Ice-Cream Headache

by James Jones

  “Have you ever seen a man that was decent?”

  “Sure I have. Hell yes. Lots of them.”

  “No you aint. And I aint neither. Because there aint a decent man ever been born. Its the decent women make the men decent. Smarten up, kid. You better go after her. The longer you wait the harder she’ll make it on you. And I cant rightly say I blame her none.”

  “You dont mind if I have a drink first before I go, do you?” Sylvanus said.

  “She’ll smell it on your breath,” Arky said.

  “Jesus Christ!” Sylvanus protested.

  “Okay, but its true.”

  “Arky the gambler,” Sylvanus sneered. “Arky the cocksman. Hell, you’re a worse of an old maid than any librarian I ever heard of.”

  “Listen,” Arky sneered patiently. “One sniff and she’ll imagine you out on a wild party with us and these pigs, cant you see that? Then she’ll really make it tough on you, before she lets you back in.”

  Sylvanus looked at him and did not say anything. Quite suddenly he knew he was right. It had happened before. But somehow, he thought, I cant quite see myself living that kind of life for fifty years, just to get my picture in the Daily News for a golden anniversary write-up.

  The picture of it made him go suddenly sick inside. And it was then he made up his mind he was not going after her, that if she came back on her own it would be a sign, an omen that this time it was different and would not end up like the others. Then the thought that maybe she would not come back hit him again and made his knees go unstable again.

  “Another time, it would be differnt and she wount care for you having a drink,” Arky sneered patiently. “You go after her now, and we’ll haul ass, and she’ll come back lookin so sweet sugar wouldnt melt in her mouth. We’ll see you later, we understand how it is.”

  When he said haul ass, like that, then so sweet sugar wouldnt melt in her mouth, Sylvanus Merrick’s ear automatically caught the inflection and recorded it. He liked that kind of talk, he liked being able to reproduce it on paper. Norma’s parents, and her friends, never talked like that. They were always watching their words. Maybe he had been in the army too long. It seemed he wanted to write the wrong things.

  “You going to go after her?” Arky sneered.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

  “You got to understand the way women work,” Russ said like a pope from the table. “Good women, that is.”

  One of the women from Terre Haute laughed. Russ shut his mouth like a clam and stiffened his neck and his face went into that deadness again.

  “Shut up, you,” Arky sneered. “What the hell do you know about decent women?”

  “Well,” she said. “I like that.”

  “Get out,” Arky sneered at both of them. “Take off.”

  “Take off where?” the other one said. “I’d like to know. In this wilderness.”

  “Anywheres,” Arky said. “Out. Go sit in the car. Go walk in the woods and lissen to the little birds. We got talkin to do.”

  “You dont have to go if you dont want to,” Sylvanus said angrily. “To hell with him.” Arky always made him mad when he acted like that.

  “I guess we’d better,” one of them said. “Come on, Clarisse.”

  “Good women are nervous,” Russ said profoundly, starting right where he had stopped, in the same tone of voice, as soon as they were outside. “They’re high-strung, like horses. Especially before they are married. You got to kind of nurse them along. Give them their head and they’ll slow down of themselves. But you dont ever checkrein them. You go along with them.”

  “Thats it,” Arky agreed. “Agree with her. Even go her one better, about how rotten we are. Lay it on thick. Make it good.”

  “I’m not going after her,” Sylvanus told them.

  “Hell Syde, you cant hurt us any. If you dont invite us down to your house after you’re married, we aint going to be hurt. We’ll see you around.”

  “What house?” Sylvanus said.

  “Aw, be sensible,” Arky said. “This is serious. We dont care what he tells her about us, do we, Russ? You tell him, Russ.”

  Russ didnt say anything. His face went back into that deadness again. “No,” he said after a while, from inside the deadness. “Why should we care? We’ve got nothing to lose, have we?”

  “There. You see?” Arky said. “We telling you this for your own god-damned good.”

