The End (23 page)

“What happened?” his father asked.

Somehow the line had broken, Enzo explained, feeling buoyant and sick, like a child in a toy boat. He had been waiting for the last half hour while the long-distance operator tried to reestablish it, he said. In any event, what was the number of his father’s train?

Halloween night. Enzo and the boy drove the truck downtown and left it in the parking lot of the cavernous baseball stadium. Nothing protected the stadium from the winds of the lake, which was only a hundred feet away to the north, and the wind blew through its open corners, playing the building like a reed. They walked through Public Square, the boy, as always, two paces ahead—was it the boy who was speeding up, or was Enzo slowing down?—and into the basement of Erie Station Tower. He told Ciccio that if his grandfather learned, by whatever means, even from a little birdie, that Ciccio smoked cigarettes, he would be beaten within a quarter of an inch of his life.

He had made the boy iron their shirts for once, and Ciccio had done a competent job, but he had used too much starch, and it had turned Enzo’s sweat to glue. A train pulled into the terminal. People of all colors spilled out of the cars. Ciccio was in front of him. He tucked the boy’s tie under the back of his collar. Enzo’s lazy eye veered off as he tried to make sense of the timetable.

“He’s going to be a big fucking ballbuster,” Ciccio was saying despondently.

“And the language,” said Enzo.

“And he won’t understand anything I say,” Ciccio said. “What do I do with this guy when you’re not around?”

“‘This guy.’ What kind of a word is that?”

Ciccio looked at the pavement and spat on it.

What was the boy? What was the word for him?
Careless.
But if Enzo weren’t charged with shaping him, if he were somebody else looking at the boy from the side, then the word he might have used instead was
untroubled.

Once, while Enzo was in the barber’s chair, he had seen Ciccio sliding down the sidewalk across the street with his pack of pals. He was the tallest of them by a head. He smoked, like the others, while they passed a basketball by bouncing it against the concrete of the sidewalk. Then one of them bounced it too hard—it was a piece of mock abuse—and the ball flew over the boy being abused and caromed into the street, where the swerving cars dodged it.

Ciccio went after the ball, sideways. He kept on yammering with the boys. Enzo saw it while Pippo the Barber’s scissors chirruped at his sideburns.

Ciccio’s feet and his hands were looking for the ball, but the senses that lived in the head were pointed back at the conversation he was having.

All this happened very quickly.

The ball still had a bit of bounce, and Ciccio, reaching it in the near lane, tapped, and tapped again, with his cigarette in the fingers of that very hand.

Look at that boy there.

Where were the cars?

What is the name, Mazzone, that you gave to the boy on the other side of the glass?

Where were the cars that would flatten him?

The ball came under the boy’s control. But rather than throwing it back to the sidewalk and hustling out of the way, what did he do (while his father watched unseen, wishing he had a god to call on)? He dribbled it, free and easy, right on the street, and the car approaching slowed to a halt in front of him while Ciccio made a half wave at the driver and in due course reached the group again, never having slowed or sped his untroubled step.

On the platform at the station, Ciccio looked down at his spit and stepped on it.

A man in a white uniform sold them some peanuts. There were many colored children. Another car arrived, and the men climbed down to the platform, cigarettes hanging from their mouths.

“Why isn’t he bringing his wife?” Ciccio asked.

“Your grandmother, you meant to say—hey, pick those shells up off the floor,” Enzo said. “You’re in a public place.”

Ciccio bent down. “You got a mother, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t,” Enzo said. “She died.”

The boy stood upright. The swollen veins that divagated across his forehead gradually reverted into the skin. He said, “I didn’t know that. Why don’t you tell me why I didn’t know that?”

“She died eight years ago,” Enzo said, chewing each bean into a paste before he swallowed it.

“When do I get to find out about your secret mob ties?” Ciccio said. “You know, I mean, come on.” He wasn’t angry. He didn’t get angry. He got mouthy.

Enzo inspected the boy’s creased and unpolished calfskin shoes. If he had one wish, it would be to get into the boy’s dreams and trouble them.

“It’s like you think I’m a worm for the Feds, seriously.”

“What do you want to know?”

