The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  She stepped up to the board and looked down at the town.

  “What do you think?” asked Jim, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.

  She stared intently and then nodded.

  The next day on the playground at school, I overheard Peter Milton telling Chris Hacket that there had been someone at his mother’s window the night before.

  “Who was it?” asked Chris. “Batman?”

  Peter thought for some time and then laughed so his whole giant body jiggled. “No, course not,” he said. “She thought she was lookin’ at a full moon, but then it was a face.”

  “What a dip,” said Chris.

  Peter thought just as long again, and then said, “Hey,” reaching out one of his man-sized hands for Chris’s throat. Hacket took off, though, running across the field, yelling, “Your mom’s got a fart for a brain.” Milton ran four steps and then either forgot why he was running or became winded.

  The minute I heard what Peter had said, I thought back to the board the previous night and remembered the shadow man’s pins scratching the back wall of the Miltons’ house. When I got home that afternoon, I told Jim and we went to find Mary. At first, she was nowhere to be found, but then we saw little clouds of smoke rising from the forsythias in the corner of the backyard. We went back there and crawled in to sit on either side of her.

  “How do you know where to put the people in Botch Town?” asked Jim.

  Mary flicked the ash off her cigarette exactly the way my mother did and said, “Ciphering the McGinn System.”

  “You’re handicapping them?” I asked.

  “From your Morning Line,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You read them to me,” she said.

  “My notebook?”

  She nodded.

  “A town full of horses,” said Jim.

  “It’s not a race,” I said.

  “Yes it is, in the numbers,” she said, staring ahead.

  “Do you figure it in your head or on paper?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  Mary stamped out her cigarette. We sat there quiet for a time, the wind blowing the branches of the bushes around us. Above, the dying leaves of the oak tree scraped together. I tried to understand what she was doing with the information I was giving her, but couldn’t stretch my imagination around it.

  “Where’s Charlie Eddisson?” asked Jim.

  “Gone,” said Mary.

  “But where does he belong on the board?”

  “I don’t know. You never read him to me,” she said.

  “I never read you his mother either,” I said.

  “I saw her,” said Mary. “Saw her on the street and saw her with Mommy.”

  For the next fifteen minutes we told her everything we knew about Charlie Eddisson; all of his trials and tribulations in school, what color bike he rode, what team insignia was on his baseball hat (the Cleveland Indians), and so on. She nodded as we fed her the information. When we were done, she said, “Goodbye, now,” and got up and left the forsythias.

  Jim started laughing. “It’s all luck,” he said. “There’s only so much space in Botch Town and if you place the figures down, they have to go somewhere. There’s a good chance you’ll get it right sometimes.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You think she’s Doctor Strange,” he said, and laughed so hard at me, I was convinced I’d been a fool. For my trouble, he gave me a Fonseca Pulverizer in the side muscle of my right arm that deadened it for a good five minutes. As he left me behind in the bushes, he called back, “You’ll believe anything.”

  In silent revenge, I thought back a few winters to the night when my parents told Jim and me that there was no Santa Claus. Just that afternoon, Jim had me next to him out in the backyard. The cellar had been off-limits since a week after Thanksgiving. We were lying on our stomachs in the snow, peering through the cellar window. “I see a bike,” said Jim. “Christ, I think I see Robot Commando.” But when my mother dropped the bomb that there was no Santa Claus after dinner, I was the one who simply nodded. Jim went to pieces. He sat down in the rocking chair by the front window, the snow falling in huge flakes outside in the dark, and he rocked and sobbed with his hands covering his face for the longest time.

  I left the bushes and went inside to dig around in the couch cushions for change. I found a nickel and decided to ride to the store and get a couple pieces of Bazooka. There was still an hour left before my mother got home from work and made dinner. The sun was already setting when I left the house. Night was coming sooner and sooner with each day, and I rode along wondering what I should be for Halloween. I took the back way to the store, down Jean Road, and wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on around me, when I suddenly woke up to the scent of a vaguely familiar aroma.