  “I’m not going after her,” he said.

  “The fact is,” Russ said heavily, “you cant tell her anything worse than the truth. When I think—”

  “Oh for god sake,” Sylvanus said. “Dont start telling me about your own lost great love and your subsequent failure in life.”

  “The kid’s right,” Arky said. “This is no time to get on no crying jag.”

  “I could tell you both many things,” Russ said stiffly.

  “Sure you could,” Arky sneered. “Look at him,” he sneered to Sylvanus. “He was a writer once, too, you know, out in Hollywood. He wrote on plenty scripts for the movies. And he had a great love, too. And now look at him. You want to end up like that?”

  “She wants me to go into her father’s business,” Sylvanus said. “After we’re married.”

  “Whats wrong with that?” Arky said. “Her old man makes plenty dough off them cars. You can live off the fat of the land and write on the side.”

  “It dont work that way,” he said.

  “Why dont it?” Arky said.

  “No!” Russ hollered violently. He jerked up in his chair. “Dont never prostitute your art.”

  “Aw nuts,” Sylvanus said.

  “I mean it,” Russ hollered.

  “I dont see why it wont work,” Arky said.

  “Because,” he said “They wont leave you alone. They act like they own you.”

  “I really mean it,” Russ said to his glass. Big tears rolled down from his eyes and splashed into it.

  “Take their money and live easy and write what you want,” Arky said. “Thats no argument to offer.”

  “I’m not going after her,” he said.

  That was the way it finally ended. Arky was worse than one of his Arkansas mules when he got his teeth into a thing, but Sylvanus outlasted them both because he had in his mind the picture of the sign it would be and knew this was a test case of the whole entire deal. He tried one other time to explain it to them, but they were each looking at something entirely different. It was like the five blind men with the elephant, and they did not even hear what he said. He gave it up then and went back to his one single sentence.

  Finally they let him have one drink. They were hoping it would loosen him up, he could see that in their eyes. It did not though, it only tightened him, so they all had another. In the end Arky called in the Terre Haute women from the car and they used the two sleeping alcoves that were without sheets, bringing in their own GI blankets from the car. Because of his tragedy, Sylvanus rated the porch.

  He lay for a long time, thinking it over. He tried hard to understand it. Finally, he too was forced back to the one single sentence that had baffled the others and now baffled him because he had used it so long it had no meaning any more, only word sounds.

  The very late-rising moon came up and he watched the light that you could not tell where it came from sifting down through the overcast and silhouetting the branches and leaves.

  Finally he went to sleep. When he woke in the morning they were already gone, nothing but three empty bottles and the dirty glasses and the over-filled ashtrays to prove there had been a great party.

  He straightened everything up and then fixed himself bacon and coffee for breakfast and washed up those dishes too, before he went out on the porch to the portable, so that everything would be ready and neat. Then he remembered she would be working all day. That put if off until evening. He did not feel much like working. In the middle of the morning he heated a can of beans and ate it and made some bacon and egg sandwiches and took the boat out
for some plug casting. He did not get any strikes. In the afternoon he went over to the beach and went swimming. At dusk he took the boat out again, this time with the flyrod he was trying to learn how to use. He did not get any strikes. With the flyrod he did not expect any. For supper he had beans and bacon both. At ten-thirty he turned in.

  She did not come the next evening either.

  The novel was not getting any nearer to the Book-of-the-Month Club.

  III

  He was trying to learn to use a flyrod then. Every evening he would go out and fish the banks of the main lake at dusk. He would sit in the boat fifteen yards from the bank and keep casting and casting until his right arm gave out. Then he would shift the rod to his left hand and cast, working the boat along down the bank. The fish would be rising, feeding, making small circles. He would cast in and around all the circles. When his left arm gave out he would shift the rod back to the right.

  He wanted to learn. But no one had ever offered to teach him. He could not just walk up and ask them, no more than he knew about it. It would embarrass him. He did not even know enough yet to be able to figure out what it was he was doing wrong. All he could do was keep casting.

