A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  My home town in industrial northern Indiana stood craggy and sharp against the grayish mud-colored skies of the Region. Even the seemingly immutable steel mills looked sullenly deserted and were decaying into rust. Never a town to be confused with Palm Beach or Beverly Hills, Hohman resembled a vast, endless lake-side junkyard that had been created by that mysterious obscene wrecking ball known as Time.

  Summoned back from civilization to attend the funeral of a distant relative, I felt curiously alone, as though surrounded by lurking, unfriendly natives speaking mysterious tongues and worshiping alien gods.

  “How would Norman Rockwell have handled this?” I muttered as I lurched past a row of decaying porn shops and “Adult” theaters, one of which bore a crude, hand-lettered sign reading: TOPLESS MUD WRESTLING! LIVE! XXX RATING!

  It was the very site on which once the proud Parthenon theater had reposed, named after the Parthenon itself of ancient Athens. It had been famous for its elegant lobby and its graceful Fred Astaire movies. Now, TOPLESS MUD WRESTLING and dealers in greasy film cartridges shot in the cellars of Caracas. Where Clark Gable was once the King, Linda Lovelace now reigned.

  I fiddled with the knob of my rented alleged radio. A few whistles and the distant sound of someone singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” was all I could manage. I flipped the bastard off and concentrated on the potholes.

  A giant dump truck roared past me, flinging bits of gravel and what appeared to be molten tar over my windshield. I struggled for control in his wake. His tailgate bore a sticker that read THE CHICAGO CUBS SUCK. I felt a note of reassurance that at least some things hadn’t changed. This was White Sox country for sure, where the fans followed a ball team as ragged-assed as they were and as cosmically defeated. The White Sox, who once, in my salad days, had actually advertised in the Classified section of the Chicago Tribune for a third baseman, they were that desperate. Four thousand out-of-work hod carriers and steel workers showed up for the audition, which was by far the largest crowd the Sox had drawn in ten years. Oh well.

  Heavy diesel fumes rolled in my window. I frantically tried to crank it up, but naturally the handle came off in my hand. I flung it under the seat with a snarl, there to join the handle from the other door and an empty Pabst Blue Ribbon can thoughtfully left for me by the previous renter.

  Out of the gloom rose the great bulk of my beloved former high school. My God, there it was! It was like meeting a totally unexpected old friend strolling through the streets of Bombay.

  “Hoh-man, we’ll fight for you …

  Pur-ple vic-tree is our hu-ue.

  Vic-to-ree is ever ours

  As …”

  I croaked the words of the “Wildcat Victory Song” as the great building loomed against the sky, untouched by time. It was all there, even the weedy athletic field with its paint-peeling goalposts where I had once played the role of an intrepid defensive lineman and where I had irrevocably shattered the ligaments of my left knee, which now began to throb sympathetically as we passed the old battlefield.

  Ghostly voices of my teachers of that golden time moaned in my subconscious: Miss Bryfogel, her high, thin bleat intoning facts about Bull Run and Appomattox, Miss McCullough’s birdlike chirp squeaking something about gerunds or whatever they were, old red-faced Huffine, our coach, barking, “I don’t want to kick no asses, but …”

  I clutched at the plastic steering wheel in a cold sweat. Old fears never really die. The long winter days I had spent in this red brick mausoleum, its echoing halls, clanging lockers, its aromatic gym and cafeteria, scented forever with the aroma of salmon loaf and canned peas. The roar of thousands of students surging up and down the stairways. My peers, now scattered to the four winds and more by the tides of life. Wars and presidents had come and gone. Do they all remember Miss Bryfogel, Miss McCullough, the salmon loaf? And do they remember … ?

  Great Scott! If it’s possible to reel in an Avis (We Try Harder) Rent-a-Car, I reeled. It was still there, exactly as it had been in my days as a Wildcat lineman, as a ceaseless unsuccessful pursuer of Daphne Bigelow, the belle of the junior class; the shrine where Schwartz and Flick and I had squandered many a hard-earned quarter. Untouched! Unchanged!

  Now squatting defensively in the shadow cast by a majestic Burger King, still gleaming snow-white, topped by a gigantic concrete Rainbow three-dip ice cream cone was–THE IGLOO.

