Tomorrow was All Saints’ Day, and after that All Souls’, but he had forgotten to buy candles to light in his house for his dead.
11
Some kid caught hold of Ciccio’s hair, a rassler from the public school who smelled of Munster cheese, sort of a dude, with his corduroy collar up — never mind how the fight got started. They were downtown, at the New Odessa rail yard. Ciccio had the usual advantage of his height and reach. But this individual went for the hair, no self-respect, and bounced Ciccio’s face on a railroad tie.
Now Ciccio was leaking blood from a gash on the high bone of the cheek, limp with fear of what Mrs. Marini was going to do to him. But he’d allowed a wound of similar depth to go unattended in the past — it was on his forearm, he kept his sleeves rolled down — and it got so fouled up he’d had to dig out the pus with a spoon.
It was the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, a holiday they hadn’t kept since his mother went away, six years previous. Nobody ever told him what the reason was.
Mrs. Marini probed indifferently at the swollen mess under his eye before changing her glasses to scrutinize the clothes, sniffing at a creosote blotch in the elbow of his jacket and then, with heart-felt scorn, smacking his face on the clean side. “When you die your father will have no heirs, don’t you realize that?” she said. “Go to the bathroom.”
There was a pot on the stove and the kitchen smelled of boiling poultry, but Ciccio’s appetite had just now left him. She hobbled down the cellar stairs.
Francesco Mazzone, the earlier model, lay on his back on the floor of the sewing room tinkering with the chassis of the desk. He had found an electric motor in the trash on someone’s curb and was trying to substitute it for the pedal-action drive of Mrs. Marini’s sewing machine, which excited the rheumatism in her hip. Or so Ciccio gathered from the two dialect words he recognized, machine and trash, and from the looks of things. The rubber pedal and the frayed belt that turned the flywheel had been tossed behind the dressmaker’s dummy into the heap she set aside for the paper-rags man, who would also take copper, tin, and bicycle tires. Earlier in the month, the old man had retiled the bathroom back at home with scavengings and rehabilitated her coffee percolator, a device he had never met before, the product of which disappointed him.
“Did you win?” asked Francesco Mazzone, taking Ciccio’s arm and leading him down the hall.
“Yes, I win,” Ciccio said. But he hadn’t won in any respect.
He sat on the lid of the commode. The disembodied heads of three young plaster ladies wearing Mrs. Marini’s other hairdos observed him with their remote, sexual, pouting looks from a shelf over the toilet paper. There was a fourth, but it was bald. His grandfather sat on the lip of the bathtub marveling at what you could find in this country’s rubbish and handling Ciccio’s skull in such a way as to position his thumbs on either side of the wound, pulling it apart and peering inside with one eye gaping and the other twisted shut. He exhaled tobacco, oranges, and tooth decay. His arms and his hands were so big and his grip on Ciccio’s head was so secure that he might have twisted the head off Ciccio’s shoulders like a squash.
“How did you get these little sticks in here?” the old man said, shiningly proud and slack-jawed, so that Ciccio could see all the way back to where his yellow tongue disappeared down his throat. The eroded molars put Ciccio in mind of the Black Hills of South Dakota, where he had never been. He had never been anyplace but the farm, and here.
“I turn him piss, shit, blood. I make nothing. The stars makes circles at his head. I rise. I come home. The victorious,” Ciccio said carefully.
The old man contorted his lips to dislodge a seed in his gums, and succeeded, and swallowed heavily.
Mrs. Marini supervised Ciccio’s washing of his hands with disinfectant soap and let him proceed straight through rinsing before she made him do it all over again with the brush. Only then did she allow him to handle the tweezers she had soaked in alcohol. His grandfather held the mirror while Ciccio picked the splinters out of his face. She dabbed the wound with peroxide and smeared it with iodine. He was saddened to hear that stitches weren’t called for but held out hope for a little scarring. A faint, permanent change in coloration was all he wanted, something to observe in later years, when he’d be able to think better, nothing that would make him look retarded, or more so, rather, just a historical marker, a chip in the favored plate.
Ciccio Mazzone took no pride in his looks. Something was amiss in his face, but he didn’t know what it was. The scientific thing would have been to monitor the changes of his features over time by comparing Ciccio Mazzone (or Frank, as nobody at home would call him) with his baby pictures, but none existed. Pop, when asked why not, only cut the crusts off his sandwich, carried it on the cutting board to the ottoman in the front room, crashed softly to the carpet, and ate.
Mrs. Marini snipped some gauze and taped it to Ciccio’s face, all the time slugging him with abuse. If Pop had said the same things to him he would have felt backwardly joyful, but coming from her — he wanted to pull his shirt over his eyes in shame.
The trick with the sewing machine had worked. Mrs. Marini even applauded, which Ciccio had never seen her do except to be nasty. The screaming motor made a smell of ozone. She sent them back to number 123 with a pot of chicken stew and some changes of the bandage. Pop was working time and a half, so supper would have to wait.
Ciccio and Francesco Mazzone made their way down the hill, quiet. All the stores were closed in preparation for the holiday that nobody understood. Due to recent petty theft, the church was chained shut. A thin rain came down. All day the city had been leaking dark fluids down its curbsides, prone in its dress grays, like a dead Confederate soldier.
He had had to wear his good shoes to school for a debate in Western Civilization. Then he had slunk with the fellows for two hours in the drizzle, and the leather had shrunk around his feet, which now tormented him. He guessed it might be all right to have some Sally or Susan-Anne, to tell her, Aw, baby, my feets hurt bad. And she’d be soft with him. Probably. But then she’d want to come visit at home.
His grandfather handed him the umbrella they were sharing and hiked up his pants like a dainty chick at the beach so the bottoms wouldn’t drag in the runoff.
It was a strange day. Ciccio was feeling unlike himself. He was fifteen, restive, aggravated. During similar moods when he was a little kid, he would climb onto a chair in front of the calendar over the telephone table, flip ahead a few months, and write, in a square that indicated a very distant date, This day will never come.
He suspected that he missed his mother. He turned the suspicion over in his brain and poked under its folds and did some timeworn experiments to test it, and he was embarrassed when he concluded that it wasn’t true. For example, two years ago she had sent his father a telegram saying she wanted to come stay with them, but Ciccio had intercepted the shitty thing, the telegram, and disposed of it. Did he regret that? Nope.
They passed the darkened pork store and made the turn onto Twenty-second Street, a turn he had made one hundred thousand times. He confessed to Francesco Mazzone that his shoes were ruined and his feet were in pain. Anyway, that was what he was trying to get across. And the old man only sniffed, so that the hair growing from his nose fluttered, and the rain went tap tap on the umbrella.
Francesco Mazzone had made a practice of rousing Ciccio at five a.m. by sopping a dishtowel in cold water and slathering Ciccio’s face with it. Then he walked Ciccio to school — a four-mile slog down Saint Ambrose Boulevard, the road thick with smoke under the sinister light of the streetlamps while the trolleys sped down the median. Ciccio had always ridden the trolley before, dozing through the jolts and rattles, and had stumbled into morning chapel with the rheum still clogging his eyes. Now he’d come to count on this long exertion in raw weather to grease his mental and bodily wheels. They didn’t have much to say to each other while they walked, and there was a generosity in this, a roominess. It left him free to watch the street and think. So long as he didn’t fall into the trap of thinking about himself, he enjoyed it.