The End (36 page)

They lost him inside of two minutes. The crowd was immense. She knew they’d lose Rocco, but he was now expendable. She waited for Ciccio to get a couple of feet in front of her and then tied an end of the string around her wrist. Then she yelled at him to slow down and not to forsake her.

“Give me the paw,” she said.

“Which?”

She made a wave of indifference, the string dangling, and he offered a whole arm, looking off into the crowd, as if it were help to steady herself that she was asking him for, which she was insulted that he’d presume. She tied the loose end of the string to his wrist.

“This is a leash of some kind,” he said, looking down.

“As you wish.”

“But I wanted to—”

“What did you want to?”

“Me and Nino were—”

“Was our plan unclear to you in some way?”

“Rocco’s not with us. We lost him.”

“And then?”

“And then so I thought, to be honest, I could—”

“You thought, to be honest, you could help me find him?” She knew there was no hope of finding him now.

“Okay, but we’re not going to find him.”

“Okay, but yes, we shall.”

She should have made the string longer. Even when he put his hands in his pant pockets, all full of sullenness, he was too far from her vertically, and he had to hunch to the side to keep from dragging her after him.

The heat was such that other people would have thought to complain, could be heard complaining. She herself was unfazed.

The barbershop was not open for business, but she saw, as they passed it, Pippo in there by himself reading a newspaper, facing the window, sitting in the barber chair which he’d pumped up four feet from the floor, presumably to see the procession over the heads of the crowd outside. The flanks of his pinguid hairdo were combed up like the fins on a car.

“Ciccio will give a knock on the glass,” she told Ciccio.

The barber looked up from the paper, his face awash in gladness, and pulled a lever below the armrest, descending royally to the floor, and let them in.

“We’ll have a drink in the back room, then, Costanza,” he said. “You, me, and the puppy dog.”

“We shall, of course. Short, please. Oh, it’s nice and cool in here with the fans.”

“What happened to the mission?” Ciccio said evenly.

“Do you know he’s not back there?” she said. “Maybe he’s back there.”

Pippo led them into the back room and pulled the curtain behind him and poured the whiskey into his teacups and dealt them three cards each and laid four open-faced on the table. Ciccio said he didn’t have any money, so she fronted him a dollar sixty from her change purse. The game was inhibited to a slight degree by the string, but she wasn’t ready yet to cut him loose.

Gary and his cousins got sick of having to listen to the heat complaint of the kids, so they elbowed their way out of the big crowds, toward the carnival rides, where there was more room to breathe. The kid was so happy on the rides. The kid was missing the point. Gary stood outside the gates of the rides with his cousins, the four of them trading their disgust that the kids refused to understand this was not a playground. This was a meaningful place.

Then there was a nun, an actual nun in the clothes they wear—how great was this?—running around to the men at the controls of the rides, evidently telling them to shut the rides off. He asked one of the ticket girls what was going on, and she said that the saint was moving—what a phrase—and she said it like it was nothing special, because to her it wasn’t, she was used to this, she belonged here. They collected their kids. They couldn’t see the avenue from where they were standing, they couldn’t see the parade, which was the heart of the matter, and they tried to press into the crowd, but it was no use. Gary put the kid on his shoulders to see, but the kid started crying that he was scared to fall off, and anyway, he said he couldn’t see anything but heads.

It was getting dark. Gary himself was thirsty and needed to use a toilet, but the parade took awhile, they’d see something, and what was the point of all this trouble if he was just going to get the kid spun around in circles on a machine and get in the car and go home?

They waited, him and his cousins and the kids, all together. The kids had quit their carping. They were looking up and pointing at these other kids that had climbed on top of every edifice. Five little girls and a boy and an old man smoking a cigarette peered down at the street from the roof of what Gary recalled was a bakery that his father used to take him to, a bakery, if memory served, that had opened every day since, like, the Civil War but had no name or sign.

