A Fistful of Fig Newtons (29 page)

In my day, it was presided over by Mr. Igloo himself, a small, worried-looking man who was never called anything but “Mr. Leggett.” His life was devoted to ice cream the way a Jesuit focuses in on the nature of good and evil. Mr. Leggett was never known to wield a scoop himself. No, his troop of disciplined dedicated high school students handled the job, clad in sparkling aprons and Igloo helmets. They were the Praetorian Guard of tutti-frutti and rocky road.

I really can’t say why I did it, since I have long subscribed to Tom Wolfe (the First) and his seminal dicta that “You can’t go home again,” but, flying in the face of good sense, I pushed open
the heavy glass door. A wave of achingly familiar ancient aromas poured over me. Ice cream joints have a distinctive smell, a kind of vague, sweetish/sour that is as uniquely American as a Fenway Park hot dog.

Great Scott, it’s shrunk! That measly little formica counter, those spindly stools. But, by God, it’s all here!

A few acne-riddled youths were squatting at the far end of the counter. One wore a faded purple T-shirt imprinted with a giant insolent finger and bearing the inscription UP YOURS. I eased myself gingerly onto one of the familiar stools with its red imitation-leather padding. Of course, it had been slashed several times and its cotton guts were oozing outward, indicating that the ancient roving tribe of Vandals had left their mark, their universal barbaric yawp of pure malevolence.

The heavy-jowled, white-aproned citizen behind the counter bellowed out at the acne victims:

“Look, you birds, tone it down or I’ll kick your butts right out of here.”

He swabbed a wet rag over the counter, glaring with the tired eye of a man whose life is truly spent at the end of his rope. There was something vaguely familiar about him. He wore a plastic igloo on his head, a white half-cantaloupe of imitation snow complete to the tunnel doorway, which extended out over his bulbous nose as a visor.

The same stupid hat. I wonder if that’s the very one that Junior Kissel tried to steal one day and damn near got his arm broke. It can’t be.

“Come on, Al. How ’bout a free scoop of marshmallow brickle?”

“Look, you punk, I’ll give you a free scoop right where you don’t want it, y’hear?”

He turned and moved toward me. I was about to enjoy, once again, the blessed fruits of the Igloo. The Igloo, a historic battleground fabled in local song and folklore, the site of one of the first decisive skirmishes of modern times between individual
man and the faceless corporation. Agincourt, Waterloo, Omaha Beach–the Igloo.

“What’ll you have, buddy?”

His gray bb eyes peered out from under his festive igloo as he glared down at me with the customary truclence which is in this day and age standard treatment given to the rank and file. Our eyes met. He wavered. In a low voice, I greeted him.

“Al, make it the regular.”

I allowed a thin, ironic smile to play over my handsome, craggy features. For a long, pregnant moment our stares locked.

“Jesus,” he hissed, “what the hell you doin’ here?”

“The regular, Al.”

“That’ll be a dip of pineapple and a dip of Dutch chocolate on a sugar cone, right?”

“Right, Al. I’m glad to see that you have not forgotten the tastes of a true connoisseur.”

“Look, buddy, you were here during the Great War. How could I forget?”

“Yes, Al, I was. Those punks down at the end of the counter couldn’t imagine anything like it, right?”

Al chuckled as he scooped deep into his ice cream vats. “Yep. But they heard of it. They teach ’em about it at the high school, in history.”

“God, that sure was something …”

It had all begun on a steamy hot day in July. It was a Friday, and there were none who suspected that this nondescript day would go down in legend. It was hot, really hot, as only Indiana can get when the sun hangs like a molten ball in the brass-colored skies, the air so thick that the clothes poles and drooping trees shimmered in your vision. The low, heavy bank of perpetual smoke from the steel mills ringed the horizon, and the air was ripe with the million rotting-egg smells of the refineries. Cicadas screamed, their cries dying out in exhaustion.

We were playing a listless game of softball, just swatting the ball around and tossing it back and forth, not a real game but the kind you play when there’s nothing much else to do.

“Come on, Schwartz. Quit hitting ’em in the stickers.” Flick gingerly poked around in the weeds, trying to find the ball amid the miserable sand burrs that made life in Indiana such a joy. These burrs are mean little buggers. They fester the skin and work their way up through the marrow of the bones, and they cover the sandy soil of Indiana like scratchy fur on a yellow Airedale. Flick casually tossed the ball to Schwartz, who was knocking out the flies for us to shag. He scooped it up and yelled in pain.