  The Igloo! My God, I can’t believe it. Still in business, still spreading tooth cavities among the young–the Igloo. The home of the greatest malted milk ever created by the hand of man!

  So ran my feverish thoughts as I smartly cut across traffic, dodged a lounging drug pusher, and pulled into the very parking slot where eons ago I had moored the Silver Streak Pontiac.

  Drawn to the Igloo by forces too immense to comprehend, I eased out of the car and headed for the same old glass door through which my generation had passed, the door that Flick had once shattered while attempting to kick Schwartz in the ass, an act which sent us on the lam for weeks and was the cause of an investigation that eventually involved the police (but they never got us)–the door through which I had once escorted Daphne on a disastrous double date centuries before.

  The Igloo was not a candy store, not a hangout. No, it was purely and functionally a place that made and sold ice cream. There were no booths, jukeboxes, all the other semi-mythic appurtenances of the traditional American kid high school hangout. You went to the Igloo for one thing alone–ice cream. Ice cream such as must be served in the ice cream parlors of heaven: rich, creamy, many-flavored, and made on the premises. It did not come out of machines, squirted out like toothpaste. No, the Igloo dealt in serious ice cream.

  In keeping with its high purpose, its interior had all the charm of the inside of a Kelvinator refrigerator; a long white formica counter, a bank of deep ice cream drums set in stainless steel, ladled out by hand with gleaming chromium scoops. The Igloo was as clean and functional as a paring knife.

  In my day, it was presided over by Mr. Igloo himself, a small, worried-looking man who was never called anything but “Mr. Leggett.” His life was devoted to ice cream the way a Jesuit focuses in on the nature of good and evil. Mr. Leggett was never known to wield a scoop himself. No, his troop of disciplined dedicated high school students handled the job, clad in sparkling aprons and Igloo helmets. They were the Praetorian Guard of tutti-frutti and rocky road.

  I really can’t say why I did it, since I have long subscribed to Tom Wolfe (the First) and his seminal dicta that “You can’t go home again,” but, flying in the face of good sense, I pushed open the heavy glass door. A wave of achingly familiar ancient aromas poured over me. Ice cream joints have a distinctive smell, a kind of vague, sweetish/sour that is as uniquely American as a Fenway Park hot dog.

  Great Scott, it’s shrunk! That measly little formica counter, those spindly stools. But, by God, it’s all here!

  A few acne-riddled youths were squatting at the far end of the counter. One wore a faded purple T-shirt imprinted with a giant insolent finger and bearing the inscription UP YOURS. I eased myself gingerly onto one of the familiar stools with its red imitation-leather padding. Of course, it had been slashed several times and its cotton guts were oozing outward, indicating that the ancient roving tribe of Vandals had left their mark, their universal barbaric yawp of pure malevolence.

  The heavy-jowled, white-aproned citizen behind the counter bellowed out at the acne victims:

  “Look, you birds, tone it down or I’ll kick your butts right out of here.”

  He swabbed a wet rag over the counter, glaring with the tired eye of a man whose life is truly spent at the end of his rope. There was something vaguely familiar about him. He wore a plastic igloo on his head, a white half-cantaloupe of imitation snow complete to the tunnel doorway, which extended out over his bulbous nose as a visor.

  The same stupid hat. I wonder if that’s the very one that Junior Kissel tried to steal one day and damn near got his arm broke. It can’t be.<
br />
  “Come on, Al. How ’bout a free scoop of marshmallow brickle?”

  “Look, you punk, I’ll give you a free scoop right where you don’t want it, y’hear?”

  He turned and moved toward me. I was about to enjoy, once again, the blessed fruits of the Igloo. The Igloo, a historic battleground fabled in local song and folklore, the site of one of the first decisive skirmishes of modern times between individual man and the faceless corporation. Agincourt, Waterloo, Omaha Beach–the Igloo.

  “What’ll you have, buddy?”

  His gray bb eyes peered out from under his festive igloo as he glared down at me with the customary truclence which is in this day and age standard treatment given to the rank and file. Our eyes met. He wavered. In a low voice, I greeted him.

  “Al, make it the regular.”

  I allowed a thin, ironic smile to play over my handsome, craggy features. For a long, pregnant moment our stares locked.

