The End (10 page)

One night, after cards, D’Agostino had spread on Rocco’s kitchen floor a map of the earth and pointed out that Norway was shaped suspiciously like Sweden, and Sweden like Finland. Was this an accident? Ohio was shaped suspiciously like the United States, with Port Clinton sticking up there into the lake like a stunted Michigan, and Ashtabula pointing up toward the northeast like a little Maine, and a wart growing out of the bottom in the middle, by Ironton, like a Texas. When D’Agostino flipped Australia upside down, it, too, resembled a little USA, with a swayback and a gulf in the underside. And, look at it, the upside-down Australia bore a remarkable resemblance to Red China. Repeated shapes, order, the existence of an afterlife, were all obvious to anybody who looked for them from a frontier. The way so often he saw Europe in the clouds.

As a boy he’d understood this instinctively. As a man, somehow he’d forgotten. And now it was coming back to him.

Distinctly he recalled the white alb and the black felt hat he wore when he was a boy of nine pulling with thousands of other boys and men the ropes that bore, up Via Etnea, a massive carriage that harbored the undecayed remains of Saint Agatha, the patroness of his hometown. The ropes spanned seven city blocks. He was supposed to be pulling them, but with so many of the devoted participating, he was lucky to get a hand on one of the ropes. Nowhere could he see actual pulling taking place, and yet the carriage was impelled up the street. And as they passed into Piazza Stesicoro, he saw the most incredible thing: From the parapet of a fourth-story balcony, a brick, with no visible cause, fell, just fell off the front of the building and smashed to the street.

And young Rocco thought, If I could understand one moment I would understand all moments.

The Canadian side, the Horseshoe Falls, was supposed to be larger and more majestic, but he could see only a corner of it from here. If he crossed the bridge over the gorge to the Canadian side, he’d heard, the view was unobstructed except by mist. And that required leaving the country, an act that represented, yes, the terminus of the path along which Providence had been leading him. He had entered the United States one morning forty years before and had yet to leave. The pattern of these last two days, the instruction he was receiving, was to take the long view, and longer. The next step, yes, was to get out of the country altogether and turn around and see it for what it was.

What a pleasure, how strangely reassuring, to listen to the tinkle of the keys on his key chain, as he bounced them in his hand, and to the roar of the water.

The music of his keys and the unlikely sycamore sapling sending down its baby roots into the earth at this suicidal proximity to the crashing river (it was Liechtenstein clinging to the side of Switzerland, hoping Germany wouldn’t notice) and these flimsy-looking tour boats down in the gorge, stuffed with raincoats, speeding toward the base of the falls, all served to reassure and reassure him that his middle one had not finished becoming only at last to turn into a nothingness. That Loveypants and Bobo and Jimmy would be swayed and return to their rightful places.

Because there is
no such thing
as a nothingness, said the falls.

He knew what D’Agostino and those devils at the newspaper wanted, and the crone across his alley and her sidekick and the faithless feast crowd—they all wanted him to deny three times that he knew his own boy, and then the cock would crow. They wanted him to declare submitfully that this thing had been destroyed while he wasn’t looking. They had the height, they had the serial number and the dog tags, they had the full faith and credit of the United States Marine Corps. But those were vanities. Those were nothing compared with the authority of Niagara Falls and of one man’s faith. I have only changed his shape, said the falls. The voice of the roaring river told him to cast his bread upon the water, for he would find it after many days. The branch was lost to the viewer in the curtain of water going down, but it wasn’t lost to the falls.

He was full of the fear of God, and happy.

Here was the bridge, saying, as all bridges say, Cross me. Beseeching. And a leftward-heading white arrow on a green metal sign that made the remarkable claim
Canada This Way.

Go ahead, Rocco, cross the bridge, it’s pretty over there, they have a little Union Jack in the corner of their flag, and a wax museum.

He searched his clothing for cigarettes and, finding them in his left hip pocket, said, “There you are, little friends!” And he mounted the bridge.

He could see at the far end a customhouse and men in red uniforms, not, alas, wearing bearskin hats. The head of state was a twenty-seven-year-old woman—a truck driver and skilled mechanic when she was a teenager, during the war—whose coronation was just two months ago, and who, perversely, lived in a different country.