  It was like that with Norma.

  When he got discouraged he would concentrate his ears on the dusk-stillness, when everything in Nature seemed to pause for a while and study the ballooning reddening sun and through their eyes replenish themselves in it. He had seen old fishermen stand like that in the dusk. His grandfather had used to stand like that in the dusk. And he wanted to learn. He would stay out till the mosquitoes would drive him in in the darkness.

  Mr Lemmon, who had the contracts for the concessions, was over at the beach every afternoon when he went swimming. After swimming, with the towel scarfed around his neck, he would talk to Mr Lemmon and it helped some. Mr Lemmon seemed so stable, so rock-founded and secure. Every afternoon he would discuss things with Mr Lemmon.

  Until the afternoon Mr Lemmon introduced him to Philips and Ohls.

  Mr Philips was the Park Superintendent, and Mr Ohls was the one-armed guard who patrolled the beach and the Lodge. They ran the Park; Mr Lemmon only ran the concessions. Mr Philips was in the State Parks Service and wore suntans and Mr Ohls, who was of a higher status than the gate guards and always wore side arms, was his right hand man—or rather his left hand man, since it was his right arm Mr Ohls had lost in France in the first war. Mr. Philips had been a Chief Machinist’s Mate in the first war. Mr Lemmon had never been in a war, too young for the first one and too old for this one, and he kind of regretted it one way but he knew he was lucky. Mr Philips and Mr Ohls agreed with him that he was lucky and looked at Mr Merrick. Mr Merrick agreed too. Mr. Philips and Mr Ohls thought they were lucky too, in that their war had been easier than Mr Merrick’s war. Mr Merrick guessed that was so. They discussed the third war, which would not be at all like the other two wars. They agreed that it would be more sensible in the long run if we would quit being squeamish and use the bomb now, before the Russians got it. If the man in the White House was a man, we would have done it before now. They agreed it would be more humane in the long run, would save more American lives and keep America secure.

  Mr Merrick had heard Mr Fry’s daughter Norma express somewhat these same sentiments, but Mr Lemmon agreed with this sentiment so heartily that he took them all down the basement for a can of beer. No alcoholic beverages of any kind were allowed in the Park; it was a considerable compliment to Mr Merrick. Mr Merrick was glad to get back to his cabin. He had a bottle of scotch there he had been saving. By sitting on his porch with his back to the door he could almost imagine he was out in the big woods. After drinking half of the bottle he could almost believe it. He sat on the porch and drank more scotch and went up to the big woods, to his brothers, the bears. It had been coming a long, long time. He had been putting and putting it off. He got very drunk … .

  It was a fine Park, at Fandalack. It sated the prairie man’s hunger for woods and for water, and you could see them all there, the stick-armed meatless-thighed young teen-aged girls, the pouchless-loined bone-hipped young teen-aged boys who followed them around with eternal optimism that was forever outsmarted, the fat old Jewish couples down from Terre Haute looking like the great fairy-story toads who eternally guard a mountain of gold for a goddess who never comes, the flat-eared thick-muscled miners in from Sullivan and Jasonville with their big-bottomed hungry-bellied wives keeping an eye on them while trying to manage four or five kids out of drowning, the tall dried-out farmers with sun-blackened faces and arms and chests white as milk, the picnicking young white-collar couples a little superior because they all owned new cars but embarrassed because even their faces werent tanned.

  It was a fine Park. But there was a great misconception in it all, he thought bitterly, throwing the empty bottle away.

  This land that was now Park was the same land that had been cut over, burned over, farmed out, strip-mined into a no man’s land even the Boy Scouts found useless, before it was finally sold to the State for a Park by the baffled fifth- and sixth-generation heirs who could no longer find any other way to get profit out of it.

