The End (7 page)

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

Rocco said, “Things to do in a well.”

3

T
he opposite of to die is to have a family. Therefore to have no family is to be dead.

Rocco detected a stink of turpentine and excused himself to Mrs. Marini’s lavatory, where, with her cold cream and nailbrush, he scoured his hands. He had awoken this morning convinced that his death was upon him; he’d impressed himself by being unafraid; but had he been unafraid only because, having no family, he was already dead?

No. The name of Loveypants was Luigina. The names of his boys were Bobo, Mimmo, and Jimmy. He had a cousin Benedict still in Omaha.

At home, he kept the door of the medicine cabinet open while he washed his hands so as not to see his image in the mirror, but Mrs. Marini’s mirror was affixed to the wall. He turned his back to it while he abraded his fingers. Then, lest he splatter cold cream on the tile, he knelt and continued his work over the commode. The three of them had carried on the whole of the afternoon, and now it was the supper hour, and the racket outside was beckoning them toward the bedlam of the feast.

He flushed. While turning to face the sink, he regarded a grommet on his right shoe, and then, while rinsing his hands, he watched the chrome flange of the drain. But this did not keep him from seeing his arms and stomach at the edge of his vision in the mirror. What did it matter if his hands weren’t clean? It would be four days at least before he touched anybody else’s food. (Oh, but there was all that bread and the onion pastries that were rising in the walk-in at his store; the whole place would smell like a brewery by the time he got back in town; he’d have to go back and throw them out; labor, treasure, purpose—wasted; gloom.) He touched the bathroom doorknob and then turned it courageously. A firecracker exploded in the alley.

Who was this man he became when he emerged from solitude into the company of other people? The hallway smelled of mothballs and was dark, and he felt his private self recede as he approached the bickering in the kitchen.

Ciccio said, “Fine, but if we’d only focused the whole invasion on Montreal in 1812 the continent would have been ours.”

Rocco wanted to turn around, to turn in. He paused in the hallway, solitude at his back, society ahead, feeling ensnared in this middle place, feeling he’d spent his whole life in this hallway and wishing at least for the next couple of hours to be all in the bathroom or all in the street wholeheartedly. I can’t go into the one place, I can’t go into the other, he said to his heart. A sneeze began to overtake him, and he succumbed to it.

Here it was—
bam bam bam
—the smoke in the streets, ninety-one degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, a boy in a window throwing an egg down at the masses and then a goldfish and then ice cubes. Every half block a man was bent over a box of coals as the sweat dripped and hissed on the pig flesh on the grill, and a woman at his side with cockeyed brown teeth took the money and rolled from time to time a pop bottle over his face. A Rican-looking kid falling out of a tree. There was the stench of animal flesh on fire and human flesh expelling salt and toxins from its pores. A kid climbing a gutter pipe attached to the façade of the church. Everywhere you looked there were children trying to climb things, maybe hoping to get out by way of up, then falling or sliding down like when an earwig is trapped in a bathtub. Kids climbing the backstop of the ball field behind the convent where the carnival rides were parked, kids on the roof of the new pet store scaling the gigantic birdcage that housed a man-sized fiberglass parakeet. The pavement in places was not visible for the bingo cards, prayer cards, matchbooks, eggshells. The men wore ties, but their hats were off. A woman kissed a heel of bread and tossed it into a puddle.

Speculations, threats, and scoldings littered the air, slurred and shouted.

“If it was the present day,” said a woman, “I already would have left you fifty times and a half.”

“Once we get home, young man,” said a man, “I got a big stick waiting for you.”

Somebody said, “No, just a friend from Oskaloosa Reformatory. Wanted to give him courage, but they wouldn’t let me.”

“The Amish can take buses, but they can’t drive them, that’s all.”

“Everything is in place and nothing is in order.”

“I don’t remember it very clearly, you see,” someone said, “because it didn’t happen.”

