Breasts

Sundays have always been depressing enough without having to do a job. Besides, he’s hungover, so fuck Sunday. Taking somebody out on Sunday is probably bad luck.

And Monday: no wheels. He’s got an appointment with the Indian at the Marvel station on Western. That man’s a pro—can listen to an engine idle and tell you the wear on the belts, can hear stuff already going bad that won’t break for months. The Indian is the only one he lets touch the Bluebird, his powder blue, 312 Y-block, Twin Holley, four-barrel T-bird.

Tuesday, it’s between Sovereign and hauling more than a month’s laundry to the Chink’s. Not to mention another hangover. He strips the sheets, balls them into the pillowcases, stuffs in the towels. He’s tired of their stink, his stink, of dirty clothes all over the floor, all over the apartment. He’s been wearing the same underwear how long? He strips naked and stares at himself in the bedroom mirror. His reflection looks smudged, and he wipes the mirror with a sock, then drops to the carpet to do a hundred push-ups—that always sharpens the focus.

He manages only seventy, and then, chest pounding hard enough to remind him that his father’s heart gave out at age forty-five, lights a cigarette. He slaps on some Old Spice, slips back into his trousers and shirt without bothering to check the mirror, stuffs another pillowcase with dirty clothes, and since he’s cleaning, starts on the heaps of dishes unwashed for weeks. Then, wham, it hits him like a revelation: who needs all this shit? Into trash bags go not only pizza cardboards and Chinese food cartons but bottles, cans, cereal boxes, plates, bowls, glasses, dirty pots. The silverware can stay. Next, it’s the refrigerator’s turn: sour milk, moldy cheese, rancid butter, all the scummy, half-empty bottles of mustard, mayo, pickles, jam, until the fridge is completely empty except for its cruddy shelves.

He removes the shelves.

Now he’s got room for the giant mortadella that Sal brought from Italy. Sal came back from his trip bearing gifts and saying, “Allora!” whatever that means. The mortadella is scarred with wounds from another souvenir Sallie brought him, a stiletto. He’s wanted an authentic stiletto for his knife collection, and this one is a piece of work, a slender pearl handle contoured to slide the thumb directly to the switch, and the most powerful spring he’s ever seen on a knife. When the six-inch blade darted out, the knife actually recoiled in his hand. It felt as if the blade could shoot through Sheetrock, let alone flesh. He tested it on the mortadella, a thick sausage more muscular than Charles F-ing Atlas. He wondered if the knife could penetrate the rind, and was amazed when the thrust of the spring buried the blade to the hilt. It was a test he found himself repeating, and the mortadella, now propped in the empty refrigerator, looks as if it’s seen gladiatorial combat, like Julius F-ing Caesar after Brutus got done with him.

Whitey calls. “Joey, you take care of business?”

“Still in the planning stage.”

“Well, the decision’s been made, you know? Let’s not be indecisive on this.”

“No problem, Whitey.”

Taking care of business. Last Saturday night at Fabio’s what Whitey said was “Blow the little skimming fuck’s balls off and leave him for the birds.”

“Not like there’s vultures circling the neighborhood,” he told Whitey, and Whitey said, “Joey, it was a manner of fucken speaking.”

Okay, allora! motherfucker, no more procrastination. He can haul out the garbage, drop his laundry at the Chink’s, and take care of Johnny Sovereign. Let’s get this fucking thing over with even though he hasn’t made a plan yet and that’s not like him. Things are chancy enough without leaving them to chance. The man who’s prepared, who knows exactly what he’s going to do, always has the advantage. What seems inevitable as fate to such a man, to others seems like a surprise. Problems invariably arise, and he wants to be able to anticipate them, like the Indian who can listen to an engine and hear what will go bad. He wants to see the scars that appear before the wounds that caused them.

With a cotton swab he oils the .22, then sets the Hoppe oil on a glass ashtray on his dresser beside the Old Spice so it doesn’t leave a ring, and tests the firing mechanism. He fills the clip with hollow-point shells and slides it into the Astra Cub, a Spanish-made Saturday night special that fits into the pocket of his sport coat. The sport coat is a two-button, powder-blue splash—same shade as the Bluebird. He’d conceal the stiletto in his sock, but he’s stuffed all his socks into the dirty laundry, which forces him to dig inside the pillowcases until he comes up with a black-and-pink argyle with a good elastic grip to it. He can’t find the match, so he puts the argyle on his right foot and a green Gold Toe on the left—nobody’s going to be checking his fucking socks—then slides the stiletto along his ankle.

From his bedroom closet he drags out the locked accordion case that belonged to his grandfather. There’s a lacquered red accordion inside that came from Lucca, where Puccini lived. In a cache Joe made by carefully detaching the bellows from the keyboard is an emergency roll of bills—seven G’s—and uppers, downers, Demerol, codeine, a pharmacopoeia he calls his painkillers. In a way, they’re for emergencies, too. Inside the accordion case there’s also a sawed-off shotgun, a Walther PPK like the one James Bond uses, except this one is stolen and has the serial number filed off, and a Luger stamped with a swastika, supposedly taken off a dead German officer, which his father kept unloaded and locked away. After his father’s death, Joe found ammo for it at a gun show. There’s a rubber-banded cigarillo box with photos of girlfriends baring their breasts, breasts of all sizes, shapes, and shades of skin, a collection that currently features Whitey’s girlfriend, Gloria Candido, and her silver-dollar nipples. She told Joe the size of her nipples prevented her from wearing a bikini. It’s a photo that could get Joe clipped, but he’s gambling that Gloria Candido is clever enough to play Whitey. Whitey’s getting old, otherwise a punk-ass like Johnny Sovereign wouldn’t be robbing him blind.

Capri St. Clair is in the cigarillo box, too, not that she belongs with the others. Her letters he keeps in his bureau drawer. She was shy about her breasts because the left was wine-stained. No matter that they were beautiful. To her, it was the single flaw that gives a person something to hide. Joe understood that, though he didn’t understand her. There’s always some vulnerability that a personality is reorganized to protect, a secret that can make a person unpredictable, devious, mysterious. Capri was all those, and still he misses her, misses her in a way that threatens to become his own secret weakness. Her very unpredictability is what he misses. Often enough it seemed like spontaneity. He doesn’t have a photo of her breasts, but one surprising afternoon he shot a roll of her blond muff. He’d been kidding her about being a bottle blonde, and with uncharacteristic swagger she hiked her skirt, thumbed down her panties, and said, “Next time you want to know is it real or is it Clairol, ask them to show you this.” She’d been sitting on his windowsill, drinking a Heineken, and when she stood the sun streamed across her body, light adhering not just to her bush but to the golden down on her stomach and thighs, each hair a prism, and a crazy inspiration possessed him with the force of desire, so strong he almost told her. He wanted to wake to that sight, to start his day to it, to restart his life to it, and maybe end his life to it, too. The breasts could stay stashed in the cigarillo box, but he wanted a blowup on his bedroom wall of her hands, the right lifting her bunched skirt and the left thumbing down her turquoise panties. He took the roll of film to Walgreens to be developed, and when he picked it up, photos were missing. He could tell from the weight of the envelope, but went down the Tooth Care aisle to open it and be sure. He returned to the photo counter and asked the pimply kid with “Stevorino” on his name tag who’d waited on him, “You opened these, didn’t you? You got something that belongs to me.”

“No way,” the kid said, his acne blazing up.

“Zit-head, I should smash your face in now, but I don’t want pus on my shirt. It’s a nice shirt, right? So, see this?” Joe opened his hand, and a black switchblade the width of a garter snake flicked out a silver fang. “I’m going to count to five, and if I don’t have the pictures by then, I’m going to cut off Stevo’s dickorino right here to break him of the habit of yanking it over another man’s intimate moments.”

“Okay,” the kid said, “I’m sorry.” He reached into the pocket of his Walgreens smock and slid the pictures over, facedown.

“How many of my boob shots have you been snitching, Stevorino? What is it? You think of me as the Abominable Titman, the fucken Hugh Hefner of St. Michael’s parish? See me coming with a roll of Kodak and you get an instant woodie?”

“No, sir,” the kid said.

Joe went outside and sat in his idling car, studying the photos, thinking of Capri, of the intensity of being alone with her, of her endless inventions and surprises, but then he thought of her deceptions, their arguments, and of her talk of leaving for L.A. It was there, in the car with her photos on the dashboard, that he let her go, accepted, as he hadn’t until that moment, that she had to want to stay or it wasn’t worth it. He didn’t let thinking of her distract him from his plan of action, which required watching the Walgreens exit. A plan was the distinction between a man with a purpose and some joker sitting in a car, working himself into a helpless rage. Two hours passed before the kid came out. He was unlocking his bicycle when he saw Joe Ditto.

“Mister, I said I was sorry,” the kid pleaded.

“Stevo, when they ask how it happened say you fell off your bike,” Joe said, and with an economically short blur of a kick, a move practiced in steel-toed factory shoes on a heavy bag, and on buckets and wooden planks, hundreds, maybe thousands of times until it was automatic, took out the kid’s knee.

Joe never did get around to making that blowup of Capri. He hasn’t heard from her in months, which is unlike her, but he knows she’ll get in touch, there’s too much left unfinished between them for her not to, and, until she’s back, he doesn’t need her muff on the wall.

 

Tuesday afternoon at the Zip Inn is a blue clothespin day. That’s the color that Roman Ziprinski, owner and one-armed bartender, selects from the plastic clothespins clamped to the wire of Christmas lights that hangs year-round above the cash register. With the blue clothespin, Zip fastens the empty right sleeve of his white shirt that he’s folded as neatly as one folds a flag.

It’s an afternoon when the place is empty. Just Zip and, on the TV above the bar, Jack Brickhouse, the play-by-play announcer for the Cubs. The Cubbies are losing again, this time to the Pirates. It’s between innings, and Brickhouse says, It’s a good time for a Hamm’s, the official beer of the Chicago Cubs.

“Official,” Zip says to Brickhouse, “that’s pretty impressive, Jack.”

To the tom-tom of a tribal drum, the Hamm’s theme song plays: “From the land of sky blue waters,” and Zip hums along, “from the land of pines, lofty balsam comes the beer refreshing, Hamm’s the beer refreshing …”

Hamm’s is brewed in Wisconsin. Zip has a place there, way up on Lac Courte Oreilles in the Chain of Lakes region famous for muskies. It’s a little fisherman’s cottage no one knows he has, where he goes to get away from the city. A land of sky blue waters is what Zip dreamed about during the war. Daydreamed, that is. If Zip could have controlled his night dreams, those would have been of sky blue water, too, instead of the nightmares and insomnia that began after he was wounded and continued for years. Sometimes, like last night, Zip still wakes in a sweat as sticky as blood, with the stench of burning flesh lingering in his nostrils, to the tremors of a fist hammering a chest—a medic’s desperate attempt to jump-start a dead body. No matter how often that dream recurs, Zip continues to feel shocked when in the dark he realizes the chest is his, and the fist pounding it is attached to his missing right arm.

When he joined the Marines out of high school, his grandmother gave him a rosary blessed in Rome to wear like a charm around his neck and made him promise to pray. But Zip’s true prayer was one that led him into the refuge of a deep northern forest, a place he’d actually been only once, as a child, on a fishing trip with his father. He summoned that place from his heart before landings and on each new day of battle and on patrol as, sick with dysentery, he slogged through what felt like poisonous heat with seventy pounds of flamethrower on his back. He’d escape the stench of shit and the hundreds of rotting corpses that the rocky coral terrain of Peleliu made impossible to bury, into a vision of cool freshwater and blue-green shade scented with pine. When I make it through this, that’s where I’m going, he vowed to himself.

Sky blue water was the dream he fought for, his private American Dream. And so is the Zip Inn, his tavern in the old neighborhood. He’s his own boss here. Zip uncaps a Hamm’s. It’s on the house. The icy bottle sweats in his left hand. He raises it to his lips, and it suds down his throat: he came back missing an arm, but hell, his buddy Domino, like a lot of guys, didn’t come back at all.

He can’t control his night dreams, but during the day, Zip makes it a practice not to think about the war. Today, he wishes for a customer to come in and give him something else to think about. Where’s Teo, that odd Mexican guy who stops by in the afternoon and sits with a beer, humming to himself and writing on napkins? The pounding in his temples has Zip worrying about his blood pressure. He has the urge to take a dump but knows his bowels are faking it. The symptoms of stress bring back Peleliu—the way his bowels cramped as the amtrac slammed toward the beach. They lost a third of the platoon on a beachhead called Rocky Point to a butchering mortar barrage that splintered the coral rock into razors of shrapnel. Zip stands wondering, how does a man in a place so far from home summon up whatever one wants to call it—courage, duty, controlled insanity—in the face of that kind of carnage, and then say nothing when two goombahs from across Western Avenue come into his place, the Zip Inn, and tell him it would be good business to rent a new jukebox from them? Instead of throwing those parasites out, he said nothing. Nothing.

