it’s not fair I lose a hundred for this.”

“All right, you want to get a hundred points back?”

“How?”

“Stick your head out the window and tell Kashka you love her.”

“Go to hell! I wouldn’t do that for a million stinking points.”

“I’ll give you fifty if you just admit it to the ladies and gentlemen.”