The End (4 page)

Loveypants applauded. The armoire hinges complained as the middle one shut himself inside. And Rocco slept.

And trouble came.

No sooner had he finally bought the old man out, after fifty-two months of leasing, than the store began to sink. It was the beginning of the panic. Free enterprise was bunk after all. For example: A child needs milk for his bones but his father can’t afford any; a certain Swede of the father’s acquaintance, a dairy farmer on the South Side, dumps fifty gallons daily of whole cow’s milk that nobody can afford to buy into the swill for his hogs. There is supply, there is demand, but there is no money. And yet money doesn’t exist, really; it’s more a theory; and so the root cause of so much waste was the lack of something that did not exist. For example: The loaf that Rocco slides from his peel onto the cooling rack has a splendidly chewy crumb, holes of many sizes and shapes, a light crust that shatters against the teeth. It has, at the moment he opens his store, just reached room temperature and is at its peak of texture and taste. In comes his clutch of clients who neglect entirely this living object of his art for yesterday’s dead leavings, available to them at half price. Today’s will sell tomorrow. God bless us.

He had no debts but his boys weren’t fed so his streak endured.

With Roosevelt came relief, and Rocco was nearly ruined. Bread they gave for free to anybody willing to wait in line. Cotton wool, he should say. Soap foam. Fermented for only an hour and a half (he asked one of the miserable scabs employed to bake it) and cooked in a lukewarm gas-fired oven. Now the bread that issued from Rocco’s oven on a Wednesday morning was the fulfillment of dough he’d started Sunday night. Look at the blistery, barklike surface of the thing he made. Put it in your mouth and press it with your tongue. He asked the Lord what had become of shame. Meantime, agents of the federal government were buying piglets and sows and incinerating them in a starving nation because they were not expensive enough. In the winter, to save on coal, Rocco and the boys and Loveypants slept in cots in the bakery kitchen. The last boy got scurvy. Briefly, Loveypants believed that she was pregnant again, but malnutrition had merely made her monthly irregular. Then her mother, living in the New Jersey now and widowed, wrote on a postcard that through the intercession of a certain Alfred, stepbrother of the deceased father, Loveypants could obtain full-time employment there in a union candy bar factory. This uncle offered as well a bed in his home—there, in the New Jersey—that could sleep two in one direction and perhaps a third crosswise at the foot, if this third, the postcard concluded, was shorter than four feet tall.

This is the tale of the man whose bucket leaked on his way home from the well.

Here is what they did. She took the first and last with her and the middle stayed with Rocco. Once the store prospered again they would regroup themselves.

Mimmo, the middle one, Mimmino, now the baron unchallenged of all the parlor, was no longer called upon to share the water in his bath. When a chicken could be found, both drumsticks were his, and the fat gleamed on his great teeth. Within a year he overgrew his father. He undressed himself while standing on the furnace grate, a suit of white flesh, immaculate, grown from Rocco’s meager seed, and Rocco pulled the bed down from the wall and threw the blankets on the boy, and doused the light. He could not bake or add or sew or read and would not learn. Mornings, five hours after Rocco had left him midsleep in the house, he stumbled into the bakery for his breakfast. He sat and ate an egg and ate a roll. Rocco dripped some oil upon his comb and pulled it through the boy’s unruly, nigrous hair.

It had long been claimed by Mimmo that bearded spirits visited him, and not in nighttime merely. He could be seen to follow them with his gaze at supper and attend to their conversations—they did not speak with him but with each other, in a language that he did not understand. But he did not fear them anymore, he said, they were older than before and frail, and he now believed that they were on his side.

Rocco had not known that they had been against him. “You should have told me,” he said, extending his hand toward the boy and with the backs of his fingers tapping Mimmo’s chest, three times, mirthfully, on the buttons. “I would have driven them off for you.”

“But they’re on my side now,” repeated his one remaining.

“Whose were they on in days gone by?”

“Yours,” he said.

