How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  “You got your confirmation suit yet?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. I took a pear-shaped bottle of Orangina from the refrigerated case. “Zia Nella’s taking me.”

  He nodded as a way to say, Good, while filling a plate with almond cookies. “She’ll find you something nice,” he said. He led me to a window booth. The noise of the café fell away, as if we were the only ones there. “Double breasted, peaked lapel, pinstripes. The works.” He pinched his thumb and index finger together and drew a straight line in the air. Perfetto. “You’ll look sharp.” He set the plate down, straddled the aisle seat, and stuck his left leg out. Then he fished two silver dollars from his pocket and slid them across the table at me. “Here, in case I forget. For when you bus the tables later.”

  I turned one of the coins over in my hands, thumbing the cracked Liberty Bell and the moon on the reverse side. “You never talk about the war,” I said. “Why? My father only talks about the caves and how the twins died. And Zia Nella, she won’t say anything at all. Like none of it ever happened.”

  Vincenzo scratched one of his long wiry sideburns. His gray hair, receding at the temples, was thinner than my father’s hair. The fifteen years he had on my father also showed in the creases of his neck and the liver spots on the backs of his hands. He leaned into the cushioned seat back and shut his eyes. His black bushy eyebrows twitched. He winced from the pain in his leg as he rubbed it. “Did I ever tell you how I met your father in the hills outside Syracuse?” He spoke with eyes closed as if he could see a View-Master reel from the day he caught my father with his pants down around his ankles behind a row of prickly pears.

  “Ew,” I said. “You saw him take a crap?”

  “Watch your mouth.” Vincenzo sat at attention. “It was a bad time.” He frowned and the lines of his face grew deep and long. I could see the weight those years held for him.

  “Your father led me up a goat path to the cave in the mountain where his family was hiding. Your nonnu invited me inside and shared some food with me, maybe a little wine, I don’t remember. I met your uncles then. They were so young, Emanuele and Leonello. So young.” And the way Vincenzo said their names sounded lyrical like a song he’d learned long ago, one he couldn’t get out of his head. “If I had stayed,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe they’d still be alive. Your father forgets he was just a boy. There was nothing he could’ve done. Me?” He tapped his chest. “If I had stayed . . .” His eyebrows twitched again, and he swept the possibility away with the flat of his hand the way my father would do. “The Allies were invading. I could not stay.”

  “But the Allies were the good guys,” I said.

  “The good guys,” Vincenzo said. “They won the war. Of course they were the good guys. You must understand, David, all the men in my unit were dead. I was alone. I’d heard what the Americans did at Biscari to the Italians who surrendered there. Seventy-one unarmed men.” Vincenzo made a pistol of his hand. “What do you think they would’ve done with me? I had to leave.”

  4

  Outside the cramped dressing room at Sandy’s Tailor Shop on Main Street after Sunday Mass, Zia Nella tapped her foot to Madonna on the portable radio. In the back of the long and narrow shop, she stood beside two rickety racks of communion suits and dresses, chattering with the seamstress about my inseam, neck size, and sleeve length. “He’s so skinny,” she said. “It’s hard to find clothes that fit.” She was short and stout with a floral skirt that hid thick ankles, and a long-sleeved cotton blouse with an olive woolen shawl draped around her shoulders and over her upper arms. Even on the hottest summer day, my zia never wore anything but a long-sleeved top or shawl.

  “Turn around,” Santina said. The seamstress took my wrist with a bony, brown-spotted hand and lifted my arm. She smelled of dust and stale perfume. The black pinstriped suit jacket tightened in the shoulder. “No good,” she said. Her cheeks sagged down from her eyes and her jowls wobbled. “We go back to the bigger size and take it in.” She hung a navy-blue suit in the dressing room.

  On the brick wall behind my zia hung two pinstriped suits—black and double breasted—tagged with the names Tony Morello and Chris Cardella.

  “But I want pinstripes,” I said.

  “Always with the pinstripes,” Santina said. “This is what I can make work for your size.” She shut the curtain.

