Salvatore Scibona - The End

For his father, on the other hand — who watched the boy with satisfaction as the great hammerhead sailed behind him, twisting his back as it went, until with a little upward heave the boy pitched it over his head — the word, if there was a word that repeated itself across the white page of his mind, uninvited and unremitting, was not, in fact, bastard, not anymore, not for ten years, at least; nor Carmelina, sorry to say, he had given up on that; but sleep.

Sleep, said the posts when he pounded them, as he inhaled the sulfurous fumes of the diesel engine and tore a frozen shoot off one of the vines and chewed it.

Two nights later, Enzo and his father headed back to the city. Ciccio stayed at the farm. The old man’s return train for New York was to leave early the next morning, and Enzo thought of the soft springs of his bed at home with love and hope.

The roads had been cleared after the Christmas Eve snow shower, but now it was snowing again. Shortly after the men drove away from the farm, the snow turned to rain. The highway was black and shimmered under the headlights. After tomorrow, it was unlikely Enzo would ever meet Francesco Mazzone again.

The windshield wipers were beating like mad. Enzo saw the road less distinctly than the rain itself — the glowing atoms that emerged from obscurity in the near distance, hung there for a fraction of a second, and then shot at him by the millions.

“Now, about the boy, there’s something I should explain—,” he began, and turned his head.

His father’s posture was rigid, as always, and his heavy arms were folded tightly against his ribs. But the rumpled eyes were shut, and the head was bowed in sleep.

Enzo could faintly make out the white stripe on the side of the road, along which he was guiding the truck.

He had parked the old Buick by the curb, he had climbed the stairs. His socks had been soaked through since lunch. He was never to forget that he had gone into the apartment — right through the front room, and then directly to the bedroom — opened the bureau, and changed his socks. Only then had he strayed back into the front room and found her on the floor behind the coffee table, her face pressed against the ottoman. Somehow she had fallen, evidently, and somehow, in falling, her dress had been hiked up over her behind. Which for some reason was naked. And somehow, evidently, she had hit her head, because she was unconscious, on the floor there, with the bleeding, although he could locate no bruise on the head. She had fallen and had been bleeding seriously, the blood was on the Oriental, and she was unconscious. He had carried her to the bathroom, her little legs were limp and slick, and put her in the tub, bending the knees so the feet would fit inside. He stood up, scanning the room, for what? A hairbrush — her hair was a mess — and didn’t find one. He ran to the kitchen, looking, for what? A rag. He had been utterly at a loss as to what had taken place. There had been a water glass, strange, a single water glass drying on the rack by the kitchen sink. It wasn’t Lina’s way to leave glasses out; she dried them and returned them to the cupboard. He had filled the glass with water from the tap and had drunk it down.

He was so tired.

Something warm and analgesic was suffusing his brain. The effect was like the stuporous, chemical ease that follows sexual release, and it led him toward the fathomless sleep of early marriage. The sleep of the thousand years.

Nine years passed.

He had come home from work. How many times had he come home from work? He had told the boy to run him a bath. He had asked the boy where his mother was, and the boy had said he didn’t know.

In the corner of Enzo’s vision, his father’s sleeping head jerked upright. “My God, wake up!” the old man cried.

Enzo looked again for the white stripe along the right side of the road and found it. But it was two stripes, and they were yellow. He was driving in the wrong lane.

Brilliantone.

Stand up so I can beat you.

Ad astra per aspera.

Momentum? Momentum is easy. Momentum, on a perfectly frictionless surface, is equal to the mass of the object times the speed.

He engaged the brake, and yet the truck continued its forward motion. Headlights growing brighter by the millisecond. The wheel was turned from side to side, and yet the truck kept on going, straight as the road, and struck the opposing vehicle face on face in an exclamation of shrieking metal and glass.

Sleep.

Up the highway, down the highway. He washes, you dry. Close the mouth when chewing. Close the light when leaving the room.

I was eleven. There was an uncle, the name was Gregorio, who leased me from my father at grain-cutting time, and who I loved better than all the others. He had left to fight in the war against Turkey and returned with a collection of postcards depicting the cities of the north in painted colors, one for each of us. But for me, secretly, there was another gift, a silver cutlass taken from the Turk he killed in Libya, my finest possession. I used to keep it in a hole in the ground in a wooden box, under a medlar tree.

Today, the two of us were walking home. We had been out from sunup taking in his wheat. The scythes, we left in a shack by the field. Our feet were bare. The heat, even now, at twilight, was incredible. We were starved and thirsty when we reached the final slope and the bell tower in town came into view, far off. Then we were hopping downhill, along the path, going faster, then faster.

Then we were running, both of us. The stones pricked my feet but it didn’t matter, we were running. When at the foot of the hill we hit the main road, we were at a sprint, the both of us, shoulder-to-shoulder. It was impossible to go any faster. But then I did.

I pulled away, breathing in the dust. I was young and fast. I was alone in front. My determined feet were small and weightless. The ground gave out under me.

Mrs. Marini and Patrizia drove downtown to pick up Lina at the train station on New Year’s Eve. They walked across Public Square and into Erie Station Tower and rode the elevator to the secondary basement, where toilet paper and butterscotch candy were stuck to the concrete and everywhere they looked, colored people of every age and tint crowded the platform, making them both anxious to get out of there. The block signals down the track turned green, and a locomotive arrived from Youngstown with what seemed to be actual blood and animal parts on the cowcatcher. Another train pulled in, from Baltimore, and an aged colored woman stepped into the gangway, holding her hat to her head. Then she seemed to see it was not the way out, went back inside the car, and emerged a minute later at the side door, goggling at the throng on the platform, tremulously touching her hat as though to reassure herself it was still there, until another old colored woman called to her and rushed to her and took her bag. A tall white woman, biting her lip, wearing a blue coat with a mink-neck collar, was engrossed in a movie magazine, on the back cover of which a grinning, mustachioed Western actor testified that Luckies Taste Better. Somebody tried to sell them a chocolate bar. What appeared to be a perfectly good man’s boot stood upright, shiny, in a rubbish can.

Earlier that day. Mrs. Marini paid the undertaker and bought herself a Danish pastry at Rocco’s on the way home. Once inside, she kept her long johns on and wore a stocking hat in place of her hair. She couldn’t remember a chill that had lingered so long and defied so many means of throwing it off. She made herself wear a shawl — and she despised shawls. The urge to wear a shawl is the body’s advice that you had better get your paperwork in order and unhide the petty cash so your heirs won’t miss it. She drank half a gallon of steaming water with lemon, but it passed through her too quickly to do its work.