Ciccio adopted an inquisitorial tone. “What’s your real name,
Mazzone?
”

They stood over the trash can, dropping in the shells, inhaling the fragrant bacteria.

“Mazzone,” Enzo said. Because he could think of nothing else to say, he added, “What’s yours?”

Some of the skins of the nuts were tangled in Ciccio’s shameful mustache.

“I’m bored. Why do we have to be so goddamn early for everything? This guy is going to squash me. Why am I telling you? You’ll laugh.”

He liked it when Ciccio talked, sometimes. He wished he had more to say to him. He was more and more the hearing kind.

The trains barreled into the station along half a dozen tracks with the great noise of many tons of iron rolling on steel. The shriek of the brakes deafened him.

He hadn’t gotten a scarf. He would know his father’s face. But five minutes after the train had arrived, he and the boy split up, looking for an elderly, confused-looking foreigner certain to be dressed to the nines for travel. Enzo hastened toward the front of the platform. By now the train that had allegedly contained his father had already left, and an identical train had taken its place.

He regretted he hadn’t worn the scarf. A dozen silent Negro children were being led off the train by an old Negro woman and a young Negro man wearing a clerical collar.

Enzo headed systematically toward the rear of the platform, stopping to check the bathroom and the ticket counter. He took off his hat and smoothed his hair. He put his hat back on.

Shortly, the boy was standing in front of him, holding the arm of a gnomish gentleman with a carnation in his lapel.

Unfortunately, it was not his father. His father was much bigger than this. The boy was distracting him with games.

“He looks lost, but he isn’t the right size,” Ciccio said.

The man looked Enzo up and down.

Ciccio held a suitcase in his free hand.

“Stop, Cheech, you’re just confusing people. Leave him alone.”

“I told you to wear the scarf,” said the man, in dialect.

“What did he say?” the boy asked.

A boar hunt. His father waited, wearing a black tie and his only coat, at the mouth of a ravine. Enzo chased the crying animal down the slope. He emerged from the trees, and the boar headed south, but he threw a rock that made it veer the other way, and it charged around a copse of fig trees, following the edge of the dried-out bed of the creek. Moments later he heard the report of the shotgun. He heard his father make a call for his brothers and him to come down from the woods. No one knew yet that he had won. He had chased the boar into the trap. He was fastest. He reached the bottom of the ravine in time to see the old man blow his nose into his handkerchief and twist himself around the panting animal ’s head, gripping the tusks, and cut its throat, and the blood came out. And then the old man looked up. He looked up. He saw that it was Enzo running in the ravine, pulling on the shirt that he had flapped to flush the boar. Now Enzo reached him, and the old man wiped the blood off his hand, and put the hand to Enzo’s face.

The man let go of Ciccio’s arm and pulled down Enzo’s face and kissed his mouth.

Clocks and smoke. The butane perfume of cigarette lighters flipped open. He had last been kissed on the mouth by a prostitute in the summer of 1950. It was the only time. Later, he regretted the expense.

The old man had had an old man’s riven, misleadingly hard and dour face even in Enzo’s youth. It seemed like a cunning disguise that he had since grown a layer of fat that had transformed the face into a rough pile of fleshy pouches, like a dilapidated stone wall from which the mortar in the joints has washed away.

“Oh, Vincenzo,” he said courteously, “how long it’s been since I’ve seen you.”

Enzo thought he saw all the many lights in the station diminish and go bright again, as though the shadow of death had raced across his eyes. “Hello, Pop,” he said.

“What did you say?” asked the boy.

Enzo’s father let go of his face and turned to the boy. “Mazzone Francesco,” he said, indicating for the boy to incline his head, and then kissing his cheeks, “I am called Mazzone Francesco as well.”

It was 7:14 in the evening, said the great clock suspended from the ceiling of the vaulted vestibule.

“Tell him to stop kissing me,” Ciccio said.

“Doesn’t he understand anything I’m saying?” said Francesco Mazzone.

“Sometimes,” Enzo said. “He doesn’t know how to speak. He understands when he tries.”

“You’re talking about me, but what are you saying?” said the boy.

