Salvatore Scibona - The End

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.

“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.