Alan Sincic

When Jack woke his father was carrying him up the ladder to the roof of the house where the whole neighborhood was already waiting, already scattered out across the flat gray surface with their goods in tow and their flashlights drawn and their heads outlined against the broad dark sky like candles on a cake, or like a stand of trees on a small square island, or like a crowd on a pier at the launching of a ship when the ropes unravel and the ship breaks away and the crowd cuts itself loose, is cut loose, as the crowd is cut adrift to make its own separate journey. Jack’s father stepped out onto the roof. The wind seemed to be following along behind him, snapping at the sleeves on his pajamas and cuffing at Jack around the ears and the shoulders. The same wind that was pushing the clouds across the sky was also pushing its way into the crowd – picking the pockets and breaking the tips from the smokes, stirring the mothers to tighten their wraps and the babies to twist in their arms, pausing, turning, and then sizzling straight through the open spaces between the others -- fathers in suspenders and wife-beater Ts, uncles in bath-towels, teens in tattered jeans, grannies in nightgowns, a kid or two even shirtless it being so warm and this being the state of Florida. The state bird of Florida is the mockingbird. Tourism is a major industry. The Goodmans had dragged their squeaky lawn-chairs to the edge of the roof in order to aim themselves at the direction of the coming sunrise, to square themselves off against the blank white air like a snapshot on the page of a family album – Johnny Goodman curled up asleep around his mother’s ankles with a soft red blanket over his head, Jay his brother cross-legged beside him with a pair of binoculars around his neck and a graham cracker in his mouth, Mr. G. screwed down into the saddle of his chair with a toaster at his feet and the barrel of a Daisy Pump-Action True-Barrel BB gun bobbing up out of the crevice between his legs, all of the different neighbors bustling around behind them in the soft gray light. Mrs. Goodman smoked a cigarette and scanned the horizon as she stirred the bowl of potato salad in her lap with a large aluminum spoon. It was the end of the world.

Everybody was busy with something. Mr. Landfair had brought up a fresh change of clothes and while Mrs. Landfair shielded him behind a Cypress Gardens beach-towel, he pulled up his boxer shorts and steered his tender white feet across the gravel to the crossbars of the TV antenna where his best suit-coat clanged back and forth on its hanger in the wind. So that his wife could get a better view of the sky, Mr. Davis leaned out over the edge of the roof and, with a pair of hedge clippers borrowed from Mr. Cochrane, began to trim the overhanging tree branches. Behind him, Mr. Cochrane -- who sold automobile mufflers for a living and who covered the bald spot on the top of his head with a dab of Brindle Brothers shoe polish -- held on with both hands to Mr. Davis’ belt to keep him from falling. The average year-round temperature in Florida is 70º Fahrenheit. Even as we speak another hundred head of cattle are being born.

Jack slid down from his father’s arms and onto the crate of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup the Landfair girls were unpacking. Janet Landfair, the younger of the two, the pretty one, brushed the sleep from his eyes and told him to go play but to keep away from the edge. She’d been taking a bath. Her hair was still damp, her skin smooth as a wet pebble. She smelled like a bowl of fresh strawberries, and as she turned back to the check-list at her feet, she pressed a can of Chicken Vegetable into his arms and brushed the top of his head with a kiss. Jack closed his eyes and slowly lifted his head, like in the movies, like when they touch, with a sword, the top of the head of King Arthur. She was gone by the time he opened his eyes. He could just make out the sound of her voice, chirping away with some girls back the other side of the chimney. Arthur comes from the Celtic word artos, meaning “bear.” The peanut is a vegetable.

The peanut is a vegetable. Jack knelt down to tie his sneakers, then climbed up onto a big Philco box TV that somebody had managed to wrestle up onto one of the far corners of the roof. How strange to see all the different families in their loose individual orbits around the other families, the Dad trotting out to the edge and then back again across the gravel to the family pile – TV tray, thermos jug, bed-sheet, hula-hoop, screwdriver, hair-dryer, bug-spray, pretzels – and how strange it all up in the sky like that with no drawer and no closets to keep the wind from mixing it together: old Mr. Porter rummaging through a crateful of oranges for a matching blue sock, somebody’s pink flamingo salt shaker mixed in with somebody else’s number four lug nuts, a bowling shoe with a big red “9” on the heel and a swizzle-stick wedged into the laces, a Koo-Ade pitcher filled with goldfish, a hatbox full of dog biscuits, three red cabbages in a skin-diver’s mask and everybody looking down and over the edge to the little box houses that they had just broken out of.

