The End (19 page)

The jeweler turns a page of the inscrutable newspaper.

The woman’s blood is under his fingernails. Before he left, he washed his hands in her kitchen sink, then dried them, then washed them again. He washed the water glass he’d used. He left it to dry on the dish rack and went back into the parlor, where the woman lay on the floor. He introduced himself again, it was at least the third time, and asked again what her name was, but again she didn’t respond, or even stir, half-naked there under the coffee table. He couldn’t find a nailbrush, so there is still some blood under his fingernails. He tries not to look at the blood under his fingernails. He resists the temptation to smell them.

Two ancient foreigners are arguing at the bar, in suits worn pale at the elbows and shoulders and knees.

The jeweler touches the room with his eyes, telling himself the name of each object he settles on in an effort to reattach himself to the material world.

That little beam over the door is a lintel. He says this to himself, and he feels better.
Lintel
has occurred twice so far in the concordance, if memory serves.

His mother’s hope was that he would use the names to affix himself to the world. As in, You do not see the mayapple until you know that’s what it’s called, and then you see it everywhere, the words teaching you to love the things they name. But this isn’t why he’s telling himself, That’s a samovar, that’s a pencil sharpener. He never used the words as his mother intended. He uses them to keep material things at bay. And by now, in fact, the words have replaced the things themselves.

But there are moments when his nostalgia for the world of a potbelly stove, bull thistle, Dreema Hannibal behind the church in Prestonsburg, holding his little hand in hers while no one saw, of his mother dipping the comb in the water of the washbasin and parting his hair while the two of them observed in the mirror—moments when his desire to hold a thing, a thing in his hand, to impress himself again with the dumb objectness of it—is so piqued he will do anything his imagination tells him in order to achieve it.

He wants the world and not the name of the world.

But every time he tries to descend on a hammer, or an amethyst, his interior voices start asking him, What is the word for that? What do you think it means to lift an amethyst in your fingers? Telling him, Get back to work. Telling him, Put that hammer down, you’ll break something.

And, finally, the private argument is always, always, Should he do this, or shouldn’t he?

So that he must ask himself if he dares stir the sugar in his tea.

(He does not.)

If he dares refill the oil in the lamp.

(He does not.)

If he dares lift his head from the pillow and watch his sister depart the room.

(He does not dare lift his head.)

So that every mere wish to hold a key, a thimble, a saw, and to leave it at that, collapses into accusation, counteraccusation, shame, and dread.

So that this morning, with the glass from the watch case glittering on the toes of his shoes, the jeweler’s hammer in the jeweler’s grip as if this were fitting, and then charging down the street, and then on the streetcar, the old solution—as backward as the problem—presented itself to his mind, once more, sweetly, like the promise of custard after supper.

Does he dare step off the streetcar?

He does step off the streetcar.

Does he dare follow this woman home, a whistling, unlucky woman he has never met before, with a burlap onion sack on her shoulder as she goes up the street now? (We will all have our misfortunes.)

He does follow her.

The old promise, the repudiated dog that loved him. Saying, There is a thing, wrapped in its name. Go on, catch it.

Then, afterward, he wanted something sweet. He walked down the block toward the main avenue. It had begun to snow. In an alley two girls were trying to balance another, much smaller girl on the back of a dalmatian. He paused on the sidewalk in front of a tiny storefront window where pastries were displayed, and intricately decorated cookies in the shapes of summer fruit. It was some kind of café or tavern. Inside, the space between the bar and the wall was just wide enough for a man to walk through if he turned himself sideways. The jeweler bought three of the cookies and a newspaper. He sat at the far end of the bar and waited for them to come find him.

He is waiting for them at the bar, which gleams this way, this beautifully, because of the beautiful name of the substance enveloping it—
shellac.
A word of which records are made, and then music is etched into the records. A word over which he has been compelled to pause before, aghast at how lovely it is, and yet how it shows his own unlovely face back at him. Which word, in one of its verb senses, means “to thrash soundly.”

