How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  “I know you’ve been lying to me,” I said.

  The box landed on its side and the lid flipped off. The tarnished silver cross clattered on the table. Old pictures staggered out in stacked layers, fossilized remains of another age. The photo of the Vassallo family at the festival—the one with all their names on the back, the one with Rocco—lay faceup on the table.

  My father approached it on unsteady legs. He flattened the mountain of photographs with a sweep of his hand. “What do you think you know?”

  “I know you changed your last name,” I said. “I know it used to be Vassallo.”

  Vincenzo shook his head, warning me off this path. But I could not stop even if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. No one could alter the course of the trajectory I had set for myself. “I know you broke Rocco’s fingers. I know you’re not from Syracuse. I know you lied to me about who you are and where you’re from. Did you lie to Mom, too? Is our whole fucking life a lie?”

  “Sta zittu!” The mark of my father’s hand burned red on my cheek. My hand shot up to the place where his had been. I tasted blood in my mouth where I had bit my tongue.

  “Jesus, Sal,” Vincenzo said.

  My father stared into his hand, as if he still felt the sting of my cheek there. “Go,” he said. “Get out. I do not want to see you right now.” His voice low, defeated. The furious backward sweep of his arm doing all the shouting for him: Vai via. Go away.

  I ran out the back door and into the yard. Bumblebees buzzed, their faces buried in the silky whiskers of pink mimosa flowers. A blue jay bobbed up and down on a branch high above me and tolled a bell-like note.

  Vincenzo came out onto the back porch. The bird bristled its pointed crest into a blue-black Mohawk. On the street somewhere, an unseen car honked its horn, wheels screeched. I jumped for the lowest branch, my feet scrabbling against the bruised and peeled bark. The jaybird squawked. In a flash of brilliant blues and whites, its wings unfolded and caught a lone patch of clear azure sky.

  “David,” Vincenzo called.

  I climbed higher. The ridges of the bark dug into my palms. The branches dipped under my weight. Leaflets brushed my cheek, cool against the sting. Vincenzo called for me again, “Get down.” The blue jay hawked a dragonfly in midair, and I kept on climbing.

  25

  “David, get down from there,” my father yelled. “Now!” He was angry and impatient, but there was something else in his voice. Something in his face I could not read.

  I sat in a thicket of leaves—the mimosa tree loomed over him, growing from the stone of his head, taking root in his mind. The overcast day had turned into a hazy evening, the sun a blood-red fireball that hung low and fat in the sky. Earlier, before my father came outside, my zia and ziu and Vincenzo each took turns trying to lure me down with bait. Zia Nella stood under the tree, a steaming dish of spaghetti and meatballs in her hands. She had made the tomato sauce from last year’s garden tomatoes, my father’s tomatoes. From the back porch, Ziu Frank proposed a game of checkers if I’d only be a good boy and go to rehearsal. But checkers was the game my father and I played together when he had no one else to play with. And going to rehearsal meant apologizing for him. “I don’t care about getting confirmed,” I said.

  Zia Nella covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Your father paid good money for that confirmation suit,” Ziu Frank said.

  “No one asked him to buy it,” I said.

  “No one had to ask him,” Vincenzo said. He pleaded with me to go, and in return offered pastries and Orangina, all the sweets I wanted from his café. And I said, “No,” as if that would be the end of it and I’d stay in this tree until this tree felt like my own bones, until blue jays alighted on my branches, and bumblebees drank my blossoms, and the land that bore me turned basalt-rich and weathered, and my father cultivated that soil for me.

  My zia turned to the house and hollered for my father to come out here and talk to his son. But he did not come outside. He did not even come to the window or the door.

  Comets went around the sun in unstable, elliptical orbits. This was mine. While in Stony Creek, I had reached my aphelion—the farthest point from the sun in my orbit—and now that I had returned to my perihelion? What now?

  “David, get down from there,” my father yelled. “Now!”