  I drowned in the navy suit. My shrunken head lolled between fat padded shoulders. The cuffs came down over my knuckles. I mussed my black hair so it stuck up at odd angles—electrostatic snakes on the head of a baby Medusa. “I’m not coming out,” I said. “I look ridiculous.”

  The seamstress tut-tutted and pulled open the curtain to a Whitney Houston song in the background. Santina knelt in front of me, took out her tape measure, and pinned me like a pincushion.

  “You are a handsome boy,” Zia Nella said. She licked her fingers and patted down my hair.

  I jerked my head away from her touch. “Why do I have to do this anyway?”

  “Stay still,” Santina said. “Before I stick you.”

  I stared over the top of her gray head at the long wall of shirts and jackets and pants waiting for their owners to pick them up, and past a sewing table cluttered with bright spools of thread to the storefront window where Sam pressed his face against the dirty glass and waved. This was what it must have been like for the Venera probes on Venus with only minutes before the molten heat burned them up or the intense pressure crushed them. I wanted to disappear.

  The bell over the door chimed as it opened wide enough for Sam’s mother, Mrs. Morris, to poke her head through. The yellowed shade covering the windowed door flapped. “Are you open?” she asked. Framed in a towheaded bob, her face floated there, all dimples and blue eyes.

  Around the pins in the corner of her mouth, Santina said, “Closed. Come back tomorrow.”

  Sam squeezed by his mother and into the shop. His face soured as if he could taste the pop song on the radio. He leaned against the counter and tilted his head like a bird, quizzical. “What happened to your face?” His blond bangs fell over his left eye and he blew at them. They came back down, splayed over his face. He looped them around his ear.

  “I can come back another time,” Mrs. Morris said. She took Sam’s arm and steered him out the door.

  It had been a long time since I had a real friend, since Charlie moved away to Baltimore with his boxes and boxes of Dungeons & Dragons books. In his game, I’d been an unnamed paladin—a holy, chivalrous knight more interested in unpuzzling his arcane origins than killing monsters and looting dungeons. All we’d ever talked about was the game, and when Charlie left, even the game went with him.

  I wanted to tell Sam what happened when I left his house Friday night—my fight with Tony, all of it. I wanted to tell Sam about Vincenzo, the Fascist my father hid behind, how I knew that was a bad thing and how I didn’t care because Tony’s father feared him.

  I wanted to tell Sam all these things, but we never spoke about family matters with someone who wasn’t family. The one time I’d asked why we considered Vincenzo family, my father said: Beh, Vincenzo. Vincenzo is different. But he never told me why.

  “Who is this boy and what’s wrong with his hair?” Zia Nella asked me in Sicilian. She sounded just like my father, and in their language I answered her, “A boy from school.”

  “Oh,” my zia said. “Amicu.” She beckoned Sam and his mother to stay. Santina made a fuss in Sicilian, but my zia shushed her and ushered them back inside.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Mrs. Morris said. “Thank you.”

  Zia Nella took the ticket from Mrs. Morris and searched the racks. “How come I don’t see you in church?”

  “We’re Protestant.”

  “David’s mother was Protestant. She converted, of course.”

  Sam mouthed Tony as a way to ask me if I had him to thank for my face.

  I nodded yes. In school tomorrow, I would tell him that much.

  Mrs. Morris paid
for her green dress, thanked my zia again and Santina for fixing the hemline. Sam waved as they left. The door closed behind them. He glanced back at the shop window over his shoulder. The sun pulled their shadows into long, thin figures that strayed outside faded white crosswalk lines.

  At home, my father called me down to the basement. I helped him feed the wood-burning stove. He asked how I liked my suit, and I told him I hated it, how the one I wanted was too small, and he said, “When I was your age, I never had a nice suit.” And I asked him what he wore to his confirmation, and he said, “I never got confirmed,” and when I asked why, he said, “No more questions, David. Work.” That was always his answer when he didn’t like the question, and I knew better than to defy him, at least when he was right there in front of me.

