The End (34 page)

Ciccio had brought the baker an ashtray and the two of them were talking about the burning of Washington by the British during the Madison administration, an event of which Rocco had never heard.

Was there any greater pleasure, she wondered, than to sit by an open window in the summertime, and drink a little, and talk?

All of a sudden Ciccio was telling them some kind of riddle.

Rocco sipped his wine and put the glass back on the table. Then he spat out the answer: “Objects descending from the clouds!”

“Oh, good, a game,” Mrs. Marini enthused.

The skin of Rocco’s yellow-green face had darkened from the booze and heat. He folded his arms over his bulbous stomach, as the sweat showed through his shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled above the peeling elbows, so that white flecks of him had come off and freckled his rumpled blue tie. He won another round of the game and laughed out loud. She had not heard him laugh before. It was a smoker’s laugh, percussive and followed by a little fit of wheezing.

“Cry for help,” Ciccio said. “Play with the rope and the bucket.”

“Things to do in a well,” said Rocco, and laughed again, slurping his wine.

He was a loquacious drinker, even expansive; she wouldn’t have guessed. Ciccio asked how many of the states he had seen.

The baker peered into his spidery eyebrows and drummed the fingers of his smoking hand one by one mechanically on the tabletop. “Nine,” he responded. Then he drew some figures in the air. “Do you know, it was forty years ago this year I arrived on our shores? It was at New Orleans, in the Louisiana. March twenty-third, 1913. Easter Sunday or the Monday following, I can’t remember. The earliest Easter in a hundred years. I couldn’t trade my currency because of the holiday. A city of believers, New Orleans. But I didn’t stay long.”

“What did you eat on the first night?” she asked. “Everybody remembers that.”

“Brown rice soaked in broth,” he said. “Out of a tin cup. Then I got on a train. Northbound. North-northwest. Straight into the heart of the continent—that would be five of the states right there—toward the Nebraska. I made a wrong turn coming out of the toilet and found myself in first class.”

Someone in the street shouted, “Ice cream! Lemon ice! Lemons!”

“There was a woman wearing a dog, I thought it was a dog on top of her hair,” Rocco said. “There was some kind of balm on the leather of the seat cushions that went all the way up my nose, and to this day if I smell it, there I am in the cabin. Midday.
Rattle rattle,
that was the tea service. Pressed copper on the ceilings. But the leather, that smell!”

The boy was mesmerized.

“Oh, it was just Newcomb’s neatsfoot oil. We even used it on our shoes,” she said.

“I kept a pet squirrel in the bachelor’s hotel, in a city that I couldn’t pronounce the name, and I went to adult education classes at the settlement house. I had an idea of everything improving. A little more food all the time, a heavier coat. My lungs were sound, my back was sound. Omaha. I couldn’t say the
h,
and then I could. Every part of me was pointed to a shining idea.”

“Ideas are trash,” Mrs. Marini said.

“I agree,” said the boy, shaking off his trance.

“Ideas aren’t really there,” she said.

“Of course they are. Like”—the baker paused, groping inwardly, then gestured up at the blank plaster of the ceiling—“the Holy Spirit, for example.”

Ciccio looked at her, waiting to hear what she would say.

“The Holy Spirit is for children and savages,” she said.

“I had a shining idea before my mind’s eye,” said the baker, “of the man I would become in the end.”

Ciccio sat up straight. He lifted his chin from its usual evasive slouch. The mismatched features of his mongrel face seemed briefly to align. He said, “Mr. LaGrassa, I think your son is dead.”

“Francesco Mazzone!” she hissed, spanking the table.

“You don’t have the first goddamn notion what you’re talking about,” Rocco told the boy. “Or yes you have, but it’s the first notion and nothing after. What is dead to a Christian?”

“Rude!” she exclaimed, but Ciccio wouldn’t look at her.

“I mean, this is kind of all a charade, right?” Ciccio said. “I mean, it’s kind of make-believe.”