He could almost see the Horseshoe now. The river was blue and rushing beneath him. A sign approaching on the bridge sidewalk came into focus; it said
International Boundary Line.
And under that:
Now Entering the Dominion of Canada.
He paused and threw his cigarette butt over the rail and the wind tossed it under the bridge before he could see it hit the water, and with significant twisting of the body to shield the match from the wind, he lit another.

He’d forgotten to leave kitty sufficient Chow Chow Bits for his absence, but she’d survive, he assured himself, she was an intrepid little monster.

Go ahead, Rocco, cross the border. What’s this shilly-shallying?

Foreboding, an itch in the brain.

Across the sidewalk ran a stripe of paint, which yet another sign alleged was the actual location of the border, although it was, he now was, the bridge was, according to the sign, two hundred feet above the surface of the river. Evidently, absurdly, an unseen wall reached into the sky. How far into outer space was Canada supposed to extend?

Shall I? Shall I? Dillydally.

In an average minute, six billion pounds of water passed under this bridge, called the Rainbow Bridge, completed in 1941. It was the fourth bridge to be constructed on this site. The first, a suspension, had collapsed in a windstorm in January 1889. The second, also a suspension, had been taken apart and put back together some miles downriver. The third, a steel arch, was destroyed by Lake Erie ice floes that had tumbled over the falls, crashed into the moorings, and collapsed them at 4:20 p.m. on January 27, 1938. The remains of the two destroyed structures lay on the riverbed even at the present day, 175 feet below the surface, one on top of the other.

Blue, yellow, red American cars, voluptuous and shiny, passed on his right, northwest-bound and southeast-bound, Ontario-bound and New York State-bound, oblivious, unslowing, as they traversed the cartographer’s invisible wall, the bodies of the people inside them cut in two for a split second, half-republic and half-dominion, one legal code and expanse of history constraining one half of the body, another the other.

Why this itch? A surveyor had calculated that rising through this stripe of paint was an invisible plane. Why this belief that the plane existed, that there were two places and not one? The border didn’t demonstrate a separation, it only asserted a separation. He was too old not to know this. He had disembarked from the steamer
Natalie of Tunis
in New Orleans in 1913 a stupid child, telling himself the same nonsense people had been telling themselves since the beginning of the spoken word: There is another place promised to you and to your children. There is a solution in this other place.

On either side of the paint stripe two Oriental girls of about seven, in identical periwinkle skirts and white sandals, bounced a tennis ball across the border to each other, back and forth against the pavement, deadly serious, aiming the ball and aiming again and throwing very softly lest the wind catch it.

Don’t tell lies to yourself, Rocco. Turn around.

We have in the American language a stouthearted expression, Rocco, that doesn’t mean what you’d think, it doesn’t mean, Enjoy yourself, it means, Tell the truth about what you did.

The tennis ball, having again been aimed very carefully, nevertheless caromed to the north and was exploded under the wheel of a late-model Pontiac.

Face the music, Rocco.

The guard back at the American customhouse demanded his driving papers and inquired after his citizenship.

“U.S.,” Rocco said.

“How long were you in Canada?” the man said, coughing into his documents.

“I didn’t go in Canada.”

“That’s Canada over there where you were, Jack-o.”

“I . . . I like to read the signs. I saw there were signs, so I wanted to read them,” he said weakly. He wanted an ice cream. It was hot, and he wasn’t hungry, and he wanted to stick something colorful into his face.

He was so confused.

“It’s a bridge. You can go one way or the other way. You can go to our side or their side. Seeing as you are now here, Jack, the onliest place you’re coming from is there, which is Canada.”

He wanted an ice cream. “I went far enough to read the signs, that’s it. I didn’t cross the border. I wanted to read the signs and learn the history of the place and so . . . and so . . . and so . . .”

He was so confused. He didn’t understand the meanings of things. The feeling of wanting very strongly to be in love could sometimes resemble the feeling of love itself.