It was the end of the world. Mrs. Goodman (belt buckle long since disappeared into the curve of her gut) leaned out over her potato salad to glimpse – above the smolder of moss that muddied the oak -- that sliver-of-a-tangerine moon. Out among the picnic baskets and the hardware tools and the cans of buttered Mexicali corn, Barbara Sego stopped to straighten the curlers in her hair and to wipe her hands on the back of her tight white shorts. She looked back to see that Mr. Goodman was watching, then called out to ask him could he, would he, just for a tiny second, push this box of roofing nails out of the way for her? The men on either side of Mr. G swayed and swayed as she spoke, sang out in soft high voices oh would you, could you, would you? as Mr. G, wrench in hand, scrambled out from under his barbecue grill and stumbled to his feet. The stirrup is the smallest bone in the body. Barbeque was first invented in 1526.

Easy now. Jack fingered, hooked with his little finger the antenna of the Philco to keep his balance. As the wind climbed up and over the horizon to the west, the stars seemed to rise and to fall with it, as if they were riding a tide, as if the sky itself were about to buckle. To the east? Sunrise. Sky the color of rose, and all of the families – fidgeting and bickering and chattering – practically bursting up to meet it. Or so it seemed to Jack from his perch on the edge of the darkness. The people they looked fresh and they looked tattered at the very same time, like a batch of presents torn open on a Christmas morning or a crowd spilling down the exit ramp of the Tilt-‘O-Whirl, like the morning last fall when the whole neighborhood suddenly, in the middle of breakfast, jumped up and ran out into the street – barefoot or with one sock on, spoon in the mouth, face half-full of shaving cream or no make-up or soggy hair or cold cigarette stuck to the face and the pants half-zipped in a one-legged run – everybody pulled out to the street by the high wailing screech of Miss Overman on her knees with her arms around the back tire of a Milk Truck from The Gustafson Farms Dairy, Mama and Papa Gus smiling down at her from a side panel mural and smiling out again across the neighborhood from the opposite side of the truck, the crowd closing in, the cries rising up, the driver in his milk-colored overalls six feet back both arms gesturing and waving get away get away as if creating some kind of wind that could blow Miss Overman back away from his truck and from the obliterated body of her pet cat Pluto. How strange it was to see everyone flushed out into the open like that, all of their gear in a tangle at their feet, all of their sociable clothes abandoned. The can of soup slipped out of Jack’s hand and landed in the gutter with a clang. The closest planet to the sun is Mercury.

Everybody was busy with something. The Cochrane’s Irish Setter Spike had one of Janet’s curlers in his mouth and as he ran back and forth along the edge of the roof with his nose in the air, sniffing, Michael Cochrane chased after him with a ball of kite string in one hand and a garden rake in the other. Mrs. Harrison with her stiff gray hair was trying to set up a card table on the windward side of the chimney, but as soon as she got the one leg anchored, the other gave way. Jack was trying to figure out where that Porter baby had gotten hold of a chocolate chip cookie. The Bowhead whale filters thousands of gallons of seawater through the sieve of the mouth for every pound of plankton it obtains.

