‘I smelled it.’
‘Sit down and have a dish before you go.’ He let the suggestion pass.
‘What’s the matter. Beans with prosciutto. It’s your favorite dish,’ she said.
‘Gee, Ma, I haven’t got time now.’ It was a plea. He was having kittens with the way she was taking such pains with the packing.
She allowed his impatience to make no impression on her and launched into a litany of warnings and instructions. She had picked him some lettuces, which he was to wash carefully because she had not had time to and there were bugs and everything in the garden. Each leaf right under the faucet was the idea and not just to run water over the whole head. He said he knew all that. If they were eating sausages, she continued, you had to cook pork a long time otherwise you could get sick. He knew that too but to cause no further delay he said nothing. Pork had to be cooked until the pink was all gone, the lesson concluded.
‘Ma, you don’t have to tell me everything.’
‘I don’t? You need someone just to follow you around.’
‘Am I that bad?’ He put on his hurt tone. ‘You marry a nice girl and I’ll be happy.’
‘And build me a nice house out in back?’
‘Yes. You know there’s plenty of room here and you’re always welcome to live in this house. But if you want to build your own place in back that’s fine with me. I know every girl likes to have her own home today.’
It was a whole litter of kittens now.
‘Look, Ma. It’s getting late and I’m in a hurry. Why don’t you just go down and put all the salad stuff in the car, huh.’ Then he buttered his voice and added, ‘Please?’
5
Bouncing off the street, Soderini’s Chevrolet drew up alongside his son’s Buick. The Chevy’s engine gave a roar, the tailpipe let go with a burst of blue haze.
Reb heard it and his eyes darted around the room for the induction notice. He had left it lying somewhere. Maybe I should have said something to him last month when they called me in for the physical, he thought in a panic. Who figured there was a chance in ten I’d be taken? He froze and waited.
‘I haven’t had time to read it yet, Pa. Not all of it anyway. I looked at it though. It. It seemed kind of long.’ His father’s silence, the look of disappointment on his face, made Reb lower his gaze to the pages of the Britannica that lay open before him on the bureau. ‘Right here, Pa. I liked the part where it said about no government.’ Head down over the volume Reb read aloud. ‘Harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority.’
‘The army has called you?’ Soderini said at last.
Reb was unable to look up from the page. He was unable to speak.
‘Yes or no?’ Soderini said. ‘You found out. Yes or no?’
‘Yes.’
Soderini stared at his son in the mirror, uncertain where to begin all he had to say. ‘Listen, Ribelle. You don’t have to go, you know.’
‘Pa, my friends are waiting for me. Going down the beach.’
‘I’m not talking about the beach.’
‘No? What then?’
‘Listen to me one minute. Do you have any understanding what militarism means? What it represents to the mankind? It’s a form of slavery still when all other forms of slavery humanity has abolished. Isn’t it true? You said it yourself there.’ Soderini thrust his jaw at the volume of the encyclopedia. ‘Submission to authority. They say kill and you have to kill. If it’s your mother, if it’s your brother, you gotta kill, porca miseria. They own your body. They take away your mind. Do you understand the question?’
His father was talking a torrent of words. The question. The question. Was there a question? The few lines Reb had read of Kropotkin he had not really understood. Should he be honest and tell his father so? He turned to face him but gave no answer.
‘You know what Victor Hugo said?’ Soderini raised a finger. ‘Something like this. Il prete ed il soldato sono i più temibili nemici del popolo. Il prete è l’uomo che mente. Il soldato è l’uomo che uccide. What do you say to that, huh?’
‘That sounds good, Pa,’ Reb said. ‘Sounds good. That’s all you got to say?’
Reb thought it over. Priest and soldier were the worst enemies of the people. Priests lie. Soldiers kill. ‘I don’t know, Pa. They ain’t gonna make me into a priest anyway.’ He tried to smile.
‘Can’t be serious, can you? For one time?’
Reb could feel his skin beginning to grow warm. He felt pressed, cornered. ‘All right, I’ll be serious,’ he said with sudden inspiration. ‘Just what am I supposed to do, huh? Tell me that.’
