One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (7 page)

Many ice-cream trucks trolled the streets of Defiance, Ohio, but mine was the only modified 1986 Astro van painted beige with brown spots. My customers liked buying ice cream from a man popping his head out the side of a giraffe. They ran down the street, chasing my bumper, and I kept coasting at seven or eight miles an hour, my boot kissing the gas every now and then. A trail of kids lured more kids, who lured parents screaming for them to get out of the road. That mess made a crowd, and crowds meant business, and business meant I made rent and paid the electric bill and the gas bill and maybe even bought a new old movie from Lacy Stacy’s Adult Boutique. But before I paid any of that, I’d drop fifty bucks into Roger and Frida’s bank account. They came first, and they always will. Even if I never see them. Even though I can’t pay child support, because their mother ran off with them when they were just learning to wobble on their stubby legs. A father doesn’t stop loving his kids, no matter how long they don’t know who the hell he is.

But as for all the boys not named Roger and all the girls not named Frida, they’re all just little shits. Sometimes when I had five or six kids chasing the van, weaving in and out of my side-view mirror, I hovered my boot over the brake pedal. The pedal beckoned
my foot, and I’d imagine hearing five or six kids pinging against the bumper. They’d get a big bite of steel. That would teach those little shits, who shoved sweaty crumples of money through the window, blocked the line while they jammed sweets down their throats, and then flicked their push-up sticks into my face. Some of them would take their Hippo-sicle and jet without paying. I wasn’t fooled by a big smile missing two front teeth or mussed up golden locks or happy squints pocked with an adorable mess of freckles. There’s no telling who’s going to fuck you over.

My second week of ice-cream selling, I was driving down this real prime suburb just after dinner. Usually I’d have a dozen little shits chasing my bumper as I circled the cul-de-sacs, but all was silent. No kids playing on a single one of those sod lawns. Just me and the ice cream and my van tinkling “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Every door was shut tight, every air conditioner humming away. Not an
SUV
creeping along the fresh blacktop. I was waiting for a goddamn tumbleweed to roll across the road.

Instead, in my side-view, a zebra-striped van appeared in the distance. I stuck my arm out the window, waved hello to my brother in arms, and he sped up, worn-out muffler roaring. The zebra van tinkled out “Camptown Races.” Its tinny notes clashed with mine as it sucked up to my bumper. I pulled my arm back inside, kept driving, wondered if he needed to borrow some Sea Urchin Sammy Cream Pops. Just as I was counting inventory in my head, planning out a real nice gesture of sharing, another van appeared in my mirror, this one painted up like a dalmatian. It sped past the zebra van and sidled up next to me. It was tinkling some tune too, but at this point, I couldn’t pick out one tune from another. It just sounded like a big pile of tinkles, like a swarm of fairies having an orgy. The dalmatian stayed tight on my side, and I waved again. I couldn’t see inside the van, the side window tinted black as a missing tooth in a six-year-old’s smile.

I sped up, tried to break away from these vans closing me in, mucking up my “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The zebra behind accelerated right along with me, closer than ever, and the dalmatian to
my side swerved into me until my rims ground the curb. I thought of Roger and Frida when they were toddlers. If their ball had skidded into the road, well, shit, there’d have been Roger and Frida pancakes. As much as I hated little shits, I couldn’t live with their deaths caused by all us vans filling the street, flying through the suburbs at twenty-three miles per hour.

The subdivision exit appeared up ahead on my left, and soon I’d be on the main road and then the freeway and then back in my studio apartment watching
Selma Slams St. Louis
on my twenty-one-inch. I was ten yards away, when another van pulled out from behind a house, this one painted up like a cow and barreling straight at me.

They had me. Boxed me in and brought me to a stop. Next thing I knew, they’d yanked me out of my van and were kicking me in the head, pummeling me in the gut with ice-cream scoops. They worked quick and wore Jimmy Carter masks, so I couldn’t get an
ID
on any of them. And I should’ve been figuring out how I’d survive this, but instead I wondered, just as the shortest Jimmy Carter ground his sneaker against my nose, where the hell they found Jimmy Carter masks. Nixon masks, sure. Reagan masks, no problem. But Jimmy C. didn’t seem like a face that would demand a factory mold. I voted for him the day after Roger was born. We were busy with the new baby and scared as shit because we were just babies too, nineteen years old. But I made time to vote. Jimmy said he was going to make the country “competent and compassionate.” A sweet baby like Roger needed competence and compassion. He deserved all of that. Frida came a year later, and two years after that, my ex stole them both away to Idaho. All the compassion in the world was sucked away, and I was left with a president who couldn’t get a couple of his boys out of Iran. I was stuck working a shit job at the same go-nowhere freight yard where my father worked until he collapsed on a crate of duck-shaped pacifiers, dead instantly from a blood clot in his brain.

