Ice-Cream Headache (4 page)

John was nodding his head. His arm hurt and his mother was still shaking him; he was wondering how, if he was to go in the car, they would be able to go to the Sugar Bowl and the show. This was Saturday and Saturday night his mother always took him and Jeannette to the Sugar Bowl and they ate coney islands or barbecues and they had a malted and then they went to the show. And the malteds at the Sugar Bowl were thick, boy. It was their Saturday treat and he hated to miss it, even if his mother always did make them sit with her at the show instead of down front with the other kids and she stopped outside the show to talk to the other ladies and always made them stand right beside her because, as she told the ladies, John was grown up and taking his father’s place like a little man. But then that was what you had to do if you wanted to go.

“Aren’t we going to the show tonight, Mother?” he said.

“No we’re not going to the show tonight, Mother. Aren’t you listening to me? I want you to go in the car with your father. I want you to get in the back seat and keep out of sight. Get down on the floor and stay hid. You watch where he goes and when he comes home you tell me every place he went. I want you to do this for me.”

“I don’t care about the show, Mother,” John said.

“Maybe we’ll go tomorrow. If you love your mother like you say, you’ll do this for her. You’ll hide in the back of the car and find out who it is your father meets, and find out what her name is if you can, and then when I go away I’ll take you with me and we’ll go away forever.”

“Will Jeannette go too, Mother?” John said.

“Yes. We’ll take Jeannette with us too,” she said to him and there were tears in her bright eyes. “He isn’t fit to have children. Him with those great big arms and strong as a bull. He hurts everything he touches, he’d kill any woman. We’ll go far away where he can never find us, with his big talk of education and making fun of my Science and Mrs. Eddy, making everybody think he’s so intelligent and saddled with a dumb wife.”

“You’re not dumb, Mother,” John said. “You’re smart. You’re my mother.” He blinked tears from his own eyes, he felt very sorry for his mother. A diworce, he thought, we’re going to get a diworce.

“I’ve given my whole life to you children.” His mother let go of his arm and he was glad of that. It was a little numb, but he didn’t rub it because his mother put her hands on his shoulders. “You’re all I have left now. You and Jeannette. Since your brother Tom grew up and left me. Everybody said I was the most beautiful woman in this country and he was lucky to get me. Now he’s cast me aside, for any hotassed bitch that walks the streets.”

John nodded, memorized the phrase. He learned lots of good swearwords the other kids never heard, listening to his mother and dad when they were mad, although he never said them around her, except when he forgot, because she always washed his mouth out with soap, holding him by the back of the neck, and turning the washrag around wrapped over her fingers and rubbing it hard over his tongue and the roof of his mouth, whenever she heard him swear.

“Someday women will be free,” his mother said. She knelt down on the floor beside him and put her arms around him. “Your mother loves you, Johnny, even if she is the ugliest old hag in town.”

“You’re not ugly, Mother,” John said. “You’re beautiful and you’re my mother.” He patted the cook-sweating broadness of his mother’s back. It was almost like the game where someone asks the question and you have to give the right answer or pay a forfeit, except he always got so scared it wasn’t any fun.

“If you really love your mother, you’ll stand by her.”

“Sure I will, Mother,” John said. “I’ll do anything for you. Someday, Mother, I’ll make a million dollars and I’ll give it all to you.”

“No,” his mother said. “No, you won’t. Someday you’ll do just like your brother did. You’ll grow up and forget all your mother ever did for you. You’ll remember the money your father gives you and I don’t have to give you and you’ll turn on your ugly mother just like your brother did and go over to your father.”

“No I won’t either,” John protested, feeling guilty. He knew his mother didn’t have the money to give him quarters and half dollars like his father did. He knew how hard up they were because his father threw so much money away on beer and whiskey, and then tried to buy his son’s affection with quarters and half dollars. Every time he sneaked up in the garage loft to play with his secret collection of extra soldiers and guns, he felt guilty.

“I’ll always stand by you, Mother,” he said. “I won’t be like Tom. Honestly I won’t. I’m not like Tom.”

