The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  Hiding behind the hedges, we waited until we saw the lights of a car coming down the street. Just when the car got close to where the hedges started, we reeled the bum in, pulling on the line, and in the dark he looked like he was crawling across the road in fits and starts, sort of like he’d already been hit once by a car.

  The car’s brakes screeched and it swerved, almost driving up on the curb and nearly hitting the telephone pole before it stopped. The instant I heard the brakes, I realized the whole thing was a big mistake. Jim and I ran like hell, bent in half to gain cover from the hedges. We stopped at the corner of the house, in the shadows.

  “If they come after us, run back and jump the stream, and I’ll meet you at the fork in the main path,” Jim whispered.

  I nodded.

  From where we stood, we had a good view of the car. I was relieved to see it was not one I recognized as belonging to one of our neighbors. It was an old model, from before I was born, shiny white, with a kind of bubble roof and fins that stuck up in the back like a pair of goal posts. The door creaked open and a man dressed in a long, white trench coat got out. It was too dark and we were too far away to see his features, but he came around the side of the car and obviously discovered Mr. Blah-blah in the road. He must have seen the fishing line, because he looked up and stared directly at us. Jim pulled me back deeper into the shadows. The man didn’t move for the longest time, but his face was pointing exactly at where we stood. My heart was pounding, and only Jim’s hand on the back of my shirt kept me from running. Finally, the man got back in the car and drove away. When we were sure the car was gone, we got Blah-blah and threw him back in the woods.

  My father cleared his throat, and I looked at Jim, who sat on the other side of Mary, and he looked at me, and I knew that his memory was stuffed with that mildewed elephant head.

  “We just wanted to tell you that we don’t think Aunt Laura is going to be with us much longer,” said my father. His elbows were on his knees and he was looking more at our feet than at us. He rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them.

  “You mean she’s going to die?” said Jim.

  “She’s very sick and weak. In a way, it will be a blessing,” said my mother. I could see the tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

  We nodded, but I was unsure if that was the right thing to do. That phrase, “a blessing,” stuck in my mind, and I wondered how dying could be a good thing. Then my father told us, “Okay, go and play.” Mary went over to where my mother was sitting and climbed into her lap. I left before the tears really started rolling.

  That afternoon, I took George and my notebook and we traveled far. When I started I felt the weight of a heavy thought in my head. I could feel it roosting, but when I tried to realize it, reach for it with my mind, it proved utterly illusive, like trying to catch a killifish in the shallows with your bare hands. On my way up to Higbee Lane, I witnessed a scene involving Mr. and Mrs. Wilson being screamed at by their ten-year-old tyrant son, Reggie; passed by Nick, the janitor from Southgate, who was fixing his car out in his driveway; saw the lumbering, moon-eyed Milton kid, Peter, big and slow as a mountain, riding a bike whose seat seemed to have disappeared up his ass.

  We crossed Higbee Lane and went down the street lined on both sides with giant sycamores; leaves gone yellow and brown. To the left of me was the farm, cows grazing in the field, to the right was a ploughed expanse of bare dirt where they had begun to frame a line of new houses. Beyond that another mile, down a hill, amidst a thicket of trees, next to the highway, we came to a stream I knew about where no one ever went.

  I sat with my back to an old telephone pole someone had dumped there and wrote up the neighbors I’d seen on my journey—told about how Mrs. Wilson had Reggie when she was forty-one; told about how the kids at school would try to fool Nick, who was Yugoslavian and didn’t speak English very well, and his response to them: “Boys, you are talking dogshit”; told about the weird redneck Miltons, who I had overheard described by Mrs. Kelty once as “incest from the hills.”

  When I was finished writing, I put my pencil in the notebook and drew George close to me. I petted his head and told him, “It’s gonna be okay.” The thought I’d been carrying finally broke through, and I saw a figure, like a human shadow, leaning over Aunt Laura’s bed in the otherwise empty room at St. Anselm’s and lifting her up. He held her to him, pressed her inside of him, into the dark, and then, like a bubble of ink bursting, vanished.

