The End (8 page)

“Get that thing away from your face!” Rocco said, swatting the air.

Look, a grown man disguised as a figment of his imagination. Unless . . .

The head didn’t move.

Then, inside Rocco’s brain, the spinning tumblers of a lock seemed to align, and the door of a vault swung open.

“Oh,” he said softly. “It’s you.” He lowered the pan. “You’ve been hiding from me in here all along.”

The head didn’t respond, but still Rocco felt a bracing pang of belief.

“You thought you could hoodwink me, my boy,” Rocco said, grinning and pointing his finger. “Don’t you think I know my own when I see him?”

And yet the figure only cocked its head.

Rocco called on his courage. He took a step, his heel sinking into a pastry, and moved to embrace the large and devilish child.

There was a timer attached to the hinge of the walk-in door, an ingenious device. The overhead light came on automatically when you entered, and then, sixty seconds after the door had closed, the light switched off again on its own.

Now the light went off.

The figure struck him in the dark, a full-body collision, and Rocco fell against the pastry shelves, and the door opened, and the interloper barreled out.

Rocco got to his feet. He heard the din from outside briefly and heard the alley-oop door slam. There was a snot rag on the tile.

Across the ball field a sister scampered, her habit hovering in the infield dust, waving her downturned hands with emphasis at the begrimed men who operated the carnival rides. The Matterhorn and the Witch’s Wheel were spinning, and the Dipsy-Doo was dipping, all of them festooned with lights that blinked ever more quickly as the cars approached maximum velocity, each blaring its own tinkle-tinkle melody. Stop the machines, she commanded; the Holy Mother was out of the church and in the street. The men, sometime vagrants, sometime elementary school janitors whose clothes emitted the musk of pencil shavings even in August, opened the gates, and the dizzy children stumbled into the outfield.

There were kids even on the roof of the convent, one climbing a flagpole by its cord.

The altar boys were preceded down the avenue by twelve prodigious men of early middle age: slow on their feet, oxen-stout, contemptuous, in white muslin cassocks and white gloves and brimless black felt hats. They forced a channel through the masses by prodding them with the blunt ends of brooms and packing them into the stalls of the vendors, against the storefront windows, unspeaking, a hard element parting a soft element in two, like the keel of a ship cutting the water.

Somebody said, “Do you have a time yet as to what time you will come to see us?”

On the roof of the Twenty-fourth Street nickelodeon, the men who had readied the fireworks display passed a bottle of beer among themselves and spat on the tar, lethargic, cursing.

Following the altar boys was a troop of priests from various parishes, some in long skirts and birettas. And the bishop of the city, a German, was among them, in a green miter and cope, a scowling, ancient man walking with a shepherd’s crook and leaning on it to balance himself.

Behind the clergy came the Virgin, smirking, her porcelain skin dark like an Arab’s, the nose upturned, English, her stature dwarflike, her clothes and hands stuck with specks of diamond donated over many years by women who had had them pried from their engagement rings. She stood on a stone platform, four spiral wooden columns supporting the gilt roof over her head. The rails undergirding the platform were borne on the shoulders of sixteen men in white albs. Ribbons hung from the columns and the people pinned money to the ribbons as they dragged by. And white-robed men with hoods hanging down their backs guarded the platform, holding bull-rib torches, singing plainsong.

It was darkening but the heat was the same.

Several hundred women in black followed the Virgin, praying rosaries, their feet naked to the pebbles and the cigarette butts and the soiled napkins and the spilled pop on the pavement. A band brought up the rear, making vehement noise. The brass played a waltz and the clarinets a two-step and the violins something else you could only barely make out. And behind the band, in the wake of the procession, was a half block of empty space where maybe it was cooler, maybe you could breathe freely.

All the bells in the church were tolling.

Rocco needed some air.