Only a two-hundred-dollar initial installation fee, they told him.

The two of them smelling of aftershave: a fat guy, Sal, the talker, and Joe—he’d heard of Joe—a psycho for sure with a Tony Curtis haircut and three-day growth of beard, wearing a sharkskin suit and factory steel-toes. The two hoods together like a pilot fish and a shark.

“Then every month only fifty for service,” fat Sal said, “and that includes keeping up with all the new hits. And we service the locked coin box so you won’t have to bother. Oh yeah, and to make sure nobody tries to mess with the machine, we guarantee its protection—only twenty-five a month for that—and believe me when we say protection we mean protection. Nobody will fuck with your jukebox. Or your bar.”

“So you’re saying I pay you seventy-five a month for something I pay fifteen for now. I mean the jukebox don’t net me more than a few bucks,” Zip told them. “It’s for the enjoyment of my customers. You’re asking me to lose money on this.”

“You ain’t getting protection for no fifteen bucks,” Sal tells him.

“Protection from what?” Zip asked.

The hoods looked at each other and smiled. “Allora.” Sal shrugged to Joe, then told Zip, “A nice little setup like you got should be protected.”

“I got Allstate,” Zip said.

“See, that kind of insurance pays after something happens, a break-in, vandalism, theft, a fire. The kind we’re talking here guarantees nothing like that is going to happen in the first place. All the other taverns in the neighborhood are getting it too. You don’t want to be the odd man out.”

“A two-hundred-dollar installation fee?” Zip asked.

“That covers it.”

“Some weeks I don’t clear more than that.”

“Come on, man, you should make that in a night. Start charging for the eggs,” Sal said, helping himself to one. “And what’s with only six bits for a shot and a beer? What kinda businessman are you? Maybe you’d like us to set up a card game in the back room for you on Fridays. And put in a pinball machine. We’re getting those in the bars around here, too.”

“Installation was fifty for the box I got. Service is fifteen a month.”

Joe, the guy in the sharkskin suit, rose from his barstool and walked over to the jukebox. He read some of the selections aloud: “Harbor Lights,” “Blue Moon,” the “Too Fat Polka,” “Cucurrucucu Paloma,” “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

“These songs are moldy, man,” Joe said. “Where’s Sinatra, where’s Elvis the Pelvis? Your current jukebox dealer’s a loser. They’re gonna be out of business in a year. Their machines ain’t dependable. Sallie, got a coin?”

“Here, on me,” Zip said, reaching into the till.

“No, no, Sallie’s got it.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Sal said, flipping a coin to Joe.

“Requests, Mr. Zip?” Joe asked.

“I hear it anytime I want.”

“So, what’s your favorite song?”

“Play, ‘Sing, Sing, Sing,’” Sal said, yolk spitting from his mouth. “Did you know Benny Goodman’s a yid from Lawndale? Lived on Francisco before the tutsones moved in.”

Joe dropped in the coin and punched some buttons. Zip could hear from the dull clunk that the coin was a slug.

“Goddamn thing ate my quarter!” Joe exclaimed. “I fucken hate when machines snitch from me. Newspaper boxes are the worst. Selling papers used to be a job for blind guys and crips. No offense, Mr. Zip, I’m just saying a paper stand was decent work for these people, and then they put in newspaper boxes. I’m trying to buy a Trib the other day and the box eats my quarter. Know what I did to that newspaper box?”

“Here,” Zip said. “Here’s a refund.”

“But, see, Mr. Zip, it’s bad business to be covering for these lousy fucking jukes. You know if you whack them just right it’s like hitting the jackpot.” Joe kicked the jukebox knee high and its lights blinked out. From the crunch, Zip knew he’d kicked in the speaker. “No jackpot? Well, guess it ain’t my lucky day.” Joe laughed. “So, listen, Mr. Zip, we got a deal to shake hands on?” Joe extended his hand. Then, eyeing Zip’s clothespinned sleeve, Joe withdrew his right hand and extended his left.

“Let me think it over,” Zip said. He didn’t offer his hand. He wasn’t trying to make a statement. It was the only hand he had.

“No problem,” Joe said. “No pressure. Give it some careful thought. I’ll come by next week, maybe Friday, and you can give me your answer.” He pulled out a roll of bills, snapped off a twenty, and set it on the mess of eggshells Sal had left on the bar. “For the egg.”

Big shots leaving a tip stolen from the pocket of some workingman. After they walked out of his bar, Zip snapped open his lighter and watched the burning twenty turn the eggshells sooty. In the war, he’d operated an M2 flamethrower. They must have figured a kid his size could heft it, lug the napalm-filled jugs, and brace against the backward thrust of the jetting flame. Its range was only thirty yards, so Zip had to get in close to the mouths of caves and pillboxes that honeycombed the ridges where the Japs were dug in ready to fight to the death. He had to get close enough to smell the bodies burning. A flamethrower operator was an easy target and always worked with a buddy, whose job it was to cover him. Zip’s buddy on Pelelui was Dominic Morales, from L.A. They called him Domino. During a tropical downpour on a ridge named Half Moon Hill, Domino was killed by the same mortar blast that took off Zip’s right arm. They were both nineteen years old, and all these years later that astonishes Zip more than it ever did at the time. Nineteen, the same age as kids in the neighborhood shooting each other over who’s wearing what gang colors in some crazy, private war. He thought he’d paid his price and was beyond all that, but now Zip stands behind the bar waiting for the days to tick down to Friday, when Joe Ditto comes back. Zip could call the cops, but he can’t prove anything, and besides, hoods wouldn’t be canvasing taverns if the cops weren’t on the take. Calling the cops would be stupid. What if he simply closed down the bar, packed his Ford, drove north into the mist of sky-blue waters?

Zip recalls putt-putting out just after dawn in his aluminum boat into a mist that hadn’t burned off the water yet. The lake looked like a setting for an Arthurian legend, the shore nearly invisible. Zip felt invisible. He’d packed a cane pole, a couple brews in a cooler of ice, and a cottage cheese container of night crawlers he’d dug the night before. He was going bluegill fishing. Fresh from the icy water of Lac Courte Oreilles they were delicious. Even in the mist, he located his secret spot and quietly slid in the cement anchor. But when he opened the container of night crawlers, he found cottage cheese. If he went all the way back for his bait, he’d lose the first light and the best fishing of the day. Defeated, he raised anchor, and the boat drifted into acres of lily pads, nosing sluggish bullfrogs into the water. Zip noticed tiny green frogs camouflaged on the broad leaves, waiting for the sun to warm them into life. He caught a few and put them in the ice cooler. He’d seen bluegills come into mere inches of water alongshore for frogs. Once they were paralyzed by cold, Zip had no trouble baiting a frog on a hook one-handed. Returned to water, the frog would revive. Zip swung his pole out, and his bobber settled on the smoldering water. He watched for the dip of the bobber, the signal to set the hook, while the mist thinned. Zip was wondering where the bluegills were when the bobber vanished. He’d never seen one disappear underwater. Before he could puzzle out what happened, the water churned and the pole nearly jerked from his hand. The bamboo bent double, and he locked it between his thighs and hung on. The fish leaped, and if Zip hadn’t known it was a muskie, he might have thought it was an alligator. It wagged in midair and appeared to take the measure of Zip, then belly-flopped back into the lake and torpedoed beneath the boat. Zip braced, tried horsing it out, and the pole snapped, knocking him off balance onto his butt, crushing the Styrofoam cooler, but he still clung to the broken pole. The fish leaped again beside the boat, swashing in water. It seemed to levitate above Zip—he smelled its weediness—and when it splashed down, the broken pole tore from his hand and snagged on the gunwale. He lunged for it, almost capsizing the boat, then watched the stub of bamboo, tangled in line and bobber, shoot away as if caught in an undertow. It was too big a fish for a cane pole. Too big a fish for a one-armed man.

Zip drains the last of his Hamm’s, sets the bottle on the bar, and stares at his left hand, the hand Joe Ditto wanted to shake. Blood pulses in his temples and a current of pain traces his right arm, and the thought occurs to Zip that if he ever has a heart attack, he’ll sense it first in his phantom arm.

 

Whitey calls in the middle of a dream:

Little Julio is supposed to be in his room practicing, but he’s playing his flute in the bedroom doorway. Julio’s mother, Gloria Candido, is wearing a pink see-through nightie, and Joe can’t believe she lets Little Julio see her like that because Little Julio is not that little and he’s just caught Joe circumnavigating Gloria’s nipples with his tongue and Little Julio wants some, too. “He’s playing his nursing song,” Gloria says. The flute amplifies the kid’s breath until it’s as piercing as an alarm. To shut him up, Joe gropes for the phone.

“Joe,” Whitey says. “What’s going on?”

Drugged on dream, Joe wakes to his racing heart. “What?” he says, even though he hates guys who say what? or huh? It’s a response that reveals weakness.

“Whatayou mean what? What the fuck? You know what. What’s with you?”

What day is this? Joe wants to ask, but he knows that’s the wrong thing to say, so he says, “I had a weird night.”

“Joe, are you fucken on drugs?”

“No,” Joe says. He’s coming out of his fog, and it occurs to him that Whitey can’t possibly be calling about Gloria Candido. A confrontation on the phone is not how Whitey would handle something like that. Whitey wouldn’t let on he knew.

“Well, what’s the problem then?” Whitey demands.

It’s Johnny Sovereign that Whitey is calling about, and as soon as Joe realizes that, his heart stops racing. “Ran into a minor complication. I went to see him yesterday and—”

“Maronn’!” Whitey yells. “Joe, we’re on the fucking phone here. I don’t care what the dipshit excuses are, just fucking get it done.”

“Hey, Whitey, suck this,” Joe says and puts the receiver to his crotch. “Who the fuck do you think you’re yelling at, you vain old sack of shit with your wrinkled minchia? Your girlfriend’s slutting around behind your back making a fucking cornuto of you. You don’t like it I’ll cut you, I’ll bleed you like a stuck pig.”

Joe says all that to the dial tone. Telling off the dial tone doesn’t leave him feeling better, just the opposite, and he makes a rule on the spot: never again talk to dial tones after someone’s hung up on you. It’s like talking to mirrors. Mirrors have been making him nervous lately. There’s a dress draped over his bedroom mirror, and Joe gets out of bed and looks through his apartment for the woman to go with it. That would be April. She’s nowhere to be found, and for a moment Joe wonders if she’s taken his clothes and left him her dress. But his clothes are piled on the chair beside the bed where he stripped them off-shoes, trousers with keys and wallet, sport coat with the .22 weighting one pocket. He’s naked except for his mismatched socks. The stiletto is still sheathed in the black-and-pink argyle.

Yesterday was supposed to have been a cleanup day. His plan was to pitch the trash, drop his laundry at the Chink’s, and then stop by Johnny Sovereign’s house on Twenty-fifth Street. The plan depended on Sovereign not being home, so Joe called from a pay phone, and Sovereign’s good-looking young wife answered and said Johnny would be back around four. Okay, things were falling into place. Joe would wait in the gangway behind Sovereign’s house for him to come home, and suggest they go for a drink in order to discuss Johnny setting up gambling nights in the back rooms of some of the local taverns. Once Joe got Sovereign alone in the car, well, he’d improvise from there.

So around three in the afternoon, Joe parked beside the rundown one-car garage behind Sovereign’s house. The busted garage door gaped open, and he saw that Sovereign’s Pontiac Bonneville was gone. Bonnevilles with their 347-cubic-inch engines that could do zero to sixty in 8.1 seconds were the current bad-ass cars—in Little Village, they called them Panchos. Sovereign’s splurging on that car was what made Whitey suspect he was skimming on the numbers. New wheels and already leaking oil, Joe thought, as he looked at the fresh spots on the warped, birdshit-crusted floorboards of the garage. If Sovereign wasn’t careless and all for show, he’d have taken that Pancho to the Indian.

Johnny Sovereign’s back fence was warped, too, and overgrown with morning glories. His wife must have planted them. She’d made an impression on Joe the one time he’d been inside their house. Johnny had invited him, and they’d gone the back way, the entrance Joe figures it was Johnny’s habit to use. Johnny didn’t bother to announce their arrival, and they caught his wife—Vi, that was her name—vacuuming in her slip. When she saw Joe standing there, a blush heated her bare shoulders before she ran into the bedroom. She was wearing a pale yellow slip. Joe had never seen a slip like that before. He would have liked to slide its thin straps down her skinny arms to see if her blush mottled her breasts the way some women flush when they come. Sovereign’s Pontiac was yellow, too, but canary yellow, and Joe wondered if there was some connection between Vi’s slip and the car.

