How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Aspetta.” He tightened his arm around me and searched the faces of the children streaming out of the church. When he saw Tony, he made sure that Tony saw him, too. I don’t know how my father did it. He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He just stared until Tony pulled away from Chris midconversation and met my father’s eyes and mine beside him. Tony wavered there. The last of the students parted around him. He was alone, a weed sprouting from a crack in the marble steps, and my father cut him down without raising a hand. Shoulders hunched in red leather, Tony grew smaller as I grew taller. And then, cowed under, that little shit slunk home.

  “Now we go,” my father said. As we walked, he told me about his father’s almond orchard in Sicily, how some nights he slept under the almond trees when he was a boy. “They made the best fruit,” he said. “When they bloomed, all the land looked like it was in the clouds.” He scratched the scruff on his jaw. “One night,” he said, “I walked with your nonnu by the cemetery on our way home from the orchard. The shadows of the stones moved as we went by, and there was a light in the window of a . . . mausoleo . . . Come si chiama . . . the little house in the cemetery?”

  “Mausoleum,” I said.

  “Mausoleum. Mausoleo. Almost the same word,” he said. “See how everything comes from Italia?” Then my father cleared his throat and said, “Maybe I was your age, I don’t remember. It was far back.” And he waved his hand in the air to show how far back in time he meant. “Anyway,” he said, “there was a light in the window, and I shouted to your nonnu, Look! Someone’s inside. What do they need a light in there for?” Then my father laughed, a watery-eyed, big-bellied laugh, and said, “You know what your nonnu says to me? Turiddu, he says, that’s what he called me, Turiddu, look with your eyes. This light, it is nothing but the moon.”

  He stopped and parted my hair at the cowlick with his fingers and brushed the bangs from my forehead. “My papà,” he said, “he tried to teach me something. Now I teach you. Capisci?” He pointed at my eyes and said, “Look with your eyes, not with this.” Then he placed his palm over my heart. “You understand?”

  6

  A week of heavy rain washed the dirty snow away. And Tony, too. It was a brief respite—one that wouldn’t last. It never did.

  Late Saturday night, while my father’s snores rattled through the house, I climbed out my window onto the back-porch roof to wrap myself in a blanket of stars and blue-black sky. But instead of a starry blanket, there was only a lumpy sheet of clouds, not even a hint of starlight, just the haze from a silver-gray wisp of moon. I read Tony’s stupid note again. I should’ve thrown it away, but I couldn’t.

  A pebble hit the shingles and clattered down the rain gutter. In the yard below, Sam’s blond bangs flopped over his face like a waning moon. Beside him stood a girl who could have stepped out of one of the posters on his bedroom wall. She dressed head to toe in black, with an eight-inch jet-black Mohawk jutting from the top of her head like a dorsal fin. She leaned into him, whispered in his ear. His white teeth flashed in a smile. He craned his neck back up at me, lifted his hands in a question: Are you coming or staying?

  I raised a finger, mouthed, One minute. Then I scampered back inside. The window squeaked like a terrified mouse when I inched it down. I froze, but my father’s snores still rumbled from his room. I’d never snuck out before, and if I got caught, he might never let me leave the house alone again. I could hear him grilling me in my head already, the same questions he peppered me with on those rare occasions he allowed me out in the world without an escort. Where are you going? What are you doing? Why? Is this for school? What time will you be done? He never let me go over to anyone’s house, and he never let me have anyone over to our house, because they weren’t family.

  But he also lied, bigger lies than I ever thought to tell. That day in the street with Tony’s father, Rocco, he’d pounded the truck hood like a man who thought he could cow old hatreds into submission with his fists the way he’d cowed Tony with only a look. He was never alone, though. Even facing down Rocco’s truck, he had Vincenzo’s strength with him. Vincenzo was his bundle. I didn’t want to be cowed, and I didn’t want to be the lone stick that gets broken.

  And there was Sam, outside with a girl and an invitation—a siren song calling me to shipwreck. Four paces to the closet and the hardwood floor squeaked. I froze again. The heartbeat of the house at night, the cadence of my father sleeping, did not stop. I grabbed dirty clothes from the closet floor and arranged them in the shape of a boy on the bed, like I’d seen on so many television shows. Sneakers in one hand and my denim jacket in the other, I tiptoed into the hall.

