Free The End by Salvatore Scibona Page A

news, this stick, passing up the procession into the pack of barefooted, black-clad women, where it splintered and spread radially through the procession and the wider crowd.
    It struck him that the original tuba player had seen what was taking place and then had kept on playing. The man was flattered. But it struck him also that the barefooted women couldn’t see through the band to see what he saw. It struck him that the news worming its way through their midst was seventh-hand, eighth-hand, ninth-hand, tenth-hand.
    As though he stood outside of time with the children on the bakery roof and saw, all at once, the past (at Twenty-second Street, where the Negroes were dancing); the present (right beneath him at Twenty-sixth, where the men in the band were telling one another what they had seen); and the distant future (farther up the avenue, where no one could be trusted and the original moment was lost).
    He saw it progress to the Virgin, and he saw the Virgin stop and the rest of the procession stop. And the clergy conferring in the distance. And the altar boys milling, confused. Then another message appeared to pass back down the hill, this time by means of yelling with the hands cupping the mouth. Everybody having stopped. And finally the music stopped. Only by now there was no dancing, either. The Negroes had vanished.
    And the violinists tucking their bows under their arms, wiping their foreheads with their neck towels.
    The parade then did an unprecedented thing. It lurched backward down the hill. The old ladies sat on the curb and reshod themselves and got up and followed the musicians back into the church. And the Virgin was carried into the church as well, none too slowly. And the men on the roof of the movie theater were packing the fireworks, unexploded, back into the crates and handing the crates down a ladder and into a truck in the alley.
    Wait, wait. The feast was over. Something had happened and the feast was called off. How did they all know it was called off? What had happened? Had everybody seen it but him?
    The kids on Rocco’s roof were crying because, he supposed, no fireworks. The generators in the ball field coughed and fell silent. The lights on the carnival rides disappeared. There was a frenzied commotion at the streetcar stop way down on Sixteenth Street. To his right, on Twenty-sixth, he saw that woman Testaquadra drag two children by their hair into a house and throw the door shut behind her.
    As though time were moving in reverse. The procession was supposed to go to the top of the hill, veer toward the cemetery, circle back all the way down the hill by way of Chagrin to Eighteenth Street, and return uphill toward the church. Instead, it moved from one moment (Thirtieth Street) backward in time down the hill on Eleventh, backward to the church again, hurriedly, in disarray.
    No, no. Wait. Something had happened, and nobody had seen it but him—and the children. There were some Negroes; they heard music and saw a band; they started to dance. But the men up front, the priests and the sweepers and the men carrying the platform, and all the many thousands in the crowd who did not see what Rocco saw must have heard a thousand differently contorted versions of what had happened—like, Some Negroes are smoking dope in the parade; Some sacrilegious niggers have mistaken the holy procession for a roadhouse. And the only part that all the versions had in common was the end—off with the lights, everybody get out, everybody go home.
    The girls were crying on the roof, and the boy stood apart from them at a corner looking down at the street and looking back at them in spasms, and Rocco could see the boy was crying, too—the welched-on promise of a fireworks display was to them the height of betrayal. The Eleventh Avenue bled people into all its tributary streets. This terrible quiet everywhere, even the smoke having cleared out, the avenue open enough that cars might pass, only no cars were passing.