He sat in the Bluebird and lit a cigarette, then unscrewed the top from a pinch bottle of scotch and washed down a couple of painkillers. Sparrows twittered on the wires and pigeons did owl imitations inside Sovereign’s shitty garage. The alley was empty except for a humped, hooded figure of a woman slowly approaching in his rearview mirror—a bag lady in a black winter coat and babushka, stopping to inspect each garbage can. Except for the stink of trash, Joe didn’t mind waiting. He needed time to think through his next moves. From where he’d parked, he could watch the gangway and intercept Sovereign before he entered the house. He’d ask Sovereign to have a drink, and Sovereign would want to know where. “Somewhere private,” Joe would tell him. And then—wham—it came to Joe, as it always did, how he’d work it. He’d tell Sovereign, “Let’s take your wheels. I want to ride in a new yellow Bonneville.” He’d bring the bottle of scotch, a friendly touch, and suggest they kill it on the deserted side street where the dragsters raced, a place where Sovereign could show him what the Pancho could do. He couldn’t think of a way to get the shotgun into Sovereign’s car, so he’d have to forget about that. Joe was scolding himself for not thinking all this through earlier when a woman’s voice startled him.

“Hi, Joe, got an extra smoke?”

“What are you doing here?” Joe asked.

“Trying to bum a Pall Mall off an old lover,” April said. “You still smoke Pall Malls, don’tcha?”

Her hair was bleached corn-silk blond and she wore a dress the shade of morning glories. Joe wondered how she’d come down the alley without his seeing her. The scooped neckline exposed enough cleavage so that he could see a wing tip from the blue seagull tattooed on her left breast. She looked more beautiful than he’d remembered.

“I thought you went to Vegas,” he said. “I heard you got married to some dealer at Caesar’s.” He didn’t add that he’d also heard she’d OD’d.

“Married? Me?” She showed him her left hand: nails silvery pink, a cat’s-eye on her index finger going from gray to green the way her eyes did. Joe leaned to kiss the pale band of flesh where a wedding ring would have been, but he paused when sunlight hit her hand in a way that made it momentarily appear freckled and old with dirty, broken nails. She lifted her hand the rest of the way and sighed when it met his lips.

“You used to do that thing with my hand that would drive me crazy,” April said.

“Hey, we were kids,” Joe said.

He worked back then for a towing service Whitey ran, and he’d met April when he went to tow her Chevy from a private lot off Rush Street. He’d traded not towing her car for a date. She was a senior at Our Lady of Lourdes High, still a virgin, and on their first date she informed him that she was sorry, but she didn’t put out. That was the phrase she used. Joe had laughed and told her, “Sweetheart, it’s not like I even asked you. And anyway, there’s other things than putting out.” “Such as?” April asked, and from that single question, Joe knew he had her. It was nothing about him in particular, she was just ready. “Imagine the knuckles on your fingers are knees and the knuckles on your hands are breasts,” Joe had told her, extending her index and middle fingers into a V and outlining an imaginary torso with his finger. “Okay, I see. So?” she asked. “So this,” he whispered and kissed the insides of her fingers, then licked their webbing. She watched him as if amused, then closed her eyes. Even after she was putting out three times a day, nothing got her more excited than when he kissed her hand. “Lover,” she’d once told him, “that goes right to my pussy.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m still using?” April asked. “I’m clean. And I been thinking about you ever since I’ve been back in the neighborhood. I’m staying with my sister, Renee. Remember her? She had a crush on you, too. I dreamed last night I’d find you here, and when I woke I thought, Forget it, you can’t trust dreams, but then I thought, What the hell, all that will happen is I’ll feel foolish.”

“You dreamed of meeting me here?”

“Amazing, huh? Like that commercial, you know? ‘I dreamed I met my old boyfriend in an alley, wearing my Maidenform bra.’ Nice ride,” she said, gliding her fingertips along the Bluebird as if stroking a cat. She came around to the passenger side, climbed in, leaned back into the leather seat, and sighed. “Just you, me, and a thousand morning glories.”

Joe flicked away his cigarette and kissed her.

“You taste like scotch,” she said.

He reached for the pinch bottle and she took a sip and kissed him, letting the hot liquor trickle from her mouth into his.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“That information wasn’t in your dream?”

“In my dream you were a lonely void waiting for your soul mate.” April took another sip of scotch and swallowed it this time. “Maybe we should have a private homecoming party,” she said.

He remembers driving with April down the alleys back to his place, stopping on the way at Bruno’s for a fifth of Bacardi and a cold six-pack of tonic water, and later, covering his kitchen table with Reynolds Wrap and laying out lines of coke. He remembers the plink of blood on foil when her nose began to bleed, and April calling from the bathroom, “Joe, where’s all the towels?”

“Forgot to pick them up at the Chink’s.”

“No towels, no sheets. Are you sure you live here? What’s in the fridge? Anything at all? I dread to look.”

They lay kissing on the bare mattress while darkness edged up his bedroom walls. How still the city sounded. Between shrieks of nighthawks, an accordion faintly wheezed from some open window. Joe’s bedroom window was open, too, and the breeze that tingled the blinds seemed blued with the glow of the new arc lights the city had erected. Before the mirror, April, streaked by the same glow, undid her ponytail. Mimicked by a reflection deep in the dark glass, she slipped her dress over her head. No Maid-enform bra, she was naked. He came up behind her and bit her shoulders. He could see what appeared to be disembodied blue hands—his hands—cupping her luminous breasts. Otherwise he was a shadow. His thumb traced the tiny seagull flying across her breast. In the mirror it looked graceless, like an insignia a gang punk might have India-inked on his forearm. Her reflection appeared suddenly to surge to the surface of the glass, and he saw that the mirror was blemished with hairline fractures superimposed on her face like wrinkles. She flipped the dress she was still holding over the mirror as if to snuff a chemical reaction. It snuffed the residual light, and in the darkness he could feel something flying wildly around the room, and they lost their balance, banged off a wall, and fell to the bed. She took his cock, fit it in, then brought her hand, smelling of herself, to his lips.

Joe remembers all that, but none of it—the booze, the coke, the Demerol, the waking up repeatedly in the dark already fucking —explains how it can be afternoon, or what her morning-glory dress is doing left behind. He yanks the dress off the mirror and is surprised to find a crack zigzagging down the center. Maybe it was the mirror they’d staggered into. He staggers into the kitchen and washes down a couple of painkillers with what’s left in a bottle of flat tonic water, then palms Old Spice onto his face and under his arms, tugs on his clothes, and dials Sovereign’s number. He knows it’s not a good idea to be calling from his place, but that can’t be helped. When Vi answers on the third ring, he asks, “Johnny there?”

“He’ll be home around four,” she says. “Can I tell him who’s calling?”

Joe hangs up.

From the closet, he digs out a gym bag stuffed with dirty gym gear and canvas gloves for hitting the heavy bag. He lifts the mirror from the bedroom wall, bundles it up in the dress, totes it into the alley, and sets it beside the garbage cans, then throws the gym bag into the Bluebird. Joe drives down the alleys, formulating a plan for how to get the shotgun into Sovereign’s car. Off Twenty-fifth, he scatters a cloud of pigeons and nearly sideswipes a blind old bag lady in a babushka and dark glasses who’s feeding them. When he pulls up behind Sovereign’s, Joe can smell the baking motor oil spotting the floorboards of the empty garage. Demerol tends to heighten his sense of smell. Wind rustling down the alley leaves an aftertaste of rotten food and the mildewed junk people throw away. He makes sure the alley is empty, then slips the sawed-off shotgun from under the seat and buries it in the gym bag, beneath his workout gear. The scotch bottle rests on top, and when he zips up the bag, the ghost of old gym sweat transforms into a familiar fragrance.

Marisol stands in the alley as if she’s emerged from the morning glories. She has a white flower in her auburn hair. Her perfume obliterates the scent of pigeons, garbage, and motor oil he’s come to associate with Johnny Sovereign. She’s dressed in white cotton X-rayed by sunlight: a shirt opened a button beyond modest, tied in a knot above her exposed navel, and white toreador pants. The laces of the wedged shoes he used to call her goddess sandals snake around her ankles. Her oversize shades seem necessary to shield her from her own brightness.

“See you’re still driving the B-bird,” she says, sauntering to the car. “That’s cute how you name your cars. Kind of boyish of you, Joe, though when you first told me your car had a name, know what? I thought, Oh no, don’t let this be one of those pathetic wankers who names his penis, too. Hey, I like the color coordination with the sport coat. That splash pattern is perfect for eating spaghetti with tomato sauce. Recognize this shirt? It’s yours. Want it back?”

She still speaks in the fake accent that when they first met had Joe believing she was from London. He’s not sure he’s ever heard her real voice, if she has one. He’d heard she broke her Audrey Hepburn neck in Europe when she blew off the back of some Romeo’s BSA on the Autobahn. Who starts these rumors about dead babes? Maybe Sal told him; Sal’s a know-it-all with a rep for spreading bullshit. Well, fucking allora, Sallie, if a very much alive Marisol, trailing perfume, doesn’t get into the Bluebird, help herself to a smoke from the pack on the dash, and ask, “Know where a girl can get a drink around here?”

Joe unzips the gym bag, hands her the bottle of scotch, and she asks as if she already knows, “What else you got in that bag, Joe?”

“Whataya mean, what else? Gym stuff.”

“Whew! Smells like your athletic supporter’s got balls of scomorza,” Marisol says. “But what do I know about the secret lives of jockstraps.”

Joe looks at her and laughs. She always could break him up, and not many beautiful women dare to be clowns. Capri was funny like that, too, and no matter who he’s with he misses her. Where’s Capri now, with who, and are they laughing? Marisol laughs, then quenches her laughter with a belt of scotch and turns to be kissed, and Joe kisses her, expecting the fire of alcohol to flow from her mouth into his, but it’s just her tongue sweeping his.

“What?” Marisol says.

“I thought you were going to share.”

“Dahlink,” she says in her Zsa Zsa accent, “you don’t remember I’m a swallower?”

Joe remembers. Remembers a blow job doing eighty down the Outer Drive on the first night he met her at the Surf, a bar on Rush where she worked as a cocktail waitress; remembers the improv theater he’d go see her in at a crummy little beatnik space in Old Town where sometimes there were more people onstage than in the audience; just say something obscene about Ike or Nixon or McCarthy and you’d get a laugh—shit, he laughed, too. He remembers the weekend right after he got the Bluebird when they dropped its top and drove the dune highway along the coast of Indiana to Whitey’s so-called chalet on the lake, water indigo to the horizon, and night lit by the foundries in Gary.

“So, luvvy, is here where we’re spending our precious time?” Marisol asked, turning on the radio.

Joe shifted through the gears as if the alleys were the Indianapolis Speedway and pulled up to Bruno’s. He left Marisol in his idling car, singing along with Madame Butterfly on the opera station, while he ran in for a fifth of Rémy, her drink of choice, then brought her back to his place.

“Where’s all the sheets and towels?” she asked. “Joe, how the bloody hell can you live like this?”

“They’re at the Chink’s. I been meaning to get them, but I been busy.”

“You better watch it before you turn into an eccentric old bachelor, luv. I think maybe you’re missing a woman’s touch.”

That was all she had to say, touch, and they were on the bare mattress.

Her blouse, an old white shirt of his, came undone, and he pressed his face to her breasts, anointed with layers of scent, lavender, jasmine, areolas daubed with oil of bergamot, nipples tipped with a tincture of roses. He recalled the single time she’d invited him to her place on Sedgwick and how, in her bedroom, a dressing table cluttered with vials and stoppered bottles smelled like a garden and looked like the laboratory of a witch. Touch, she said, and he straddled her rib cage, thrusting slicked with a bouquet of sweat, spit, and sperm between perfumed breasts she mounded together with her hands. A woman’s touch.

When he woke with Marisol beside him it was night and his room musky with her body—low tide beneath the roses. An accordion was playing. It sounded close, as if someone in the alley below was squeezing out a tune from long ago. “Hear that?” he asked, not sure she was awake.

“They’re loud enough to wake the dead,” Marisol said. “When I was little I used to think they were bats and their squawks were the sonar they flew by.”

“I didn’t mean the nighthawks,” Joe said. “Those new mercury vapor lights bring the bugs and the bugs bring the birds. Supposed to cut down muggings. Or at least line the pockets of a few contractors. I had to buy fucking venetian blinds to sleep.”

“You need earplugs, too,” Marisol said. She rose from the dark bed and crossed through the streaky bluish beams, then raised the blinds. The glare bestowed on her bare body the luster of a statue. “Liking the view in the vapor lights?” she asked. “Ever think of a window as an erogenous zone?”

“Always the exhibitionist,” Joe said. “But why not? You’re beautiful as a statue.”