  That night, my mother, well into her bottle of wine, erupted, spewing anger and fear in loud, slurred tones. During these episodes, she was another person, and when they were done I could never remember what the particulars of her rage were, just that the experience seemed to suck the air out of the room and leave me unable to breathe. The image that came to my mind was of the evil queen gazing into her talking mirror, and I tried to rebuff it by conjuring the memory of a snowy day when I was little and she rode Jim and me to school on the sled, running as fast as she could. We laughed, she laughed, and the world was covered in white.

  We kids abandoned our father, leaving him to take the brunt of the attack. Jim fled down the cellar to lose himself in Botch Town. Mary went instantly Mickey, encircled herself with a whispered string of numbers for protection, and snuck next door to Nan’s house. As I headed up the stairs to the refuge of my own room, I heard the sound of a smack and then something skittered across the kitchen floor. I knew it was either my father’s glasses or his teeth, but I wasn’t going back to find out. While he sat there, stoically, waiting for the storm to pass, I shoved off with Perno Shell down the Amazon in search of El Dorado.

  Sometime later, just after Shell had taken a curare dart in the neck and paralysis was setting in, there was a knock on my door. I said to come in and Mary entered. She curled up at the bottom of my bed and lay there staring at me.

  “Hey,” I said, “want me to read you some people from my notebook?”

  She sat up and nodded.

  So I read her all the ones I had recently added, up to the Milton kid on his bike. I recounted my findings at a slow pace in order to kill time and allow her a long stint of the relief she found in the mental tabulation of my findings. When we finished, the house was silent.

  “Any winners in that bunch?” I asked.

  “Nick the janitor,” she said.

  “Go to bed now,” I told her.

  When she opened the door to leave, George was sitting there, waiting to accompany her to her room.

  Sunday morning, at the breakfast table, a phone call came in after we had pretty much finished eating and my father was recounting some of his stories from the army. I wondered if my mother’s assault the night before had put him in mind of other conflagrations. My mother, now light and smiling, as if suffering amnesia of her Mr. Hyde nature, answered the phone. When she hung up, she told us the news—Charlie Eddisson, who was in my class at Southgate, had gone out to play on Saturday afternoon and had never returned. At dinnertime, when he didn’t appear, his mother started to worry. When night fell and he still hadn’t gotten home, his father called the police. My mother said, “Either something has happened to him or he’s been abducted.” Nan’s lips moved in and out, and she said, “Maybe he’ll show up for lunch.”

  Charlie Eddisson was even more weak and meek than me. We’d had the same teachers all the way up from kindergarten. In class photographs, he came across as the runt of the collective litter. His arms were as thin as pipe cleaners, and he was short and skinny with a pencil neck and face that looked like Tommy the Turtle from the old cartoons. His glasses were so big, it was as if he had stolen them from his old man, and every time I tried to picture him, I’d see him pushing those huge specs up on the bridge of his nose with one extended finger. Charlie’s daily project was trying to achieve invisibility, because the meaner kids liked to pick on him. My feelings for him were ones of sympathy and also relief that he existed, since without him, those same kids would probably have been picking on
me.

  For gym, we had a teacher, Coach Cambell, who for some reason always had at least one hand in his sweat pants, and I’m not talking about the pockets. When it rained or the weather was too cold to go outside, we’d stay in the gym and play dodge ball. There were two teams, one on either side of the gym. You couldn’t cross the dividing line and you had to bean someone on the other side with one of those hard, red gym balls in order to get them out. If they managed to catch the ball, then you were out and had to sit on the side.

  One day, right before Christmas, Cambell got that glint in his eye and called for dodge ball. The usual game ensued, and Charlie managed to hide out and practice his powers of invisibility long enough so he was the last one left on his side of the line. On the other side of the line, the last one left was Jake Harweed. No one knew how many times he’d been left back, but it was certain he’d already been arrested once before he’d made it to fifth grade. His arm muscles were like smooth rocks and he had a tattoo he had given himself with a straight pin and India ink: the word Shit, scrawled across the calf of his left leg. When Cambell saw the final match-up, he blew the whistle and instituted a new rule: the two remaining players could go anywhere they wanted, the dividing line no longer mattered.

