by Marco Rafalà
Zia Nella stood at the bottom of the stairs. She wore bright-yellow rubber gloves dirtied with oven grease. “Do you like her?” she asked.
“We’re just working on a science project together,” I said. Zia Nella followed me back into the kitchen where I returned the phone to its wall-mounted cradle.
“You know,” Zia Nella said, “your ziu Frank and I used to study together, too.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. I took a walnut from the wooden bowl on the counter and cracked it open with the V-shaped silver nutcracker.
“David,” my father bellowed from the back porch. “What are you doing, David? There’s work outside.”
Before I had a chance to lie, Zia Nella lied for me. “Sam called him,” she said, “to talk about schoolwork.”
My father stepped inside and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a paper towel. He filled a glass with water at the sink, downed half the glass before taking another breath. “Outside,” he said. “While we still have the light.”
Sunday—the day of my confirmation—my father was up at dawn. He made a pot of coffee and hard-boiled eggs and burnt toast. Then he threw open my door and hollered at me to get up and eat something. He showered while I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen. I wanted it to be next weekend already. I wanted to wander the tunnels with Em, her hand in mine. Our evening would end with us stretched out on Foss Hill, kissing under a vault of stars.
My father yelled at me from the top of the stairs to tell me the bathroom was free. I showered while he banged around in his bedroom, getting into his suit. Soon, the doorbell rang. He barked at me through the bathroom door for taking too long. The doorbell rang again, and he stomped downstairs to answer it.
He’d laid my navy-blue suit out on my bed—a nicely dressed flat boy, with a fluffy pillow for a head.
Zia Nella pinched my cheek in the front hall when she saw me in that suit and tie. “So handsome,” she said. She took my picture with a Polaroid instant camera. It ejected the photo like a tongue wagging at me. She shook the picture, blowing on it like it was a mug of hot coffee, and watched an awkward boy, fidgeting with his clip-on tie, appear in the image. “One more,” she said. “This time stand straight.”
“Leave him alone,” Ziu Frank said. He patted my shoulder with an approving smile. “Look,” he said. “Look.” He led me into the kitchen and showed me the box of cannoli in the refrigerator. “For after.”
Vincenzo came up from the basement with a bottle of wine. He poured two fingers’ worth into two half-pint jam jars. Then he held one out to me and said, “This will make it go easier.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “You drink it.”
He poured my jar into his own. “Salute,” he said, and drank the wine.
In the front hall, my father slapped his hands together. “All right,” he called out. “Come on. Let’s go.” He held the door open, sweeping his arm in the air to get us moving. “You have to respect the time,” he said.
On the way out of the house, Zia Nella slipped the Polaroid into my suit-jacket pocket and whispered, “For your girlfriend.”
We stood in front of the wide stone steps of the church, the five of us in formation like suspects in a police lineup. Two altar boys latched open the center double doors, and out stepped Father Salafia—a sentinel beside the impassive stone stare of the witness.
My father hitched up his pant legs and squatted in front of me. He flattened his palm against the first cool step and shot a sidelong glance at all the other steps. The church bells pealed and his eyes watered. This was the sound of my father crying. He cried for imported Sicilian stone—not for me, not for my mother—stone cut into the image of the church he left behind in Melilli.
Before I could squirm beyond his long reach, he’d licked a finger and slicked back my cowlick. He smiled at my embarrassment, straightened my shirt and jacket collars, examined my clip-on tie. “I should’ve bought you a real one,” he said, “taught you how to tie it like a man.” He patted my chest. “Beh, you look good.” Then he followed Zia Nella and Ziu Frank inside.
