How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  “Oh, Nella.” I shook my head no. “Not you,” I said. “You don’t need to do this.” I crossed the hall and stood beside her, placed my hand over hers on the handle of the hammer, eased it from her grip.

  “I made a promise to Don Salafia,” Salvatore said.

  “And where is the great Don Salafia now?” Nella said. “The priest, he cannot protect us. Open your eyes.”

  “Your sister’s right,” I said. I set the hammer down on the little table by the door. “This cannot go unanswered.”

  “I started this,” Salvatore said. He tried his best to sound strong and sure, but I heard the uncertainty in the tenor of his voice. I saw it in the forward pitch of his eyebrows. He was losing a battle within himself.

  “Let me do this for you both,” I said. But I did not say what I should have: that the fault was mine as much as anyone’s. My journal had provided the ammunition that broke Salvatore and Rocco apart, that split a family and set a village against them. In the bunker, outnumbered more than two to one, I had told Krause that I did not want to die for nothing. But now, for these two, I would do anything.

  Salvatore shrugged me off. “I brought this on our family. I should be the one to finish it.”

  “Turiddu,” Nella said. Her voice almost pleading, but whether for him to go or stay I could not tell. I don’t think even she knew.

  Salvatore swept Nella’s hair away from her forehead and planted a kiss there. “Lock the door behind me and go to bed.” Then he walked out into the hall and hurried down the stairs.

  “Enzo,” Nella said. She grabbed my wrist as I followed her brother out the door, her fingernails digging into my skin. “Don’t show that bastard mercy. Do it right this time. And bring my Turiddu back to me.”

  24

  Rocco rented a room on the top floor of an old house on Bridge Street under the Arrigoni Bridge. We followed the train tracks through weeds and rusting freight cars, out by the old cemetery and Hartford Avenue, over where Portland Street turned into Bridge Street, and where concrete columns rose up to meet the steel of the Arrigoni.

  The house stood dark except for a lighted window in the corner of the top floor. On the porch, Salvatore raised a fist to pound the front door, but I pulled him back. I rolled up my shirtsleeves, knelt, and inserted a hairpin into the lock. Pushing the pin down, I jiggled it back and forth until the tumbler moved. Then I bent the pin into a tension bar and pulled it to the right. The lock clicked.

  “You learn that in the war?” Salvatore asked me.

  “After,” I said. Then I motioned for him to be quiet, and we slipped inside.

  A black phone sat on a table by the wall opposite the staircase. The numbers inside the finger holes had worn off. I took my knife from my back pocket, opened the blade.

  Salvatore whispered, “What are you doing?”

  I cut the wire to the wall jack. Then we snuck up the three flights of stairs.

  The crack under the old wooden door at the end of the hall glowed. We checked the other two rooms: a toilet and a furnished, empty bedroom. Then I pressed my ear to Rocco’s door, heard him praying. He was too stupid to think we would come for him here, too stupid or too devoted in the power of his saint’s protection.

  Salvatore waited a step behind me. There was something in the way he stood-one leg forward, chest out, and fists clenched at his sides-something in the deathlike pallor of his face lit from below. I saw in him the ghost of the boy I knew from Melilli. Go home, I wanted to tell him. Go home to your sister, be like your saint. You don’t have to do this. I could give this to you. I owe this to you. But Salvatore nodded his chin toward the door. There was no going back.

  Inside, Rocco bolted upright from kneeling at his bed and smiled-he had wanted us to follow him. Salvatore rushed at him like a bull to a matador. In one graceful move, Rocco stepped aside and knocked the wind out of his opponent with a punch to the abdomen. Salvatore doubled over, hands on his knees.

  I picked up a wooden chair by the window and struck Rocco over the back with it. He hit the floor with a thud. Then I shut the door behind us and locked it.

  “What did I tell you?” I said. “You remember?”

  Rocco pushed himself up with his arms and shook his head like a dog shaking off water.

  “You came to my home,” Salvatore said. “My sister is hurt because of you.” He grabbed him by his armpits and pulled him to his feet. “Face me like a man,” he said. “This is what you wanted.”