  Charlie had the ball, but Jake stalked toward him, unworried. Charlie threw it with all his might, but it just kind of floated on the air, and Jake grabbed it like he was picking an apple off a tree. That should have been the end of the game, but Cambell didn’t blow the whistle. Everyone in the gym started chanting Jake’s name. Then Jake wound up, and as he did, Charlie backed away until he was almost to the wall. He brought his hands up to cover his face. When it came, the ball hit him with such force in the chest it knocked the air out of him and slammed him backward so that his head hit the concrete wall. His glasses flew off, cracked in half on the hardwood floor, and he slumped down unconscious. An ambulance was called, and for that Christmas, Charlie got a broken rib.

  My father and Pop went out in the car to join the search for Charlie, and Jim and I hooked up George and headed for the woods to see if we could track him there. On the way, we passed a lot of parents and kids from the neighborhood either in their cars or on bikes out looking for him too.

  Jim told me, “He must have just gotten lost somewhere and couldn’t remember how to get home. You know Charlie.”

  I didn’t say anything as my imagination was spinning with images of myself lost, unable to find my way home, or worse, being tied up and taken away to a place where I would never see my parents or home again. I was frightened, and the only thing that prevented me from running back to the house, besides the daylight, was that we had George with us. My thoughts concerning recent events and the new terror I felt for poor Charlie’s situation eventually twined together behind my eyes, and I said, “Maybe the prowler took him.”

  We were, by then, at the entrance to the school, and Jim stopped walking. He turned and looked at me. “You know what?” he said. “You might be right.”

  “Do you think they thought of it?”

  “Of course,” he said, but I remembered the hatbox in the garbage can and had my doubts.

  Our tour of the woods was brief. It was a beautifully clear and cool day, the trees all turning red, but the idea that the prowler was now doing more than just looking kept us on edge. We only ventured in as far as the bend in the stream where the sassafras grew, before giving up. Once out from under the trees, we peered in the sewer pipe, inspected the basketball courts, gazed briefly down into the sump, and followed the perimeter of the fence around the schoolyard back to the entrance.

  “I have thirty cents,” said Jim. “You want to go to the deli and get a soda?”

  There were cops all over the neighborhood for the next week or so, interviewing people about the disappearance of Charlie Eddisson and trying to piece together what might have happened to him. The story was on the nightly news, and they showed a shot of Southgate in the report. It looked different in black and white, almost like some other school a kid would want to go to. Then they flashed a photo of Charlie, smiling, from behind his big glasses, and I had to look away, aware of what he’d been through since I’d known him.

  There had been honest grief over his absence and the anguish it caused his family, but at the end of the second week, the town started to slip into its old ways as if some strong current was pulling us back to normalcy. It distressed me, though I couldn’t so easily put my finger on the feeling then, how readily we were to leave Charlie behind and continue with the business of living. I can’t say I was any different. My mind turned to worrying about Krapp’s math homework and the tribulations of my own family. I suppose the investigation into Charlie’s disappearance continued, but it no longer involved the neighborhood at large.

  Even though the hubbub surrounding the tragedy was quickly receding, I’d still get a chill when, at school, I’d look over to Charlie’s place and see an empty chair, or when out on my bike, I’d pass by his mother, who had certainly lost her mind when losing her son. Every day she’d wander the neighborhood, traipsing through people’s backyards, inspecting the dumpsters behind the stores downtown, staggering along the railroad tracks. She had been one of the youngest mothers on the block, but the loss had drained her overnight and she became haggard; her blonde hair frizzed and her expression blank.