The old man on the bakery roof belonged to another age, when a three-piece suit was for walking about town. Modern people were much taller, with smaller hands and solicitous looks. Not a living soul that Gary knew could have formed such a gruesome expression as the one on this man’s face, the eyes utterly still, the mouth hard, the fat, lugubrious head stooped and watching.

Then the crowd started moving backward, into them, on the street. At first he thought it meant room had had to be made for the parade to move through up front, but the people started to turn around and face back.

They were trying to get out.

The purple sky behind the old man on the bakery roof buckled in the heat. Something was amiss in his dismal face. The nose was flared, in disgust maybe or contempt, but not alarm, because what hadn’t he seen, this man, in his ten thousand years, standing on top of us, watching?

The kid asked him what was happening, and Gary had to say he didn’t know. He asked his cousin. His cousin didn’t know. The kid asked, Was there a potty where he could make tee-tee?

There were flowers tied upside down from the fire escapes.

The word he kept hearing was
moolinyans,
which he loved himself for a second, he knew what he was, how he was connected to some people and not to others because he knew this was the word for “eggplants” or “niggers,” and he knew this because of his last name, because of His father had been who his father had been.

His cousin said in his ear, so the boy couldn’t hear it, “Some moolie kids got into the church, like, vandalizing. Like, tipping over the statues and pissing on the rugs.” And he was tied to this man, his cousin, they belonged to each other because they both knew that that word was a shortening of the other word.

Everybody was getting out, so he had to get out, too, and the kid, and his cousins, and the cousins’ kids.

People were talking, it was true, but mouth to ear. He heard a man say, “Jigaboo rain dance, absolutely bare chested, while the old ladies were trying to pray.” There was a deep collective hum, like trucks passing far off, that grew continually quieter until he just heard thousands of soles scratching on the asphalt and the garbage. The kid groused about He had to go to the bathroom. There was no issue of finding a way out at this point. The crowd had its own idea of direction and goal. He could go only where the crowd was taking him, feeling unmanned and stupid; and he didn’t want the kid to see this in his face, so he walked in front and made the kid hold on to his belt in the back.

There was a downward pull on his pants, the kid clutching like he’d told him to do, and yet Gary couldn’t shake the sensation that it was a spirit of some kind, afoot in the crowd now, something that was trying to pull his pants right down to his ankles.

He looked up at the old man on the bakery roof in the falling light. The face was never going to tell you what it saw. The nostrils gaped, the jowls drooped, the whole apparatus of his being was bent in watching. It was all Gary could hope to be and was never going to be, a hardened face, still and watching, exerting no effect on what it saw, quiet and remote.

Then the crowd threw them all around a tenement corner and the man was lost to him forever. Thrown by the current, all of them: Gary, his cousins, and his young son, named Clement, called Clem, a name his wife had read in a tabloid.

It didn’t make any sense, where the crowd was headed and him with it, but they were all moving fast. The crowd went up Twenty-sixth, all the way back down Emmanuel Avenue to Sixteenth, then back toward Eleventh Avenue. He lost his cousins. His car was someplace on the west end of Twenty-second. He’d have to circle some, back up the hill. It was impossible, given the crush, to go right away up the hill on Eleventh. Everybody was headed down toward the streetcar stop. He made the boy wait with him awhile on the corner.

The whole place was emptying. A little current formed, heading back upward on Eleventh, and he yanked the boy by his hand and dove in, and they made it to Twenty-second and turned right.

East Twenty-second Street was devoid of other pedestrians, quiet under the yellow lamplight in the gloaming.

The kid, in his corduroy short pants and no front teeth, had a chance finally to ask him what had happened; what about the fireworks? And Gary had to say he didn’t know—although he did know, or almost knew—because he was embarrassed to explain.

They were still in the thick of the neighborhood. There were grape arbors in the yards, and meticulously shaped fruit trees, and little devotional statues among the shrubs. Everything so tidy except for tremendous quantities of garbage in the street. The kid was unwilling to hold his hand as they made their way down the street because now there was room enough to walk separately.