  My father had left his door open as usual. Even in sleep he couldn’t let me alone. Slants of streetlight shone through his torn window shade. And I did what he had told me to do. I looked with my eyes, not with my heart. The stalks of his hair, thinning and gray, always kept neatly combed back from his widow’s peak, grew wild atop his head. In the light, those wild stalks were thinner and grayer. He looked, for the first time, old to me, feeble. He was afraid for me, his son, afraid of all the things that could go wrong in the world. But I wanted to see who I could be without that weight, without his crushing fear, for one night at least. I crept downstairs at an elephant’s pace and slipped out the back door.

  Sam tossed me a black Bauhaus T-shirt. “Want to go to a party?” he asked.

  I laced up my high-tops and pulled the shirt on over my army-green long-sleeved tee. “Lead the way.”

  “I told you he’d be cool,” Sam said to the girl. Up close she was pretty. Not magazine pretty, but interesting with her crooked nose and powder-white skin, black lipstick and black winged eyeliner.

  “I’m Jamie,” she said.

  “David. But I guess Sam already told you.” I toed the grass with my sneaker. “So, where to?”

  Wesleyan University students swarmed in and around Butterfield dorms like winking fireflies on a warm summer night. They huddled in small circles or wandered from clique to clique until they found a home. Couples drifted in and out of each other’s airspace, and disappeared into one of three dormitories that snaked around a central courtyard. Flyers covered a kiosk, hand-scrawled and printed announcements about shows and rides, math tutoring and music lessons. The charged thrum of the party tingled in my feet through the soles of my sneakers, a shock like a circuit being completed.

  Jamie’s sister, Sarah, stood in a huddle of people by a door that had been propped open with a garbage bin. They drank from red plastic cups and passed a joint. She looked like an older version of Jamie without the ghost-white makeup and Mohawk. Pink waves of hair spilled over the shoulders of her black motorcycle jacket. Her fingers were stacked with silver rings and turquoise stones. She peeled away from the others, her green peasant skirt swaying around the ankles of her combat boots.

  “You brought an entourage,” she said.

  “You going to offer us a drink?” Jamie asked.

  “You’re on your own there, kiddo.” She squinted at her Swatch. “If you hurry, you can still catch the band. Go to the laundry room in Butt B and follow the noise. Oh, and don’t make me regret inviting you.”

  Jamie rolled her eyes. “Just make sure there isn’t a boy in your room when I get in.”

  In the laundry room, screeching guitars and wild feedback echoed around us. Washing machines and dryers, exposed pipes running the length of the ceiling, even the air vibrated from the thunderous punch of drums and bass. Graffiti-covered concrete walls stretched out ahead of us-a labyrinth of dimly lit corridors deep under the earth.

  “These tunnels connect to all the Butterfield dorms,” Sam yelled in my ear. “There’s supposed to be a door down here that leads to the main network under the whole campus.”

  My old D&D games were coming alive. We were a company of adventurers in search of secrets long forgotten in a maze of shifting walls and hidden treasures. We passed metal doors, some locked and some with bro
ken locks-rooms with bare bulbs casting long shadows across discarded telephones and furniture, and rooms taken over as art studios. There was a kiln and pottery wheel in one room, and easels stood in another with canvases of every size stacked against the walls. Students lived here. They slept on mattresses on the floor. They left their clothes heaped in corners and books strewn about.

  Sam and Jamie ran ahead of me into an alcove where clusters of people drank and smoked and made out under flickering fluorescent lights. All around them, red and blue faces scowled from where they were painted on the concrete walls. Political rants and propositions for sex scribbled on every inch of free space called out for attention.

  I wove through the crowd, caught in Sam and Jamie’s wake. The alcove opened into a large room. Inside, the band played. Their amplifiers were so loud, the sound rattled my chest. My body tensed. A mass of people jumped up and down in place, headbanging and bouncing off one another like balls in a pinball machine. Sam and Jamie threw themselves into the throng and disappeared. The air felt thick and sticky. It smelled like damp socks and cigarettes. Sweat beaded on my upper lip. I wiped it away with my sleeve, then shouldered out of my denim jacket. I let the songs-each one louder and faster than the last-shred me into pieces.