“Ow! God dammit, Flick, take the stickers off the ball before you throw it!”

He dropped the bat and began surgery on his injured mitt.

And so the game went, if you could call it a game. An airplane droned painfully overhead, chopping through the thick atmosphere on its way toward Chicago. Half the county was out of work. They’re always having things called “slumps,” but the current one had gone on for years. The White Sox were in seventh place, forty-three games behind the Yankees. They were trailed only by the St. Louis Browns, but by a mere half-game. As Charles Dickens put it, it was not the best of times, nor was it the worst of times, but something sure as hell was about to happen.

“Boy, am I thirsty. Wow. My tongue is hanging down around my knees. Boy, do I need a drink. Gaaahhh!” Kissel clutched at his throat and reeled around in the weeds, pretending that he was dying. Schwartz slammed a fast hopper at him and caught him neatly in the gut as he staggered about.

“Come on, Kissel, quit horsing around,” I yelled. Kissel was the worst ballplayer for miles around. He tried to make up for it by clowning, but he wasn’t very good at that either. Kissel picked up the ball and awkwardly tossed it into the stickers back of Schwartz.

“Y’throw like a girl, Kissel,” Schwartz hollered.

This was, of course, a maximum insult.

“Hey, Kissel, you’re horsin’ around, you go after the ball in the stickers.” Flick sailed a rock in the general direction of Kissel, who was now groveling in the dust pretending that he was dying of thirst. Schwartz fished the ball out of the sand burrs with the end of the bat and began golfing it around without picking it up, since it now looked like a porcupine about to strike. The field we were using was a semi-abandoned city ball park with a rickety chicken-wire backstop and barely discernible base lines.

Thirst is a contagious disease. Kissel had started it; now all of our tongues were hanging out. Schwartz picked up a rock and said, “Let’s see if we can open the spigot.” The spigot was a mysterious pipe that stuck out of the ground a couple of inches, back of third base just outside the foul line. It had caused many a swollen ankle, and had never been known to be turned on.

Schwartz banged on it with the bat, first on one side and then the other.

“Come on, Schwartz, you’re tightening it.” Flick tried to grab the bat away from him. “You gotta hit it on the other side.”

“How do you know so much?” Schwartz snarled. “You ain’t my boss.”

We gathered around the faucet, some kicking, Kissel hammering with a derelict chunk of grandstand. Schwartz whacked it again with the Louisville Slugger, putting his back into it.

S S S S S S S S S S S S!

A silver spray of liquid arced fanlike into the air. We jumped back.

“Boy, you got it, Schwartz!” Kissel leaped on the faucet and wrapped his mouth around the pipe, gulping frantically. He came up for air and again the crescent of water sprayed over us.

“Oh, boy, is that good! Wow!” Kissel’s dripping face was contorted in ecstasy. Flick fell onto the faucet and gulped greedily. Each in his turn filled up our tanks.

Five minutes later, our stomachs taut and sloshing, we wandered listlessly toward the far end of the field. Without a
word being said, the game was over. Contentment had us in its silky, comforting grip.

“Hey, there’s Clarence.” Schwartz waved the bat toward the chicken-wire fence. “Hey, Clarence, is there gonna be a ball game here tomorrow?” Flick hollered out.

Clarence “worked for the city.” He was sort of in charge of the park, but he never came around much, spending most of his time at the Bluebird testing the Pabst Blue Ribbon to be sure it came up to city health standards. Clarence wore coveralls and drove a pickup truck with the seal of the city on its door, so he was a celebrity among the kids who hung around in the park.

“Hey, you guys, was you guys foolin’ around with that spigot over there?”

“Why, no, of course not, Clarence, what gave you that idea? Why, we were just having a bit of infield practice.” Flick, the resident smart-ass, was back at his trade.

“Come on, I saw you guys drinkin’ out of that spigot. Lookit, it’s still squirtin’.”

“C’mon, Clarence, we were thirsty. It’s really hot today.” I tried pure reason as a last resort. After all, there was no telling what Clarence could do, since he was Official.

“Well”–Clarence shot a stream of tobacco juice into the stickers—“don’t come around and ask me for no sympathy when you start throwin’ up and heavin’ all over the place.”

