The End (38 page)

Where had she gone, the girl in the pinafore, with her pink legs? The pinafore was a contradiction that walked around on a girl in a crowd.

It was going to thunderstorm. The creek would turn brown and swell farther up its steep banks. Soon, privately, the water would fill his shoes. And later on somebody would find him downstream and look into his face and ask, Who was this man, what was his name? And they would print the words in the newspaper for others to read and speak.

A picture and a caption. And the caption would lay bare at last his name, age, and address.

That tree with its branches twisting was a Norway maple. No good for tapping for syrup.

He turned again and faced the unperceiving crowd. And the woman with the onion sack—six minutes before the fact, five, four—ascended the hill, whistling.

“My name is,” he said, and spoke his name, haughty and shame-faced, jangling the big ring of keys in front of her face to wake her up. “Alliterative. Funny. Go on, say it.”

He missed his sister. Preserver of artifacts. Kisser of soft, reassuring kisses down the despairing hours. “The clammy clown is clumsy,” she’d used to say when, refilling the lamp, he dribbled kerosene on the rug in the back parlor, where they read at night before bed.

Who would notice him gone that knew his name? Not the coal man. He only came in wintertime. Not the postman. The jeweler collected his bills from a box at the PO. His barber called him, modestly, Chief.

It was so easy to follow her from a distance of half a block and not to expose his plan of action. In fact, he had no plan. Had he intended ahead of time to climb the stoop and to open the door of the tenement, then surely, fatefully, he would have found the door locked. She went in and closed the door behind her. He saw this from the street, waiting, listening to his heart. Then he climbed the stoop, on which salt was splayed, and pumpkin-seed shells, and held the knob of the door and turned it, and the door opened. If it were necessary to any plan that he find her alone in the apartment, then the apartment door once opened would have exposed a room occupied by others. Fate required that he obey the commandments of his heart only as they revealed themselves, emerging one by one, each at the last moment, as a curb, a stray roller skate, reveal themselves to a blind man making his way with a cane. Here is a door. Open it. Here is a stairwell. Climb it. Listen. Someone has clicked on a radio behind that door, right there. So go ahead. Open the door. See what happens. See what you do. There is a woman.

People had long said, and the many books of regional history and toponymy he’d used to own agreed, that the
Elephant
of the name derived from a circus that had spent the winter upstream from here during the last year of the Civil War. A young cow had trundled onto the ice, nosing her trunk about for liquid water, and had fallen through and drowned. A painting that depicted this event hung in the foyer of the county historical society.

But several years ago he had made a discovery. He had bought a map of the portion of what would become the Ohio Territory that had been deeded to Connecticut by King Charles II in 1662, the last tract of land, as far as he knew, retained as a colony by an individual state; it was known then as New Connecticut or, as it was still sometimes called, the Western Reserve. The date under the compass rose was 1799. On it, a slim black line described a creek approximately one hundred miles west of the settlement at Conneaut, fifteen miles long, emptying into the lake. The note to the right of the creek read
La Fonte
—a little extra space between the
L
and the
a.
His French dictionary told him it meant a “melting; smelting; thaw; mixture of colors, as in painting;” or “the holster of a saddle.” Or else it was someone’s name. A fur trapper perhaps, Canadian, with a trading post on that site.

He held a magnifying glass in his hand. He looked up from the map. “Oh,” he said aloud, “we have misunderstood.”

Forgetting himself a moment, he called to his sister in the parlor. But she was dead, of course. She had been dead for three years. He was always forgetting.

Now the crowd was gone at last. Night had fallen utterly. He walked off the bridge and found at the end of the rail a muddy, switchback ing path through the bull thistle and sumacs, to the water’s edge. A heap of oil filters rusted on the far bank. He took two steps into the current.

