Salvatore Scibona - The End

The sun, reflected in the windshield of a car veering onto the bridge, flashed momentarily in Rocco’s eyes.

“I’m so confused,” he said to the guard.

Briefly, he was convinced that there was no God after all. The falls weren’t speaking to him anymore; only the bridge and the cars, artifacts of a country married to mathematics and ferroconcrete, were speaking to him, or rather were screeching meaninglessly.

The guard handed him back his moist papers. “Answer me, did you buy anything over there?”

“No, I didn’t.”

The guard let him pass. He retraced his steps along the edge of the gorge, slowly, having lost hold of all the many convictions to which his first few minutes of observing the falls had led him. He didn’t understand the meaning of anything except the stripe painted across the pavement of the bridge. He tramped the crisscrossing sidewalks in the little park abutting the gorge, in search of ice cream. He felt profoundly unhappy and alone. The meaning of the stripe of paint was, You have been behaving as if imaginary things were real.

Certain nights at home, he felt his spirits lift upon hearing the toc, toc of the pilot in the new furnace and the gas catching and making its whoosh. His spirits lifting as a knock on the door would make them lift. He regarded the furnace as company, as a human being. The regularity of the furnace lighting itself, toc-tocking every half hour in the winter nights, was the suggestion of a permanent alleviation of aloneness. He called the furnace Harry, as in, Give ’em hell.

The cigarettes were making his heart slam away at his rib cage, and experience told him the only way to address this was to smoke another.

The ice cream man, once he had been located under the heavy cover of a sugar maple twenty feet from the pre-fall, crashing Niagara, wore a white paper hat in the conventional military shape, the same model Rocco wore when he was on the job; also, a white and blue polka-dotted shirt and a black bow tie. A lipless, unholy grin was frozen to his face. He sat atop the steel cage of a milk crate behind his refrigerated cart, his back against the trunk of the tree. The light all around was splendorous, but the shade afforded beneath this tree was so complete that no patches of sunlight whatsoever fell on the grass.

Such a complicated device just to catch light with. So many thousands of leaves. There was a leaf for every angle of sun coming down. The tree was a cistern for light.

The ice cream man had nothing he was reading, no oddments to fiddle with. Each of his hands rested on the knob of one of the freezer hatches as though he were manning the gate to a passage underground. He stood up with some effort in the strange shadow of the leaves. He was aged significantly. He began speaking before Rocco had completed his approach.

“I have strawberry. I have chocolate. I have pistachio. I have a sugar cone. I have a regular cone. I have no vanilla. One napkin, please.” He cleared his throat. A grasshopper landed on Rocco’s shoulder and the ice cream man leaned smoothly toward him and flicked it off. “I have no sandwiches, drumsticks, or novelties of any kind. I have paper cups and wood spoons. One scoop, twelve cents. Two scoops, nineteen cents. Three scoops, a quarter. I have no nuts. I have no cherries. Sixty feet in that direction one finds a public water fountain. Thirty feet to the left of that is a public latrine. I don’t know what time it is.”

There was a pause while the two men took in each other’s faces. Rocco thought he saw a shiver of recognition pass across the man’s features, and then the man stifle it. There was unquestionably the too-longness of the pause and of the looking at each other before the man set himself to opening the freezer hatches and exposing his wares. The paper hat was cockeyed — a cheerful angle, the way Rocco himself wore his — and liver spots were visible on the exposed portion of the scalp, beneath what remained of the glossy, pallid hair.

“I know you,” Rocco said.

“No, you don’t.”

“We know each other. If you give me a second—”

“Whoops! There it goes! Now then, to summarize, your choices are three in number—”

“I hope you’ll forgive me. For two days, I’ve been beside myself.”

“—flavor, vessel, number of scoops.”

“I’ve been under a cloud. I’m having trouble thinking with a high degree of clearness. Whenever I think it’s lifting, or thinning out — the cloud, I’m saying — suddenly everything gets darker than before.”

“You think you’re unique. You think the newlyweds don’t give me this. I am their uncle that died. I am Grandma’s former milk-man. They leave the confines of Mother’s home to get married, and they come here and get a motel for the night, and the next morning, snap—”

“No no no.”

“—suddenly I am the long-lost. I am Mark Twain. One night with their husband and they have second thoughts. They want a return to normalcy, Grandma, the butter churn.”

“No, but—”

“Pull yourself together, for Chrissake.”

“I’m in some very delicate business these days. Let me not hang details around your neck. It’s enough to know that at the very heart of this business is something that I have to have all my powers about me.”

“I’m plain of face. I could be anybody.”

A tabby cat with a live swallow in its jaws sprung from a rock below them onto the sill of the cliff, squeezed itself under the rail, and padded away across the bright grass.

“I am a man of firm beliefs,” Rocco said. “Such as love of my country; the power of prayer; the belongingness of wife with husband, and children with their father.”

“And now you’re corrupted. That’s the confession you feel compelled to make. Like as though it hasn’t ever occurred to anybody before to open their heart to the old man under the tree and pretend he is the dearly departed whatever-the-relation.”

Rocco peered into the gaping mouth of the freezer, but he saw only what was promised — three tubs, brown, pink, and green, in a shallow, frosted box.

“I am not corrupt,” Rocco said.

“And yet you think corrupt thoughts.”

“I’m very, very faithful, sir. What I’m trying to explain is, I have to know you. If you have the face of the person, that means you are the person.”

The ice cream man closed the freezer hatches, turned aside, and made four neatly spaced and phlegmy sneezes into his handkerchief. Rocco blessed him.

“Something in my face — thank you — evidently expresses, Please come over here and unfold your regrets,” he said wearily. The sneezes had taken something out of him, a reserve of spiritual force necessary to maintain the cocksure veneer. There was a suggestion of pleading-ness in the voice. Rocco felt certain now that he was faking.

“And you know me. We know each other. If you give me a second.”

“No. .,” the man said, trying to sound lackadaisical, making a grandly dismissive gesture in the air, a shoo-fly gesture in which the hand, at the top of the arc, snapped to one side as if only barely tied to the wrist, a move Rocco had no doubt he’d seen before.

Unless the feeling of wanting very deeply to have no doubts could resemble the feeling of having no doubts itself.

“At least once, we’ve seen one another. I think.”

“Jesus Christ, this fucking ragweed over here.”

“Unless our Lord has led me astray.”

“They actually planted it, if you can believe that. It’s part of the landscaping, is what they told me, the park rangers, when I asked them why not mow it down.”

In the moss beneath the hedges, the cat stood with its forepaws on the swallow’s neck and tail and bit into a bunch of feathers and ripped them off, while one of the wings methodically slapped its face.