She thought the baker was about to strike the boy. He stretched himself across the table, reaching, showing the back of his hand, but he only tapped the breast pocket of Ciccio’s shirt, three times confid ingly with his apish knuckles. It was a gesture of uncommon, obtuse, and misplaced affection, and Ciccio might have recoiled in response. Instead Ciccio looked down at the hand with interest, even admiration, as though he were the famous dog that had licked the hand of the surgeon vivisecting it. “You have a shining idea, too, my boy,” the baker said. “Everything seems to spin, am I right? But it spins around something compact in the middle. Or you’re in the dark in a dream, but you’re moving straight in one direction, like on a train in a tunnel. You don’t see the way out but you feel there’s a way out. Don’t you believe you’re pointed at it? I was supposed to work in steel when I got here, but the position fell through. Then I was a baker for twenty-nine consecutive years of days. I thought that was going to be the end, but I was wrong. That’s fallen through as well. God is great. He has something else in mind for me, and I know what it is. Daylight waiting on the outside of the tunnel when I get there, I believe. Everything else will be stripped away. But you know what?
I will be the father of three sons.
I’d know that even if I didn’t believe it.”

Rather than being a birther and a rearer of sons, Mrs. Marini had been a what, a dry goose, and a snuffer-out of sons. Bluntly, a dismemberer of them. And had been one so long it was impertinent to ask anymore whether that was the glowing goal to which she was always aimed, as in Rocco’s formulation, or whether instead her soul had been shaped by her work, as Rocco’s hands had been shaped by his. He weighed perhaps half as much as the boy, but the hands were three times as thick.

“What is dead to a Christian?” he repeated, pointing at the boy.

Ciccio’s tumid Adam’s apple bounced.

“Dead is dead,” Mrs. Marini said, taking the boy’s side again.

“To
you
he is dead,” said Rocco, “and to
you
he is dead, but to
me
he is alive.”

There was a pause. Ciccio looked at each of them, inquiring with his eyebrows whether it was his turn to speak.

Mrs. Marini said, “Go ahead.”

Ciccio turned to the baker. He said, “He’s alive as long as you know he’s alive.”

“Yes.”

“It’s so, even while it isn’t so.”

“Yes.”

“I wish I was older,” Ciccio said, looking down at his lap. “I wish I could think better. I mean, that’s a beautiful idea—”

“No, it isn’t, it’s disgusting,” she said. “Look up when you talk.”

“It’s a beautiful idea,” he went on, raising his chin a little, “but I just don’t know how to believe it. I feel like, if I was smarter I could believe it—”

“
Were
smarter,” she corrected.

“Were smarter. Or if I were somebody else.”

Mrs. Marini didn’t need any shining idea. That was all over. God might or might not be great. She had no evidence either way. She did, however, have ample evidence that the tempter, the prince of the silly world through which she had taught herself to walk backward, was very great indeed.

She loosed a long guffaw, haughty, at both of them. “Dead is dead is dead is dead is dead is dead,” she said. Then she put some cheese in her mouth.

She breathed out, long and deeply, her lips closed, and the spirits from the bottoms of her lungs moved over the chewy mass of cheese inside her mouth and up into her sinuses, which in turn perceived the most wondrous mild, living scent. It was like the smell of a man’s armpit just after he’s taken a bath.

Their three places were set at one end of the grand dining-room table. The window behind them let out on the alley that Mrs. Marini’s house shared with Rocco’s store. Some kids were out there throwing faint, pleasant firecrackers at the pavement. Then one of them set off a toy bomb that rattled the windows in the sashes and made Mrs. Marini’s ears ring.

At the table, they all three flinched.

When Mrs. Marini opened her eyes again, everything was as before except that at the far end of the vast void of the table, a figure was seated, tall, with brilliant red hair and an air of utter self-possession, as though even the table belonged to him.

Neither the boy nor Rocco, who went on talking, appeared to know that the figure was there. She looked at them both, making a little smile each to each, and glanced back to the far end of the table. The figure had not moved. It fixed her with its gaze. Its thick hair was curly, and sweat poured in great streams down the sides of its lovely face.

“That’s just a better mask than the others,” she told it. “I’m not so easily taken in.”

It wore a sleeveless undershirt. Its legs were dapperly folded in a way that showed her one of the knees above the surface of the table, so she saw that it was even wearing the military pants—black with red trim—that Nico had worn the day of the race.

“Leave me alone,” she said, her nose twisting.

The figure was out of breath. She saw that the head wasn’t merely sweating, it was soaked, as though it had just been dunked in the fountain. It looked not through her but at her, a ruthless look, glib and entitled. It extracted from its pocket the playing cards she had given him for a prize.

