Ice-Cream Headache (24 page)

“No-o; I don’t think so.” The lawyer shook his head. “They’ve only had that habitual criminal law fifteen or twenty years. And anyway he’s beat several raps, I think.”

Both of them were grinning in a curious way now, at each other. As if the thought of Chet Poore just automatically made them grin. It was not a hateful grin, but was really affectionate. With perhaps just a hint of superiority in the affection. But the superiority was much more noticeable in the tall deputy’s face than in the short fat lawyer’s.

“Well, he’s a helluva lot more than a three time loser if you count all those jobs he pulled on his old man,” the deputy grinned. “I’m just glad he’s not around here any more.”

“Oh, he comes back,” the lawyer grinned. “He always comes back, Chet does. Couldn’t stay away from here. He was back about a year ago for a few days and stopped up the office to see me.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t have this job then.”

“Well, you won’t have it when he gets out this time, either. If he gets out. I’ll have to look up and see. If he’s a three time loser and gets life or not, I’m not just for sure.”

“I’ll bet he is,” the deputy said.

“He might be. Christ, remember the time he stole his old man’s car and robbed the till of the store and wound up in Kansas City before they picked him up? The old man let them send him up that time. Got two years. But that was years ago. God, the old man was mad.”

The deputy, whom I did not like, and still don’t, though I’m always polite to him, laughed a little, softly, almost shyly. “I never knew him very well. He was older than me. What makes a guy be like that, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Chet was always wild. And he just didn’t give a damn,” the lawyer grinned, as if this in some way pleased him immensely.

It was then that I interrupted. My friend, still looking shamefacedly criminal, was still signing and receiving whatever it was he had to sign and receive. I began to question the lawyer about Chet Poore. Actually, I found out little more than the preceding conversation had already told me by implication. But I wanted to know everything about him that I could learn so I continued to question, but not eagerly. Long ago I had learned that uneager people always look at you oddly whenever you show eagerness about something they think does not deserve it. And I do not like to be looked at oddly. But, as I have said, I learned almost nothing. Chet came and went; sometimes he stayed a while; sometimes he even worked; sometimes he worked in Detroit too, or Flint, or Chicago or Hammond. All this apart from his criminal activities of car-thievery or cashbox-lifting. The last time he had been home for any length of time, which had been six years ago, he had stayed for two years I learned and had worked for his uncle a house-painter, until finally getting bored with that, the lawyer said and grinned, he had happened to make a big win at poker and then stole his uncle’s car and just took off. They never did find the car. The uncle did not turn him in. It was an old car.

But I learned nothing more. Nothing, certainly, of all the things I hungered to know about Chet Poore. But then, what did I hunger to know? My friend finished all his paying and signing and receiving, and, leaving the law enforcement officers, the three of us—my friend, his lawyer and myself—left the hollow high-ceilinged courthouse and stood on the steps outside in the sun a while chatting and speaking to everyone who came by, to show that we really did not feel we were criminals after all. I did not take much part in this performance, because I was still thinking of Chet Poore.

I am thirty-one, and I make a good living, in my business, which is operating a tavern. A bar, if you will. In the town where I live it is too small for anything like cocktail lounges. So I operate a bar. People will always drink, my father who was an insurance man used to say. And he was right. I am married, to a fine woman—naturally, since if she were not a fine woman I would not have married her—and I have two small sons. I try to be a companion and a counselor to my children, but they will not let me inside their lives any more than I would let my parents inside my own. I am, in short, a solid man, fast approaching middle age. I see it coming at me, and it appears to move faster and faster the closer it gets.

But if I am this, at thirty-one (and this is the point I was leading to in describing myself to you), look at Chet Poore. What about him? He must be at least fifteen years older than me, perhaps more. And yet he is still doing the half-prankish criminal things he used to do when he was young, as almost all of us did. But now, because he is no longer young, they have become serious for him. Then why does he not stop them? He has not, so far as I have been able to find out, ever married. He is not a father. He has never congealed himself a solid place out of the welter of protoplasm we call life and are forced to flounder in. And now he was in prison again, perhaps as a three time loser which would mean for life.

