He dumped fifty pounds of serviceable, if oversour, sponge dough into the rubbish because the Lord had called him to more crucial work in the days ahead. The pastries were in the walk-in cooler at the rear of the kitchen. Maybe he’d stay in there for a minute, in the walk-in, and collect himself. He sprung the walk-in latch and had gone so far as to lift a tray of crescent rolls from the wire shelf, when he turned his head and was stricken to discover that he wasn’t alone in here, either.
A lime white man facing the rear of the cooler was seated on a box of vegetable shortening. But for a fedora with a peacock feather under the band and white knee socks, he was naked.
Rocco stood there and looked at him.
The man started and got up, his back still turned. He inserted a foot into a leg of his trousers and stuffed his underpants in a trouser pocket. A smoldering cigar was on the floor. His furry back was turned to Rocco and was rippled with fat, gray-bluish white, deathly under the fluorescent tubes that had come on when Rocco opened the walk-in door. His arms and neck, however, were brown — a man who made his living out of doors. Judging from the fur, which was gray and patchy, he was roughly Rocco’s age. The man yanked at his shirt, though it was much too large for a shirt, part of which was stuck under the shortening box, and mashed his shoe with his foot, unable to find the hole where the toes were intended to go.
A cloud billowed in from the moist outside, and a switch was tripped in Rocco’s head that made him shut the cooler door. It was an economic impulse, but the man let out a yip, puppylike, and fumbled at his shoes (it was a sound Rocco had heard himself make when he’d had too much coffee and it hurt him to piss). And Rocco sensed weakness in the enemy and a sudden blood thirst in himself. Murder him, said a voice. The cooler smelled of dried-out cigar, as would the doomed pastries have smelled. Use the pan, said the voice of the beast inside him.
The man had liberated his shirt and was tying it over his head, the back still turned.
It was unlikely that Rocco could bludgeon to death with an aluminum baking pan an adult male as thickly built as he himself, but so ordered the voice, and he raised the pan, somewhat higher than you hold a ball bat before swinging. The pastries cascaded down on his head.
At last, the man turned. The capacious shirt enshrouded his face. The breathing was loud and distressed. The fabric over the mouth went convex and concave. His pink tits hung there. He held his hat in hand, and the sleeves of the shirt fell around his shoulders like white, bedraggled hair. Without a face. The fabric containing the head like a hangman’s hood.
Did he know this man? He had no idea if he did. A man who was not he, was not Rocco, unless he was Rocco, only he couldn’t be.
“What did you steal?” Rocco said in dialect.
The head shook no vigorously.
“Did you piss on my floor or do yourself like a saw in here?”
No again, as the hands reached up and tightened the mask.
There was an outsider, a member of the public, or rather an insider, a member of Rocco himself, who hadn’t only intruded into the bakery kitchen, Rocco’s private citadel, but had violated even the cooler, the holy of holies, the place where Rocco closeted himself when his need to be alone was at its bleakest.
“Get that thing away from your face!” Rocco said, swatting the air.
Look, a grown man disguised as a figment of his imagination. Unless. .
The head didn’t move.
Then, inside Rocco’s brain, the spinning tumblers of a lock seemed to align, and the door of a vault swung open.
“Oh,” he said softly. “It’s you.” He lowered the pan. “You’ve been hiding from me in here all along.”
The head didn’t respond, but still Rocco felt a bracing pang of belief.
“You thought you could hoodwink me, my boy,” Rocco said, grinning and pointing his finger. “Don’t you think I know my own when I see him?”
And yet the figure only cocked its head.
Rocco called on his courage. He took a step, his heel sinking into a pastry, and moved to embrace the large and devilish child.
There was a timer attached to the hinge of the walk-in door, an ingenious device. The overhead light came on automatically when you entered, and then, sixty seconds after the door had closed, the light switched off again on its own.
Now the light went off.
The figure struck him in the dark, a full-body collision, and Rocco fell against the pastry shelves, and the door opened, and the interloper barreled out.
Rocco got to his feet. He heard the din from outside briefly and heard the alley-oop door slam. There was a snot rag on the tile.
Across the ball field a sister scampered, her habit hovering in the infield dust, waving her downturned hands with emphasis at the begrimed men who operated the carnival rides. The Matterhorn and the Witch’s Wheel were spinning, and the Dipsy-Doo was dipping, all of them festooned with lights that blinked ever more quickly as the cars approached maximum velocity, each blaring its own tinkle-tinkle melody. Stop the machines, she commanded; the Holy Mother was out of the church and in the street. The men, sometime vagrants, sometime elementary school janitors whose clothes emitted the musk of pencil shavings even in August, opened the gates, and the dizzy children stumbled into the outfield.
There were kids even on the roof of the convent, one climbing a flagpole by its cord.
The altar boys were preceded down the avenue by twelve prodigious men of early middle age: slow on their feet, oxen-stout, contemptuous, in white muslin cassocks and white gloves and brimless black felt hats. They forced a channel through the masses by prodding them with the blunt ends of brooms and packing them into the stalls of the vendors, against the storefront windows, unspeaking, a hard element parting a soft element in two, like the keel of a ship cutting the water.
Somebody said, “Do you have a time yet as to what time you will come to see us?”
On the roof of the Twenty-fourth Street nickelodeon, the men who had readied the fireworks display passed a bottle of beer among themselves and spat on the tar, lethargic, cursing.
Following the altar boys was a troop of priests from various parishes, some in long skirts and birettas. And the bishop of the city, a German, was among them, in a green miter and cope, a scowling, ancient man walking with a shepherd’s crook and leaning on it to balance himself.
Behind the clergy came the Virgin, smirking, her porcelain skin dark like an Arab’s, the nose upturned, English, her stature dwarflike, her clothes and hands stuck with specks of diamond donated over many years by women who had had them pried from their engagement rings. She stood on a stone platform, four spiral wooden columns supporting the gilt roof over her head. The rails undergirding the platform were borne on the shoulders of sixteen men in white albs. Ribbons hung from the columns and the people pinned money to the ribbons as they dragged by. And white-robed men with hoods hanging down their backs guarded the platform, holding bull-rib torches, singing plainsong.
It was darkening but the heat was the same.
Several hundred women in black followed the Virgin, praying rosaries, their feet naked to the pebbles and the cigarette butts and the soiled napkins and the spilled pop on the pavement. A band brought up the rear, making vehement noise. The brass played a waltz and the clarinets a two-step and the violins something else you could only barely make out. And behind the band, in the wake of the procession, was a half block of empty space where maybe it was cooler, maybe you could breathe freely.