Salvatore Scibona: The End

Rocco had no shirt. His nipples looked uncertainly at his knees.

Well, this was stated in such a way as not to allow for another person’s way of looking at things. Obviously they had received training in theatricals and elocution. So it was not really any use to argue the case. Because they were committed to their view. Which was their right because in America we have liberty of talking as we please. Thank you, good-bye.

A moment to consider how he would proceed. Bending deeply, he poured a teacup of cod liver oil into the cat’s bowl.

On straightening again, his resolution was complete:

He would physically transport himself, finally, to the New Jersey, to the dwelling place of Loveypants and the boys, and confess to them his own sin in having permitted them to live separately from him these many years, leaving them exposed to the Lord’s righteous anger. He would not plead weakly via post. He would go and see their faces, not only in the mind’s eye but in blood and skin. Once they perceived the earnestness of his confession, they would return with him to Ohio to live.

Outside the screen door, a woodpecker with flaming red plumage about the head glided past, and the cat flattened herself watchfully to the floor. Rocco cracked the door, and out she slunk.

All at once his blood went thick with fatigue. He reached his bed just as he lost the strength in his knees to stand. The streak was nearly as old as the middle one himself, if memory served, and now had seen its completion. Sleep, real sleep, lusty, murderous, fell on him at last in all its smothering weight.

In the middle of the night, not far from his house, the Russians exploded an atomic bomb.

No, sorry, it was only the risen sun. He was a little disoriented. He had slept clear through the dark part of the morning for the first time in 10,685 days.

War at last! Again! It was the beginning of the atomic apocalypse, or so he surmised.

Rocco was abed, alone, striving mightily to be stouthearted. The flood of light had broken his sleep, and now a boom was going to come, and he would be finished off. Everything was white and ablaze — his sheets, his Skivvies on the chair, his blameless knees. Would he hear the boom, or would it split his eardrums first? He waited for the fabled shock wave, a naked man in his brilliantly illuminated bedroom on a sheet. All of mankind would be annihilated this time for sure.

The cat fastened her claws to the doorjamb and stretched herself. He had time to note that outside a jay was shrieking. He waited to go deaf and then to disintegrate. He waited in the famous interval between the flash and the noise. Assuming their aim was good, the Russians had bombed the steel mills downtown. That was what Rocco would have hit if he were running their show. He waited — liking himself a little because he wasn’t afraid — for the boom and then the nothing. He commanded kitty to come keep Papa warm, but she refused him and refused him until, acquiescing, she levitated onto the bed and gave Rocco a kiss on his chin. “Here it comes,” he told her. Nothing in reality was as terrible as in his nightmares.

And wouldn’t you know. No boom. Why, it wasn’t any atomical cataclysm.

Outside, the paper-rags man bawled his plea that Vermilion Avenue bring out its old paper and old rags. His nag clip-clopped. His nag clip-clopped. The dray wheels rasped along the sandy pavement bricks.

Rocco pissed, he showered, he shaved, he boiled his coffee, he toasted his toast. His brood would not recognize the toaster once they returned, but he hoped they would appreciate that he had otherwise maintained the furnishings they knew.

Mindful of the August daytime heat, he decided to defer the start of his drive until the cool of the evening. In the meanwhile he put on his good duds — a coal-colored, faintly pinstriped three-piece suit and shiny brogues — folded a square of toilet paper for his breast pocket, and went out.

Hair swept back and tonicked, cup and saucer in hand, he now made his way toward the bakery to take in the mob scene that, he was confident, awaited him there. A seething pile of shoppers was what he had in mind, all of them deep in perplexity as to why the Lord was visiting upon them this particular deprivation on this unexceptional morning. Rocco was always, but always, open, such that they seldom thought of Rocco, did they? They presumed that there was ever Rocco with anise cookies at Christmastime, and in February with the glazed sugar mounds that have the red candies on top and are supposed to recall Saint Agatha’s tits.

He made the turn off Thirtieth onto the Eleventh and, look, indeed, below him down the slope the crowd had amassed. The reality of what he’d incited was far worse than what he’d hoped for. Sixty in total had been his thought. This was easily two hundred.

He changed his mind. He was almost out of coffee already, and he wanted to go to the bathroom, and he decided to go home.

Yet his body continued its forward progress down the hill toward the squirming horde. Nobody had seen him, or at least nobody had recognized him yet. Already he missed his own company. He wanted deeply to go home and to sit on the can and for nobody to know he was there.

A boy on roller skates flew by on his right. The head was lowered like he was a halfback charging the line. The skate key on a string around his neck bounced on his back. He was wailing nonsense. His acceleration was impressive. He was aimed straight for the horde, on a collision course, perhaps randomly, with Lenny Tomaro.

Rocco was almost part of them now.

The boy hit Lenny from behind and fell backward onto the black-top. Lenny kicked him a few times, tappingly, sort of motheringly, in his ribs, but the crowd paid no notice. Rocco was among them, but they didn’t know it. He heard himself humming “Bye Bye Blackbird” as he sauntered through their midst. On their knees on the sidewalk, two girls in pinafores played jacks with a yellow rubber ball. Next to them twin boys worked a jigsaw puzzle on the concrete. Radios chirped from shops with their doors propped open. Nobody, maybe, recognized him with the nice duds and no flour in the mustache and no paper hat over the hair. He heard his name spoken but not in such a way that anyone was calling out for him.

Somebody said, “I only let them stay because the girl got bit by rats, plural, at the other place.” Somebody said, “I can tell you this, I can tell you this, he begged me. And I can tell you also the words which I used when I gave him his answer.” Somebody said, “We saw there was a line, so we got in.” Somebody said, “It says Continued on B-twenty-four, but you didn’t bring B-twenty-four, did you?” From light post to light post across the narrow avenue, banners flapped with red lettering that wished long life to the Holy Mother. It was Assumption Day. He’d forgotten. The feast would start in a few hours, and how many of them would go crustless and crumbless at this feast because Rocco hadn’t opened the store?

The bell in the belfry of the church began to toll.

Somebody said, “She has that sunglasses that she rips them off her face, like now I’m supposed to be scared.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” somebody said. “Here he is!” A woman with tightly bobbed red hair — her name was Testaquadra — pointed at Rocco like he was a criminal, and two by two the eyes began to seek him out and fix their gaze.

It was eight o’clock in the morning.

The woman Testaquadra approached him, kissed the sides of his face, muttered something he failed to hear amid the chatter of the others, and walked off down the hill.

“The store is closed,” he softly told a buxom young lady with maybe sympathetic eyes, but she chose to look away from him, pretending it wasn’t her he meant to address. She was one of the many, faithful to the host that desired a leader who would speak to them collectively and explain why no bread today. He himself was not such a person; there are those whose greatness of spirit only the Lord sees; he could not speak in a loud voice to the all. He was a simple believer. He turned and went in under the tattered canvas awning of his store and sat on the steps.