The sun, reflected in the windshield of a car veering onto the bridge, flashed momentarily in Rocco’s eyes.

“I’m so confused,” he said to the guard.

Briefly, he was convinced that there was no God after all. The falls weren’t speaking to him anymore; only the bridge and the cars, artifacts of a country married to mathematics and ferroconcrete, were speaking to him, or rather were screeching meaninglessly.

The guard handed him back his moist papers. “Answer me, did you buy anything over there?”

“No, I didn’t.”

The guard let him pass. He retraced his steps along the edge of the gorge, slowly, having lost hold of all the many convictions to which his first few minutes of observing the falls had led him. He didn’t understand the meaning of anything except the stripe painted across the pavement of the bridge. He tramped the crisscrossing sidewalks in the little park abutting the gorge, in search of ice cream. He felt profoundly unhappy and alone. The meaning of the stripe of paint was, You have been behaving as if imaginary things were real.

Certain nights at home, he felt his spirits lift upon hearing the
toc, toc
of the pilot in the new furnace and the gas catching and making its
whoosh.
His spirits lifting as a knock on the door would make them lift. He regarded the furnace as company, as a human being. The regularity of the furnace lighting itself,
toc-tocking
every half hour in the winter nights, was the suggestion of a permanent alleviation of aloneness. He called the furnace Harry, as in, Give ’em hell.

The cigarettes were making his heart slam away at his rib cage, and experience told him the only way to address this was to smoke another.

The ice cream man, once he had been located under the heavy cover of a sugar maple twenty feet from the pre-fall, crashing Niagara, wore a white paper hat in the conventional military shape, the same model Rocco wore when he was on the job; also, a white and blue polka-dotted shirt and a black bow tie. A lipless, unholy grin was frozen to his face. He sat atop the steel cage of a milk crate behind his refrigerated cart, his back against the trunk of the tree. The light all around was splendorous, but the shade afforded beneath this tree was so complete that no patches of sunlight whatsoever fell on the grass.

Such a complicated device just to catch light with. So many thousands of leaves. There was a leaf for every angle of sun coming down. The tree was a cistern for light.

The ice cream man had nothing he was reading, no oddments to fiddle with. Each of his hands rested on the knob of one of the freezer hatches as though he were manning the gate to a passage underground. He stood up with some effort in the strange shadow of the leaves. He was aged significantly. He began speaking before Rocco had completed his approach.

“I have strawberry. I have chocolate. I have pistachio. I have a sugar cone. I have a regular cone. I have no vanilla. One napkin, please.” He cleared his throat. A grasshopper landed on Rocco’s shoulder and the ice cream man leaned smoothly toward him and flicked it off. “I have no sandwiches, drumsticks, or novelties of any kind. I have paper cups and wood spoons. One scoop, twelve cents. Two scoops, nineteen cents. Three scoops, a quarter. I have no nuts. I have no cherries. Sixty feet in that direction one finds a public water fountain. Thirty feet to the left of that is a public latrine. I don’t know what time it is.”

There was a pause while the two men took in each other’s faces. Rocco thought he saw a shiver of recognition pass across the man’s features, and then the man stifle it. There was unquestionably the too-longness of the pause and of the looking at each other before the man set himself to opening the freezer hatches and exposing his wares. The paper hat was cockeyed—a cheerful angle, the way Rocco himself wore his—and liver spots were visible on the exposed portion of the scalp, beneath what remained of the glossy, pallid hair.

“I know you,” Rocco said.

“No, you don’t.”

“We know each other. If you give me a second—”

“Whoops! There it goes! Now then, to summarize, your choices are three in number—”

“I hope you’ll forgive me. For two days, I’ve been beside myself.”

“—flavor, vessel, number of scoops.”

“I’ve been under a cloud. I’m having trouble thinking with a high degree of clearness. Whenever I think it’s lifting, or thinning out—the cloud, I’m saying—suddenly everything gets darker than before.”

“You think you’re unique. You think the newlyweds don’t give me this. I am their uncle that died. I am Grandma’s former milk-man. They leave the confines of Mother’s home to get married, and they come here and get a motel for the night, and the next morning, snap—”