The Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry Page A

of the First Gulf War.
    There was a photo of his boy along Stella’s counter, under glass on the countertop along with photos of lots of other people from the neighborhood. He knew the exact place where the picture lay, farther up along the counter, but he didn’t glance toward it, and neither did Stella.
    That wasn’t why he had come.
    Very faintly, as if in the distance, he heard Chinese music, a pop song, and also the sound of running water, dishes rattling. Sorrentino wanted to talk to Stella, but she had her back to him now.
    The old ones watched the television. It was way up in the corner and the sound was off, but they watched anyway. On screen, firemen were digging out the rubble at Ground Zero in New York. The World Trade Center had gone down some time ago, a little more than a year now. It looked like old footage but you couldn’t be sure, and anyway the media liked to show it over and over. And the faces had started to become familiar. Like they were people Sorrentino knew out there doing the digging. Then the scene switched and switched again. Other parts of the world, men being held hostage. Then bombs—artillery in the desert. Protestors in a European city, upset over the expanding American retaliation—but then, no, this last scene was here.
    Downtown San Francisco.
    Local jackasses. A-number-one idiots. Wise guys against the war.
    â€œIt’s over.” The man who said this was old, maybe a million years. Maybe a hundred million. He sat with another old man at the table by the wall.
    Sorrentino did not recognize either man at first, but the longer he looked, the more he began to see something familiar about the pair—their faces before gravity had lengthened their chins, before the moles had grown ulcerous, when the skin was still tight and there was not so much hair growing from the nostrils and the ears. The older of the two men wore a black shirt. He coughed and lit a Pall Mall.
    Johnny Pesci, he remembered. And the other one—George Marinetti. Pesci was Marinetti’s uncle, something like that, and the two were always arguing. Together, they looked as if they’d crawled up out of the crypt.
    â€œIt’s over,” Pesci said again.
    At a table nearby sat Julia Besozi. Guy recognized her now as well. She wore a hairnet, with blacking on the scalp underneath, like the old women used to do when their hair thinned. She sat alone, sipping tea, legs crossed, wilting into the wallpaper.
    She smiled. Her eyes were black like pebbles.
    Meanwhile Stella had retreated into the kitchen. You could hear the Chinese dishwasher in the back, laboring in the sink. You could hear him humming along with the radio and dishes clattering in the background. Then he dropped a dish, and you could hear Stella scolding him in Italian.
    It was an old routine. Stella enjoyed it, yelling at the Chinaman. It went on for a while and then there was silence.
    In the recesses of the café, in a rear booth, one of the shadows moved. Franceso Zito, he thought. Mollini. Ettore Patrizi. Or men who resembled them. Sorrentino remembered obituaries, but maybe he had been mistaken. Or maybe not. Maybe they were dead. They raised the grappa to their lips and grunted, but that didn’t prove anything either way.
    â€œIt’s over,” said Pesci.
    â€œWhat’s over?” Marinetti wanted to know.
    â€œThe whole business. America—all of it.”
    â€œI don’t see how you can say that.”
    â€œThey should beat their heads in.”
    â€œWhose heads?”
    â€œAll of them. All their heads.”
    â€œThat’s not a thing to say.”
    â€œOnce upon a time, things were not this way.”
    â€œâ€˜Once upon a time,’ what does that mean? When was that, anyway, once upon a time?”
    â€œIt’s not now.”
    â€œWhen…”
    â€œThey should beat them on their heads.”
    â€œOnce upon a time, they should beat them on their heads.