The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  Then that long, haggard face came into focus, and I could just about hear him say, What’ll it be, sweetheart?

  My mother told us that the news story was about him recently being arrested because he was wanted for child molestation in another state. For a while, they suspected him in the disappearance of Charlie Eddisson, but he was cleared of that suspicion.

  “What’s child molestation?” I asked.

  “It means he’s a creep,” said my mother, and turned the page.

  “He gave some kid a Special Softee,” said Jim.

  My mother lifted the paper and swung it at him, but he was too fast.

  “What’s the world coming to?” she said, and took a sip of wine.

  That night, I couldn’t get to sleep, partly because I had slept during the day and partly because my thoughts were full of all the dark things that had burrowed into my world. I pictured a specimen of Miter’s Sun fresh from the branch but riddled with wormholes. The antenna moaned in the wind, and it didn’t matter how close Perno Shell was to the golden streets of El Dorado, the aroma of pipe smoke made it impossible to concentrate on the book.

  I got up and went to my desk, opened the drawer, and took out the stack of Softee cards. The living vanilla-cone head now struck me as sinister; leering with that frozen smile. I took them over to the garbage pail and dropped them in. Back in bed, though, all I could think of was the one card that I had never owned. Unable to throw it out, bury it, burn it with the rest of the deck, those eyes gained an illusive power, and they watched me from inside my own head. They were Charlie’s drowned eyes, the eyes of the prowler, the eyes of the man in the white car, my mother’s eyes when the anger was upon her. I hunkered down under the covers and waited to hear my father come in from work.

  Instead, I heard a scream, Mary downstairs, and the sound of George barking. I jumped out of bed and took the steps. Jim was up in a flash, right behind me. When I got to her darkened room, she was sitting upright in bed with a terrified look on her face.

  “What?” said Jim.

  “Someone is outside,” she said. “There was a face at the window.”

  George snorted and growled.

  I felt someone right behind me and turned quickly. It was Nan, standing there in her quilted bathrobe and hairnet, holding a blackjack in her hand. The weapon—a slim sack of stitched leather, like a long, black teardrop, with lead sewn into it—had belonged to her first husband, who had been a motorcycle cop in New York City. She’d told me once that you could break bones with it and leave no bruises.

  Jim took George by the collar and led him to the kitchen. “Get ’em, George,” he said, and opened the back door. The dog ran out, growling. Mary, Nan, Jim, and I waited to hear if he caught anyone. After some time passed, Nan told us to stay put and went out, holding the blackjack at the ready. A few seconds later, she came back with George following her.

  “Whoever it was is gone,” she said. She sent Jim and me back to bed and told us she’d sit with Mary until our father got home. My mother had never even opened an eye, and as I passed by her bedroom, next to Mary’s, I saw her lying there, mouth open, the weight of Holmes holding her down.

  By the time I was in the kitchen the next morning, fixing a bowl of cereal, Jim had already been out in the backyard, studying the scene of the crime.

  “The ladder was up against the house,” he said.

  “Any footprints?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Your father is calling the police about it from work today,” said my mother from the dining room.

  Jim leaned in close to me and whispered, “We gotta catch this guy.”

  I nodded.

  I went to school, my head full of worry, only to learn a piece of information that almost made me laugh with joy. At recess, Tim Caliban told me that he had heard from his father that on the coming Saturday the police were going to dredge the lake for Charlie Eddisson. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. It was as if someone had read my mind, and not only that, they were doing something about it. I suppose it only made sense, given the circumstances of Charlie’s disappearance, but for me it was an enormous relief.

  That afternoon, Krapp announced that the police were going to be “searching” the lake for Charlie on Saturday, and they had asked him to make an announcement that no kids were allowed near the school field or in the woods. Part of our homework assignment was to tell our parents.

