A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  “Hey, Flick,” I yelled. I had spotted Flick going by, eating two cones at once; one a brilliant cascade of banana, raspberry royale, and maple walnut, the other a splendid mountain of rocky road, pistachio, and vanilla–a sight to bring tears to the eyes of any ice cream nut.

  “Hey, Flick, how ’bout a little river water to wash it down?” I yelled.

  He laughed, sending a spray of pistachio juice into the mob.

  “River water? What do you mean, river water?” my mother asked. She was now carrying her remaining shoe.

  “Nothin’,” I grunted, “I was just kiddin’.”

  “My God!” The guy in the engineer’s cap and suspenders, who was still just ahead of us in the line, lurched sideways as he struggled to cross the street again. I looked over at the Happy Cow, and couldn’t believe my eyes.

  3¢ 3-DIP!

  The Manager flicked his whitewash brush insolently toward the Igloo. Mr. Leggett, his mouth hanging open in astonishment, his eyes staring at the incredible “3¢,” seemed to shrink as the ungrateful herd charged out of his store. The immense, writhing human bullwhip thundered over Hohman Avenue, leaving in its wake shoes, a few broken crutches, smashed eyeglasses, the impedimentia of total war.

  The mood had changed dramatically from a sort of carnival gaiety to a grim, lurching, slit-eyed rapacity. Even my mother had a hawklike look on her face that I had never seen before. My kid brother snarled angrily. The old man hitched up his pants and stood in a slight crouch, his eyes slatey gray.

  Three-cent triple-dip ice cream cones, went through my mind, THREE CENTS! Where will it ever end?

  None of us in that vast throng were aware that the final act of war was fast approaching.

  Ice cream cones of all shapes, sizes, and colors were emerging from the Happy Cow, in an unbroken stream. The Manager coolly lounged under his death-defying “3.” He knew that there was no way that Mr. Leggett could top that one.

  In the silent Igloo, Mr. Leggett appeared to be huddling with his troops. Several helmets were cracked. One soda jerk wore a rough bandage on his shoulder. I recognized Al Symenski, a senior from my home room.

  We were now not more than ten or fifteen feet from our ice cream cones. We were so close to the battlefield that we could hear the clatter and bang, the squish squish of the corporation ice cream scoops doing their deadly work.

  “Mooooo, Mooooo, Moooo,” echoed up and down the main street as the crowd applauded wildly the concept of a three-cent triple-dip cone.

  We all knew, instinctively, that this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

  “He’s finished,” the old man laughed as he watched Mr. Leggett addressing his troops. We, all of us, were about to witness the single greatest act of human courage that most of us would ever see.

  High above us, the towering concrete Tessie had taken on an air of triumph. Her eyes, lit by blue winking light bulbs, gloated over the fallen Igloo. Mr. Leggett, his shoulders square, his face without expression, strode through his glass doors. He was carrying his paint brush. Quickly swabbing away the “7,” he fired his last shot.

  F-R-

  “Oh no!” the old man staggered against the bird in the engineer’s cap. They clung together. The crowd had fallen totally, eerily silent. It was like watching an execution by hanging.

  F-R-E-

  Somewhere a siren wailed as one of the wounded was carried off the battlefield. Before he could finish the last letter “E,” the multitude had grasped Mr. Leggett’s atom bomb. Mindless as an express train, dangerous as a maddened bull, the colossal, primitive animals who had once been human beings, with families, mortgages, used cars, and bad eyes, bellowed and stampeded in for the kill.

  Free! Triple-dip ice cream cones! All you want! The floodgates were opened. I saw my friend Al slam backward against the door of a freezer, his dipper loaded with rum raisin. Mr. Leggett stood quietly, his cash register now useless. After all, how can you ring up a free triple-dip cone?

  We were inside the Igloo now, amid the piglike grunts of the wallowing mob, the floors slippery with a rich patina of Dutch chocolate, cherry ripple, and strawberry sherbet. Mr. Leggett’s troops bravely dipped like automatons. No longer did flavors matter, or even cones. Balls of ice cream were dipped into clutching hands. It was a sickening scene of total debauch.

  Across the street, The Manager hung up the phone, his face grim; ashen. He appeared to have aged a decade or more. He took a long, defeated stare at the roistering Igloo.