  But you could not get away from a thing like that so easily, Norma Fry, by just shutting your eyes and not seeing it. This land, he thought drunkenly, this same gelded land; that the grim Bible-toting fathers, who knew their rights God owed them and were prepared to take them, had trooped up the Wabash into it like sprinters from the gun and spread out in like a battalion being given open ranks march—so that they might bequeath us, their offspring, their heritage of mordant Protestantism; out of their lust for salvation, sometimes called security.

  This land, this same spavined land; that their sons, and their sons, who already now loved God more than square dances, had scratched and re-scratched with the plough like surgeons innoculating the young against the pox of fertility—so that they, who were saved, might add to the Protestantism their own great faith in buying more land to grow more corn to buy more land; out of their lust for security, seldom called salvation.

  This land, this same castrated land; that their own sons, having no soil left to farm, had stripped what was left of the surface off of and left it piled in raw mountains like a Jack the Ripper who is too tired to bother to put the clothes back over the emptied corpse, to get at the coal and oil that was the only virtue the land had left now, the last black memory of the once lush virgin forest—so that they, who were twice saved, might expend it in two wars for security, never called salvation now except in reference to other men.

  This land, Norma Fry, this dead land; that we are now, out of our great spiritual inheritance that they left us, looking down from the walls of our donjon of security they have made us, could take now and refurbish with trees and log cabins like the best of interior decorators and dedicate to them, who made this fine Park possible, so that we might have a place to play at camping and woodcraft two weeks out of every year for the rest of our natural lives, while we continue to fight the world for security.

  The misconception was in the security. It had all of it been done for security. Yet there never had been any security. Everybody fought and killed and gave up their young dream, for security. Just as we now were preparing to fight a third war, for security. But it was not security that was gained, security was not ever gained, only herding and mechanization, fear was gained, but never security.

  In his mind he could see them all, trying to live by their great misconception, wandering vaguely frantic-eyed down the dim dust-haunted coal-mine corridors of their lives, trying to light their way along with the feeble kitchen match of their inheritance: the juiceless loveless Protestant-Catholicism with its attendant ritualistic sanctity of the vulva and the resulting great national fiction of romantic love and its products: the sixty-year-old mothers fat with the virtue of their multiple virgin births playing gin and bridge; and the sixty-two-year-old fathers fat with the vice of their guilty fear of cuckoldry talking business prospects an
d advice to their young they always feared werent theirs, and rightly, since how can any man ever father a virgin birth? All of them seeking the old druid god of woods and water that they all of them had helped somewhat to kill, with Sylvanus Merrick and Norma Fry right in there, leading the van.

  “O my god,” he hollered drunkenly, wishing now he had brought two bottles, “dont they make real women any where any more?”

  IV

  She came back Friday evening. He had taken the flyrod down to the South Lake, where they let him have a boat free since he had rented one on the big lake, and when he got back it was after dark and her car was sitting there in the clearing next to the road and the lights were on in the cabin in through the trees.

  He did not go in for a while. She had left Thursday a week ago, so that he had eight whole days to begin to get used to it. Now he did not know what to expect. His legs were quivery, as if he had been walking up hill. It was too much to expect that in one week she had changed, just like that. He expected a big accusation scene. But there was none.

  She had the stove lit and coffee made and there was a cup sitting on the table where she could reach it while she made up the beds fresh with the clean sheets she had brought. She had also brought a bag this time, because it was standing just inside the door and he almost fell over it.

  She had her hair up in a green scarf wrapped tightly like a turban around the small fragile head on the long slender neck. It was almost as if she had never been gone. He did not know what to say, how to start talking, but she took care of that too. She did not mention Arky or Russ or the trouble.

  “What would you ever do without me to take care of you?” she smiled frowning, and walked over to the door of the icebox. “Look what I brought you.” She pulled out a center-cut T-bone at least an inch thick and held it up for him to admire.

  “Stuff like that comes pretty scarce.” It sounded hollow. He could feel himself still waiting for her to begin the big scene, and he could not stop waiting.