  A few feet in front of me, parked next to the curb of the sidewalk I rode along, was a white car. I knew I had seen it before, but couldn’t remember where right away. Only when I was next to it, and looked in the open passenger-side window to see a man sitting in the driver’s seat, did I remember. The fins, the bubble top, the old curved windshield—it was the car that had stopped the night we dragged Mr. Blah-blah across the street. As I passed by, the man inside, wearing a white trench coat and smoking a pipe, turned and stared at me. His hair was close cut, salt-and-pepper, his face, thin with a thin, sharp nose, and his eyes were squinted as if he was studying me.

  I panicked and took off. Behind me, I heard the car start up, and that pushed me to peddle even faster. I made it around the turn that led to the stores, but didn’t stop. Instead of heading left to the deli, I made a right on Higbee and rode all the way down to Pine and back home. When I almost got to the house, I was winded. Finally I stopped and turned around to see if he was still behind me. The street was empty all the way to the end, and night was only a few minutes away.

  I didn’t want to tell Jim about what had happened, because I knew he would laugh at me, but I couldn’t shake the memory of the way that guy had stared. It took a lot of effort to put him out of my mind. We had dinner and did our homework and went next door to listen to Pop play the mandolin, and only after a few hours was I able to forget him. When I went to bed, though, and opened the novel about Perno Shell in the Amazon, that face came floating back. Pipe smoke! The same exact scent that had made me look up during the bike ride, now emanated from the pages of my book.

  The next day, Pop had to drive over to the school and pick Mary up. She was running a high fever and feeling sick to her stomach. Something was definitely making the rounds at Southgate. When my class was in the library that afternoon, Johnny March, the boy who smelled like ass, puked without warning all over the giant dictionary old Mr. Rogers, the librarian, kept on a pedestal by the window. Johnny was escorted to the nurse’s office, and Nick the janitor was called in, pushing his barrel of red stuff and carrying a broom. I don’t know what that red stuff was, but in my imagination it was composed of grated pencil erasers and its special properties absorbed the sins of children. He used about two snow-shovels full in the library that day. As Nick disposed of the ruined dictionary, much to Mr. Rogers’s obvious sadness, he diagnosed the problem. “It must have been the black olives,” he said.

  Back in Krapp’s classroom, though, after library, Patricia Trepedino puked, and then after watching her, Felicia Barnes puked. Nick and his barrel of red stuff were in hot demand, because reports of more puking came in from all over the school, and his call of the black olives was obviously found to be an instance of his “talking dogshit.” Krapp was visibly shaken, his nostrils flaring, his eyes darting. After everything was cleaned up, a lingering vomit funk pervading the room, he opened all the windows and put on a filmstrip for us about the uses of fossil fuels, featuring a talking charcoal briquette. He sat in the last row in the dark, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief.

  When I got home, Doctor Geller was there. He had pulled the rocker over by t
he living room couch where Mary was sleeping wrapped in a blanket with a bed pillow under her head. A big steel pot we knew as “the puke bucket” was on the floor next to her. He opened his eyes and waved to me when I came through the door. He was smoking a cigar, which he took out of his mouth momentarily to put his finger to his lips and caution me to be quiet.

  Doctor Geller was everybody’s doctor in town. He was a heavy-set man, with a thick wave of black hair, a wide face, and glasses. I never saw him without his black suit on and his black bag sitting next to him or in his hand. He gave us kids all of our shots, choked us on flat sticks, rubber hammered our knees, listened to our hearts, and came when we were really sick and couldn’t make it to his office. When my mother first brought Mary, small and weak, home from the hospital, he came every day for a month to help her get used to administering a special medicine and to assure her our sister would live. It was not unusual to find him, morning or night, dozing for a few minutes in the living room rocking chair, his pocket watch in his hand. He was constantly tired, dark circles under his eyes, and always due at another sick neighbor’s house.