A priest pointing with a slow and curving finger at the asphalt insisted, “It doesn’t live here.”

A human skull was immured in a niche bordering the courtyard of the convent, and various other bones—ribs and fingers and clavicles—were mortared around it in a pattern that resembled a chrysanthemum, and beneath it was an inscription in a copper plate reading:
Let us perform works of justice and mercy while we are still in time.
Someone said, “Now, you shut up and listen to me.” Someone else: “In the part of the brain where the rest of us have common sense they have money.”

Children were climbing sweet-gum trees and telephone poles and ginkgo trees and Papa’s back. Were they trying to climb out? And what were they escaping from, exactly, and where were they escaping to?

A man in a gas mask wearing black shorts and a white tank top and suspenders dragged a love seat onto a third-floor balcony and reclined on it, and observed the crowds, and unbuckled his mask to take a sip on his lemonade.

A couple of police observed on horseback, as still as statuettes on the corners of Sixteenth and of Twenty-eighth. Also, pigeons and rats and alley cats.

Somebody said, “What is that, Stanley? It looks like pie.”

Hungarian was spoken, and Slovak, Rumanian, Polish, German, Russian, Croat, Greek, Lithuanian, Spanish, Bohemian; and if you looked closely you saw a couple of Japanese, army brides, it appeared. And there were multitudes of Italians from the crosstown neighborhoods and from the suburbs. And some colored were there, and they were being given what you call a wide berth, such as could be managed in the press. It was a neighborhood outside of which outsiders stayed except for once a year, on the fifteenth of August, when they descended in their tens of thousands. And there were the carny games where you paid a nickel to throw a softball at a pyramid of soup cans in the hope of winning a salami sandwich. In the central event, the Virgin was paraded out of the church and through the streets by men in white robes accompanied by torchbearers who until recently had covered their heads with pointed white hoods. However, the police, careful to prevent miscommunications and slanders, forbade them to wear the hoods anymore.

At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy. What you felt was primitive—a grasshopper becoming a locust, a yard dog becoming a pack dog. The mind of the throng became your mind the way a whale takes on the desire of its pod to feel the sand of the beach under its belly.

Europe was happening, right here, and it didn’t fit. This wasn’t the continent of the group, socialism, a million jam-packed cities. This was the country of the particular person, private enterprise, vast and empty grassland counties, the Protestant Jesus who went by his first name and saved souls one by one, depending on Do you believe, in your private heart, or don’t you? This crowd did not belong in this place.

And the kids hunched in the windows and straddled the exposed I beams.

The doors of the church swung open, and three boys in red cassock and white surplice were first down the steps: Two carried candles as tall as themselves; the other bore a staff. At the top of the staff, of course, was the golden, emaciated figure, stretched and pinned, either dying or dead, of an individual man who had been tortured and executed by a mob. And night was falling.

Rocco was alone in the crowd, trying to make it to the bakery. He wanted a cigarette, but there wasn’t enough room between his mouth and the hair of the woman in front of him. He might have enjoyed a sausage sandwich and some peppers, but the buns these people were using were beneath the honor of the swine that had died to stuff them. He wanted to get a move on, there was the New Jersey to reach in two days’ time, the face of Loveypants, a commandment he was shaping. There was the need while in a crowd to seek out a darkened corner where nobody could get at him with their paws. He also knew that to escape from the crowd was to rip off and kill the part of himself that was attached to it. You had to gnaw off the leg that was trapped in the trap. And once in fact you left you felt as lonely as you were ever likely to feel.

While fording the human current in the direction of the alley behind the Twenty-fourth Street nickelodeon, he inadvertently stepped on the foot of a white-haired boy of perhaps three years in denim coveralls and brought him screaming to the ground, but Rocco kept forcing his way through the crowd. He made a right and a right and a left through the labyrinth of alleys that led to the alley between his store and Mrs. Marini’s house. Half a dozen boys in linen blazers, their hair in uniform flattops, were shooting off fizgigs in his alley and paid him no mind as he pretended to use his key to unlock the alley-oop door.

