T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“By the way,” Nick said, and Mr. McCormick had begun to sing to himself now, a tuneless low-pitched moan that could have been anything from a highbrow symphony to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “did you hear about the wop shoemaker? You know, the one with the little wife, you, uh—” and he let his hands round out the phrase.

“What about him?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“No, what?”

“He’s dead. Two, three days ago. Ernestine told me because she went to get her boots resoled and there’s a wreath on the door of the place and all these Guineas beating their breasts and hollering in the street. It’s a shame, it really is, and I don’t think any of us are safe anymore — not till this thing burns itself out or it gets all of us, every last one, and then we won’t have nothing to worry about, will we?”

O‘Kane had Roscoe drop him off in front of Capolupo’s Shoe Repair as soon as he got off his shift, but the place was closed and shuttered and there was no answer at the door to the apartment above. He rattled the doorknob a few times, pounded halfheartedly at the windowframe, and then, for lack of a better plan, sat down to wait. He’d worked overtime to help cover for Mart, and it was late — quarter past nine — and he couldn’t imagine where Giovannella would be, unless they hadn’t buried the shoemaker yet and there was some sort of Guinea wake going on someplace. He leaned back, wishing he’d thought to pick up a pint of something or even a bottle of wine, and pulled the collar of his jacket round his throat. It was cold, cold for Santa Barbara anyway, probably down in the mid-forties. He listened to the night, the sick bleat of a boat horn carrying across the water from the harbor, the ticking rattle of a car’s exhaust, a cat or maybe a rat discovering something of interest in the alley below, and all the while he thought about Giovannella and what he would say to her. And just thinking about her and how she’d be free now to come to him anytime, day or night, and no excuses or explanations for anybody, was enough to spark all sorts of erotic scenarios in his head, and he saw her climbing atop him, her lips puffed with pleasure, nipples hard and dark against her dark skin, it’s like riding a horse, Eddie, come on, horsie, come on—

He couldn’t marry her, of course, and she knew that — it would be bigamy, even though she was trotting around town with his green-eyed son in a pair of kneepants and you’d have to be blind not to know it was his son and nobody else‘s — but for half an hour or so he thought how it might be to take up housekeeping with her somewhere far enough away so nobody would know the difference. They could get a place in Carpenteria, seven miles to the south and right on the ocean, with that sweet breeze fanning the palms and everything so small and quiet, and just claim they were man and wife, and who was going to dispute it? But then he’d have to get a car, and renting a house — that would be something, like moving in with Rosaleen and Old Man Rowlings all over again, the baby squalling, shit strewn from one end of the place to the other…

At ten-thirty, chilled through and thoroughly disgusted with himself — and with Giovannella and even Guido for having the bad grace to die off and stir the pot like this — O‘Kane pushed himself up and went back along the hushed and empty streets to Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s. The place was dark, but for the light in the entrance hall, and he let himself in with exaggerated caution, wondering vaguely if there was anything left in the emergency bottle he kept on the floor behind the bureau — and he was picturing it, actualizing that amber bottle in his mind — when he saw that there was a package for him on the table in the hall.

It was small, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and with a slight heft to it, more than paper would carry anyway. Dirty white tape was double- and triple-wrapped around the outside of it and he could see the imprint of a thumb under a loop of tape and a few stray hairs trapped beside it in the film of glue. He recognized the handwriting immediately: Rosaleen’s. For a moment he hesitated, turning the thing over in his hand. This couldn’t be what it felt like — a gift, a belated Christmas gift, maybe from Eddie Jr. — no, it couldn’t be. If Rosaleen had anything to do with it, it was going to be the sort of thing he’d be better off looking at tomorrow, in the light of day, when Giovannella wasn’t so much in his mind.

He shifted the package from one hand to the other, looking off down the length of the dark parlor with its spidery plants and dim furniture and the rugs that had been beaten to within an inch of their lives. What the hell, he thought, and he sat in the stiff chair in the hallway and tore the thing open. The tape slipped away from his fingers, the paper fell to the floor. And now he was even more bewildered than he’d been a moment ago: here was the jackknife he’d sent to Eddie Jr., come right back to his hand like a boomerang. But wait, there was more, a message, a note curled up like a dead leaf inside the husk of tape and wrapping paper and inscribed in the smudged semiliterate scrawl that spoke so eloquently of Rosaleen’s innermost being:

Deere Eddie:

I cannot live a lie anymore. I never wrote you in sept. but the spannish flue hit here and our son died of it. He was burried in the St. Columbanus cemetary and I never told your mother or anybody heres the Jack nife back he would of loved it.

Yours, etc Rosaleen

He didn’t have a chance to react, because at that moment somebody began tapping insistently at the window set in the front door. (And how was he supposed to react anyway — fall to his knees, tear his hair out, bemoan his fate to the heavens? The sad truth was that he’d never known his son. A stranger had died someplace, that was all, and so what if he had Eddie O‘Kane’s eyes and his walk and the look of him when he smiled or brooded or skinned his knee and came running to his mother with the tears wet on his face? So what?)

The tapping grew louder— chink-chink-chink-chink— and he dropped the letter and drifted stupidly toward the door. There was a face pressed to the glass in the dark of the night, the image of his own wondering face superimposed over it. It took him a minute, because he was thinking of ghosts, of the disinterred spirits of little deserted bare-legged boys dead of the epidemic ‘flu and come back to haunt him, and then he realized who it was tapping with a coin at the brittle glass and not a thought to Mrs. Fitzmaurice sleeping the wakeful sleep of the eternally vigilant at the end of the hall: it was Giovannella.

She was saying something, mouthing the words behind the glass to the accompaniment of a series of frantic gestures. She had to see him — she wanted to — did he know?

He opened the door and there she was, brushing past him and into the hallway with her broad beautiful face and her eyes that knew everything about him, and Guido, little Guido, his only surviving son, thrown over her shoulder like something she’d picked up at the market, like so many pounds of pork roast or beef brisket. As soon as he’d closed the door she whirled round on him and clutched at his neck with her free hand, crushing her mouth to his, and it was theatrical and wild and it brought his attention into the sharpest of focus. “He’s dead,” she hissed, throwing back her head to look him in the eye. “He’s dead of the ‘flu.”

He put a finger to his lips. Mrs. Fitzmaurice would be pricking up her ears, past ten o‘clock at night and a strange woman in the house, Mrs. Fitzmaurice, who was raging and furious and sexless as a boot. “Shhhh!” he warned, half-expecting to see the landlady stationed behind him in her declamatory nightgown that fell to the floor and beyond. “I know.”