“Will you prove it to me? Will you find out who your father goes out with tonight?”

“Sure I will, Mother. Didn’t I say I would?”

His mother stood up. “All right. You wait out on the front porch where he won’t see you. When he brings the groceries in you run out and get in. But be careful: He bought groceries for over Sunday and he’ll probably have to make two trips to the car.”

“All right, Mother,” John said. “You can trust me, Mother.”

His mother was on her way back to the kitchen. “Don’t let him see you out on the porch.”

“OK, Mother,” John said.

He went out the front door and sat down in the porch swing to wait for his father to come home. The moon was full, and reminded him of the quarters and half dollars his father tried to buy his affection with every now and then. It was so bright it made shadows under the trees just like daytime. It made everything hazy like a lace curtain. He sat and swung the swing and listened to the chain creak and rubbed his arm where it still hurt and watched the lace curtain of moonlight.

I’ll fool him, he thought. I won’t let him buy me away from mother with quarters and half dollars like he did Tom. I’ll take the quarters and half dollars, but I won’t let him kid
me.
It made him feel a little better, a little less guilty, but still he knew, guiltily, that he shouldn’t take them, any of them.

Once his father had given him a half dollar right in front his mother. It was the time she hit him with the kitchen fork when she was frying chicken. He was standing by the stove bothering her with questions and making a nuisance of himself, and it was a hot day long, long years ago, and she just got mad and hit him with the fork. The fork cut his forehead and broke his glasses and the blood ran down into his eyes. It did not hurt much but the blood in his eyes scared him because he couldn’t see and thought maybe he was going to die. His mother threw the fork down on the floor and started crying and that scared him worse because then he was sure he was going to die and he did not want to die yet, when he was still just such a little boy. She phoned the doctor and his father, and she kept wringing her hands and crying “O what have I done! My poor little boy! My darling son!” and he had felt very sorry for her and put his arms around her and told her it was all right and it didn’t hurt much and for her not to worry, he did not really mind dying when he was still such a little boy, but it only made her cry worse. He knew she did not really mean to do it because she cried so much and she sacrificed everything for him and Jeannette and loved them better than anything in the world. So when the doctor and his father came, he and his mother told them he fell down and cut his forehead on the edge of the table. His father gave him a half dollar right in front of his mother and squatted down and put his arm around him. If he had been cut over both eyes he bet his father would have given him a whole dollar.

Other kids’ fathers didn’t give them whole dollars when they got cut over both eyes, and his father really looked tough when he got mad. He bet there wasn’t anybody would tackle his father when he got mad, even if he was a drunkard and ran around with hotassed bitches and had those great big arms and belly and strong as a bull and would kill any woman. Sitting in the swing he wondered what the hotassed bitch looked like. He hoped he would get to see them doing it.

Suddenly in his mind he saw his father sitting at the kitchen table, all alone, holding the diworce, drinking a bottle of beer, playing with a pile of quarters and half dollars that he did not have anybody to give them to, that was the way it would be when they were gone. He blinked tears from his eyes, he felt very sorry for his father. A diworce, he thought, we’re going to get a diworce.

When his father drove in the driveway he got down on his hands and knees behind the brick railing and watched through the four-cornered hole like a diamond while his father opened the back door of the big square Studebaker and took two huge paper sacks of groceries in his big arms and carried them to the back door. Looking through the trees into the clearing, Hawkeye leveled his cap-n-ball-long-rifle and let the big Indian have it, right in the chest, and the two big paper sacks of dynamite tumbled unhurt to the ground; Hawkeye had fired between them carefully because the dynamite was needed to blow the Indian village up the river. He aimed over his finger and fired; and his father walked on to the house.

Then he waited, just as his mother had told him, grinning at how he was outsmarting his father. After the second trip he ran lightly out into the yard, carrying his rifle at trail and loading her as he ran, the Indians called him The Man Whose Gun Was Always Loaded, opened the back door of the car and hit the dirt. It was dusty on the floor and the dust got in his nose and choked him up but he did not mind because he had made it across the clearing unseen and had slipped into the enemy general’s limousine.