  I kept little acts of defiance, little moments of almost freedom, where he could not see them. They’d always been small—staying up past my bedtime reading fantasy and science-fiction novels under the covers with a flashlight, sitting on the back-porch roof while my father slept, cutting corners on my chores, like sweeping dust under the bookshelf in the hallway instead of into the dustpan. At least they’d always been small until the day I’d gone to Sam’s. But despite getting caught, it was worth it. For the length of the albums Sam had played for me, I’d finally felt light, free from the weight of my father’s gravity.

  Together, my father and I checked his stores of braided onions for soft spots and sorted through his sealed mason jars of seeds collected and dried from last year’s harvest, each labeled with the name of a plant from his garden.

  Soon the smell of Zia Nella’s pan-fried sausages cooked in their own grease led us to the kitchen upstairs. Dishes covered in aluminum foil sat on the card table, with plates, glasses, and utensils all in their proper places. I peeled back the foil and snuck a piece of meat with my fingers.

  “Bestia,” Zia Nella said. “Wash your hands.”

  From the bathroom, I heard my father and zia argue in Sicilian. When they spoke Sicilian, their voices were loud and fast, and it always sounded like they were angry, but I knew the difference.

  “Your son doesn’t want to get confirmed. Who put this idea in his head?”

  “Enough, Nella.” I imagined my father making that motion with his hand as he said her name, the one that managed to thrust you aside without ever touching you. “I work every day, long hours on my feet,” he said. “The noise of those machines, even when I go to bed, I hear them grinding in my head. Enough, Nella. You are like the machines in my head, you never stop.”

  When the back door slammed shut, I stepped into the kitchen.

  “Come,” my zia said. “Sit. Eat.” She removed the foil from the pasta dish and the pan of fried peppers with sausages, onions, and potatoes. She spooned heaping servings of each onto my plate. “Your father,” she said, and she pointed the greasy metal spoon at the back door. “When he remembers he is hungry, he will eat.” Then she shrugged into her coat and stood in the front hall at the door. She held the knob, looked over her shoulder at me, and said, “Always your father makes trouble. He doesn’t think right, but you . . . I see so much of the twins in you. You are a good boy.”

  “It’s not his fault,” I said. “How they died.”

  She took in a deep breath. The way she clenched her jaw and shook her head reminded me of him. “No,” she said, letting the air out. “That was never his fault.”

  5

  In seventh-period science class, we talked about gravity, how it was gravity that shaped the planets into spheres. It pulled them toward the sun even as they fought against that pull. This tug-of-war forced them into orbits called ellipses and trapped them there forever.

  The teacher, Mr. Clark, drew a picture on the blackboard—the fat white dot of the sun surrounded by four circles labeled Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. He left out the asteroid belt and the outer planets, the four gas giants, and the last terrestrial world, the smallest and coldest, the icy world Pluto.

  Sam sat in the row beside me, a moon in my orbit. Our gravity made us always show the same face to each other. His sneakers, like mine, crossed at the ankles and tucked under his chair. He sucked spaghetti strands of hair into his mouth and held his spiral-bound notebook up for me to read. He had written there on the page: What did Saturn say to Neptune?

  When I shrugged, he set the notebook down, scribbled out the answer, and held it up again: Uranus smells bad.

  I snorted, stifling my laughter.

  Mr. Clark called on me. He perched on the corner of his desk with one foot planted on the gray-and-white checkerboard floor. “When was the Giotto space probe launched on its mission to study Halley’s Comet?”

  “July 1985,” I said.

  “And what fresco inspired the name of this probe?”

  I knew these answers by heart from the extra-credit reading. “The probe was named after the Italian Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone, because he saw Halley’s Comet in 1301 and interpreted it as the Star of Bethlehem in his fresco Adoration of the Magi.”

  Mr. Clark returned to the blackboard and added the long arc of the comet’s orbit to the inner solar system. “We know the comet is outbound from the sun,” he said. “We know that in April it will be thirty-nine million miles away from us.”

