The Empire of Ice Cream (23 page)

We went next door to say goodnight to Nan and Pop.

“Where's your mother?” asked Nan.

“She's out cold,” said Jim.

Nan's lips did that kissing fish thing, in and out, that they did whenever she was about to try to trick you into ignoring the truth. I noticed it first that past summer on the day the ladies came over and she read the cards for them. The widow, old Mrs. Ripici, who lived by herself next to the Curdmeyers on the left, across the street, drew the ace of spades. Nan's lips started going, and she quickly pulled the card from the table and claimed, “Misdeal.” There was a moment where the room went stone quiet and then, like someone flipped a switch, the ladies started chattering again.

“Your mother works hard for you kids and she's very tired,” Nan told us the night autumn came.

Mary was always upset when my mother didn't tuck her in at night, so to create a diversion, Pop brought out the band. He collected windup toys that played musical instruments, and he had seven of them. One was an Indian who beat a tom-tom, one, an elephant that blew a horn, a clown that played the tambourine, and more. He took out his mandolin, and Nan and Mary and Jim and I madly wound the toys to get them all ready to play at the same time, but at the same time could not let any of them start to unwind. Then Pop gave the signal and we released the keys at their backs. They banged and tooted and jangled away while he strummed and sang “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Somehow that crazy music blended together and it all sounded just right.

The first Saturday morning after school started, I followed Pop around the yard, holding a colander, as he harvested the yield of the trees. Before he picked each piece of fruit, he'd take it lightly in his hand as if it were a live egg with the most fragile shell imaginable.

As we moved from tree to tree, he told me things about them. “Never put a peach leaf near your mouth.” he said. “They're poisonous.” Or when we came to the yellow apple tree: “This tree grew from seeds that no one sells anymore. It's called Miter's Sun, and I bought the sapling from an old coot who told me there were less than a dozen of them left in the world. It's important to take care of it, because if it and the couple of others that remain die, it will be gone from the face of the Earth for all of eternity.” He picked a small, misshapen yellow apple from a branch, rubbed it on his shirt, and handed it to me. “Take a bite of that,” he said. From that ugly marble came a wonderful, sweet taste.

We continued on to the plum tree, and he said to me, “I heard you were in a fight this week.”

I nodded.

“Do you want me to teach you how to box?” he asked.

I thought about it for a while. “No,” I said, “I don't like to fight.”

He laughed so loud that the crow sitting on the TV antenna atop the house was frightened into flight. I felt embarrassed for a moment, but then he reached down and put his hand on my head. “Okay,” he said, and laughed more quietly.

After retiring from the Big A, Aqueduct Race Track, where he had worked in the boiler room for years, Pop took up an interest in trees, especially ones that gave fruit. On our quarter-acre of property, he planted quite a few—a peach, a plum, three apple, a cherry, an ornamental crab apple, and something called a Smoke Bush that kept the mosquitoes away—and spent the summer months tending to them; spraying them for bugs, digging around their bases, pulling up saplings, getting rid of dead branches. I'd never seen him read a book about the subject or study it in any way, he just started one day the first week after he had left his job.

I guess it was something he had done before at some point in his long life. Nan had shown us old, yellowing newspaper clippings from when he was a boxer and photographs of him standing on the deck of a ship with an underwater suit on and a metal diving helmet with a little window in it. Once when my parents thought I was asleep on the couch but I just had my eyes closed, I learned that he had spent time in a mental institution where they had given him electroshock therapy. Supposedly, when he was fifteen, his mother had sent him out around the corner for a loaf of bread. He went and joined the Merchant Marine, lying about his age, and returned home three years later, carrying the loaf of bread. When asked how his mother reacted, his answer was, “She beat the shit out of me.”

He was powerfully built with a huge chest and wide shoulders. Even in old age, his biceps took three of my hands to fit around. Every once in a while, we'd ask to see his tattoos, vein-blue drawings he could make dance by flexing his muscle: a naked woman on his left forearm; an eagle on his chest; and a weird, fire-breathing dragon-dog, all curly cue fur and huge lantern eyes, on his back that he had gotten in Java from a man who used whale bone needles to render the design. He told Jim and me that the dog creature was named Chimto, and that it watched behind him for his enemies.