  “Jesus,” he hissed, “what the hell you doin’ here?”

  “The regular, Al.”

  “That’ll be a dip of pineapple and a dip of Dutch chocolate on a sugar cone, right?”

  “Right, Al. I’m glad to see that you have not forgotten the tastes of a true connoisseur.”

  “Look, buddy, you were here during the Great War. How could I forget?”

  “Yes, Al, I was. Those punks down at the end of the counter couldn’t imagine anything like it, right?”

  Al chuckled as he scooped deep into his ice cream vats. “Yep. But they heard of it. They teach ’em about it at the high school, in history.”

  “God, that sure was something …”

  It had all begun on a steamy hot day in July. It was a Friday, and there were none who suspected that this nondescript day would go down in legend. It was hot, really hot, as only Indiana can get when the sun hangs like a molten ball in the brass-colored skies, the air so thick that the clothes poles and drooping trees shimmered in your vision. The low, heavy bank of perpetual smoke from the steel mills ringed the horizon, and the air was ripe with the million rotting-egg smells of the refineries. Cicadas screamed, their cries dying out in exhaustion.

  We were playing a listless game of softball, just swatting the ball around and tossing it back and forth, not a real game but the kind you play when there’s nothing much else to do.

  “Come on, Schwartz. Quit hitting ’em in the stickers.” Flick gingerly poked around in the weeds, trying to find the ball amid the miserable sand burrs that made life in Indiana such a joy. These burrs are mean little buggers. They fester the skin and work their way up through the marrow of the bones, and they cover the sandy soil of Indiana like scratchy fur on a yellow Airedale. Flick casually tossed the ball to Schwartz, who was knocking out the flies for us to shag. He scooped it up and yelled in pain.

  “Ow! God dammit, Flick, take the stickers off the ball before you throw it!”

  He dropped the bat and began surgery on his injured mitt.

  And so the game went, if you could call it a game. An airplane droned painfully overhead, chopping through the thick atmosphere on its way toward Chicago. Half the county was out of work. They’re always having things called “slumps,” but the current one had gone on for years. The White Sox were in seventh place, forty-three games behind the Yankees. They were trailed only by the St. Louis Browns, but by a mere half-game. As Charles Dickens put it, it was not the best of times, nor was it the worst of times, but something sure as hell was about to happen.

  “Boy, am I thirsty. Wow. My tongue is hanging down around my knees. Boy, do I need a drink. Gaaahhh!” Kissel clutched at his throat and reeled around in the weeds, pretending that he was dying. Schwartz slammed a fast hopper at him and caught him neatly in the gut as he staggered about.

  “Come on, Kissel, quit horsing around,” I yelled. Kissel was the worst ballplayer for miles around. He tried to make up for it by clowning, but he wasn’t very good at that either. Kissel picked up the ball and awkwardly tossed it into the stickers back of Schwartz.

  “Y’throw like a girl, Kissel,” Schwartz hollered.

  This was, of course, a maximum insult.

  “Hey, Kissel, you’re horsin’ around, you go after the ball in the stickers.” Flick sailed a rock in the general direction of Kissel, who was now groveling in the dust pretending that he was dying of thirst. Schwartz fished the ball out of the sand burrs with the end of the bat and began golfing it around without picking it up, since it now looked like a porcupine about to strike. The field we were using was a semi-abandoned city ball park with a rickety chicken-wire backstop and barely discernible base lines.

  Thirst is a contagious disease. Kissel had started it; now all of our tongues were hanging out. Schwartz picked up a rock and said, “Let’s see if we can open the spigot.” The spigot was a mysterious pipe that stuck out of the ground a couple of inches, back of third base just outside the foul line. It had caused many a swollen ankle, and had never been known to be turned on.

  Schwartz banged on it with the bat, first on one side and then the other.

  “Come on, Schwartz, you’re tightening it.” Flick tried to grab the bat away from him. “You gotta hit it on the other side.”

  “How do you know so much?” Schwartz snarled. “You ain’t my boss.”

  We gathered around the faucet, some kicking, Kissel hammering with a derelict chunk of grandstand. Schwartz whacked it again with the Louisville Slugger, putting his back into it.