  “FREE! FREE! FREE!” the mob screamed in the stifling heat.

  It was all over in moments. The lights went out in the Happy Cow; the doors were silently shuttered. The blue bulbs in Tessie’s eyes flickered weakly to darkness.

  For the rest of the night, Mr. Leggett and his brave band ladled out triple-dip cones until there was no more. The great primitive beast, now once again uncles and cousins, kids and old aunties, faded into the darkness. The Great Ice Cream War was over, but it would be remembered forever in the town, a story passed from generation to generation.

  The Happy Cow closed its doors two days later, never to reappear in the neighborhood. Mr. Leggett, a valiant warrior, never mentioned his stirring victory. In the tradition of all true heroes, he was a modest, silent man.

  Al loomed over me, an immense triple-dip masterpiece dripping in his paw.

  “That was some night. My shoulder still aches,” Al chuckled as I took my first delicious lick of Igloo ice cream. It was as good as ever.

  “Yep,” Al went on, “I used one of the old scoops from them days on that cone. Look at the size of that ball! The scoops we use today are like Ping-Pong balls, but for an old veteran of the Great War, who was really there, nothin’s too good.”

  Like two ancient survivors of Bull Run, we were both lost for a moment in silent reverie.

  “Yep, Mr. Leggett’s been gone for years,” Al said, “retired to St. Pete, plays shuffleboard every day. They tell me he ain’t been beaten in sixteen years.”

  “That sounds like him.” I took a lick of the rich Dutch chocolate. “Al, did he ever have a first name? He was always ‘Mr. Leggett’.”

  “Yep.” Al swabbed at the counter with his rag. “Ellsworth. Ellsworth Leggett. Worked for him till the day he retired, and fifteen minutes before he left the place for the last time he said, ‘Al, you can call me Ellsworth.’ ”

  “Ellsworth Leggett. Ellsworth.” I rolled the name over my tongue. “Got a good classical ring to it. A name that means business.”

  Al laughed and raised aloft his gleaming dipper. “Here’s to Ellsworth Leggett, the man who beat Tessie, the Happy Cow, at her own game.”

  “I’ll buy that.” I licked a bit of pineapple off my Omega.

  Some customers came in, laughing and hooting. Al moved to serve them. I rose to leave. It was getting late.

  “How much for the triple-dipper, Al?” I called out. Al, smiling under his gleaming Igloo helmet, said: “Are you kiddin’? The same price you paid for the last one I made for you.”

  I went through the doors and back to my rented tin can. It was growing dark. The first mosquitoes had shown up, but the ice cream tasted fine.

  The tunnel made its final jog. I knew that only a few hundred yards of struggling machinery stood between me and the open air, the sky, the sun.

  “Price wars,” I muttered. “It’s hard to believe they really had them.”

  The Shell station passed out NFL shot glasses, Mobil featured steak knives.

  “Holy Moley.”

  Those feckless undergraduates ahead in that smoking heap probably never heard of a price war, and would laugh if you told them that the Amoco station gave away free tea trays, for God’s sake. Tea trays!

  Another thought hit me. They charge you a buck fifty for going through this Tunnel of Love. The least they could do is put in a few trap doors that opened up, with skeletons rattling or spooky skulls or something to give you a little extra fun for the ride. Turn the job over to the Disney Company and people
would line up for hours just to go through the tunnel. They do anyway. But at least they wouldn’t hurl obscenities at the lady collecting the toll.

  Ah, you mad impetuous dreamer with a rose in your teeth. I was getting sullen and moody, as I often did at the end of a bad day, with the car reading 200 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. I sang a few snatches of my old high school fight song. It didn’t help. I tried my favorite Chevy commercial:

  “We go together, in the good old USA …

  Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie …

  and CHEVROLET!”

  The poor Pilgrim behind me was being held prisoner in a tired Impala that had what looked like cold sores around its grille. I hummed tunelessly. The light had changed subtly. The end of the tunnel was not far away.

  In a low, cracking voice I sang:

  “When Johnny comes marching home again …

  Hurrah, hurrah.

  We’ll give him a hearty welcome then …

  Hurrah, hurrah.