The end. The end of the world. Jack buttoned the collar of his Roy Rogers pajamas and carefully made his way along the roof’s edge. The gravel crackled underfoot, the branches of the pines raked back and forth against the cinder-block houses, the smell of orange blossom and burnt rubber flashed by as the wind gusted, and paused, and gusted again. Jack remembered his father telling him how the bulldozers had to be careful when they first invented the street, how they’d try not to smash into these pines because of the name of the street – Pine Street. And the palmettos, the palmettos in Palmetto Court. The name like a picture. Like the name of the road round the corner there, Orange Grove Road? No. No. They built it out of a orange grove, but when the time came to name it they discovered a mistake, that this was not the picture they’d wanted, they’d need a new picture, that in their rush to build the road they’d plowed under all the oranges. So they had to name it “Hernando,” Hernando Drive so as not to put a dent in the overall view, Hernando in honor of the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto who swung by Florida in 1539 after sailing 5,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett is the name of a famous American Heavyweight Boxing Champion from the 1890s. Many breeds of dog are descended from a single Boston Terrier.

There was a rumbling in the distance. The sky grew lighter. Jack’s father handed him a pair of fingernail clippers and told him to clip his nails so that he would not look like he’d just crawled in out the woods. The steering wheel of a 1964 Chevy Impala appeared at the top of the ladder, followed by a hand around the steering column like the hand was just along for the ride. It was T-Bird Wilson whose mother had died and left him the house on the corner last year while he was away in the army. He jogged quickly to the far end of the roof where he drove the steering column into a laundry exhaust pipe and then climbed up onto the wheel like it was a stool in a bar. As the birds blew by in the wind he whirled and raised his hands to his face and pretended to shoot at them.

Everybody was busy with something. Fat Mr. Deverall rose up over the sharp edge of the roof, the ladder sagging gently under this weight as he climbed, the rungs creaking in a rhythm with the grunt of his voice, as if the ladder was a musical instrument and he was the tune it was playing. Somebody had swept away enough of the gravel to spread out a red checkered picnic blanket where Mrs. Cochrane (angry at her husband for having awakened her in the first place) lay snoring with an embroidered tea-cloth across her face. Mr. Cochrane’s job was to wake his wife when the time came so that she would not miss anything. Tea-cloths were first embroidered by the British in the 1700s. Over seven thousand separate sugar cane stalks go into the production of a single drop of chocolate.

The men dropped a bungee cord into the mist. Tried to hook the garden hose – there, upside the house there, still fat with the force of the water, the sprinkler a-spin – but wait. Mrs. Harrison called out to say wait, but wait, that whoever wanted to wash up, that she had a canteen and here, a hubcap, T-Bird’s hubcap for a sink. Not so good as a cooler, a Styrofoam cooler but no, too late, it was too late for that. When the Porter’s baby began to cry they’d made a cradle of it, laid him in the bottom with a few dishtowels and Mr. Dentiston’s sweat-shirt as a mattress. It was the end of the world.

Jack listened to the clanging of the tetherball pole in the backyard and wished that he’d gone back to get the globe of the world that was hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom. The globe was made out of an old tetherball the countries of which Jack had painted in by hand – the democracies in green, the communists in red, the oceans of the world in indigo blue. Cornelius J. Crowley Jr. of New Haven, Connecticut invented the molded-rubber-with-lacing tetherball in 1956. Admiral Perry was a great man. Running out from the top of the pole and into the smashed-up center of an old orange tree was Jack’s mother’s clothesline with the laundry flapping in the gray light and the branches of the pines roaring and roaring around it. The clothes in a ripsaw -- Jack’s mother had forgotten to grab them -- but still, it was nice to look down, and to think of them as flags, personal individual flags, a line of banners in the wind like the signal flags on the bow of a ship.

Most of the people on the roof were still in their pajamas. Jack’s father had on the pinstripe pajamas that Jack had gotten him in honor of Joe DiMaggio number 9 of the New York Yankees, son of a crab fisherman and the only player in the history of the game to hit safely in 56 consecutive games. Jack’s father’s father immigrated from Croatia in the days of the Kaiser. He was a cook on one of Teddy Roosevelt’s expeditions to Africa.

Old Mr. Cottles wandered over to Jack with one slipper off and a red toothbrush at the end of his shaking fingers. He had gotten hold of his wife’s toothbrush by accident and now he didn’t want to use it for fear of the germs. It had taken him a long time to climb up to the top of the ladder and now there were these blue streaks of toothpaste smeared up and down the front of his terry-cloth bathrobe. Jack took him around to each one of the families in turn to ask for a new toothbrush.