Immediately he heard a shrill, unbroken keen, as if from an ailing electrical device, the residue that tremendous noise leaves in the skull upon one’s entering a quiet place. He put his head under the tap and drank. The ventilator was off, and the air in here, even with the coal burned out, even to Rocco, felt tropical and oppressive. He hung his hat atop the pile of springform pans, verified that the deep fryer was off, pulled aside the flag of the state of Ohio, slouched into the front room, and sat on the floor in the crawl space of relative cool. On the other side of the storefront windows he beheld the arms and hips and wilting hairdos of the masses squishing against the glass, smearing it with sweat and pomade. The crowd had stopped moving along the street as, just above head level, the Virgin hovered slowly up the hill. He was safe from them in his little box in here. Half of the moon had risen over the tenement roof across the street. The balconies and fire escapes abounded with onlookers whose faces were indistinct in the twilight. Did he have any friends? No, not really.

He dumped fifty pounds of serviceable, if oversour, sponge dough into the rubbish because the Lord had called him to more crucial work in the days ahead. The pastries were in the walk-in cooler at the rear of the kitchen. Maybe he’d stay in there for a minute, in the walk-in, and collect himself. He sprung the walk-in latch and had gone so far as to lift a tray of crescent rolls from the wire shelf, when he turned his head and was stricken to discover that he wasn’t alone in here, either.

A lime white man facing the rear of the cooler was seated on a box of vegetable shortening. But for a fedora with a peacock feather under the band and white knee socks, he was naked.

Rocco stood there and looked at him.

The man started and got up, his back still turned. He inserted a foot into a leg of his trousers and stuffed his underpants in a trouser pocket. A smoldering cigar was on the floor. His furry back was turned to Rocco and was rippled with fat, gray-bluish white, deathly under the fluorescent tubes that had come on when Rocco opened the walk-in door. His arms and neck, however, were brown—a man who made his living out of doors. Judging from the fur, which was gray and patchy, he was roughly Rocco’s age. The man yanked at his shirt, though it was much too large for a shirt, part of which was stuck under the shortening box, and mashed his shoe with his foot, unable to find the hole where the toes were intended to go.

A cloud billowed in from the moist outside, and a switch was tripped in Rocco’s head that made him shut the cooler door. It was an economic impulse, but the man let out a yip, puppylike, and fumbled at his shoes (it was a sound Rocco had heard himself make when he’d had too much coffee and it hurt him to piss). And Rocco sensed weakness in the enemy and a sudden blood thirst in himself. Murder him, said a voice. The cooler smelled of dried-out cigar, as would the doomed pastries have smelled. Use the pan, said the voice of the beast inside him.

The man had liberated his shirt and was tying it over his head, the back still turned.

It was unlikely that Rocco could bludgeon to death with an aluminum baking pan an adult male as thickly built as he himself, but so ordered the voice, and he raised the pan, somewhat higher than you hold a ball bat before swinging. The pastries cascaded down on his head.

At last, the man turned. The capacious shirt enshrouded his face. The breathing was loud and distressed. The fabric over the mouth went convex and concave. His pink tits hung there. He held his hat in hand, and the sleeves of the shirt fell around his shoulders like white, bedraggled hair. Without a face. The fabric containing the head like a hangman’s hood.

Did he know this man? He had no idea if he did. A man who was not he, was not Rocco, unless he was Rocco, only he couldn’t be.

“What did you steal?” Rocco said in dialect.

The head shook no vigorously.

“Did you piss on my floor or do yourself like a saw in here?”

No again, as the hands reached up and tightened the mask.

There was an outsider, a member of the public, or rather an insider, a member of Rocco himself, who hadn’t only intruded into the bakery kitchen, Rocco’s private citadel, but had violated even the cooler, the holy of holies, the place where Rocco closeted himself when his need to be alone was at its bleakest.