‘You don’t go,’ Soderini said. ‘There are ways.’
‘Name me one.’
‘Mexico,’ Soderini said.
‘Mex. Well, name me another.’
‘Sweden,’ Soderini said.
‘Okay, name a third.’
‘You go to Sweden.’
‘Sure, Sweden,’ Reb said. ‘Hey, Pa, don’t you know they got my number down there in Washington. 1078653. Here’s Soderini of Putnam Mass. He wants a passport to go to Sweden. Oh he does, does he? Let’s have a look here in the files. Well well, isn’t this a funny coincidence? 1078653 Soderini of Putnam Mass is supposed to be going in the army this month. Come on, let’s nail him. Ever heard of the FBI, Pa?’
Soderini smiled a knowing smile. ‘You don’t have to worry about the passports. We can fix that easy.’
‘How?’
‘Through Canada.’
‘Through Canada?’
‘Montreal. Forge passport,’ Soderini said. ‘Oh, but a good forge. Cost a thousand dollars. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. I know where to get the money.’
Reb felt the heat in his face now. He knew how to handle his mother even in the worst of times but he never before had had to handle Soderini. He knew what to say but he did not know how to say it. Keep cool, he told himself. Keep cool.
‘You know, Pa. I think you’re serious.’
‘All right then,’ Soderini said. ‘Sweden.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t just say no,’ Soderini told him reasonably. ‘Think first.’
‘It’s crazy, can’t you see that? Sweden. Mexico. Anyplace. It’s a crazy scheme.’
‘We send you something to live on every month.’
‘That’s all right, Pa. The answer’s still no. Thanks anyway. No kidding.’ Reb strapped on his wristwatch, slowly, with great care. The seconds passed. He ran the comb through his hair again, in dread of having to turn and look into his father’s blue eyes. His own eyes were that same odd blue. ‘You really mean it, don’t you?’he said finally. ‘You really want me to take off.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Everybody else is going. I’m not the only one. Most of the guys I know have been called.’
‘We are anarchist,’ Soderini said. ‘We don’t go.’
‘Sure. I’m gonna tell them we’re anarchists and we don’t go.’
‘You don’t tell them nothing. We act.’
‘There’s plenty of guys around here that already went. Sons of compagni of ours. Look at Walter. Look at Gary. Even Bruno’s gone.’
‘If Bruno’s grandfather was alive Bruno wouldn’t go in. There was a man.’
‘Well, how come about Walter and Gary then?’
‘No character,’ Soderini said.
‘Character?’ Reb snorted. ‘Nobody’s asking them to work in a bank.’
‘Character to resist, dio cane. That’s what. To resist.’
‘Believe me, I tried. I said I had this bad knee. I never carried the draft card on me. I even lied I pissed in my bed.’
‘I mean really resist,’ Soderini said.
‘You mean take off,’ Reb said. ‘You mean run away. It’s wartime. They’ll shoot me if I don’t go in.’
‘Not in Sweden they won’t shoot you.’
Reb’s heart was hammering hard. ‘Pa, you’re talking forty or
fifty years ago when you first come to this country. It’s all different now,’ he said.
‘Ah, Ribelle. This war is different you think? The fifty years ago war and the hundred years ago war was different? Soldiers didn’t die then like they dying now? The ones stayed home then didn’t make the money out of it like now? Maybe the machines are better now so more die faster but the rest stays always the same. The battlefield changes, that’s all.’
‘Pa, there’s no sense arguing like this. I know nobody can beat you with words. So let’s just say you won then, okay?’
‘I won what?’
‘The argument,’ Reb said. ‘You win. I lose.’
‘That means you’re not gonna put on the uniform?’
‘No, no, no. That ain’t what I said. I said you win, that’s all.’
He was blind with rage. His face burned. He burned. In the lower half of the mirror he noticed he was wearing his jacket. From the doorway when he turned to speak he saw Soderini at his bureau closing the encyclopedia. Reb clutched the jamb and stammered unintelligibly.
Then he hurled himself down the stairs. His one instinct, his blind instinct, was to run. He had taken the stairs on the run. Now he ran through the kitchen. He ran out of the house.