“Statues are by nature exhibitionists, even when they’ve lost their arms or boobs or penises. Where’s your mirror? I want to watch statues doing it in mercury vapor.”

“No mirror.”

“You don’t have a mirror? Don’t tell me—it’s at the Chink’s.”

“It’s in the alley.”

“That’s a novel place to keep it. I may be an exhibitionist but I’m not going to screw in the alley.”

“It’s broken.”

“Seven years’ bad luck, Joe. Poor unlucky bloke doesn’t get to watch the statues with their shameless minds.”

“Allora!” Joe said. “It’s not that broke.”

He went down the back stairs into the alley. The mirror was still where he’d set it beside a trash can. April’s morning-glory dress was gone; some size-six bag lady must have had a lucky day. The mirror no longer appeared to be cracked, as if it had healed itself. It reflected an arc light. Nighthawks screeched. No one was playing an accordion in the alley, not that Joe thought there would be, but he could still hear it, a song he’d heard as a child, something about blackbirds doing the tango that his grandpa played on Sundays when he’d accompany scratchy 78s on his red accordion. Joe listened, trying to identify the open window from which the song wafted. Every window was dark. The music was coming from his window. He saw the flare of a lighter, and a silhouette with its head at an awkward angle, gazing silently down at him.

Marisol was still at the window, smoking a reefer, her back to him, when he returned to the room. “You didn’t get mugged. See, those new streetlights must be doing their job,” she said.

He propped the mirror against the wall.

“I’ll share,” she said, and exhaled smoke into his mouth. He felt her breath smoldering along the corridors of his mind. She handed him the reefer, and the crackle of paper as he inhaled echoed off the ceiling. “That paper’s soaked in hash oil,” she said. The accordion pumped louder, as if it tangoed in the next room. Lyrics surfaced in his mind and dissolved back into melody. “E nell’oscurita ognuno vuol godere … in the darkness everyone wants pleasure.” When he opened his eyes, he could see in the dark. “L’amor non sa tacere … love can’t keep silent …” She was in his arms, and he smoothed his hands over her shoulders, down her spine, over her hips, lingering on and parting the cheeks of her sculpted ass.

“Have any oil?” she whispered.

“What kind of oil?”

“Like you don’t want me that way. Almond oil, baby oil, bath oil, Oil of Olay, Vaseline if that’s all you got.”

“Hoppe’s Number Nine,” he said.

“That’s a new one on me.”

He gestured with the reefer to the bottle in the ashtray next to the Old Spice on the bureau top. She picked it up and sniffed. By the lighter’s flame, she read the label aloud: “‘Do not swallow. Solvent frees gun bores of corrosive primer fouling and residue. Preserves accuracy.’ Jesus, Joe! Don’t you have some good, old-fashioned olive oil? What-a kinda Day-Glo are you?”

“Maybe in the kitchen,” Joe said.

Brandishing the lighter like a torch, she went to the kitchen. Joe waited on the bed, listening to the accordion playing with the mesmerizing intensity that marijuana imparts to music … “Love can’t keep silent and this is its song … la canzon di mille capinere … the song of a thousand blackbirds …” when Marisol screamed. “God, what am I stepping in? What’s leaking out of your fridge, Joe? You have a body in there?”

 

Wounded wing, how strange to fall from blue. Like a fish that suddenly forgets the way to swim. When men fly, they know, by instinct, they defy. But to a bird, as to a god, nothing’s more natural than sky …

Needing somewhere to think about the words forming to a nonstop percussion in his mind, not to mention needing a cold brew, Teo gimps out of daylight into the Zip Inn. A slab of sunshine extends from the doorway. Beyond it, the dimness of the narrow, shotgun barroom makes the flowing blue water of the illuminated Hamm’s beer sign on the back wall look like a mirage. The TV screen flickers with white static that reflects off the photos of the local softball teams that decorate the walls. Teo doesn’t remove his dark glasses. Zip, the folded right sleeve of his white shirt fastened with a yellow clothespin, stands behind the bar before a bottle of whiskey and raises a shot glass.

“Qué pasa, amigo!” Zip says, a little loudly given there’s just the two of them.

“Nada, hombre.” Teo is surprised to see him drinking alone in the afternoon, an occupational hazard of bartending to which Zip has always seemed immune.

“Knee acting up? Have one with me,” Zip says, filling a second shot glass.

“What’s the occasion?” Teo hooks his cane on the lip of the bar, carefully sets the bowling bag he’s carrying onto a stool, and eases onto the stool beside it.

“Today is Thursday,” Zip says, “and if you ask me, and I know nobody did, Thursday’s a reason for celebrating.”

“To Thursday,” Teo says. “Salud!”

“Na zdrowie,” Zip answers. He draws a couple of beer chasers.

“Let me get the beers,” Teo says, laying some bills on the bar. Zip ignores his money. After a meditative swallow, Teo asks, “TV broke?”

“No game today,” Zip says. “Giants are in tomorrow. You work Goldblatt’s?”

“No, Leader Store,” Teo says. He pushes a dollar at Zip. “At least let me buy a bag of pretzels.”

“I heard Leader’s is going under. Any shoplifters even there to pinch?” Zip asks, ringing up the pretzels.

“A kid in Pets trying to steal one of those hand-painted turtles. A pink polka-dotted turtle.”

“Give him the full nelson?” Zip asks.

“Only the half nelson. He was just a grade-schooler.”

“I think the dress disguise actually reduces your effectiveness, my friend. I mean, if there was a problem in my tavern, you know, say, theoretically speaking, somebody pocketing eggs—”

“The eggs are free,” Teo says.

“Then pretzels. Say I got a problem with some pretzel sneakthief, so I hire you and you’re sitting here, supposedly undercover, in a polka-dot dress wearing a wig and dark glasses and a cane and maybe smoking a cigar. I mean, you wouldn’t be fooling nobody. It might be a deterrent, but not a disguise. You might as well be sitting there in your secret wrestler’s getup. Whatever the hell it is.”

“Amigo, you really want to see the wrestler’s outfit?”

“Why not?” Zip says. “Liven things up. This place could use a little muscle.”

“You’d be disappointed. And, by the way, it was the turtle with the polka dots, not the dress.”

Lately, Teo has been stopping at the Zip Inn on weekday afternoons when the bar is mostly empty. Zip seems to know when Teo is in a mood to sit scribbling or simply to sink into his own thoughts, and he leaves him alone then, but other times they swap stories. Zip has told Teo hilarious tales of the world-record muskies he’s lost, and Teo, trying to make his story funny, too, told Zip how his knee was injured when he was thrown from the ring onto the pavement during an outdoor wrestling match.

“You mean like those masked wrestlers when they set up a ring on Nineteenth Street for Cinco de Mayo?” Zip had asked. “What are they called?”

“Luchadores,” Teo told him.

“So, you’re a … luchador … with a secret masked identity?” Zip had sounded genuinely curious.

“Not anymore,” Teo had answered.

Now, from the bowling bag, Teo pulls the hem of the dress he dons occasionally as part of his store security job. It’s the dress they gave him when he began working for Goldblatt’s—blue paisley, not polka dots—and, contrary to Zip’s wisecracks, Teo has caught so many shoplifters that he’s begun moonlighting at Leader Store on his days off.

“Yeah, this one is more you,” Zip says, fingering the fabric, then asks, “What the hell else you got in there?”

Teo lifts out the pigeon.

This morning, he tells Zip, on his way to work he found the pigeon, a blue checker cock—columba affinis—dragging its wounded wing down an alley, and took it with him to Leader’s, where he kept it in an empty parrot cage in Pets and fed it water and the hemp seed he carries with him as a treat for his own birds. Teo thinks of it as the Spanish pigeon. He doesn’t mention the message, in Spanish, that he found tied to its unbanded leg.

“So it ain’t one of your birds?” Zip asks.

“No.” Teo shakes his head. He’s told Zip how he keeps a palomar, a pigeon loft, on the roof of the three-story building on Blue Island Avenue where he rents a room, but he hasn’t told Zip about the messages arriving there. Teo hasn’t told anyone but the sax player, and he’s gone missing. Over the last month, Teo’s pigeons have been coming home with scraps of paper fastened with red twine to their banded legs. The first message arrived on a misty day, attached to the leg of one of his bronzed archangels. It wasn’t Teo who first noticed it but the sax player, Lefty Antic, who practiced his saxophone on the roof. Teo untied the message, and he and Lefty read the smeared ink: “Marlin.”

“Mean anything to you?” Lefty Antic had asked.

“Just a big fish, man,” Teo had told him.

“Maybe it’s his name, Marlin the Pigeon,” Lefty Antic said.

“No,” Teo said. “They don’t tell us their names.”

The next morning, slipped under his door, Teo found two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp bills rubber-banded in a folded page from a Sportsman’s Park harness-racing form with “Merlin” circled in the fourth race and a note that read, “Thanks for the tip. Lefty.”

Teo saved the winnings and the message in a White Owl cigar box. A few days later, out of a drizzle, a second, barely legible message arrived fastened to one of his racing homers. As far as Teo could tell, it read: “Tibet.” He took the message and half his winnings and knocked on Lefty Antic’s door. There was no answer, and Teo had turned to go when the door opened, emitting the smell of marijuana. The sax player looked hungover, unshaven, eyes bloodshot, and Teo was sorry he’d disturbed him, but Lefty Antic insisted he come in. Together they studied the harness races in the newspaper and found a seven-to-one shot named Tidbit in the fifth race. There was also a buggy driver, J. Tippets, racing in the third and eighth races. Lefty decided they’d better bet both the horse and the driver and went to book it with Johnny Sovereign.

That night Teo had a dream in which his cousin Alaina was riding him. She hadn’t aged—the same bronze-skinned, virgin body he had spied on through the birdshit-splattered skylight on the roof in El Paso where his uncle, Jupo, kept a palomar. Uncle Jupo had taken him in when Teo was fourteen after his mother had run off with a cowboy. It became Teo’s job to care for his uncle’s pigeons. He was seventeen when Uncle Jupo caught him on the roof with his trousers open, spying on Alaina in her bath. His uncle knocked him down and smashed Teo’s face into the pebbled roof as if trying to grind out his eyes, then sent him packing with eight dollars in his pocket. In the dream, Alaina still looked so young that Teo was ashamed to have dreamed it. The pain of her love bites woke him at dawn, and even after waking, his nipples ached from the fierce way her small teeth had pulled at his body, as if his flesh was taffy. Waiting under his door was an envelope with eight hundred dollars and a note: “It was the driver. Thanks, Lefty.”

The third message arrived in a rainstorm. “Lone Star.” Teo woke Lefty Antic out of a drunken stupor. They pored over the harness races, but the only possibility was a driver named T. North whose first name, Lefty thought, was Tex, and whose last name suggested the North Star. Then they checked the thoroughbreds at Arlington, and found a long shot named Bright Venus. “The Evening Star!” Lefty said, smiling. Track conditions would be sloppy, and Bright Venus was a mudder. Lefty had the shakes so bad he could barely get dressed, but, convinced it was the score they’d been building to, he went off to lay their bets with Sovereign. Teo bet a thousand to win.

That night he had a nightmare that he was in El Paso, where he’d begun his career as a luchador, wrestling on the Lucha Libre circuit at fiestas and rodeos. In the dream he was wrestling the famous Ernesto “La Culebra” Aguirre, the Snake, named for the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of human sacrifice. Lucha Libre wrestlers often took the names of superheroes and Aztec warriors, and Teo once really had wrestled the Snake, though not in El Paso. That match was in Amarillo, back in the days when Teo was making a name for himself as a masked luchador called the Hummingbird. He’d come upon his identity in an illustrated encyclopedia of the gods of Mexico. The Hummingbird was Huitzilopochtli, the Mayan sun god; the illustration showed a hawklike warrior bird rising from a thorny maguey plant. According to the caption, the thorns symbolized the Hummingbird’s beak, and after Spain destroyed the Mayan empire, the thorns of the Hummingbird became the crown Jesus wore. Huitzilopochtli’s sacred colors were sun white and sky blue, so those were the colors of the costume—mask, tank top, and tights—that Teo wore. When Teo put on the mask, he’d feel transformed by a surge of energy and strength. As the Hummingbird, he defied the limitations of his body and performed feats that marveled the crowds. He flew from ropes, survived punishing falls, lifted potbellied fighters twice his size high off their feet and slammed them into submission. To keep his identity secret, he would put on his mask miles from the ring, and afterward he wore it home. The nights before bouts he took to sleeping in his mask.

