by Marco Rafalà
Sam sat back on his haunches, his knees under him. What I must have looked like to him in that moment with all the inmates gone. I imagined this silence was what it must be like just before you die. You touch on something strange and big, get a catch in your throat, and the words never come.
“My family is so boring compared to yours,” Sam said. “You think he was in the Mafia?” Sam jutted out his chin, pinched his hands together in the air, and in a bad Marlon Brando impression from The Godfather, he said: “Your father, he came to me seeking justice for the death of his brothers.”
“I’m serious,” I said. But I was laughing, too. “Why would they change their names?”
16
Who were the Vassallos? And what did it mean to not know I was one?
When I was younger, my father liked to say that I was always with my face in a book. Even at the card table in the kitchen, I flattened paperbacks out with one arm so I could read while eating. He told me not to, but I did it anyway, until one day he got sick of it. He grabbed my book, lost my place, and set it on the counter. “After dinner,” he said. But I retrieved the book and marched back to the table. He laughed at my defiance and told me that I was either brave or stupid, and then he bent me over his knee and spanked me and asked me which one it was. When he released me, I ran to my bedroom in tears and slammed the door. I never read at the kitchen table again. My father had his answer.
I was an alien to him. That was what he said when he said the words: You are always with your face in a book. And it made me think of Mr. Spock on Star Trek, how he suppressed his human half. The half he inherited from his mother. My mother was American.
Who were the Vassallos?
At the library, I flipped through a book on the Second World War, pages and pages of black-and-white photographs of soldiers dead in the dirt and soldiers with their rifles hugging the dirt, bombed-out homes and a barefoot boy in tattered clothes. He stood in a pile of rubble, held his filthy face with filthy hands. That boy—he could’ve been my father captured on film moments after the explosion that pulled his brothers, in pieces, away from him. His life before, the one he and my zia left behind when they came here. He got as far away from Sicily as he could, crossed an ocean, and learned a new language. But inside, his thoughts were still Sicilian, bound by a basaltic life. Inside, he smoldered.
My father liked to talk about all the great men of history—all Italians, of course. Galileo Galilei. Guglielmo Marconi, no relation, the true inventor of radio. Amerigo Vespucci, a navigator so great that two continents bore his name. But my father never spoke of the Vassallos.
On the third Friday in May, opening night of the Saint Sebastian festival, Vincenzo and I were first in line for the Ferris wheel. The wheel cut a towering profile against the rectory, lit by ground-level spotlights. The hub flashed a beam of light that swept around the spokes like a pulsar.
Vincenzo patted the operator’s arm while slipping him a pack of cigarettes in a firm handshake. He never bought tickets for rides or food at the festival. He never needed them. He bartered and traded favors. For three days, he was a king walking among his subjects.
The Ferris wheel carried us high above the red-tiled roof of the church and came to a stop at the apex of a revolution. Our gondola swayed back and forth. I squinted against the breeze. Below us, neat rows of houses with little yards sprawled eastward into a zone of commercial brick buildings and parking lots, long rows of old tenements fronting Main Street and ending in the North End at the Arrigoni Bridge. Dark against a pink-and-purple sky, the bridge’s two steel arches spanned the Connecticut River into Portland. A ribbon of asphalt—the Route 9 corridor—separated downtown from the waterfront’s Harbor Park boardwalk at the elbow of the river.
Who were the Vassallos? That unanswered question was a black hole my family spiraled around. Without knowing that hole had ever existed, I’d lived my life feeling as if something was missing—an amputee and his phantom limb. The ache of nothingness.
“How’s school?” Vincenzo asked me.
“How come you never had any kids of your own?”
Vincenzo scratched one of his long wiry sideburns and looked down at his café. “There was a woman in Rome,” he said. “Maria.” He whistled and shook his hand, swaying a limp wrist. “She was something else. We could have—” His shoulders slumped with the memory. He circled his own unanswered question. “Beh, that’s life,” he said. He mussed my hair. “Don’t worry. You’ll meet a nice girl someday.”