  Jamie bounded out of the mosh pit. “Tie it around your waist,” she shouted over the thrashing music. And she mimed tying jacket arms around her waist.

  The band finished their set. My ears rang. Sam stumbled toward us. “That was awesome,” he said. The room thinned out as people delved deeper into the tunnels or headed back to the surface. For the first time, I could see the musicians who were set up on the floor at the far end of the space. They all sported Mohawks except for the drummer. He sat on his stool while the singer stood behind him and shaved the sides of his head down to stubble.

  “Now you’re an official member,” the singer said.

  The drummer felt the flat blond line of hair. “Wicked,” he said, and then he set to work, breaking down his drum kit.

  “Bauhaus,” the singer said. He waved the clippers at me. It was a question, or a dare. Or maybe it was an answer, a way to finally breathe-a way to not be afraid. I felt free in these tunnels. I wanted to carry that feeling with me, no matter the price. And there would be a price.

  I sat down on the drummer’s stool in that cave of a room at the heart of the maze. Electric clippers buzzed around my ears. And when I spoke, I didn’t recognize my own voice. “What are you guys called?”

  “I’m Hunter. That’s Flint and River, and over there is-”

  They all had the names of something wild. “No, I mean your group. What do you guys call yourselves?”

  “Katabasis,” he said. “But when we play Eclectic House, we’ll be Genetic Disorder.”

  Sam and Jamie watched me like I was the most fascinating television program they’d ever seen. Clumps of black hair tumbled past my shoulders and fell into patterns with the drummer’s towhead strands like the colored inkblots of a Rorschach test. Those weak pieces of me the night had pruned away.

  “Rad,” Jamie said.

  Sam wagged his head in agreement. “Totally.”

  The bare sides of my scalp felt prickly and soft at the same time. There was no mirror, but I could read my reflection in the look on Sam’s face. I tugged at my thick mane. “Gladiator-helmet head,” I said. “Think I’ll grow it long into a real plume.”

  Hunter coiled the microphone cable around his arm and tossed it into a milk crate. “Righteous band name,” he said. “Gladiator Helmet Head.”

  “PSafe is topside,” a shout echoed from the tunnels. Around us, people sprang to life, jack-in-the-boxes with their buttons pushed.

  “Public Safety,” Hunter said. “You kids should jet. That way.” He thumbed at a tunnel behind him. “You’ll end up in Butt C.”

  Sam and Jamie followed me through the tunnels. We sprinted around drunken students and vomit puddles, past flashes of almost-familiar graffiti and open doorways, until we spilled up a metal staircase and into the fluorescent-lit first floor of Butterfield C.

  On the beige couch of the student lounge, a couple pawed at each other, oblivious to the chaos just outside the big windows and open glass doors. The party had swelled since we first arrived. It spilled beyond the dormitories and courtyard to Lawn Avenue. A drunken brawl had broken out near the kiosk. Students lingered in the swinging beams of PSafe flashlights. The rough voices of campus security apprehending the brawlers carried over the noise of the crowd.

  In the hallway behind us, a shirtless resident pushed open his door and glared at us. “Fucking townies,” he said. “What are you, fifteen? Don’t let them find you.” He nodded at the PSafe officers who had just entered the building down the end of the hall.

  “Shit,” Sam said. “Jamie, where’s your sister? We can hang in her room until this blows over.”

  “No way,” she said. “I’m not supposed to show my face for another two hours.”

  A second guy came to the door, hair tousled, shirt unbuttoned, and cheeks flushed. “Ignore them,” he said. Then he sauntered into the bathroom across the way.

  “Act like we belong,” I said. I pulled my shoulders back, brushed my fingers over my gladiator plume. No one would chase or jump me, not tonight. Not ever again. I strolled down the narrow corridor, away from where the officers entered. “Let’s go.”

  “This is nuts,” Sam said with a wild grin.