It was at a carnival in El Paso that he saw Alaina again, standing ringside with a group of high school friends, mostly boys. It had been three years since his uncle had thrown him out without giving him a chance to say goodbye to her. The boys must have come to see the rudo billed as El Huracán—the Hurricane—but known to fans as El Flatoso—Windy—for his flatulence in the ring. El Flatoso, with his patented move of applying a head scissors, then gassing his opponent into unconsciousness, was beloved by high school boys and drunks. Teo had been prepared to be part of the farce of fighting him until he saw Alaina in the crowd. He could feel her secretly watching him through her halflowered eyelashes with the same intensity that he knew she’d watched him when he’d spied on her through the skylight. Suddenly, the vulgar spectacle he was about to enact was intolerable. The match was supposed to last for half an hour, but when El Flatoso came clownishly propelling himself with farts across the ring, the Hummingbird whirled up and delivered a spinning kick that knocked the rudo senseless. He didn’t further humiliate El Flatoso by stripping off his mask, and the boys at ringside cursed, demanding their money back, before dejectedly dragging Alaina off with them. But he saw her look back and wave, and he bowed to her. Later that night, there was a light rap on the door of the trailer that served as his dressing room. Alaina stood holding an open bottle of mescal. “Don’t take it off,” she whispered as he began to remove his mask. Though they’d yet to touch, she stood unbuttoning her blouse. “I don’t believe this is happening,” he said, and she answered, “Unbelievable things happen to people on the edge.” She spoke like a woman, not a girl, and when she unhooked her bra, her breasts were a woman’s, full, tipped with nipples the shade of roses going brown, not the buds of the girl he’d spied on. He knelt before her and kissed her dusty feet. She raised her skirt, and he buried his face in her woman smell. He wanted the mask off so he could smear his cheeks with her. “Leave it on,” she commanded, “or I’ll have to go.” He rose, kissing up her body, until his lips suckled her breasts and their warm, sweet-sour sweat coated his tongue, and suddenly her sighs turned to a cry. “No, too sensitive,” she whispered, pushing him gently away, then she opened his shirt and kissed him back hard, fiercely biting and sucking his nipples as if he were a woman. “My guainambi,” she said, using the Indian word for hummingbird.

It was months before he saw her again, this time at a rodeo in Amarillo—a long way from El Paso—where he stood in the outdoor ring waiting for his bout with the Snake. The loose white shirt she wore didn’t conceal her pregnancy, and for a moment he wondered if the child could be his, then realized she’d already been with child when she’d knocked on his trailer door. La Culebra, in his plumed sombrero, rainbow-sequined cape, and feathered boa, was the star of the Lucha Libre circuit, and it had been agreed that the Hummingbird was to go down to his first defeat in a close match that would leave his honor intact so that a rivalry could be built. But when Teo saw Alaina there at ringside, he couldn’t accept defeat. He and the Snake slammed each other about the ring, grappling for the better part of an hour under a scorching sun with Teo refusing to be pinned, and finally in a clinch the Snake told him, “It’s time, pendejo, stop fucking around,” and locked him in his signature move, the boa constrictor. But the Hummingbird slipped it, and when the Snake slingshotted at him off the ropes, the Hummingbird spun up into a helicopter kick. The collision dropped them both on their backs in the center of the ring. “Cocksucker, this isn’t El Flatoso you’re fucking with,” the Snake told him as he rose spitting blood. The legend surrounding La Culebra was that he’d once been a heavyweight boxer. He’d become a luchador only after he’d killed another boxer in the ring, and now, when he realized they weren’t following the script, he began using his fists. The first punch broke Teo’s nose, and blood discolored his white and blue mask, swelling like a blood blister beneath the fabric. The usual theatrics disappeared, and the match became a street fight that had the fans on their feet cheering, a battle that ended with the Snake flinging the Hummingbird out of the ring. The fall fractured Teo’s kneecap, his head bounced off the pavement, and as he lay stunned, unable to move for dizziness and pain, the Snake leaped down onto his chest from the height of the ring, stomping the breath from his body, and tore off the bloodied mask of the Hummingbird as if skinning him, then spit in his flattened face. Teo, his face a mask of blood, looked up into the jeering crowd, but he never saw Alaina again.

In Teo’s nightmare, the Snake humiliated him not only by tearing off his Hummingbird mask and exposing his identity to the crowd but by derisively shouting “Las tetas!” and tearing off Teo’s tank top, exposing a woman’s breasts weeping milky tears. At dawn, when Teo groaned out of his dream, with his stomped, body-slammed chest aching and his heart a throbbing bruise, there was no envelope of winnings waiting. That morning Teo knocked repeatedly on Lefty Antic’s door without an answer. The thought occurred to him that the saxophone player had taken off with their money, not out of crookedness but on a drunken binge. It was only in the afternoon, when Teo bought a newspaper and checked the racing scores at Arlington, that he learned Bright Venus had finished dead last. He checked the harness results at Sportsman’s, and there was a story about a buggy overturning in the third race and its driver, Toby North, being critically injured when a trotting horse crushed his chest.

It seemed as if a vicious practical joke had been played on them all, but when the next message came, Teo knocked again on Lefty Antic’s door. He hadn’t seen the saxophone player since Lefty had staggered out to place their bets on Bright Venus. There still was no answer, and Teo, filled with a terrible sense of abandonment and foreboding, sure that Lefty Antic was dead inside, got the landlord to open the door, only to find the room empty and orderly. Alone, feeling too apprehensive simply to ignore the message, Teo studied the racing pages looking for clues as he’d seen Lefty Antic do. It seemed to him that the new rain-smudged message, “delay plaza,” referred to the mayor, Richard Daley, and when he could find no connection whatsoever at any of the race tracks, he took the El train downtown. There wasn’t a Daley Plaza in Chicago, but there was an open square near City Hall, and Teo walked there, not sure what he was looking for, yet hoping to recognize it when he saw it. But no sign presented itself, nothing was going on in the square but a rally for a young senator from Massachusetts, an Irish Catholic like the mayor, who was running for president in a country that Teo figured would never elect a Catholic.

The messages have continued to arrive, and Teo continues to save them, and the cigar box fills with scraps of paper his pigeons have brought home from God knows where. Teo can’t shake the foreboding or the loneliness. His sleep is haunted by the recurrent dream of a funeral that extends the length of a country of ruined castles and burning ghettos. He’s part of the procession following the casket, ascending a pyramid, its steps dark and slippery with the blood of what’s gone before. He doesn’t want to see what’s at the summit. Unable to return to sleep, sometimes he spreads the messages on the table and tries to piece them together, to see if the torn edges fit like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or if the words can be arranged into a coherent sentence. He senses some story, some meaning, connecting them, but the words themselves baffle him: knoll, motorcade, six seconds, bloodstone …

And it’s not dreams alone that disrupt his sleep. There’s an increasing tenderness in his chest that waking doesn’t dispel. In the darkness, his nipples ache as if they’ve been pinched with tongs; the palpitations of his heart resonate like spasms through soft tissue. His flesh feels foreign to his breastbone. He can feel his inflamed mounds of chest swelling beneath his undershirt, and he brushes his fingertips across his chest, afraid of what he’ll find. He’s put on weight, and his once sculpted chest has grown flabby, his weight lifter’s pectorals drooping to fat. Come morning, he reassures himself that’s all it is—fat, he’s simply getting fat, and this strange pain will also pass. Better to ignore it. He avoids studying the bathroom mirror when he shaves.

Sometimes, after midnight, he thinks he hears Lefty Antic playing his saxophone softly on the roof, but it’s only wind vibrating the rusted chimney hood, streaming clouds rasping against a rusty moon, the hoot of pigeons. He hasn’t seen the sax player since they lost their stake on “Lone Star.”

Teo has written his own notes—“Who are you? What do you wants?”—and attached them to those pigeons of his who have brought the strange messages. Noah-like, he’s sent them flying out over the wet rooftops to deliver his questions, but those pigeons haven’t returned home, and it takes a lot to lose a homing pigeon. They fly in a dimension perilous with hawks and the ackack fire of boys armed with rocks, slingshots, and pellet guns. Fog and blizzards disorient them, storms blow them down, and yet instinct brings them home on a single wing, with flight feathers broken, missing a leg or the jewel of an eye.

Teo has decided that since his communiques go unanswered and his birds don’t return, he will refuse to accept further messages. All week he has kept his remaining pigeons cooped. And now this morning, attached to a strange pigeon, another message, the first in Spanish: asesino. “Murder” or “assassin,” Teo doesn’t know which.

He’d like to ease the loneliness, if not the foreboding, and tell Zip about the messages. But until this afternoon, when he found Zip drinking alone and obviously needing someone to talk to, Teo has been reluctant to talk about anything more personal than Zip’s favorite subject: fishing. True, Zip was obviously curious about Teo’s wrestling career, but it didn’t seem right to tell the insignificant story of the Hummingbird to a man who is so careful never to speak of war wounds.

“This feels like we’re in some kind of joke,” Zip says, opening his palm and allowing the pigeon to step from Teo’s hand to his.

“What do you mean?” Teo asks.

“You know,” Zip says, “there’s all these jokes that start: A man walks into a bar with a parrot, or a man walks into a bar with a dog, or a gorilla, or a cockroach. You know, all these guys walking into all these bars with every animal on the ark. So in this one, a man—no, a wrestler, a masked wrestler—walks into a bar with a pigeon.”

“So, what’s the punch line?” Teo asks.

“You’re asking me?” Zip says. “It’s your pigeon.”

“No, not one of mine.”

“Yeah, but you brought it in here.”

“But the joke is your idea.”

“Jesus, we got no punch line,” Zip says. “You know what that means?”

“What?”

“We’ll never get out of the joke.”

 

Whitey calls.

Joe, lying on the bare mattress, naked but for mismatched socks, doesn’t answer. He knows it’s Whitey on the phone. Joe can almost smell his cigar.

What day is it? Must be Thursday, because yesterday was Wednesday, a day’s reprieve Johnny Sovereign never knew he had. Joe can have the conversation with Whitey without bothering to lift the receiver.

—Joe, what the fuck’s going on with you?

—Hey, Whitey, you ball-buster, vaffancul!

Are these ball-busting calls some kind of psychological warfare? Maybe Whitey knows about Gloria Candido, and the whole thing with Johnny Sovereign is a setup. Maybe it’s Whitey arranging for these women to distract Joe from doing his job, giving Whitey an excuse other than being a fucking cornuto to have Joe clipped. Could Whitey be that smart, that devious? Maybe Whitey has tipped off Sovereign to watch his back around Joe and Sovereign is waiting for Joe to make his move. Or maybe the women are good luck, guardian angels protecting him from some scheme of Whitey’s.

Joe quietly lifts the receiver from the cradle. He listens for Whitey to begin blaring, Yo, Joe, whatthefuck? but whoever is on the line is listening, too. Joe can hear the pursy breathing. It could be Whitey’s cigar-sucking, emphysemic huff. Joe slides the stiletto from his right sock, holds it to the mouthpiece, thumbs off the safety, touches the trigger button, and the blade hisses open: Ssswap! Then he gently sets down the receiver.

Joe dresses quickly. The shirt he’s been wearing since Tuesday reeks, so he switches to the white shirt Marisol left behind even though it smells of perfume. She’s left a trail of rusty footprints down the hall from the kitchen as if she stepped on broken glass, and Joe splashes them with Rémy and mops them with the dirty shirt he won’t be wearing, then kills the bottle, washing down a mix of painkillers. There’s a soft wheeze from his closet, as if an accordion is shuddering in its sleep. When he dials Johnny Sovereign’s number, Vi answers on the third ring.

“Johnny home?”

“He’ll be back around six or so,” Vi says. “Can I take a message?”

“So where is he?”

“Can I take your number and have him call you back?”

“Do you even know?”

“Know what?” Vi asks. “Who’s calling?”

“An acquaintance.”

“You called yesterday and the day before.”

Joe hangs up.

The Bluebird is doing fifty down the cracked alleys, and when a bag lady steps from between two garbage cans, she has to drop her bag to get out of the way. Joe rolls over her shopping bag, bulging from a day’s foraging, and in the rearview mirror sees her throwing hex signs in his wake. He pulls up behind Sovereign’s, and there’s that smell of trash, oil, and pigeons, compounded by a summer breeze. Joe can sense someone eyeing him from inside the empty garage, and he eases his right hand into the pocket of his sport coat and flicks the safety off the .22, uncomfortably aware of how useless the small-caliber pistol is at anything but point-blank range. A gray cat emerges from Sovereign’s garage, carrying in its mouth a pigeon still waving a wing. The cat looks furtively at Joe, then slinks into the morning glories, and from the spot where the cat disappeared, Grace steps out. Morning glories are clipped to her tangled black curls. She’s wearing a morning-glory-vine necklace, vine bracelets, and what looks like a bedraggled bridesmaid’s gown, if bridesmaids wore black. Her bare feet are bloody, probably from walking on glass. “Long time, no see, Joey,” she says. “I been with the Carmelites.”

Joe recalls Sal asking if he was going to her closed-casket wake. “You had a thing with her, didn’t you?” Sal had asked.