  Once, during a snowstorm, when it was impossible to drive, and my mother thought Jim was having an appendicitis attack because of the pains in his stomach, Geller came the half-mile from his office on foot, trudging through the snow. When the doctor discovered Jim only had a bad case of gas, he shook his head and laughed. Then he went next door to see Pop, with whom he shared an interest in the horses, had a glass of Old Grand-Dad and a cigar, and was off. I watched him through the front window when he left, the dark coming on and the snow still driving down.

  He didn’t stay long the day Mary was sick, but told Nan, who was in and out from her apartment, leaving the door open to listen, that he had another dozen kids to see, who all had the same thing. When he left, I sat at the end of the couch and watched cartoons on TV with the sound off. Just when I was about to get up and go outside, Mary opened her eyes. She was shivering slightly. Her mouth started to move and she mumbled something to me. I got up and went to the hall closet where the towels were kept. Taking a washrag, I wet it with cold water and placed it on her forehead. She grabbed my hand as I pulled it back and her eyes opened wide.

  “The boy,” she said. “He’s to show. I found him.” She pointed one finger down at the floor.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  She soon returned to a deep sleep and seemed to be more comfortable. I told Nan, who had come to the door every few minutes to check on Mary, that I was going outside. She came in then, her cleaning done, and took my place at the end of the couch. I went out into the yard and looked for something to do. Jim, I knew, would not be home soon, as he had joined the wrestling team and now took the late bus. In the middle of smacking the cherry tree trunk with an old, yellow whiffle-ball bat, it suddenly came to me what Mary was signaling.

  I ran back inside and went down into the cellar. Leaning out over Botch Town, I pulled the string for the bulb. I started at Higbee Lane and scanned down the block, looking for the clay figure of Charlie Eddisson. Mrs. Ryan was standing, round as a marble, in her front yard. Nick was turned, facing his house. Mr. Kelty was out of place, standing next to Mrs. Graves in the Graveses’ backyard. Mr. Stutton had fallen over in his driveway. I did find Mrs. Eddisson on her way down Pine Street toward the school, but didn’t see Charlie anywhere. Most of the characters usually just milled around by their houses, but Charlie was no longer there. I thought maybe Mary or Jim had taken him from the board because he was missing.

  I was about to turn the light out and give up my search when I finally saw him. All the way on the other side of the board, beyond the school field and the trees that represented the woods, his figure lay on its side, directly in the center of the glittering blue waters of the lake.

  Back upstairs, I put the leash on George and we were out the door in a second. Down the block and around the corner we went, moving quickly toward the school. It was getting late in the afternoon and the temperature had dropped. The woods were somewhat forbidding to me after Charlie had gone missing, and I wasn’t supposed to go in them alone, but I only hesitated for a moment before plunging in beneath the trees.

  We took the main trail, and ten minutes of fast walking later, stood at the edge of the lake. I’m not sure it was really a lake or just a very large pond, but I know that it was supposed to be very deep in places. All of the kids’ parents told them it was bottomless, whatever that meant, but the older I got the more I suspected it was a story concocted to keep us from swimming in it or trying to set sail on a raft. My father added to the story for us. He had said that the corpse of someone who had drowned in it once was found months later, floating over in the bay. In circumference the lake could easily have fit the entire structure of the school within its boundaries.

  Its surface was littered with fallen leaves, and in those places where just the water showed through, the reflection of the surrounding trees was scattered by the wind moving over its surface. It was so peaceful. I didn’t know what I expected to find, maybe a body floating out in the middle, but it merely looked as it always did in autumn. I stood there for quite a while, listening to acorns and twigs falling in the woods around me, until I started thinking about Charlie. An image of him resting lightly on his back at the bottom, his eyes wide, mouth open as if he were crying out, his hands reaching up for the last rays of sunlight that came in over the treetops, cutting the water and revealing the way through his murky nightmare back to the world, spooked me. The gathering dusk chased George and me down the path and back out of the woods.

