The John Fante Reader

by John Fante

  Then he was sobbing. Was this any way for a man to fall asleep, calling for his mother? It seemed he would never stop. It tore me to shreds. I knew nothing of his mother. She had been dead for over sixty years, had expired in Italy after he had left and come to America, still visiting him now in his old man’s sleep, as if he felt her near in his dreams, like one lost and wandering, crying for her.

  I lay there tearing my hair and thinking. Stop it, Father, you are drunk and full of self-pity and you must stop it, you have no right to cry, you are my father and the right to cry belongs to my wife and children, to my mother, for it is obscene that you should cry, it humiliates me, I shall die from your grief, I cannot endure your pain, I should be spared your pain for I have enough of my own. I shall have more too, but I shall never cry before others, I shall be strong and face my last days without tears, old man. I need your life and not your death, your joy and not your dismay.

  Then I was crying too, on my feet, crossing to him. I gathered his limp head in my arms (as I had seen my mother do), I wiped his tears with a corner of the sheet, I rocked him like a child, and soon he was no longer crying, and I eased him gently to the pillow and he slept quietly.

  —The Brotherhood of the Grape

  BACK AT THE SMOKEHOUSE my father seemed invigorated, and the kink in his back was gone as he selected a long-handled sledgehammer and positioned himself before a craggy chunk of granite four feet square. He was about to make little ones out of big ones. I stood aside and watched him swing the sledge powerfully, half a dozen blows until the stone began to break, not in clean sheaths, but twisted, jagged chunks and splinters.

  “Fine,” he pronounced, breathing hard, “just fine. Bring them to the wall.”

  I hauled them and he laid them, the big ones and the little ones, the chunks and the splinters. I crushed the rock and he did the wall. We did fine. When tired, he called for wine. He could not straighten up, so he stood like an ape as he drank. When he began to sweat the blotches on his back and under his arms were rose-colored. I thought, what the hell, it’s nutritious, it’s grape sugar, energy, and drank with him every time. We were doing fine, fine. We were tired and dazed, and I thought I saw a gnome with a red hat in the forest as the sun went over the trees and the smokehouse wall sprouted toward the sky.

  We stopped work as darkness fell. We could have worked by moonlight, but that would have been the edge of madness. Sam Ramponi might drive home from Reno and laugh at us. Motel guests would wonder what was going on. We called it a day. We had drunk two gallons. We had pissed three or four. We were spinning. We were spooked. Old Nick laughed to himself. He fell on his face as we went for our supper. I laughed and pulled him to his feet. Ramponi wasn’t home. Mrs. Ramponi filled our plates. Maybe it was deer meat. What did I care?

  My father fell asleep at the table. I dragged him to the cabin and heaped him into bed. I slept. Suddenly it was morning. No need to dress; I had slept in my clothes. My mouth was full of Mrs. Ramponi’s old tennis shoes and dog hair. I cleansed it with a gargle of wine and we went back to work.

  We hurried now. We had to get out of there. I busted the big stones and the old man popped them into the wall. We were at sea, on a raft, hurrying, setting a record. Have a drink, son. It was a race. Have a drink, Papa. No starting line, no finish. But fast. He tossed aside the plumb line. He stopped using the mason’s level. He worked by instinct. Sometimes he lowered his head down to the line of the wall and squinted, keeping it plumb. The wall went up and the wine went down. Once I looked up at the sky and asked, “What time is it?” He answered, “There ain’t no time,” and I laughed. God, he was profound. When the wine was gone Ramponi brought more from Reno. Just in time. In the last moment of the last drop from the last jug. Good wine, from Angelo Musso.

  Then a peculiar thing happened. My father died. We were working away, swirling in mortar and stone, and all of a sudden I sensed that he had left the world. I sought his face and it was written there. His eyes were open, his hands moved, he splashed mortar, but he was dead, and in death he had nothing to say. Sometimes he drifted off like a specter into the trees to take a piss. How could he be dead, I wondered, and still walk off and pee? A ghost he was, a goner, a stiff. I wanted to ask him if he was well, if by chance he was still alive, but I was too tired and too busy dying myself, and too tired of making phrases. I could see the question on paper, typewritten, with quotation marks, but it was too heavy to verbalize. Besides, what difference did it make? We all had to die someday.

