The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  Painting, playing the guitar, making bizarre collages were mere hobbies compared to my mother’s desire to be a mystery writer. Before work became a necessity for her, she’d sit at the dining room table all afternoon, the old typewriter in front of her, composing her own mystery novel. I remembered her having read me some of it. The title was Something by the Sea, and it involved her detective Milo, a farting dog, a blind heiress, and a stringed instrument to be played with different colored glass tubes that fit over one’s fingers. Something by the Sea was the name of the resort where the story took place. All the while she wrote it, she kept Holmes by her side, opened to “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

  My fear of starting the library book lasted nearly a week until one night at dinner when my mother told a story about a friend of hers when she was younger. From the state she was in, I was sure her conversation was headed directly toward Bermuda but instead it veered off into an odd detour about Kenny Boucher. He was a boy in her class in grade school, and he stuttered and was very timid, but she involved him as a co-conspirator in all of her evil plots. One was the distribution of Ex-Lax to the kids in the neighborhood under the false claim that it was free chocolate. “It was a shit storm,” she said, laughing into her wine.

  Another had to do with a giant box they had found at the curb on junk day. They cut a little door out of it and then strung the inside with wads of chewed gum that they stretched into spider webs. When their work was done, they invited friends to enter their clubhouse. Kids emerged covered in gum, their clothes ruined, their hair matted with it.

  When Jim and I asked to hear more of her adventures with Kenny Boucher, she shook her head and looked sad. “He died,” she said. “He had this disease called Saint Vitus Dance that would make him spin around out of control every once in a while. He had an attack of it one day, fell down in the street, and drowned in a puddle before anyone found him.” She fell into a sullen silence and said nothing else for the rest of the night until she sent us to bed.

  Upstairs, I thought about the affect her memory had on her and realized that maybe there was something in The Hound of the Baskervilles that could tell me a secret about her. I passed up Perno Shell and pulled the book out from under the mattress. That night I stayed up late and read the first few chapters. In them I met Holmes and Watson. The book was not hard to read. I was used to the British voice in it as my father, when we were younger, read us a lot of books by Kipling and Rider Haggard. I was interested in the story, and liked the character of Watson very much, but Holmes was something else.

  The great detective came across to me like a snob, the type my father once described as “believing the sun rose and set from his asshole.” The picture of him in my mind was something like a mix between Perno Shell and Phineas Fogg, but his personality was pure Krapp. When told about the demon hound, Holmes replied that it was an interesting story for those who believed in fairy tales. He was obviously, “not standing for it.” Still, I was intrigued by his voluminous smoking and the fact that he played the violin.

  The days sank deeper into autumn, rotten to their cores with twilight. The bright warmth of the sun only lasted about as long as we were in school, and then once we were home, an hour later, the world was briefly submerged in a rich, golden aura, a honey glow, that was both beautiful and sad, gilding everything, from the barren branches of willows to the old wreck of a Pontiac parked alongside the Miltons’ garage. A minute after that, the tide turned, the sun suddenly appeared a distant star, and in rolled a dim gray wave of neither here nor there that seemed to last a week each day, its shadows enhanced by our steamy exhalations and the smoke of burning leaves.

  The wind of this in-between time made me always want to curl up inside a memory and sleep with eyes open. Dead leaves rolled across lawns, scraped along the street, quietly tapped the windows. Jack-o’-lanterns with luminous triangle eyes and jagged smiles turned up on front steps and in windows. Rattle-dry cornstalks bore half-eaten ears of brown and blue kernels like teeth gone bad, as if they had eaten themselves, the way kids wore and then chewed the ultimately unsatisfying licorice/root beer gunk of wax teeth. Scarecrows hung from lawn lampposts or stoop railings, listing forward, disjointed and drunk, dressed in the rumpled plaid shirts of long-gone grandfathers and jeans tied up with a length of rope. In the true dark, when walking George after dinner, these shadow figures often startled me when their stitched and painted faces took on the features of Charlie Eddisson or Jimmy Bonnel.