Standing with my friend and his lawyer on the steps of the courthouse in the warm spring sun, with the blindfolded concrete statue of Justice above the lintel behind us, I went back inside my childhood to the one time that I ever had anything at all to do with Chet Poore personally. It is hard to go back inside your childhood, I mean really back inside, after you are twenty-five; and it becomes increasingly harder as you, and in that order: 1) go into a business, 2) marry, and 3) have children of your own. Increasingly you forget what you really used to feel, because after all it is no longer really very important. But such was my emotional state standing in the spring sunlight on the steps of the courthouse, that I was able to do it. That, and the fact of the very definite mental picture I had of Chet Poore: a huge tall grownup man standing over me and staring grinning down at me. And that feeling of intense smiling pleasure it always gave me.

I remember I had been out in the yard playing. It was an early summer morning, and the garage of our house was a double one, with a double concrete driveway that tapered down to a single one a car’s length from the doors. This was my tennis court, and I was playing a championship match and that I was both Don Budge and the German, Baron von Cramm. I was not sure yet who was going to win today and the tension and excitement were tremendous. And that was when my mother had called to me to go uptown for her and get her a bottle of whipping cream, for some dish she was making.

I had to go, of course. There was no choice. I could sense at once with my child’s sly knowledge that my mother was irritated with the cooking and the heat of the stove, and probably mad at my old man to boot, as she usually was, so I did not even try to argue but instead ran all the way uptown with the money and ran all the way back with the cream so that I might get on with my championship match. But then, just as I was lifting my racket for the first cannonball serve by Budge to the Baron, my mother came to the door and called to me angrily. The cream was sour. I must take it back at once, immediately, and make the shopkeeper exchange it.

Once again, of course there was no choice. I was her child, her property, and she had ownership of me, and was big enough to make me do what she said. I was about seven at the time. Or perhaps eight. Possibly I was six. Once again I took the little half-pint cream bottle in its little sack and started for town, but this time I did not try to hurry. I had given up all hope of ever finishing my championship match today. It was only in the second set, and the Baron had won the first. Hopeless, I went as slowly as I could. I was angry at the cream and at my mother, who was angry at the cooking and at my father, who was angry at all the bills he had to pay and at God. Actually, of course, we were all angry at life but I did not know this then and apparently, though they were much older than me, neither did they.

There was a little rise I had to climb which was a block long and which led up onto the square with the courthouse in its center. This same courthouse, in fact, it was. The grocery store was the second store around the corner. The first store, whose building ran all the way back down the rise to the other corner, was a furniture store then, but is something else now.

In the hot June sun which was already heating up the sidewalk and the street and beginning to make everything smell dusty, I started up the little rise which always looked to me like a long hill back then, though it has since dwindled, dragging my fingertips along the uneveness of the tan-painted brick wall, And it was then, as of course everyone has probably guessed by now, that I dropped the bottle of cream.

It crashed to the sloping sidewalk and smashed, and the cream began to run out of the mouth of the sack. I stopped and stared down at it, the enormity, the irrevocability of what I had done dawning on me slowly in a wind of terror. I stooped down to it on one knee, hoping desperately that it might be put back together again, but knowing beforehand that it could not; and of course it couldn’t be. Kneeling beside it, and wishing desperately that it had not happened, oh if only it hadn’t happened, as if the very force of my wish itself might cause the bottle to re-form and the cream to run back into it, I began to cry. And crying, I began to cast about in my mind as to just which lie I could tell that would get me out of it.

