Salvatore Scibona - The End

Also, Enzo bought a bag of licorice and a bag of cherries and some parsley from various men on the street.

His fault was not that he did not beat the boy enough, but that he didn’t beat him with a correcting fervor, and so, for the boy, to be beaten was only the cost of a scamp’s afternoon and no longer shamed him. Enzo’s heart wasn’t in it anymore. Look, he’d already bought him some candy.

He entered Mrs. Marini’s kitchen still not in control of his breathing. His shins were killing him. She was at the sink shelling peas.

“Go outside and knock,” she said.

He went outside. He was a believer in the formalities, in the keeping of customs even after their original intent was exhausted. They sustained him.

She came to the door. “My Enzo!” she said, stretching her sarcastic arms. “What’s this package that someone didn’t know how to tie?”

He gave her the fish. Then he took off his shoes and went into the front room, where the boy lay asleep on the sofa.

He dropped the licorice on the boy’s chest.

The boy woke up. “Hey, Pop,” he said.

Enzo sat down, rubbing his shins. The boy’s ripe feet repelled him. “You will obey me,” he said.

“It’s a pleasure to see you. You’re a sight for sore eyes.” But his sore eyes were closed. He grinned with his thick, chafing, woman’s lips.

“Don’t get wise in the face,” Enzo said. “Now then, my peppers and beans. Speak.”

“I forgot.”

“He forgot, he says.”

“I forgot to do them.”

Enzo unbuckled his belt as he stood up, trying to think of something he could say that would penetrate the boy’s goodwill and also fend it off. “And the lies,” he said desperately.

“Sorry. I meant to say, I made a bad decision. I don’t know what’s good.”

“Stand up so I can beat you.”

“Stand up so I can beat you,” the boy parroted. It was dead-on. It was incredible. He had a gift, but it was for the circus. And Enzo wagged his weary head at the prospect of this boy turning into a man who had never learned that eventually you have to give up the cheap kick of being interesting to other people, that you can go on eating it, but it won’t feed you.

From the kitchen came the solid thwack of Mrs. Marini decapitating the walleye.

“I am the king of my house.”

“But this isn’t your house,” the boy pointed out, raising a finger.

“Yes, well,” Enzo said, tightening his belt again and snapping it closed. The boy would get his beating later, on a full stomach. Good.

“Have some licorice,” said the boy, tearing open the cellophane and breathing in the saccharine chemical aroma his father despised.

Enzo Mazzone was a person of fixed patterns that mostly served him well, such as buying a treat for the boy on weekend afternoons although it might contradict the lesson he was otherwise trying to teach.

“I am the king of you,” said Enzo.

“Sure you are,” said the boy.

Mrs. Marini made a broth from the fish’s head and cooked the rice in it. She boiled them some peas to eat with the fish itself, which she roasted in a pan. Finally, a pear tart she had bought from Rocco’s.

Afterward, Ciccio and Mrs. Marini drank coffee while Enzo sipped at a glass of tap water that tinked with a dozen cubes of cocktail ice. He was of the school that abstained from drink until the meal was finished so as not to dilute the acids of the stomach. The ice stank of the freezer, and the water itself was barely potable, compared with the water on his mother-in-law’s farm, which he bottled and took home with him. His feelings regarding a drink of bitingly cold water with the merest whiff of sulfur coming off it were sentimental. They had more power over him than he would have liked.

(He had had an uncle, unmarried and abstemious — the name was Gregorio — who leased Enzo from his father at grain-cutting time and who would drink only the water of his own well and only when it was freshly pulled out of the ground. When Enzo was with him, he did likewise and taught himself the pleasure of going without. After the day’s work on the hillside plot, without a drop to drink since lunchtime, they trotted back to his uncle’s house, under the walls of the town, three miles, shoes in hand, as the dusty sun went down. When at last they arrived, his uncle hoisted the bucket out of the deep cave — and Enzo drank, the nerves inside his teeth throbbing and his esophagus recoiling painfully before it let the water down.)

The three of them — the boy, the old woman, and Enzo — opened walnuts in their chosen ways. Enzo smashed two of them against each other in his fist. The boy laid one seam up on the table and shattered it with the fat of his hand. Mrs. Marini used a mallet. Enzo couldn’t eat his and gave them to the boy.

Mrs. Marini said she had a six o’clock appointment. Ciccio wanted to know what kind of an appointment, but Enzo interrupted.

“If she wants you to know something, she’ll tell you,” Enzo said.

Mrs. Marini pursed her lips, aggrieved as always when she felt the boy was being roughly treated.

Enzo’s rolling eyes regarded the crystal light fixture in the ceiling. He would have to make an effort to beat Ciccio once they got home, but more and more of late it slipped his mind.

The boy and the old lady nipped at their little cups and went on talking. It was only local gossip, but it was frank and mean-spirited and smooth. He liked to listen to them. He rarely knew exactly what they were talking about.

He was a very lonely man.

They walked on down the avenue, Enzo and the boy. It was the hour of digestion, and no cars tried to pass through the crowded lanes, and the natty old men went arm in arm among the crowd, talking under their hat brims. What did they talk about? Supper; “Your nephew Anthony with the jungle-bunny music while I’m trying to sleep across the alley”; “That’s very nice workmanship on your slacks there, Carmen, who did those for you?” But these were already the dying days of men walking arm in arm down an American street while they digested their food. The young generation preferred to lie down on the sofa and smoke in their underpants.

The boy headed up Twenty-second, and Enzo followed half a step behind, fat, at his ease.

They stopped in for a minute at the DiStefano household so that Enzo could pay his weekly respects to a union brother lately retired.

Eddie DiStefano pulled himself nearly to a standing position and allowed them to shake his hand. Then he settled back into the recline of his lounging chair. It was in this chair that he now expended his summer days as the current of the fan atop his radio cabinet unend ingly struck his bristled face — chin up, squinting, serene, like a mal amute on a car ride. His obesity was majestic. You shook his hand, rather than shaking hands with him, because he did not swing the thumb down over your hand to grip it.

Did they know, Eddie began as soon as the volume of the radio had been adjusted by one of his little ones and Enzo and the boy were seated, did they know that there were certain cultures now living on Saint John’s Avenue, five minutes by foot from the house where they were currently relaxing in safety?

They did, but he continued.

The Slovaks had sold the parish of Saint Bartholomew’s. You could count on the fingers of one hand the Caucasian people still living in Fort Saint Clair. “Columbiana Avenue — absolutely lost, Dug ansville, New Odessa, Tooley Boulevard. One gigantic plantation. All of them holding hands, singing their songs.”

His many young children scurried on the carpeting around and under the mighty leatherette throne where he lived. His wife was at work (a typist in a brewery).

Six months before, lest doubt remain as to the sentiments of the citizens of Elephant Park, Eddie DiStefano and a few of his colleagues had hung a Negro dummy from a streetlamp in front of Holy Assumption Church; then they had called the newspapers and set it on fire. The dummy was made by Eddie’s little girls out of pillowcases, grass clippings, and house paint.