The Empire of Ice Cream (45 page)

“No, we've gotta keep going” said Barney. “He'll blow your friggin' head off.”

“I have a better chance of staying alive against that guy. If I run five more steps, I'm gonna drop over.”

“Okay,” he said, shaking his head and looking doubtful.

The girl patted my back. I turned, smiled, and put my finger to my lips. She did the same.

I got quietly to my feet, making sure to stay hunched down beneath the top of the blind. Grasping the stick tightly with both hands, I lifted it back over my shoulder.

“Break his fucking skull,” whispered Barney, and then we could say no more because the kidnapper was right in front of us, less than ten yards away. That big, ugly face was twisted with a look of anguish, and I noticed tears in his eyes. He stepped closer.
“Marta!”
he screamed. When he turned to look behind him, I bolted out from behind the bushes with nothing on my mind but swinging for the fence. As I moved, I heard Barney and the girl take off. I could smell the cigarettes and whiskey on the guy and brought the stick around. I had his head directly in my sights when I slipped on the leaves and went down like a 280-pound sack of shit at his feet. I lost my wind and the stick fell out of my hands.

I laid there, eyes closed, working to get my breath back, waiting for the gun to go off. Seconds passed, and then a minute, then two, and there was nothing, just the sound of the wind in the trees. When I finally got up enough courage to open my eyes, there was Barney and the girl looking down at me.

“Where's the guy?” said Barney.

“His name is Gerry,” said the girl.

I staggered to my feet and looked around in a daze. “I took a fall on the leaves. I thought I was a dead man,” I said.

“I didn't hear a gun shot, so we came back.”

“Let's get out of here,” I said. “If he didn't shoot me by now, he's not going to … I hope.”

We saw no trace of Gerry on the way back to the house, but we were jumpy as hell, turning with every falling twig, always ready to bolt. Barney asked Carly what more she knew about him, so we could tell the police. She told us he drove a black van and also provided part of the license plate number. “The policeman in school told us to remember the numbers,” she said.

The instant our cars came into view up by the road, we took off toward them. There was no sign of the black van. Barney and the girl ran and I hobbled as best I could. He opened the back door of his car and she climbed in on the seat.

“Put the belt on,” said Barney.

She did as she was told and then said to us, “I'm tired,” and lay down on the seat, closed her eyes. My heart went out to the poor kid; she was brave as hell.

He closed the door. “Follow me,” he said. “I'm going to head into town to the police station.”

I agreed, got into my car, and we drove off. Finally at rest behind the wheel, I began to feel every ache and pain from our adventure in the woods. The sky had, at some point, grown overcast. It seemed later than it should have been. I didn't think the whole ordeal at the pink house could have taken more than an hour and a half at the most, but from the look of things it seemed night was now only an hour or so away.

The fact that we had rescued the girl had begun to sink in, and I felt good about it. With all my bruises, my creaking knees, instead of feeling my age, I felt like I was sixteen again and had just finished high school football practice. Then, on Bascomb Road, heading east toward town, I saw Barney turn into the lot of a closed farm market/gas station and park next to a pay phone. I pulled in behind him.

I thought he was going to get out, but he stayed seated in the car. I got out of mine and walked up next to his window.

He rolled the window down but didn't turn to look at me.

“What's the deal?” I said.

“Look in the back seat,” he said.

I stepped back and peered in the window. She was gone. I opened the door and leaned down to touch the seat where she had been.

Barney got out of the car as I slammed the back door. He dropped some money into the pay phone and put through an anonymous call to the police. While I stood there listening as he told them what we thought we knew about the girl's abduction, snow started to fall. By the time he hung up it was really coming down.

I lit up and he bummed a cigarette off me. “We've been played,” he said.

“What'd the cop say?” I asked.

“He warned me of the penalty of interfering in a police investigation. ‘Get a life, buddy,' he said just before he hung up on me.”

Three days later, the news reported that, due to the efforts of law enforcement and a nationwide Amber alert, Gerry Gilfoil had been arrested and the girl he had abducted had been rescued. The black van, the plate number, all of it was on the money. The cops caught up with them in Ohio. The girl, Carly, was fine. He hadn't hurt her. He said he was taking her to Disneyland. The reason he'd grabbed her was because his wife had left him and taken their daughter. She was about the same age as Carly and he missed her terribly. It seems he had grown despondent and depressed of late, uncommunicative, and his wife couldn't take it anymore.

Along with the story, there was a photo of the girl being reunited with her family, and beneath that a photo of poor Gerry, his eyes as empty as Carly's were luminous. I carried that image of her abductor around in my mind for weeks, and every morning, in the bathroom mirror, I'd compare my own to it and contemplate his loss. Sometime soon after that story ran, the kitchen sink busted again, and I can't readily describe what a pleasure it actually was to fix it.

The next time I saw Barney was about two months later, the night before New Year's Eve. We sat out in the frozen studio, dressed in coats and gloves, sipping from a bottle of Four Roses. Because of the bitter cold in recent weeks, the paint on some of the
Coffins on the River
series had cracked and fallen off onto the floor in big, bright chips.

“That's a shame,” I said, eyeing Biscuit Boy's leprosy.

“What are we gonna do?” he said.

“I know what you mean,” I told him. “I found out the other day that my publisher doesn't want to take a chance on another
Deluge
. They're dropping me.” I took a taste from the bottle and passed it to him.

“Jeez,” was all he could muster. He shook his head and then drank until he grimaced.

I hadn't mentioned our adventure at the pink house since we had parted in the snow that day, but there were a lot of times I had almost called him. “So,” I said, “what did you make of that rescue?”