A low fog came rolling in across the trim lawns and into the mailboxes and around and over the chain link fences between the separate homes. Up top of the last remaining ladder sat the paperboy with his legs disappearing over the edge of the roof like it was a raft in the middle of great gray ocean. At the foot of the drive a fire hydrant. Slung over the snout a haversack. A dozen papers, rolled and rubber-banded into little log shapes, spilled out the sack and onto the lawn, the drive, and onto the spokes of the Schwinn Glider the paperboy had – like a rodeo rider – abandoned on the fly. His flashlight flicked on and off as he slapped it with the palm of his hand. The highest waterfall in the world is Angel Falls in Venezuela. Africa is the third largest continent.

Next to the paperboy was a policeman. He’d come up with his equipment, but one good look at the distant tree line – bristled up and vibrating in the wind like the fur on the back of a bear – and he tossed the gun and the walkie-talkie overboard. The azalea bush crackled with invisible voices. Jack elbowed his way to the edge. Miss Overman’s brittle hairdo brushed his arm as he leaned over to listen. Azalea. It was an azalea blossom Miss Overman laid, launched, lofted into Pluto’s water-bowl the day the truck, all a-jangle with milk, struck him. On the hinge of his left arm the milkman had had a tattoo of a hinge that he’d gotten in Japan just after the war. Jack wondered what the milkman was doing now. McArthur was a great general.

McArthur was a great general. Before he threw the gun away, the policeman took out the bullets and passed them around to the kids as souvenirs. The handcuffs he clamped onto the ladder and the rain gutter so that nobody would lose their balance and get pitched out into the flowerbed below.

The clouds swept in so smoothly as they brushed the tops of the trees, it seemed the sky itself was standing still and it was the gray gravel roof that was doing the gliding. Somebody had brought up a thermos of coffee and it was making the rounds. Mr. Straley had a backpack with a side pocket full of sugar and Sweet’N Low in little packets. To stir with, Renee Coats broke out some tiny plastic spoons and knives from her Barbie Doll set.

Bobby Straley leaned against the chimney in his red pajamas and used a baseball glove to brush the gravel out from between his toes. He always carried his glove with him everywhere because he was afraid that somebody would steal it.

Sally Goodman had her crayons and a couple sheets of manila paper spread out across the Harrison’s wobbly card table. She was making a drawing of the streaks of red and yellow breaking out across the sky from left to right.

Jack’s father stood in a circle with the other fathers and chewed on a blue plastic toothpick and scratched his earlobe and looked down and then up and then down again as he listened to the other fathers talk. The fathers had decided that it was time to break out the ponchos in case it rained, but Jack’s father argued that after all it was fairly warm out and what, were they made out of sugar or something and what, was a couple drops of water going to kill them? Why couldn’t they just let it rain? The men thought that this was a good idea, so they tossed the ponchos over the edge.

Bonnie Flightstone had a Instamatic but she didn’t have any flashcubes left. She was going around to all of the families asking them if they had any extras. The Porter baby had one in his mouth but by the time they pried it loose the plastic plug-in part was all twisted up and would no longer fit into the slot of Bonnie’s camera. Griffin Porter told her that it wasn’t much use anyway because the most you could hope to capture with a flash would be, what, eight, eight and a half feet. What the hell you gonna get at eight and a half feet?

Jack spread his father’s jacket out on the gravel and got down on his belly to see through the window of the Dentiston’s living room two doors down. The lights were off but the TV was on, a small cube of light in the corner. Mr. D knelt alongside as Jack adjusted the binoculars they’d borrowed from the Landfairs. In the two circles of the binoculars he could see that there was some kind of morning wake up show going on inside of Mr. D’s TV. A man was standing in front of a picture of a tree. He was holding up a fishing pole and casting it out into an imaginary stream. Mr. D had clicked onto the show but then turned off the sound so that he could read by the dim light without waking Mrs. D, who was sleeping in the living room because she was afraid of the mouse in the bedroom, Mr. D’s pet mouse in the blue plastic cage they’d brought up onto the roof with them when they found out it was going to be the end of the world.

