The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  Once they called him into the psychologist’s office and made my mother go over to the school and witness the tests they gave him. They showed him pages of paint blobs and asked him what he saw in them. “I see a spider, biting a woman’s lip,” he said. “That’s a sick, three-legged dog, eating grass.” Then they asked him to put pegs of various shapes into appropriate holes in a block of wood. He shoved all the wrong pegs in the wrong holes. Finally my mother smacked him in the back of the head, and then he and she started laughing hysterically. Throughout sixth grade, he incorporated something about Joe Mannygoats into all of his test answers, no matter the subject, and signed all yearbooks with that name. Still, he never failed a grade, and this gave me hope that I too would someday leave Southgate.

  My teacher for sixth grade was the fearsome Mr. Krapp. To borrow a phrase from Nan, “as God is my judge,” that was his name. He was a short guy with a big nose and a crew cut so flat you could land a helicopter on it. Jim had had him and told me he screamed a lot. My mother had diagnosed Krapp with a Napoleonic complex. “You know,” she said, “he’s a little general.” He assured us on the first day that he “wouldn’t stand for any of it.” The third time he repeated the phrase, Tim Caliban, who sat behind me, leaned forward and whispered, “He’d rather get down on all fours.” Krapp had big ears too, and he heard Tim, who he made get up in front of the classroom and repeat for everyone what he’d said. That day we all learned an important lesson in how not to laugh no matter how funny something is.

  School brought a great heaviness to the hours of my days as if they had put on new dungarees. By that year, though, it was business as usual, so I weathered it with a grim resignation. The only thing drastic that happened in that first week was on the way home one afternoon: Will Hickey, a kid with a bulging Adam’s apple and big, curly hair, challenged me to a fight. I tried to walk away, but before I knew what was going on, a bunch of kids surrounded us and Hickey started pushing me. The whirl of voices and faces, the evident danger, made me lightheaded and what little strength I had quickly evaporated. Mary was with me and she started crying. I was not popular and had no friends there to help me; instead everyone was cheering for me to get beat up.

  After a lot of shoving and name calling and me trying to back out of the circle and getting thrown into the middle again, he hit me once in the side of the head and I was dazed. Putting my hands up, I assumed the position I had seen on TV and when other kids fought, and he circled around me. I tried to follow his movements, but he darted in quickly and his bony knuckle split my lip. There was little pain, just an overwhelming sense of embarrassment, because I felt tears welling in the corners of my eyes.

  As Hickey came toward me again, I saw Jim pushing through the crowd. He came up behind Hickey, reached around, and grabbed him by the throat with one hand. In a second, Jim wrestled him to the ground where he proceeded to punch him again and again in the face. When Jim got up, blood was running from Hickey’s nose and he was quietly whimpering. All of the other kids had taken off. Jim lifted my book bag and handed it to me.

  “You’re such a pussy,” he said.

  “How?” was all I could manage, I was shaking so badly.

  “Mary ran home and told me,” he said.

  “Did you kill him?”

  He shrugged.

  Hickey lived, and his mother called our house that night complaining that Jim was dangerous, but Mary and I had already told our mother what had happened. I remember her telling Mrs. Hickey over the phone, “Well, you know, you play with fire, you’re liable to get burned.” When she hung up the phone, she flipped it the middle finger, and then told us she didn’t want us fighting anymore. She made Jim promise he would apologize to Hickey. “Sure,” he said, but later, when I asked him if he was really going to apologize, he said, “Yeah, I’m going to take him to Bermuda.”

  In reality, the start of school was an afterthought, because the prowler had surfaced twice again. The Graves’s teenage daughter, Marci, spotted him spotting her sitting on the toilet late one night. The Stutton kid, Kenny, who regularly proclaimed in school that he would someday be president, found the shadow man in their darkened garage, crouching in the corner behind the car when he went out there with the empty milk bottles after dinner. As he told Jim and me later when we went to talk to him about it, “He ran by me so fast, I didn’t see him, but his air was cold.”