PART THREE

Bogus 1952 - 1953

9

A
Saturday. Enzo Mazzone was on the job until six o’clock. When he got home, the dishes were still in the sink, a pack of cigarettes was missing from the utility drawer, the radishes were not picked, the peppers were not picked, the beans were not limed, the lettuces were not weeded, the boy was nowhere to be found.

Wood spoon in hand, he prowled the backyards, stalked across the ball field behind the church, down the railroad tracks, under the bridge, over the bridge, down around the perimeter of the Chagrin Avenue woods, whacking his head with the spoon as the mosquitoes fed on him. With the right wind he could have smelled his prey. He sneaked up the alley by the bakery and out in front of Mrs. Marini’s house, but the boy wasn’t there.

The old lady was sitting on the banquette of her screened front porch in a bushy black wig, shucking corn over a laundry kettle.

“Enzo!” she shouted through the screen. “Come here.”

“Give him up,” he commanded. He was standing in her begonias, right up at the rail of the porch.

“But I don’t have him.”

“Habeas corpus,” he said.

“He wasn’t here earlier. He’s not here now.”

“I want his head. Do you understand?”

“Come up here. I’m like a judge, where you’re pleading your case at the bar. He’s a nice boy. Leave him alone.”

Enzo went inside the cool, dim, bugless enclosure. He opened a lawn chair and sat down, extending his hand in the direction of the kettle.

“Keep your grubby hands off my corn,” she said.

“What’s all this? You hate corn.”

“Dom LaMana had garden surplus. He thinks he was doing me a favor. This, this enormous basket of chicken feed he carried fifteen blocks in the sun. The sweat on the top of his head, you should have seen, it was like a fountain. I disguised my true feelings out of courtesy.” She gave him a wide-eyed look that Enzo took to mean, Please take this corn off my hands.

“I have the colitis. I can’t eat corn,” he said.

“Perhaps Ciccio—”

“The boy gets nothing,” he interrupted. “The boy starves.”

She went into the house and brought him half of a salami sandwich, a wilted salad, a fork, and a limp linen napkin.

Enzo surmised it was all left over from the boy’s lunch. He insisted she disclose his whereabouts as he pushed the sandwich into his mouth.

“Don’t think you can bully me,” she said. And then in English, “Go find your fink someplace else.”

She suggested that if he were to clean his hands thoroughly she might permit him to help with the corn, so he went inside and scrubbed the grease and mortar out of the cracks in his hands. He had expended the day laying brick for a suburban shopping center, three stories up and as long as a city block, without a single angle or window, like the tomb of a dictator. He worked more slowly than years ago but accomplished twice as much. He was a shining piece of modern engineering these days, fleshless and precise, an unerring machine.

He went back out. The trees overhanging her porch were lush, the sun was not too bright, the wind had a taste in it, a vegetable sweetness. Down the block people were hosing down their driveways and sidewalks. Next door, Larry Lombardi was using an electric gizmo to trim his azaleas.

“Left,” Mrs. Marini said.

Enzo offered his hand for her inspection. She pulled the fingers apart, glowered at the cuticles, the stained and swollen eminence that opened and closed the thumb over the palm, the blood blister beneath the nail on the middle finger. She said, “Is this as clean as they get? Did you use the brush?” His left pinky didn’t work, it stayed erect when he made a fist. He had been made to register as an alien of enemy nationality during the war; the clerk tried to get his fingerprints, but the tips of his mortar-worn fingers were as blank as glass. He couldn’t put a spiral on a football because he couldn’t get a purchase on the skin.

He bent himself over the kettle, ripping the corn apart with disgust while begonia pollen breezed through the screen.

“Did he eat here or did you pack his lunch for him?” Enzo said, wagging a shorn ear at her and sneezing into his shoulder.

“Don’t you threaten me.”

“That Slav was with him, I guess.”

“You believe that I am breakable, and you are mistaken.”

“He went to downtown, to the ballgame, with the flea Ricky, while my peppers are rotting, and you protect him,” Enzo said.