In the ceiling over one of the coal bins was a pasteboard scuttle he’d painted many years ago to match the surrounding plaster. He climbed atop the bins, popped the scuttle from its frame, and, with considerable effort, hoisted himself into the bakery attic. The heat was nauseous. He was blind until, with his hat, he screened from his eyes the hole of light emanating from below. The source of light thus obscured, a cloud of airborne dust appeared, thick and twinkling. As he caught his breath, he saw the dust stream into his mouth and swirl out of him. Wood shavings and what appeared to be dry lumps of chewing tobacco covered the attic floor, the leavings of a roofing crew from the 1890s who had never bothered to clean up the job. It was damn hot up here. His skull vibrated in sympathy with the noise from outside.

Crouching, and careful to balance himself on the joists, he made his way to a ladder in the attic wall. It was flaked with rust, and the mooring bolts were loose in the blocks, and the ladder shook as he climbed to the trapdoor in the rafters.

He emerged in the rooftop twilight and breathed. The music, if you could call it music, was close by and deafening. He twisted his head around, and wouldn’t you know, peering over the wall that formed the top of the façade stood five girls and a little boy. He held out hope that Chiara was among them.

“How did you get up here?” he called to them, brushing the spi derwebs and sawdust from his pants.

“We climbed,” one of them said. There was a run in her stocking and a fresh, bloody scratch down her leg. She didn’t turn to address him.

“What did you climb?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“The wall, I guess.”

“You have a cut, little miss, on your leg there,” he said, pointing, but she didn’t answer him.

He approached the ledge and observed the tumult below. He was wet with exhaustion and defeat. One two three four five. No Chiara. Sigh. And the boy.

“It’s always the same,” another said, disconsolate. “Why is it always the same?”

“It’s opposed to be the same,” said the boy.

They meant that year in, year out, the procession was always the same.

Then one of them jolted upright. Then the others. The first poked the air. “Look!” she said. “Look at the shines!”

All told, the procession was five blocks long. The Virgin now teetered at Eleventh Avenue and Thirtieth Street. An empty space of half a block, which people had historically enjoined themselves from entering, followed the band. At the edge of this space, a colored woman and a colored man were dancing.

Shortly, they were joined by some other colored men and colored women, not too many, about seven. They were clapping, he could see, and doing a slow-stepping, herky-jerky dance, invisible, as one is in a crowd, so they surely believed, while the fevered, dissonant music kept playing. Funny. They weren’t in the conventional man-to-woman, two-by-two embrace, nor even holding hands. They were nine, now, out of maybe twenty thousand, pretty inconspicuous even from up here, and upon more careful observation they were all young people, even teenagers, although one more, a girl younger than the girls on his roof, tried to wrest herself from the grip of a white-haired, squat colored lady and join them.

The children, renewed in their boredom, commented wearily in phrases of forced adult courtliness on the multitude. “Maria, Maria, but we are in so many,” one said.

Rocco had to envy the colored kids down there, dancing with the herd and by themselves at the same time as though they weren’t obliged to pick one or the other. Either they were naïve, or he had made a needless choice. If he were ever put in jail, he hoped they wouldn’t let him have a window.

A white-haired colored man in a tan suit and black tie was hissing, it looked like, beside the squat lady and pointing at the dancers and then back at his feet, furious. And Rocco had to shake his head at this poor, forbidding fellow so much like himself.

Somebody smacked the lone tuba player on the back, Rocco saw this, and the mighty instrument turned around like a stag in the brush.

Then—he could see this happening, he actually watched it happen—the remainder of the back row of the brass turned as one man, saw the Negroes dancing, and turned forward again. They in turn tapped the shoulders of the drummers, who turned and craned to see. And this smacking of the back and craning to see progressed row by row up the band at terrific speed. As you watch, from high banks above, a stick make its way down a river. And the band kept playing—they saw, they passed on the news, and kept playing. And he could see this news, this stick, passing up the procession into the pack of barefooted, black-clad women, where it splintered and spread radially through the procession and the wider crowd.

It struck him that the original tuba player had seen what was taking place and then had kept on playing. The man was flattered. But it struck him also that the barefooted women couldn’t see through the band to see what he saw. It struck him that the news worming its way through their midst was seventh-hand, eighth-hand, ninth-hand, tenth-hand.