Terrified, I knew I could not go back to my mother and tell her the truth. Not only would she whip me and yell at me loudly all the while as she did so, but also she would accuse me of wasting money we could not afford to waste, which would disturb me even more, even though I knew we were not anywhere near poor enough that we could not afford a second bottle. On the other hand, I could not take the broken bottle on to the store and tell the storekeeper I had dropped it but that the cream was soured; he would never believe me. He would think I had carelessly dropped the bottle and was trying to get a free second bottle by saying it was sour so I would not have to tell my mother. Can you understand the terrifying implications of this? To tell the truth and not be believed? But then, what lie was there I could tell him? And the only other alternative left, to buy a second bottle, was impossible too because I only had seven cents of my own in the whole world, and I knew whipping cream was even more expensive than regular coffee cream.

Trapped, completely hopeless, terrified, I crouched over my broken cream bottle and merely continued to cry. I could go neither forward to the store, nor backward home to my mother. Casting about, I thought I might tell my mother that a little neighbor boy had attacked me and knocked it out of my hands. But I knew my mother well enough to know she would fly in a rage to the telephone and call the boy’s mother; then she would find out the truth. And after rejecting this possibility I gave up entirely, and merely crouched, crying, and in a complete trauma, staring at my bottle and trying by force of will to make it not have happened, make it go back together and the cream to run back into it.

How long I remained like this, I have no idea because my time sense was distorted out of all reason by my fear, terror and guilt. Even today it still seems it must have been a very long time, hours; though I know rationally that it was not. Finally I became aware of two men walking down the hill on the other side of the street, and through my cascading tears of hopelessness saw them start across the street toward me. I didn’t care. I didn’t even care if they saw me, a boy, crying. Hell to them, I thought with my child’s mind and true instinct, they don’t know what it is to be little. Nevertheless I watched them approach until one man, huge, tall and grownup to my child’s stature, stood over me and stared grinning down at me.

“What’s the matter, kid?” he said. “You drop your bottle?”

Still today I have no recollection of the tone or timbre or quality of his voice. Such was the state of my collapse.

“Who’re you?” I said cautiously, though still crying.

“I’m Chet Poore and I live in this town too,” he said kindly. He must have been only twenty-four or -five, at that time, but he looked old, aged, to me.

“Who’s he?” I said.

“He’s my friend,” he said. And I looked at the other man, but saw there neither the interest nor the kindness of the first face.

“Come on, Chet,” he said. “Let’s get goin’.”

“Shut up,” Chet Poore said and squatted down beside me and the bottle. “Come on, kid,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

So, inchoately, almost unintelligibly, stuttering with sobbings that tore at my diaphragm convulsively, I told him and poured out to him my terrible crime and what my guilty situation was, how I could not go on to the store because I would not be believed, how I could not go back home because I would at the very least be whipped,

“Well, now, that’s not too bad,” Chet Poore said. “What if I was to go up to the store with you and explain it to them.”

I could only shake my head. “It wouldn’t do any good.” And I knew it wouldn’t.

“Well, at least we can give it a try,” Chet Poore said. “That won’t hurt anything.” And so saying, he picked me up and sat me on one arm, and picked up the wet sack of broken glass with the other, and carried me up the slope to the store, his friend following along disgustedly behind us.

In the store it proved that I was right, as I had known I would be. The storekeeper looked at Chet Poore strangely and said he was sorry for me, and said he really believed me, too. But he just couldn’t give me a bottle of cream. He had to have back the bottle of sour cream to turn back to the dairy man before he could do that. And the bottle was broken, and the cream spilled. It was the fact.

“All right then, damn it,
sell
me a bottle of cream,” Chet Poore said irritably, “you tight bastard.”

“Sure,” the storekeeper said agreeably, and Chet Poore, after he paid the storekeeper, set me down and handed me the bottle, slapped me on the bottom and started me toward the door, himself and his disgusted friend following after. It was as simple as that. I had my cream back and my problem, which had so terrified me, was gone. Just wasn’t there, didn’t exist anymore, and I felt the horrible nightmare of it had never happened. Outside the store I stopped to try and thank him again, effusive, over-eager, tongue-tied by my very gratitude and its inexpressibility.