The trees may have been Pop's hobby, a way to fill up the hours of retirement, but his art and his love were the horses. He studied the
Daily Telegraph
, the horse paper, as if it were a sacred text. When he was done with it, the margins would be filled with the scribble of horses' names, jockeys' names, times, claiming purses, stacks of simple arithmetic, and strange symbols that looked like Chinese writing. Whatever it all stood for, it allowed him to pick a fairly high percentage of winners. There was one time when he went to the track and came home in a brand new car, and another when he won so much he took us all on vacation to Niagara Falls. Pop's best friend was his bookie, Bill Pharo, and Pop drove over to Babylon to see him almost every day.

Saturday afternoon, when my father returned home from work, he called us kids into the living room and made us sit before him on the love seat. My mother and he sat on the couch across the marble coffee table from us. Before they spoke, my mind raced back through the recent weeks to try to remember if we could be in trouble for something.

All I could think of besides the incident with Hickey, which seemed to have blown over by then, was a night sometime before school started when we made a dummy out of old clothes—shirt and pants—stuffed with newspapers and held together with safety pins. The head was from a big, mildewed doll, an elephant stuffed with sawdust someone had won at a fair or the circus, that had been lying around in the cellar for as long as I could remember. We decapitated it, removed some of the sawdust, tied the neck in a knot, and pinned it to the collar of the shirt. The figure was crude, but we knew it would serve our purposes, especially in the dark and when people were driving in their cars. We got it out of the cellar unseen by lifting it through one of the windows into the backyard.

We'd named our floppy elephant guy, Mr. Blah-blah, and tied a long length of fishing line around his chest under the arms of the shirt. We laid him at the curb on one side of the street and then doled out the fishing line over to the other side of the street and through the bottom of the hedges in front of the empty house that had, until recently, belonged to the Holsters. We knew it wouldn't pay to do what we were planning in front of our own house, and the one we chose had the benefit of having a southern extension of the woods right behind it in the backyard. We could move along the trails in the pitch black and anyone who tried to chase us would have to turn back.

Hiding behind the hedges, we waited until we saw the lights of a car coming down the street. Just when the car got close to where the hedges started, we reeled the bum in, pulling on the line, and in the dark he looked like he was crawling across the road in fits and starts, sort of like he'd already been hit once by a car.

The car's brakes screeched and it swerved, almost driving up on the curb and nearly hitting the telephone pole before it stopped. The instant I heard the brakes, I realized the whole thing was a big mistake. Jim and I ran like hell, bent in half to gain cover from the hedges. We stopped at the corner of the house, in the shadows.

“If they come after us, run back and jump the stream, and I'll meet you at the fork in the main path,” Jim whispered.

I nodded.

From where we stood, we had a good view of the car. I was relieved to see it was not one I recognized as belonging to one of our neighbors. It was an old model, from before I was born, shiny white, with a kind of bubble roof and fins that stuck up in the back like a pair of goal posts. The door creaked open and a man dressed in a long, white trench coat got out. It was too dark and we were too far away to see his features, but he came around the side of the car and obviously discovered Mr. Blah-blah in the road. He must have seen the fishing line, because he looked up and stared directly at us. Jim pulled me back deeper into the shadows. The man didn't move for the longest time, but his face was pointing exactly at where we stood. My heart was pounding, and only Jim's hand on the back of my shirt kept me from running. Finally, the man got back in the car and drove away. When we were sure the car was gone, we got Blah-blah and threw him back in the woods.

My father cleared his throat, and I looked at Jim, who sat on the other side of Mary, and he looked at me, and I knew that his memory was stuffed with that mildewed elephant head.

“We just wanted to tell you that we don't think Aunt Laura is going to be with us much longer,” said my father. His elbows were on his knees and he was looking more at our feet than at us. He rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them.

