Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Did you win?” asked Francesco Mazzone, taking Ciccio’s arm and leading him down the hall.

“Yes, I win,” Ciccio said. But he hadn’t won in any respect.

He sat on the lid of the commode. The disembodied heads of three young plaster ladies wearing Mrs. Marini’s other hairdos observed him with their remote, sexual, pouting looks from a shelf over the toilet paper. There was a fourth, but it was bald. His grandfather sat on the lip of the bathtub marveling at what you could find in this country’s rubbish and handling Ciccio’s skull in such a way as to position his thumbs on either side of the wound, pulling it apart and peering inside with one eye gaping and the other twisted shut. He exhaled tobacco, oranges, and tooth decay. His arms and his hands were so big and his grip on Ciccio’s head was so secure that he might have twisted the head off Ciccio’s shoulders like a squash.

“How did you get these little sticks in here?” the old man said, shiningly proud and slack-jawed, so that Ciccio could see all the way back to where his yellow tongue disappeared down his throat. The eroded molars put Ciccio in mind of the Black Hills of South Dakota, where he had never been. He had never been anyplace but the farm, and here.

“I turn him piss, shit, blood. I make nothing. The stars makes circles at his head. I rise. I come home. The victorious,” Ciccio said carefully.

The old man contorted his lips to dislodge a seed in his gums, and succeeded, and swallowed heavily.

Mrs. Marini supervised Ciccio’s washing of his hands with disinfectant soap and let him proceed straight through rinsing before she made him do it all over again with the brush. Only then did she allow him to handle the tweezers she had soaked in alcohol. His grandfather held the mirror while Ciccio picked the splinters out of his face. She dabbed the wound with peroxide and smeared it with iodine. He was saddened to hear that stitches weren’t called for but held out hope for a little scarring. A faint, permanent change in coloration was all he wanted, something to observe in later years, when he’d be able to think better, nothing that would make him look retarded, or more so, rather, just a historical marker, a chip in the favored plate.

Ciccio Mazzone took no pride in his looks. Something was amiss in his face, but he didn’t know what it was. The scientific thing would have been to monitor the changes of his features over time by comparing Ciccio Mazzone (or Frank, as nobody at home would call him) with his baby pictures, but none existed. Pop, when asked why not, only cut the crusts off his sandwich, carried it on the cutting board to the ottoman in the front room, crashed softly to the carpet, and ate.

Mrs. Marini snipped some gauze and taped it to Ciccio’s face, all the time slugging him with abuse. If Pop had said the same things to him he would have felt backwardly joyful, but coming from her — he wanted to pull his shirt over his eyes in shame.

The trick with the sewing machine had worked. Mrs. Marini even applauded, which Ciccio had never seen her do except to be nasty. The screaming motor made a smell of ozone. She sent them back to number 123 with a pot of chicken stew and some changes of the bandage. Pop was working time and a half, so supper would have to wait.

Ciccio and Francesco Mazzone made their way down the hill, quiet. All the stores were closed in preparation for the holiday that nobody understood. Due to recent petty theft, the church was chained shut. A thin rain came down. All day the city had been leaking dark fluids down its curbsides, prone in its dress grays, like a dead Confederate soldier.

He had had to wear his good shoes to school for a debate in Western Civilization. Then he had slunk with the fellows for two hours in the drizzle, and the leather had shrunk around his feet, which now tormented him. He guessed it might be all right to have some Sally or Susan-Anne, to tell her, Aw, baby, my feets hurt bad. And she’d be soft with him. Probably. But then she’d want to come visit at home.

His grandfather handed him the umbrella they were sharing and hiked up his pants like a dainty chick at the beach so the bottoms wouldn’t drag in the runoff.

It was a strange day. Ciccio was feeling unlike himself. He was fifteen, restive, aggravated. During similar moods when he was a little kid, he would climb onto a chair in front of the calendar over the telephone table, flip ahead a few months, and write, in a square that indicated a very distant date, This day will never come.

He suspected that he missed his mother. He turned the suspicion over in his brain and poked under its folds and did some timeworn experiments to test it, and he was embarrassed when he concluded that it wasn’t true. For example, two years ago she had sent his father a telegram saying she wanted to come stay with them, but Ciccio had intercepted the shitty thing, the telegram, and disposed of it. Did he regret that? Nope.

They passed the darkened pork store and made the turn onto Twenty-second Street, a turn he had made one hundred thousand times. He confessed to Francesco Mazzone that his shoes were ruined and his feet were in pain. Anyway, that was what he was trying to get across. And the old man only sniffed, so that the hair growing from his nose fluttered, and the rain went tap tap on the umbrella.

Francesco Mazzone had made a practice of rousing Ciccio at five a.m. by sopping a dishtowel in cold water and slathering Ciccio’s face with it. Then he walked Ciccio to school — a four-mile slog down Saint Ambrose Boulevard, the road thick with smoke under the sinister light of the streetlamps while the trolleys sped down the median. Ciccio had always ridden the trolley before, dozing through the jolts and rattles, and had stumbled into morning chapel with the rheum still clogging his eyes. Now he’d come to count on this long exertion in raw weather to grease his mental and bodily wheels. They didn’t have much to say to each other while they walked, and there was a generosity in this, a roominess. It left him free to watch the street and think. So long as he didn’t fall into the trap of thinking about himself, he enjoyed it.

The old man would shuffle along, tying and retying his scarf and yanking at his pants as they went. How he managed to walk all the way into the city and back again on his ruined feet, Ciccio didn’t know. The only complaint his grandfather ever made was that his feet hurt. At the same time the old man was convinced that all his foot trouble came from poor circulation and that unless he walked for at least three hours a day, his feet would dry up and fall apart. Ciccio had seen him take off his socks, exposing the dried-out flecks of sponge that were his toenails, and the many corns, and the purple-blotched and bloated insteps. The bones were contorted in such a way that you wondered how he could walk at all.

The two of them and their chicken supper arrived at home. Ciccio climbed the stairs and threw his books on the floor in his room. He lit a cigarette and stumbled down to the kitchen, faint under the effect of the noxious chemicals he’d introduced into his bloodstream. He felt trapped and crippled, thinking, Ciccio Mazzone, Ciccio Mazzone, Ciccio Mazzone. He felt at a permanent remove from everything he saw. Hard to say what had brought this on. He hated this house. He hated the smell of the house.

He wished he had somebody to talk to.

At the sink, the old man was drawing hot water into their stock-pot. He indicated with a movement of the hand like the dribbling of an invisible basketball that Ciccio should sit down.

Ciccio got an ashtray from the counter and seated himself, observing the square and determined back of this figure he resembled in no way but in name.

The old man heaved and pivoted, bending deeply, and dropped the steaming pot on the floor at Ciccio’s feet. He knelt strainingly. Then he began to unlace Ciccio’s shoes.