  “We’ll go into the woods behind the Hossetters’ house,” Jim said later that day after I’d told him. We were in his room, and he was supposed to be doing his homework. “The cops will have guys at the school field and maybe over on Minerva, but they probably won’t be that far into the woods. We’ll take the binoculars.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you imagine if they pull him out of the lake?” he said, staring at the floor as if he were seeing it before his eyes. “We’ll have to get up and go early.”

  I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see them dredge Charlie up, but I knew I had to go. “If they find him, does that mean he fell in or someone threw him in there?” I asked.

  “What do I look like, Sherlock Holmes?” he said.

  After that he gave me instructions to rig the ladder the next day after school. “Get two old soda cans and fill them with pebbles,” he said. “Tie one to one end of the ladder with fishing line and one to the other end the same way. If he comes at night and tries to take it, we’ll hear him, and let George out.”

  The week dragged in anticipation of the Saturday dredging. Mary sat with me the following afternoon as I worked at setting up the ladder. It lay along the fence on the right-hand side of the yard, near the clothesline. She had counted the number of pebbles I put into the first can and would not let me tie the second one on until I had evened up the number in that one.

  “Two more,” she said when I tried to add just one extra pebble and leave it at that. I looked over at her, and she lifted her hand. First the index finger came up and then, slowly, the thumb. I laughed and put the other two in.

  “So, Charlie’s in the lake,” I said as I tied the second can in place. I had not yet spoken to her about her Botch Town revelation.

  “He’ll be in the lake,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “He’ll be in the lake.”

  I went out on my bike looking for someone to write about and passed Mr. Barzita’s yard. He was such a quiet old man, I’d almost forgotten he lived on our block. There he was, though, raking leaves in his front yard. He lived alone since his wife had died back when I was only seven. His property was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and instead of going for the usual open lawn, he had long ago planted rows of fig trees, so that the front of his house was obscured by a small orchard. Even though he lived in solitude, rarely coming out of the front gate, he always smiled and waved to us kids when we rode by on our bikes, and he would come to the fence to talk to grown-ups.

  Mr. Barzita was one of those old people who seemed to be shrinking, and would eventually disappear instead of die of old age. During the winter, I never saw him, but in spring, he would emerge from his house shorter, more wizened than the year before. On the hottest days of the summer, he would sit in his chaise longue among the fig trees, sipping wine, holding a loaded pellet pistol in his lap. When the squirrels would invade his yard to get at the figs, he’d shoot them. In passing his house, if you yelled to him, “How many?” he’d hold whatever his kill was up by the tails.

  One Sunday when just my father and I were in the car, and we passed the old man’s house, I asked what he thought of Barzita killing the squirrels. My father shrugged. He told me, “That old man, he was in the medical corps in the army during the Second World War. At the place where he was stationed, a very remote mountain base in Europe, there was an outbreak of meningitis—a brain disease, very catching, very deadly. They asked for volunteers to take care of the sick. He volunteered. They put him and another guy in a locked room with fifteen
infected soldiers. When it was over, he was the only one who came out alive.”

  I tried to imagine what it must have been like in that room, the air stale with the last exhalations of the dying, but didn’t get very far.

  “A lot of these old farts you see scrabbling around town …” he said. “You’d be surprised.”

  Jim looked both ways up and down Pine to check for cars or anyone who might be watching, and then he and I ducked into the Hossetters’ driveway and behind the hedges. We ran around the side of the house, through the backyard, and down a slope that led to a branch of the stream. Jumping the stream, we moved in under the trees. It was a little before eight o’clock on Saturday morning. The sky was overcast and there was a cold breeze that occasionally gusted, lifting the dead leaves off the floor of the woods and loosing more from the branches above.

  We moved along the winding path to where it led back behind Southgate. Jim suggested we not take the most direct route that passed closest to the schoolyard, but that we arc out on the less used trail that went through the moss patches and the low scrub. He had Pop’s old binoculars around his neck, and he made me carry the Brownie camera. When we came to the split in the path, one direction leading away south toward the railroad tracks and one directly to the lake, he told me to move quietly and that if we got chased we should split up. He’d head for the tracks, and I was supposed to go back the way we came. I nodded and from that point on we only whispered.

