The End (24 page)

It was the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, a holiday they hadn’t kept since his mother went away, six years previous. Nobody ever told him what the reason was.

Mrs. Marini probed indifferently at the swollen mess under his eye before changing her glasses to scrutinize the clothes, sniffing at a creosote blotch in the elbow of his jacket and then, with heart-felt scorn, smacking his face on the clean side. “When you die your father will have no heirs, don’t you realize that?” she said. “Go to the bathroom.”

There was a pot on the stove and the kitchen smelled of boiling poultry, but Ciccio’s appetite had just now left him. She hobbled down the cellar stairs.

Francesco Mazzone, the earlier model, lay on his back on the floor of the sewing room tinkering with the chassis of the desk. He had found an electric motor in the trash on someone’s curb and was trying to substitute it for the pedal-action drive of Mrs. Marini’s sewing machine, which excited the rheumatism in her hip. Or so Ciccio gathered from the two dialect words he recognized,
machine
and
trash,
and from the looks of things. The rubber pedal and the frayed belt that turned the flywheel had been tossed behind the dressmaker’s dummy into the heap she set aside for the paper-rags man, who would also take copper, tin, and bicycle tires. Earlier in the month, the old man had retiled the bathroom back at home with scavengings and rehabilitated her coffee percolator, a device he had never met before, the product of which disappointed him.

“Did you win?” asked Francesco Mazzone, taking Ciccio’s arm and leading him down the hall.

“Yes, I win,” Ciccio said. But he hadn’t won in any respect.

He sat on the lid of the commode. The disembodied heads of three young plaster ladies wearing Mrs. Marini’s other hairdos observed him with their remote, sexual, pouting looks from a shelf over the toilet paper. There was a fourth, but it was bald. His grandfather sat on the lip of the bathtub marveling at what you could find in this country’s rubbish and handling Ciccio’s skull in such a way as to position his thumbs on either side of the wound, pulling it apart and peering inside with one eye gaping and the other twisted shut. He exhaled tobacco, oranges, and tooth decay. His arms and his hands were so big and his grip on Ciccio’s head was so secure that he might have twisted the head off Ciccio’s shoulders like a squash.

“How did you get these little sticks in here?” the old man said, shiningly proud and slack-jawed, so that Ciccio could see all the way back to where his yellow tongue disappeared down his throat. The eroded molars put Ciccio in mind of the Black Hills of South Dakota, where he had never been. He had never been anyplace but the farm, and here.

“I turn him piss, shit, blood. I make nothing. The stars makes circles at his head. I rise. I come home. The victorious,” Ciccio said carefully.

The old man contorted his lips to dislodge a seed in his gums, and succeeded, and swallowed heavily.

Mrs. Marini supervised Ciccio’s washing of his hands with disinfectant soap and let him proceed straight through rinsing before she made him do it all over again with the brush. Only then did she allow him to handle the tweezers she had soaked in alcohol. His grandfather held the mirror while Ciccio picked the splinters out of his face. She dabbed the wound with peroxide and smeared it with iodine. He was saddened to hear that stitches weren’t called for but held out hope for a little scarring. A faint, permanent change in coloration was all he wanted, something to observe in later years, when he’d be able to think better, nothing that would make him look retarded, or more so, rather, just a historical marker, a chip in the favored plate.

Ciccio Mazzone took no pride in his looks. Something was amiss in his face, but he didn’t know what it was. The scientific thing would have been to monitor the changes of his features over time by comparing Ciccio Mazzone (or Frank, as nobody at home would call him) with his baby pictures, but none existed. Pop, when asked why not, only cut the crusts off his sandwich, carried it on the cutting board to the ottoman in the front room, crashed softly to the carpet, and ate.

Mrs. Marini snipped some gauze and taped it to Ciccio’s face, all the time slugging him with abuse. If Pop had said the same things to him he would have felt backwardly joyful, but coming from her—he wanted to pull his shirt over his eyes in shame.

The trick with the sewing machine had worked. Mrs. Marini even applauded, which Ciccio had never seen her do except to be nasty. The screaming motor made a smell of ozone. She sent them back to number 123 with a pot of chicken stew and some changes of the bandage. Pop was working time and a half, so supper would have to wait.