He reached down and lifted a large paint chip off the floor that held Qua Num's chest emblem: a beautifully rendered alarm clock. Spinning it slowly in his hands, he studied it while he spoke. “Life and Art,” he said, “are the same thing; one illusion standing in for the other and vice versa. Even if no one is watching, the only happiness is to try to do your best.” He dropped the chip and it broke in two.

“Maybe something's always watching,” I said.

“Maybe not,” he said. Then he pulled a fat joint out of his coat pocket, lit up, took a drag, and passed it over. “Hold those hits,” he said, and I did, my head soon growing light. In the silence that followed the last toke, I heard the boards of the studio creak in the cold, and the wind coming in through the window was like the sound of water rushing by. I pictured that old, tired year, climbing into its coffin and pushing off into the flow, leaving the two of us behind to manage as best we could.

Coffins on the River

Story Notes

The central idea of this story was inspired by an amazing book I read by Jeremy Narby called
The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge.
Since its premise is explained in the story, I won't bother to reiterate it here. Whether Narby's concept is close to truth or mere folly, I really don't care. This kind of imaginative speculative science is The Breakfast of Champions for writers like me
.

The character of Barney in the story is based on my painter friend (see the afterword for “A Man of Light”) who actually created a series of pictures whose theme was coffins on the river. In the coffins were famous dead people, and they were moving along downstream as seen from above. He also did another series of paintings of super heroes of his own invention, basically as I describe them in the story, and so, in my narrative, I switched the super heroes with the famous dead people in the coffins
.

Some people who read this story thought of Barney and the narrator as losers, but I don't think they are. In dedicating one's life to an art, there are myriad pitfalls and the possibility of never having your work recognized by the public. Still, there are millions of people who valiantly pursue their dreams long after others have forsaken theirs. To all those who think of art only in terms of success and remuneration, I suppose the two characters in this story would appear losers, but for anyone who keeps their creative dream alive in the face of grave consequences and a hostile populace of zombie-like naysayers, I see them as heroic. Our heroes in this story have traveled deeper and deeper inside themselves to chase that dream as the years have flowed on. Sometimes, in doing this, one can lose contact with the outside world and not realize that it is
there
that the answers to their questions sometimes lie (in both senses of the word)
.

I think some readers were put off by this story because it dealt with the use of drugs. Drugs have, from ancient times, starting with the
Rig Veda,
been an integral part of fantastic literature—the elixir, the potion, soma, etc. They have always been agents of transcendence. Besides, they exist in the real world. To include drugs in a story does not mean that the writer advocates their use or is promoting them as a viable answer to life's dilemmas, but when they are part of life, they should be expected to appear in fiction sometimes, just as murder is included in the Bible. Remember, there's a reason we call it
fiction.

I took this story to the Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference and received good advice on key elements from some of the other writers in attendance. The story was published by Deb Layne and Jay Lake of Wheatland Press in the third installment of their incredible anthology series
, Polyphony.

Summer Afternoon

Henry James once said that the two most beautiful words in the English language were
Summer Afternoon
, and after he spoke those words they hit the atmosphere and shattered. Pieces of them flew this way and that. Some of each went into the ears of his listener, who heard them and nodded as if in agreement, even though she thought all along they should be
Autumn Night
.

The shards that did not serve a purpose for James and the young Miss Pentrith flew on and later joined up as they left Earth's atmosphere. In space they became a tiny ball of green fizz drawn into the far blackness by the electromagnetic pulse of a quasar.

They made the cosmic pinball rounds at light speed—planets, suns, nebulae—rapping lightly against the door of Heaven, bouncing from moon to star, piercing molten cores and lodging momentarily between the ears of Sufra, Queen of the Harvang. In an ocean of gamma ray, a single seed of meaning germinated and grew into a thought that later had a memory of itself rolling off the spiral tongues of galaxies. Time came and went. On a summer afternoon those words returned to Earth, looking for Henry James.

They looked for a good long time, flitting here and there, miasmatic and ineffable, but they did not think to look under the ground. Finally, in South Jersey, on a screened-in porch, they overheard brief mention of their creator and gathered themselves up in the corner of the ceiling to learn what they could.

Beneath them, sitting on a wicker rocker, was a forty-year-old man holding a phone to his ear. He wore a shirt with no sleeves, gym shorts, and white socks. There was much of him, and he had a beard and glasses.

He wasn't speaking to Henry James on the phone as Summer Afternoon suspected. As a matter of fact, he wasn't talking to anyone. He was making believe he was talking to Henry James. He was a writer and for months he had been unable to write. Summer Afternoon didn't know he had sat every night for the past three months, smoking cigarettes, staring at a blank computer screen. He strained to pass greatness, but each night, the result—a mere handful of malodorous clichés. So he thought that while the kids were at school and his wife was at work, he would make believe calling Henry James for some advice.

The first thing James told him was to soak his feet in ice water twice daily.

“Whatever you say, Henry,” said the writer.

Next, the old master told him to refrain from cursing.

“That's a toughie,” said the writer, “I say ‘fuck' every other word.”

Henry didn't like to hear that and said it was a disgrace.

“What else?” said the writer.

“Moon bathing.”

“Moon bathing?” he asked.

Then Henry started laughing and the writer laughed too. But Henry kept on laughing at his own joke way too hard.

“What a putz,” said the writer as he slammed down the receiver. He wondered what Thomas Mann was up to.

The spirit of the words swooped down and filtered into the cigarette burning in the ashtray. The writer decided he didn't have time to climb
The Magic Mountain
and knew Mann's advice would be to clip his toenails or something equally innocuous. A better bet, he thought, would be to just dial at random and see who he got. He dialed and while the phone rang, he picked up his cigarette and took a drag. Finally a woman answered.

“Are you a writer?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “my name is Dara Melsh. I wrote one novel called
Autumn Night
.”

“Can you give me a little?” he asked.