Vincenzo and I waited in the line of boys with their sponsors in front of the smaller door on the right. The girls with their sponsors lined up on the left. Rocco and his wife arrived with Tony and his sponsor. Rocco dropped his cigarette and snuffed it out under the heel of his dress shoe. Tony glowered at me—a slow burn meant to wither the troll who dared summon him. He’d gotten my note. He’d be there tonight. His father smacked the back of his head and pulled him close and whispered in his ear. Tony stood ramrod straight, staring at the back of Chris Cardella’s head in front of him, eyes boring a hole through his skull. The line started moving. Vincenzo placed his right hand on my shoulder. We walked inside the church, the echo of our footsteps like the sound of the ocean trapped in an empty seashell.
It was eleven o’clock that night when I pulled on my denim jacket and snuck outside with my shoebox of notes from Tony and the photograph from my father’s closet—the snapshot of his family in Melilli at the festival, with Rocco in the background. Middletown looked deserted, dark except for the bright moon, quiet but for the far-off insect calls and the occasional car. The tall, flat columns and sweeping, curved top of the church towered against the sky in a wash of floodlights. The church looked beautiful like that, lit up at ground level with the arched doors and flourishes all dark.
A police car sped up Washington Street, and I ducked behind a tree. The taillights disappeared around the corner at High Street. Then I walked to the café, the sidewalk tables and chairs stacked inside behind the storefront window and the red security grille. Light seeped around the yellowed edges of the drawn shades of Vincenzo’s second-floor apartment windows. I went around back and threw the box into the dumpster. My father and Vincenzo and Zia Nella, all their secrets—I didn’t want to be like them.
I crossed Main Street to the lower end of Washington and cut through a parking lot, deserted except for an old man. He struggled to push a shopping cart filled with plastic bottles and dented cans. The cart’s front left wheel wanted to go its own direction. The empty highway stretched out on either side of me, a concrete river. Pools of light from the streetlights rippled on the asphalt. I took the stairs down to the pedestrian tunnel. It ran beneath the highway to Harbor Park and the Connecticut River. At the bottom of the stairs, weeds grew through cracks in the graffitied walls. Plastic bags and paper bags and soiled fast-food containers all littered the yawning tunnel entrance. The air smelled of urine. The rusted gate stood ajar, the lock broken. Inside, someone’s singing washed in the reverb of the tunnel, but I couldn’t make out the words.
“Who’s there?” a man’s voice boomed from the darkness.
The thin blade of a pocketknife glinted. My eyes adjusted to the underground. A man in an olive-drab jacket and torn blue jeans sat slouched against the wall. He squinted at me. “A boy,” he said. The left corner of his mouth twitched. He folded the blade into the handle and pocketed the weapon. Then he covered his bare feet with a tattered blanket. When I didn’t move, he waved me over to him. “Shake and Bake won’t hurt you,” he said.
“I’m just going to the river.” I stepped through the gate.
“This is my place.” His voice thundered around me. He held out a dirty hand and looked sideways at me, clicking his tongue through a gap-toothed grin.
I searched my pockets and found the two dollar coins Vincenzo had given me. I inched forward. Shake and Bake had bits of food trapped in the wiry curls of his thick, sandy beard. He smelled like hard, pungent cheese. I gave him a coin. I’d paid the ferryman.
He pocketed the dollar piece and began to sing again, the throaty mumbling song of a man lost in his own world.
The melody reverberated through the tunnel and followed me out the other side. Past a pedestrian path, a hexagon-shaped pavilion stood in the center of a wide patio, a mishmash of brick and asphalt, with grass sprouting up from every crack. Shattered glass sparkled beneath two unlit l
ampposts. A steel railing and narrow strip of boardwalk marked the river’s edge. I sat with my legs dangling over the side, heels bumping against the steel bulkhead, arms drooping over the lower railing. My sneakers hovered over the moon on the water. The water was higher than usual from all the rain these last weeks. In the distance, anchored boats swayed in the river. The sky curved overhead like a movie screen showing a three-dimensional film, and I had the glasses that made the images pop. I felt like the stars were right in front of me. I could reach out and touch them, trailing my fingers through the ocean of sky the way Sam trailed his through the waters of the Long Island Sound. The stars felt that close.
