The calendar page that was now showing depicted four brown-skinned people bent obliviously over a bean field while a volcano erupted in the background. However, it was the page for July.
Enzo looked at the stairs and climbed them, dodging Ciccio’s textbooks and the rank pads of his football uniform, which obstructed the steps.
He drew a bath and peeled off his clothes and got in, soaping and rinsing himself expeditiously, shaving his face and combing the mortar out of his hair underneath the water. Carmelina used to whet his razor for him, but now he did it himself.
He tied on his bathrobe and looked into the boy’s room, where Ciccio lay on the floor reading a color comic book, on which the ash of his cigarette had fallen. On the writing desk, the teeth of the secondhand typewriter that Enzo had bought for him, and that he had to be forced by threats and beating to use, were jammed together, so that all of them pointed toward the opening that exposed the paper but none of them reached it, like a mob trying to shove its way onto a bus.
“Get your goddamn books off my stairs,” Enzo said with fatigue.
“All right,” Ciccio said, turning a page, intent while he read the pictures.
Enzo said, “Do like I say: I want you to put some Brilliantone in the utility sink and fill in the water and wash off all that padding you put inside the football clothes.”
Before the boy could answer him, Enzo closed the door and descended the stairs, taking each step more slowly than the last. His tongue was swollen as though a bee had stung it.
Did he ring the number again, incautious, while he sweated through his robe and the calendar pages ruffled in the wind from the open window down the hall? Yes.
“What happened?” his father asked.
Somehow the line had broken, Enzo explained, feeling buoyant and sick, like a child in a toy boat. He had been waiting for the last half hour while the long-distance operator tried to reestablish it, he said. In any event, what was the number of his father’s train?
Halloween night. Enzo and the boy drove the truck downtown and left it in the parking lot of the cavernous baseball stadium. Nothing protected the stadium from the winds of the lake, which was only a hundred feet away to the north, and the wind blew through its open corners, playing the building like a reed. They walked through Public Square, the boy, as always, two paces ahead — was it the boy who was speeding up, or was Enzo slowing down? — and into the basement of Erie Station Tower. He told Ciccio that if his grandfather learned, by whatever means, even from a little birdie, that Ciccio smoked cigarettes, he would be beaten within a quarter of an inch of his life.
He had made the boy iron their shirts for once, and Ciccio had done a competent job, but he had used too much starch, and it had turned Enzo’s sweat to glue. A train pulled into the terminal. People of all colors spilled out of the cars. Ciccio was in front of him. He tucked the boy’s tie under the back of his collar. Enzo’s lazy eye veered off as he tried to make sense of the timetable.
“He’s going to be a big fucking ballbuster,” Ciccio was saying despondently.
“And the language,” said Enzo.
“And he won’t understand anything I say,” Ciccio said. “What do I do with this guy when you’re not around?”
“‘This guy.’ What kind of a word is that?”
Ciccio looked at the pavement and spat on it.
What was the boy? What was the word for him? Careless. But if Enzo weren’t charged with shaping him, if he were somebody else looking at the boy from the side, then the word he might have used instead was untroubled.
Once, while Enzo was in the barber’s chair, he had seen Ciccio sliding down the sidewalk across the street with his pack of pals. He was the tallest of them by a head. He smoked, like the others, while they passed a basketball by bouncing it against the concrete of the sidewalk. Then one of them bounced it too hard — it was a piece of mock abuse — and the ball flew over the boy being abused and caromed into the street, where the swerving cars dodged it.
Ciccio went after the ball, sideways. He kept on yammering with the boys. Enzo saw it while Pippo the Barber’s scissors chirruped at his sideburns.
Ciccio’s feet and his hands were looking for the ball, but the senses that lived in the head were pointed back at the conversation he was having.
All this happened very quickly.
The ball still had a bit of bounce, and Ciccio, reaching it in the near lane, tapped, and tapped again, with his cigarette in the fingers of that very hand.
Look at that boy there.
Where were the cars?
What is the name, Mazzone, that you gave to the boy on the other side of the glass?
Where were the cars that would flatten him?
The ball came under the boy’s control. But rather than throwing it back to the sidewalk and hustling out of the way, what did he do (while his father watched unseen, wishing he had a god to call on)? He dribbled it, free and easy, right on the street, and the car approaching slowed to a halt in front of him while Ciccio made a half wave at the driver and in due course reached the group again, never having slowed or sped his untroubled step.
On the platform at the station, Ciccio looked down at his spit and stepped on it.
A man in a white uniform sold them some peanuts. There were many colored children. Another car arrived, and the men climbed down to the platform, cigarettes hanging from their mouths.
“Why isn’t he bringing his wife?” Ciccio asked.
“Your grandmother, you meant to say — hey, pick those shells up off the floor,” Enzo said. “You’re in a public place.”
Ciccio bent down. “You got a mother, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t,” Enzo said. “She died.”
The boy stood upright. The swollen veins that divagated across his forehead gradually reverted into the skin. He said, “I didn’t know that. Why don’t you tell me why I didn’t know that?”
“She died eight years ago,” Enzo said, chewing each bean into a paste before he swallowed it.
“When do I get to find out about your secret mob ties?” Ciccio said. “You know, I mean, come on.” He wasn’t angry. He didn’t get angry. He got mouthy.
Enzo inspected the boy’s creased and unpolished calfskin shoes. If he had one wish, it would be to get into the boy’s dreams and trouble them.
“It’s like you think I’m a worm for the Feds, seriously.”
“What do you want to know?”
Ciccio adopted an inquisitorial tone. “What’s your real name, Mazzone? ”
They stood over the trash can, dropping in the shells, inhaling the fragrant bacteria.
“Mazzone,” Enzo said. Because he could think of nothing else to say, he added, “What’s yours?”
Some of the skins of the nuts were tangled in Ciccio’s shameful mustache.
“I’m bored. Why do we have to be so goddamn early for everything? This guy is going to squash me. Why am I telling you? You’ll laugh.”
He liked it when Ciccio talked, sometimes. He wished he had more to say to him. He was more and more the hearing kind.
The trains barreled into the station along half a dozen tracks with the great noise of many tons of iron rolling on steel. The shriek of the brakes deafened him.
He hadn’t gotten a scarf. He would know his father’s face. But five minutes after the train had arrived, he and the boy split up, looking for an elderly, confused-looking foreigner certain to be dressed to the nines for travel. Enzo hastened toward the front of the platform. By now the train that had allegedly contained his father had already left, and an identical train had taken its place.