“But what happened?”
“Beh, what happened. I was too young, too caught up in what I’d lost to see what I’d found. I was no good for her.” He fixed his sights on the bridge in the distance. “Sometimes love, it’s not enough. For some, it’s too much.” He tapped his temple with an index finger. “It makes them crazy.”
My father and my zia severed themselves from their surname, but they could not stop circling their lost brothers. What did Vincenzo lose that made him cut this woman from his life yet still invite her memory to haunt him?
“Everything okay? That Morello boy, Tony, he still giving you trouble?”
Vincenzo asked the question with such kindness, and I could see in the way he pressed me to him that he only wanted to help. So I sank into Vincenzo’s arm and told him what I could not tell my father.
“Notes?” Vincenzo raised his black bushy eyebrows. “What kind of notes? He threatening you?”
“Promise me you won’t tell anyone. It’ll only make things worse.”
“Family is everything, David. A wolf pack, stronger than steel. No outsider can break the pack that stays together. Let me tell you something. When I was your age, there was this boy in school, a real troublemaker, wouldn’t leave me alone. Bigger than me. Maybe a year or two older. People like that, people like Tony, you have to make them respect you.”
“How?”
Vincenzo made a fist. “With this.” He held his knuckles to the tip of my nose. “These people, they go to school their whole lives and still they learn nothing. You understand? Tony bothers you again, you punch him in the nose. He still doesn’t learn, you hit him and you keep hitting him until he stays down. You show him what it means to go up against us, show him that you are fierce like the wolf. You do that—” He mimed washing his hands. “Problem solved.”
I tilted my head back over the rim of the seat. We were wolves. Our gondola jerked and swayed. The dizzying feeling of falling into the sky lessened as we were brought low to the ground by our slow, creaking orbit around a neon star sputtering with life.
17
In an hour, Sam met me at the café. Loud Italian music from the festival’s PA system spilled out into the evening and echoed off the walls of nearby buildings. We opened the umbrellas over the sidewalk tables and wiped the tabletops clean. Inside, Vincenzo turned on the espresso machines and heated the little cups with the steam nozzles. He opened a bag of coffee from the freezer and poured the beans into the grinder.
A short, fat man walked in—an Italian, overweight version of Steve McQueen with wool trousers, a blue turtleneck, and a tweed blazer with a matching flat cap. He held a metal cashbox tucked under his arm.
Vincenzo filled the filter cup with ground coffee, tamped it down, and motioned with his head for the man to go into the stockroom. When the man returned, he had Marlboro cartons sticking out of his blazer’s side flap pockets. He stepped out of the propped-open door and tipped his hat to us, then crossed the street into the festival crowd.
“David,” Vincenzo called from the counter. “Help me with something. Your friend, too.”
Café supplies lined the metal shelves of the stockroom—espresso machine cleaners and accessories, glass bottles of sparkling water and cans of soda, coffee filters and stacked cases of beer. Marlboro cigarette cartons in uneven stacks two rows deep took up shelf space above the beer.
Vincenzo didn’t smoke. He sold the cigarettes for favors or extra pocket money, “a little business on the side,”
he liked to call it while pushing the tip of his nose sideways with his index finger. He reached behind the cartons where the other man had stashed the cashbox filled with tickets for the festival, and gave me half a roll for all the rides, games, and food we wanted.
I tore the tickets from the perforated ticket roll and divided the spoils between Sam and me. “You can’t tell anyone,” I said, stuffing my denim-jacket pockets. He zipped his lips with an imaginary zipper. Then we brought out bottles of sparkling water and cans of soda and stocked the refrigerated case.
“Okay, boys,” Vincenzo said. “Go have fun. But be careful, eh? I mean it.” He pointed his first two fingers at his eyes, then out at the festival and said, “I got eyes out there. You understand? Don’t make trouble unless trouble makes you.”