Early evening. October. Mimmo slouched, boneless, on his stool. The first and last and Loveypants had decamped sixteen months and five days before. The bold and simple pennant flag of Ohio hung from curtain rings in the doorway between the front of the store and the kitchen and billowed with the heat convecting from the oven in the rear. The numbers sixteen, five, twenty-four, stitched by Rocco into the central stripe of the flag, attested to the date of the initiation of his streak. The dough in his grip, leavened by a colony of yeasts he’d founded and daily fed and daily taxed so as to save on brewer’s yeast, was folded by him, rolled, thrust, folded, rolled, swung through the air behind him, thrashed against the surface of the worktable, rolled again, all at terrific speed (he was not ungifted at this) until it was as tight as a mattress and wondrous to touch, even this late in the day its charms unlost on him. “Strike it with your open hand, Mimmino,” he murmured, hoisting it under the melting boy’s unsubmitting eyes. “Spank it. Look, I am a little god. I make flesh out of dust and water.

Look, it weighs more than you. Why, it feels more like your ass than your ass does.” His voice was soft, rasping, tired, a soft bass voice, the soft voice of a hardened man. “Give it a roundhouse punch, it won’t mind.” He sniffled, as did the boy. The Buddha wore a forlorn look today. His posture made Rocco worry he wasn’t feeding him enough cheese. “Go on, close your fist and give it what you have,” he said. “Feel how silky and warm like your skin it is. Sit up and touch it, why don’t you, talk to it, stick your nose in it and take it in.”

That was when the boy asked, if it was all the same to him, and if room could be found on the floor, maybe, if he could go live with his mother. He had the merest beginnings of yellow-orange whiskers at the corners of his mouth.

Rocco put him on the train and watched him go.

The bucket leaked. The water dripped on his shoes. And yet he didn’t run home but continued walking at the same pace.

She didn’t come back. She stayed there. Even when he had a little money and wrote postcards saying,
Now is the time; Steak for breakfast; I will take you dancing; I will close the store on Sundays; What therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder.
And the boys stayed with her. They visited their wanting father seldom, then less, then not anymore. One married. One enrolled in a taxicab-driving class. One volunteered to fight the nation’s enemies in the Far East.

Like anyone else, he struggled to keep the commandments and to be steadfast in his faith. He confessed on Saturday afternoons that, notwithstanding the threat of the scriptures, he had as yet failed to turn the hearts of his children to their father. He took a break from work at six thirty Sunday mornings to hustle up the street and receive Communion and made it back in time to open the store at the wonted hour. Regarding his neglect of the day of rest, he recalled that the Lord had once asked, If you had a sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn’t you lay hold of it and lift it out?

His streak endured.

He desired for himself solitude, which was to say the company of his own.

Late afternoon. August 14. Yesterday. Seventeen years unwifed. Dog days. The days the Dog Star rose with the sun. Attempting to nap on the Murphy bed in his work pants. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. Drip, said the ice in the icebox on the pan. Something to slow his heart down, gin maybe, of which there was alas not a spoonful in the house. Ice cubes in a dishrag on his eyes.

When they knocked on his door he thought it was time already for D’Agostino and the Friday card game. Why, hello. Brush kitty from the door with the foot. They were wearing impractical woolen outfits but were unsweating and tucked their hats under their arms as they entered, and then they made their outlandish pronouncement.

Pursuant to the terms of the recent armistice, all United Nations prisoners of war in North Korea were to be let go, Mimmo among them. (Rocco read the news, thank you, he was aware, he had awaited the day.) However, Mimmo, they declared to him, in words that really did not allow air to get in between, had contracted tuberculosis and, by the date of the exchange of prisoners, had died. This was only last week that this had happened. The navy was soon to return the body to the New Jersey, where Loveypants intended to bury it. The secretary of defense wished to express the regret of a grateful nation.

Rocco had no shirt. His nipples looked uncertainly at his knees.

Well, this was stated in such a way as not to allow for another person’s way of looking at things. Obviously they had received training in theatricals and elocution. So it was not really any use to argue the case. Because they were committed to their view. Which was their right because in America we have liberty of talking as we please. Thank you, good-bye.

A moment to consider how he would proceed. Bending deeply, he poured a teacup of cod liver oil into the cat’s bowl.