He heard them talking loud in the kitchen and guessed they were having another big argument. His father came out and slammed the door and got in the car and he lay, laughing to himself, very excited.

His father drove down toward town and every corner John concentrated hard on which way they turned and tried to see the corner in his mind. There was a place on the road through the forest the enemy general’s truck was following that it was of the greatest importance he jump out the back of the truck unseen. Some enemy soldiers were holding Priscilla Jenkins captive and going to torture her with red-hot irons. In his mind he saw Priscilla, a great lady now, standing tied to a tree, her clothes torn clear off of her and the enemy soldiers stepping up to put a red-hot iron against her thing—just as he leaped into the circle of firelight wearing his fringed buckskins of a scout and the two enemy soldiers were deaders and Priscilla was very happy to be saved from a fate worse than death and they did it there in the firelight with the two deaders staring open-eyed at the sky. When his father stopped the car it was the spot, and it was of the greatest importance that he know where it was, and he picked Meeker’s Restaurant. He waited till his father got out and was gone and then peeked over the bottom of the window. Instead of Meeker’s Restaurant they were in front of the old American Legion. It was very bad, because Priscilla was a deader unless he could figure something out.

He lay there on the floor a long time, wishing his father would hurry up and come back with the hot-assed bitch so he could see them do it, he had never seen anybody do it, but he was tired of laying on the floor and he was getting sleepy. He lay with the sleepiness and the Saturday night noises coming loud suddenly, then going far away, and coming and going and coming and going and he heard his father speak from behind a curtain and far away the car doors opened and his father and someone else got in. Then suddenly he was back inside himself again and listening hard. None of the kids had ever really seen anybody do it. They wouldn’t care if he was a drunkard’s son or not, if he told how he had seen them do it and just what they did.

“Give me the bottle,” he heard his father say. “You mark what I’m saying, Lab. It won’t be ten years.”

John recognized with disappointment the other voice that answered. It was no hot-assed bitch at all, it was only old Lab Wallers from the American Legion, and he felt he had been cheated of a great adventure. “I still say she wouldn’t want you to go, Doc,” it said.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Sometimes I think she would. I know she would. She’d be damned glad to get rid of a no-good like me. And I guess I don’t blame her any. Anyway,” he said, “I’ll be too old.”

“There won’t be another war anyway,” Lab Wallers said. “Thas why we won the last one, so there wouldn’t be no more. Wilson was a good man, and he knew what he was doin’.”

“He couldn’t do anything with a Republican Congress,” his father said. “Well, he was smarter than this Coolidge. Doc, you don’t want your boys to grow up and get drug into something like we did,” Lab Wallers said.

“Hell, no,” his father said. “But there’s no way out. Give your son luck, and throw him into the sea. That’s what the Spaniards say. That’s all any man can do. I tell you it won’t be ten years.”

That’s me, John thought, they’re talking about me. He was a little surprised because everybody knew there wouldn’t be any more war. He had always been sorry when he thought how he would never get to be in a war like his father. He lay there, excited, thinking how he would save Priscilla Jenkins from the enemy just as they were about to burn her thing with the red-hot iron. He would come home a great hero and everybody would think he was a fine upstanding man. He wouldn’t drink at all, and maybe he would marry Priscilla Jenkins.

Following the pictures in his mind the sleepiness came back and the voice talking began to come and go, loud and faint, like the band concert across town sounded in a shifting summer wind.

“She’s a fine woman, Doc,” Lab Wallers said. “They don’t come any finer. My wife’s always talkin’ about how fine she is.”

“I know she is,” his father said. “Everybody knows it. Nobody has to tell me that. I know it’s my fault. I know I’m a bum and a drunk.”

“We don’t deserve the women we got, Doc,” Lab Wallers said, his voice thick. “Neither one of us.
None
of us.”

“If it wasn’t for the kids I’d light out tonight,” his father said. “Give her a chance. But it’s awful hard to leave your kids, your own kids. What you’ve done lives on in your kids, if nowhere else.”

“She loves you though,” Lab Wallers said. “Don’t you forget it.”