A galaxy of green and red lights hummed above our heads. A canopy of stars pulled down to Earth and strung on a wire from concession stands to game booths to all the rides. Bumper cars bounced against one another, their drivers laughing and turning steering wheels wide. The galleon whirred to life. It swayed back and forth in wider arcs, sweeping higher with each swing. Children with cotton candy and candied apples squealed and chased each other. They darted and wove through the maze of teenagers and adults.
At the pizza fritta stand, Fulvia stood with one hand on her hip and a metal serving spoon in the other. She owned the flower shop on Pease Avenue and always wore her silver hair in a long braid. I pulled out a clump of tickets from my pocket and counted out enough for two orders topped with tomato sauce and grated Parmesan.
She spooned sauce over the fried dough, sprinkled on the cheese, and handed us our food on two paper plates. “You got a guardian angel in Vincenzo,” she said. “Be good to him.”
I turned around and my paper plate flipped up against the white T-shirt under Tony Morello’s red leather zipper jacket. The fried dough snailed down the front of his shirt in a trail of tomato sauce and then flopped on the pavement. Our sneakers were splattered red.
What happened next, happened fast: Tony grabbed my collar and pulled back his free arm, hand balled into a trembling fist. Fulvia darted around the table, shaking a clean spoon and cursing in Sicilian. And Chris Cardella inched back from the fray, a frightened dog about to bolt. “Come on,” he said. “We’re supposed to stay away from him.”
“Moonwalk on out of here, Michael Jackson,” Sam said.
“I can fight my own battles,” I said.
Fulvia caught hold of a clump of Tony’s curly hair and pulled him off me. She pushed the troll down over the table, his pimpled face pressed sideways on a stack of paper plates, and thwacked his backside with the metal spoon. She was thick, strong for a woman her age. “You want me”—she paddled him while spitting each word—“to tell your father?” Two more blows, each one harder than the last, two exclamation points for Tony’s ass. He winced, his face tightening with each strike, but he did not cry. Fulvia had pulled the pin from a hand grenade, and she was about to release the handle.
“No,” he said. His violence tempered for the moment. “Don’t tell him.”
When she let go of Tony, she patted his cheek and said, “Smart boy. Now clean that up.” Then she stepped back behind the table and fixed me another pizza fritta.
Tony scooped the fried dough off the pavement and tossed it into a trash bin. “I’ll get you for this, Marconi,” he whispered.
“Let’s go,” Chris said. He tugged on Tony’s jacket sleeve. “Your dad will do more than spank you with a spoon if he finds out.”
“Shut up.” Tony jerked his arm free. “You shut the hell up.” His slow-burning fuse turned on Sam next. “And you.” He poked him in the chest. “No one told me to stay away from you.”
Sam swatted Tony’s finger away like it was a mosquito.
A snaggletoothed sneer curled Tony’s lip. He knew that Fulvia watched him now, that she had been drafted into Vincenzo’s army of snitches who looked out for me. I got eyes out there. Tony tossed up his hands in mock dismissal and said, “See you around, ladies.” You can’t hide behind that Fascist forever. Then he marched a slow, crooked retreat through the crowd with Chris tagging along after him.
Fulvia hadn’t done me any favors. She’d only made things worse, and now I would end up paying for her well-intentioned mistake. On the church steps, Sam and I ate from our greasy paper plates. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and asked me if I was okay. I shrugged. No one could help me escape from Tony’s malice. I had to meet it head-on. I had to be faster, meaner, and more brutal, the way Vincenzo had told me to be. Only then would Tony leave me alone.
Sam leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and said, “Don’t worry. We’re a team. I’ll always have your back.”
“Like family,” I said. And Sam spit into his hand, held it out to me, and said, “Brothers.” “Brothers,” I echoed and spit into my own hand, and we shook on it.
In the church vestibule, Brother Calogero opened boxes with a utility knife. He pulled out bulletins and stacked them in neat piles on a table set up in the corner. When he saw me, he smiled and motioned his head toward the stack. “Take one,” he said.