The boy was fifteen years old. He was smarter than his father, but he didn’t know it yet. He claimed he couldn’t tell the difference between a tomato from the garden and a tomato from the store. He gave up on the accordion, and Enzo wrapped it up in its velvet pall, closed it in its case, and stowed it in the otherwise vacant attic of the house he’d bought the year after the boy was born. All Ciccio wanted to do in what he called his free time was play football and pick fights. As if it mattered what he wanted to do. Enzo made him work all summer in Patrizia’s grapes, hoping the lonesome would make him a more formidable person. The boy was too old to be so agreeable.

Ciccio had a sight hound’s face. The long, narrow, protruding nose was crooked, and the big eyes were closely set. He had recently pubesced, instantaneously, and the hairs grew even on his pimpled shoulders. His teeth were discolored from coffee and Mars bars. It must have been an illusion created by the comical elongation of his forehead and face that his hairline seemed already to be in regress. His height was excessive, like a vulgar joke.

They finished with the corn. They went inside and she put a loaf of bread on the table, and a bowl of mushrooms. Enzo chewed one of them, then got up, rummaged her kitchen drawers for a pack of cards, and discreetly spit the mushroom into the bucket of scraps for the garden. It was raw.

A knock came from the clatterous screen door that opened onto a path through her garden to the alley gate in back, and she popped up to answer it. He found the cards and poured himself a glass of wine from the pantry, unable to hear what she was saying in the breezeway to these people at the door. He sat down with his glass, snapped the rubber band off the cards, and inspected his shirt pockets for cigarettes.

The pneumatic mechanism that slowly closed the door of the breezeway
siss
ed, long and malicious, as the piston pressed the air out of the cylinder; then it shut with a clap.

The smell reached him, sweet-sour—only momentarily did he fail to recognize what it was—of the fetid feet of an unwashed teenaged boy.

He blinked. He stood up. The chair crashed to the floor behind him.

He shot through the breezeway, down the garden steps, and through the pole beans and chard growing on either side of the narrow garden path. The old lady protested from the house as he fumbled with the latch and finally threw open the back gate into the alley. What he saw there was the accomplice, Ricky, rounding the bakery corner and disappearing onto Twenty-sixth Street.

The closer on the breezeway door repeated its long, insinuating sound.

He listened to it, then pointed himself down the center of the alley and flew.

He was all legs, growling, fleet, and livid.

He ran on top of the puddles. Rounding the bakery corner himself, he caught a glimpse of Ricky, in some old man’s plaid pants that had been shorn crookedly at the knees, vanishing at the edge of the dry cleaner’s. They were turning onto Eleventh Avenue. A tactical error on Ciccio’s part (Ciccio was leading; Enzo hadn’t seen him, but he had smelled him well enough).
When being chased, avoid open places.
The boy never listened.

Enzo threw himself across Twenty-sixth Street, leaping into the air. He could not hear his footfalls. Hurdling heaps of garbage, springing right in front of a cruising yellow Oldsmobile. However, they were headed
uphill.
Perhaps he’d underestimated the boy. Exhaust the enemy, the boy was thinking. I am fifteen, he is forty-eight, the boy was thinking. I will not merely escape. I will humiliate my pursuer.

Enzo made the cleaner’s and veered up the hill. Eleventh Avenue was a throng of fruit vendors, nut vendors; the armies of the retired, the lame, the blown out and wasted; the philosophers; the poets of the last, lost era; the prophesiers of impending atomic catastrophe; the man who sold his homemade brand of bleach from a wagon painted electric white crying, “Brilliantone! Brilliantone!”; the woman who picked the sidewalk clean while she went; the heartless, the jobless, the shoeless; the man who sharpened your knives with a pedal-operated grindstone while you sat on the stoop, listening.

He swerved into the gap between the lanes, and the boys came into view, both of them at once, toeing the double yellow line between traffic, white knee socks pulled all the way up (they had been in the high grass someplace), on a dead sprint. The cars moved slowly to the edges of the street. Nobody seemed to be taking special notice, because a man chasing two boys up this street was nothing special.

He had forgotten the happiness of running away and of giving chase. Between the ages of five and thirteen, he had spent half his hours crashing through the dark alleys of a desolate hilltop town thick with the odor of molding fruit peels, bathwater, and shit, ducking away from the wider lanes, playing games in which the rules changed without notice, midcareer.