  Zia Nella had gone into the house and shamed him into being a father, and I had my answer. Gravity. He didn’t lure me out of the tree so much as he pulled me down out of the sky without laying a hand on me.

  As soon as I’d gotten down from the tree, my father dismissed his sister and brother-in-law. He sent Vincenzo with them to wait for me at their house across the street. My father insisted there was still time to help him clean before I had to leave, and handed me the extension tube for the vacuum.

  We spent an hour shuffling furniture around, folding kitchen chairs and stacking them in the front hall with the couch from the living room. “Hold it from the bottom,” he said.

  “I got it.”

  “Use your legs, not your back.”

  “I said I got it, Dad.”

  “Watch your fingers. Okay. Put it here. Bonu. Bonu.”

  Then he cleaned each room in silence as if nothing had happened. He thought that with enough soap and water and scrubbing on his hands and knees, enough suction power from the vacuum cleaner, he could erase all traces of that other world recorded in old photographs in a shoebox that even now sat in his closet. He mopped, scrubbed, scoured, and vacuumed his way around that house, around me, around the slap. It was his house. It had never been mine. Like the name, Vassallo.

  When the rooms were back in order, he scratched his head, looked at the floor in the front hall. “You scuffed the tile,” he said.

  “It’ll come off,” I said, and I knelt and rubbed it with my thumb. “See? It’s coming out.”

  “Do it right,” he said from the kitchen. “Use a towel paper.”

  “They’re called paper towels.”

  He came back with the whole roll. I took two and went to work on the scuff mark. The back door closed. The porch floorboards creaked. I bore down hard, put my elbows into it. “Tile’s clean,” I called out into the empty house.

  26

  Vincenzo waited for me on the steps of Zia Nella’s front porch, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, nursing a glass of rosy wine. He stood when I crossed the street, brushed the creases from his dark slacks and white button-down shirt. He thumbed at my blue striped crew neck and jeans and said, “That what you’re wearing?”

  “I don’t even know why I have to do this,” I said.

  “It’s important to your papà that he sees you get confirmed. He never had the chance. So go easy on him.”

  The front door opened, and Zia Nella came out and grabbed me in her arms. “Don’t do that again, David,” she said. “You scared me half to death.”

  “Okay,” I said, so she would let me go.

  She held me at arm’s length. “You have to forgive your papà. He didn’t mean it.”

  I shrugged her hands off my shoulders. “We’re going to be late,” I said.

  Zia Nella stepped back and pressed her hands together, fingers intertwined, and watched us leave.

  Vincenzo and I walked several blocks without one word spoken between us. The argument with my father played again and again and again in my mind. I was the needle caught in the groove of his scratched record. The record warbled and crackled. The needle skipped through scratches, back to the night we roasted peppers, the night he caught me in my lie.

  That night, my father told me to stay away from the man who fought when he knew he could not win. This was his lesson, the lesson of the fasces, the strength in the bundle of sticks, and the warning.

  Finally, Vincenzo. He looked after us, that’s what he’d said. He was the soldier, the Fascist Rocco spoke about, the one my father hid behind. I asked Vincenzo once if the Italians lost the war because they did not stay united, and he said, “Mus
solini’s one mistake was making an alliance with Hitler. The people went against him for that.”

  We were those men my father warned me about, the men who liked to fight anyway. This was what happened to Rocco’s fingers.

  Vincenzo lifted the needle from the turntable in my mind. “Long ago, I gave your papà my word. All a man has in this life is his word. His word is his currency.”

  At confirmation rehearsal, we sat paired with our sponsors in the front pews. The girls sat on one side of the center aisle. The boys sat on the other side. Father Salafia explained the procedures of the Mass. Tony leaned forward and mouthed the words You’re dead. His sponsor yanked him back by his jacket collar. Vincenzo patted my knee and whispered, “Ignore him.” Then we went over the readings and practiced the anointing process. After rehearsal, Tony’s sponsor walked him up to the priest with a rough hand on the back of the boy’s neck. They waited at the side altar of Saint Sebastian. The church emptied.