6
The beach house was a plain neatly painted modern bungalow, gray with white trim, set close to the angle of two dirt roads. Reb and his brother Ateo had built it weekends, they supplying the labor and their sister the money. Now all three owned and shared it jointly. Its small yard with a single tree sprouting from the edge of the roadway, a stunted chokecherry whose trunk had been torn by a bulldozer, was a waste of sand and gravel and an occasional weed and was used only for parking cars. The chokecherry was full of dead branches and cast almost no shade. The ocean was a quarter of a mile away.
‘Quarter of a mile,’ Alex said when they arrived. ‘That’s rather a long way, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, we don’t go swimming here,’ Reb explained. ‘Beach is all stones. We go to the town beach for residents only. It’s a couple of miles that way.’ His thumb pointed over his shoulder.
Alex gazed forlornly up the road. It was straight, wide, and rose in a steady incline. Cottages, half of them new and ugly, half old and ramshackle and ugly, lined it on both sides. The roadway itself was an assault of leaning poles that were crisscrossed with power lines. Everything swam in the heat waves of the dying day. Beyond the rise at the end of the road, beyond a three foot thick concrete wall buttressed with five foot granite blocks, lay the ocean.
‘I thought perhaps you’d be right on the water.’
‘We couldn’t because of Livvy’s kids and anyway we don’t care about the water that much.’
Alex was fortysix, divorced, meticulous, and had thinning gray hair. Women and girls, the whole female species, were the beacon of his life. Experienced and worldly, he was also trustworthy. Reb looked up to him, relying on Alex for something the men Reb’s own age were incapable of giving him. Alex was the one Reb sounded out about his love life and the management of it.
An hour and a few drinks later, a mellowed Alex and Reb were out in the sandy yard among the cars grilling steaks over a charcoal fire.
‘Hey, come on, Alex,’ Reb said eagerly. ‘What did you make of the girl I was with Monday night?’
‘Girl?’ Alex said. He had been instructing Reb never to use the word girl.
‘Woman I mean.’
‘I take it you’re not sleeping with her,’ Alex said.
‘She leapt across the room when I put my arm around her. That’s a telltale sign. I’m trying to though. I really am.’
‘Going with her a month and not laying her yet?’
Reb laughed. It was Alex who had told him he had never been out with a woman more than four times before he got into her.
‘Laying her?’ Reb said. ‘Who’s talking about laying her? I been screwing Bunny since the second time I seen her. Anything I want in the back seat of the car long as I take her home afterwards. It’s just that I can’t get her to come down here to the beach and stay over.’
‘Still playing cherry,’ Alex said. ‘Saving a little something for the next guy.’
‘Yeah. That’s what she says. Doing it with you is okay, Reb. But it’s different spending the whole night with a man. I wouldn’t do that unless I was married.’
Alex turned the steaks. His polish, his sophistication, was a patina he had acquired with his job and his fancy clothes. He managed a haberdashery. ‘That’s the thing with these broads, Alex,’ Reb continued. ‘Take this Bunny now. First night I lay eyes on her she’s with Buster Fradoni at the Clover. Well, right away I size up she didn’t give a shit for Buster. So I march right up to their table and say oh. This is the beautiful girl I’ve been hearing so much about, huh Buster? Poor Buster. He turns red all over. Bunny kind of gives me that look. I buy them a drink but don’t even sit down. I just stay long enough to find out where she lives. That night around one a.m. I give her a ring about stepping out the next night. Sure, she says. Next night I take her for a little spin. No show, no bars. I just grab her and say get in the back seat.’
‘And she didn’t refuse?’
‘I never let them tell me no,’ Reb said.
‘Except when it’s overnight at the beach?’ Alex needled.
‘Shit, Alex,’ Reb said. ‘I always have more than one woman going at a time.’
Reb’s idea of a woman was someone older, say thirtyfive, so that she knew the difference and appreciated a good lay. He had never been out with such a woman. As for those his own age he liked their bodies but the struggle bored him. Alex was on some other wavelength. He claimed he went for fifteen and sixteen year olds, a taste Reb found unimaginable. But he would never have come straight out and told Alex that. There was a large streak of cynicism in Alex. The women he came across, he was the first to admit, were other men’s problems. Castoffs, divorcees, widows with kids. ‘It’s like buying a used car,’ he once told Reb. Was that what made him serious about sixteen year olds?
