Salvatore Scibona - The End

The others were still talking among themselves, watching him closely but averting their eyes whenever he looked back, and awaiting his address.

Near him in the crowd stood a very young girl, towheaded, slit-eyed, with sharp teeth (her name was Chiara), and he beckoned her with his finger, and she approached him bravely.

He made a sandwich of her little hand between his hands and said, “Rocco doesn’t work at the moment. He’s taking a holiday. A week, perhaps. Tell them. Afterward, things will rearrange themselves nicely.” He picked up his cup and saucer from the concrete step, and sipped, and flapped his hand toward the others that she might run off now and explain for him.

Instead she sat on the step. She petted his biceps, scanning the crowd, vigorous, wrathful.

When D’Agostino poked through the front of the crowd, Chiara leapt in front of him, folding her arms as if to forbid his approach, and clicked her heels.

Sidestepping the girl and bending himself double, D’Agostino kissed the air on either side of Rocco’s ears. “You suffer, and so I bless you,” he said.

“There’s something maybe you can explain to them for me, and then they’ll shove off,” Rocco said.

“Yesterday evening I came and knocked, but there was no answer,” D’Agostino said. “So unlike you. But now it’s already understood.” He added, “Most likely you’ve already seen this,” and unfolded the newspaper he had stowed in his vest.

In order to hold the paper and still leave one hand in the care of Chiara, who had resumed her seated position beside him, Rocco was obliged to balance his saucer in his lap.

The main headline, with a gruesome photo, read QUADRUPLE AMPUTEE HEADED HOME, PLANS TO RELAX. D’Agostino stooped, seizing the paper, and flipped it upside down. Under the fold, next to an ad for a carpet-cleaning service, five inches of a single column began with the heading REMAINS OF ELEPHANT PARK NATIVE INCLUDED IN OPERATION BIG SWITCH.

Chiara’s stockings were powder blue and stitched higgledy piggledy with little fishes. He wondered what he had done to deserve her at this time.

Then, with alarming conviction, a reckless laugh sprung from Rocco’s stomach. He held the newspaper aloft. “You have misunderstood, Joseph. All of youse have misunderstood. This isn’t Mimmo. There was an error at the highest levels.”

He laughed again, wickedly.

“There has been a misidentification. ”

D’Agostino, the side of his nose twitching as he spoke, asked him what did he mean; what was going to happen?

What was going to happen was that Rocco and his wife were going to have to go to the government and look at the face of the body of this unlucky person and explain that it wasn’t Mimmo.

A cement truck tooted its horn, and the crowd, which now occupied the breadth of the street, contracted toward the sidewalk. Some version of what he was saying to D’Agostino spread among them. The general volume ebbed. He felt, like a swollen sinus, the pressure of their attention on the workings of his private mind.

D’Agostino said, So he would have to inconvenience himself, that was to say, he would have to keep the bakery closed while he traveled all the way to New Jersey and then back, only because they had failed to keep their records in order?

“Exactly that,” Rocco said.

Chiara looked at him, compressing her lips so that the blood left them. “Thou hast borne false witness,” said the resolute expression of her arch, white mouth.

He mustered all the charity and patience within himself and whispered, “You must understand, my dear. They’re trying to stick their filthy fingers in my mouth and look inside.”

D’Agostino leaned back on his heels, out of the shadow of the awning, raised his face to the sky, then glanced behind himself, then turned again to Rocco. You would think, he said, that the government could at least read the identification tags that, like everybody knows, you wear in the service at all times, wouldn’t you?

In a sense, Rocco had to acknowledge, he could understand where the government was coming from, seeing as this boy they’d found was, according to the gentlemen from yesterday, in fact wearing the god tags of a Mimmo LaGrassa, and the serial number matched the one Rocco’d kept in his wallet since Mimmo had enlisted, which he kept the number for just such an occasion — rather dog tags he meant to say — and the height was the same.

He turned to the girl and said, “Satisfied?”

“I would very much enjoy an apple fritter,” she entreated.

He looked at the newspaper. He was full of rage and shame. He was saddened that Chiara should see him this way.

So the gentlemen from the Marine Corps, D’Agostino pursued, just to make clear, had said to him, “We need you to come identify”—like they were confused and they didn’t know — and here the paper made it out like this information was confirmed?

Why ask him about the newspaper? He didn’t write it.

D’Agostino looked up again, and back again, and forward. And how tragic, really, because the gentlemen from the Marine Corps had never used any words like, for example, We are sure or We confirm?

“Or a marmalade crescent?” said the girl.

Well, you might say, “I confirm that the moon is made of green cheese,” said Rocco, but if the moon isn’t in fact made of green cheese then you haven’t confirmed anything, because how could you be sure of a statement that was false? And so on and so forth.

Chiara flitted off on tiptoes, as little girls will do, or else she could not abide his sin.

Somewhere a bicycle bell was rung.

Or else it was a desk bell somebody was beating to demand service. A version of what he’d said to D’Agostino, mangled, doubtless, had permeated the host, and they didn’t like it. They maybe disbelieved him.

D’Agostino excused himself and peeled off in the direction of the bell. Others followed. Soon there was a wholesale dispersal of the verminous crowd. A few wished him courage, told him to keep his eye alive, and disappeared. Probably they were ashamed at having been so mistaken — probably.

In short order, all of the faces were facing away from him but one. They scattered into the side streets and the places of business along the Eleventh Avenue, but for one old woman who was making her way through the tangle of bodies in his direction. She was in the widow’s uniform — the black shoes, the black dress, the black purse. She came closer.

She said, “Mr. LaGrassa, you will come please to my house for lunch at one o’clock.” She held a clothespin, which she methodically snapped.

“I have to go to—”

“They told me where you have to go.” She held up a hand. Her name was Marini.

“I have to change my oil.”

“Change your oil. Wash your hands thoroughly. Climb onto my front porch. Knock on my door. Et cetera.”

In truth, he was starving. He said, “I guess I’ll come, then.”

“What is that, ‘I guess I’ll come’? What is that?”

He was standing now, in the sunlight. He looked up. He saw what it was that had snagged D’Agostino’s eye when he had looked up. A girl in a ratty yellow sun hat had ascended, by means not readily discernible, to the top of a telephone pole, where on a small plank she sat reading.

How long do you have to live in a place before you notice it? The whole morning was a dream. Around every corner was a view that should have been same old, same old, but today impressed itself on his mind as if for the first time and for all time. As in, Look, there’s a kid licking the streetcar tracks, wearing short pants — only it seemed to Rocco that he’d never seen the tracks or a child in short pants before and he was never going to forget this. As on a day when the ruler dies and everybody, without even trying, holds on to the slightest speck of mental lint from that day for years. As in, I was squirting blue sugar roses on a wedding cake when Loveypants popped the alley-oop door and whispered, “Harding went to Alaska, and now he’s dead.” And she had a tiny bit of snot dangling from her one nostril. And right away he knew it was going to be that dangling bit of snot he would remember. Today, with no apparent excuse, the neighborhood was full of these bits of snot, so to speak. A boy alone, eating a banana on the steps of the church. It must have been not going to work that did this. He had a bird’s-eye view of the forest for the trees. He went to Bastianazzo’s and got his cup refilled with the watery coffee available at that establishment. Bastianazzo himself pretended to be too busy ironing his aprons behind the counter to talk to him. He drifted about the streets awhile, noticing so much and considering the city itself, which he was about to depart for the first time in so many decades.