“No way!” Joe told him. “A little kissyface after a party once. I don’t know why she made up all those stories.”

“That whole Fandetti family is bonkers,” Sal said.

Nelo, her father, a Sicilian from Taylor Street, operates an escort service, massage parlors, and a strip bar on South Wabash, but he brought his four daughters up in convent school. The official story was that Grace wasted away with leukemia, but rumor had it that it was a botched abortion. Now, Joe realizes old man Fandetti is even crazier than he thought, faking his daughter’s death in order to avoid the humiliation of an illegitimate pregnancy. No surprise she’s a nutcase. He wonders if they collected insurance on her while they were at it.

“If you stick your finger inside, you can feel the electric,” Grace says and demonstrates by poking her finger into a flower. “That hum isn’t bees. Electric’s what gives them their blue. You should feel it. Come here and put your finger in.”

“Where’s your shoes, Grace?”

“Under the bed, so they think I’m still there.”

“Still where? What are you doing here?”

“Come here, Joey, and put your finger in. You’ll feel what the bee’s born for. They’re so drunk on flower juice!” She walks to the car and leans in through the window on the passenger side, and the straps of her black gown slip off her shoulders, and from its décolletage breasts dangle fuller than he remembers from that one night after a birthday party at Fabio’s when he danced with her and they sneaked out to the parking lot and necked in his car. She’d looked pretty that night, made up like a doll, pearls in her hair, and wearing a silky dress with spaghetti straps. That was what she called them when he slipped them down and kissed her breasts. She wanted to go further, pleaded with him to take her virginity, but he didn’t have a rubber and it wasn’t worth messing with her connected old man.

“Know what was on the radio?”

“When?” Joe asks. He’s aware that he’s staring, but apparently still stoned on that hash oil, he can’t take his eyes off her breasts. His reactions feel sluggish; he has to will them. He realizes he’s been in a fog … he’s not sure how long, but it’s getting worse.

She opens the door and sinks into the leather seat and humming tunelessly flicks on the car radio. “I Only Have Eyes for You” is playing. “Our song, Joey!”

“Grace, we don’t have a song.”

“The night we became lovers.”

“Why’d you tell people that?”

“You got me in trouble, Joey, and in the Carmelites I had to confess it to the bishop. We weren’t supposed to talk, but he made me show and tell.”

Joe flicks off the radio. It’s like turning on the afternoon: birdsong, pigeons cooing, flies buzzing trash, the bass of bees from a thousand blue gramophones.

“All the sisters were jealous. They called me Walkie-Talkie behind my back. They thought I didn’t understand the sacredness of silence, but that’s not true. They think silence is golden, but real silence is terrifying. We’re not made for it. I could tell you things, Joey, but they’re secrets.”

“Like what, Grace? Things somebody told you not to tell me?”

“Things God whispers to me. Joey, you smell like a girl.”

“I think you can’t tell ’cause you don’t know. Tell me one secret God said just so I see if either of you knows anything.”

“I know words to an accordion. If you turn on your radio you’ll hear stars singing the song of a thousand crackles. I know about you and girls. I know what’s in your gym bag.”

“Yeah, what?”

“They’re your way of being totally alone.”

“What’s in the gym bag, Grace?”

“I know you can’t stop staring at my tits. I don’t mind, you can see. Oh, God! Windshields glorify the sun! Feel.”

“Not here, Grace.”

“Okay, at your place.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Joe says, but he can’t stay here with her either, so he eases the car into gear and drives slowly up the alley. The top of her dress is down, and against his better judgment—almost against his will—he turns onto Twenty-fifth, crosses Rockwell, the boundary between two-flats and truck docks. He drives carefully, his eyes on a street potholed by semis, but aware of her beside him with her dirty feet bloody and her bare breasts in plain view. Rockwell is empty, not unusual for this time of day. They’re approaching a railroad viaduct that floods during rainstorms. A block beyond the viaduct is Western Avenue, a busy street that in grade school he learned is the longest street in the world, just like the Amazon is the longest river, so they called it Amazon Avenue. Western won’t be deserted, and across Western is the little Franciscan church of St. Michael’s and the old Italian parish where he lives.

“I’m a Sister of Silence, so you need to be nice to me like I always was to you.”

“I’ve always been nice to you, too, Grace.”

“I could have had men hurt you, Joey, but I didn’t.”

They’re halfway through the streaky tunnel of the railroad viaduct and he hits the brakes and juts his arm out to brace her from smacking the windshield. “I don’t like when people threaten me, Grace. It really makes me crazy.”

“Let’s go to your place, Joey. Please drive. I hate when the trains go over. All those tons of steel on top of you, and the echoes don’t stop in your head even after the train is gone.”

“There’s no train.”

“It’s coming. I can feel it in my heart. My heart is crying.” She squeezes a nipple and catches a milky tear on a fingertip and offers it to him, reaching up to brush it across his lips, but Joe turns his face away. When he does, she slaps him. He catches her arm before she can slap him again, and under the viaduct, minus the glare of sun in his eyes, he sees her morning-glory-vine bracelets are scars welted across her wrists. Whistle wailing, a freight hurtles over, vibrating the car. He releases her arm, and she clamps her hands over her ears. Her bare feet stamp a tantrum of bloody imprints on the floor mat.

“Get out!” Joe yells over the concussions of boxcars, and he reaches across her body to open the door. She looks at him in amazement, then mournfully steps out into the gutter, her breasts still exposed. Without looking back, he guns into the daylight on the other side, catches the green going yellow on Western, veers into traffic, rattles across the bridge wheeled by pigeons that spans the Sanitary Canal. He isn’t going back to his place, he’s not heading to pick up his laundry, and until he finishes this job he’s not going to Fabio’s or any of the hangouts where he might run into Whitey. It’s Thursday, and Joe’s been seeing Gloria Candido on the sly on Thursdays, when Julio goes to his grandmother’s after school, but Joe isn’t going to Gloria’s either. He’s in the flow of Amazon Avenue, popping painkillers, Grace’s handprint still hot on his face. He heads south to see what’s at the end of the longest street in the world. The radio is off as if he’s broken contact, and he’d drive all night if not for hallucinations of headlights coming head-on. Finally he has to pull over and close his eyes. When he wakes, not sure he was ever really asleep, he’s parked on a shoulder separated from a field by rusty barbed wire netted in spider silk suspending pink droplets of sun. The blank highway is webbed like that as far as he can see. He thinks, I could just keep going, and at the next gas station, on an impulse, Joe decides he will keep going if she doesn’t answer the phone. But then he doesn’t have enough change to make the call. “Make it collect, for Vi Sovereign,” he tells the operator.

“Who should I say is calling?” the operator asks.

“Tell her a friend who’s been calling, she’ll know.” And when the operator does, Vi accepts the call. “Where you calling from?” Vi asks. “I hear cars.”

“A phone booth off Western Avenue. Johnny home?”

“You’re calling early,” she says. “He’ll be home around noon or so for lunch.”

“You don’t know where he is or what he’s doing? I can hear it in your voice. Did he even come home last night?”

“What do you keep calling for? If you’re trying to tell me something about Johnny, just say it. You somebody’s husband? What’s your name?”

“Maybe we’ll meet sometime. I’d pay you back for the phone call, but then you’d know it was me.”

“I’ll recognize your voice.”

“Better you don’t,” Joe says, and hangs up.

Before noon, he pulls up behind Johnny Sovereign’s. From the longest street in the world, he’s back to idling in a blocklength alley, and yet it’s oddly peaceful there, private, a place that’s come to feel familiar, and he’s so tired and wired at the same time that he’d be content just to drowse awhile with the sun soothing his eyelids. He lights a smoke, chucks the crushed, empty pack out the window, checks the empty alley in the rearview mirror, and notices the handprint still visible on his face. He catches his own eyes glancing uncomfortably back, embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment, as if neither he nor his reflection wants anything to do with each other. He puts on a pair of sunglasses he keeps in the visor, and when he looks up through their green lenses, a tanned blonde with slender legs, in a halter top and short turquoise shorts, stands beside the morning glories. She’s wearing sunglasses, too.

“Hi, Joe, they told me I’d find you here. I been waiting all morning, thinking how it would be when I saw you. I missed you so much, baby. I thought I could live without you, but I can’t.”

“Capri,” he says.

She smiles at the sound of her name. “My guy, my baby.”

“Oh fuck, fuck, not you, baby. I didn’t care about the others, but not you, too.” He hasn’t realized until now that he’s been waiting for this moment ever since, without warning, her letters had stopped, leaving a silence that has grown increasingly ominous. Her last letter ended: “Sometimes I read the weather in your city, so that I can imagine you waking up to it, living your life without me.” After a month with no word, he’d asked Sal if he’d heard anything about her, but he hadn’t. In all likelihood she’d met someone, and Joe thought he’d be making a fool of himself getting in touch. Even so, he tried calling, but her number was disconnected.

“I’m back, baby. Aren’t you glad to see me?” She steps toward the car and removes her sunglasses. He can’t meet her eyes any more than he can meet his own in the mirror. If he could speak, the words he’d say—“I’m crying in my heart”—wouldn’t be his, and when she reaches her arms out, Joe slams the car into reverse, floors it, and halfway down the alley, skidding along garbage cans, hits a bag lady. He can hear her groan as the air goes out of her. He sees her sausage legs kicking spasmodically from where he’s knocked her, pinned and thrashing between two garbage cans. Joe keeps going.

 

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.”

“Why wouldn’t you stay home with a primo lady like that? You’re out of control, man. Your fucken Pancho’s leaking oil. With your fear of cages, next you’ll be talking to the wrong people. You’re a punk-ass bullshitter and a bad risk.”

“Joe, I swear to you—”

“You swear?”

“On my mother’s grave. Swear it on my children.”

“You cross your heart and hope to die, too?”

“Huh?”

“Like little kids say.”

“I know how kids talk, Joe. I got a baby girl and a little boy, Johnny Junior.”

“So, swear it like you mean it,” Joe says, exhaling smoke and flicking his cigarette out the window. “I cross my heart …” Sovereign looks at Joe as if he can’t be serious, and Joe stares him down.

“Cross my heart … ,” Sovereign says.

“No, you got to actually cross your heart,” Joe says, crossing his own heart, and when, to illustrate further, Joe reaches with his left hand to open Sovereign’s sport coat, Sovereign flinches, then smiles, chagrined at being so jumpy. Instead of making a move to resist Joe touching him, Sovereign drags on his cigarette. “Nice pricey sport coat, nice monogrammed shirt,” Joe says, holding Sovereign by the lapel. “Sure there’s a heart in here to cross, Johnny?” Joe brings his right hand up to check for a heartbeat. “Relax, I’m just fucking with you.” Joe smiles, then touches the trigger on the stiletto he’s palmed from his argyle sock, the blade darting out as he thrusts, slamming Sovereign back against the car door, the cigarette shooting from his mouth as he groans uuuhhh.

Sovereign’s hands are pressed to where the blade is buried. He looks down at the bloodied pearl handle of the stiletto sticking from his chest, his eyes bulging, teeth gritted so that the muscles knot out from his jaw.

“Don’t move, it’s in clean,” Joe says. “Just let it go.”

“Oh, my God, oh, oh,” Sovereign exhales, and an atomized spray of blood hangs in the sunlit air between them. The 3 V’s birds raise a junglish chatter against the everyday chirp of sparrows. The hot car fills with Sovereign’s gasping for breath and with the smell of garlic, of the mortadella sausage on the blade, and then an acrid smell, calling to Joe’s mind a line of kindergartners. Sovereign has peed his pants. His right hand, smeared with the blood soaking through his monogrammed shirt, slips down his body, weakly feeling as if to brush away a burning cigarette. There’s no cigarette, his cigarette has slipped between the seats. Joe guides Sovereign’s hand back to his chest and Sovereign grits his teeth again and groans from the soul, then closes his eyes. Tears well out from under his red lashes. His skin has gone translucent white, making his liverish freckles stand out like beads of blood forced through his pores.

“Not Vi,” Sovereign says. “Oh, please, not Vi. I got little kids.” Blood gurgles in his throat, he tries to clear it and begins to choke and Joe clamps a handkerchief over his mouth and Sovereign keeps swallowing, breathing hard, but otherwise not struggling, as if the pain of the knife has pinned him to the door.

“I told you not to talk. Just let it go. I tried to do you a favor, man. Whitey wants you turned into hamburger. I let you off easy,” Joe says, removing his bloodied handkerchief from Sovereign’s mouth.

Sovereign is shaking his head no-no, trying to form words with his open mouth. A bubble of bloody spit breaks on his lips. All he can do is whisper. His body has slouched so that Joe looks into Sovereign’s dilated nostrils, which are throwing cavernous shadows. Joe leans closer to hear what Sovereign’s trying to say.

