Salvatore Scibona - The End

The man let go of Ciccio’s arm and pulled down Enzo’s face and kissed his mouth.

Clocks and smoke. The butane perfume of cigarette lighters flipped open. He had last been kissed on the mouth by a prostitute in the summer of 1950. It was the only time. Later, he regretted the expense.

The old man had had an old man’s riven, misleadingly hard and dour face even in Enzo’s youth. It seemed like a cunning disguise that he had since grown a layer of fat that had transformed the face into a rough pile of fleshy pouches, like a dilapidated stone wall from which the mortar in the joints has washed away.

“Oh, Vincenzo,” he said courteously, “how long it’s been since I’ve seen you.”

Enzo thought he saw all the many lights in the station diminish and go bright again, as though the shadow of death had raced across his eyes. “Hello, Pop,” he said.

“What did you say?” asked the boy.

Enzo’s father let go of his face and turned to the boy. “Mazzone Francesco,” he said, indicating for the boy to incline his head, and then kissing his cheeks, “I am called Mazzone Francesco as well.”

It was 7:14 in the evening, said the great clock suspended from the ceiling of the vaulted vestibule.

“Tell him to stop kissing me,” Ciccio said.

“Doesn’t he understand anything I’m saying?” said Francesco Mazzone.

“Sometimes,” Enzo said. “He doesn’t know how to speak. He understands when he tries.”

“You’re talking about me, but what are you saying?” said the boy.

Outside, Francesco wanted to know if it was customary for children to dress in such dramatic fashion. Witches, ballerinas, ghosts, and hobos entered and departed the storefronts.

“He’s confused about the costumes,” Enzo explained.

“How disgraceful,” Francesco said.

“This is our Public Square,” the boy said pleasantly.

“This is the square, he says,” Enzo translated.

“I see that for myself, thank you.”

They walked down Coshocton Street toward the water.

Francesco Mazzone shook a couple of Camel cigarettes from a pack inside his coat and handed one to Enzo and one to the boy. “I bought these in Yonkers. They are of the very highest quality.” His head was a well-cut block on which the trim white hair was meticulously arranged.

Ciccio was wide-eyed with awe and gratitude.

The old man had taken Ciccio’s arm.

“Enzo, translate.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m dying from cold,” Francesco said, addressing the boy. “Is it always like this? I’ve never been so cold in my life.”

Enzo started to translate, but the boy waved him off. They managed to communicate through pointing and nods. As they approached the truck on the dark side of the stadium, the boy started using Italian words he had always refused to admit he knew how to pronounce.

They drove east down Maumee Avenue, Francesco in the window seat, the boy with the gearshift between his legs, shifting when Enzo engaged the clutch. Francesco and the boy were holding a more or less regular discussion, with only occasional recourse to Enzo for translation.

They drove through niggertown.

“This is where the moolies live,” the boy said.

“Hey.”

“What? I thought that was the word.”

“What did he say?” Francesco said.

“This is where the tizzoons live,” Ciccio said.

“I told you what to call them.”

“Is there a law?” his father asked. He meant a law about who could live where.

“No,” Enzo said. “Maybe. I don’t know, honestly.”

They passed through a series of green lights. Snow fell. Francesco held up a finger, pointed at himself, indicated the truck, and then spoke briefly.

The boy said, “He’s never been in a car before?”

“That can’t be,” Enzo said.

“Buses, of course. All the time. When we go to see your brothers in Bergamo. Never once in a private car. This is a strange kind of car. What kind of car is this?”

“A pickup,” the boy said.

Francesco repeated the word.

The boy said, in Italian, with nary an accent, “Your voyage, how it was? You am comfortable on it?”

“Where did you learn to talk like that?” Enzo demanded.

“I can’t. I don’t know,” the boy said, downshifting. “It just comes out.” That was the boy. Opening his mouth for anything that knocked on his rotten teeth.

And here was their church, the boy explained.

Enzo had been married in it twenty-three years before, with his union pin holding the boutonniere to his jacket and the boys from Local 238 standing in for relatives. Carmelina wore a satin suit and a small hat with a veil on it. He used to wake up in the morning with her sweet rose soap on his breath and a loose strand of her hair stuck in his throat.

Something was slowing Enzo down. It had been slowing him down for a long time. Eventually, like a ball thrown straight up that slows and slows, he would come to a stop for a moment, in midair, and begin his descent.

Francesco Mazzone, throwing one leg over the other and turning himself suavely, gripped Ciccio’s chin, turning the head from side to side, examining it skeptically, like a rancher at a livestock auction. “Such a good-looking boy,” he said, staccato, in dialect. “You should do something about these teeth, however, Enzo. Lemon juice and bicarbonate. Morning and afternoon.”

“What did he say?” the boy asked.

Enzo didn’t answer.

Tomorrow was All Saints’ Day, and after that All Souls’, but he had forgotten to buy candles to light in his house for his dead.

Some kid caught hold of Ciccio’s hair, a rassler from the public school who smelled of Munster cheese, sort of a dude, with his corduroy collar up — never mind how the fight got started. They were downtown, at the New Odessa rail yard. Ciccio had the usual advantage of his height and reach. But this individual went for the hair, no self-respect, and bounced Ciccio’s face on a railroad tie.

Now Ciccio was leaking blood from a gash on the high bone of the cheek, limp with fear of what Mrs. Marini was going to do to him. But he’d allowed a wound of similar depth to go unattended in the past — it was on his forearm, he kept his sleeves rolled down — and it got so fouled up he’d had to dig out the pus with a spoon.

It was the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, a holiday they hadn’t kept since his mother went away, six years previous. Nobody ever told him what the reason was.

Mrs. Marini probed indifferently at the swollen mess under his eye before changing her glasses to scrutinize the clothes, sniffing at a creosote blotch in the elbow of his jacket and then, with heart-felt scorn, smacking his face on the clean side. “When you die your father will have no heirs, don’t you realize that?” she said. “Go to the bathroom.”

There was a pot on the stove and the kitchen smelled of boiling poultry, but Ciccio’s appetite had just now left him. She hobbled down the cellar stairs.

Francesco Mazzone, the earlier model, lay on his back on the floor of the sewing room tinkering with the chassis of the desk. He had found an electric motor in the trash on someone’s curb and was trying to substitute it for the pedal-action drive of Mrs. Marini’s sewing machine, which excited the rheumatism in her hip. Or so Ciccio gathered from the two dialect words he recognized, machine and trash, and from the looks of things. The rubber pedal and the frayed belt that turned the flywheel had been tossed behind the dressmaker’s dummy into the heap she set aside for the paper-rags man, who would also take copper, tin, and bicycle tires. Earlier in the month, the old man had retiled the bathroom back at home with scavengings and rehabilitated her coffee percolator, a device he had never met before, the product of which disappointed him.