The End (20 page)

The narrowness of mind and of purpose.

There is the boy. Get him.

The initial burst of desire and power burned off. But then he didn’t stop. Going up and up the hill, the cars having parted and made way. He didn’t stop, and the thrill turned into something else, a peacefulness of mind he rarely felt anymore.

They were, all three of them, moderate smokers. This couldn’t go on forever. Enzo was gaining on them, but he was shorter than they were, so his old legs were working twice as fast. The boy would be taking this into account. Let him wear himself out, the boy was thinking. Exhaust him and humiliate him while I run away in my baseball socks.

A whale of a Studebaker turned left onto Thirtieth Street, blocking his view momentarily, an excuse for the boy to change course. When the middle of the street opened up again, Enzo saw Ciccio’s burred head breaking left above the traffic. Ricky had escaped. All the better. Ciccio’s scalp was red and peeling. Enzo had found a louse on him and shaved his head two days before and rubbed it with poison and told him he must wear a hat now or the sun would scorch his naked scalp, but the boy had disregarded him.

There is the boy. Bring him to justice.

Enzo wasn’t tired. He could run like this forever.

He turned down Thirtieth Street.

He wasn’t tired—then a stopcock came open in each of his two flat feet, and the life force was like a liquid draining out of him, into the gutter.

He slowed, and slowed, and finally sat on the curb, crumpled, sucking air.

Someone had removed the classy old egg-and-dart cornices from the façade of the house he was facing and had replaced them with plain white boards. Certainly they were easier to paint.

He stumbled along the downhill blocks back toward Mrs. Marini’s house. Maybe it took him three hours to get there. At the fish truck, on the way, on the corner of Twenty-ninth, he bought a walleye. It was the biggest thing, a long silver animal with savage teeth. He was famished.

“Head off, or head on?” said the uneasy, ill-fed, and gray-faced young man as he shook the ice off the fish, which eerily resembled him, onto the avenue pavement.

“On,” Enzo said. And the young man wrapped it in white butcher paper and tied it with a length of orange ribbon, poorly.

Also, Enzo bought a bag of licorice and a bag of cherries and some parsley from various men on the street.

His fault was not that he did not beat the boy enough, but that he didn’t beat him with a correcting fervor, and so, for the boy, to be beaten was only the cost of a scamp’s afternoon and no longer shamed him. Enzo’s heart wasn’t in it anymore. Look, he’d already bought him some candy.

He entered Mrs. Marini’s kitchen still not in control of his breathing. His shins were killing him. She was at the sink shelling peas.

“Go outside and knock,” she said.

He went outside. He was a believer in the formalities, in the keeping of customs even after their original intent was exhausted. They sustained him.

She came to the door. “My Enzo!” she said, stretching her sarcastic arms. “What’s this package that someone didn’t know how to tie?”

He gave her the fish. Then he took off his shoes and went into the front room, where the boy lay asleep on the sofa.

He dropped the licorice on the boy’s chest.

The boy woke up. “Hey, Pop,” he said.

Enzo sat down, rubbing his shins. The boy’s ripe feet repelled him. “You will obey me,” he said.

“It’s a pleasure to see you. You’re a sight for sore eyes.” But his sore eyes were closed. He grinned with his thick, chafing, woman’s lips.

“Don’t get wise in the face,” Enzo said. “Now then, my peppers and beans. Speak.”

“I forgot.”

“He forgot, he says.”

“I forgot to do them.”

Enzo unbuckled his belt as he stood up, trying to think of something he could say that would penetrate the boy’s goodwill and also fend it off. “And the lies,” he said desperately.

“Sorry. I meant to say, I made a bad decision. I don’t know what’s good.”

“Stand up so I can beat you.”

“Stand up so I can beat you,” the boy parroted. It was dead-on. It was incredible. He had a gift, but it was for the circus. And Enzo wagged his weary head at the prospect of this boy turning into a man who had never learned that eventually you have to give up the cheap kick of being interesting to other people, that you can go on eating it, but it won’t feed you.

From the kitchen came the solid
thwack
of Mrs. Marini decapitating the walleye.

“I am the king of my house.”

“But this isn’t your house,” the boy pointed out, raising a finger.

“Yes, well,” Enzo said, tightening his belt again and snapping it closed. The boy would get his beating later, on a full stomach. Good.