  Halloween was close, our favorite holiday because it carried none of the pain-in-the-ass holiness of Christmas and still there was free candy. The excitement of it crowded all problems to the side. The prowler, Charlie, school work were overwhelmed by hours of decision as to what we would be for that one night—something or someone who wasn’t us, but who we wished to be, which I suppose ended up being us in some way. I could already taste the candy corn and feel my teeth aching. My father had given me a dollar and with it I’d bought a molded plastic skeleton mask that smelled like fresh BO and made my cheeks sweat.

  At the time, the only thought I had about that leering bone face was that it was cool as hell, but maybe, in the back of my mind, I was thinking of all those eyes out there trying to look into me, and it was a good disguise because it let them think they were seeing deep under my skin even though it was only an illusion. I showed the mask to Jim, and he told me, “This is the last year you can wear a costume. You’re getting too old. Next year you’ll have to go as a bum.” All the older kids went around trick-or-treating as bums—a little charcoal on the face and some ripped up, baggy clothes.

  Mary decided she would be the jockey, Willie Shoemaker. She modeled her outfit for Jim and me one night. It consisted of baggy pants tucked into a pair of white go-go boots, a baseball cap, a baggy, patchwork shirt, and a piece of thin curtain rod for a jockey’s whip. She walked past us once and then looked over her shoulder. In the high nasal voice of the TV race announcer, she said, “And they’re off …” We clapped for her, but the second she turned away again, Jim raised his eyebrows and whispered, “And it’s Cabbage by a head.”

  Then, only three days from the blessed event, Krapp threw a wet blanket on my daydreams of roaming the neighborhood by moonlight, gathering, door-to-door, a Santa sack of candy, turning the joyous sparks of my imagination to smoke, which leaked out my ears and mixed with the twilight. He assigned a major report that was to be handed in the day after Halloween. Each of us in the class was given a different country, and we had to write a five-page report about it. Krapp presented me with Greece, as if he were dropping a steaming turd into my open Halloween sack.

  I should have gotten started that afternoon when school let out, but instead I just sat in my room staring out the window. When Jim got home from wrestling, he came into my room and found me still sitting there like a zombie. I told him about the report.

  “You’re going to be doing it on Halloween if you don’t get started,” he said. “Here’s what you do. Tomorrow, right after school, ride down to the library. Get the G volume of the encyclopedia, open it to Greece, and just copy what they have there. Write big, but not too big or he’ll be on to you. If it doesn’t look like what’s written there will fill five pages, add words to the sentences. If the sentence says, ‘The population of Greece is one million,’ instead you write like, ‘There are approximately one million Greeks in Greece. As you can see, there are many, many Grecians.’ You get it? Use long words like ‘approximately’ and say stuff more than once in different ways.”

  “Krapp warned us about plagiarism, though,” I said.

  Jim made a face. “What’s he gonna do, go read the encyclopedia for every paper?”

  The next afternoon I was in the public library, copying from the G volume. With the exception of the fact that it said the people there ate goat cheese, none of the information in the book got into my head, as I had become merely a writing machine, dashing down one word after the next. The further I got into the report, the
harder it was to concentrate. My mind wandered for long stretches at a time and I stared at the design of the weave in my balled up sweater that lay on the table in front of me. Then I’d look over at the window and see that the twilight was giving way to night. I was determined to finish even if I got yelled at for coming home late for dinner. When I hit the fourth page, I could tell the information in the encyclopedia was running out, and so I started adding filler the way Jim described. The last page and a half of my report was based on about five sentences from the book and was infused with so much hot air I thought it would float away.