What were the worst days? The very worst? The days when he couldn’t read. His eyes wouldn’t stick to the words. At times a week of this. What was the sadness of weeks like these? It was the sadness of Today, in my mind, has been so void and brief, it’s hardly taken place. Yesterday was only a moment ago. Other days, conversely, he lay on the parlor daybed sunup through midnight reading a big leather-bound book with gilt pages, and his sister brought in his food on a tin platter, and tea, and he got up only to empty his bladder and his bowels. On those days he felt free of the elapsing of minutes: like the long-ago preacher in Prestonsburg said of God, “He does not endure for all time; he lives outside of time.” It was such a sweetness those days in the parlor, to occupy a room, a self, made only of words, the objectness of things having been peeled off and tossed aside. He said his mother’s name, waking her from the dead.

If he could denude himself of his mineral self, leaving only his caption, he would become at last transeunt, transient, timeless.

There was a dream from childhood that returned to this day, a dream in which he was thrust from a precipice by an unseen person and
fell,
wheeling through the air.

The rocks beneath his feet were slick with moss. The body, even now, struggled to preserve the balance to which it was accustomed. He slipped. He fell neck-deep, his arms twisting behind him to stop the fall, to protect the head. He half-stood again, on a rock deeper down, and slipped again and fell.

Now, above him on the bridge, the nothing at which the arrow of fear pointed took shape. He glimpsed it as it became material. He saw it with his material eyes. It was as real as he was. The shape it took was of a very tall, slender male figure running across the bridge. A boy, fleet of foot, passing in the dark over and away from him.

Here is at last our end goal, the child’s dream come to its fulfillment: Having begun again to fall and twist fearfully in the air, we find our will; we aim our face down; we do not say “fall,” but “dive”; we watch the ground rush to meet our eyes. Here it is. We do not make land-fall. We are a line intersecting a plane. We shoot through.

21

C
iccio stood up from the curb.

The Russians weren’t coming. People lost track of time when they played cards, that was all.

The glut of crumpled paper cups and napkins and sandwich wrappers clogging the grates of the storm sewers was such that when the thunderstorm that was about to crack open above his head finally cracked, the streets would flood, the trash would float down to the creek and sail through the night toward its mouth and settle at last on the floor of the lake. If he stayed right here he would see the last evidence of the crowd carried off on the water. And if a cyclone touched down on this place and lifted the buildings away, and if he chose to stay here and watch . . .

Was that the choice? Were those the only choices? Whether to take shelter in the basement of a heavy building or to stay, to stay, to stay, out here and watch and risk being carried off into the air? The storm was coming, the storm was saying, Either stay here and watch me and be carried off, or take cover; either way you have to answer to me. But he didn’t want to. No. He didn’t want to answer it. No, he didn’t. He didn’t.

It wasn’t until he came to a halt on the corner of Eighteenth Street to check for cars coming (there were no cars coming) that he said to himself, I’ve stood up from the curb and I’m carrying myself away and out. He didn’t know this was happening until he described it to himself. Likewise, he didn’t know he was running until he was on the bridge (the wind blasting him backward, only still he was going forward across the bridge, in the direction of the boulevard) and said to himself that he wasn’t sprinting, he was galloping, that was the word, in his dress shoes through the wealth of garbage on the pavement of the bridge.

Two colored women were waiting at the streetcar stop, an older one and a younger one that only looked old, both of them laughing on the bench there. He couldn’t hear what they were laughing about. It was still windier than before. The younger one was rubbing the sole of the unshod foot of the older one, who wore pearls in her ears and whose long hair was braided with a piece of ribbon and coiled around the crown of her head like a wreath.

He counted his change. There was an electric ozone odor of imminent summer rain. The smell of No more work today, time to get inside, there’s a honeydew for after supper. He didn’t want to go in under the awning of the trolley stop with the colored women because he wanted to feel the rain on his head when it came. For a second the wind quit squalling and he heard the older one say, “That’s a coincidence. They don’t call it a corn because it’s like corn. They call it that because it grows out of the bone like a horn does.”

Ozone was the result of electricity shooting through the air, forming oxygen molecules with three atoms instead of two, and young people smelling it were stricken with nostalgia even when they had never left home before.

Then the streetcar came and the colored women got on it, and he did, too.