  “What do you mean his air was cold?” asked Jim.

  “It smelled cold.”

  “Unlike yours?” said Jim.

  Kenny nodded.

  That evening, down in the cellar, Jim made tiny, red flags out of sewing needles and construction paper, and stuck them into the turf of Botch Town at all the spots where we knew the prowler had been. When he was done, we stepped back and he said, “I saw this on Dragnet once. Just the facts. It’s supposed to show the criminal’s plan.”

  “Do you see any plan?” I asked.

  “They’re all on our block,” he said, “but otherwise it’s just a mess.”

  Apparently, we weren’t the only ones concerned about the prowler, because somebody called the cops. Thursday afternoon, a police officer walked down the block, knocking on people’s doors, asking if they had seen anything suspicious at night or if they had heard someone in their backyard. When he got to our house, he spoke to Nan. As usual, Nan knew everything that happened on the street and she gave him an earful. We hid in the kitchen and listened, and in the process learned a tidbit we had been unaware of. It so happened that the Farleys had found human shit at the bottom of their swimming pool, as if someone had sat on the rim and dropped it.

  When the cop was getting ready to leave, Jim stepped out of hiding and told him we had a footprint we thought belonged to the prowler. He smiled at us and winked at Nan, but asked to see it. We led him back to the shed, and Jim went in and brought out the hatbox. He motioned for me to take the lid off and I did. The cop bent over and peered inside.

  “Nice job, fellas,” he said, and took the box with him, but later on, when I walked George around the block that night, I saw the pink cardboard, the poodle, and the Eiffel Tower jutting out of the Mardinellas’ open garbage can at the curb. I went over to it and peeked under the lid. The footprint was ruined, so I decided not to tell Jim.

  As George and I continued on our rounds, the autumn came. We were standing at the entrance to Southgate; there was a full moon, and suddenly a great burst of wind rushed by. The leaves of the trees at the boundary of the woods over beyond Sewer Pipe Hill rattled, some flying free of their branches in a dark swarm. Just like that, the temperature dropped, I realized the crickets had gone silent, and I smelled a trace of Halloween.

  Down the block a wind chime that had been silent all summer sounded its cowbell call, and I turned and looked over at the Fuscias’ house; the last one before the school. Their lighted window brought me a memory of their pet rabbit, Dibby, who had chewed through its wooden crate and then chewed a hole in the wall. It was never found and now either lived or died somewhere inside the darkness behind the walls of their house. Mrs. Farley had announced, at one of the wine-in-a-teacup afternoon gatherings of the ladies, presided over by Nan, that Amy Fuscia, who was in Mary’s grade, lived in fear that the creature would crawl out of the wall some night and seek revenge on her, and she wet her bed every night since its escape.

  I looked up at the stars and felt my mind start to wander, so I sat down at the curb and George sat next to me. That day in school they had herded us into the cafeteria and showed us a movie, The Long Way Home from School. It was about kids playing on the train tracks and getting killed by speeding trains or electrocuted on the third rail. The guy who spoke the stories looked like the father from Leave It to Beaver. He told one about kids thinking it was fun climbing onto train cars and running across the tops. Little did they know that the train was about to pull out, and when they showed it start to move, he said, “Oops, Johnny fell in between the cars and was crushed to death by tons of steel. It
’s not so much fun when you’re flat as a pancake.” After that came a scene of a kid shooting a slingshot at a moving train, that jumped right into another scene of a little girl on board in a passenger compartment with her hand covering her eye and blood dripping down across her face while the landscape rolled by. “Nice shooting, Cowboy,” the guy said.

  After the movie, they made us line up out in the hallway on our knees with our heads down and pressed into the angle where the floor met the wall. “Cover the back of your head by locking your fingers behind it. This will protect you from flying debris,” said Mr. Tary, the principal, as he rubbed his throat. He was always rubbing his throat. We were led to believe, without anyone coming right out and making the claim, that this maneuver on the floor would save us if the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on our town.