  The priest called out to me.

  Vincenzo put his arm around my shoulders. “This is something you have to do for your papà,” he said.

  We stood up together and joined them at the altar of the saint. Tony’s sweatshirt stretched taut over the cast. He cradled the broken arm in front of him. A scowl crossed his face under his crooked nose. We had a history, Tony and I, a whole shoebox full stashed under my bed, a chronicle of his unending bullying, and I hated him for that. I hated him for everything he’d ever done to me, every hurtful word he’d ever uttered, and I wanted to tell him. I wanted to tell him how much I hated him. I wanted to scream, Fuck you! But my father’s broken record kept spinning, and what choice did I have but to skip along those grooves?

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Tony stared down at his Reeboks—the fat white tongues of his sneakers sticking out at me. His downcast face hid his smug satisfaction from the priest. My apology was a victory for him. He tormented me, and the one time I fought back and won, I had to apologize for it. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Me, too.”

  Father Salafia’s face set into a cracked frown like molded clay stiffening and losing water as it dried out too fast. “Tony,” he said. “Your father is next door in the rectory. Do you want to tell him why you can’t receive the sacrament of confirmation?”

  “No, sir,” Tony said. He straightened his shoulders and stared me down. He waited for me to blink before saying with a smirk, “I’m sorry, David.”

  “Okay, boys,” the priest said. He clapped his hands together. “Good. I will see you both this Sunday.”

  27

  That night I lay on my bed, eyes closed and ankles locked, biting my fingernails and listening to Depeche Mode on my headphones. If you could make ash and embers sing for you, these were the songs they would sing. Throwing sparks from a dying fire. And if you could be those songs, you would know what it was like to feel those red-hot embers trailing off you, floating around your body.

  My father shook my foot.

  I sat up, pulled my headphones down around my neck. “Don’t you knock?”

  “How can you hear anything with those things on?” My father hovered at the foot of my bed like a helicopter trying to land in rough weather. “Where did you get that anyway? I thought you gave that thing back?”

  “Did you come in here to make me apologize to Rocco next?”

  My father moved to the window and shut the blue curtains. Then he opened a fat astronomy book on my desk and flipped through its pages. He was still hovering, unsure how to stick this landing. “One time,” he said, “my papà showed me a picture in this book he kept with him during the war, and he says, Turiddu, tell me what you see.” My father scowled at the swirling eye of Jupiter scowling back at him from the page. “It was the winged head of Medusa, David, with three ears of wheat and three bent legs. Your nonnu had told Vincenzo that this was Sicilia, a jewel, a star, but it was the hair of snakes that I saw, you understand? The gorgon, she turned me into stone. I was scared, David. I couldn’t see what your nonnu could. You think you know Tony, but you cannot know what he sees. You cannot know what trouble he brings. Better you leave him alone now.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I put my headphones back on to drown out the world.

  When my father told me that story, he was trying to tell me how my nonnu once thought of Sicily as a bright star in the night sky, and how all men’s wars would one day end, but the sky and those stars, they were infinite. He was trying to tell me to let it go, to do what he could not. This proxy war with Tony would die down, it would end, and our family—like Sicily, that three-pointed bright star of the Mediterranean—our family would endure, it would be safe. My father believed my apology would stop the bullying, but he didn’t see Tony the way I did, didn’t recognize the wounded, cornered animal Tony had become. Tony and I, we had a history, it didn’t belong to us, but we had made it ours. We had made monsters of each other, and of ourselves. In Tony’s story, I was the troll. For as long as he could remember, in all the stories he’d ever told himself about me, I was his nemesis.

  My nonnu was wrong. Stars were fires and they burned like wars burned, and they ended, too. My father and Tony’s father had started this war long ago in Melilli, in the village where they were born—Typhon trapped under the mountain, spitting embers, embers seeding other fires, songs of ash, songs of smoke—but it would be their sons who ended it.

  Friday, I wrote my own note, slipped it into Tony’s locker at lunch: Sunday. Harbor Park. Midnight.