Later, on the train heading west along the lakeshore, a train that was, as it happened, the last scheduled departure from Erie Station Tower for the night, the conductor asked him for the ticket he hadn’t bought. Ciccio reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. But the ticket wasn’t there! He stood and turned his trouser pockets inside out. He’d forgotten it at home! “Oh, jeez, you’ll kick me off the train!” he said.

The conductor’s rheumy eyes came up to Ciccio’s jutting Adam’s apple, and his mutton-chop whiskers grew into his mustache, so that he looked like Chester Arthur and also like a walrus. He filled his cheeks with air and expelled it pensively, looking at the loosened knot of the tie that Donna Costanza had made Ciccio put on for lunch and that Ciccio would have taken off by now if he’d had a bag to stow it in.

He didn’t even have to use the weepy story about the aunt who was expecting him, who’d be pulling out her hair with worry when he didn’t get off the train in Toledo. The conductor just wagged his head sadly, unspeaking, and continued up the aisle. It was a Christian country. He was a kid, there were no real punishments for the likes of him.

He woke up when the train pulled into Sandusky, then he went back to sleep.

He woke up again when the conductor was passing in the dark of the aisle toward the dim light of the gangway that led to the next car. “Mishawaka,” the conductor called. “Mishawaka, Indiana, approaching. Mishawaka.” The ashtray in the armrest of the window seat was stuck shut with chewing gum. It was deeply dark in the cabin. When the gangway door slammed behind the conductor’s back, Ciccio stood up. He couldn’t see anyone else in the cabin with him. Briefly he thought of himself, of what he might be feeling. But he figured that could only be fear, which had derailed him in the past and would not derail him now. And although he knew it was better to feel than to think, he resolved to think instead.

He thought of salmon, and bugs.

Then he thought of Father Delano, teacher of Christian Doctrine, and a game the priest had made them play in class a few months back, a kind of parlor amusement for Jesuit cocktail parties.

“Write in ink on a scrap of paper,” the bumptious, shrunken, emphatic, salt white priest had said, “the deadly sin to which your character is most likely to fall prey. Don’t think. Just fess up. Nobody else will see this. It’s for your own reference.” Ciccio wrote
wrath
and
gluttony.
Then he struck out
gluttony.
He was still growing, after all. Father Delano said, “What you have written down so quickly is ipso facto a sin you can acknowledge with ease. You are reconciled to this sin. You are clandestinely prideful of it. The ego generated this response. The function of the ego is to what? To protect the self from the world of others. Now then, being boys and being sixteen years of age, you certainly answered ‘lust’ or ‘wrath,’ all of you. I am quite assured. You even believe in the sinfulness of your sin, that it is not in fact soi-disant okay to act lustfully or wrathfully, but this is also charming. That you believe it is a sin is the source of its charm for you.

“Therefore. There is another sin, which isn’t charming. A real sin. No, it is not charming at all. Write down the real sin. I give you twenty seconds this time. No one will know.” When he spoke, he exposed his piebald incisors and flexed his nostrils in spasms and allowed his saliva to collect in a froth at the edges of his lips. He was Swiss, but you could never hear the accent. He had advanced tuberculosis. It was his last year at the school. They’d all heard the news that the order was planning to send him in the fall to a sanitarium in Oklahoma. But he was to die in June in his bed in the rectory, in Ohio.

Ciccio had dipped his pen.
Vanity,
he wrote in a burst. Then he looked at the word. He couldn’t remember if it was one of the seven on its own or if it was a species of pride. No, it was a species of pride, the species concerned not with the insensible but with the sensible portion of the self. And it didn’t fit him right.

“I want you to consider the darkness in your hearts, boys, how deeply dark it is in there. Surely what you’ve just written down still fails to puncture the shell of your viciousness. If it was so easy of access and if you truly believed in the sinfulness of it, you would have fixed it already. This second sin is a mask for the sin about which you cannot come clean. The ego protects the self from assaults from without but also from within, namely, in this case, from knowledge of your real sin. Your
real
sin, which is what?”