Last Summer at Mars Hill (37 page)

Once it had been a Good Humor truck. Ghostly letters still glowed balefully above a phantom ice cream bar, since painted over with the slogan
Jolly Times.
One side of the cab was plastered with ancient decals displaying mottled éclairs twisted into weird shapes and faded, poisonous colors. I grimaced, then clambered in after Cass.

As the engine wheezed, the ancient cab rattled like a box of marbles, empty pop bottles and freezer cartons rolling underfoot as I tried to clear a place to lean against the freezer. Cass lit a cigarette, dropping the match into a grape puddle.

“You ready?” he shouted, and the truck lurched forward. I braced myself against the freezer lid, my hands sticking to the cool metal. Cass glanced back and apologized. “Sorry about that. Left a Chump Bar there last night. First stop’s Tandy Court.”

The truck hurtled through the university town of Zion, past the college lawn and the student ghettos, past tiny churches where clots of the faithful stirred listlessly on brown lawns, fanning themselves with Sunday bulletins. Cass and I sucked popsicles to cool off, the sticks piling on the floor between us like chicken bones at a barbecue. Above the dashboard dangled a string of rusty bells. Occasionally Cass tugged at an old gray shoelace to ring them, frowning at the wan metallic gargle. He hunched over the steering column, like a rodeo clown clinging to that great ugly hulk. Then he whooped, jangled the bells, and gunned the motor.

The road narrowed to a silvery track stretching before us, churches and homes falling away as we left the town limits. About us began the slow steady erosion of village into farmland, farmland into open country, the furrows of plowed fields plunging into the ravines and ancient hollows of the Blue Ridge. We turned off the highway, bouncing across train tracks. I breathed the cloudy sweet scents of anthracite and honeysuckle and laughed, suddenly elated.

Below us perched a dozen trailer homes, strewn among stands of poplar and red oak like a doll village sprung from a sandbox. Old pickups and junked Chevys rusted side by side like Tonka Toys. The truck crept gingerly between ruts and boulders until we reached a little midden where an inflated Yogi Bear hung from a broom handle, revolving lazily in the breeze.

Cass shook his head, bemused. “Lot of toys on this route.” He pointed to a shiny new trailer shell, its brown pocket of lawn vivid with red plastic tulips and spinning whirligigs. In the trailer’s windows huddled small figures, brown and green and pink, staring out with shiny black eyes. More toys peered from other trailers as we crept by, rag dolls and inchworms abandoned in back lots. Only the pickups and motorcycles parked between Big Wheel bikes hinted that there might be adults somewhere.

“So where are all the kids?” I demanded, unwrapping a Neapolitan sandwich.

Cass halted the truck in a cul-de-sac. “Watch this.”

The bells jingled, echoing against the mountainside until the hollow chimed. Silence, except for distant birdsong.

Then another sound began, a clamorous tide of screen doors slamming open and shut, door after door creaking, booming, hissing closed. Drawers banged, coins jingled. And the children came, big ones dragging smaller ones, toddlers dragging dolls, galloping dogs and kittens scampering beneath the stalled truck. Cass fell into his seat, grinning. “Ready to sell some ice cream?” He threw open the freezer drawers, nodding to the group outside.

“Here’s the three Kims,” he commented, hefting an unopened carton. Three girls in cut-offs and T-shirts squirmed to the side of the truck, eyeing me warily.

“Hi,” whispered the prettiest girl, staring at Cass boldly enough to belie her soft voice. “Give me a ee-clair.”

Cass winked as he reached into the freezer. “Éclair? That’s a new one. Anything for your momma?”

She shook her head, clinked down two quarters and slipped away.

“What about you, Kim?” asked Cass. “Same thing?”

“Kim
ber
ly” lisped the second girl. She had protruding front teeth and a true harelip, her split upper lip glowing pink and wet as bubblegum when she smiled. “Fudgesicle.”

He handed her a fudgesicle, and then the remaining children piled forward, yelling requests as I dredged ice cream from the freezer, frost billowing around me like steam. After the last child darted off, Cass wheeled the truck around and we plunged back up the road.

From one side of the mountain to the other I watched the same scene, an endless procession of children unwinding beneath the blinding sun. I felt sick from too many cigarettes and ice cream bars. My eyes ached; the landscape looked flat and bright, overexposed, the streams of children a timelapsed film: first the tiniest boys and girls, grinning and dirty as if freshly pulled from a garden.