  I didn’t know how late it was when I finished, but I was so relieved I began to sweat. I rolled up the five written pages and shoved them in my back pocket. Closing the big, green tome, I lifted it and took it back in the stacks to reshelve it. As I was coming out of the stacks, I suddenly remembered my sweater and pencil and looked over at the table by the magazine section where I’d been working. Sitting there in my chair was the man in the white trench coat. My heart instantly began pounding. I was stunned for a second, but as soon as I came to, I ducked out of the aisle in behind the row of shelves to my right.

  I raced down the row, and, once in the middle, pulled a book off the third shelf from the top and then reached through and pushed the books on the other side over so I could see what he was doing. He was sitting there, reading a magazine, or pretending to. Every couple of seconds he looked up and turned to scan the library. The woman who’d been reading the newspaper in one of the big chairs while I finished the last pages of my report, got up, laid the paper down on the table, and walked away. The man in the white trench coat looked around and, seeing no one near him, lifted my balled up sweater and sniffed it. His beady eyes closed and his head cocked back a bit as if my sweater funk was crumb cake day at McGill’s Bakery. A shiver ran through me. Still clutching it in his hand, he stood up and started heading for me.

  I ran down to the center aisle and made for the back of the stacks. I was pretty sure that when he came looking for me, he would head up the center aisle so that he could look down each row. Once I reached the back wall, I moved all the way along it to the side of the building that held the front door. Checking my pocket, I touched the rolled up report. I didn’t care about leaving the sweater and pencil behind. I waited, while in my mind I pictured him walking slowly toward me, peering down each row. My breathing was shallow, and I didn’t know if I would have the power to scream if he somehow cornered me. Then I saw the sleeve of his trench coat, the sneaker of his left foot, before he came fully into view, and I bolted.

  I was down the side aisle and out the front door in a flash. I knew that whereas a kid might run in a library, an adult would be expected not to, which might give me a few extra seconds. Outside, I sprinted around to the side of the building where my bike was chained up. Whatever time I saved was spent fumbling with the lock. Just when I had the bike free and got my ass on the seat, I saw him coming around the side of the building. My only route to Higbee was now cut off. Instead of trying to ride around him, I turned and headed back behind the library, into the woods that led to the railroad tracks.

  I carried my bike over the tracks in the dark, listening to the deadly hum of electricity coursing through the third rail and watching both ways for the light of a train in the distance. Although the wind was cold, I was sweating, trying not to lose my balance on the dew-covered wooden ties. All the time I cautiously navigated, grim scenes from The Long Way Home from School played in my memory. At any second, I expected to feel upon my shoulder the bony hand of the man in the white coat.

  On the other side of the tracks there was another narrow barrier of woods, and I searched along it, walking my bike, until I found a path. I wasn’t actually sure what street it would lead me to since I had never gone that way before. We occasionally crossed back and forth over the tracks, but always in daylight and always over on the other side of town behind the woods that started at the schoolyard. This was uncharted territory for me.

  I walked clear of the trees onto a road that didn’t seem to have any houses. My mind was a jumble, and I was on the verge of tears, but I controlled myself by trying to think through where I was in relation to the library and home. I had an idea I was west of Higbee and just had to follow that street around to find the main road. Getting on my bike, I started off, following my best guess.

  No sooner had I pedaled twenty feet before I saw, way up ahead, the lights of a car that had just turned onto the street. It was moving slowly, and I immediately feared it was the man in the white coat, searching for me. At the same time that I saw the car coming toward me, I noticed there was another one parked on the right-hand side only a few more feet up the road. I would have taken to the woods, but there was no path immediately there and it was too dark to find one. Once off my bike, I gave it a good shove and it wheeled into the tall grass and bushes and fell over, pretty well covered from sight. I got low and ran up to hide close against the side of the parked car, which was an old station wagon with wood paneling like our next door neighbor’s, Mr. Kelty’s.