  My mother had told us if the air raid siren ever really went off, I was to get home. She and my father had devised a plan. The minute the siren sounded someone was supposed to shovel dirt into the window wells of the cellar and then get all the mattresses from the house and lay them out on the first floor to block the radiation from seeping down. At one time they had stocked a bunch of cans of food in the cellar and gallons of water with a drop of bleach in each one to keep them fresh. But as time went on, the supplies dwindled to a single can of Spam and a bottle of water that had gone green. As George and I got up and headed back, I daydreamed a Twilight Zone scenario of us projecting ourselves into the world of Botch Town to escape the horrible death of atomic bombs in the wider world.

  At home, the wine bottle sat on the kitchen counter, empty, and my mother had passed out on the couch. There was a cigarette between her fingers with an ash almost as long as a cigarette. Jim pointed it out to me. Then he went and got an ashtray that was half a giant clamshell we had found on the beach the previous summer, and Mary and I watched as he positioned it under the ash. He gave my mother’s wrist the slightest tap, and the ash dropped perfectly into the shell.

  I wedged a pillow under her head as Jim took her by the shoulders and laid her down more comfortably on the couch. Mary fetched the Sherlock Holmes. Jim opened it to “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” the story that obsessed her as a writer, and gently placed the volume, binding up, its wings open like those of a giant red moth, on her chest.

  We went next door to say goodnight to Nan and Pop.

  “Where’s your mother?” asked Nan.

  “She’s out cold,” said Jim.

  Nan’s lips did that kissing fish thing, in and out, that they did whenever she was about to try to trick you into ignoring the truth. I noticed it first that past summer on the day the ladies came over and she read the cards for them. The widow, old Mrs. Ripici, who lived by herself next to the Curdmeyers on the left, across the street, drew the ace of spades. Nan’s lips started going, and she quickly pulled the card from the table and claimed, “Misdeal.” There was a moment where the room went stone quiet and then, like someone flipped a switch, the ladies started chattering again.

  “Your mother works hard for you kids and she’s very tired,” Nan told us the night autumn came.

  Mary was always upset when my mother didn’t tuck her in at night, so to create a diversion, Pop brought out the band. He collected windup toys that played musical instruments, and he had seven of them. One was an Indian who beat a tom-tom, one, an elephant that blew a horn, a clown that played the tambourine, and more. He took out his mandolin, and Nan and Mary and Jim and I madly wound the toys to get them all ready to play at the same time, but at the same time could not let any of them start to unwind. Then Pop gave the signal and we released the keys at their backs. They banged and tooted and jangled away while he strummed and sang “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Somehow that crazy music blended together and it all sounded just right.

  The first Saturday morning after school started, I followed Pop around the yard, holding a colander, as he harvested the yield of the trees. Before he picked each piece of fruit, he’d take it lightly in his hand as if it were a live egg with the most fragile shell imaginable.

  As we moved from tree to tree, he told me things about them. “Never put a peach leaf near your mouth.” he said. “They’re poisonous.” Or when we came to the yellow apple tree: “This tree grew from seeds that no one sells anymore. It’s called Miter’s Sun, and I bought the sapling from an old coot who told me there were less than a dozen of them left in the world. It’s important to take care of it, because if it and the couple of others that remain die, it will be gone from the face of the Earth for all of eternity.” He picked a small, misshapen yellow apple from a branch, rubbed it on his shirt, and handed it to me. “Take a bite of that,” he said. From that ugly marble came a wonderful, sweet taste.

  We continued on to the plum tree, and he said to me, “I heard you were in a fight this week.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you want me to teach you how to box?” he asked.

  I thought about it for a while. “No,” I said, “I don’t like to fight.”