Then their older brothers and sisters, feral creatures with slanted eyes yellowed in the sunlight, bare arms and legs sleek and golden as perch. Girls just past puberty, one with her mother’s bra flapping loosely around her thin chest. An occasional boy, rude and bashful, a wad of chewing tobacco plumping his cheek. And finally another baby stumbling to the truck behind a mother ungraced by a gold ring, the two of them leaving naked footprints in the road.

“Wild girls,” Cass said softly as we watched them run from the truck, to swing over fences or perch there for an instant, staring back at us with glittering eyes. “Like dragonflies,” he murmured. I saw them as he did, shining creatures darting between the pines. A flicker in the trees and they were gone, their pretty husks crumbled in the sun.

Farther up and farther in we drove. The houses grew older, more scattered. There were no more telephone poles. The truck scaled tortuous roads so narrow I wondered how we’d get back down after dark. I stood beside the driver’s seat, balancing myself so that I could watch the sun dance in and out of the distant mountaintops. In front of me Cass fidgeted in his seat, chainsmoking.

“Count and see if we got enough for a case of beer when we get back,” he yelled over the droning motor.

My hands were stained in minutes, counting streaked pennies and quarters sticky with tar and gum and more lint than I cared to think about. I felt rather than saw the difference in one coin, so heavy I thought at first it was a silver dollar.

“What’s this?”

I tossed it gingerly into my other hand, extending it to Cass. The face was worn to a dull moon, but letters still caught the afternoon light and flashed as Cass took it from me. “Look: it’s not even in English.”

He shut one eye and regarded it appraisingly. “Another one? She gives me those sometimes. It’s real silver.”

I took it back, weighed it in my fist. “They worth anything?”

“Worth their weight in silver,” Cass replied brusquely, and he reddened. “I told Sam. But he wouldn’t take ’em back,” he added defensively. He bent to trace the characters on the coin with one finger. “They’re Greek. And they’re real, real old. I bring them to the stamp shop in Zion and the guy there gives me twenty bucks apiece. You can keep that one. I haven’t seen any for awhile.”

“I bet they’re worth more than twenty bucks,” I said, but Cass only shrugged.

“Not in Zion. And up here they’re only worth fifty cents.” And laughing he lit a cigarette.

“We’re almost at the bearded lady’s,” he announced. “You’ll meet Sam there. That’s always my last stop. I found her place by mistake,” he went on, pounding the dashboard for emphasis. “We’re not even supposed to go
down
this road.”

He pointed his cigarette at the dusty track winding before us, so narrow that branches poked through the windows, raking my arms as the truck crept down the hill.

“No one lives here. Just the kids, they’re always around. Come to play with Little Eva. But I never see anyone in these houses,” he mused, slowing the truck as it drifted past two dilapidated cottages, caved in upon themselves like an old man’s gums. Cass yanked on the shoelace and the bells rang faintly.

From the shadowy verdure appeared a tiny white house, stark and precise as a child’s drawing chalked against the woodlands. Here the dirt road straightened and the hill ended, as if too exhausted to go on. The truck, too, grated to a stop.

Behind the house stretched woods and fallow farmland, ochre clay, yellow flax fading into the silvery horizon where a distant silo wavered in the heat like a melting candle. From an unseen bog droned the resolute thud of a croaking bullfrog, the splash of a heron highstepping through the marsh. Shrill tuneless singing wafted from inside the house.

A kitten lay panting beneath the worn floorboards of a little porch, ignoring a white cabbage butterfly feebly beating its wings in the scant shade. The singing stopped abruptly and I heard a radio’s blare.

“Watch,” Cass whispered. He lit another cigarette and rang the bells. The kitten sprang from beneath the porch, craning to watch the front door.

One moment the doorway was black. The next a girl stood there, her hair a spiky orange nimbus flared about a white face. Barefoot, a dirty white nightgown flapping around legs golden with dust and feet stained brick red from the clay. She smiled and jigged up and down on her heels, glancing back at the house. The kitten ran to her, cuffing her ankle—I could have circled one of those ankles with my thumb and forefinger and slid a pencil between. Her thin arm lashed out and grabbed the kitten by its nape, dangling it absently like a pocketbook.

“Hi,” called Cass, blowing a smoke ring out the window. “Little Eva.”

The girl beamed, stepping towards the road, then stopped to squint back at the doorway. “She’s real shy,” Cass muttered. “Hey, Eva—”

He flourished a green and yellow popsicle shaped like a daisy. “I saved this for you. The three Kims wanted it but I told ’em, no way, this one’s for Little Eva.”

