Salvatore Scibona - The End

He bent himself over the kettle, ripping the corn apart with disgust while begonia pollen breezed through the screen.

“Did he eat here or did you pack his lunch for him?” Enzo said, wagging a shorn ear at her and sneezing into his shoulder.

“Don’t you threaten me.”

“That Slav was with him, I guess.”

“You believe that I am breakable, and you are mistaken.”

“He went to downtown, to the ballgame, with the flea Ricky, while my peppers are rotting, and you protect him,” Enzo said.

The boy was fifteen years old. He was smarter than his father, but he didn’t know it yet. He claimed he couldn’t tell the difference between a tomato from the garden and a tomato from the store. He gave up on the accordion, and Enzo wrapped it up in its velvet pall, closed it in its case, and stowed it in the otherwise vacant attic of the house he’d bought the year after the boy was born. All Ciccio wanted to do in what he called his free time was play football and pick fights. As if it mattered what he wanted to do. Enzo made him work all summer in Patrizia’s grapes, hoping the lonesome would make him a more formidable person. The boy was too old to be so agreeable.

Ciccio had a sight hound’s face. The long, narrow, protruding nose was crooked, and the big eyes were closely set. He had recently pubesced, instantaneously, and the hairs grew even on his pimpled shoulders. His teeth were discolored from coffee and Mars bars. It must have been an illusion created by the comical elongation of his forehead and face that his hairline seemed already to be in regress. His height was excessive, like a vulgar joke.

They finished with the corn. They went inside and she put a loaf of bread on the table, and a bowl of mushrooms. Enzo chewed one of them, then got up, rummaged her kitchen drawers for a pack of cards, and discreetly spit the mushroom into the bucket of scraps for the garden. It was raw.

A knock came from the clatterous screen door that opened onto a path through her garden to the alley gate in back, and she popped up to answer it. He found the cards and poured himself a glass of wine from the pantry, unable to hear what she was saying in the breezeway to these people at the door. He sat down with his glass, snapped the rubber band off the cards, and inspected his shirt pockets for cigarettes.

The pneumatic mechanism that slowly closed the door of the breezeway siss ed, long and malicious, as the piston pressed the air out of the cylinder; then it shut with a clap.

The smell reached him, sweet-sour — only momentarily did he fail to recognize what it was — of the fetid feet of an unwashed teenaged boy.

He blinked. He stood up. The chair crashed to the floor behind him.

He shot through the breezeway, down the garden steps, and through the pole beans and chard growing on either side of the narrow garden path. The old lady protested from the house as he fumbled with the latch and finally threw open the back gate into the alley. What he saw there was the accomplice, Ricky, rounding the bakery corner and disappearing onto Twenty-sixth Street.

The closer on the breezeway door repeated its long, insinuating sound.

He listened to it, then pointed himself down the center of the alley and flew.

He was all legs, growling, fleet, and livid.

He ran on top of the puddles. Rounding the bakery corner himself, he caught a glimpse of Ricky, in some old man’s plaid pants that had been shorn crookedly at the knees, vanishing at the edge of the dry cleaner’s. They were turning onto Eleventh Avenue. A tactical error on Ciccio’s part (Ciccio was leading; Enzo hadn’t seen him, but he had smelled him well enough). When being chased, avoid open places. The boy never listened.

Enzo threw himself across Twenty-sixth Street, leaping into the air. He could not hear his footfalls. Hurdling heaps of garbage, springing right in front of a cruising yellow Oldsmobile. However, they were headed uphill. Perhaps he’d underestimated the boy. Exhaust the enemy, the boy was thinking. I am fifteen, he is forty-eight, the boy was thinking. I will not merely escape. I will humiliate my pursuer.

Enzo made the cleaner’s and veered up the hill. Eleventh Avenue was a throng of fruit vendors, nut vendors; the armies of the retired, the lame, the blown out and wasted; the philosophers; the poets of the last, lost era; the prophesiers of impending atomic catastrophe; the man who sold his homemade brand of bleach from a wagon painted electric white crying, “Brilliantone! Brilliantone!”; the woman who picked the sidewalk clean while she went; the heartless, the jobless, the shoeless; the man who sharpened your knives with a pedal-operated grindstone while you sat on the stoop, listening.

He swerved into the gap between the lanes, and the boys came into view, both of them at once, toeing the double yellow line between traffic, white knee socks pulled all the way up (they had been in the high grass someplace), on a dead sprint. The cars moved slowly to the edges of the street. Nobody seemed to be taking special notice, because a man chasing two boys up this street was nothing special.

He had forgotten the happiness of running away and of giving chase. Between the ages of five and thirteen, he had spent half his hours crashing through the dark alleys of a desolate hilltop town thick with the odor of molding fruit peels, bathwater, and shit, ducking away from the wider lanes, playing games in which the rules changed without notice, midcareer.

The narrowness of mind and of purpose.

There is the boy. Get him.

The initial burst of desire and power burned off. But then he didn’t stop. Going up and up the hill, the cars having parted and made way. He didn’t stop, and the thrill turned into something else, a peacefulness of mind he rarely felt anymore.

They were, all three of them, moderate smokers. This couldn’t go on forever. Enzo was gaining on them, but he was shorter than they were, so his old legs were working twice as fast. The boy would be taking this into account. Let him wear himself out, the boy was thinking. Exhaust him and humiliate him while I run away in my baseball socks.

A whale of a Studebaker turned left onto Thirtieth Street, blocking his view momentarily, an excuse for the boy to change course. When the middle of the street opened up again, Enzo saw Ciccio’s burred head breaking left above the traffic. Ricky had escaped. All the better. Ciccio’s scalp was red and peeling. Enzo had found a louse on him and shaved his head two days before and rubbed it with poison and told him he must wear a hat now or the sun would scorch his naked scalp, but the boy had disregarded him.

There is the boy. Bring him to justice.

Enzo wasn’t tired. He could run like this forever.

He turned down Thirtieth Street.

He wasn’t tired — then a stopcock came open in each of his two flat feet, and the life force was like a liquid draining out of him, into the gutter.

He slowed, and slowed, and finally sat on the curb, crumpled, sucking air.

Someone had removed the classy old egg-and-dart cornices from the façade of the house he was facing and had replaced them with plain white boards. Certainly they were easier to paint.

He stumbled along the downhill blocks back toward Mrs. Marini’s house. Maybe it took him three hours to get there. At the fish truck, on the way, on the corner of Twenty-ninth, he bought a walleye. It was the biggest thing, a long silver animal with savage teeth. He was famished.

“Head off, or head on?” said the uneasy, ill-fed, and gray-faced young man as he shook the ice off the fish, which eerily resembled him, onto the avenue pavement.

“On,” Enzo said. And the young man wrapped it in white butcher paper and tied it with a length of orange ribbon, poorly.