  He laughed so loud that the crow sitting on the TV antenna atop the house was frightened into flight. I felt embarrassed for a moment, but then he reached down and put his hand on my head. “Okay,” he said, and laughed more quietly.

  After retiring from the Big A, Aqueduct Race Track, where he had worked in the boiler room for years, Pop took up an interest in trees, especially ones that gave fruit. On our quarter-acre of property, he planted quite a few—a peach, a plum, three apple, a cherry, an ornamental crab apple, and something called a Smoke Bush that kept the mosquitoes away—and spent the summer months tending to them; spraying them for bugs, digging around their bases, pulling up saplings, getting rid of dead branches. I’d never seen him read a book about the subject or study it in any way, he just started one day the first week after he had left his job.

  I guess it was something he had done before at some point in his long life. Nan had shown us old, yellowing newspaper clippings from when he was a boxer and photographs of him standing on the deck of a ship with an underwater suit on and a metal diving helmet with a little window in it. Once when my parents thought I was asleep on the couch but I just had my eyes closed, I learned that he had spent time in a mental institution where they had given him electroshock therapy. Supposedly, when he was fifteen, his mother had sent him out around the corner for a loaf of bread. He went and joined the Merchant Marine, lying about his age, and returned home three years later, carrying the loaf of bread. When asked how his mother reacted, his answer was, “She beat the shit out of me.”

  He was powerfully built with a huge chest and wide shoulders. Even in old age, his biceps took three of my hands to fit around. Every once in a while, we’d ask to see his tattoos, vein-blue drawings he could make dance by flexing his muscle: a naked woman on his left forearm; an eagle on his chest; and a weird, fire-breathing dragon-dog, all curly cue fur and huge lantern eyes, on his back that he had gotten in Java from a man who used whale bone needles to render the design. He told Jim and me that the dog creature was named Chimto, and that it watched behind him for his enemies.

  The trees may have been Pop’s hobby, a way to fill up the hours of retirement, but his art and his love were the horses. He studied the Daily Telegraph, the horse paper, as if it were a sacred text. When he was done with it, the margins would be filled with the scribble of horses’ names, jockeys’ names, times, claiming purses, stacks of simple arithmetic, and strange symbols that looked like Chinese writing. Whatever it all stood for, it allowed him to pick a fairly high percentage of winners. There was one time when he went to the track and came home in a brand new car, and another when he won so much he took us all on vacation to Niagara Falls. Pop’s best friend was his bookie, Bill Pharo, and Pop drove over to Babylon to see him almost every day.

  Saturday afternoon, when my father returned home from work, he called us kids into the living room and made us sit before him on the love seat. My mother and he sat on the couch across the marble coffee t
able from us. Before they spoke, my mind raced back through the recent weeks to try to remember if we could be in trouble for something.

  All I could think of besides the incident with Hickey, which seemed to have blown over by then, was a night sometime before school started when we made a dummy out of old clothes—shirt and pants—stuffed with newspapers and held together with safety pins. The head was from a big, mildewed doll, an elephant stuffed with sawdust someone had won at a fair or the circus, that had been lying around in the cellar for as long as I could remember. We decapitated it, removed some of the sawdust, tied the neck in a knot, and pinned it to the collar of the shirt. The figure was crude, but we knew it would serve our purposes, especially in the dark and when people were driving in their cars. We got it out of the cellar unseen by lifting it through one of the windows into the backyard.

  We’d named our floppy elephant guy, Mr. Blah-blah, and tied a long length of fishing line around his chest under the arms of the shirt. We laid him at the curb on one side of the street and then doled out the fishing line over to the other side of the street and through the bottom of the hedges in front of the empty house that had, until recently, belonged to the Holsters. We knew it wouldn’t pay to do what we were planning in front of our own house, and the one we chose had the benefit of having a southern extension of the woods right behind it in the backyard. We could move along the trails in the pitch black and anyone who tried to chase us would have to turn back.