Giggling, she shuffled down the dirt walk, her feet slipping between paving stones and broken glass. I smiled, nodding reassuringly as she took the popsicle and squatted beside Cass on the truck’s metal side-steps. He opened a can of grape pop and drained it in one pull, then tossed the empty into the back of the truck. “Where’s your mom, Eva?”

“Right there.” She pointed with her ice pop, dropping and retrieving it from the dirt in one motion. The kitten scrambled from her arms and disappeared in the jewelweed.

From the shadows of the doorway stepped a woman, small and fat as a bobwhite, wearing a baggy blue shift like a hospital gown. Long greasy hair was bunched in a clumsy ball at the back of her neck; long black hairs plastered her forehead. From her chin curled thick tufts of black hair, coarse as a billy goat’s beard. A pair of glasses pinched her snub nose, thick-lensed glasses with cheap black plastic frames—standard county issue. Behind the grimy lenses her eyes glinted pale cloudy yellow. When she spoke, her voice creaked like burlap sacking and her head bobbed back and forth like a snake’s. It was a whole minute before I realized she was blind.

“Little Eva,” she yelled, her twang thick and muddy as a creek bottom. “Who’s it?”

“Ice cream man,” drawled Eva, and she poked her popsicle into the woman’s hand. “He give me this. Get money from Sam.”

Cass nodded slowly. “It’s Cass Tyrone, Maidie.” He thumped a heavy carton on the side of the truck. “I got you a box of éclairs here. That what you want?”

Her hands groped along the side of the truck, pouncing on the frost-rimed box. “Sam,” she shrilled. “Ice cream man.”

Someone else shuffled onto the porch then, wiping his hands on the front of a filthy union suit. Much older than Maidie, he wore only those greasy coveralls and a crudely drawn tattoo. He took very small steps to the edge of the porch—such small steps that I glanced down at his feet. Bare feet, grub white and hardly bigger than Little Eva’s.

How he walked on those feet was a mystery. He was very fat, although there was something deflated about his girth, as though the weight had somewhere slipped from him, leaving soft folds and ripples of slack papery skin. His head and neck looked as though they’d been piped from pastry cream, ornate folds and dimples of white flesh nearly hiding his features. Even his tattoo was blurred and softened by time, as though it had shrunk with him, like the image on a deflated balloon. I turned my head to keep from laughing nervously. But the old man turned his head as well, so that I stared into a pair of vivid garter-blue eyes fringed with lashes black as beetles. I coughed, embarrassed. He smiled at me and I drew back, my skin prickling.

Such a beautiful smile! Perfect white teeth and lips a little too red, as though he’d been eating some overripe fruit. I thought of Ingrid Bergman—that serene glow, those liquid eyes with their black lashes fluttering beneath a shock of grimy white hair. He was irresistible. Shyly I smiled back, and in a very soft voice he said, “Hello, Ice Cream.”

He was the ugliest man I had ever seen.

Cass nudged me, explaining, “That’s what he calls me. ‘Ice Cream.’ Like you call a blacksmith Smith, or a gardener Gardner.” I nodded doubtfully, but Sam smiled, tilting his head to Little Eva as he bent to tug her gently by the ear.

“You want a cigarette, Sam?” drawled Cass, handing him an Old Gold. Sam took it without a word.

“That’s my girl, Sam.” Cass sighed mournfully. “Julie Dean: she’s awful mean. Maidie, that’s my girl.”

The bearded lady wagged her head, then thumped her hand on the side of the truck, palm up, until I stuck my own hand out the window. She grabbed it and nearly yanked me out into the road.

“Maidie,” I said loudly, wincing as I heard my fingers crackle in her grip. “I’m Julie.”

She shook her head, staring eagerly at the roof of the truck. “I knowed all about you. He told me. He got this girl…” Her voice ebbed and she turned to Sam, wildly brandishing her box of éclairs as she shouted, “Take ’em, Sam! That Ice Cream’s girl?”

Sam smiled apologetically as he enfolded the box in one great soft paw. “I don’t know, Maidie,” he told her, then whispered to me, “She don’t see much people.” He spoke so slowly, so gently, that I wondered if he was dim-witted; if he’d ever been off the mountain. “Ice Cream,” he murmured, and reached to stroke my hand. “Ice Cream, this your girl?”

Cass grabbed me, shaking me until my hair flew loose from my bandana and my jaw rattled. “This is her. The one and only. What you think, Sam?”