In the myth of Pisces, mother and son transformed into fish and swam away together. In the myth, the sea saved them both. The water drummed against the bulkhead. Shake and Bake’s crooning echoed in the night, repeating the same troubled refrain, and I didn’t hear Tony climb over the Route 9 guardrail or scuttle down the grassy embankment to the boardwalk until he was on top of me.
29
Tony punched the back of my head, and my forehead slammed against the steel post of the boardwalk railing. I dropped the photograph. “What the hell do you want, Marconi?”
My back curled into a crescent moon, and I held a hand over the egg-shaped bump swelling above my left eye. Pain spiked through my skull. My vision blurred. My father’s picture floated on the water. “Vassallo,” I said. I stretched an arm out through the bars. “My father’s last name.”
“Your father’s name isn’t Vassallo,” Tony said. “They’re all dead because of him, because of what he made my father do.”
“No. You need to see.” I got down on my belly and hung over the edge, holding the post with one hand and reaching out with the other.
Tony grabbed my shoe with his good arm. “Are you crazy?” he said. “It’s just a stupid picture. Leave it.”
The photo drifted and I shimmied further out, Tony pulling against me. The cement lip of the boardwalk pressed into my thighs. My fingertips brushed a corner of the photo. It bobbed beneath the water. “Let go,” I said. “Almost got it.”
“Stop, you’re going to fall.” He tugged my ankle.
“Get off!” I kicked my foot out of Tony’s grasp. My fingers, slick with blood, slipped from the railing, and my head slammed against the rusted metal of the bulkhead and then the water—a burst of freezing wet.
I struggled for a moment, but only a moment—my arms and legs were lead weights on a broken fishing line. Tony’s face wavered, a distant moon that gave off no light. Help me. He didn’t hear me, but maybe I didn’t speak. Maybe I only thought the words. My mouth filled with too much water—the taste of silt and mossy stones. I knew who he would become. He would run. He would pretend he was never here. He would carry his own secret now, too.
“It was an accident,” Tony said—his voice disembodied, floating in the dark like me. “It was an accident. My father didn’t mean to shoot them.”
30
The water closed over me. The world shimmered in blue flaring light. The light contracted and the world grew dim and flat, and then the light flared again, and the world shimmered with the heat from the fires of a billion stars all going supernova, all winking out one by one. In the hot, blue light of the last star burning out above me, my father as a boy from one of his stories sat in a cave hulling almonds with his brothers and sister, father and mother. The sounds of war so close, they shook the stones of the world. Bits of dirt and rock fell on top of them. The boys buried their faces in their father’s shirt. They hugged him tight. Outside, the Allies pushed the German army through the streets all the way to Mount Etna. Don’t look, their father said. Saint Sebastian will keep us safe. He always keeps us safe.
An enormous inky blackness unfurled around me, so thick and dark as it crept east and west like the black sickled wingspan of Typhon—storm-demon and fire-monster of the ancient world. Better if Etna destroyed everything, my father told me when he told me about the cave. That’s what we should’ve prayed for, he said, for the volcano to come down on our heads.
On June 1, 1986, I made the sacrament of confirmation in Saint Sebastian Church. The bishop led the renewal of baptismal promises. He performed the laying on of hands and said a prayer. I approached the altar with Vincenzo, my sponsor. He stood behind me, putting his right hand on my shoulder. The thurifer swung the thurible containing the smoking incense. The bishop anointed my forehead with chrism, calling me by the confirmation name I had chosen.
“Salvatore, be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
“Peace be with you.”
“And also with you.”
I left the altar with my new name, my father’s name. I had made it mine. I slouched against the wooden backrest and looked at the painted stars on the ceiling. Early man engraved his stories on the sky with imaginary lines to trace the outlines of the constellations and to keep them there forever. I was like that—the imaginary thread, tracing the outline of memories that told a story of a boy who followed his father into the mouth of a volcano, into the heart of a curse.