  S S S S S S S S S S S S!

  A silver spray of liquid arced fanlike into the air. We jumped back.

  “Boy, you got it, Schwartz!” Kissel leaped on the faucet and wrapped his mouth around the pipe, gulping frantically. He came up for air and again the crescent of water sprayed over us.

  “Oh, boy, is that good! Wow!” Kissel’s dripping face was contorted in ecstasy. Flick fell onto the faucet and gulped greedily. Each in his turn filled up our tanks.

  Five minutes later, our stomachs taut and sloshing, we wandered listlessly toward the far end of the field. Without a word being said, the game was over. Contentment had us in its silky, comforting grip.

  “Hey, there’s Clarence.” Schwartz waved the bat toward the chicken-wire fence. “Hey, Clarence, is there gonna be a ball game here tomorrow?” Flick hollered out.

  Clarence “worked for the city.” He was sort of in charge of the park, but he never came around much, spending most of his time at the Bluebird testing the Pabst Blue Ribbon to be sure it came up to city health standards. Clarence wore coveralls and drove a pickup truck with the seal of the city on its door, so he was a celebrity among the kids who hung around in the park.

  “Hey, you guys, was you guys foolin’ around with that spigot over there?”

  “Why, no, of course not, Clarence, what gave you that idea? Why, we were just having a bit of infield practice.” Flick, the resident smart-ass, was back at his trade.

  “Come on, I saw you guys drinkin’ out of that spigot. Lookit, it’s still squirtin’.”

  “C’mon, Clarence, we were thirsty. It’s really hot today.” I tried pure reason as a last resort. After all, there was no telling what Clarence could do, since he was Official.

  “Well”–Clarence shot a stream of tobacco juice into the stickers—“don’t come around and ask me for no sympathy when you start throwin’ up and heavin’ all over the place.”

  “What do you mean?” Kissel squeaked. His mother was a legendary hypochondriac who carried a shopping bag full of pills with her wherever she went. It was rumored that she sprayed Kissel himself with Lysol three times a day, and she had a deadly fear of something she called “germs.”

  Clarence threw his shovel into the back of the city pickup and clanged the tailgate shut.

  “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He squirted more juice into the weeds.

  “Come on, Clarence, stop the kidding.” Flick looked a little worried.

  “I ain’t kiddin’.” Clarence blew his nose loudly into a
blue-and-white bandanna. “That ain’t city water. That stuff is pumped right out of the river. It’s supposed to be used just for waterin’ the grass. There’s a sign over there on the tool shack, if you wanna know. That stuff’ll kill you.”

  Water out of the river! The river that moldered and festered its smelly way through the Region was so gooey and full of dead snakes that it wasn’t water at all, just a kind of brown ooze. Every chemical factory for miles around dumped stuff into it. It once caught fire, and the Fire Department had to come and squirt water into it to put it out.

  Clarence climbed into the cab and started the engine.

  “Don’t come cryin’ around to me when you’re dead.” He laughed nastily and roared off down the street, trailing a cloud of stickers and tobacco juice.

  There was a long moment of tremulous silence, broken only by the distant sound of someone beating a carpet.

  “He’s kiddin’. He’s always sayin’ that kind of stuff.” Schwartz had a funny sound in his voice.

  “Yeah” was all I could think to say.

  Flick kicked his tennis shoe against a curb. “He got tobacco juice on my new laces.”

  “Listen, you guys, don’t tell my mother. She’d go crazy. She won’t even let me drink out of the hose. She says there’s rubber in the hose and it could stop up your kidneys or something. Boy, she’s gonna kill me.”

  Schwartz laughed. “How could she kill you if you’re already dead from drinkin’ that water? When you’re layin’ there in the kitchen, turning green, and she comes in there and starts hollerin’, and you’re layin’ there …”

  Schwartz, as was true of all of us, was always ready with the needle.

  “Look, you guys, this ain’t funny. I never heard of anybody drinking water out of that crummy river. That ain’t even water!”

  Kissel spoke the truth. It was sobering. The sun was hanging low over the flat plains of Illinois to the west. Many a pioneer forefather had passed on into the Great Happy Hunting Grounds from drinking at the wrong water hole. All of us had seen enough cowboy movies to know what could happen.