That scrawny Jimmy C. mask wearer gave me a final kick to the jaw. Of course the smallest guy would have to end things. It made
me hope Roger had grown up to be a monstrous man who didn’t need to prove shit, six and a half feet of confidence.

Those Jimmy Carters told me that I was entrepreneurializing on Scream-a-Dream Ice Cream turf, infringing copyrights with my unregistered animal van. They zip-tied my hands behind my back, jammed a map into my pocket. Then they tied me to a mailbox and pulled out knives. I’m not a man who’s easily scared, but I’m also not an idiot who thinks he has a body made of steel and would talk shit to a glinting blade. I knew I could bleed, so I kept my mouth shut, watched silently when they slashed my tires and spray-painted
STAY
OFF
SCREAM
-
A
-
DREAM
TURF
on the side of my van.

When they left, I tried to wriggle free, but I couldn’t budge the ties, couldn’t snap a tiny width of plastic. So I hung my head, leaned against the mailbox, resigned to stay there until some little shit found me and started pelting me with stones. I didn’t have to wait. The mailbox snapped under my weight. It wasn’t my muscle or my ingenuity that freed me, but all those pounds I’d put on since I stopped working the freight yards.

I called a tow. I got home. Didn’t need no damn emergency room, just a microwave salisbury steak and a movie. Before I watched, I double-checked the back of the
Selma Slams St. Louis
box for the date. I didn’t watch anything that came out after 1995. Frida turned eighteen in 1997, and I added two years, just to be safe. Every father prays his daughter doesn’t get into that kind of acting, but I wasn’t around to raise her right. There’s just no telling. Selma donned her heels and G-string in 1985. She made me feel safe, banging dozens of men in a time before Frida would have grown to learn the incompetence and cruelty of this world.

I scrubbed blood out of my shirt while Selma moaned. I’d taken worse beatings. Before a tiny curdle of blood killed my dad, he spent years thrashing me with the rubber insoles of his work boots. I don’t know why he used the insoles. All that matters is he was a cruel asshole, slapping the foot stink of an eight-hour all over my face.

I spread the map those Scream-a-Dream bastards gave me across my kitchen counter. Every halfway decent suburb in town
was highlighted in blood-red ink—Scream-a-Dream turf. They left me freeways and industrial districts and dirt roads on the county line. I took the giraffe van out on the road the next day, thinking about all the places I couldn’t go. A free man in an unfree country, an anchor the size of Toledo tied to my bumper. How was I ever going to make enough money to give Roger and Frida the life they deserved? When I drove to one of my designated work zones, the freight yards over by the Maumee River, I considered spinning the wheel, aiming my van at the bridge guardrails, and barreling through. At least Roger and Frida would collect the life insurance policy. And then they’d know my name, know their real daddy. Only, I didn’t know their names. The ex could’ve remarried. Any name could’ve landed in their laps. Any faceless man could be the one they called Daddy.

I didn’t drive the giraffe over the bridge. The Maumee smelled like shit, and that’s no way to drown, lungs filled with brown water all foamed up by melting ice cream. I drove past the subdivisions where I couldn’t go, my tinkler silent. I listened out the window for the sounds of my competition but heard nothing, and what a damn shame that I couldn’t work the routes they weren’t even using. I was about to say fuck it and drive into a no-no zone called Emerald Pines, when I spotted a subdivision with no name out front.