  We snaked through the dorm and found an exit opposite the courtyard. Large corner windows that had once been lit and full of people emptied and went dark. Streams of students stumbled away from Butterfield and the strobe lights of PSafe vehicles.

  Cutting through a thicket of bare trees, I shrugged back into my jacket. We hopped a wood fence and walked through several backyards to get to a street clear of PSafe officers. We hoofed it past the science building and university library to Foss Hill, where we lay on our backs and stole glimpses of starlight between low-hung clouds. Sam launched into a retelling of the whole evening. When he got to the part where Hunter shaved my head, Sam turned to me and said, “Dude, I can’t believe you did that.”

  The story grew and shifted as we each took turns embellishing it until the night sounded more like a Ray Harryhausen adventure movie than a college party we’d crashed. In our version of events, we were heroes pitted against giant, stop-motion-animation monsters: PSafe swooped down on us like pterodactyls in One Million Years B.C. and sprang up out of the earth like skeleton warriors from Jason and the Argonauts.

  We all agreed, tonight was the best night ever.

  7

  At home, I slept until my father’s shouts from the bottom of the stairs woke me. “Your zia is here,” he said. “Did you eat?” I rolled over and pulled the covers up over my head. “David, you got church in a few minutes.” The stairs creaked under his heavy footsteps. His long, drawn-out “ooh” signaled a warning. He was losing his patience. He lifted my window shade and flung open the curtain. “What’s the matter? You sick?”

  “What time is it?” I sat up in bed, squinting against the morning light. The clock on my nightstand read seven forty-five.

  My father’s forehead bunched into rows of wrinkled skin, speed bumps for his fast-climbing unibrow. That caterpillar on his face wanted no part of what was coming next. His eyes bulged like two hard-boiled eggs bursting from their shells. A string of Sicilian curses erupted from my father’s mouth so fast I couldn’t follow them. His hands moved even faster, churning air into a storm as he spoke.

  In the doorway, Zia Nella’s bright-blue dress was like a patch of clear sky in a thunderstorm. She gasped and crossed herself.

  My father turned his fury on her. “This was that friend, wasn’t it? Miricani!” There was an insult in the way he pronounced the Sicilian word for Americans. It sounded almost like merda di cane—dog shit.

  “Where were you when your son did this to himself?” Zia Nella said. Then the two of them argued in Sicilian about who was at fa
ult for what I’d done to my hair and what they were going to do with me now that there wasn’t time for breakfast. They talked about me as if I weren’t there, listening to every word. They couldn’t let me out in public like this. There were no barbers open. There must be something wrong with me. I was sick in the head. That American boy was a bad influence. Maybe it was drugs. My father should go to church more often. He should go with me. We should go together, as a family. Maybe it was too much television. Who knew what they were teaching us in school.

  In their world, I had no volition of my own. My actions were a product of some outside force, plotting the ruin of good Sicilian boys.

  “I’m not on drugs,” I said. They both stopped and looked at me. “I didn’t learn it in school. I didn’t watch it on TV. What do you care what my hair looks like? It’s mine, not yours. I like it. It’s cool.”

  “Sta zittu,” my father said. Shut up. He dragged me by my arm out of bed. I pulled against his grip, but he was bigger and stronger than me, and it was useless to resist. I knew this from the times I’d disobeyed him before. Still, the impulse to flee was powerful in that frantic moment when caught. My feet shuffled forward across the carpet in the hall to the cool tiles of the bathroom. With his free hand, he plugged in the electric clippers and set to work. Clumps of black hair tumbled into the white porcelain bowl. There was no fighting him on this. But my hair would grow back. And if I wanted to, I’d cut it into a Mohawk again.

  All through Palm Sunday Mass my stomach rumbled. My back itched from stray hairs. After the service, Zia Nella and I each took one of the small crosses made from the blessed and incensed palm leaves. She fidgeted with the cross in her hands as she spoke with the priest in the church vestibule. They were talking about me. Tony and Chris walked by with their families. In the shadows of their fathers, they snickered and wondered aloud if I had head lice. I felt the stubble on my shaved head, the uneven line where the Mohawk had been, patches of my plume. I was a caged gladiator, waiting for the contest to begin.