“Bullshit,” Johnny Sovereign manages. The word sends up a hanging, reddish spray. “You just wanted to see if it worked.”

“Fuck you,” Joe says. “You got a reprieve you didn’t even know you had. What did you do with the time?” But even as he says it, Joe realizes Sovereign is right. He wanted to see what the knife could do, and how stupid was that, because now he’s stuck talking with a dying mook. He should have just put a couple into Sovereign’s brain and walked the fuck away instead of getting cute, sitting here listening to birds chatter, beside a guy with his jaw grinding and red eyelashes pasted shut by the tears leaking down his cheeks as his life hemorrhages away, the muscle that once pumped five quarts a minute, a hundred thousand heartbeats a day—how many in a life?—no longer keeping time. Joe’s not sure how long they’ve been here. He wants the knife back but worries that if he pulls it out Sovereign will start to thrash and yell, and the wound will gush. Sovereign makes a sound as if he’s gargling, syrupy blood dribbles from the corner of his mouth as his head rolls to the side, and then he’s quiet. Tears dry on his cheeks.

“Sovereign,” Joe says. “Johnny? You still here?” Joe can hardly speak for the dryness of his own mouth. He’s aware of how terribly thirsty he is, and of how suddenly alone. Heat rays in as if the windshield of the Pancho is God’s magnifying glass. Now Joe can hear the name Sovereign was talking about—some 3 V’s bird repeating betty betty betty. He can’t sit any longer listening to the nonstop jabber of the last sounds Sovereign heard.

“Johnny.”

Joe digs the shotgun out of the gym bag. His handkerchief is bloody so he uses his jockstrap to wipe down the sawed-off shotgun he’ll leave behind, jammed in Sovereign’s piss-soaked crotch. He tries to ease out the stiletto. Blood wells up without gushing. Joe tugs harder but can’t dislodge the knife, maybe because his hands have started to shake. He’s drenched with sweat, and takes his jacket off. How did his white shirt get spattered with blood? He removes his shirt. The lapels of his powder blue sport coat are speckled, too, but the splash pattern that’s good for eating spaghetti makes it look as if the blood might be part of the coat. He wipes the car and knife handle down with the shirt. In the gym bag, there’s a wrinkled gray tank top with the faded maroon lettering CHAMPS over an insignia of crossed boxing gloves. Joe pulls that on and slips his jacket over it, and then, for no reason, fits the jockstrap over Sovereign’s face so that it looks as if he’s wearing a mask or a blindfold. At the shotgun blast, flocks rise, detonated from the factory roofs, and Joe imagines how on the top floor of 3 V’s the spooked birds batter their cages.

 

Friday afternoon, a red clothespin day at the Zip Inn. Ball game on the TV, Drabowsky against the Giants’ Johnny Antonelli, top of the fifth and the Cubs down 2-0 on a Willie Mays homer. The jukebox, Zip apologizes, is on the fritz. No “Ebb Tide,” no “Sing, Sing, Sing,” no “Cucurrucucu Paloma.”

Teo sits on a stool, balancing the quarters that he was going to feed to the jukebox on the wooden bar.

“One more, on the house,” Zip says. His white shirt looks slept in, his bow tie askew, his furrowed face stubbled, eyes bloodshot. It’s clear he’s continued the pace from yesterday. Teo turns his shot glass upside down. Zip turns it back up. “To Friday,” Zip says.

“We already drank to Friday.” Teo turns his shot glass back down. “We drank to Friday yesterday, and to Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.”

“We missed Thursday.”

“Yesterday was Thursday, we started out drinking to Thursday.”

“Yeah, but today’s fucking special.”

“Every day’s special. Isn’t that the point of drinking to them?” Teo asks.

“There is no point,” Zip says. “That’s the point.”

Teo shrugs. “So why’s today special? An anniversary?”

“Special’s the wrong word,” Zip says. He looks as if the right word might be doomed.

Something is eating at Zip, but Teo doesn’t know how to ask what. Yesterday, Teo stayed drinking with him until the afterwork crowd started filtering in. By then, Teo was half-loaded. He put the wounded Spanish pigeon back in his bowling bag and went home, tended to the coop, then fell into bed and, for the first night in weeks, slept undisturbed by dreams. “Look, compadre, if there’s something I can do …”

“Have a brew,” Zip says. He sets a Hamm’s before Teo, and a bag of pretzels, and rings up one of the quarters that Teo has balanced on the bar. “You bring your feathered friend with the bum wing?”

“No,” Teo says, “but I got something you been asking about.” From the bowling bag on the barstool beside him, Teo lifts out a blue head mask and sets it faceup, flat on the bar. The face has the design of a golden beak and iridescent white feathers that fan into flames around flame-shaped eyes. The luminous colors are veined with brownish bloodstains. “You wanted to see, so I brought it.”

“Goddamn.” Zip smiles, looking for a moment, like his old self. “This is what you wrestled in? Pretty wild. So, what was your ring name?”

“La Colibrí.”

“Like the vegetable?”

“It’s a kind of bird,” Teo says.

“You got the rest of the outfit in there?”

Teo unfolds the matching blue tights, and Zip holds them up, smiling skeptically at Teo.

“They stretch,” Teo says.

“Not that much they don’t.”

“Yeah, they do. I’m wearing the top. Same material.” Teo unbuttons his checked short-sleeved shirt. Underneath, he’s wearing an iridescent blue tank top. Its bulgy front is spotted with faded blood, like the canvas of a ring.

“I wish I could of seen you in the ring, amigo, must have been something.” Zip picks up the mask. He looks as if he’d like to try it on if he had two hands to pull it over his head. “Can you actually see to fight out of this?”

“Sure,” Teo says, “it’s got holes for the eyes.”

“Let’s see.” Zip hands the mask to Teo, and when Teo hesitates, Zip says, “Come on. What the hell?”

“What the hell,” Teo agrees, and pulls it over his head. It’s the first time in years that he’s worn it, and he’s amazed to feel a reminiscent surge of energy, but maybe that’s merely the whiskey kicking in on an empty stomach.

“You are one fierce-looking warrior,” Zip says. “You should come in here wearing the whole outfit, just amble in and sit down, open up your book, and if somebody asks, ‘Who’s that?’ I’ll tell them: ‘Him? The new security. Guards the hard-boiled eggs—which are now a buck apiece in order to pay for security. Salt’s still free.’”

On the TV, the Hamm’s commercial, “From the land of sky blue waters,” plays between innings.

“Can you drink beer through that?” Zip asks.

When Teo laughs, it’s the mask itself that seems to be laughing, the mask that chugs down a bottle of Hamm’s.

“Why’s Goldblatt’s got you disguised in a dress when they could have a goddamn superhero patrolling the aisles? You’re wasting your talent. You could be a rent-a-wrestler, make up business cards. Headlocks for Hire, Half nelsons fifty percent off. I need an autographed picture for the wall. Hey, I could sponsor you, advertise on your jersey.”

“Have a Nip at the Inn of Zip,” Teo says.

“You’re a poet!” Zip sets them up with two more cold ones and rings up another of the quarters Teo has balanced on the bar. “Can the Kohlrabi still kick ass?” Zip asks.

“Fight again?” Teo asks. Even wearing the blue tank top and the mask, even after the first good night’s sleep in a long time, even with the sunlight streaming through the door and whiskey through his veins, on a Friday afternoon, and nowhere to be but here, drinking cold beer and joking with his new friend, Teo knows that’s impossible.

“What if there was no choice?” Zip asks. “If it was him or you? Say you catch somebody stealing and he pulls a knife? Could you do whatever it took? Is it worth it? Purely theoretical, what if somebody hired you to watch their back in a situation like that?”

The undisguised undercurrent of desperation in these questions makes Teo recall the message from the Spanish pigeon: “Asesino.” Murder. The slip of paper is still in Teo’s pocket. There’s an eerie feeling of premonition about it. He’d been thinking maybe of showing it to Zip to see what he made of it, but not now. “Purely theoretical, you keep protection back there?” Teo asks.

“Funny you should ask, I was just looking through my purely theoretical ordnance last night,” Zip says. “Swiss Army knife, USMC forty-five missing the clip. Ever seen one of these?” Zip reaches beneath the bar and sets a short, gleaming sword in front of Teo.

Teo runs his finger along the Oriental lettering engraved on the blade.

“Careful, it’s razor sharp,” Zip says. “Never found out what the letters mean, probably something about honor that gets young men killed. Guys said the Japs used to sharpen these with silk. I don’t know if that’s true, but all the dead Jap soldiers had silk flags their families gave them when they went to war. Made good souvenirs. GI’s took everything you could imagine for souvenirs. Bloody flags, weapons, gold teeth, polished skulls until there was an order against those. Wonder what happened to all that shit? Probably stuffed away forgotten in boxes in basements and attics all over the country. Only thing I took was this. It’s a samurai knife used for hari-kari. They’d sneak in at night and cut your throat, so we slept two in a foxhole, me and Domino Morales, one dozing, the other doing sentry. You’d close your eyes dead tired knowing your life depended on your buddy staying awake.” Zip weighs the sword in his hand, then sets it back under the bar and lifts a length of sawed-off hickory bat handle that dangles by a rawhide loop from a hook beside the cash register. “This used to be enough,” he says, “but the way things are these days you gotta get serious if you want to defend yourself. Whoa!” Zip exclaims, gesturing with the bat at the TV screen. “Banks got all of that one.”

On the TV, Jack Brickhouse is into his home-run call: “Back she goes … way back … back! … back! Hey! Hey!”

“Hey! Hey!” Joe Ditto says. He stands in the emblazoned doorway in his sunglasses and factory steel-toes, his powder-blue sport coat looking lopsided and pouchy where the gun weighs down his right pocket. He’s wearing the sport coat over a wrinkled gym top, and in his left hand he holds a gym bag. He’s sweating as if he’s just come from a workout. “Didn’t mean to startle you, Mr. Zip. I thought you were going to brain your customer here. This masked marauder didn’t pay his bar tab? You want I should speak to him?”

Zip hangs the bat back on its hook, and Joe sets the gym bag down and straddles a stool beside Teo. No introductions are made. On the right side of Joe’s face, beneath a four-day growth of beard, there’s a hot-looking handprint. “What’s so interesting?” Joe asks, when he catches Zip staring. “You don’t like the new look from the other side of Western?” He tucks in his Champs tank top as if it’s his gym shirt-sport coat combination that Zip was staring at. “Fucken hot out there,” Joe says. “I need a cold one. You need an air conditioner in here, Mr. Zip.”

“They’re too noisy,” Zip says. “You can’t hear the ball game.”

“Hey, I’m not trying to sell you one,” Joe says. He drains his beer in three gulps and slams down the bottle. Teo’s remaining two quarters teeter onto their sides. “Hit me again, Mr. Zip. And a shot of whatever you’re drinking. What’s score?”

“Cubs down two to one. Banks just hit one.”

“Drabowsky still pitching? You know where he’s from?”

“Ozanna, Poland,” Zip says like it’s a stupid question. “He’s throwing good.”

“You bet on him?” Joe asks. When he raises the shot glass, his hand is so shaky that he has to bring his mouth to the glass.

“I don’t bet on baseball,” Zip says.

“Hit me again, Mr. Zip. And one for yourself.” From a roll of bills, Joe peels a twenty onto the bar. “What are you drinking, Masked Marvel? Zip, give Zorro here a Hamm’s-the-beer-refreshing.”

Zip sets them up, and the three men sit in silence, looking from their drinks to the ball game as if waiting for some signal to down their whiskeys. Their dark reflections in the long mirror behind the bar wait, too. Teo glances at the mirror, where a man in a blue Hummingbird mask glances back. He knows the guy in the sunglasses beside him is mob, and can’t help noticing that Zip has gone tensely quiet, unfriendlier than he’s ever seen him. It makes him aware of how Zip set the samurai sword within reach, and of the message from the Spanish pigeon.

On the TV, Jack Brickhouse says, “Oh, brother, looks like a fan fell out of the bleachers,” and his fellow sportscaster, Vince Lloyd, adds, “Or jumped down, Jack.” Brickhouse, as if doing play-by-play, announces, “Now, folks, he’s running around the outfield!” and Vince Lloyd adds, “Jack, I think he’s trying to hand Willie Mays a beer!”

“That’s Lefty!” Teo exclaims.

“Lefty? Lefty Antic?” Zip asks. “You sure?”

“The sax player. He’s my neighbor.”

“Here come the Andy Frain ushers out on the field,” Brickhouse announces. “They’ll get things back under control.”

“Look at him run!” Teo says.

“Go, Lefty!” Zip yells. “He ain’t going down easy.”

Without warning, the TV blinks into a commercial: “From the land of sky blue waters …”

“Shit!” Joe says, “that was better than the fucking game. Guy had some moves.”