  The period bell rang and we shot up out of our seats, but the teacher waved us back down into them. “Think about that for a minute,” he said. “Thirty-nine million miles. That’s really far away, isn’t it? And yet, maybe one of you will see it in the sky.” He grabbed an eraser and told us to finish chapter four in our textbooks by tomorrow if we hadn’t already finished it, and then he released us.

  I headed for the door with Sam. Mr. Clark asked me to stay behind, and Sam told me he had to jet because his mom was picking him up.

  “I heard you got into a fight,” Mr. Clark said. His eraser cut through the chalk drawing. “Everything okay?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.” White lines of orbits blurred into dusty smears.

  “You’re an excellent student, David.” Mr. Clark turned from the board, the eraser cutting only air now. “I hope you know your mind is worth more than your fists.”

  It didn’t matter what my mind or fists were worth, I was one lone stick waiting to be broken.

  Tony punched my locker. I had just come down the stairs and turned the corner and was making my way to the end of the crowded hall when I spotted him. I sidestepped into the doorway of an empty classroom and peeked around the end of the long row of lockers.

  “Fuck,” Tony swore, shaking his hand at the wrist. All the other students gave him a wide berth except Chris, who strode up and whistled as he rapped the new dent in my door.

  Tony rubbed his knuckles. “Fucking hurt.”

  “Well, it is steel,” Chris said.

  “No kidding, Mr. Obvious.” Tony swaggered like a prizefighter walking to the ring. Chris followed. They were heading my way.

  I ducked into the empty classroom and waited, back pressed against the wall. Seconds passed: one, two, three, four. Out in the hall, their chuckles turned to laughter at something Tony said, something about me. I heard him say my name. My ears pounded—it was like sitting inside a bass drum while a drummer kept the beat. Five, six, seven, eight. Were those seconds, or minutes? Their voices faded. Silence fell, save for the ticking of the clock like the clicking of my father’s tongs. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. His disapproval found me everywhere. I’d hidden instead of fighting back.

  A janitor pushed his mop bucket into the classroom on screeching wheels. I darted to my locker and opened it. A slip of yellow notepad paper fluttered out, seesawing in the air as it fell to my feet. That mountainous troll had scrawled the note, Your dead, Marconi, in large childish letters. My mind was worth more than my fists. Yeah, right. All the grammarians in the world couldn’t protect me from Tony. I shoved the note into my pocket, grabbed my backpack, and walked home. I was glad for once that I’d missed the bus, missed Tony and Chris and the spit
balls they’d send soaring my way from their back-row seats.

  At dinner, my father asked if that boy gave me any more trouble, and I told him no. Later, when he walked me to Catechism class, he asked me again, and this time he told me not to lie. “I didn’t even see him today,” I said, and my father weighed these words for their truth in that frown he always made when he was thinking about what to say next. When I covered my fib by blurting out how scientists named a space probe after a famous Italian painter, my father swept my deflection away with a sweep of his hand, saying everything comes from Italy, even the name of this country, even a part of me, his son. U miricanu, he called me, the Sicilian word for American.

  Saint Sebastian Church held Catechism class each Monday night at six o’clock in the linoleum-tiled basement. The overhead fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered and drained the room of color. Tony and Chris sat in my usual spot in the first row of long bingo tables. I took the seat farthest from them and from the warmth of the space heater beside Brother Calogero’s feet. He droned on for an hour about the importance of the sacraments, and when the hour ended, he unplugged the space heater. Like a school bell, that was my signal.

  I was first out the door, first up the stairs in a sprint, two steps at a time, and first to push through the main doors of the vestibule. Dim streetlights hummed, casting a dirty-yellow glow from their fat bulbs. In the sickly light, my father paced, hands shoved hard in his jacket pockets, nose red from the cold as if he’d been out there the whole time. Maybe he had. Maybe he’d hovered outside, waiting to protect a son from ghosts only he saw.

  The sounds of the other Catechism students echoed behind me. Their footsteps and chatter and laughter herded me down to the sidewalk. My father hooked me with his arm to stop me from bolting past him.