by Marco Rafalà
I kicked him, and Sam joined in, kicking him again with more force. We fought like wolves. We snarled and growled. “Son of a bitch,” I yelled. “You son of a bitch.” We were the children of the sickle-winged colossus, and no one, not even the gods, could stand against us. I straddled Tony, my knees pinning his arms. I became the mountain and the fire thrown by Typhon. I stuffed Tony’s note into his mouth. “Eat it,” I said, forcing his jaw shut.
Tony spit out the note and bucked me off him. We staggered to our feet. He stood frozen in place as if petrified by Medusa’s glare. My hands shook. The pulsing rhythm of my heart beating in my ears goaded me on. My fist hurled at him like one of Typhon’s boulders. Sam swung at him, too, but Tony’s tree-trunk arm blocked the blow. He struck Sam’s face with a left hook. Sam stumbled back. One step. Then two. Tony lunged at me, arms swinging wide like a windmill. But my fist landed first—the weight of a thousand days of bullying breaking his nose. Blood flowed over his mouth and down his chin, mixing with the tomato-sauce stain on his T-shirt. He cradled his nose and howled.
“Boys, break it up.” Two police officers rounded the stage truck. One made for Tony, the other corralled me and Sam.
I tried to shake the pain from my hand but it remained, a dull throbbing soreness like a toothache in my knuckles.
“You okay?” I asked Sam. And a smile crept across his bloodied and bruised face, framed by all the spinning colors of the festival behind him. The light made his sandy-blond hair—bangs fluttering in the breeze—look like flames licking at the night sky.
At Vincenzo’s café, the police officer instructed us to sit down in the front corner booth. His partner had taken Tony to the rectory. The café grew quiet. The patrons watched the cop remove his hat and approach Vincenzo at the counter. The two spoke in hushed voices. We sat on our knees and leaned over the seat backs, trying to hear what they were saying.
Vincenzo shook the officer’s hand and poured him a cup of coffee, then motioned for us to join them at the register.
“Tony was harassing David,” Sam blurted.
“Take it easy,” the cop said, sipping his coffee. “That boy did a number on you, huh?” Then he knelt down at eye level with Sam. His forearms all scratched up and bloodied. His lower lip bruised and swollen. “Tony jumped you, isn’t that right? And your friend here.” The cop thumbed at me. “Your friend stepped in to help.”
Vincenzo patted my cheek and said, “He tells me you got him good.”
“I did,” I said. Then I rubbed the bruised and swollen knuckles of my fist, like they were a prize I’d won from one of the game booths at the festival.
The officer finished his coffee and put his hat back on. “Ice that,” he said. Then he winked at me and left the café.
Patron voices rose in his wake, layers of conversations in Sicilian mixed with English words. Some of the men wanted to know what was wrong with Sam’s hair. They wondered whether the barber had been drunk when the boy got it cut. Other men whispered in conspiratorial tones that no bad tree bears good fruit.
Vincenzo chopped the air with his hands held together as if in prayer. “What do we got in here,” he said, “a bunch of old ladies?”
The idle chatter ended. The hum of benign conversation returned. Sam and I took turns in the bathroom, cleaning the dirt and blood from our faces and hands. My father arrived and waited at the bar for me to finish. He motioned with his hand. “Come here,” he said. He sized me up as if he’d never seen me before this evening. He studied my face, took my hands into his, and turned them over.
“What’re you doing?”
“Eh, looking,” he said. Then he held his own bigger hands next to mine and nodded yes, an answer to some question that only he had heard.
“Am I in trouble?”
“No.” He smiled, his face brightened, and it made him look younger. “Go. Enjoy the festival.”
At the concession tent for Italian ice, I ordered almond ice and Sam ordered lemon. Then we sat on the bench near the ticket booth. Inside, we saw the man who had exchanged the tickets for cigarettes at the café. He tipped his hat to us. I waved to him and then said, “Let’s go on a ride.” I jumped up from my seat. “We’ve got all these tickets to use.”