“Go away!” she cried.

But it only looked down and shuffled the cards.

“Oh, please go away, please,” she said. “I have been having such a nice time. If I—oh, please don’t make me talk.”

Its skin was clean and fresh and rosy, the eyebrows were trim, the mustache was blond and curled up at the corners. It dealt itself a hand of cards, panting heavily.

“Be good to me, please, and leave. Please. Oh, please. Please. Please.”

Its hands began to shake as it turned over the cards. When it looked up at her again, tears beaded from its eyes. She looked to the eyes, windows of the soul, route to the brain, and felt the terrible long-lived longing in her stomach to go to them and suck them out and swallow. To go to him and eat him up and keep him. To go and sell all she had and buy him. To lay her fortunes at his feet and follow him across the world and out.

She said, “No, but I
mustn’t.”

“I thought you’d been waiting all this time so we could talk again,” he said.

Her resolution failed her, but only momentarily. “Yes, I have—but this isn’t the time.”

“Oh?”

“The time was forty years ago.”

“Oh?”

“What’s the use of apologizing, Nicolo? It’s unseemly. It doesn’t fix anything. You missed out—I wish you had known me later on.”

The radio twittered from the parlor. The baker split another peach and passed half of it to the boy.

The figure wiped the tears from its face with its handkerchief and blew its nose. As it hastily got up to leave, it knocked over the chair and bent low to right it, but the boy and the baker didn’t see. The figure passed through the doorway, slow and young, its slick white shoulders gleaming.

Mrs. Marini turned to the baker. She said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to be going out now.”

The Forest Runner

E
ven today, sixteen and one half years after the fact, his sister dead, his store sold, his archive of Confederate correspondence donated to the county public library, his concordance burned, his flower garden on the bluff behind the house collapsing season by season into the lake, the house leaking rain in every room, the woman herself dead, surely—since how else has he for sixteen and one half years been denied the fulfillment that is his by right, of being called, in words spoken out loud not by himself but by somebody else, by a person living in the world out there, the thing that he is—even this afternoon, trapped in the throng of bodies in a street carnival not three blocks from the café where he had whiled away the hours, poisoning himself with sugar, ardently believing he would be found, he still casts his eyes about for the face that will know his face, for the woman who will recognize what he is and point her finger, opening her mouth to speak, and call him by his name.

The jeweler knows that the undiminished desire to be accused by name by this woman is the proof that he has failed. That gable roof with sides that are shallow in slope at the top and steeper below is a gambrel. The short sleeveless dress with a row of buttons up the spine that the little girl in front of him is wearing, against whose backside the force of the crowd is pressing his legs, is a pinafore. He has a name, too, that could save him from himself, that could turn him into a word if only she were to see him and call him by it. Then all would be lost at last. He could surrender the long-held hope to hold a thing, a thing in his hand, and leave it at that. He would no longer have a material hand in which to hold the thing. But she isn’t here, surely, she’s dead—the instrument of his salvation—he killed her, surely.

He’s been coming to this carnival every August for five years, but she has yet to show herself, and his hope is waning.

He has stood at the washroom mirror calling himself by the name his father shared with him, but the words only stuck to the mirror. Another person was required. Look at these people, the girl in the pinafore with her pink legs, the ten thousand others forcing him up against her; they are at least not alone in having names, like the gambrel roof, or the samovar in the café. Only he is nameless, real, among them.

At night, as a boy in the winter in Kentucky, warming himself by the potbelly stove in the cabin, his uncle showed him how to put a double bend in a saw by pushing it against the toe of his boot, and how to strike it with a hammer and control the note its vibrations made by bending it further and unbending it and striking different parts of the bigger bend. He practiced playing it at home, in the woodshed of his father’s house by the lake. He taught himself to play “My Sister, She Works in a Laundry” and “The Mule Skinner’s Song” and “What Was Your Name in the States?” and “Pharaoh’s Army Got Drownded.” And he made up his own tunes, in love, as he would never love anything else, with the queer, trembling, human sound of a shaking piece of steel, and he taught himself to bow it also, with the bow of his father’s fiddle. Then his father’s cousin, who picked banjo in a hillbilly band at a saloon on Saturday nights, persuaded his parents to let him go just once and play with them.