Back outside on the steps, I sat down next to Sam. “The bulletins I told you about in my father’s closet,” I said. A photograph of the statue of Saint Sebastian filled the first page. The statue wore a large red sash and a skirt of dollar bills that draped to the floor. On the next page, the story of the life of the saint and his martyrdom spooled out in a riddle of misspelled words and punctuation errors. Sebastian served the Roman Empire as captain of the Praetorian Guard and, in secret, cured the sick with prayers. He consoled imprisoned Christians until betrayed and sentenced to death. But the arrows failed to kill him. Refusing to flee Rome, he confronted the emperor, and the emperor had him bludgeoned to death. Over a thousand years later, a statue of the saint washed ashore in Sicily. Peasants from Melilli carried it to their village when no one else could lift it. They called him their soldier-saint—and he had been, a soldier in life and in death.
“I don’t get it,” Sam said. “What’s the big deal about that?”
“That is everything,” Rocco boomed. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, ash falling at each word. He leaned against the stone railing in his black pinstriped suit and a button-down white shirt, open at the collar, showing curly, gray chest hair and a red horn pendant that was long and twisted like the horn of an antelope.
I let the bulletin fall shut and set it on the steps beside me. “You and my father were friends once.”
“Friends,” he said. He ground his cigarette butt into the heel of his dress shoe and flicked the butt onto the sidewalk. “Your family and mine, we carried the statue home, we built the church. Long years our families lived and worked side by side by the grace of God and our soldier-saint. But your father—we weren’t enough for him. He turned his back on us.”
Rocco’s mouth fixed into a thin, taut line. His eyes narrowed at yellow-flowering weeds swaying from a crack in the concrete. “Friends,” he said again. “We were like brothers. Before he broke my heart, before—” He held up his hands and stared at them like he didn’t recognize the swollen hairy knuckles, the bony swan-neck fingers, and the three crooked fingers of his left hand ending at the upper joints.
The leathery skin of his face twitched with a memory. He waved his deformed hands in the air like he was erasing something between us. “Stay away from him,” he said to Sam. “Stay away from his family. The saint has cursed them all.” Then he kissed his pendant and hurried up the sidewalk to the rectory.
“What do you think happened to his fingers?” Sam asked.
I stuffed my hand into my jeans pocket and felt the note Tony left for me today in my locker. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I bet he deserved it.” I balled the slip of paper in my fist and said, “Let’s find Tony.”
18
We made a plan. Sam would wait in a vacant corner of the lot, behind the empty stage truck where bands played i
n the earlier hours of the festival. I would be the bait.
I wandered through the concession tent and around the game booths, past the swing ride and the Tilt-A-Whirl, until I found Tony and Chris riding wooden horses on the carousel.
“That ride’s for girls!” I shouted over the music from the calliope.
Tony climbed down from his bobbing white stallion. It felt good to see that boy jump when I called. He zigzagged between the rows of horses, grabbing hold of barley-twist poles like a monkey swinging from tree to tree. But Chris would not follow. He remained, steadfast, on his black horse even as Tony went back for him and tried pulling him down off the saddle. Chris gripped the pole tighter and cocked his head away from his friend’s invective.
The operator, an old man with a thick gray mustache and cigarette-stained teeth, cut the ride short. “Scemu,” he said. The carousel slowed. He chastised Tony to wait until it came to a full stop—and to not bother getting back on for the rest of the festival. But Tony stepped off the still-moving platform, straightened his jacket, and lumbered through the young children with sticky, cotton-candied fingers forming a line with their parents.
Seconds passed, but to me those seconds felt like hours. The Vassallo name echoed in my mind—the name my father had left behind. The invisible name I had not known I carried. It muted the whirring machinery and blaring music and shrieking children. I exploded into a run for the stage truck. Tony gave chase. His thundering hooves dampened when Sam swept down from the starless shadows like a cleansing storm, a dark fist that landed the first blow. I grabbed a fistful of Tony’s curly hair and pulled his head back. His arms flailed—the monkey lost his balance and toppled backward, and I punched him in his side as he went down. He hit the asphalt hard. His eyes widened, and he covered his face with his arms. All this time, Tony Morello should have feared me.