The Wild Comet Infantino

by Michael J. Vowles

Larry shifts his weight to the other foot, wonders whether it’s appropriate to turn up to this thing in fatigues. Brown sedan—no sign of it. The Greyhound station is on a rise and he has a good view of downtown at the base of the valley, the steel mills and leafless trees on the other side. White smoke disappears into a dull, off-white sky. It’s a view of everything that he hasn’t seen before. He imagines it’s most people’s first view of the place, those folks that aren’t from here.

The brown sedan—he senses it, it feels, before he sees it. His sister’s arm dangling out the window, cigarette between her fingers like she could take it or leave it. By the time Rosalie parks the car, Larry’s stopped shifting his weight from foot to foot. When she gets out, and she sees him for the first time in—how long has it been, exactly?—he’s the picture of stillness. He finds, too, that his jaw is locked into a hard shape, keeping his lips from forming any kind of expression.

He doesn’t flinch when she looks at him, and she doesn’t flinch when he looks back.

“You look different—you’ve filled out,” Rosalie says, blowing smoke.

“Filled out how?”

“In a good way, I mean,” she says, and she crushes the cigarette stub under the toe of her shoe. “You was always so skinny growing up.”

Larry wants to smile at her, but he doesn’t. Rosalie puts her hands on her hips and looks him up and down.

“Mom will be pleased. Look at you.”

A beat of silence passes that neither of them feel the need to fill. A plastic wrapper, or a loose ticket, or something else, scratches along the asphalt behind him. One of the buses hisses to a stop; farther out a jackhammer is pulling up concrete in a street somewhere down the rise. The wind is pulling her hair across her face, threatening to bring her carefully ironed curls undone. But she doesn’t do anything. Just stands there.

He’s not sure how long they’ve been looking at each other, but he can feel the whole world moving around them, and them still, as though the axis on which everything turns. Rosalie’s face is increasingly hard to interpret. The right side seems to drop, almost imperceptibly, and Larry knows the sight of him is something she’s found herself unequipped to deal with.

Then she steps forward. Larry allows himself to be hugged. Her forehead against his shoulder, face angled away. Auburn curls bobbing below his chin. Larry wraps his arms around her and they stay like that for a moment, but not too long.

In the car, she asks him if he wants to stop at her house first. To take a leak, presumably. Or maybe she thinks he wants to change clothes.

“You know, to drop your things, or whatever,” she says.

“Don’t got nothing,” Larry says. “I’m going back tonight, aren’t I?”

“Are you?” Rosalie shoots him a glance.

“I got a ticket.”

“Why would you assume you’re not staying the night?”

Larry doesn’t say anything.

“This is your home,” Rosalie says, barely audible but somehow more direct. They lapse into silence and Larry stares out the window. There’s still a little snow tucked into the sidewalk, rained away the preceding nights into a gray sludge. A few blocks down the hill and Larry starts to remember things. A gas station with a slush machine inside—they’d only ever gone there if they were taking the interstate south. An alleyway between fenced backyards, strewn with discarded cardboard, a riderless bicycle propped against a telephone pole. He ran down there once; he can’t remember why. A small park with a baseball diamond; no one ever seemed to play there and no one is playing there now.

Rosalie avoids downtown, takes them straight across the truss bridge where things become overwhelmingly familiar. This side of town, he realizes now, he will never have to rediscover. The streets trap all of history in the present, fixing it unchanging and unyielding before him. The streets are something he can’t wash from his body. Larry drags his gaze back inside the car, takes in his sister.

“Since when you smoke?”

“Since whenever, I don’t know.”

“After I left.”

“Maybe. You’ve been gone a long time.”

Rosalie parks at the cemetery and they sit in silence for a moment. She seems afraid, suddenly, to look at him. Her hands are still gripping the wheel.

“Thank you,” she says then. “For coming today.”

Larry swallows a lump in his throat, staring out at the wrought iron gates. He waits for Rosalie to get out and follows her. The Catholic cemetery, St. Mary’s, is on the north side of town, almost directly opposite the Greyhound station. Larry looks back but he can’t make it out in the distance. He can see a lot though. The small city is a lot more familiar from this angle. This is the view of downtown, the river, as he remembers it. The redbrick parking garage and the adjacent redbrick library, the courthouse and the clock tower poking out behind them. The big hotel by the interstate. Cheaper houses and wider streets here on the industrial side of town. The naked trees leading down to the railroad tracks and the synagogue and the Cedar Park gazebo and everything exactly as it’s always been.

Below them, where the land is more even by the river, chain-link fencing borders the two steel mills. Larry looks down at the white smoke from the blast furnaces and blows an imitative plume of misty condensation.

“You cold?” his sister asks.

“I’m good.”

He turns back and they continue into the cemetery. St. Mary’s, built as it is into the north bluffs, is on a slant, with the various footpaths giving it a terraced look when viewed from afar. Nice little place, Larry thinks. He has always thought so, despite everything.