  “I didn’t hurt her,” he said. “You did.” His solid left hook sliced open a cut on Salvatore’s brow. Then he went for an uppercut, but Salvatore ducked and landed a blow of his own. They danced around the room, trading insults and throwing jabs with counterpunches.

  Rocco taunted Salvatore, observing his wide, even stance, how he charged, what side he favored. But Salvatore was no longer the bull in this fight, and Rocco, he was no bullfighter. This time, when Rocco stepped aside, Salvatore stepped with him and barreled him into the wall. The plaster cracked. Rocco covered his face with his arms while Salvatore kneed him in the chest and drove them both crashing to the floor.

  Salvatore sat atop Rocco, a leg on either side of him, and pummeled his face.

  A man pounded at the door. “What’s going on in there?”

  Salvatore pressed his hands over Rocco’s mouth.

  “Mi scusi, Signore,” I said through the door. “My friend, he is drunk. I helped him home and tried to put him to bed, but he fell taking off his shoes.” Then I slipped several ten-dollar bills under the door. “For your trouble,” I said. “Buona notte.”

  When I heard the man walk away, I turned and saw that Rocco’s face was bruised and swollen. His left eye was swollen shut and the other darted around in its purple socket. He squirmed under Salvatore’s weight. His arms were splayed out, fingers scratching at the floorboards, feeling under the bed frame. Then his hand came up fast with a knife in his grip.

  Salvatore elbowed Rocco’s wrist. The blade clattered to the floor. He kicked it away as he stood up. “Sceccu,” he said.

  I bent the little finger of Rocco’s left hand backward until I heard the snap of the joint forced apart.

  “Sammastianu,” he cried.

  “Who do you think sent us?” I whispered into his ear. Then I went further until the bone cracked and Rocco howled in pain.

  “Vincenzo, my God, that’s enough,” Salvatore said.

  I cut a strip of cloth from the bedsheet with my knife. “You don’t have to stay,” I said. “Not for this. There is no shame in you leaving now. We won’t speak of it again.”

  Rocco spat blood on the floor at our feet. “Still a child,” he said. “Poor Turiddu plays with matches and gets scared when there is a fire. Go, run and hide behind your sister’s skirt. Let a man clean up your mess.”

  “You see,” I said. “He is like an animal. Next time we might not be so lucky. Next time we could lose Nella. I could lose you both.”

  Salvatore knelt beside me, his mouth set in a grim line. “I’ll finish it,” he said. He tied a large knot in the middle of the strip, shoved it into Rocco’s mouth, and pulled the cloth tight between his teeth and around his head, tying it off in the back. “We are no longer children,” Salvatore said. “This is a serious business, what you have done, so now we talk serious.” Then he broke the ring finger on Rocco’s right hand.

  Rocco gnashed his teeth around the knotted gag. He let out a low moan. He looked up at us with his one good eye, wet with pain and anger.

  “Don’t test me,” Salvatore said. “Come near my sister or my home again-” He broke another of Rocco’s fingers. “I’ll kill you. Understand?”

  Rocco nodded yes. But he was like that young German. He would betray us. Already, he fixed his gaze on a meteor shower out the window. It flared over the Connecticut River-a streak of fiery lights-and Rocco, I imagined he took it as a sign from his saint.

  “I don’t think you do,” I said. “Not yet.” Then we dragged him by his arms
to the window.

  He squirmed and thrashed, kicking out his legs.

  We backed him up against the sill, and Salvatore trapped him there with the force of his body. “This is your language,” I said. “This is how you learn.” Then I slammed his fingers in the window.

  A spiderweb of capillaries bloodied the yolk of his eye. The eyeball bulged and watered. His head lolled sideways with a bulging blue vein in the middle of his forehead and a line of snot swinging from his nose.

  When we released him, he hid his crushed fingers under his armpits and rocked back and forth. I loosened the gag, and through his misshapen mouth Rocco uttered, “Raphael, do you forgive me now?”

  “You don’t get to ever speak my father’s name,” Salvatore said.