  On the fourth day, between large draughts of Angelo Musso, we built the scaffold and had two feet to go. Nick, who was dead, could feel no pain as he strung out the stone. He was not neat anymore, not the fussy, fastidious stonemason of the past, and the wall was splattered and the mortar oozed and made big pies at the base. There below, still alive, I broke slabs and packed them on my shoulder and lifted them to the scaffold, and then one day, I know not which day, I died too.

  I must have died bravely and quietly, for I did not remember lamentation and tears. First there was this splintering pain in my lumbar region from swinging the sledge and then it was gone, it seemed to drift off into the forest, as did the other pains—my aching feet, my blistered palms, the throb in my kidneys—one by one they all vanished, and I felt the cessation of the nervous system. When I die again, I thought, and undoubtedly for the last time, I must remember to face it as I did that day in the mountains, succumbing to death as if she were my beloved, smiling as I took her into my arms.

  The other deceased person, my friend, my old man, greeted me across the threshold of life with eyes vacant as windowpanes as I hoisted him a massive stone and he wrestled it into a nest of mortar.

  Then an ironic thing occurred. Turning from the scaffold, I stepped upon the sharp edge of a hoe and it sprang at me with its handle, a brutal clout between the eyes. I felt no pain at all. The blow knocked me down, but I was beyond pain.

  We did not see much of Sam Ramponi except in the morning as he drove off to Reno, sometimes waving, sometimes not. Toward evening on the fifth day he strolled up without a sound and stood close to the construction, his arms folded, staring at my father on the scaffold. No greeting, no sign of recognition from either man. My father returned Ramponi’s concerned frown with mournful but defiant eyes. Ramponi could not have known of our demise, but he sensed a change in us, an immateriality, spectral and disembodied. He waved me an uneasy glance and hurried away toward the motel, turning once to look over his shoulder at us, like someone repelled.

  Mrs. Ramponi was puzzled and disturbed too. Whereas at first she brought our lunches to the job, she now placed the tray on a tree stump fifty feet from where we worked, and then scurried back to the motel. At breakfast she shrank from serving us, showing a fearsome respect. We usually left by the kitchen door, which she promptly bolted shut as we walked out.

  Sunday afternoon, six days from the start, my father laid the final stone and the smokehouse was finished. We were bearded and gray, we were drunk and we stank, for we had worked and slept in the same clothes.

  Kneeling beside the creek, we pulled on the jug and gazed with sunken eyes at what we had wrought—a chunky little structure that resembled an Arab bunker in the Sinai. It was crude and it was crooked. The stones appeared to have been thrown into the wall rather than set. The walls waved crazily, convex and concave, bellied in and bellied out, and they were very thick, much thicker than Papa had agreed upon. Mortar oozed from the joints, soiling the walls. Whatever its aesthetic flaws, the building looked indestructible. All that remained for completion were the roof and the placement of the single door, tasks for a carpenter. Molise and son were finished.

  The area was in ruins, like a deserted battlefield. It badly needed cleaning up, if only to lend a little dignity to the loony smokehouse. Planks were scattered about, odds and ends of lumber and chunks of stone, tools, empty wine jugs, cement sacks, paper plates and napkins, half-eaten sandwiches, clothing. The more my eyes fell upon the smokehou
se the crazier it seemed.

  It didn’t look like a building at all, but more like a load of stone carelessly dumped there. Tired, drunk and hallucinating, I began to see it as an ancient Indian burial. Then an iceberg. I blinked and looked again. It was a polar bear. Now it was Mount Whitney, now a rocky formation on the moon. A mist settled over the clearing as I rolled up the hoses and gathered the tools. When I looked at the thing again it was a ship moving slowly across a fogbound sea. Disquieting and vague alarms sent me hurrying toward the cabins.

  Through the mist Sam Ramponi’s Cadillac entered the motel driveway. He pulled up beside me. He was in his working clothes, Reno black silk suit, white shirt, black bow tie.

  “How you doin’?” he asked.