19
The unveiling of the statue of Saint Sebastian took place on Saturday afternoon. A line formed in front of the side altar and snaked all the way to the confession booths at the back of the church. At the entrance, Brother Calogero handed out safety pins from a collection basket. Zia Nella and I waited in line. When I was little, Vincenzo brought me here before the crowds formed. First in line, he’d say, and then he’d lift me up so I could reach the statue with the dollar bill he gave me. Oh, you’re so heavy, he’d say. Pretty soon I won’t be able to pick you up. Then I’d ask him, Will I be big like my daddy? And he’d say, Bigger.
“Zia,” I whispered. “Tell me about the Vassallos.”
Her walnut eyes grew wide, my question cracking open those two hardened shells. She pulled me into her blouse, smelling of almond paste and powdered sugar. “That family is gone,” she spoke low into my ear, a lie. “There are no more left.” She kissed my bruised knuckles before letting me go.
Father Salafia pulled the cord that opened the red curtain, revealing the plaster saint. It stood on a pedestal, arms pulled back around a white Roman column. The feathered ends of arrows, hand carved and painted green, stuck out of the statue’s chest and its left flank, thigh, and upper arm.
“Look,” Zia Nella said. She showed me my mother’s picture from the bulletin tucked in the handbag under her arm. It wasn’t the small, grainy headshot from previous years. This was the color photo my father had the night Halley’s Comet swung by Earth. It was larger, more like the way I remembered her. It brightened the page.
“That came out nice,” she whispered. “I found the picture in your father’s laundry basket, in one of his shirt pockets.” She handed me the bulletin. “Keep it.”
The line moved forward. Soon, it was our turn. Zia Nella rested her hands on my shoulders, steering me toward the statue. I pinned the five-dollar bill my father had given me to the saint’s red sash.
After Mass the next morning, Zia Nella and I sat at one of the sidewalk tables outside Vincenzo’s café. We ate slices of her almond cake. People congregating on the sidewalks spilled out onto Washington Street. My father and Ziu Frank sat inside at the bar, sipping espresso. Sam filled the refrigerated case with bottles of Orangina from the stockroom. This was the first time in years my father had come even this close to the festival with me.
“Here they come,” Vincenzo said. He propped open the door with a splintered wood wedge.
A fervent army of men, women, and children ran down Washington Street. They wore white shirts, white pants, and white socks, though some were barefoot. Red diagonal sashes crossed their chests from right shoulders to left waists. They held bouquets high above their heads while chanting, “E chiamamulu paisanu. Prima Diu e Sammastianu.” He is one of our own. First God, and then Saint Sebastian.
“Salvatore,” Zia Nella said. “Frank. Come out here.”
“You know how many times we’ve seen that,” my father called out from inside the café.
The runners stormed the church.
“What are they doing?” Sam asked. He sat down next to me. Nella cut him a slice of cake.
“Declaring their loyalty to God and the saint,” Vincenzo said. “They are saying, the saint is one of them, a paisanu. You know what that word means? It’s like the way you and David fought for each other. You understand? It’s the same thing.”
Sam nudged me and said, “Hey, paisanu.” Then he blew at his bangs. They floated up and came back down in front of his face.
I fake elbowed him in his side. He scrunched up his face in mock pain and threw himself off the plastic chair in slow motion. The chair kicked out from under his feet and fell on top of him.
Zia Nella scolded us for fooling around.
Vinc
enzo told her to let us be boys.
“You okay?” my father asked. He stood in the doorway.
I righted the chair and said, “We’re fine.”
Sam sat up, chewing the ends of a few strands of his hair. “I’m cool,” he said.
Across the street, men carried the statue of Saint Sebastian on a wooden pallet out of the church. And a mass of the faithful followed close behind them. “Be careful,” my father said.
The festival crowd thinned out by midafternoon, the last hours of the three-day feast. In our little enclave, my father was the first to leave. He didn’t want to lose the light of the day. There was work in the garden that needed his attention. “Don’t let Vincenzo keep you too late,” my father said. He marched up the street, hands clasped behind his back, head turned toward home. He rounded the corner, and I lost him behind a row of houses on Pearl Street. Everything he ever needed in life, he grew from working the soil. His plants, the peppers and tomatoes and greens, those were all the words and thoughts he wanted to tell me but could not.