“Have some licorice,” said the boy, tearing open the cellophane and breathing in the saccharine chemical aroma his father despised.

Enzo Mazzone was a person of fixed patterns that mostly served him well, such as buying a treat for the boy on weekend afternoons although it might contradict the lesson he was otherwise trying to teach.

“I am the king of you,” said Enzo.

“Sure you are,” said the boy.

Mrs. Marini made a broth from the fish’s head and cooked the rice in it. She boiled them some peas to eat with the fish itself, which she roasted in a pan. Finally, a pear tart she had bought from Rocco’s.

Afterward, Ciccio and Mrs. Marini drank coffee while Enzo sipped at a glass of tap water that tinked with a dozen cubes of cocktail ice. He was of the school that abstained from drink until the meal was finished so as not to dilute the acids of the stomach. The ice stank of the freezer, and the water itself was barely potable, compared with the water on his mother-in-law’s farm, which he bottled and took home with him. His feelings regarding a drink of bitingly cold water with the merest whiff of sulfur coming off it were sentimental. They had more power over him than he would have liked.

(He had had an uncle, unmarried and abstemious—the name was Gregorio—who leased Enzo from his father at grain-cutting time and who would drink only the water of his own well and only when it was freshly pulled out of the ground. When Enzo was with him, he did likewise and taught himself the pleasure of going without. After the day’s work on the hillside plot, without a drop to drink since lunchtime, they trotted back to his uncle’s house, under the walls of the town, three miles, shoes in hand, as the dusty sun went down. When at last they arrived, his uncle hoisted the bucket out of the deep cave—and Enzo drank, the nerves inside his teeth throbbing and his esophagus recoiling painfully before it let the water down.)

The three of them—the boy, the old woman, and Enzo—opened walnuts in their chosen ways. Enzo smashed two of them against each other in his fist. The boy laid one seam up on the table and shattered it with the fat of his hand. Mrs. Marini used a mallet. Enzo couldn’t eat his and gave them to the boy.

Mrs. Marini said she had a six o’clock appointment. Ciccio wanted to know what kind of an appointment, but Enzo interrupted.

“If she wants you to know something, she’ll tell you,” Enzo said.

Mrs. Marini pursed her lips, aggrieved as always when she felt the boy was being roughly treated.

Enzo’s rolling eyes regarded the crystal light fixture in the ceiling. He would have to make an effort to beat Ciccio once they got home, but more and more of late it slipped his mind.

The boy and the old lady nipped at their little cups and went on talking. It was only local gossip, but it was frank and mean-spirited and smooth. He liked to listen to them. He rarely knew exactly what they were talking about.

He was a very lonely man.

They walked on down the avenue, Enzo and the boy. It was the hour of digestion, and no cars tried to pass through the crowded lanes, and the natty old men went arm in arm among the crowd, talking under their hat brims. What did they talk about? Supper; “Your nephew Anthony with the jungle-bunny music while I’m trying to sleep across the alley”; “That’s very nice workmanship on your slacks there, Carmen, who did those for you?” But these were already the dying days of men walking arm in arm down an American street while they digested their food. The young generation preferred to lie down on the sofa and smoke in their underpants.

The boy headed up Twenty-second, and Enzo followed half a step behind, fat, at his ease.

They stopped in for a minute at the DiStefano household so that Enzo could pay his weekly respects to a union brother lately retired.

Eddie DiStefano pulled himself nearly to a standing position and allowed them to shake his hand. Then he settled back into the recline of his lounging chair. It was in this chair that he now expended his summer days as the current of the fan atop his radio cabinet unend ingly struck his bristled face—chin up, squinting, serene, like a mal amute on a car ride. His obesity was majestic. You shook his hand, rather than shaking hands with him, because he did not swing the thumb down over your hand to grip it.

Did they know, Eddie began as soon as the volume of the radio had been adjusted by one of his little ones and Enzo and the boy were seated, did they know that there were certain cultures now living on Saint John’s Avenue, five minutes by foot from the house where they were currently relaxing in safety?

They did, but he continued.

The Slovaks had sold the parish of Saint Bartholomew’s. You could count on the fingers of one hand the Caucasian people still living in Fort Saint Clair. “Columbiana Avenue—absolutely lost, Dug ansville, New Odessa, Tooley Boulevard. One gigantic plantation. All of them holding hands, singing their songs.”