  “All finished.”

  He sighed. “Good. How does she look?”

  “It’s a smokehouse, Sam. There’s no denying that.”

  “It sure ain’t no Taj Mahal.”

  “Couldn’t be avoided,” I said professionally, echoing my father. “You ordered the wrong stone. Alabaster quartz is for tombstones. It’s not suited for walls. Too heavy, too hard to maneuver. All things considered, we did a remarkable job.”

  His fat eyes fell upon me.

  “You can say that again.”

  “That smokehouse will outlast these mountains. If you’d asked for the Acropolis the old man would have built it. You wanted a smokehouse and that’s precisely what you got.”

  Big as a walrus he was, shrugging his silken shoulders, not putting up an argument. Then he suddenly blurted it out:

  “Looks like a shithouse to me.”

  He pulled a wallet from inside his coat pocket, removed a check, and handed it to me.

  “Give it to Nick. Paid in full.”

  The check confused me. Everything about it seemed wrong. It was written in the amount of fifteen hundred dollars, but not to my father. On the contrary, my father had written the check payable to Sam Ramponi on the Reno Bank and Trust Company. I racked my head trying to make some sense out of the transaction.

  “What in the hell’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s your old man’s IOU from the poker game.”

  I laughed. “Absurd. My father hasn’t got fifteen hundred. He hasn’t got fifteen cents. He hasn’t had a bank account for years, and he’s never had a bank account in Reno.”

  Sam touched the check with his thick finger. “Isn’t that your father’s signature?”

  “The one he uses when he’s drunk, yes.”

  “Drunk or sober, it’s legal tender.”

  “It’s not legal and it’s not tender. It’s just a bad check.”

  He turned his palms in a shrug.

  “So he wrote a bad check. That’s against the law. I don’t want to make trouble, Tony. Me and your father, we go back a long ways. He owes me fifteen hundred from the poker game and I owe him for that thing out there. So,” he smiled with blameless eyes, “we’re even.”

  He had us, my father and me. Euchred. It was staggering. My God, how long had I been tumbling around in this nightmare? Dragged from the peace and quiet of my home by the sea, tricked into becoming a stonemason’s helper, hauled off into the mountains with three tosspots, to spend six wretched days building a hunchbacked monstrosity?

  Oh, the pain! The blisters! The screaming backache, the tortured feet, the dead weight of those stones, the delirium of our exhaustion, our wraithlike deaths! How long, O Lord, how long? Why was I being punished so? I scanned the past. Was it the waitress in Paris? The three Naples hookers? I have paid, O Lord, I have paid and paid like a credit card that revolves and revolves. Close the account, O Lord. Give me a break. Give me peace. I am wiser, I have learned my lesson. There shall be no more transgressions. I shall return to the church, for I am old now, too fucking old.

  Ramponi, my tormentor, crook, card cheat. Rage. I lunged at him through the car window, my fingers around his thick neck, my mind searching for cruel, obscene curses—something better than motherfucker. But the fat man, like most fat men, was quicker than a bird, twisting from my grasp, and the best I could get off was, “All right for you, Sam Ramponi! You’ll be sorry!”

  He stepped on the gas and the car moved fifty feet to the motel office and stopped. I wasn’t through. I pursued him, walking grimly as he got out of his Cadillac, ready for my onslaught, waiting, fists doubled, big as a walrus, prepared to fight.

  Maybe he could have taken me, maybe not. He was ponderous as a hippo, fat, a pasta man. I was short, runty, and strong as an ox. I had been preparing for this without knowing it. Six days on the rock pile. I was like iron. He was older, over seventy. I was a youth of fifty. He had no chance. Quickness was on my side. A generation separated us.

  I took my stance, fists raised. I spoke:

  “You cheated my father, Ramponi. Now you have to reckon with his son.”

  He brought up his fists.

  “I didn’t cheat. When you play cards with your old man you don’t have to cheat. There’s no way you can lose.”

  “You take him for fifteen hundred, and you don’t call that cheating?”

  “It was three thousand, Tony. I settled for half.”

  “Who changed the stakes? When I left you were playing for nickels and dimes.”