SALVATORE
1
When we came here out of Sicily, we left behind the bones of our father and mother, and the bones of their fathers and mothers, and the bones of the land we came up in. This new country was good. We settled down. I bought this house, grew a garden, made you. My son. My David.
I did what I could, raising you on my own. I did my best. I put a roof over your head, kept you from going hungry. I made sure you had shoes on your feet, clothes on your back. Made sure you went to school. It wasn’t easy, on my feet all day, eight hours of grinding metal and breathing in the metal dust. I gave you life, tried to make a man out of you. I was the vine and vinedresser and you-picciriddu-you were the fruit.
2
The day you left me, I looked everywhere for you-the porch roof outside your window, all the rooms in the house, the attic, the basement, every inch of the yard and shed, even up in the mimosa tree-but you were gone, the sun only just starting to come up. You snuck out of the house again, I told myself. That’s what I wanted to believe. What haircut would you come home with this time?
I banged on Nella’s door. Frank answered, on his way to work, a foreman at a construction job an hour away in Plainfield. He asked if he should stay. “Go to work,” I told him. “One of us shouldn’t have to lose a day.”
Inside, a ceramic rooster figurine stood on a little table in the front hall for good luck against danger. In the story of the rooster, a family hired assassins to kill a rival family, but the crowing of the birds woke them up and saved them from the plot. When I told your zia that you had snuck out of the house sometime last night, she paced the kitchen and fingered the rosary beads in her pocket. She started every sentence with “what if.” “What if he’s hurt?” “What if someone took him?” “What if it was-”
“Enough,” I said. I sat down at the table and took the lids off her ceramic sugar and cream rooster and hen. “Call his friend. The kid’s last name is Morris. Look it up in the phone book.”
Your zia’s English was always better than mine, and her eyes were better, too-she could read the small print in the white pages. She found the right number on the third try. She spoke to Sam’s mother for twenty minutes. Your zia’s face had gone white. She sat down next to me. “David didn’t go out with Sam last night,” she said.
“Boys lie. Call Jimmy at the factory. Tell him I won’t be in today.”
“His mother said we should call the police.”
“Call Jimmy. I’ll wait for you in my car.”
We drove around the neighborhood, out by the library and around Wesleyan. I went slow and we craned our necks out the windows at nothing, and I asked myself, “Where did I go wrong?”
I did not realize I spoke the words aloud until your zia, she made a little joke, if you can believe that, she said, “Turiddu, where do you want me to start?”
And I said, “At the beginning,”
and we laughed-tight, nervous laughter-driving down Main Street, and I decided then, David, that I wouldn’t be mad at you, I wouldn’t yell or slap you, I’d let you keep whatever crazy hair you came home with, if you just came home, I’d hold you at arm’s length and ask you, Please, please don’t run off again.
In the North End, at the traffic light on Main Street before the on-ramp to the Arrigoni Bridge, by some unspoken agreement, I turned right and went past Saint John Church and the old cemetery to Rocco’s house by the highway under the bridge. Nella stood outside the car, arms folded like a boss. I rang the buzzer. When Rocco first came to Middletown, he rented a room in this house. Now he owned the whole building, lived on the first floor, rented out the other two. On the opposite side of the door Rocco cursed, his deformed fingers fumbling with the knob. Finally, he opened it halfway, leaned his bare forearm against the doorjamb, and looked at me and Nella and my car parked at the curb. He spoke Sicilian. “Who else is with you?” He checked around the porch. “Where’s your little soldier? What do you want?”
“David went out last night,” I said, “and he isn’t home yet. I want to talk to your boy, see what he knows.”
“Antonio was here all night. He doesn’t know anything.” Then Rocco started to shut the door, but I stopped him with my foot.
“I want to hear him tell me,” I said.
“Minchia!” Rocco opened the door wide and hollered over his shoulder for Tony. The boy stumbled out of his room in his underwear and complained that it was too early yet for him to get up. He spotted me on the porch, and then darted back inside his room to put some clothes on. “What’s he doing here?” he said.