Read Online I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek - Free Book Online

floating turds?” Mick asked.
    â€œIt was still a river in some places, not a sewer. It was beautiful.”
    Â 
    The breeze off the Rocks felt almost chilly. It blew straight in over a horizon that was a blinding gleam, and beyond the horizon I could picture the forests of Michigan. I tried to recapture the daydreams I’d had all week about coming out to the lake; I tried to remember how stuffy it would be tonight when we got back home.
    There weren’t any women. Men and teenagers plunged and swam in the deep green swells. Water bucked over the lip of the concrete walkway. I stared into the lake and couldn’t imagine touching bottom.
    â€œWant me to lower you in by the arms and cool you off?” Sir asked Mick. Mick was watching the swells hump in, standing well back from the edge.
    â€œNo, I’m gonna climb the rocks.”
    Just behind the concrete walk, enormous limestone blocks were piled in jagged, steplike tumbles as if some ancient city lay in ruins after a tidal wave.
    â€œOkay, you do that”—Sir laughed—“and keep an eye on the towels.” He slipped his shoes and socks off, put his car keys in one heel and shook them into the toe.
    Spray showered over the concrete. I felt like going with Mick. The walkway vibrated when the waves whumped in as if it were hollow underneath. The sun was slipping lower in the hazy lilac sky. Mexican teenagers with gang tattoos whapped at each other with wet towels, their gold crosses swinging from their necks as they pushed each other in.
    Sir gave an ape call.
    Everyone turned for a moment and looked at him.

    He backed up against the limestones and sprinted toward the water, hurtling off the concrete edge. His body arced like that of a man shot from a cannon—legs together, arms against his sides, so that when he hit the water it was headfirst, arms still pressed to his body. A spume thumped up, then showered back around his point of entry.
    The guys standing next to me cheered.
    We waited. Mick gathered up the towels and his shoes. Sir hadn’t come up. People began to stare at us. I studied his socks stuffed in his shoes, then looked at Mick. He glanced away. Go find a lifeguard, I was getting ready to say, when Sir’s head shot up, hair flattened slick as a seal.
    â€œThe old torpedo dive!” he shouted. “Come on in, Perry! Don’t ever try the old torpedo unless you know there’s nothing sticking up underwater.”
    Two Mexican guys who’d cheered raced for the water and torpedoed in on either side of Sir. They came up snorting and coughing and rubbing their eyes.
    Sir sidestroked around them, laughing.
    â€œCome on, sonnyboy!”
    I’d never dived into deep water before. I was shivering and wasn’t sure I remembered how to swim.
    A Mexican kid, not much older than Mick, stood beside me. He was drying himself off with his shirt and shivering too, except he was dripping wet.
    â€œCold?” I asked, gesturing at the water.
    â€œMuy, muy.”
    â€œStrong undertow today,” a guy with a mustache said. He looked like he could be the shivering kid’s older brother. “Somebody drowned this morning and they still ain’t found his body, man.”
    I’d heard of the undertow off the Rocks, of people being
pulled out into the lake, sucked under. I watched the bobbing swimmers for anyone being drawn away.
    Sir was backstroking along the concrete edge, waves boosting him almost level with the walkway.
    â€œGimmie the soap!”
    I got the bar of laundry soap and flipped it out to him. He floated on his back, lifting his toes and ankles high out of the water as if he were rocking on a hammock, and soaped his feet and legs, then rubbed the soap into lather in his black chest hair. I’d never seen anyone else bring soap to the lake, and for the first time a possible reason occurred to me: maybe when he was a boy they didn’t have a bathtub. Whatever the reason,