Free I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek Page B

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?”
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œMister, I said I was sorry,” the kid pleaded.
    â€œStevo, 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.
    Â 
    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.

    â€œOfficial,” 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