Even though he hasn’t been back since that day, he remembers where Carmine Jr’s stone is. Right in the back, where the trees open up at the corner of St. Mary’s to overlook the nearer of the city’s two plants. Close enough you can map out the journey from the coke ovens to the blast furnaces, the pig iron from there to the plant to the rolling mill beyond. Close enough you can hear the dull echoes climbing up the hillside.

Everyone else is already there when they arrive. They all stop talking and turn to look at him and he’s glad now that he wore the fatigues. A sign that he belongs to something else now. Don’t worry about me, he thinks; I’ve found a place for myself somewhere. Somewhere that’s not here. Carmine Sr. and Sylvia seem to have their feet rooted to the ground, but he can see the anticipation of movement in their limbs. The uncertainty. Sylvia’s mouth hanging agape. Carmine Sr. looking a lot older than Larry had expected. There was a time when both of them would have scooped him up in their arms, pressed their lips to his cheek on reflex.

The rest of the family is there too, but Larry doesn’t look at them.

“It’s good to see you,” Carmine Sr. says.

“You look good, Larry,” Sylvia says with a weak smile.

They’re unsure whether he wants to be hugged. Larry decides to leave them unsure, does his best to look like it’s not hard for him to be there. Manages a nod. A mumble that’s not really a hello. He can feel Rosalie watching them, and the others too. It’s hot, all of a sudden, in his chest. He can’t keep standing here like this, so Larry turns toward the gravestone, steps forward to get a better look.

Carmine Infantino

1980-1994

Our shining star

Forever loved

“The lilies—they’re beautiful, Ma,” Rosalie says behind him. Kisses are exchanged.

“Aren’t they just?” Sylvia’s voice quavers, which increases the tension Larry feels beneath his ribs. Just breathe. Look at the stone and nothing else. “We thought, as soon as we saw them, they’re perfect…”

Hear nothing else. Muffled acoustics from the blast furnace. The reverberant clangs dissipate—

cold up here, much colder below

                                                            in the earth

packed away with his hopes                                    (and all their hopes too)

our shining star

“They are perfect, Syl—”

block it out you can do it you’ve been doing it for years now, for years

                  four years?

longer than that

                                  longer than they think

                                                                                longer than you knew

fix on the stone—no; the ground in front of it

pale sun-starved tufts of grass

                                                                                                                  and only the bones of him left now, probably

only that

only

fourteen-year-old bones

whiter than the lilies, colder than the earth

their shining star

“What do you think—aren’t they nice, Lah?” Rosalie says. Her hand on his shoulder almost makes him jump. Probably only she noticed.

“Yeah,” he manages, still looking down at the ground. “Real nice.”

It’s not much, but it seems to get the others to relax a little bit. They all gather closer, all facing the gravestone now, and Larry feels himself relax too. It seems like it’s okay for no one to say anything, and they do that for a while.

Larry chances a look at Rosalie, who he finds already looking at him. She smiles, looks away.

“It’s really flown by, huh?” someone says.

“Feels like yesterday.”

“Ten years,” Sylvia mutters. A beat. She’s crying quietly. “God, how can it be ten years already?”

“Feels like nothing has really happened since. Like it’s a blur, or something,” Rosalie says.

“Ten years,” Sylvia says again.

“God bless…”

“My namesake,” Carmine Sr. says in a low voice that almost catches in his throat. They lapse back into silence again.

Ten years and a day ago, Larry followed Rosalie into the woods. A bunch of them sitting around a little fire. Carmine’s face. He remembers one of them saying, “Hey, it’s your kid brother,” exaggerating the last word.

“He ain’t my brother.”

Carmine’s face like cold marble, eyeing him across the fire all night. Long and angular and princelike. Eyes brighter than the flames.

“You shouldn’t be drinking,” Rosalie had told Carmine.

“You gonna rat me out?”

Every year as long as Larry could remember, they went up there. But that year felt different. Carmine. Only in that last year had he started being aggressive. And as much as it stung, Larry never questioned it. You didn’t question Carmine about anything. Everybody knew that. To question him was to question God.

“Come on, it’s late and it’s freezing.”

“Everyone got their wishes?” Rosalie called out.

The familiar laughing and excitement. One by one, they removed the little slips of paper from their pockets. But even then, Larry remembers, it felt different to all the other years. If Carmine wasn’t laughing, you were afraid to laugh too much. He can’t remember much of what they talked about. Just Carmine’s chiseled face and his drinking and his hate.

He remembers how they stood in a circle around the old well, just as they always had. Rosalie going first; the wish folded into an airplane and disappearing quickly and decisively into the darkness. In retrospect, Larry imagines that she wished that everything would stop changing and go back to the way it always had been. Next went the cousins. Papers folded only once, the wishes floating steadily downward, corners scratching against the damp stone on the way.

Carmine staring at him.

“So what did you write down, punk?”

How Larry had froze.

“Come on, you know you can’t ask him that,” Rosalie had said. “If he tells you, then it won’t come true.”

“Fuck that. You tell me now, you hear?”

It was—and still is, Larry feels—the hardest thing he’s had to do; disobeying Carmine. Leaving home was easier. Hell, a tour in Afghanistan had been easier. His hand opened above the well and the scrunched-up wish descended fast, damning Carmine Jr. Infantino forever.

