“Blue Island,” by Stuart Dybek

By Stuart Dybek

Uncle Romy told me that, if he hadn’t grown up on the inner-city street named Blue Island, he probably would never have dropped out of high school to join the Navy. Blue Island was within walking distance of the Ashland Avenue bridge, which spanned the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It was a walk that Romy took from sixth grade on. He’d imagine that he was running away from home, escaping down a river like Huckleberry Finn, or going to live in secret like a hermit in one of the deserted little bridge-tender houses. He never tired of seeing the street split open as the bridge lifted its asphalt arms to the sky. He loved watching the rusty barges, heaped with demolished cars, floating by on river time, while street traffic waited, jammed bumper to bumper. At night, eruptions of acetylene-blue sparks and furnaces flaring behind charred foundry windows coated the oily water with visions of hellfire. But, even as a kid, Romy sensed that, if a toxic river flowing backward as it carried out the city’s sewage could enthrall him, then he needed to see the ocean as soon as possible.

The Navy taught him to box. When his tour of duty was over, he moved back to Chicago to fight in the annual Golden Gloves tournament, and made it to the welterweight finals. Romy wasn’t my godfather, but, given that we’d grown up in different generations in the same neighborhood, and were both southpaw welterweights, he appointed himself my guardian angel. That required him to teach me to box, or at least to try, which he did until I was able to convince him that getting repeatedly hit in the mouth was ruining my embouchure for the clarinet.

He also advised me in matters of the heart.

His advice for getting back with a girl you couldn’t forget was to call her out of the blue. Timing was important. It had to be in the evening, but early enough that you hadn’t lost the light. When she answered—if she answered—you’d say, “Let’s go walking.”

“And, whatever you do, skip the sad-ass Hi . . . it’s me moment, followed by a melodramatic pause, like you got some special status as me.”

“What if she asks where to?”

“Where what?”

“Is this something you’ve done yourself?” I asked him. It was hardly the first time I’d wondered about the backlog of secrets he kept stashed.

“That’s a story for another day. You need to stick to now,” he said. “You been out of touch so long, and suddenly silence has been broken, but you’re worried what next and want a backup plan, right?”

“It was just a simple question.”

“Right. So, if she asks where to, you want to be prepared to respond, like, Well, I thought maybe we could, like, go get hot beefs, wet, with both kinds of peppers, at Gino’s.”

“It doesn’t have to be Gino’s.”

“It doesn’t have to be anything, numbnuts. It’s not about fucking where to. It’s just let’s walk. If she wasn’t good with that already, she wouldn’t have answered your call.”

We are walking in the cold. I know this taqueria on Twenty-sixth that features an assembly-line-like contraption that makes fresh corn tortillas. A sign claims that in the whole world only two such machines exist, one in Mexico City and the other here in Chicago. It reminds me of a similar setup I saw at the Café du Monde in New Orleans, where they make fresh beignets no matter the time of night.

But we have wandered into a part of the city where neither of us has been before, even though it feels familiar. There’s a saline smell of pilings that you might expect in a maritime city like New Orleans, but not in Chicago.

“Maybe you were here once as a kid,” she says, “back when you’d pedal around for hours on that red Sears bike, trying to get lost.”

“If I was here before, it was in another life.”

“You believe in past lives?”

“Believe? No. Even though sometimes it feels like it could be true.”

“That’s due to all the different lives we live during the one we think we have.”

We stop at the center of a bridge spanning the river and look down at a sheet of ice so thin that we can see the shapes of swimming fish below it. Carp, maybe, or catfish, bottom-feeders the ice has brought to the surface. The gulls see them, too, and dip past us, swirling and skimming over the frosted shadows just out of reach.

“Who knew there were still so many fish,” she says. “Didn’t this river once catch on fire?”

“They’re not fish you’d want to eat, unless one of your other lives was as a gull.”

The bridge crosses into blocks of deserted streets grooved by railroad tracks and lined with shuttered warehouses. We stop in front of what looks to be an abandoned factory with a “FOR RENT” sign taped to the door.

“Can you imagine what living here would be like?” I ask.

“Let’s go in and see.”

“There’s a lock.”

“That’s just cosmetic,” she says, and removes a glove, then slowly rotates the numbers she leans toward, as if listening for the tumblers. When it opens, she isn’t the least surprised. We glance around to be sure that no one is watching and push inside.

I expect it to be dark, but the tile floors gleam at the mouths of corridors, and a shaft of light suspending dust as if it were photons streams down the stairs. We begin to climb.

“How’d you guess the combination?”

“It’s always the same. Same as it was on my gym locker in high school, which was the same as the birthday in May of the first boy I had a crush on.”

“My birthday’s in April.”

“I know. He preceded you. Third grade, St. Casimir’s.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You remember his birthday but not his name?”

“Must be the kind of secret so sacred you keep it even from yourself. Know what I mean?” she asks.

We climb three flights and turn down a corridor that’s lined with chipped, cream-colored radiators. A bank of wired-glass windows gleams above them. Like the river, the windows are sheathed in a pane of ice. It has patched over all the cracked and broken places that shine a coppery pink through the frost, like wounds through gauze. Dusk shoots like laser beams through the bullet holes. The track of a push broom on the floor has shaped a tiny dune of shattered glass mottled with flakes of lead paint and bird droppings. We stare up into a skylight whitewashed by generations of pigeons.

“It feels like we’re in a story together,” she says.

“More like a poem.”

“What poem would that be?”

“Remember that old anthology of Chicago poets we used to page through for something to read at slams, Sandburg’s ‘the fog comes on little cat feet,’ Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’? There was one by Vachel Lindsay about factory windows.”

“ ‘Factory windows are always broken,’ ” she says, reciting.

The words are amplified by the skylight, and she raises her voice so that it rings through the factory. Along corridors, the radiators begin to knock, more like someone demanding in or out than like applause.

Somebody’s always throwing bricks,

Somebody’s always heaving cinders,

Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.

“There was more,” she says. “Another stanza about how nobody throws bricks through chapel windows, but I don’t remember the rhymes. I always thought that name Vachel was too cool.”

“So you remember Vachel and his immortal lines, but take the fifth when it comes to the name of your first love.”

“Casimir.”

“I thought that was the school?”

“They named it after him.”

The radiators stop their arrhythmic knocking. The windows above them no longer glow. The skylight has turned from whitewashed to bronzed. We’re losing the light. Earlier, when we crossed the river, the cries of gulls resonated through the girders as if the bridge were a giant tuning fork. We’ve yet to hear the pigeons.

“You’d think they’d be flying all over this place,” I tell her.

“I could live here,” she says. “I love steam heat.”

But there’s no heat. The only thing steaming is our breath.

“We’re losing the light,” I say.

“We could build a fire,” she says.

“Out of what?”

“The pages of the notebook you’ll be writing this down in.”

“They’d see it flickering behind the windows in the dark and come for us.”

“I’d hide in that fancy topcoat of yours. It’s reversible, isn’t it? You didn’t get that on Blue Island.”

“I bought it at Heathrow Airport so I could walk around London looking like I spoke the language.”

“You bought it because it was on sale.”

“It was my lucky day.”

“Factory windows are always broken, and clothes at airports are always on sale.”

I unbutton my coat, hold it open, and she steps close and presses against me, and, when I button it back up, you’d never know she’s inside. ♦