  After jumping the snaking stream twice more, from mossy hillock to root bole, from sand bank to solid dirt, we came in view of the lake. Jim motioned for me to get down and I did.

  “The cops are there already,” he said. “We’ll have to crawl.”

  We made our way to within thirty yards of the southern bank of the lake, and moved in behind a fallen oak with some tall stickers forming a kind of blind between us and the view the police had. My heart was pounding, and my hands were shaking. Jim peeked up over the trunk and put the binoculars to his eyes.

  “It looks like they just got started,” he said. “There’s five guys. Two on the bank and three in a flat-bottom boat with a little electric motor.”

  I looked and saw what he had described. Coming off the back of the boat were two ropes attached to winches with hand cranks. The boat was moving along slowly, trolling the western side of the lake. Then I noticed that on the opposite bank there stood some of the neighbors. Mr. Eddisson was there, a big man with a bald head and a mustache. He wore his gas station uniform and stood, head down, arms folded across his chest. It was the first I’d seen of him since Charlie had gone missing. Beside him was his next-door neighbor, Mr. Gelimina. There were a few other people I didn’t recognize, but when one of them moved to the side, I caught sight of Krapp. There he stood, dressed in his usual short-sleeve white shirt and tie, his hairdo flatter than his personality.

  “Krapp’s here,” I whispered.

  Jim turned the binoculars to focus on the crowd I had been looking at. “Jeez, you’re right,” he said.

  “Wonder what he’s doing here?” I said.

  “I think he’s crying,” said Jim. “Yeah, he’s drying his eyes. Man, I always knew he was a big pussy.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but the thought of Krapp both showing up and crying struck me.

  Jim swung the binoculars back to see what the cops were doing. He reported to me that at the ends of those ropes they had these big steel hooks with four claws each. Every once in a while, they’d stop moving and reel them in by turning the hand cranks. He gave me an inventory of what they brought up—pieces of trees, the rusted handlebars of a bike, the partial skeleton of either a dog or fox … and it went on and on. They slowly covered the entire lake and then started again.

  “He’s not down there,” said Jim. “So much for Mary’s predictions.”

  I peered back over the fallen trunk and watched for a while, braver now that I probably wasn’t going to see Charlie. We sat there in the cold for two straight hours and I was starting to shiver. “Let’s go home,” I whispered.

  “Okay,” said Jim. “They’re almost done.” Still he sat watching, and our hiding and spying reminded me of the prowler.

  From out on the lake, one of the cops yelled, “Hold up, there’s something here.” I stuck my head up to watch. The cop started turning the crank, reeling in the rope. “Looks like clothing,” he called to the other cops on the bank. “Wait a second …” he said. He reeled more quickly then.

  Something broke the surface of the water near the back of the boat. It looked like a soggy body at first, but it was hard to tell. There were definitely pants and a shirt. Then the head came into view, big and gray, with a trunk.

  “Shit,” said Jim.

  “Mr. Blah-blah,” I whispered.

  “Hand me the camera,” said Jim. “I gotta get a picture of this.”

  He snapped it, handed me back the camera, and then motioned for me to follow him. We got down on all fours and crawled slowly away from the fallen tree. Once our escape was covered by enough trees and bushes, we got to our feet and ran like hell.

  We stood behind the Hossetters’ place, still in the cover of the woods, and worked to catch our breath.

  “Blah-blah,” said Jim, and laughed.

  “Did you put him in there?” I asked.

  “Blah,” he said, and shook his head. “Nah, Softee molested him and threw him in there.”

  “Get out,” I said.

  “Probably Stutton and his horrible dumpling sisters found him and took him to the lake. They’re always back here in the woods,” he said. “We should have had Mary predict where Mr. Blah-blah would be.”

  “But then where’s Charlie?” I asked.

  He brushed past me and jumped the stream.