  “I’m sorry,” Rocco said. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. Please. I never meant to do it.”

  The fight had gone out of him. The inflamed feelings-the dead weight that is the settling of old scores-had finally left Rocco.

  “You had an accident at the machine shop,” I said. “The shop out on Newfield Street. That’s where you work, isn’t it?” Then I leaned into his ear and whispered, “The lights in the sky, they were your saint, sending me for vengeance.”

  Outside, we lingered in the backfill beneath the bridge. Rocco’s sobs thrummed in my ears. Salvatore fell back against the concrete column and slid down its rough and pockmarked surface. He squatted in weeds, his arms flopping limp over the tops of his knees. I knew he didn’t mean for this to happen, that he wished he could fix things. If ever a son needed his mother, he needed her then. Casa mia, matri mia. She held the family together. She was its heart. Only she heard the troubles of the mute, as the old saying went.

  The sky loomed over the river-the impermanent stars and moon set against all that blackness. In my dreams about the war, I dreamed of a boy huddled in that void, trapped in the moment of his own unmaking.

  Bloodshed swelled me up like an intoxicating breath of cleansing sea air. There was no sense in denying nature. My wine was violence. It always had been, long before I trained and marched in formation in quickstep parades of boy Blackshirts. And long after I became Balilla, an obedient boy, a strong young Italian. A Fascist one. A delinquent in a uniform. The vicious dog trained to follow orders was still a vicious dog.

  An ambulance wailed in the night. The low, rumbling hum of a car passed overhead. Rocco’s window went dark. I toed the dirt with my boot and sent gravel scattering into the black. The dark had settled dense and thick as fog around me. And I could not shut it out.

  25

  “I heard a siren,” Nella said. She sat in the dark by the broken window, looking out into the night.

  “It’s finished,” I said and locked the door behind us. “We took care of it.”

  “Not like before?” She watched the street below as if expecting Rocco to return.

  “No,” I said. “Not like before.”

  Nella turned away from the window. “Turiddu, you’re hurt.” Her brother winced as she touched the cut on his brow. “Let me clean that.”

  He pulled his head away. “It’s nothing,” he said. He took her hands into his hands and said, “We won’t speak of this again.”

  She turned his hands over-the knuckles scraped raw-and hid his bruised fingers in her closed fists. “No,” she said. “We won’t speak of it.” Then she led him to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and left me standing in the slanting beam of a streetlight through the broken window.

  Each night, the beam flickered and dimmed in the blue before sunrise. Each day, I worked the Route 9 overpass with Salvatore and Frank. We broke for lunch together and in the evening sat down for dinner at the apartment with Nella. We pretended that night never happened. We had our quiet life. What we had done-the price we had paid for it-it was the only thing that could be done. And for a time, the world agreed with us. But it wore on Salvatore. Mornings before work, he began tending seedlings in long plastic trays set on the kitchen counter by the window. Evenings he transplanted the young plants into larger ceramic planters set in front of the big living room windows. In our apartment, he grew a forest of hot and sweet peppers, and Roma tomatoes. He never stopped long enough to look at his hands. He always stayed busy.

  Nella kept the red and raised scars on her arm hidden with long sleeves or a shawl draped over her shoulders, just another secret. That year, she graduated from Saint Sebastian School. She wrote to Don Giovanni in Syracuse to thank him and tell him that she would be attending the public high school in the fall. And in four years, in 1956, at nineteen, she married Frank Lombardo.

  After the ceremony, Salvatore and I sat at one of the bingo tables lined up in the church’s basement hall. We drank red wine and ate pastel-colored Jordan almonds from little white mesh bags. For that night, the wariness lifted from Nella’s face, and she carried herself as if she’d lived her whole life here, in this little American town where bombs and wars were something that happened to other people. She and Frank chatted with their guests, and I could hear Nella’s laughter across the room. It was everything Salvatore had wanted for his sister, for himself.