  28

  Saturday, Em called.

  That morning my father drafted me into helping him in the garden. He showed me how to prune tomatoes—pinching off the side shoots that sprouted from the armpit of each branch. I went up and down the rows plucking out tender shoots until my fingers were sticky and smelled of sweet greens. Past the beets and the romaine lettuce, my father squatted over a bed of garlic in his white sleeveless undershirt, the front and back stained with sweat, and snipped spiral stems from their stalks with shears to make the bulbs grow bigger and stronger. Later, he would wash and slice the garlic tops, fry them with liver, onions, and potatoes.

  Zia Nella was in the house doing the work that my father and I would never do. She had stripped the sheets and pillowcases from our beds, put on fresh sets, and hauled the bundle to the washing machine in the basement when the phone rang. She called to me from the back-porch door, the beige handset pressed into her blue floral blouse. I wiped my hands on my jeans as I climbed the stairs.

  “There’s a girl on the phone for you,” Zia Nella said. She spoke in hushed, conspiratorial tones so my father wouldn’t hear, and her voice betrayed the little girl locked away inside her from before the war changed everything. Her hips swiveled to some memory from her youth. I imagined an accordion folding air into music—an old love song from the dusty streets of Sicily. She held the handset out to me and asked, “Who is she? She sounds nice.”

  “Someone from school,” I said and grabbed the phone from her hand. I hoped it was Em, and when I said, “Hi,” and she said, “Hi” back, my face got hot. I hurried through the kitchen, into the front hall, and up to the top of the stairs, stretching the coil cord as far as it would go.

  “Sam gave me your number,” Em said. “Hope that’s okay.”

  Even though Em was in Stony Creek, she sounded so far away that she might as well have been on another planet in some distant star system.

  “He did?”

  “He said you wouldn’t mind. But if this is a bad time or something, or if you don’t want to talk to me—”

  “No,” I said. My voice cracked and I winced, hoping she didn’t notice. “This is a great time. I’m glad you called.”

  “Oh, good. So, how’s Middletown?”

  “Not as good as Stony Creek,” I said.

  She laughed, and I pictured her black eyeliner crinkling at the corners of her eyes.

  “You wouldn’t say that if you lived here,” she said. “God, I’m so bored. There’s this cool b
and playing a party in Mystic tonight and my parents won’t let me go. What’s your sign, anyway?”

  “Pisces,” I said.

  “I knew it,” she said. “A water sign. I’m a Scorpio. Anyway, Jamie has this whole plan to go out to Middletown next weekend and go spelunking in the tunnels. I mean, that’s what she’s calling it. But, I wanted to see if, maybe, you’d want to hang out, too?”

  I ran my fingers over the taut ridges of the telephone cord. “I love those tunnels,” I said. “You could get lost for hours just checking out all the old stuff, seeing where the next bend takes you. It’s like this whole other world down there.”

  Through the banisters I spied a flash of Zia Nella’s blouse. “Hold on a second,” I said to Em. I leaned over the railing and shooed my zia back into the kitchen. As I sat back down, the stairs creaked. The phone felt slick in my damp hand. I was sweating more now than I had been working outside in my father’s garden.

  “David?” Em’s voice crackled up from the receiver. An electrical signal carried from miles and miles away, and still it zapped me.

  “I’m here,” I said into the phone. “Sorry about that.”

  “So, how about it? Next weekend. Is it a date or what?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A date.”

  After Em had hung up, I sat on the stairs and rubbed my ear sweat from the receiver with a thumb. I bet Em had a phone in her bedroom, where she could close the door and wouldn’t have to shoo her family away like nosy pigeons pecking at the window. In my mind, her room looked a lot like Sam’s—poster-covered walls and shelves lined with cassettes and records. But she’d also have dog-eared books on astrology, stacked on her nightstand and desk. Maybe she was reading her horoscope right now, comparing our astrological charts, using the stars as guides to understand whether we were meant to be together.