Outside, Francesco wanted to know if it was customary for children to dress in such dramatic fashion. Witches, ballerinas, ghosts, and hobos entered and departed the storefronts.

“He’s confused about the costumes,” Enzo explained.

“How disgraceful,” Francesco said.

“This is our Public Square,” the boy said pleasantly.

“This is the square, he says,” Enzo translated.

“I see that for myself, thank you.”

They walked down Coshocton Street toward the water.

Francesco Mazzone shook a couple of Camel cigarettes from a pack inside his coat and handed one to Enzo and one to the boy. “I bought these in Yonkers. They are of the very highest quality.” His head was a well-cut block on which the trim white hair was meticulously arranged.

Ciccio was wide-eyed with awe and gratitude.

The old man had taken Ciccio’s arm.

“Enzo, translate.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m dying from cold,” Francesco said, addressing the boy. “Is it always like this? I’ve never been so cold in my life.”

Enzo started to translate, but the boy waved him off. They managed to communicate through pointing and nods. As they approached the truck on the dark side of the stadium, the boy started using Italian words he had always refused to admit he knew how to pronounce.

They drove east down Maumee Avenue, Francesco in the window seat, the boy with the gearshift between his legs, shifting when Enzo engaged the clutch. Francesco and the boy were holding a more or less regular discussion, with only occasional recourse to Enzo for translation.

They drove through niggertown.

“This is where the moolies live,” the boy said.

“Hey.”

“What? I thought that was the word.”

“What did he say?” Francesco said.

“This is where the tizzoons live,” Ciccio said.

“I
told
you what to call them.”

“Is there a law?” his father asked. He meant a law about who could live where.

“No,” Enzo said. “Maybe. I don’t know, honestly.”

They passed through a series of green lights. Snow fell. Francesco held up a finger, pointed at himself, indicated the truck, and then spoke briefly.

The boy said, “He’s never been in a car before?”

“That can’t be,” Enzo said.

“Buses, of course. All the time. When we go to see your brothers in Bergamo. Never once in a private car. This is a strange kind of car. What kind of car is this?”

“A pickup,” the boy said.

Francesco repeated the word.

The boy said, in Italian, with nary an accent, “Your voyage, how it was? You am comfortable on it?”

“Where did you learn to talk like that?” Enzo demanded.

“I can’t. I don’t know,” the boy said, downshifting. “It just comes out.” That was the boy. Opening his mouth for anything that knocked on his rotten teeth.

And here was their church, the boy explained.

Enzo had been married in it twenty-three years before, with his union pin holding the boutonniere to his jacket and the boys from Local 238 standing in for relatives. Carmelina wore a satin suit and a small hat with a veil on it. He used to wake up in the morning with her sweet rose soap on his breath and a loose strand of her hair stuck in his throat.

Something was slowing Enzo down. It had been slowing him down for a long time. Eventually, like a ball thrown straight up that slows and slows, he would come to a stop for a moment, in midair, and begin his descent.

Francesco Mazzone, throwing one leg over the other and turning himself suavely, gripped Ciccio’s chin, turning the head from side to side, examining it skeptically, like a rancher at a livestock auction. “Such a good-looking boy,” he said, staccato, in dialect. “You should do something about these teeth, however, Enzo. Lemon juice and bicarbonate. Morning and afternoon.”

“What did he say?” the boy asked.

Enzo didn’t answer.

Tomorrow was All Saints’ Day, and after that All Souls’, but he had forgotten to buy candles to light in his house for his dead.

11

S
ome kid caught hold of Ciccio’s hair, a rassler from the public school who smelled of Munster cheese, sort of a dude, with his corduroy collar up—never mind how the fight got started. They were downtown, at the New Odessa rail yard. Ciccio had the usual advantage of his height and reach. But this individual went for the hair, no self-respect, and bounced Ciccio’s face on a railroad tie.

Now Ciccio was leaking blood from a gash on the high bone of the cheek, limp with fear of what Mrs. Marini was going to do to him. But he’d allowed a wound of similar depth to go unattended in the past—it was on his forearm, he kept his sleeves rolled down—and it got so fouled up he’d had to dig out the pus with a spoon.