The blacktop was fresh, smooth and black. Not a house in sight. After a quarter mile of gnarled brush lining the curbs, they finally appeared. But not the clean vinyl-and-brick facades of the usual subdivision houses. The birth of new construction was an ugly sight. These houses wore siding like scabs, speckling the nakedness of plastic house wrap. Deeper into the subdivision, I watched two-by-four skeletons cast their stringy shadows onto the parched dirt. Or no skeletons at all, only holes in the ground where houses might grow. No families here, no little shits—no place a Scream-a-Dream van would ever stalk. Instead of painted-up tinkling vans, plain white ones littered the curbs, ladders strapped to their roofs. Or half-ton pickup trucks, their beds spilling scaffolding and sheets of drywall and copper wires and brass pipes. And all around me,
grizzled men stared, aimed their unshaven chins at my van, gripped their shovels and nail guns tighter.

Now, if I were a Scream-a-Dream sucker, I would’ve whipped my van into a U-turn and zipped out of there, dragging my zebra tail between my rear axle. But this challenge of entrepreneurship made my heart race, my teeth itch, fingers tap-tapping the steering wheel. No little shits as far as the eye could see, but there was potential here. I flicked on “Flight of the Bumblebee” and slowed the van to a creep. The men who hadn’t looked before did so now, craning their necks from ladders, hammers halted in midswing. I kept my eyes straight ahead, focused on the work of keeping my foot just barely pressed against the gas, tried to forget about my van that could’ve hauled lumber but was painted like a giraffe, tried to forget about my flabby biceps, my soft hands. But I’d put in my time at the freight yards, lifting crates until my arms burned.

I heard a yelp, and when I looked into my side-view, I saw one of the workers following me. He wore a baby-blue polo shirt a size too small so that the bare bottom of his belly wiggled brightly as he jogged behind me. His tool belt jangled with the rattle of nails and hammers. I fought the urge to press the brake. One frenzied customer could easily turn into two, two into four, four into a snaking tail of hot and hungry men dying for my ice cream.

But no one else picked up after the fat man in the polo. The road ended in a cul-de-sac, and I parked. The man jogged up to the side window where I kept the menu. He planted both hands on the van, gasping and studying.

I slid out of my seat, withheld opening the side window as long as I could. A customer waiting to order was the start to a crowd of followers. I opened my coolers, took a quick stock of my Quintuple-Berry Pops, pulled a roll of small bills from my pocket, and then, finally, slowly slid the window open.

“Christ on a stick, you nearly killed me.” His chest heaved. He licked his lips. “I’m going to need an
IV
of Fudge-O-Saurus Bars stat.”

I spread ten bars across the counter and smiled.

“How fat do you think I am, asshole?” he said. “They’ll saw off my left foot if I eat all of those.”

I moved to pull them away, and he grabbed my wrist, said, “Shit. I have some hungry boys back at the house. I guess I can put them to use.”

He gave me a fifty, told me to keep the change, and the profits there were ten bucks in the kids’ account and half an
Annie Poke-Me
video.

After the fat man left, I was alone again. I needed to get rid of my stock soon, or it would start to get freezer burn, and then I’d have to eat the loss. Except I couldn’t eat the loss literally. I’m lactose intolerant, ever since I was a kid. When my daddy used to take me to get ice cream after laying into me with his boot insoles, it just meant more punishment. Knots in my belly, welts on my back, a night spent curled over the toilet crying, and that would just get the old man all fired up with the insoles again for my being an ungrateful little shit.

The tinkler ran through a half-dozen more rounds of its tune before I heard a knock at the window. Two men stood outside, picking flakes of drywall mud off their shirts. They asked me if I had any water, and I didn’t, but I told them how refreshing a Weasel Pop could be. They shelled out a couple bucks, and then one of them said, “Now, if you had water in there, you could make a killing.”

The other one, whose baseball cap barely fit over a mess of curly brown hair, said, “Or if you had a shitter we could use, guys around here would pay for that. You get a little tired of shitting in buckets.”

I didn’t have the heart to try to sell them more ice cream after hearing that, especially with my own lactose-intolerant stomach twitching just feet away from freezers full of torture. But they got me thinking. If life hands you lemons, you don’t have to make lemonade. You sell those lemons for better product. Or you carve those lemons into bowls made of rind or into little lemon hats for dogs, or you pelt the giver of lemons with his own lemons until he relents and gives you oranges. Life is full of lemon givers, and a smart man takes his fate and makes more than just complacent
lemonade. Those tradesmen, for example, had pockets full of cash yet no water to drink, no proper pot to piss in. But they had plenty of buckets, and they made that work. They had new sinks and copper pipes to install but no water. Now they had me, who could provide life’s simple necessities.