  The men will cheer, the boys will shout …

  The ladies, they will all turn out,

  And we’ll all feel gay …

  When Johnny comes marching home.”

  The Barbi Doll Celebrates New Year’s

  There was nothing to do now but just sit and wait for the whistles to blow, signaling the end of our army careers. The last minutes of a whole era in my life were slowly ticking away. A short, fat Pfc sat on a bunk across the aisle from us. He plucked continuously and nervously at imaginary lint on the GI blanket.

  “You guys gonna re-up?”

  His high, quavering voice didn’t fit his solid, potlike body. He wore the pale blue braid of the Infantry and the look in the eye of a man who had seen a lot of things that he wished he hadn’t.

  “Nah,” I answered. It hadn’t even occurred to me to re-enlist. The question surprised me.

  “I think I’m gonna,” the Pfc said to no one in particular, and went back to plucking at the lint.

  Whistles blew. We stampeded through the door and out into the cold for the last formation many of us would ever stand, a formation I had pictured in my mind a thousand times, through countless boring, mosquito-ridden, heat-rashed nights of the endless past. This was it! Already I could feel civilian life seeping into my being, a rising note of excitement. My God, I was getting out! From now on life was going to be so unbelievably great that already I could hardly stand it.

  We formed a neat column of twos, with the professional cool of veteran soldiers. A captain wearing the insignia of the Quartermaster Corps stood next to the master sergeant, who now cradled in his arms a stack of large, pale yellow folders. Every last one of us riveted our eyes on that treasure trove of precious papers. The captain calmly began reading names: last name, comma, first name, comma–initial, comma, rank, comma, army serial number. As each name was called the man stepped forward through the frigid air, and the sergeant handed him his papers.

  At last my name was called. I lurched forward, feeling as though I were floating over the ground. I felt the cold surface of the yellow folder in my hand, floated back into formation. Then everything seemed to happen fast, in a jerky way, like the shutter of a camera.

  The captain spoke: “Misters, I am pleased to be the first to call you ‘Mister.’ As of now, you are no longer under obligation to the United States Army.”

  He said this in a kind of official voice. He then went on, and his voice changed somehow:

  “Well, that’s it, you guys. There’s bus tickets and stuff to get you home in those envelopes. Have a ball. I wish I was getting out with you.”

  A ragged cheer broke out in the platoon.

  “Well, that’s it, as the captain said.” Gasser lit a cigarette. “Now for the Brave New World. We are reborn. We shall walk forever in shining glory and beauty.” He laughed sardonically and headed down the company street. I never saw Gasser again.

  Company K was now part of history. We had no proud, tattered regimental banner, no unit citations. All I had left to remind me of Company K, 3162nd Signal Air Warning Battalion was a pair of wire cutters I had stolen and which were now weighing down my back pocket and digging me sharply in the rump.

  I squatted on my bunk and loosened my scratchy GI tie. My B-bag was packed and ready to go, stuffed with worn suntans, an old pair of trusty PX shower clogs, an extra pair of GI shoes, a couple of sad souvenirs; a moldering compost heap of stained letters, petrified cookie crumbs, buttons, broken combs, extra stripes, a faded field jacket, and all the rest of the effluvia that sinks to the bottom of every soldier’s barracks bag, no matter what the war or army.

  Zynzmeister was carefully folding a shirt on the next bunk.

  “Do you realize, gentlemen, that a whole new life has begun?”

  Zynzmeister, Company K’s resident philosopher, was still getting in his licks.

  “Yes, it is an awesome thought.”

  He neatly folded a tie and tucked it inside the shirt.

  “I hope you are absorbing everything about you, since this is a historical occasion.”

  He paused dramatically. Faintly, in my mind, I could hear the sardonic voice of Gasser, who right about now would be saying, “Road apples!”

  “You know, Zynzmeister, I miss Gasser,” I said, scraping some snow off my shoes with a tent peg.

  “Never fear for Gasser,” Zynzmeister laughed, beginning to pack away his library, which had mystified Company K for many years. The reading material, by and large, in our late company ran heavily to tattered magazines composed largely of photographs of poorly clad young ladies, all extraordinarily developed in the mammary regions. Gasser once said you could tell a lot about a man by whether he called them “boobs,” “tits,” or “bosoms.”

