Dust Devil (7 page)

“
Papa
Nick,” Uncle Vinnie said, greeting the hulking old man who sat
and rocked silently in the shadows deep at the back of the veranda, a
glowing-tipped cigar in his mouth, his powerful, age-spotted hands
folded like claws over the ornate silver knob of a gleaming malacca
cane. Vinnie bent and kissed the heavy gold ring on one of those
gnarled hands. “How you doing? As prosperous as ever, I see. We
brought the boy.”

Then
Sofie, too, greeted the old man, kissing his dark, weathered, fleshy
jowl before she turned and dragged Renzo forward to present him.
“This here’s Renzo, Papa Nick,” she said, tugging
covertly at her skirt, as though only just now aware it was too
short, too tight, and rode up vulgarly around her thighs.

Although
he might have been anywhere from fifty to ninety, Papa Nick looked
exceedingly ancient to a young boy, and Renzo saw at once why his
mother had called the old man a spider. There
was
something
spidery about Papa Nick, something dark and ominous that seemed to
spin out from him like a web, something that was just as gossamer and
chilling against the skin and made the fine hairs on Renzo’s
nape stand on end. In later years, he was to know it was power,
lethal and immense, that he had felt emanating
alm
ost
tangibly from the old man. But this day, he knew only that it was a
thing to be feared. Papa Nick’s hawkish, piercing eyes were as
black as the coal that had provided much of his legitimate fortune,
and they appeared to bore right through Renzo, making him shiver.

“
Whadda
they been feeding you, boy? You’re not’ing but skin and
bones. Looka more pitiful than a scarecrow in that new suit!”
The old man’s voice was deceptively soft, deep and deliberate,
overlaid with a thick Italian accent, although it held a note of
menace all the same. His black eyes burned like embers in his head.
Suddenly, somehow, Renzo knew Papa Nick’s anger wasn’t
directed at him, but at his mother and Uncle Vinnie, both of whom
were sweating profusely, despite the wide-bladed fans hanging from
the veranda’s broad ceiling. With a sharp, contemptuous wave of
one hand, the old man dismissed the two adults, then motioned Renzo
closer. “You like candy, boy?” Reaching into his trouser
pocket, Papa Nick drew forth a piece of gold-foil-wrapped chocolate
and handed it to him. “Go on. It’sa yours. Take it,”
he urged when, still, the boy hesitated. “I wanna bite you.”

At
that, Renzo tentatively stretched out one hand and snatched the piece
of chocolate from the old man’s grasp, as though fearing he had
lied, that he would, in fact, bite him. To Renzo’s surprise,
Papa Nick laughed then, long and loud, his big belly shaking.

“
Go
on now,” he ordered gruffly after a moment, thrusting his cane
at Renzo. “Go and play with the other children. Take that
miserable jacket and tie and those socks and shoes off, and havva
some fun for a change. You donna looka like you’ve had too
mucha that in your young life. Joe! Madonna! Come getta the boy! Take
good care of him! Fatten him uppa with some fine Italian cooking!”

A
couple hovering nearby approached then, their plain, careworn faces
kind, welcoming and anxious to please. They were, Renzo soon learned,
much to his surprise and relief, the Martinellis, with whom he was to
live from now on. Madonna, unable to bear any children of her own,
knelt. Her eyes shone with unshed tears as she smiled and held out
her arms to Renzo; and with that simple, accepting gesture, he
somehow knew instinctively that here, at long last, was someone
prepared to love him wholeheartedly, without reservation. Clutching
the chocolate, he stumbled toward her, felt her arms enfold him
against her plump, comforting breast; and in that moment, he
understood, then and for always, that home wasn’t a place—but
a place in someone’s heart.

True
love’s the gift which God has given

To
man alone beneath the heaven;

It
is not fantasy’s hot fire

Whose
wishes, soon as granted, fly;

It
liveth not in fierce desire,

With
dead desire it doth not die;

It
is the secret sympathy,

The
silver link, the silken tie,

Which
heart to heart and mind to mind

In
body and in soul can bind.

The
Lay of the Last Minstrel

—
Sir
Walter Scott

The
first time Renzo ever saw Sarah Kincaid, he was twelve years old, and
his life before he had come to the small, rural town, to live with
Joseph and Madonna Martinelli, had faded so much that sometimes, when
he thought of it, he imagined it had been only a bad dream.

There
was nothing in the Martinellis’ tidy white bungalow on Elm
Street to remind him of the tenement in the big city where he had
been born. Nor, since the day they had brought him to Papa Nick’s
imposing, red-brick house on the hill and left him there, had Renzo
ever seen his mother or Uncle Vinnie again. After a while, they, too,
had faded in his mind, to become no more than a memory so vague that
he could no longer even recall his mother’s face. When he
thought of her at all, he remembered only her red mouth and nails,
her high heels the color of blood.

Fueled
by Madonna Martinelli’s good Italian cooking, Renzo had in the
past five years filled out, growing tall and strong for his age, so
his body even now held the promise of a man’s long bones and
hard muscle. And if he resembled his dead father more and more with
every passing day, he himself did not yet see that whenever he gazed
into a mirror. He saw only the thick, unruly black hair, the dark
brown eyes and the bronzed skin that marked him as being of Italian
heritage and that had therefore caused to be erected around him a set
of invisible boundaries in a town where everyone had his place—and
was expected to keep to it.