  “Your father raised the stakes. He wanted action. He said he’d quit unless we made it a no-limit game.”

  “You jerk! The man was drunk.”

  “He was no drunker’n me. We were all drunk.”

  Then silence. Cold statues we were, facing one another, Greeks in stone. Staring, fearful of movement. Who would strike first—the crucial blow, the first? We began to circle, slowly round and round. It became tedious. Then it became clear. We didn’t want to fight. We had one thing in common: cowardice.

  But Sam was first to back off. Dropping his hands, he groaned, turned his back, and stepped into the motel office. It gave me a sense of victory. As he disappeared, I put my hands on my hips and sneered. I felt pretty good walking back to our cabin.

  The old man was taking a shower. I pulled the phony check from my pocket and studied it. The dilemma was, should I give it to him, or would it be better if I pretended not to know? Besides, it was really none of my business. It was a private transaction, a gambling debt between him and Sam. I should not have accepted the check in the first place. Then a way out occurred to me. I took an envelope from the motel stationery, slipped the check inside, and sealed it. Presently he emerged naked from the bathroom and scrambled quickly into bed.

  I handed him the envelope.

  “Sam said to give you this.”

  He sat up and looked at it. The fact that it was sealed reassured him and he tore it open. His lips broke into a false smile as he examined the check.

  “Been a long time since I had a real good paycheck,” he said.

  —The Brotherhood of the Grape

  THE LIGHTS WERE OUT and my mother’s house was in darkness as I turned into the yard, but I saw that the front door was open and I heard the creak of the rocker on the front porch, then my mother’s voice:

  “Is he dead?”

  There was no anxiety in her voice, no emotion, only a flat acceptance of what had to be.

  “No, Mama. I just came from the hospital.”

  “How is he?”

  “Okay,” I said, finding a bit of her face in the darkness. “Dr. Maselli’s with him.” I sat on the top porch stair and leaned against the post.

  “It’s been coming,” she said. “I’ve known all along. Is it his heart?”

  “He’s got diabetes.”

  She rose and kissed a white rosary in her hand.

  “His father died of diabetes.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Young. Only eighty. When can we go see him?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Are you hungry? I made a meat loaf.”

  I followed her into the house. The meat loaf was in the open oven. It didn’t look appetizing, as if it had been prepared
for my father, his supper, and I could not eat it. As I spread peanut butter on a slice of bread my mother came to the door. She was in a gray and blue dress with a black shawl over her hair.

  “I’m going to church.”

  “At this hour? It’s closed.”

  “Not anymore. Father Martin keeps the doors open all night.”

  “Go in the morning.”

  “Now. I want to pray.”

  “I’ll call a cab.”

  “No. I’d like to walk.”

  She left and I felt the peanut butter sticking to my mouth, and I thought of her walking seven blocks in the night, across the railroad tracks, past the lumberyard and out Pacific Street to the frame church in the Mexican neighborhood. I went after her.

  As I caught up with her and fell in step she did not acknowledge I was there, moving instead with other thoughts and quiet determination. How beautiful she seemed in that warm night along a dimly lit street of rundown houses, loving that tyrant husband in the hospital, her face like a dove, sweetly moving, reminding me of an old photograph of her in a large hat at Capitol Park in Sacramento when she was twenty, leaning against a tree and smiling, so precious then, so precious now that I wanted to take her into my arms like a lover and carry her through the church door.

  Though it was nearly midnight the church was not deserted. It reminded me of an Italian proverb: “If you see a crowd of women, the church is close at hand.” A dozen women knelt in the pews, all wearing shawls, old like my mother, most in prayer before the Virgin’s altar. My mother stayed at the back of the church, entering a pew and kneeling to kiss the cross on her rosary. I knelt beside her and listened to the old wooden edifice crack and wheeze after the heat of the day. There was a smell of layers and layers of incense and fresh flowers, like marriages piled on funerals, and leaping shadows on the walls behind tiers of vigil lights.

  Peace smoothed my mother’s face. She had not been married in this church, but her children had been baptized there and educated by the nuns of this parish. Her faith was nourishing her now, and from the way her lips moved you could see her sucking up the magic of the place.