Free I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek Page 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.”
    â€œNo way,” the kid said, his acne blazing up.
    â€œZit-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.”
    â€œOkay,” the kid said, “I’m sorry.” He reached into the pocket of his Walgreens smock and slid the pictures over, facedown.
    â€œHow many of my boob shots