Sometimes, when you no longer see a person, you begin to see them more clearly.
Soon, my zia and ziu said their goodbyes. She kissed my cheek and he pinched it. Her amaretto scent lingered in the air long after she was gone. Then Sam’s mother called the café looking for him, and he had to go home, too. I stood in the doorway. Vincenzo and a few scattered customers remained.
The man from the ticket booth came in and sat down at a table by himself. He took off his flat cap and held it in his hands in his lap. Vincenzo sat down beside him. They made small talk. Under the table, Vincenzo dropped two cigarette packs into the cap. In one quick motion, the man flipped the hat back onto his head. Then he fished in the breast pocket of his tweed blazer for tickets. He put them down on the table under the cover of his palm. Vincenzo slipped his hand over the tickets as the man stood up to go.
“David.” Vincenzo called me over to him. He slid his hand off the table and into his shirt pocket. “All set for tonight,” he said with a wink. “Our last spin on the Ferris wheel like always, eh?”
The sun glinted off the café window into my squinting eyes. My father worked the soil alone under the heat from that light. “Maybe I should go home,” I said, “see if my father needs anything. You wouldn’t mind, would you?”
“No,” Vincenzo said. “Go. Be with your papà.”
At home, I found the hose hooked up to the outside spigot and snaked across the lawn. A garden rake leaned against a wheelbarrow at the edge of the garden beds. My father stooped between tomato rows. He stabbed the soil near the root of a weed with his hand weeder. Then he pushed down on the handle and tore up the root.
“Dad,” I said. “Papà, you need help?”
He looked over at me, tossing the weed into the wheelbarrow. He picked up a hand rake in the dirt by his feet and gave it to me. I crouched in the row beside him. His thick, calloused hands loosened the roots of a dandelion that hadn’t bloomed. He pulled it out, shook off the soil, and dropped it into a brown paper bag. “We eat these,” he said.
I answered him by freeing a dandelion with my rake. Seeds from the white seed head sailed on a breeze. He lifted his head for a moment and watched them sail over the wire fence into the neighbor’s yard. I tossed the weed into the wheelbarrow. He turned to me with eyes tight like the spiral arms of two distant galaxies seen head on. He grunted his approval.
We worked together in the garden in silence until the work was done.
20
I didn’t see Tony in school the next day. Chris stopped me in the hall between classes and told me how Tony’s father had beaten him, whipped him with the buckle end of his belt for picking a fight with me at the festival. Chris saw it all, standing in the flower bed outside their open kitchen window. Tony’s mother got between Rocco and her son. She held her arms up in the air and pleaded with her husband that the boy had taken about as much as a boy his age could take. Rocco slapped her. She fell back against flat-paneled plywood cabinets. Then he chased Tony out of the house, and Tony tripped on the back-porch stairs and broke his left arm in the fall.
“It’s your fault,” Chris said. His backpack, dangling at the end of his right arm, swayed back and forth like a criminal on the gallows. “It’s true, what they say about you. You’re bad luck.”
“I guess you better stay away from me then.”
He stepped back. “It was all Tony,” he said. “You know that, right? I have no beef with you. We’re cool.” He handed me a slip of paper.
“Love notes,” I said. “From you, or Tony?” I crumpled it up without reading it and tossed it back at Chris.
That evening, Tony showed up for our final Catechism class. He had a swollen, crooked nose, purple bruises on his face, and his broken arm in a fresh plaster long arm cast. He sat alone in the last row of bingo tables at the far end of the church basement. Chris sat in the front. Several minutes before class ended at seven o’clock, Father Salafia joined us. He strode to the front of the room in his black suit and clerical collar, Buddy Holly glasses, and a comb-over that wasn’t fooling anyone. He cleaned his glasses with a white handkerchief, held them up to the fluorescent lights for inspection, and set them back on his nose, marbled with broken capillaries. Then he launched into a meandering speech on the importance of the sacrament of confirmation in our lives and in our relationship with God. He closed with a reminder about confirmation rehearsal the following week. Then he dismissed everyone except Tony and me.