“You know Lefty, the sax player?” Teo asks Zip.

“Hell, I got him on the wall,” Zip says, and from among the photo gallery of softball teams with ZipIn lettered on their jerseys he lifts down a picture of a young boxer with eight-ounce gloves cocked. The boxer doesn’t have a mustache, but it’s easy to recognize the sax player. “He made it to the Golden Glove Nationals,” Zip says. “Got robbed on a decision.”

“That southpaw welterweight from Gonzo’s Gym. I remember him from when I was growing up,” Joe Ditto says. “Kid had fast hands.” He raises his shot glass, and they all drink as if to something.

“Well, back to baseball, thank goodness,” Jack Brickhouse says. “Vince, it’s unfortunate, but a few bad apples just don’t belong with the wonderful fans in the friendly confines of beautiful Wrigley field.”

“Best fans in the game, Jack,” Vince says.

“They didn’t want to show him beating the piss out of the Andy Frains,” Joe says.

“Lefty’s good people. Hasn’t put Korea behind him yet, that’s all,” Zip says.

Until yesterday, Teo couldn’t gimp on his bum knee into the Zip Inn without wondering how Zip could put behind him the war that took his arm. Now he knows. Zip hasn’t.

“Hit me again, Mr. Zip,” Joe says. “A double. And get yourself and Masked Man, here.” Joe turns Teo’s shot glass up.

Teo turns it back down.

Joe turns it back up. “Hey, mystery challenger, we’re having a toast.” Joe props Lefty’s photo up against a bottle of Hamm’s. “To a man who knows how to really enjoy a Cubs game.” This time, his hand steadier, Joe clinks each of their glasses.

“Gimme a pack of Pall Malls, Mr. Zip. So, what’s with the mask?” Joe asks Teo. “Off to rob a savings and loan? A nylon’s not good enough? Goddamn, you got the whole outfit here,” he says, examining the tights that Teo hasn’t stuffed back into his bowling bag. “You one of those street wrestlers on Cinco de Mayo or something?”

“Used to be,” Teo says.

With his long-neck beer bottle, Joe parts Teo’s open shirt to get a look at his tank top. “Who’d you fight as, the Blue Titman? Jesus, Mr. Zip, check the boobs out on this guy. That’s some beery-looking bosom you’re sporting, hombre. They squirt Hamm’s? This might be the best tit in Little Village.” Joe lights a smoke, offers one to Teo, who refuses. “Mr. Zip, hit me again, and Knockers here, too,” Joe says. He’s holding Teo’s glass so that Teo can’t turn it over. Zip pours and Joe takes a sip of beer. Then his hand snakes along the bar and into Teo’s bag of pretzels. Joe munches down a pretzel, and his hand snakes back for another, except this time it snakes inside Teo’s shirt for a quick feel before Teo pulls away.

Zip appears to be busy rinsing out a glass.

“Ever go home after a hard day’s wrestling and just spend a quiet evening getting some off yourself, or does there have to be a commitment first?” Joe asks. “I’m just fucking with you, friend. I used to love to watch wrestling when I was a kid. I didn’t know it was a fake. You know, I didn’t mind finding out Santa Claus was bullshit, but Gorgeous George and Zuma the Man from Mars—he wrestled in a mask, too—that hurt.”

“It’s not always fake,” Teo says.

“What fucken planet are you from? How do you think Gorgeous George could have done against Marciano? Would you consider a little private contest that wasn’t fixed?”

“I don’t wrestle anymore,” Teo says.

“See, but this may be my only chance to say I wrestled a pro. I’m just talking arm wrestling here,” Joe says, and assumes the position, with his elbow on the bar. “We’ll wrestle for a drink, or a twenty, or the world championship of the Zip Inn, whatever you want.”

“I’m retired,” Teo says.

“Come on,” Joe says, “beside experience you got forty pounds on me. If your friend Lefty can jump out of the bleachers and take on the Andy Frain ushers, you and me can have a friendly little match. Mr. Zip has winner. Left-handed, of course. You can referee, Mr. Zip, and hey, that little matter of business for today, let’s forget it. Another time, maybe. Who you betting on, or do you not bet on arm wrestling, either?”

“Twenty on El Kohlrabi,” Zip says.

Teo looks at Zip, surprised.

“Purely theoretical,” Zip, says, “but you can take him.”

“Purely,” Teo says, and smiles, then leans his arm on the bar and he and Joe Ditto clench hands.

“Una momento,” Joe says. He removes his sport coat and folds it over his gym bag, takes a puff of Pall Mall, then drops to the floor and does ten quick push-ups with a hand clap after each. “Needed to warm up.”

Teo removes his shirt to free up his shoulder. Both men, now in tank tops, clench hands again. Joe is still wearing his sunglasses, and his half-smoked cigarette dangles from his lip. Zip counts one, two, wrestle! and they strain against each other, muscle and tendon surfacing along their forearms. Joe gives slightly, then struggles back to even, seems to gain leverage, and gradually forces Teo’s arm downward.

The crowd at Wrigley is cheering, and Jack Brickhouse breaks into his home-run call: “Back she goes, back, back, way back …”

“Goddamn, come on, luchador,” Zip urges; his left hand slaps the bar with a force that sends the red clothespin flying off the sleeve folded over the stump of his right arm.

Gripping the edge of the bar with his left hand and grunting, Teo heaves his right arm up until it’s back even, but his surge of momentum stalls. He and Joe Ditto lean into each other. They’ve both begun to sweat, their locked hands are turning white, arms straining, faces close together, separated by the smoke of Joe’s dangling Pall Mall. “My friend,” Joe says from the side of his mouth, “you smell like pigeons.”

Out on the street, sirens wail as if every cop, ambulance, and fire truck in Little Village is rushing past. The lengthening ash of Joe’s cigarette tumbles to the bar. Joe spits out the butt, and it rolls across the bar top onto the floor, where Zip grinds it out. Their arms have begun trembling in time to each other, but neither budges. Teo turns his face from Joe and finds himself looking into the mirror. A man in a blue mask looks back reproachfully; he won’t allow another defeat. Teo closes his eyes and concentrates on breathing, resolved to ignore the pain, to welcome it, and to endure until Joe tires and he makes one last, desperate move. Teo knows that final assault will be a sign of weakness; if he can hold it off, he’ll win.

“From the land of sky blue waters” tom-toms from the TV, and Joe’s left hand slowly snakes across the bar to Teo’s tank top. At its touch, Teo pushes back harder, but Joe won’t give. His right arm resists Teo’s concentrated force while his left hand gently brushes, then fondles Teo’s chest.

“Got you where I want you now,” Joe says. “Cootchie-cootchie-coo, motherfucker.”

 

Our father figured that we’d want to see the sewer rat he’d captured, and he was right about that, so he waited to kill it until Mick and I came home. It was a Saturday in summer, and I’d taken Mick to the icy swimming pool at Harrison High. Our hair, towels, and the wet swimsuits we wore beneath our jeans still smelled of chlorine as we walked down the gangway into the sunny backyard where Sir had an enormous rat imprisoned in a glass canister. It had a wide-angled mouth and metal lid, the kind of rounded jar that’s often used for storing flour or sugar. The rat filled it up and behind the thick convex glass appeared distorted and even larger, with magnified beady eyes, buck teeth, handlike rodent feet, and a scaly bald tail. I looked for rabies foam around its whiskers. Sir had used the canister to store dago bombs. Every few weeks, he’d lift the sewer cover over the pipe in the basement, light a dago bomb, and drop it down the sewer. The echoey sewer amplified the explosion. Sir said the noise chased off rats. The fireworks from the canister were gone; I’d been planning to pilfer a few for Fourth of July, but I never saw them again. I don’t know what Sir did with them, or how he managed to catch the rat in the jar. I didn’t ask at the time, maybe because we were too involved with preparations for its execution.

My father had me take the garden hose and fill the large galvanized metal washtub that he always referred to in Polish as the balja. We used the balja for mixing cement and, sometimes, for rinsing the mud out of crayfish we caught with string and chicken livers at the Douglas Park lagoon. When the balja was brim full, Sir brought over the rat-in-a-jar, as we’d begun to call it. I stood on one side of the tub and Mick on the other. Mick had stripped down to his bathing suit and cowboy boots as if he planned a dip in the balja himself. He’d put on his cowboy hat and was holding his favorite toy, a cork-shooting shotgun. Mick’s toy box was an arsenal: matched six-shooters that shot caps, a Davy Crockett musket to go with a coonskin cap, squirt guns of various calibers, pirate swords and flintlock pistols, a Buck Rogers ray gun. They were mostly made of plastic, but not the shotgun. It had a blued metal barrel and a wooden stock, and broke at the center like a real shotgun. Breaking it was how one pumped it up enough to shoot the corks that came with it. If you jammed the muzzle into the dirt after a rain, it would shoot clots of mud. Holding the rat-in-a-jar with one hand on the bottom and the other on the lid, Sir lowered it into the balja. The rat looked worried. When the glass canister was entirely immersed, Sir slowly raised the metal lid so that water could seep in. Mick and I moved in closer on either side of him, trying to see. Sir lifted the lid a little more, and the rat shot straight up out of the tub and splashed back down into the water. Mick and I jumped back, but Sir grabbed the shotgun by the barrel out of Mick’s hand, and as the wet rat scrambled over the side of the washtub, Sir knocked it back into the water. “Da-dammit!” Sir yelled. He was thwacking at the balja, sending up swooshes of water, and the rat squirted out between blows and ran for the homemade board fence separating our yard from the woodpiles and uncooped chickens in Kashka’s yard next door. We scrambled after it, and Sir managed to hack the rat one more time as it squeezed through the fence and crawled off into a woodpile.

We stood peering through the fence.

“Da-damn,” Sir muttered.

“My gun!” Mick said. Sir handed it back to him. “You ruined my gun.” A piece of the wooden stock had splintered off, and the connection between the barrel and stock was noticeably loose. One more good whack would have snapped it in two.

“Is that rat blood?” I said. There was a red, sticky smear along the side of the stock.

“I nailed it a couple good ones,” Sir said.

Mick dropped the shotgun as if it might be carrying rabies and walked away, fighting back tears.

For a week or so the shotgun lay in the back yard where Mick dropped it, rusting in rain, bleaching in sun. Finally, Mick forgave our father enough to pick up the gun again. The bloodstain was now a permanent feature of the splintered stock, and though the gun was the worse for wear, it had acquired a mystique it hadn’t had before its baptism in rat blood. It became Mick’s favorite toy all over again, the weapon he’d always take with him when he went down the alley to play guns with his best friend, JJ—short for Johnny Junior.

Johnny Senior was Johnny Sovereign.

When Johnny Sovereign was found dead in his own car, with a jockstrap on his face and his balls blown off, it was big news in the neighborhood, but Mick knew nothing about the specifics. My parents and I never discussed the murder openly at home. Mick had simply been told that it wasn’t a good time to go play at his friend JJ’s house, that he should wait until JJ called him. But Mick got bored waiting, so after a few days he decided to sneak over to JJ’s for a visit. He pulled on his cowboy boots, armed himself with the rat-blood shotgun, and snuck off down the alley. Alleys were secret thoroughfares for kids, and as long as Mick was sneaking away from our house, he decided he’d also sneak up on JJ. Surprise attack was one of their favorite games. He went past the garage where JJ’s father parked the yellow car, but the garage was empty. As always, pigeons hooted from inside. At the Sovereigns’ back fence, overgrown with morning glories and sizzling with bees, Mick paused, as he and JJ often did, to poke a finger inside a morning glory. He and JJ would pretend the flower was a socket, but unlike an electric socket, a morning glory was safe to stick your finger into. If you held it there long enough, you’d feel connected to the power coming through the tangled green wires of the vines.

Recharged with morning-glory power, Mick snuck past the back fence into the small patch of grassless back yard that led into a shadowy gangway. Instead of going to the back door, he sidled along the house, crouching under the back windows. He’d approached this way several times before to ambush JJ. He liked to catch JJ when he was least expecting it—still in his pajamas, eating Sugar Pops at the breakfast table.

The curtained kitchen window was partially opened, and Mick slowly rose and slid the barrel of the shotgun through the slit between the drawn curtains. He was into the make-believe of the game, and his heart pounded with a combination of tension and repressed laughter. When he heard the scream, he froze.

“Oh, God, no, please, please, I beg you,” a woman’s voice cried. “I don’t know anything about what Johnny did. Please, I won’t say anything. I have two little kids.” It was JJ’s mother, Vi, who’d always been nice to Mick. She was weeping hysterically, repeating, “Please, please, I wouldn’t recognize your voice, you never called, I don’t know who you are, it was all Johnny, for the love of Jesus, I’m begging you don’t, please, I’m still young.”

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.