Salvatore Scibona - The End

Lina didn’t move.

Enzo picked up the dish in which the carcass of the rabbit was sitting and stalked to Umberto’s side of the table. “Say, Papa,” he said, “why don’t you give me that spoon now. I want to soak it.”

It was dark outside. The image in the window had flipped: It was a reflection of the five of them, at the table, waiting.

Waiting for the train, looking behind herself. Thinking that in this way everything would remain as it was on that afternoon, that they would always be there — but knowing that this was a lie and that someday she would admit to it. That she had left her mother and father, that she had allowed them to die or killed them. Then looking at the chestnut trees down the track and around. And, God forgive her, stepping back onto the platform. Then a puff of smoke over the trees, the scream of the train. The train swerving into view.

And later — in her kitchen on Twenty-sixth Street, in the house she’d shared for thirty years with this man who was her consolation, her right arm, her pearl of great price — the timer went off, and she opened the oven door. She called to him in the parlor. She said, “Nico, wheel yourself in here and carve the roast.” Waiting a minute, but he didn’t answer. She didn’t turn to go into the parlor (but she knew he was in there, reading on the sofa). The wet air smelled of cloves and pork. She stood in front of the oven, saying it louder, saying his name, louder, and waiting. From the gaping mouth of the oven, the heat rose to her face.

They left the farm.

Everything was radiantly black and oily outside the car. Lina drove, and Enzo directed her incorrectly, and soon they were lost in the southern part of the county, where much of the land was fallow and saplings grew from the gutters of the dark houses. The road was too narrow for the car, which straddled it crookedly, two wheels on the grassy embankment, two in the single rut down its middle. In fact, it was little more than a path fixing the boundary between many miles of adjacent farms. Dung littered it. In places the trees on either side approached so close to it that their branches met in the air overhead, like the arch of a narrow tunnel.

Dogs scattered from the corpse of another dog as the headlights struck them. Lina had no choice but to slow down and run it over.

“Holy Mary, the stench,” Enzo said.

A little while later he was sick, and lay down with his head in her lap.

“You only want to drive,” she said.

His nose in her skirt, he inhaled deeply.

It was one of his peculiarities that he could break a bone without sentiment but when he was nauseated he demanded comforting from her openly.

She touched his hair.

He muttered an endearment into her clothes.

“All I could hope is that I embarrassed him,” she said, meaning her father.

“That spoon,” he slurred, picking at his eyes. He was so miserable.

“The spoon was for show,” Lina said.

Enzo rolled onto his back, looking up at her wretchedly, and pointed at his mouth and pointed at the window, but she knew that he didn’t really want her to stop the car.

He had strained to make his strabismic eye look forward while he ate with her father, and now the muscles needed to be rested. She had learned his system, as Donna Costanza had said she must do. Often she knew what he wanted better than he knew it himself.

She glanced down at him as he wrapped his arms around his shoulders snugly and closed his black eyes.

She knew, for instance, that his desire to have a son was terrible. It was like a wraith that followed close behind him and that he could hear but never see (only she saw it). He would never admit that it was really there. He no longer wrote letters to his parents, having no children to report and no interest in describing himself. Excepting Donna Costanza, he was the only person she knew without a single relative in the United States. She was supposed to have made him one and had failed. She was probably also supposed to be ashamed of having failed, but she was only a little ashamed at feeling so unashamed of it. She thought she must be very cold. Sometimes she thought she should make a show of her regret and beat herself softly with a heavy spoon out of solidarity with him, but his feelings were genuine; she admired them; the wraith was a formidable creature; it remembered his ancestors and feared his death for him. It seemed right to her that he should be haunted this way and stupid that she should ever try to interfere with it by pretending to be haunted herself.

“If your father hadn’t kept you out so late, we might have left in the daylight,” Mrs. Marini shouted from the rear.

Enzo sat up. “We went there to work,” he told her.

“Don’t defend him. He’s — he’s a cannibal!”

“No, he is a farmer,” Enzo responded.

“We better find a quicker way to get out there,” Lina said. “She won’t ever leave now.”

“Well, that’s so,” Mrs. Marini said.

“Why shouldn’t she?” Enzo asked.

“Revenge,” Lina said.

“Hell hath no fury, and so on,” said Mrs. Marini.

In a cynical voice that was unlike him, Enzo said, “Why should he care? How will he know? Will she send him photos?”

“God will know,” said Lina.

“God will know,” Mrs. Marini repeated.

“That isn’t revenge. That’s just what-do-you-call.”

“Spite—,” Mrs. Marini said.

There was a hole in the floor of the car. Enzo had cut it with a hacksaw and planted the gearshift in it when he had replaced the transmission the month before. The hole was overwide for its purpose and exposed the interior, by a circuitous route through the undercarriage, to the open road.

Suddenly a shard of gravel shot up through the hole and rico cheted against two of the windows, cracking them.

Lina felt something formless and gratifying settle over her brain.

“Ooh!” Mrs. Marini shrieked. “What was that?”

“A stone!” Enzo said.

Lina watched the road. She had foreclosed the false hope of having a child. It wasn’t hard to do because it was false, and it was false because she had never cared very much to have a child, and she had never cared to have a child because there was a part of her that was supposed to be there and wasn’t (she didn’t miss it), but it was a hope because Enzo hoped for it, and she felt his feelings.

“I said, what was that?”

“A stone,” Enzo repeated.

“He said it was a stone,” Lina said.

The cracks in the windows weren’t serious, they were nicks. One of them was on the passenger side, the other in the windshield.

Then it came to Lina that the stone was sitting sort of proudly on the dash; and that it had struck her nose, high up near the eye, on the left side, where the others couldn’t see it, and a welt was growing, and she was slightly cross-eyed.

She picked up the stone. It was a kind of reward. She started to announce it to the others, but then she changed her mind and put it in her pocket.

Enzo stuffed his scarf and one of his gloves around the gap at the base of the gearshift, cursing the expense of replacing the glass once the cracks spread.

Mrs. Marini poked her face over the seat and jabbed her finger toward the hole in the floor while she shielded her eyes from it with her pocketbook. “We could have been killed! And all because you were too cheap to buy the collar for that thing!”

Lina blinked and blinked again. Her vision corrected itself.

They found the state highway, and she aimed the car at the setting moon.

As they entered the city, they approached a stop sign in front of a boarded-up dry goods store, where a woman sat on a valise on the curb. Her clothes enveloped her so heavily that at first it was impossible to see that she was carrying a baby behind her in a sling. She stood as they reached the stop, rattling a tin can and opening her mouth to let her thick tongue out. Then she smacked Enzo’s window with the can. The child was big and asleep, utterly unresponsive to its mother’s erratic movements. She did not produce any comprehensible words.