His many young children scurried on the carpeting around and under the mighty leatherette throne where he lived. His wife was at work (a typist in a brewery).

Six months before, lest doubt remain as to the sentiments of the citizens of Elephant Park, Eddie DiStefano and a few of his colleagues had hung a Negro dummy from a streetlamp in front of Holy Assumption Church; then they had called the newspapers and set it on fire. The dummy was made by Eddie’s little girls out of pillowcases, grass clippings, and house paint.

Time was, the Slovak kids knew better than to come into Elephant Park, and vice versa for the Italian kids staying out of Fort Saint Clair. If you married into another nationality (like Enzo’s sister-in-law, Antonietta, whom he’d never met; her husband was from Austria), it was understood you wanted to move, say, to Chicago or the suburbs. Now they were all concerned, white people. When this had happened, Enzo could not have told you. He himself didn’t even prevent the Croat Ricky from sleeping in his house.

With a yardstick, Eddie reached out to the fan on the radio and depressed one of its buttons, whereupon the previously fixed instrument began to turn its head imperiously from side to side, sermonizing them with its cold breath.

Eddie went on about the tizzoons.

They hadn’t planned to linger too long. It was more a visit to say, The men of Local 238 salute you and vow to carry your coffin when the day arrives.

Eddie said, “Am I right?”

“I am not political, Edward,” Enzo responded. He’d never voted. He was unsure how, physically, voting took place. He wasn’t even formally a citizen, he didn’t think. During the war, the previous war, with Europe, he wasn’t allowed to fly in an airplane, use a shortwave radio, or own a camera. It wasn’t any skin off his nose. The restrictions were lifted in 1943, he found out five years later. The boy wasn’t really political, either. He could tell you whatever you wanted to know about the Battle of Tippecanoe and how the Constitution was amended but had no interest in the local news.

Now, Enzo did follow the police action in Korea, with the anxious eye of the father of a teenaged boy. It was stalled now, but he was sure another war would start someplace in time to catch Ciccio up in it and blow him to smithereens.

Eddie asked them to stay for the supper that his Phyllis would prepare once she got home from work. The boy said sorry, but they’d already eaten. Coffee, then? Ice cream? A beer? Enzo said no, thanks, but he didn’t drink beer.

The boy began to suffer a fit of blinking, the way he did when he knew he was supposed to keep quiet but was about to make some flip comment anyway.

Enzo pointed at the boy. “He doesn’t drink beer either,” he intervened. And they all laughed. Ha, ha.

They continued toward home. Enzo suggested the width of a single wooden match by holding out his thumb and forefinger before the eyes of the boy. “You are this close,” he said. But Ciccio only boxed him on the shoulder like old chums.

They waited at the stoplight on the corner of Chagrin. The boy stood in the street and Enzo on the curb, so that they were nearly the same height and Enzo could see the pores inside the boy’s filthy ears.

Ciccio, inserting three fingers between the buttons of his jersey, flapped it to dry his sweat, and his father realized only then that all day long the boy had been flouting another one of the original house rules.

“Hold on,” Enzo said, his nostrils flaring as they sucked in the boy’s wafting scent. “The law regarding an undershirt at all times. Say it.”

“What do you care?” Ciccio said, his head bent into the breeze from below. “I should look like you, that’s all you care.”

Enzo bit his lip. He raised his hand, rotating it so that the splayed knuckles were oriented at the boy, and swung, cracking him in the face.

From Ciccio’s slanting nose a little blood splashed out, like a prize.

The boy said quietly, “Fuck.”

“Now how do you look?” Enzo said.

Fatherhood was a catalogue of threat, surveillance, legislation, prescription, prohibition, penal retribution, harassment, breaking and entering, assault and battery, cigarettes, meals, Latin, trigonometry, “Do like I say,” “Go get the tin snips,” “The square root of two divided by
x,
” “I told you to use the shoe trees, but you didn’t use the shoe trees.” While driving, the left hand is free to smoke with because the boy can shift the gears. Up the highway, down the highway, he washes you dry. “Stand up so I can beat you.” “You don’t know what’s good.” “Close the mouth when chewing.” “Close the light when leaving the room.” Brilliantone. Laundry.