He regretted he hadn’t worn the scarf. A dozen silent Negro children were being led off the train by an old Negro woman and a young Negro man wearing a clerical collar.
Enzo headed systematically toward the rear of the platform, stopping to check the bathroom and the ticket counter. He took off his hat and smoothed his hair. He put his hat back on.
Shortly, the boy was standing in front of him, holding the arm of a gnomish gentleman with a carnation in his lapel.
Unfortunately, it was not his father. His father was much bigger than this. The boy was distracting him with games.
“He looks lost, but he isn’t the right size,” Ciccio said.
The man looked Enzo up and down.
Ciccio held a suitcase in his free hand.
“Stop, Cheech, you’re just confusing people. Leave him alone.”
“I told you to wear the scarf,” said the man, in dialect.
“What did he say?” the boy asked.
A boar hunt. His father waited, wearing a black tie and his only coat, at the mouth of a ravine. Enzo chased the crying animal down the slope. He emerged from the trees, and the boar headed south, but he threw a rock that made it veer the other way, and it charged around a copse of fig trees, following the edge of the dried-out bed of the creek. Moments later he heard the report of the shotgun. He heard his father make a call for his brothers and him to come down from the woods. No one knew yet that he had won. He had chased the boar into the trap. He was fastest. He reached the bottom of the ravine in time to see the old man blow his nose into his handkerchief and twist himself around the panting animal ’s head, gripping the tusks, and cut its throat, and the blood came out. And then the old man looked up. He looked up. He saw that it was Enzo running in the ravine, pulling on the shirt that he had flapped to flush the boar. Now Enzo reached him, and the old man wiped the blood off his hand, and put the hand to Enzo’s face.
The man let go of Ciccio’s arm and pulled down Enzo’s face and kissed his mouth.
Clocks and smoke. The butane perfume of cigarette lighters flipped open. He had last been kissed on the mouth by a prostitute in the summer of 1950. It was the only time. Later, he regretted the expense.
The old man had had an old man’s riven, misleadingly hard and dour face even in Enzo’s youth. It seemed like a cunning disguise that he had since grown a layer of fat that had transformed the face into a rough pile of fleshy pouches, like a dilapidated stone wall from which the mortar in the joints has washed away.
“Oh, Vincenzo,” he said courteously, “how long it’s been since I’ve seen you.”
Enzo thought he saw all the many lights in the station diminish and go bright again, as though the shadow of death had raced across his eyes. “Hello, Pop,” he said.
“What did you say?” asked the boy.
Enzo’s father let go of his face and turned to the boy. “Mazzone Francesco,” he said, indicating for the boy to incline his head, and then kissing his cheeks, “I am called Mazzone Francesco as well.”
It was 7:14 in the evening, said the great clock suspended from the ceiling of the vaulted vestibule.
“Tell him to stop kissing me,” Ciccio said.
“Doesn’t he understand anything I’m saying?” said Francesco Mazzone.
“Sometimes,” Enzo said. “He doesn’t know how to speak. He understands when he tries.”
“You’re talking about me, but what are you saying?” said the boy.
Outside, Francesco wanted to know if it was customary for children to dress in such dramatic fashion. Witches, ballerinas, ghosts, and hobos entered and departed the storefronts.
“He’s confused about the costumes,” Enzo explained.
“How disgraceful,” Francesco said.
“This is our Public Square,” the boy said pleasantly.
“This is the square, he says,” Enzo translated.
“I see that for myself, thank you.”
They walked down Coshocton Street toward the water.
Francesco Mazzone shook a couple of Camel cigarettes from a pack inside his coat and handed one to Enzo and one to the boy. “I bought these in Yonkers. They are of the very highest quality.” His head was a well-cut block on which the trim white hair was meticulously arranged.
Ciccio was wide-eyed with awe and gratitude.
The old man had taken Ciccio’s arm.
“Enzo, translate.”
“What did he say?”
“I’m dying from cold,” Francesco said, addressing the boy. “Is it always like this? I’ve never been so cold in my life.”
Enzo started to translate, but the boy waved him off. They managed to communicate through pointing and nods. As they approached the truck on the dark side of the stadium, the boy started using Italian words he had always refused to admit he knew how to pronounce.
They drove east down Maumee Avenue, Francesco in the window seat, the boy with the gearshift between his legs, shifting when Enzo engaged the clutch. Francesco and the boy were holding a more or less regular discussion, with only occasional recourse to Enzo for translation.
They drove through niggertown.
“This is where the moolies live,” the boy said.
“Hey.”
“What? I thought that was the word.”
“What did he say?” Francesco said.
“This is where the tizzoons live,” Ciccio said.
“I told you what to call them.”
“Is there a law?” his father asked. He meant a law about who could live where.
“No,” Enzo said. “Maybe. I don’t know, honestly.”
They passed through a series of green lights. Snow fell. Francesco held up a finger, pointed at himself, indicated the truck, and then spoke briefly.
The boy said, “He’s never been in a car before?”
“That can’t be,” Enzo said.
“Buses, of course. All the time. When we go to see your brothers in Bergamo. Never once in a private car. This is a strange kind of car. What kind of car is this?”
“A pickup,” the boy said.
Francesco repeated the word.
The boy said, in Italian, with nary an accent, “Your voyage, how it was? You am comfortable on it?”
“Where did you learn to talk like that?” Enzo demanded.
“I can’t. I don’t know,” the boy said, downshifting. “It just comes out.” That was the boy. Opening his mouth for anything that knocked on his rotten teeth.
And here was their church, the boy explained.
Enzo had been married in it twenty-three years before, with his union pin holding the boutonniere to his jacket and the boys from Local 238 standing in for relatives. Carmelina wore a satin suit and a small hat with a veil on it. He used to wake up in the morning with her sweet rose soap on his breath and a loose strand of her hair stuck in his throat.
Something was slowing Enzo down. It had been slowing him down for a long time. Eventually, like a ball thrown straight up that slows and slows, he would come to a stop for a moment, in midair, and begin his descent.
Francesco Mazzone, throwing one leg over the other and turning himself suavely, gripped Ciccio’s chin, turning the head from side to side, examining it skeptically, like a rancher at a livestock auction. “Such a good-looking boy,” he said, staccato, in dialect. “You should do something about these teeth, however, Enzo. Lemon juice and bicarbonate. Morning and afternoon.”
“What did he say?” the boy asked.
Enzo didn’t answer.