“You fuck!”

“Come on, it’s late. Let’s head back before Mom loses it like she did last year…”

“Come on, Carmine…”

Larry blinks. They’re all looking at him. Rosalie gives his arm an encouraging squeeze and he flinches again.

“We was just saying things we remembered about Junior,” she says softly. Larry looks at Carmine Sr. and then at Sylvia and back at the gravestone.

“Right, right…” he says. He feels a little like they’re standing around the well again, waiting for him to offer up some part of himself. Except it can’t stay a secret this time. He licks his lips, tries not to look at those watching him. “I guess one thing I always come back to…Carmine pulling me on the sled. Must’ve been ten. I was only a few months younger than him but all he wanted was to pull me, and hear me laughing. He was so damn strong. Felt like there wasn’t nothing he couldn’t do.”

It’s not a lie. Carmine really had done stuff like that, kept Larry around like a novelty he was proud to show off, a little curiosity that never ceased to amuse him. And to be Carmine’s favorite—nothing felt sweeter.

Rosalie is crying now. She hugs onto his arm and doesn’t let go.

“He really did do that, the crazy son-of-a-gun,” she says, half-whimpering, half-laughing. Some murmurs of laughter from the others.

“I thought about it a lot, when I was…” Larry clears his throat. “Over there, you know.”

They stay a while longer, telling stories about Carmine Jr. and how full of life he was. His indomitable spirit. The wild comet Infantino, the best Infantino. All of it is true.

“Back to the house?” Carmine Sr. says.

“Back to the house,” Sylvia agrees. There are trays of baked ziti, Carmine Jr.’s favorite. Balloons waiting to be released in the back yard. Stones ready to be painted—that was Rosalie’s idea. Something creative to celebrate him.

The grandparents leave first. Larry doesn’t acknowledge them as they file past. They had never wanted him around anyway. Everyone leaves.

“I’m gonna stick around for a while,” Larry says.

“Are you sure?” Rosalie says. “I can wait with you. We’ll walk back to the house together.”

“It’s okay, I know the way.”

Rosalie nods, starts walking down the path. Then she stops.

“Wait,” she calls out—but not to him. Carmine Sr. and Sylvia are lingering behind the rest. They turn like they know what she wants. They exchange a look and walk back. It’s been a long time since he has called them Mom and Dad. Ten years, almost. Carmine Sr. clears his throat, looks back at Rosalie. Rosalie is giving them a hard look now. Larry can feel it, that heat spreading across his chest again, prickling up toward his throat.

Sylvia speaks first.

“We’re sorry, Lah,” she says. “We never believed it—you have to know that.”

“We…we should have done a better job…at letting you know that.”

“We never believed anything like that—”

“—and we should have done a better job protecting you too—”

“It’s okay,” Larry says. He doesn’t know whether he believes them but he has to make them stop. “I just need a moment.”

Sylvia breaks into a sob. Carmine Sr. looks at Larry a while longer, the boy he took as his own. To tell the truth, Larry can’t even remember anything before the Infantinos. He knows there was a house, that there were other children like him, and sometimes he thinks he can see it in his dreams. Gray walls and a popcorn ceiling. But maybe it’s just a dream.

Carmine Sr. puts his arm around Sylvia and leads her back up the path.

“You have to believe us,” she whimpers.

Rosalie watches them go, then follows at a distance. For a brief moment, Larry thinks he might collapse. But then everyone is out of sight, and he can breathe again. He crouches down and looks at the stone.

Our shining—

come on Carmine lets go

you fuck

if he tells you then it won’t come true

you have to believe us

Maybe if the rest of the family had given Larry Christmas and birthday presents, or asked him about school, Carmine wouldn’t have started to see him as different. Maybe if their parents had told them about the adoption in a controlled way, at the right time, instead of the cousins letting it slip. Maybe if Carmine had been able to control himself around the girls at school, he wouldn’t have worried about Larry and Rosalie hanging out so much.

Maybe whatever the fuck.

Larry doesn’t know how long he’s been at the cemetery when he gets up. Outside, he takes a steep residential road that goes farther up the bluffs, instead of the downhill one that leads to the house.

Maybe if he or Rosalie or any of them had had the courage to insist Carmine come back with them that night.

“It’s going to rain!”

Maybe if Larry hadn’t wished his brother would die.

It takes him an hour to reach the well. It looks smaller than he remembers. A rough wind shakes the trees, blowing down toward the city. Larry crouches there, peers over. He can see how someone would think it’s not that far down, how slippery the stones might get. For a long time, he stares into its pitch darkness, feels the pull of it.

“Lah!”

It’s Rosalie, running up through the woods. She stops behind him.

“Guess I can tell you, since it didn’t come true. All I wanted was my brother back,” Larry says, unable to tear his gaze away from the well. “But I didn’t write it like that. I was angry at him, so I wished—”

“It’s not your fault,” Rosalie says, panting. “You don’t really know what he was going through that last year. None of us do. Sometimes there’s no answer to these things. No reason, maybe. He was just…angry…and lost…”

The pull is strong, but there’s nothing down there. He knows it.

“Come on, let’s get back…”