  A man with an organetto walked on stage, followed by a mandolin player. They greeted the audience and asked them to leave the tables for the dance floor. Then they played and we clapped out a beat and watched as the older couples locked elbows and danced in circles and the younger men whirled their dates around the floor, and the girls gathered the corners of their dresses and swung them left to right. I wondered about Maria, then, if her wedding had been this full of hope and promise. I hoped it had.

  Salvatore and I hung back. The dancers moved and swayed like an ocean tide. Fulvia-a widow in her early thirties-stood from an empty table, dangling her high heels by their straps from one long finger. She danced. And the way her feet touched the floor, the curve of her arches, the hem of her black dress brushing against the chiseled beauty of her ankles, she reminded me of the streets of Rome, how they narrowed and curled around blue-shuttered buildings of the finest stone and around fragments of age-old temples and statues.

  I nudged Salvatore’s shoulder.

  He made that disapproving face of his, the one where it looked like he’d bitten into a bitter orange peel. “Go if you want,” he said.

  I joined the circle that formed around Nella and Frank, who were dancing, and we held each other’s hands above our heads, moving one way and then the other, Fulvia’s long braided hair swinging against her back as the tarantella got faster.

  The pain in my knee, it burned like a stoked campfire shooting sparks. I hobbled to the nearest table and sat down, masking the ache with more wine.

  “You’re a good dancer,” Fulvia said. “It’s a shame about your injury.”

  “This,” I said. I waved my hand as if swatting a fly. “This is nothing. You Italian Americans, you’re soft like balls of dough rising on the counter.”

  “Is that what you think?” she said. “What if I told you that I’m not looking for a husband? What would you think about that?”

  “Perfetto,” I said. “I am not looking for a wife.”

  A mop and bucket bumped against the edge of my chair. “Scusi,” Rocco said behind me. I stood up and pushed in my chair. Then he saw me and quickly looked at his shoes. His awkward grip on the mop handle slipped and the wood clattered to the floor.

  “Vincenzo,” Salvatore called out from two table rows over. “You all right?” He approached us.

  Rocco fumbled with the handle in his damaged fingers, cursing under his breath. He flinched when Fulvia touched his back.

  “You poor man,” she said. She knelt down and helped him.

  He leaned the handle against his shoulder and mumbled his thanks. Then he kept his head down and pushed the mop and bucket across the room. He hunched over a child’s spilled soda while the altar boys cleared the empty plates and dishes from the long tables and refilled the ceramic rooster pitchers with wine.

  I gripped Salvatore’s arm. “H
e can’t hurt her now,” I said. “Look at him, a lame dog on the priest’s leash.”

  Salvatore’s jaw muscles clenched and he ground his teeth together. “A lame dog still bites,” he said.

  Fulvia finished my wine. “I don’t want to know,” she said before returning to the dance floor.

  After the wedding, Frank moved into the Ferry Street apartment, where we all lived for a number of years before he and Nella bought the house on Pearl Street. They had postponed their honeymoon to save for the down payment. And then, they just never got around to taking one.

  By 1964, I’d opened my café. Soon after, I got in touch with my old employers from Naples. They arranged a little job for me with their friends in the tri-state area. In two weeks, a man started making regular stops at my café late at night. The trunk of his car was full of bootleg cigarettes-American and sometimes even Italian brands if he could get them. I sold the cigarettes out of the storeroom in back, always selling out the Italian packs first. Sometimes I went down south with the man and drove a truckload of cigarettes back to Connecticut. That’s when I made real money. Soon I had saved enough to buy the building and move into the apartment upstairs. Finally, I had my little piece of Rome. I had my customers, the rhythms of their lives, old men passing the time, children on their way home from school, and families coming in after church services. Some evenings when Fulvia stopped by, I’d cook us dinner and brew espresso afterward, and we’d laugh about things that were not funny.

  26

  Salvatore had a difficult time with the Sicilian girls in town. The ones he liked whispered about him behind their hands. The ones he didn’t approached him because of the stories the others whispered. The American girls turned up their noses at his calloused hands and broken English. I worried he might end up a priest.

  And then he met Eileen.

  A July night in 1972, he burst into the café to tell me about her. I had made fresh espresso and wiped down the tables, preparing for the after-dinner rush.