Ciccio and Francesco Mazzone made their way down the hill, quiet. All the stores were closed in preparation for the holiday that nobody understood. Due to recent petty theft, the church was chained shut. A thin rain came down. All day the city had been leaking dark fluids down its curbsides, prone in its dress grays, like a dead Confederate soldier.

He had had to wear his good shoes to school for a debate in Western Civilization. Then he had slunk with the fellows for two hours in the drizzle, and the leather had shrunk around his feet, which now tormented him. He guessed it might be all right to have some Sally or Susan-Anne, to tell her, Aw, baby, my feets hurt bad. And she’d be soft with him. Probably. But then she’d want to come visit at home.

His grandfather handed him the umbrella they were sharing and hiked up his pants like a dainty chick at the beach so the bottoms wouldn’t drag in the runoff.

It was a strange day. Ciccio was feeling unlike himself. He was fifteen, restive, aggravated. During similar moods when he was a little kid, he would climb onto a chair in front of the calendar over the telephone table, flip ahead a few months, and write, in a square that indicated a very distant date,
This day will never come.

He suspected that he missed his mother. He turned the suspicion over in his brain and poked under its folds and did some timeworn experiments to test it, and he was embarrassed when he concluded that it wasn’t true. For example, two years ago she had sent his father a telegram saying she wanted to come stay with them, but Ciccio had intercepted the shitty thing, the telegram, and disposed of it. Did he regret that? Nope.

They passed the darkened pork store and made the turn onto Twenty-second Street, a turn he had made one hundred thousand times. He confessed to Francesco Mazzone that his shoes were ruined and his feet were in pain. Anyway, that was what he was trying to get across. And the old man only sniffed, so that the hair growing from his nose fluttered, and the rain went
tap tap
on the umbrella.

Francesco Mazzone had made a practice of rousing Ciccio at five a.m. by sopping a dishtowel in cold water and slathering Ciccio’s face with it. Then he walked Ciccio to school—a four-mile slog down Saint Ambrose Boulevard, the road thick with smoke under the sinister light of the streetlamps while the trolleys sped down the median. Ciccio had always ridden the trolley before, dozing through the jolts and rattles, and had stumbled into morning chapel with the rheum still clogging his eyes. Now he’d come to count on this long exertion in raw weather to grease his mental and bodily wheels. They didn’t have much to say to each other while they walked, and there was a generosity in this, a roominess. It left him free to watch the street and think. So long as he didn’t fall into the trap of thinking about himself, he enjoyed it.

The old man would shuffle along, tying and retying his scarf and yanking at his pants as they went. How he managed to walk all the way into the city and back again on his ruined feet, Ciccio didn’t know. The only complaint his grandfather ever made was that his feet hurt. At the same time the old man was convinced that all his foot trouble came from poor circulation and that unless he walked for at least three hours a day, his feet would dry up and fall apart. Ciccio had seen him take off his socks, exposing the dried-out flecks of sponge that were his toenails, and the many corns, and the purple-blotched and bloated insteps. The bones were contorted in such a way that you wondered how he could walk at all.

The two of them and their chicken supper arrived at home. Ciccio climbed the stairs and threw his books on the floor in his room. He lit a cigarette and stumbled down to the kitchen, faint under the effect of the noxious chemicals he’d introduced into his bloodstream. He felt trapped and crippled, thinking, Ciccio Mazzone, Ciccio Mazzone, Ciccio Mazzone. He felt at a permanent remove from everything he saw. Hard to say what had brought this on. He hated this house. He hated the smell of the house.

He wished he had somebody to talk to.

At the sink, the old man was drawing hot water into their stock-pot. He indicated with a movement of the hand like the dribbling of an invisible basketball that Ciccio should sit down.

Ciccio got an ashtray from the counter and seated himself, observing the square and determined back of this figure he resembled in no way but in name.

The old man heaved and pivoted, bending deeply, and dropped the steaming pot on the floor at Ciccio’s feet. He knelt strainingly. Then he began to unlace Ciccio’s shoes.