  That night I woke from sleep, shivering. The wind was blowing and the antenna on the roof above my room vibrated with a high-pitched wail, like the very house was moaning. I made it to the bathroom, got sick, and staggered back to bed where I fell into feverish dreams—a tumbling whirl of images punctuated with scenes of the sewer pipe, the lake, the descending brick stairway at St. Anselm’s. Jimmy Bonnel paid me a visit. Charlie, his mother, the man in the white car, a pale face at the window, and Perno Shell himself chased me, befriended me, betrayed me, until it all suddenly stopped. I heard the birds singing and opened my eyes to see a hint of red through the window. There was a wet cloth on my forehead, and then I noticed the shadowy form of my father, sitting at the end of my bed, hunched forward, eyes closed, one hand lying atop the covers over my ankle. He must have felt me stir. “It’s okay,” he whispered, “I’m here. Go back to sleep.”

  Although the fever had broken, and I was feeling much better by nine o’clock in the morning, the virus bought me a day off from school. Mary didn’t go either, and my mother stayed home from work to take care of us. It was like the old days, before the drinking and the money trouble. Nan came in and we all sat for an hour after breakfast at the dining room table, playing cards: Old Maid and Casino. I had a great adventure with my plastic soldiers, which I hadn’t bothered with for months, on the windowsill in the living room while the brilliant, cold day shone in around me. We watched a mystery movie on TV with Peter Lorre as the sauerkraut-eating detective, Mr. Motto, and my mother made white spaghetti with butter.

  At around three o’clock, I lay back down on the couch and closed my eyes. Mary sat on the floor in the kitchen, putting together a puzzle, my mother sat in the rocker beside me and dozed. All was still save the murmur of the wind from outside making it sound as if the house was breathing.

  I thought back to when I was in fourth grade and had stayed out of school off and on for forty-five days. My mother wasn’t working then, and if I didn’t feel like going to school, she let me stay home. I had genuinely discovered reading that year, and I lay in bed much of the time, devouring one book after another: Jason and the Argonauts, Treasure Island, The Martian Chronicles, Charlotte’s Web, to name just a few of my favorites. It didn’t matter what type of story it was, the characters were more alive to me than all the students and teachers at Southgate.

  At lunchtime I would come out into the liv
ing room and she would make the spaghetti, and we would watch an old movie. I was the only fourth grader who could identify Paul Muni or Leslie Howard on sight. I loved the mystery movies, their plots and the sense of suspense. My favorites were the ones with the Thin Man, and my mother, of course, was partial to Basil Rathbone as Holmes. Mr. Tary threatened to keep me from passing fourth grade, but she went over to the school and told him I was passing, and I did.

  In remembering that year, I realized how different she was from other parents. That difference was like a light that always shone in the back of my mind no matter how dim things got when she’d drink the dark wine and become a vampire. She scared me and I hated what she became, but that light was like the promise of an eventual return to paradise. These memories protected me when suddenly I fell a thousand stories down into sleep. I didn’t struggle or abruptly awaken in the descent, but let myself go, my breathing copying the breathing of the house.

  I only woke from that peaceful nap of no dreams because Jim pried open my left eye with his thumb. “This one’s dead, Doctor,” he said. I came to and noticed twilight at the window, heard the sound of the wine bottle pinging the rim of a glass in the kitchen. The first thought I had was of Charlie at the bottom of the lake. Who could I tell that would believe what I thought I knew?

  After dinner, my mother put the Kingston Trio on the Victrola and sat at the dining room table drinking and reading the newspaper. Mary was in roller skates, going round and round, following the outer curve of the braided rug in the living room. Inside her orbit, Jim showed me some of his wrestling moves.

  “Could you possibly …” I heard my mother say, and then she called us over to her.

  Jim and I each went to one side of her chair. She pointed at a small photograph on the page. “Look who that is,” she said.

  I didn’t recognize him at first because he wasn’t wearing his paper hat, but Jim finally said, “Hey, it’s Softee.”