  “Zynzmeister, do you remember the night Lieutenant Cherry blew his stack over Elkins and all those guys from the Motor Pool fighting it out over Ava Gardner’s boobs?”

  “Yes, I certainly do recall that deplorable incident. In fact, it will remain one of my fondest memories of Company K. Truly typical of the festive times that we all will cherish in years to come. Yes, I would certainly classify that night as a Golden Memory. Had I been Gasser, I would have vulgarly referred to it as a ‘Golden Mammary.’ But I’m glad I do not have that kind of mind. No, indeed.”

  “Why do you think Cherry got so mad?”

  “I have often wondered about that myself,” Zynzmeister answered, briskly tightening the drawstrings on his barracks bag. “I believe it stemmed from one important fact.” He paused to straighten his tie.

  “Yeah? What was that?” I asked.

  “It is my belief that Lieutenant Cherry was a desperate man, and on the night of the Bazoom Caper, became a bit overheated.”

  I had never thought of Lieutenant Cherry as particularly desperate. Chicken, yes. Desperate?

  “How do you mean, ‘desperate’?” I asked, as the wind rattled the eaves of the barracks and the unfamiliar, alien GIs with their strange patches and foreign braid nervously paced and twitched all around us.

  “It is obvious,” Zynzmeister continued as he carefully sat on the edge of his bunk so as not to blunt the crease of his ODs. “Consider, he was a company commander. Usually an exalted position. But Lieutenant Cherry commanded Company K.”

  “Yeah. I never thought of it that way.”

  We both sat for a while staring reflectively into our mutual past. Zynzmeister had opened up new vistas again. I mulled it over. It had been bad enough being in Company K, but commanding Company K must have been a special hell.

  “Yes, there were times when I felt profoundly moved by the plight of our brave lieutenant. The night of the Tumult Over the Tits was certainly one of them.”

  He carefully straightened his garrison cap, hoisted his barracks bag with the practiced ease of an old soldier, and stuck out his free hand.

  “Well, old friend, my comrade in arms, this is truly it.”

  “Yeah, Zynzmeister.”

  We shook hands.

  “W
e have survived, which is a lot more than many have done.” He shifted his B-bag to his other hand. “Have a good life. May your soldering iron always be hot,” he laughed. “My transport awaits.”

  “Good luck, Zynzmeister.”

  “Be careful,” he laughed again, and disappeared out the door. I knew I would never see him again, either. We had been through a lot together. Now it had all disappeared like smoke.

  Fifteen minutes later I was in the Greyhound station, with a one-way ticket, waiting for the bus to take me up north through the frozen cornfields and the icy used-car lots of midwinter Indiana. To kill time before my bus left, I hoisted up my bags and drifted in to the coffee shop. A waitress in a yellow apron came over and slid a menu to me, a sheet of faded blue mimeographed goodies featuring salmon loaf, a veal cutlet with tomato sauce, and pig-in-the-blanket, Indiana-style. The menu was encased in cracked and scratched celluloid.

  “What’ll you have, sol’jer?” she asked, staring vacantly over my head at a plastic Santa Claus that hung from a Pabst Blue Ribbon clock on the wall behind me.

  “Cheeseburger and coffee.”

  “You want cream inna coffee, sol’jer?”

  “Black. And I’m not in the Army.”

  “You’re what?” she asked, sticking her pencil into her shellacked blond hair.

  “I’m not in the Army.”

  “Howcome you’re wearin’ that uniform?”

  “I’ve been discharged.”

  “You honest ain’t in the Army?” She peered at me suspiciously.

  “Nope. I’ve been sprung.”

  “Tough luck, buddy,” she said, smiling evilly, showing a faint glint of a gold tooth. “That means you ain’t entitled to our serviceman’s free cuppa coffee. You gotta pay like everybody else, mister.”

  “Oh.”

  It was all I could think of to say. Civilian life was starting off great.

  Eventually the bus roared into the station, trailing clouds of blue diesel smoke. I got a seat near the back, over one of the wheels, naturally. The bus was packed with people going wherever people keep going on Greyhounds. A blue-jowled customer in a stiff black suit, wearing a white shirt with dirt on the collar, sat next to me, taking up both armrests. I squeezed next to the window, thinking, Dammit, it’s always my luck.