The mind of Ciccio Mazzone was an unruly animal. He could not explain why it would buck or leap or chase some innocent creature that wasn’t truly there at moments when the world outside the brain-pan gave it no clear impetus for doing these things. In any case, here were the events being recounted in his mind at the present moment:

At the siege of Yorktown, in 1781, when the Americans were trying to free themselves from the British, Lafayette and a French army had come to the Americans’ aid. One hundred thirty-six years then elapsed. Lafayette, Washington, George III, Cornwallis, all had died. Their children and grandchildren had died. The Germans were beating up on the French, and the Americans decided to get into the Great War and defend them. John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, the American general, landed in France. The story was that he then traveled to Paris and visited the crypt where the old hero was buried in soil brought from the United States, and one of his aides, Colonel C. E. Stanton, said aloud, “Lafayette, we are here.”

To Ciccio Mazzone the significance of this was that we may perceive ourselves to be careening aimlessly through space, when in fact distant events have thrown us into long, elliptical, cometlike orbits, far from our origins, and eventually we will circle back on people whose lives preceded and gave rise to our own. We may recognize them immediately. Or else we may meet a stranger for the first time and, while shaking his hand, feel vividly that an ancient obligation has finally been kept.

“I’m going to show you how to take care of your feet,” the old man said. “Pay attention and don’t forget how I’m doing this.”

His glasses were fogged. He took them off, inserted one of the stems between his teeth, and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He stripped Ciccio of his sodden socks and cuffed his pants. Then he seized Ciccio’s feet and plunged them, with his own hands, into the stinging water.

The old man shifted his weight from knee to knee, the lenses dangling from his jaw while his white hands and Ciccio’s white feet reddened in the pot. Hands and feet were then pulled from the water, and the old man began his work.

Each of the toes was pinched individually and rolled between the meaty fingers. He scrubbed the dead skin from Ciccio’s heels with a brush and picked the rot from between the toes, flicking it into the water. The webbing between the toes was cracked, and the old man’s fingers were crooked.

He dropped the feet back into the water for a minute and stretched his hands. Then he lifted the feet out again and jammed his thumbs into the arches. He squeezed and stretched, kneading the balls of the feet, and isolated a long tendon, the existence of which Ciccio had been unaware, and rubbed it down and pulled it straight.

Ciccio hadn’t realized how stiff and cold his feet were until they began to loosen and warm. His foot was held in both of the old man’s hands, was wrung by them, then released suddenly, and he could feel the blood go.

Meanwhile, in a distant quarter, the mind of Ciccio Mazzone was chasing Lafayette. Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette. Some decades after the Revolution he’d taken a tour of the states and everywhere he went they named towns for him that persisted to the present. From this trip, he took home to France a box of American dirt so he could be buried under it.

Now, Ciccio would have liked to talk to Lafayette. Maybe Lafayette could have answered some questions he had. Because this thing of taking the American dirt home but still wanting to be buried in France, this was the act of a man who was really cut in half, like Ciccio was cut in half (but what were his halves?), and had found a way—the shipping of the dirt—of turning an idea into a real thing. Like these pods at the bottoms of Ciccio’s legs were only ideas to him, they were kind of unlikely locomotive machines that translated electrical impulses and muscle contractions and logarithms into swift forward motion, but the old man was saying, They are feet, they are feet.

12

T
he new road to Ashtabula was freshly, soundly paved, a four-lane superhighway, white with salt, that shortened the trip to the farm from two hours to one and led them along the lakeshore, through the ashy manufacturing and port towns, rather than through the corn and hog tent counties to the south, as the old roads did. As the truck flew over the surface, the frigid air whiffled into the vents, through the simmering foils of the radiator under the dash, and out over the shoes of the two men inside, saturating the cab agreeably with warmth. The younger man, Enzo, who drove, resembled his father in the slight flatness of his crown, in the furrows that had begun to show at the corners of his fleshy mouth, and in his thick, mangled hands, on which the skin was too scabrous for hair to grow. However, both his father’s eyes looked squarely forward, unlike his own, and the nails of the fingers were better cared for.