  I followed him across the stream and stayed close as we moved through the backyard and around the house to the street.

  When we arrived home, I was relieved to find that my mother wasn’t sitting at the dining room table. We had a chance to stash the camera and binoculars. The door to Nan’s was open. I could hear Pop in their figuring his system out loud and, without looking, knew Mary was beside him. Jim took our spying implements upstairs, and I walked down the hallway toward my parents’ room to see if my mother was up yet. She wasn’t in her bed, but when I passed by the bathroom door, I heard her in there retching.

  I knocked once. “Are you okay?” I called.

  “I’ll be right out,” she said.

  It had been obvious since the start of the school year that Mr. Rogers, the librarian, had been losing his mind. During his lunch break, when we were usually laboring over math in Krapp’s class, the old man would be out on the baseball diamond, walking the bases in his rumpled suit, hunched over, talking to himself, as if he were reliving some game from the distant past. That loose dirt that collected around the bases, the soft brown powder that Stinky Steinmacher ate with a spoon, would lift up in a strong wind, circling around Rogers, and he’d clap as if the natural commotion was really the roar of the crowd. Krapp would look over his shoulder from where he stood at the blackboard and see us all staring out the window, shake his head, and then go and lower the blinds.

  The loss of his giant dictionary seemed to be the last straw for Rogers, as if it was an anchor that kept him from floating away. With that gone, as my father would say, “He dipped out.” Each week we would be delivered to the library by Krapp and spend a half-hour there with Rogers. Of late, the old man had been smiling a lot like a dog on a hot day, and his eyes were always busy, shifting back and forth. Sometimes he’d stand for minutes on end, staring into a beam of light shining in through the window, and sometimes he’d be frantic, moving here and there, pulling books off the shelves and shoving them into kids’ hands.

  Jake Harweed was brutal to him, making hand motions behind the librarian’s back, coaxing everyone to laugh (and you had to laugh if Jake wanted you to). Jake would knock books off the shelf onto the floor and just leave them there. For Rogers to see
a book on the floor was a heart-rending experience, and one day Harweed had him nearly in tears. I secretly liked Rogers, because he loved books and had a sense that there was something alive in them between the covers, but I couldn’t let on that I wished the others would just leave him alone. Still, he was beginning to put even me off with his weirdness.

  On the Monday morning following the dredging, we had library. Rogers sat in his little office nearly the entire time we were there, bent over his desk with his face in his hands. Harweed started the rumor that he kept Playboy magazines in there. When the time was almost up, he came out to stamp the books kids had chosen. Before he sat down at the table with his stamp, he walked up behind where I was standing, put one hand on my shoulder, and then reached up over my head to the top shelf where he pulled a thin volume from the row.

  “You’ll need this,” he said, and handed it to me. He walked away to the table then, the kids lined up with their selections, and he began stamping them.

  I looked down at the book he had handed me. On the cover, behind the library plastic, was a drawing of a mean-looking black dog. Above the creature in two rows of words, yellow letters made of lines like saber blades, was the title: The Hound of the Baskervilles. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I never got the chance. News spread quickly through the school the next day that he had been fired because he was so old he went nuts. Having the Baskervilles in my possession was, at first, an unsettling experience. It felt like I had taken some personal belonging of my mother’s, just as if I had appropriated my father’s watch or Nan’s hairnet. The book itself had an aura of power around it that prevented me from simply opening the cover and beginning. I hid it in my room, between the mattress and box spring of the bed. For the next few days, I’d take it out every now and then and hold it, look at the cover, gingerly flip the pages. Although by this time my mother only used the big, red volume of The Complete Sherlock Holmes as an anvil in her sleep, there was a time when she had avidly read it over and over. She read a wide range of other books as well, everything from Tchaikovsky’s Letters To His Family to The Naked Ape, but always returned to detective stories. She loved them in every form, and before we went broke, spent Sunday mornings consuming five cups of coffee and a dozen cigarettes, solving the mystery of the New York Times crossword puzzle.