As though he stood outside of time with the children on the bakery roof and saw, all at once, the past (at Twenty-second Street, where the Negroes were dancing); the present (right beneath him at Twenty-sixth, where the men in the band were telling one another what they had seen); and the distant future (farther up the avenue, where no one could be trusted and the original moment was lost).

He saw it progress to the Virgin, and he saw the Virgin stop and the rest of the procession stop. And the clergy conferring in the distance. And the altar boys milling, confused. Then another message appeared to pass back down the hill, this time by means of yelling with the hands cupping the mouth. Everybody having stopped. And finally the music stopped. Only by now there was no dancing, either. The Negroes had vanished.

And the violinists tucking their bows under their arms, wiping their foreheads with their neck towels.

The parade then did an unprecedented thing. It lurched backward down the hill. The old ladies sat on the curb and reshod themselves and got up and followed the musicians back into the church. And the Virgin was carried into the church as well, none too slowly. And the men on the roof of the movie theater were packing the fireworks, unexploded, back into the crates and handing the crates down a ladder and into a truck in the alley.

Wait, wait. The feast was over. Something had happened and the feast was called off. How did they all know it was called off? What had happened? Had everybody seen it but him?

The kids on Rocco’s roof were crying because, he supposed, no fireworks. The generators in the ball field coughed and fell silent. The lights on the carnival rides disappeared. There was a frenzied commotion at the streetcar stop way down on Sixteenth Street. To his right, on Twenty-sixth, he saw that woman Testaquadra drag two children by their hair into a house and throw the door shut behind her.

As though time were moving in reverse. The procession was supposed to go to the top of the hill, veer toward the cemetery, circle back all the way down the hill by way of Chagrin to Eighteenth Street, and return uphill toward the church. Instead, it moved from one moment (Thirtieth Street) backward in time down the hill on Eleventh, backward to the church again, hurriedly, in disarray.

No, no. Wait. Something had happened, and nobody had seen it
but
him—and the children. There were some Negroes; they heard music and saw a band; they started to dance. But the men up front, the priests and the sweepers and the men carrying the platform, and all the many thousands in the crowd who did not see what Rocco saw must have heard a thousand differently contorted versions of what had happened—like, Some Negroes are smoking dope in the parade; Some sacrilegious niggers have mistaken the holy procession for a roadhouse. And the only part that all the versions had in common was the end—off with the lights, everybody get out, everybody go home.

The girls were crying on the roof, and the boy stood apart from them at a corner looking down at the street and looking back at them in spasms, and Rocco could see the boy was crying, too—the welched-on promise of a fireworks display was to them the height of betrayal. The Eleventh Avenue bled people into all its tributary streets. This terrible quiet everywhere, even the smoke having cleared out, the avenue open enough that cars might pass, only no cars were passing. The people made their way on foot, murmuring or dumb.

The children were gasping. He was wrong. It wasn’t that they’d been cheated. They were frightened.

“Now, listen, my little ones,” he began, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.

It was the quiet that frightened them, he knew this emphatically, and he wanted to reassure them but didn’t know how he could do this, could not invent a single lighthearted word to distract them. If only he could put together a few words that could help them.

He made one backward step on the tacky tar of the roof. Then paused. Not one of them so much as glanced in his direction. The children had forgotten he was there.

4

R
occo crossed into the Pennsylvania at one a.m. and spent the night in his car in a wayside. Half a dozen times he awoke as cargo trains screeched across the bridge overhead.

When the sun rose, his arm was wrapped around the gearshift and was numb, his undershirt was pasted to his back with sweat, and his ribs were squeezing his kidneys. His glasses had migrated to the backseat in the night. He shook out his dead arm. Having located at last his cigarettes under the brake pedal, he walked into the slag-littered field under the railroad bridge and pissed and smoked a cigarette and blew his nose. Between the piles of the bridge, a stream dribbled, and on its surface many-colored swirls of oil glinted in the sunlight. He got to his knees on the sandy bank to say his rosary. Afterward, he asked the Lord to grant him safe passage to the New Jersey and to restore to Loveypants her long-lost sense of reason and decency. Again, overhead, a train passed, but in the other direction. He climbed the bluff toward the highway and drove into the next town for breakfast.