It was getting dark. Gary himself was thirsty and needed to use a toilet, but the parade took awhile, they’d see something, and what was the point of all this trouble if he was just going to get the kid spun around in circles on a machine and get in the car and go home?
They waited, him and his cousins and the kids, all together. The kids had quit their carping. They were looking up and pointing at these other kids that had climbed on top of every edifice. Five little girls and a boy and an old man smoking a cigarette peered down at the street from the roof of what Gary recalled was a bakery that his father used to take him to, a bakery, if memory served, that had opened every day since, like, the Civil War but had no name or sign.
The old man on the bakery roof belonged to another age, when a three-piece suit was for walking about town. Modern people were much taller, with smaller hands and solicitous looks. Not a living soul that Gary knew could have formed such a gruesome expression as the one on this man’s face, the eyes utterly still, the mouth hard, the fat, lugubrious head stooped and watching.
Then the crowd started moving backward, into them, on the street. At first he thought it meant room had had to be made for the parade to move through up front, but the people started to turn around and face back.
They were trying to get out.
The purple sky behind the old man on the bakery roof buckled in the heat. Something was amiss in his dismal face. The nose was flared, in disgust maybe or contempt, but not alarm, because what hadn’t he seen, this man, in his ten thousand years, standing on top of us, watching?
The kid asked him what was happening, and Gary had to say he didn’t know. He asked his cousin. His cousin didn’t know. The kid asked, Was there a potty where he could make tee-tee?
There were flowers tied upside down from the fire escapes.
The word he kept hearing was moolinyans, which he loved himself for a second, he knew what he was, how he was connected to some people and not to others because he knew this was the word for “eggplants” or “niggers,” and he knew this because of his last name, because of His father had been who his father had been.
His cousin said in his ear, so the boy couldn’t hear it, “Some moolie kids got into the church, like, vandalizing. Like, tipping over the statues and pissing on the rugs.” And he was tied to this man, his cousin, they belonged to each other because they both knew that that word was a shortening of the other word.
Everybody was getting out, so he had to get out, too, and the kid, and his cousins, and the cousins’ kids.
People were talking, it was true, but mouth to ear. He heard a man say, “Jigaboo rain dance, absolutely bare chested, while the old ladies were trying to pray.” There was a deep collective hum, like trucks passing far off, that grew continually quieter until he just heard thousands of soles scratching on the asphalt and the garbage. The kid groused about He had to go to the bathroom. There was no issue of finding a way out at this point. The crowd had its own idea of direction and goal. He could go only where the crowd was taking him, feeling unmanned and stupid; and he didn’t want the kid to see this in his face, so he walked in front and made the kid hold on to his belt in the back.
There was a downward pull on his pants, the kid clutching like he’d told him to do, and yet Gary couldn’t shake the sensation that it was a spirit of some kind, afoot in the crowd now, something that was trying to pull his pants right down to his ankles.
He looked up at the old man on the bakery roof in the falling light. The face was never going to tell you what it saw. The nostrils gaped, the jowls drooped, the whole apparatus of his being was bent in watching. It was all Gary could hope to be and was never going to be, a hardened face, still and watching, exerting no effect on what it saw, quiet and remote.
Then the crowd threw them all around a tenement corner and the man was lost to him forever. Thrown by the current, all of them: Gary, his cousins, and his young son, named Clement, called Clem, a name his wife had read in a tabloid.
It didn’t make any sense, where the crowd was headed and him with it, but they were all moving fast. The crowd went up Twenty-sixth, all the way back down Emmanuel Avenue to Sixteenth, then back toward Eleventh Avenue. He lost his cousins. His car was someplace on the west end of Twenty-second. He’d have to circle some, back up the hill. It was impossible, given the crush, to go right away up the hill on Eleventh. Everybody was headed down toward the streetcar stop. He made the boy wait with him awhile on the corner.
The whole place was emptying. A little current formed, heading back upward on Eleventh, and he yanked the boy by his hand and dove in, and they made it to Twenty-second and turned right.
East Twenty-second Street was devoid of other pedestrians, quiet under the yellow lamplight in the gloaming.
The kid, in his corduroy short pants and no front teeth, had a chance finally to ask him what had happened; what about the fireworks? And Gary had to say he didn’t know — although he did know, or almost knew — because he was embarrassed to explain.
They were still in the thick of the neighborhood. There were grape arbors in the yards, and meticulously shaped fruit trees, and little devotional statues among the shrubs. Everything so tidy except for tremendous quantities of garbage in the street. The kid was unwilling to hold his hand as they made their way down the street because now there was room enough to walk separately.
A door opened. The number on the house was 123. And a gray-haired colored woman walked onto the porch and turned around and faced the doorway. Another colored woman, younger, came out, too. The younger one was unsteady on her legs. The old one took a step down and held the arm of the younger, guiding her. They descended likewise the two more steps slowly, to the lawn.
He had stopped to watch this and the kid had stopped and was watching also.
They were here, they were even here, already. They were living here. What hadn’t they been given, and now they wanted this, here, too? How was he supposed to bear this? The kid was going to ask him, What are they doing here? Eventually, he would be dead. The kid would grow up and ask himself someday, Who am I?
Awhile later, Ciccio was soundly beating Mrs. Marini and the barber both and had paid her back the money she’d lent him with money he’d won from her. Certainly he was cheating. She put on a shawl from her purse so as to have a means of enshrouding her hand. It was more a tea towel, actually. She couldn’t remember how it had gotten in there.
Pippo, noticing the shawl, leaned back in his chair and flipped a switch in the circuit box, whereupon the whir of the fans there in the back room and (she could hear on the other side of the curtain) in the front room faded gradually.
“Jeez, it’s quiet,” Ciccio said. “You can’t even hear them in here.”
“Who them?” she said.
“The people, he means — the masses, the craziness,” said Pippo.
Ciccio smacked a card on the table. “Scopa,” he said again. In dialect this time—shcoopa—to antagonize her.
Pippo got up and pulled the curtain, exposing the front room of the shop and the broad wall of windows that looked out on the avenue. Night had fallen.