  The headlights of the car approaching drew slowly closer, and the low speed that it traveled at could easily have been an indication that the driver was looking for something or someone. By the time it passed the parked car I was hiding behind, I was hunkered down, my hands covering my head air-raid style, my right leg off the curb and under the station wagon. The vehicle moved very slowly by and then picked up speed, almost disappearing around the bend at the opposite end of the road before I could get a look at it. No mistaking, though, I saw the fins of the old white car. I wasn’t sure whether to sit tight in case the stranger reached a dead end somewhere and came back or get on my bike and make a run for it.

  Then I felt the car I was next to begin to gently rock. From inside there came a muffled moan. I lifted my head up carefully and peered in the window. Only then did I notice that the glass of all the windows was fogged over. It was dark inside, but the dashboard was glowing. I found a small spot where the glass was clear. Lying on the wide front seat was Mrs. Graves, her blouse open, one big, pale breast visible in the shadows, and one bare leg wrapped around the back of a small man. After observing his grease-slicked hair and flapping ears I didn’t have to see his face to know that it was Mr. Kelty.

  I ran over to where my bike had fallen in the weeds and lifted it. In a second I was on it and peddling like a maniac up the street.

  As it turned out, I found Higbee and made it back to the house safely, never seeing the white car along my way. When I pulled up in the front yard, I knew I was late and would get yelled at, perhaps sent to my room. Luckily, through all of the turmoil, my report on Greece still stuck out of my back pocket, and my hope was that this document could be used as proof that I wasn’t just goofing off. I was sweating and dirty from kneeling in the road next to the car. When I opened the front door, and stepped into the warmth of the living room, I remembered that I had left my sweater at the library and had not concocted an excuse for its absence.

  The house was unusually quiet, and I was inside no more than a few seconds when I could feel something wasn’t normal. The light in the dining room, where my mother usually sat drinking in the evenings, was off. The kitchen was also dark. I walked over and knocked on Nan’s door. She opened it, and the aroma of fried pork chops came wafting out around us. Her hairnet was in place and she wore her yellow quilted bathrobe.

  “You’re mother’s gone to bed already,” she said.

  I knew what she meant by this and pictured the empty bottle in the kitchen garbage.

  “She told me to give you a kiss, though,” she said. She came close and gave me one of those protracted Nan kisses that sounded like air escaping from the pulled-taut, wet mouthpiece of a balloon. “Jim told me you were at the library doing your homework. I left food for you in the oven.”

  And that was it. She went back into her house and closed the door. Like my father, I was left to get my own dinner, alone. It was all
too quiet, too stark. I sat in the dining room by myself and ate. Nan wasn’t a much better cook than my mother. Every dinner she made had some form of cabbage in it. Only George happened by while I sat there. I cut him a piece of meat and he looked up at me as if wondering why I hadn’t taken him out yet.

  When I had finished eating and put my plate in the kitchen sink, Jim came down from upstairs.

  “Did you get your paper finished?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Let me see it,” he said, and held his hand out.

  I pulled it out of my back pocket and handed the rolled up pages to him.

  “You shouldn’t have bent it all up. What was your country again?” he said, sitting down at the dining room table in my mother’s chair.

  “Greece.”

  He read through it really quickly, obviously skipping half the words. When he got to the end, he said, “This last page is a hundred percent double talk. Nice work.”

  “The Greece part in the encyclopedia ran out,” I said.

  “You stretched it like Mrs. Ryan’s underwear,” he said. “There’s only one thing left to do. You gotta spice it up a little for the big grade.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Let’s see,” he said, and went back through it. “It says the exports are cheese, tobacco, olives, and cotton. I saw a kid do this thing once for a paper and the teacher loved it. He taped samples of the exports onto a sheet of paper. We’ve got all these things. Get me a blank sheet of paper and the tape.”

  Jim went to the refrigerator and took out a slice of cheese and the bottle of olives. I fetched the tape for him, and then he told me to get a copy of a magazine and start looking for a picture about Greece in it for the cover of the report. Fifteen minutes later, as I sat paging through an old issue of Life, he turned the sheet of paper he had been working on around to show me.