  In the evenings, she’d walk around to the schoolyard and stand by the playground, calling Charlie’s name. One night, as darkness came and we were sitting, eating dinner, my mother, quite a few glasses of sherry on her way to Bermuda, looked up and saw, through the front window, Mrs. Eddisson heading home from Southgate. She stopped talking and got up, walked through the living room and out the door. Jim and Mary and I went to the window to watch. She met Mrs. Eddisson in the street and said something to her. She then stepped closer and put her arms around the smaller woman and held her. They stood like that for a very long time, swaying slightly, until true night came, and every now and then my mother would lightly pat her back.

  Since it involved him going out in the early morning before the sun came up, Jim was made to quit his paper route, and certain precautions were taken as far as now locking the front and back door at night. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere off the block without another kid with us, and if I went to the woods, I’d have to get Jim to go with me. Still, I walked George by myself at night, and now had another specter lurking behind the bushes, along with Jimmy Bonnel, to contend with.

  On the first really cold night, near the end of September, the wind blowing dead leaves down the block, I went out with George and started around the bend toward the school. As we passed Mrs. Grimm’s darkened house, I heard a whisper: “Is that you?” The sudden sound of a voice made me jump and George gave a low growl. I looked over at the yard, and there, standing amidst the barren rosebushes, was Mrs. Eddisson dressed in white.

  “Charlie, is that you?” she said, and put her hand out toward me.

  The sudden sight of her there scared the hell out of me, and I turned, unable to answer, and ran as fast as I could back to the house. When I got home, my mother was asleep on the couch, so just to be near someone else I went down in the cellar to find Jim. He was there, sitting beneath the sun of Botch Town, fixing the roof on Mrs. Ripici’s house. On the other side of the stairs, Mickey and Sandy Graham and Sally O’Mally were working hard in Mrs. Harkmar’s class.

  “What do you want?” asked Jim.

  My heart was still beating fast, and I realized it wasn’t so much the sight of Mrs. Eddisson that had scared me, since we were used to her now popping up anywhere at just about any time, but it was the fact that she thought I was Charlie. I didn’t want to tell Jim what was wrong, as if to speak it would make the connection between me and the missing boy a real one.

  “I guess the prowler is gone now,” I said to him. There had been no reported sightings of him since Charlie’s disappearance. I scanned the board to find the shadow man’s figure, those painted eyes and st
raight-pin hands, and found him standing behind the Miltons’ shack of a place up near Higbee Lane.

  “He’s still around, I bet,” said Jim. “He’s laying low because of all the police on the block in the last couple weeks.”

  My eyes kept moving over the board as he spoke. Botch Town always drew me in. There was no glancing quickly at it. I followed Pine Avenue down from Higbee and around the corner. When I got to Mrs. Grimm’s house on the right side of the street, I was brought up short. Standing in her front yard was the clay figure of Mrs. Eddisson.

  “Hey,” I said, and leaned out over the board to point, “did you put her there?”

  “Why don’t you go do something,” he said.

  “Just tell me, did you put that there?”

  I knew he could tell from the tone of my voice that I wasn’t kidding.

  “No,” he said. “Why?”

  “’Cause I was just out with George, and that’s exactly where I saw her a few minutes ago.”

  “Maybe she walked over there after I turned the lights out last night,” said Jim.

  “Come on,” I said, “did you move her?”

  “I swear I didn’t touch her,” he said. “I haven’t moved any of them in a week.”

  We looked at each other, and out of the silence that followed, we heard, from the other side of the cellar, the voice of Mrs. Harkmar say, “Mickey, you have scored a 100 on your English test.”

  A few seconds passed and then I called out, “Hey, Mary, come here.”

  The voice of Sally O’Mally said, “I’ll have to do better next time.”

  Jim got up and took a step toward the stairs. “Mickey, we need you over here,” he said.

  A moment later, Mary came around the stairs and over to where we were standing.

  “I’m not going to be mad at you if you did, but did you touch any of the stuff in Botch Town?” he asked, smiling.

  “Could you possibly …?” she said in her Mickey voice.

  “Did you move Mrs. Eddisson, here?” I asked, and pointed to where the figure stood.