“What do you mean?” Kissel squeaked. His mother was a legendary hypochondriac who carried a shopping bag full of pills with her wherever she went. It was rumored that she sprayed Kissel himself with Lysol three times a day, and she had a deadly fear of something she called “germs.”

Clarence threw his shovel into the back of the city pickup and clanged the tailgate shut.

“Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He squirted more juice into the weeds.

“Come on, Clarence, stop the kidding.” Flick looked a little worried.

“I ain’t kiddin’.” Clarence blew his nose loudly into a blue-and-white bandanna. “That ain’t city water. That stuff is pumped right out of the river. It’s supposed to be used just for waterin’ the grass. There’s a sign over there on the tool shack, if you wanna know. That stuff’ll kill you.”

Water out of the river! The river that moldered and festered its smelly way through the Region was so gooey and full of dead snakes that it wasn’t water at all, just a kind of brown ooze. Every chemical factory for miles around dumped stuff into it. It once caught fire, and the Fire Department had to come and squirt water into it to put it out.

Clarence climbed into the cab and started the engine.

“Don’t come cryin’ around to me when you’re dead.” He laughed nastily and roared off down the street, trailing a cloud of stickers and tobacco juice.

There was a long moment of tremulous silence, broken only by the distant sound of someone beating a carpet.

“He’s kiddin’. He’s always sayin’ that kind of stuff.” Schwartz had a funny sound in his voice.

“Yeah” was all I could think to say.

Flick kicked his tennis shoe against a curb. “He got tobacco juice on my new laces.”

“Listen, you guys, don’t tell my mother. She’d go crazy. She won’t even let me drink out of the hose. She says there’s rubber in the hose and it could stop up your kidneys or something. Boy, she’s gonna kill me.”

Schwartz laughed. “How could she kill you if you’re already dead from drinkin’ that water? When you’re layin’ there in the kitchen, turning green, and she comes in there and starts hollerin’, and you’re layin’ there …”

Schwartz, as was true of all of us, was always ready with the needle.

“Look, you guys, this ain’t funny. I never heard of anybody drinking water out of that crummy river. That ain’t even water!”

Kissel spoke the truth. It was sobering. The sun was hanging
low over the flat plains of Illinois to the west. Many a pioneer forefather had passed on into the Great Happy Hunting Grounds from drinking at the wrong water hole. All of us had seen enough cowboy movies to know what could happen.

“It was your idea, Flick,” I mumbled through the sweat.

“What do you mean, my idea! It was Kissel started all of it. Rollin’ around in the dirt like a nut, with your tongue hangin’ out. It was Kissel!”

“I got a right to roll around in the dirt. It’s a free country. I never even knew that spigot was there.” Kissel was the color of a dirty dishrag with fear.

“You started hitting it with the bat, Schwartz,” I said, giving him a shove.

Schwartz, as the guilty always have, took the offensive. “Nobody forced y’ to drink it. I ain’t your boss. You hit it too, Flick, with that board!”

We trudged on through the stifling heat. The first mosquitoes were coming on duty. A ragged sparrow flew by on his way to the city dump. Each of us carried his own private knot of fear that the end had come. We had many such terrors in our lives. For instance, it was well known that if you licked the point of an indelible pencil, thus purpling your tongue, there was no hope. Or, it was fully recognized by the best medical authorities among the kids that a sure way to commit suicide in a particularly nasty manner was to swallow a wad of bubble gum, which would “cause your guts to stick together.” Naturally, it was believed that eating too much candy caused you to “get worms,” which, while not fatal, was certainly serious. There were hundreds of these mortal dangers that we believed in, and I must admit that even today I’m very careful around indelible pencils and bubble gum. We all had heard of the kid who once cut open a golf ball, which had, of course, exploded, blowing up his neighborhood. Then there was the two-aspirins-and-a-swig-of-Coca-Cola, which was guaranteed to make you drunker than a skunk. It goes without saying that drinking a tank full of river water had to be, at the very least, fatal.

We were listlessly shuffling in the general direction of our various houses. Instinctively, the way a herd of Guernsey cows heads for the barn at twilight, kids in the flatlands of Indiana mosey barnward at suppertime.

“Y’know, that water tasted kinda funny.” Schwartz juicily shot a wad of bubble gum at a passing brown-and-white rat terrier that was innocently going about his job of knocking over garbage cans and rooting among the coffee grounds. “Sorta like rusty iron, or something.”