Salvatore Scibona - The End

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.

Rocco 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.

All he asked the lady to bring him was coffee and toast. You might have thought toast was a simple enough dish, but you’d have been mistaken. He was made to pay fifteen cents for two pale squares of baize soaked in margarine. He washed his hands and face in the café lavatory. He looked like hell. Warm water and soap were evidently too much to ask. He’d heard of a pretty meager level of civilization in the state of Pennsylvania, and so far he wasn’t disappointed.

He found a barbershop down the block from the miserable café and went inside. (How reassuring that wherever you went in the wide world a barbershop smelled of talc and ethyl alcohol.) He sat on the bench, awaiting his time, turning the pages of a lawn and garden magazine. The barber and the client in the chair were discussing white meat versus dark meat, it sounded like. Rocco wasn’t paying attention because it wasn’t his business.