Everybody was helping themselves to a big wooden salad bowl filled with peanuts that Jack’s mother had placed on top of the chimney. Since this was Florida where the average year-round temperature is 70º F, the chimney was a fake chimney, aluminum with red paint so that from the street it would look like a giant brick sticking up out of the roof. The aluminum was molded by Vernon Dewald, a friend of Jack’s father who came to Florida from West Virginia in 1952 and who set up his aluminum shop alongside the furniture warehouse on Silver Star Road. The largest silver mine in the world is in Queensland, Australia. The only way to get a chigger-bug out from under your skin is to rub alcohol on it. Because of the trouble that Jack’s mom had gone to, most everybody, the grown-ups especially, tried – as they shucked the peanuts – to toss the shells into the wicker basket she’d anchored to the chimney with a swatch of duct tape.

Mr. Terry sat in his bathrobe on the edge of a folding lawn chair with a flashlight and the Orlando Morning Sentinel (’Tis A Privilege To Live In Central Florida) spread out across his knees. The official motto of the city of Orlando is “The City Beautiful.” The amoeba is likely to turn up anywhere at any time in any random drop of water. Some of the neighborhood kids gathered around Mr. Terry to watch him finish up the crossword puzzle on page seven next to the box scores of the Orlando Twins, Triple-A farm team of the famous Minnesota Twins organization who do their playing at Tinker Field – named after Tinker of Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance – and who move their whole operation down here once a year for spring training.

Joe Lena and his wife Tammy stood near the top of the ladder arguing about whether or not Joe had forgotten to turn off the stove when they left. Joe had a cup of coffee in his hand and Tammy was pointing at it and telling Joe that there must have been somewhere that he had gotten that from and that it was hot wasn’t it and if he would take the trouble to look around him did he happen to see anybody up here roasting marshmallows around a roaring fire? Joe is nodding his head and sipping coffee and looking out at the streaks of red climbing up out of the clouds in the east. Joe is telling Tammy that she is being a perfect example of the word that she is always accusing him of calling her, but Tammy is insisting to Joe that if they don’t want to see their little nest-egg reduced to a pile of cinders then they had better be paying some attention. Joe cups his hands over the coffee to keep it warm and presses his lips between his fingers for another sip as he watches the streak of red against the gray sky grow.

Jack is nudging Johnny Goodman with the heel of his cowboy boot and trying to loosen the package of firecrackers from Johnny’s back pocket, Mr. Terry is scratching the word “Antipodal” into the margin of his newspaper, Tammy Lena is tucking her lime green polyester blouse into the waistband of her panty hose, Vernon Dewald is leaning out over the round eyes of the Porter baby and making a clucking sound with his tongue between his teeth, Bob Dentiston is trying to drape his windbreaker across the blue cage of his pet mouse Oscar, the Southwestern Desert Kangaroo Rat living as it does on the moisture in its solid food is the only mammal capable of living completely without drinking water for many years on end, Mrs. Dentiston stands beside her husband with a bobby pin in her mouth, the state song of Florida is “The Swanee River,” Mrs. Goodman has Jay by the collar and is wiping the streak of Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup from his cheek with a wet rag, Mr. Goodman is telling Mr. Cochrane the story about the Bootlegger and the Librarian and the Landfair girls are squatting above the cans of Cream of Asparagus pretending not to listen, Mrs. Straley is telling Bobby if he doesn’t stop throwing gravel at the chimney she’s going to take his “Newk” Newcombe autograph model and pitch it over the edge, Donald Newcombe is the first black major league pitcher of the modern era to win more than 20 games in a season, the women are folding baby clothes and debating how long it will take for Bob Dentiston to make another pass at that Sego woman and the men are standing at the edge of the roof smoking and pointing to the huge red rent across the face of the eastern sky the clouds disappearing into it the first Republican governor of Florida Harrison Reed in 1868 and Jack trying to peel open the packet of Black Cat firecrackers before Johnny Goodman has a chance to catch him at it even as you read it coming to the world as all things must or try as you might and nothing you it coming to can or would say the end.