“Why can’t I go?” I asked.
Father Salafia took hold of my upper arm, pulling me out of my seat. He walked me to Tony’s table and sat me down across from him. Then the priest tilted the nearest folding chair on its back legs, dragging it to the head of the table. He sank into the padded seat with a sigh.
“Boys,” Father Salafia said. His breath smelled like onions and coffee. He lectured us about how we had disappointed him. How we’d disappointed the Lord, our families, and the church. How we’d let down our confirmation sponsors—our spiritual guides. Then he leaned back in his chair, patted his potbelly, and asked us if there was something we wanted to say to each other.
Tony scratched under his cast with the eraser end of a pencil and said, “This isn’t over.”
“Looks over to me,” I said. “May I be excused now?”
Father Salafia threw up his hands. “You may go,” he said. “I will continue this conversation with both of your fathers and your sponsors.”
I bolted from the church basement and crossed the street to Vincenzo’s café.
“What’s chasing you?” Vincenzo said. He looked out the window and pursed his lips when he saw Tony leaving the church. “Tell you what,” Vincenzo said with a hand on my shoulder. “What do you say we close early and make dinner? We’ll give your zia a rest tonight.”
We dragged the sidewalk tables and chairs inside the café, and then went out again. Vincenzo locked the door. He pulled down the red security grille and fastened it with a padlock. We walked home in the warm evening light. He asked me about school. I told him Sam had invited me to spend the coming weekend at his father’s house by the water in Stony Creek and how I didn’t think my father would let me go.
“I’ll see what I can do to maybe steer your papà in the right direction,” Vincenzo said. He mussed my spiky hair and then left his hand on my shoulder, guiding me home.
At the card table in the kitchen, I finished my homework. Vincenzo cooked rigatoni with rapini and sausage in spicy tomato sauce. He looked silly wearing Zia Nella’s pink floral-print apron, and he knew it and he didn’t care. He did a little dance while adding basil leaves to the saucepan and sang “O Sole Mio” into his wooden spoon. He made the house feel light, made me feel light, the way a dancer pirouetting on stage made an audience forget gravity.
“Is it true,” I asked, “what Rocco said about us? That we’re cursed.”
“Don’t ever say that.” Vincenzo spun from the stove, wagging the spoon at m
e as he whirled. Sauce splattered the table edge. “Don’t even think it.”
I flinched away from him. You could forget gravity, but gravity wouldn’t forget you. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He looked at the spoon as if just realizing it was in his hand, then at the speckles of strained tomatoes on the table. He let out a sigh, a balloon deflating. “Superstition,” he said. “Don’t give this idea power over you. It does not deserve your belief.” Then he wiped the tabletop clean.
When my father’s car pulled into the driveway, I cleared my schoolbooks and papers from the table and set out the plates. Vincenzo dished out the servings. My father clomped in through the cellar, hefting the weight of a fat jug of wine, red like old schoolhouse bricks. He turned with the bottle in his hands, as if to show us a newborn in his arms, so we could see my name on the strip of masking tape. “Want to try it?” he asked me.
Vincenzo raised his eyebrows, nodding at the gallon glass jug. The strip of tape had yellowed and dulled with time. But there was a fire in my father’s perfect curling letters, a fire that time could not dull or put out.
“Okay,” I said.
My father set it down on the counter. He removed the cork. “Let it breathe,” he said. He washed the factory from his hands at the kitchen sink. Then he poured two fingers of wine into a half-pint jam jar for me, and filled mason jars for himself and Vincenzo. We stood there, the three of us, and I wasn’t that seedling anymore.
Sometimes my father told me how much he cared with just his body. I couldn’t see this before. I wasn’t looking. His body gave voice to all the things left unspoken between us. You could read it in the worming age lines on his face and in his knotted muscles, in the way they relaxed and went slack. The prose of tight-lipped men.
