I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek

give you.”
    Sir took off walking, shaking her arm off, trying to ignore her. Suddenly, he slapped his wallet, pinning her hand to his back pocket. “Let go,” he said.
    Instead, she reached a hand around and grabbed his crotch and, still smiling, stared up at him, whispering something I couldn’t hear. It stopped him in his tracks.

    â€œDa-dammit,” he said, screwing up his face as if he’d swallowed something sour, then shot a harried look back at me, a look I interpreted as Don’t tell Mother.
    They stood stalemated, nobody on the street paying the least attention, the gypsy massaging the front of his trousers while Sir tried to work her hand out of his back pocket without the wallet coming with it. I just stood there, too, instantly entranced by her, until I saw two gypsy men stepping out of the same doorway toward my father.
    A cop, gnawing a Polish sausage dripping sauce, ambled across the street and headed them off.
    â€œGiving you trouble?” he asked Sir.
    â€œForget it,” Sir said, face still registering a sour taste. “I don’t want no trouble.”
    As we walked away, I turned and saw the cop slip his arm around the girl’s shoulder, taking a bite from the sausage he held in one hand while his other hand nonchalantly slid into her blouse so that a bare breast almost lifted over the elastic neckline, flashing the tan areola of a nipple I didn’t quite see. I watched the girl disappear back into the doorway of the storefront. Sir caught the look on my face.
    â€œThey get you inside there and shlish,” he said, drawing a finger across his throat. “Girls like that carry a disease that’ll make you walk like Charlie Chaplin.”
    It was the first advice he ever gave me about sex and, thankfully, the last.
    We saw the Chickenman that day, stilt-legged, balanced on a hydrant above the passing crowds, with the chicken rising from his head like a weather vane. The bird hopped to his shoulder, and the man’s mouth widened to a gaping hole in which the chicken bobbed his head. The mouth closed, and when the chicken slowly spread its wings, it looked as if the man’s head might fly from his body.

    I’d described the whole scene more than once to Mick on nights when I’d lie in the dark and think about the girl before I went to sleep, wondering where the gypsies had gone. Mick especially liked the part about her grabbing Sir by the balls.
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    We knew we were close when we passed Donnelly’s, a block-long factory where telephone books were printed. I could feel the pneumatic exhalation of its giant, racketing presses, smell the scorched ink of all those compressed names and numbers and the sweat of the night shift, who stared out like convicts behind mesh screens. Then traffic accelerated, and as we pulled onto the Outer Drive the sudden coolness made my head light. Soldier Field rose on the left, and the lake stretched past the breakwater and farthest sailboats, shimmering pink under a sun that glazed the park trees.
    â€œWorkin on the railroad, workin on the farm, all I got to show for it’s the muscle in my arm,” Sir sang in a voice he lowered to a baritone he considered operatic. He often sang when he drove. “I had a Caruso-quality voice as a kid,” he’d tell us, “but ruined it imitating trains.”
    Mick was rolling around in the backseat with his hands over his ears, groaning as if having convulsions.
    â€œAt least he’s not singing ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime?’” I said.
    â€œAnd it looks like I’m never gonna cease my wanderin.”
    â€œHe’s never gonna cease his wanderin,” I said to Mick.
    Mick and a black kid in the backseat of a car in the lane beside us were giving each other the finger. The kid tried to spit into our Kaiser, but his spit blew back on him. We all busted up, including the kid.
    Sir was pumping the brakes as cars weaved in front of