On straightening again, his resolution was complete:

He would physically transport himself, finally, to the New Jersey, to the dwelling place of Loveypants and the boys, and confess to them his own sin in having permitted them to live separately from him these many years, leaving them exposed to the Lord’s righteous anger. He would not plead weakly via post. He would go and see their faces, not only in the mind’s eye but in blood and skin. Once they perceived the earnestness of his confession, they would return with him to Ohio to live.

Outside the screen door, a woodpecker with flaming red plumage about the head glided past, and the cat flattened herself watchfully to the floor. Rocco cracked the door, and out she slunk.

All at once his blood went thick with fatigue. He reached his bed just as he lost the strength in his knees to stand. The streak was nearly as old as the middle one himself, if memory served, and now had seen its completion. Sleep, real sleep, lusty, murderous, fell on him at last in all its smothering weight.

In the middle of the night, not far from his house, the Russians exploded an atomic bomb.

No, sorry, it was only the risen sun. He was a little disoriented. He had slept clear through the dark part of the morning for the first time in 10,685 days.

2

W
ar at last! Again! It was the beginning of the atomic apocalypse, or so he surmised.

Rocco was abed, alone, striving mightily to be stouthearted. The flood of light had broken his sleep, and now a boom was going to come, and he would be finished off. Everything was white and ablaze—his sheets, his Skivvies on the chair, his blameless knees. Would he hear the boom, or would it split his eardrums first? He waited for the fabled shock wave, a naked man in his brilliantly illuminated bedroom on a sheet. All of mankind would be annihilated this time for sure.

The cat fastened her claws to the doorjamb and stretched herself. He had time to note that outside a jay was shrieking. He waited to go deaf and then to disintegrate. He waited in the famous interval between the flash and the noise. Assuming their aim was good, the Russians had bombed the steel mills downtown. That was what Rocco would have hit if he were running their show. He waited—liking himself a little because he wasn’t afraid—for the boom and then the nothing. He commanded kitty to come keep Papa warm, but she refused him and refused him until, acquiescing, she levitated onto the bed and gave Rocco a kiss on his chin. “Here it comes,” he told her. Nothing in reality was as terrible as in his nightmares.

And wouldn’t you know. No boom. Why, it wasn’t any atomical cataclysm.

Outside, the paper-rags man bawled his plea that Vermilion Avenue bring out its old paper and old rags. His nag clip-clopped. His nag clip-clopped. The dray wheels rasped along the sandy pavement bricks.

Rocco pissed, he showered, he shaved, he boiled his coffee, he toasted his toast. His brood would not recognize the toaster once they returned, but he hoped they would appreciate that he had otherwise maintained the furnishings they knew.

Mindful of the August daytime heat, he decided to defer the start of his drive until the cool of the evening. In the meanwhile he put on his good duds—a coal-colored, faintly pinstriped three-piece suit and shiny brogues—folded a square of toilet paper for his breast pocket, and went out.

Hair swept back and tonicked, cup and saucer in hand, he now made his way toward the bakery to take in the mob scene that, he was confident, awaited him there. A seething pile of shoppers was what he had in mind, all of them deep in perplexity as to why the Lord was visiting upon them this particular deprivation on this unexceptional morning. Rocco was always, but always, open, such that they seldom thought of Rocco, did they? They presumed that there was ever Rocco with anise cookies at Christmastime, and in February with the glazed sugar mounds that have the red candies on top and are supposed to recall Saint Agatha’s tits.

He made the turn off Thirtieth onto the Eleventh and, look, indeed, below him down the slope the crowd had amassed. The reality of what he’d incited was far worse than what he’d hoped for. Sixty in total had been his thought. This was easily two hundred.

He changed his mind. He was almost out of coffee already, and he wanted to go to the bathroom, and he decided to go home.

Yet his body continued its forward progress down the hill toward the squirming horde. Nobody had seen him, or at least nobody had recognized him yet. Already he missed his own company. He wanted deeply to go home and to sit on the can and for nobody to know he was there.

A boy on roller skates flew by on his right. The head was lowered like he was a halfback charging the line. The skate key on a string around his neck bounced on his back. He was wailing nonsense. His acceleration was impressive. He was aimed straight for the horde, on a collision course, perhaps randomly, with Lenny Tomaro.