‘I’ve been studying that tie by the way. Where did you get it?’ Alex said.
‘Why? Something wrong with it?’
‘A silver tie? You look like a North End hood.’
‘But it’s silk. Italian silk like you told me to get.’
‘Sure, Italian silk. But that doesn’t mean just any Italian silk. A silver tie for christ’s sake. All you need now is one of those wide brimmed pearl gray soft hats they wear on Hanover Street.’
Reb lifted the tie to his nose to examine it. Then he tugged at it with both hands, stripped it off, and threw it under the grill. On the coals a silver snake puffed up into flame.
‘Four fifty,’ he laughed. ‘Up in smoke.’
‘Well, don’t worry,’ Alex said. ‘I’ve got a new tie for you in my suitcase.’
‘Yeah? What kind is it?’
‘English. A handblocked foulard.’
‘Wow. What’s it worth?’
‘Five fifty.’
Reb whistled. ‘It’s handblocked, huh? Is it silk?’
‘Of course it’s silk. It has a dark background with a small pattern all over it. Very conservative. And just the thing for that suit.’
‘I ought to have you buy all my ties,’ Reb said. After that Reb got them more drinks and then he said he would go in to take care of the salad and look over the table.
‘I like mine rare,’ he called back to Alex from the kitchen door.
‘What about the others?’ Alex said.
‘Never mind about them,’ Reb said. ‘You can go crazy cooking different for everybody.’
7
Reb blinked in the kitchen’s bright light. He caught a glimpse of Wiggy and Sal in the living room.
‘Hey, we’re dying,’ Vinnie said. ‘Where the hell are them steaks?’
‘Who fixed up this table?’ Reb said.
‘Me. Anything wrong?’ Lee said.
‘No, everything’s good. Get out some wine-glas
ses while Vinnie helps me make the salad.’
Reb dumped tomatoes and lettuce into the sink, then was back at the refrigerator rummaging for green peppers and a bunch of celery.
‘I don’t like celery in the salad,’ Vinnie said.
‘Leave it out then,’ Reb said. ‘And you don’t have to clean that lettuce leaf by leaf for chrissake. Just stick the head under the faucet or we’ll be here all night.’ He sliced the tomatoes into wedges and snapped the washed lettuce small. ‘I’ll put the dressing on the last minute. Them guys in there got anything to drink, Lee?’
‘Shit, we’re all lit up,’ Vinnie said. ‘I think we killed a fifth already.’
‘Boy, I’m half in the bag myself,’ Reb said. ‘You, Lee?’
‘Me. All I’m feeling is weak,’ Lee said. ‘Deathly weak.’
‘Yeah,’ Vinnie said. ‘I’m fainting myself. Let’s get this goddam show on the road.’
The words were no sooner spoken when Alex stood in the doorway, a platter of meat balanced on his fingertips shoulder high, and announced, ‘Gentlemen, the steak.’ With a rousing cheer everyone flocked to the table and forks flew from every direction going at the steaks almost before Alex had set the platter down. Lee splashed out six glasses of wine from the gallon Sal had brought. It was home made, his father’s, good but strong as hell, Sal warned them. There was a sudden end of talk. The six of them sliced and chewed steak and washed it down with the wine.
Reb looked along the table. All happy faces, all good friends, and it warmed him to see them digging in and having such a good time. Outside a car pulled into the yard.
‘Who can that be?’
‘I don’t know. Who’d you invite?’
‘I don’t know. Could be anyone.’ The car door slammed.
‘It’s either Chub or Dom,’ Lee said. ‘Who else?’
‘Nah,’ Reb said. ‘They won’t come.’
‘Hey, am I in time to eat?’
It was Chub’s gruff voice coming through the screen door.
He lumbered in to a boisterous welcome. There was a grin on his face, a case of Budweiser under his arm, and a suitcase in his hand. Lee took the beer, Vinnie took the suitcase.
What About Reb Page 3