Free The End by Salvatore Scibona Page B

The people made their way on foot, murmuring or dumb.
    The children were gasping. He was wrong. It wasn’t that they’d been cheated. They were frightened.
    “Now, listen, my little ones,” he began, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.
    It was the quiet that frightened them, he knew this emphatically, and he wanted to reassure them but didn’t know how he could do this, could not invent a single lighthearted word to distract them. If only he could put together a few words that could help them.
    He made one backward step on the tacky tar of the roof. Then paused. Not one of them so much as glanced in his direction. The children had forgotten he was there.

4
    R occo crossed into the Pennsylvania at one a.m. and spent the night in his car in a wayside. Half a dozen times he awoke as cargo trains screeched across the bridge overhead.
    When the sun rose, his arm was wrapped around the gearshift and was numb, his undershirt was pasted to his back with sweat, and his ribs were squeezing his kidneys. His glasses had migrated to the backseat in the night. He shook out his dead arm. Having located at last his cigarettes under the brake pedal, he walked into the slag-littered field under the railroad bridge and pissed and smoked a cigarette and blew his nose. Between the piles of the bridge, a stream dribbled, and on its surface many-colored swirls of oil glinted in the sunlight. He got to his knees on the sandy bank to say his rosary. Afterward, he asked the Lord to grant him safe passage to the New Jersey and to restore to Loveypants her long-lost sense of reason and decency. Again, overhead, a train passed, but in the other direction. He climbed the bluff toward the highway and drove into the next town for breakfast.
    All he asked the lady to bring him was coffee and toast. You might have thought toast was a simple enough dish, but you’d have been mistaken. He was made to pay fifteen cents for two pale squares of baize soaked in margarine. He washed his hands and face in the café lavatory. He looked like hell. Warm water and soap were evidently too much to ask. He’d heard of a pretty meager level of civilization in the state of Pennsylvania, and so far he wasn’t disappointed.
    He found a barbershop down the block from the miserable café and went inside. (How reassuring that wherever you went in the wide world a barbershop smelled of talc and ethyl alcohol.) He sat on the bench, awaiting his time, turning the pages of a lawn and garden magazine. The barber and the client in the chair were discussing white meat versus dark meat, it sounded like. Rocco wasn’t paying attention because it wasn’t his business.
    When the barber tucked the collar of tissue paper around Rocco’s neck and asked what he could do for Rocco this morning, Rocco said he wanted a trim and a shave.
    “Speak up.”
    “Just a trim all around the sides, the ears especially, and a shave, thank you,” he expounded.
    “Just a trim and an alla-something and a something else,” said the barber.
    He didn’t mind repeating himself. There was an autographed photo taped to the wall of Rogers Hornsby with the barber as a younger man.
    At this moment, from Leningrad to Buenos Aires, the barber was tucking the tissue paper around the client’s neck, throwing the oilcloth shroud over the clothes, and fastening it at the shoulder. All over the world—Ohio, the Pennsylvania, irregardless—this unique mode of conversation was taking place in which the barber and the client addressed not the face of the other, but the face of the other in the mirror opposite. If the client was a stranger, the barber, by rights, adopted a superior tone. But Rocco’s sense today of being right with his God, of having embarked on an enterprise that aimed to make straight what spite and cowardice had conspired to make crooked, a mystic hopefulness this morning, inspired a charity in him that exposed petty complaints—his meager breakfast, a spleeny barber—as petty