A door opened. The number on the house was 123. And a gray-haired colored woman walked onto the porch and turned around and faced the doorway. Another colored woman, younger, came out, too. The younger one was unsteady on her legs. The old one took a step down and held the arm of the younger, guiding her. They descended likewise the two more steps slowly, to the lawn.

He had stopped to watch this and the kid had stopped and was watching also.

They were here, they were even here, already. They were living here. What hadn’t they been given, and now they wanted this, here, too? How was he supposed to bear this? The kid was going to ask him, What are they doing here? Eventually, he would be dead. The kid would grow up and ask himself someday, Who am I?

Awhile later, Ciccio was soundly beating Mrs. Marini and the barber both and had paid her back the money she’d lent him with money he’d won from her. Certainly he was cheating. She put on a shawl from her purse so as to have a means of enshrouding her hand. It was more a tea towel, actually. She couldn’t remember how it had gotten in there.

Pippo, noticing the shawl, leaned back in his chair and flipped a switch in the circuit box, whereupon the whir of the fans there in the back room and (she could hear on the other side of the curtain) in the front room faded gradually.

“Jeez, it’s quiet,” Ciccio said. “You can’t even hear them in here.”

“Who them?” she said.

“The people, he means—the masses, the craziness,” said Pippo.

Ciccio smacked a card on the table.
“Scopa,”
he said again. In dialect this time—
shcoopa
—to antagonize her.

Pippo got up and pulled the curtain, exposing the front room of the shop and the broad wall of windows that looked out on the avenue. Night had fallen.

The crowd had vanished utterly.

It was an ordinary summer night on Eleventh Avenue, only less so. He unlocked the door and held it open for her and the boy. They went out to the sidewalk, looking around at the nobody, at the no trace of the thousands in the street that had been there not two hours before, no trace except that the street was white and aglow from trash, on the sidewalk asking one another murmuringly what had happened.

Others knew him as Eddie that bore the standard, Eddie that defended the faith and the hearth. Others, he knew, relied on him to speak in the voice of us, to tell us what do we do to protect ourselves. But he was also a private man with sweet feelings for private things, feelings which his position required that he keep to himself, the better to bear the concerns of others. Like anyone else he experienced uncertainty, even fear, in his heart, and Phyllis understood, and his babies napped atop him on the sofa after supper.

Oh, but he’d let everybody down, Eddie had.

He’d been so hot all day, from the minute he woke up—all day with the gastric acids scalding the holes in his stomach lining (oxtails for breakfast: a mistake). That and the heat. And the crowd! Holy Mother, the heat and crowd.

When at midday he heard on the street that the baker Rocco had closed up shop, for a few days, at least, the most exquisite notion struck him. There was an ice room in the back of the bakery. Eddie had seen it before from the counter in front. The baker had to have it for the slow rising of the pastries and the hardening of butter. So early that afternoon, Eddie crept up the alley and tried the back bakery door. Lo, it opened. The saints were with him. And he went on in and found in the ice room the bleakest, most peaceful peace of mind a man could hope to know. He took off his shirt and pants. Perfect darkness. He draped his linen cassock over a box, and sat on it, and leaned his naked back on the cold wall, and closed his eyes. Think of a sunbather in reverse. And at length, the cool and the darkness led reckless Eddie into the deep sleep of a little child.

To be discovered, and awoken, in the same moment, in such a state—this was one of the ignominies the Lord sends to a man in later middle age that seems to say, Edward, prepare thyself. Worse is in store. Thy babies shall empty thy bedpan, and thy spouse shall wipe the shit from thine ass as thou sleepest.

He was attacked by the small deranged man, the baker Rocco, and Eddie counted himself blessed to have escaped with his life and name, if not his honor, intact.

Meanwhile, having earlier that day slept through the garden-watering hours, he now had slept through the blessing of the sweepers, and the procession proceeded without him, so that he watched it among the masses like everybody else, unable to make it to his rightful place among the elect in front of the parade, and, rather than doing the pushing, was pushed himself. And the whole procession had gone terribly wrong.