“You mean she's going to die?” said Jim.

“She's very sick and weak. In a way, it will be a blessing,” said my mother. I could see the tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

We nodded, but I was unsure if that was the right thing to do. That phrase, “a blessing,” stuck in my mind, and I wondered how dying could be a good thing. Then my father told us, “Okay, go and play.” Mary went over to where my mother was sitting and climbed into her lap. I left before the tears really started rolling.

That afternoon, I took George and my notebook and we traveled far. When I started I felt the weight of a heavy thought in my head. I could feel it roosting, but when I tried to realize it, reach for it with my mind, it proved utterly illusive, like trying to catch a killifish in the shallows with your bare hands. On my way up to Higbee Lane, I witnessed a scene involving Mr. and Mrs. Wilson being screamed at by their ten-year-old tyrant son, Reggie; passed by Nick, the janitor from Southgate, who was fixing his car out in his driveway; saw the lumbering, moon-eyed Milton kid, Peter, big and slow as a mountain, riding a bike whose seat seemed to have disappeared up his ass.

We crossed Higbee Lane and went down the street lined on both sides with giant sycamores; leaves gone yellow and brown. To the left of me was the farm, cows grazing in the field, to the right was a ploughed expanse of bare dirt where they had begun to frame a line of new houses. Beyond that another mile, down a hill, amidst a thicket of trees, next to the highway, we came to a stream I knew about where no one ever went.

I sat with my back to an old telephone pole someone had dumped there and wrote up the neighbors I'd seen on my journey—told about how Mrs. Wilson had Reggie when she was forty-one; told about how the kids at school would try to fool Nick, who was Yugoslavian and didn't speak English very well, and his response to them: “Boys, you are talking dogshit”; told about the weird redneck Miltons, who I had overheard described by Mrs. Kelty once as “incest from the hills.”

When I was finished writing, I put my pencil in the notebook and drew George close to me. I petted his head and told him, “It's gonna be okay.” The thought I'd been carrying finally broke through, and I saw a figure, like a human shadow, leaning over Aunt Laura's bed in the otherwise empty room at St. Anselm's and lifting her up. He held her to him, pressed her inside of him, into the dark, and then, like a bubble of ink bursting, vanished.

That night, my mother, well into her bottle of wine, erupted, spewing anger and fear in loud, slurred tones. During these episodes, she was another person, and when they were done I could never remember what the particulars of her rage were, just that the experience seemed to suck the air out of the room and leave me unable to breathe. The image that came to my mind was of the evil queen gazing into her talking mirror, and I tried to rebuff it by conjuring the memory of a snowy day when I was little and she rode Jim and me to school on the sled, running as fast as she could. We laughed, she laughed, and the world was covered in white.

We kids abandoned our father, leaving him to take the brunt of the attack. Jim fled down the cellar to lose himself in Botch Town. Mary went instantly Mickey, encircled herself with a whispered string of numbers for protection, and snuck next door to Nan's house. As I headed up the stairs to the refuge of my own room, I heard the sound of a smack and then something skittered across the kitchen floor. I knew it was either my father's glasses or his teeth, but I wasn't going back to find out. While he sat there, stoically, waiting for the storm to pass, I shoved off with Perno Shell down the Amazon in search of El Dorado.

Sometime later, just after Shell had taken a curare dart in the neck and paralysis was setting in, there was a knock on my door. I said to come in and Mary entered. She curled up at the bottom of my bed and lay there staring at me.

“Hey,” I said, “want me to read you some people from my notebook?”

She sat up and nodded.

So I read her all the ones I had recently added, up to the Milton kid on his bike. I recounted my findings at a slow pace in order to kill time and allow her a long stint of the relief she found in the mental tabulation of my findings. When we finished, the house was silent.

“Any winners in that bunch?” I asked.

“Nick the janitor,” she said.

“Go to bed now,” I told her.

When she opened the door to leave, George was sitting there, waiting to accompany her to her room.