I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek Page A

him.

    â€œDa-damn nuts,” he yelled, jockeying for the turning lane. “It’s really dog eat dog on this thing.”
    Brakes grinding, we shimmied off the exit for Twelfth Street Beach and crawled along the aisles of the parking lot looking for a space. Finally, Sir had to drive over the sidewalk and park on the grass. There were a lot of other cars parked on the grass.
    â€œCan’t give us all tickets,” he said.
    We slipped our jeans off. Sir hid his watch and wallet under the seat.
    â€œLeave the windows open a crack, so when we come back it’s not like a da-damn oven in here.”
    â€œWhere’s the door opener?” Mick asked.
    â€œJust climb out this way,” Sir said.
    â€œNo,” Mick insisted, “I demand the door opener.”
    I handed it to him over the seat, and he began to mash at the buffalo. Only the door on the Kaiser’s driver side opened, so we carried around a sawed-off broom handle we called the door opener. The Kaiser had no inside door handles. Before the Kaiser-Frazer company went out of business, it had advertised its designs as the automobiles of the future. To their engineers, the future meant push buttons, so they’d replaced door handles with push buttons embossed with the Kaiser trademark, a buffalo. By mashing the buffalo with just the right amount of force, we sometimes got the passenger door to open. We’d turned it into a competition. This time Mick got it on five tries—average.
    Sir checked to make sure everything was locked while Mick and I hopped barefoot across scorching asphalt to the beach.
    â€œDon’t step on any da-damn broken glass or we’ll have a real mess,” Sir hollered behind us. “I don’t know why the punks have to break the bottles instead of throwing them in the trash.” He paused to kick a bottle neck through a sewer grate. He was still wearing his socks and unlaced factory shoes, though he’d stripped
down to his old maroon bathing trunks with the gold buckle and the leaping aqua blue swordfish over the coin pocket. People didn’t wear swimsuits like that anymore. Sometimes seeing it made me weak inside with a feeling that I couldn’t name but that had to do with all the times I’d seen him wear it before, times when I was little—younger than Mick was now—when Moms would always come with us to the beach, times before she got nervous, before we’d hear her pacing the house in the dark in the middle of the night crying to herself. Seeing the maroon bathing suit made me think of the old maroon Chevy, the first car I remembered. I thought my father had driven home from the Army in it. It had a running board he’d let me ride on while he parked.
    It was a car we’d pack once a year with shopping bags full of old clothes and jars of jam and the dill pickles Moms canned. Leaving Moms behind, my father and I would drive a long time into what seemed to me to be countryside because the streets were shadowy with trees. We’d arrive at a high iron gate and follow a road that curved through park-like grounds where people in wheelchairs were pushed by attendants in white. We’d park and enter a cavernous building of gray stone, tote our shopping bags down corridors acrid with disinfectant, and wait before a bank of windows that looked out on lawn. An old man with stunned eyes and a jawline grizzled in gray would be wheeled in to where we waited. The three of us would sit silently together. There was never any talk, not even in Polish, a language my father relied on for secrecy. My father took the old man’s veined, stony hand and traced its battered knuckles. Before we left he’d kiss that hand. We never stayed long, and I’d forget about our trip until a year later, when we’d again load shopping bags into the maroon Chevy and drive into what felt like a déjà vu.
    After a few such visits I asked, “Dad, who is that old