It
didn’t matter that from his newspaper, the
Tri-State
Tribune,
Joseph
Martinelli earned as good a living as Fritzchen Mueller did from his
restaurant, Fritzchen’s Kitchen. In the town’s social
pecking order, Fritz’s standing was higher than Joe’s—because
the color of Fritz’s skin was white.

Few
ever came right out and said that, of course. It was simply
understood that that was the way things in town had always been—and
were always going to be. It was, after all, the natural order of men.

Renzo
had learned this lesson the hard way—by having it pounded into
him at school by boys like Bubba Holbrooke and Skeets Grenville,
Forrest Pierce and Drew Langford, Tommy Lee Archer and Clayton
Willoughby, who were sons of the town’s politicians, lawyers,
doctors, bankers and merchants. So it was that when Renzo first spied
Sarah, his initial thought was that he should get back on his bicycle
and ride in the opposite direction as fast as his legs would pedal
him. But for some unknown reason, his feet rooted him where he stood
at the edge of the woods, fishing pole and bait bucket in hand,
bicycle leaning against a tree.

She
looked not like a little girl, but a fairy child, he thought as he
watched her dance and whirl through the tall-grass meadow that was
like a wide, shimmering green sea around her, rippling in the breeze
and afoam with a profusion of wildflowers in every color imaginable.
Her long, silky hair was as brown as the dark trunks of the towering
old trees, whose leaves, rustling gently in the wind, matched the
green of her eyes. Her cheeks were rosy, in beautiful contrast to her
pale skin dusted with gold from the kiss of the Indian-summer sun
that stretched even now toward autumn. She wore a shabby, faded pink
sundress, and her small, delicate feet were, like his own larger
ones, bare. As she skipped and leaped and pirouetted, she paused now
and then to pick another flower to add to those she already clutched
in one grubby hand; and she sang in a high, clear, sweet voice, some
song about tallying bananas, because daylight was coming and she
wanted to go home.

Renzo
was mesmerized. He hardly dared to breathe, for fear she would notice
him and, frightened by his presence, bound away like one of the
startled fawns he had sometimes seen leaping through the woods in the
springtime. So it was that he witnessed her grow suddenly still and
silent as her eye was caught by a big yellow butterfly rising and
dipping through the quiet air, skimming the undulating tops of the
tall green grass. Slowly, enthralled, she dropped her wildflowers,
which scattered in the breeze to strew the earth around her. Then she
cupped her tiny, graceful hands and held them upward, as though in
offering. In her piquant face upturned to the sun, her eyes closed
tightly, her lips moved, and Renzo thought she might have been
praying—or whispering a spell of enchantment. For just then,
something miraculous, something magical happened.

The
butterfly came to light in her outstretched palms.

At
its feathery touch, she opened her eyes wide, her mouth forming
an
O
of
wonder and delight as she gazed raptly at the insect. For a fleeting
eternity, it poised there in her grasp, its gossamer wings
fluttering, she holding it carefully, making no attempt to capture
and imprison it. Then, suddenly, she flung her hands up, spreading
them wide and laughing aloud with pure joy as the butterfly took
flight, soaring away into the boundless blue sky.

“
Sarah,”
a woman’s voice called from the distance, breaking the hushed
drone of the summer air. “Sary, where are you? It’s time
for you to come home now. Sarah...”

Turning
her head at the sound of her name, the child cried, “Here,
Mama. I’m here.” Then she began to run lightly through
the meadow, toward the voice summoning her home.

In
moments, she was gone.

Afterward,
it seemed to Renzo that he was drawn inexorably to the place where
she had stood in the grass and held the butterfly. Although he knew
full well it wasn’t possible, in his mind, he imagined that it
was the very same insect he had watched emerge from its cocoon so
many years ago at the tenement in the big city. The butterfly was,
somehow, like a bond between him and the little girl, a secret they
alone in all the world shared. Bending, he slowly picked up one of
the wildflowers she had cast away. Its fragrance was as sweet as the
summer grass; its petals were as fragile and ethereal as the child
herself had appeared, and would be just as easily bruised.

Carefully,
Renzo tucked the wildflower into his shirt pocket. Why he wanted it,
he could not have said. He knew only that he did.

The
second time Renzo ever saw Sarah Kincaid, she was standing on the
school grounds, sobbing as though her heart would break. To her
breast, she clutched a lunch box, and the way she held it reminded
Renzo of how he had clung to his teddy bear that long-ago day at the
tenement in the big city. In fact, it was only in the past few years
that he had felt safe enough, secure enough, beloved enough to tuck
Teddy away at last into the small cedar chest at the foot of his bed
in his room at the Martinelli bungalow.

A
butterfly. A ragged old teddy bear. A secondhand lunch box.
Such
small things they were. Yet because of them, unbeknown either to
Renzo or to Sarah that day, his life and hers were to touch, to
tangle like a honeysuckle vine—and forever entwine.