The Empire of Ice Cream (22 page)

By the time I was done, it had grown quiet downstairs, and I knew my parents had finally gone to bed. Still, I wasn't tired, and on top of that I was a little spooked by remembering Rose's stories. Any meditation on Death was capable of conjuring the angry spirit of Jimmy Bonnel. To dispel his gathering presence, I got out of bed and tiptoed quietly down the stairs. In the kitchen, I stole a cookie and that's when I decided to descend and review Jim's recent progress with Botch Town.

Every old wooden step on the way to the cellar groaned miserably, but my father's snoring, rolling out from the bedroom at the back of the house, covered my own prowling. Once below, I inched blindly forward and when my hip touched the edge of the plywood world, I leaned way out and grabbed the pull string. The sun came out in the middle of the night in Botch Town. I half-expected the figures to all be moving of their own volition, but no, they must have heard me coming and froze on cue. Jim was right, there was a sense of being God, hovering above the clouds and peering down on the minute lives. It also made me think for an instant about my own smallness.

Scanning the board, I found the prowler, with his straight-pin hands, on the prowl, hiding in the toothpick grape arbor netted with vines of green thread behind the Curdmeyers' house across the street from ours, his clever, glowing eyes, like beacons, searching the dark for lost souls.

School started on a day so hot it seemed stolen from the heart of summer. The tradition was that if you got new clothes for school, you wore them the first day. My mother made Mary a couple of dresses on the sewing machine. Because he had outgrown what he had, Jim got shirts and pants from Gertz department store. I got his hand-me-downs, but I did also get a new pair of dungarees. They were stiff as concrete and, after months of nothing but cutoffs, seemed to weigh fifty pounds. I sweated like the Easter pig, shuffling through school zombie style, to the library, the lunchroom, on the playground, and all day long that burlap scent of new denim smelled like the spirit of Work.

Jim was starting junior high and, going to a different school, he had to take a bus to get there. Mary and I were still stuck at the Retard Factory around the corner. None of us were good students. I spent most of my time in the classroom either completely confused or daydreaming. Mary was in a special class, basically because they couldn't figure out if she was really smart or really simple. The kids they couldn't figure out, they put in room X. Although all of the other rooms had numbers, this one just had the letter that signaled something cut-rate, like on the TV commercials: Brand X. When I'd pass by that room, I'd look in and see these wacky kids hobbling around or mumbling or crying, and there would be Mary, sitting straight up, focused, nodding every once in a while. Her teacher, Mrs. Rockhill, whom we called Rockhead, was no Mrs. Harkmar and didn't have the secret to draw the Mickey of all right answers out of her. I knew Mary was really smart, though, because Jim had told me she was a genius.

As for Jim, no one knew what the hell he was up to. He had a history of putting obviously wrong answers down on his tests and homework assignments. “What's 6 apples and 3 apples?” they'd asked him in third grade. Jim's answer: “4 tin cans.” In an essay question dealing with the Navajo boy, Joe Mannygoats, we had to read about in fifth grade social studies, Jim ignored the question about Navajo family life, and created a scenario where Joe stole a gun and shot his goats. Then he cooked them and invited everyone to a barbecue. How Jim stayed out of room X was a room-X mystery no one could solve.

Once they called him into the psychologist's office and made my mother go over to the school and witness the tests they gave him. They showed him pages of paint blobs and asked him what he saw in them. “I see a spider, biting a woman's lip,” he said. “That's a sick, three-legged dog, eating grass.” Then they asked him to put pegs of various shapes into appropriate holes in a block of wood. He shoved all the wrong pegs in the wrong holes. Finally my mother smacked him in the back of the head, and then he and she started laughing hysterically. Throughout sixth grade, he incorporated something about Joe Mannygoats into all of his test answers, no matter the subject, and signed all yearbooks with that name. Still, he never failed a grade, and this gave me hope that I too would someday leave Southgate.

My teacher for sixth grade was the fearsome Mr. Krapp. To borrow a phrase from Nan, “as God is my judge,” that was his name. He was a short guy with a big nose and a crew cut so flat you could land a helicopter on it. Jim had had him and told me he screamed a lot. My mother had diagnosed Krapp with a Napoleonic complex. “You know,” she said, “he's a little general.” He assured us on the first day that he “wouldn't stand for any of it.” The third time he repeated the phrase, Tim Caliban, who sat behind me, leaned forward and whispered, “He'd rather get down on all fours.” Krapp had big ears too, and he heard Tim, who he made get up in front of the classroom and repeat for everyone what he'd said. That day we all learned an important lesson in how not to laugh no matter how funny something is.

School brought a great heaviness to the hours of my days as if they had put on new dungarees. By that year, though, it was business as usual, so I weathered it with a grim resignation. The only thing drastic that happened in that first week was on the way home one afternoon: Will Hickey, a kid with a bulging Adam's apple and big, curly hair, challenged me to a fight. I tried to walk away, but before I knew what was going on, a bunch of kids surrounded us and Hickey started pushing me. The whirl of voices and faces, the evident danger, made me lightheaded and what little strength I had quickly evaporated. Mary was with me and she started crying. I was not popular and had no friends there to help me; instead everyone was cheering for me to get beat up.

After a lot of shoving and name calling and me trying to back out of the circle and getting thrown into the middle again, he hit me once in the side of the head and I was dazed. Putting my hands up, I assumed the position I had seen on TV and when other kids fought, and he circled around me. I tried to follow his movements, but he darted in quickly and his bony knuckle split my lip. There was little pain, just an overwhelming sense of embarrassment, because I felt tears welling in the corners of my eyes.

As Hickey came toward me again, I saw Jim pushing through the crowd. He came up behind Hickey, reached around, and grabbed him by the throat with one hand. In a second, Jim wrestled him to the ground where he proceeded to punch him again and again in the face. When Jim got up, blood was running from Hickey's nose and he was quietly whimpering. All of the other kids had taken off. Jim lifted my book bag and handed it to me.

“You're such a pussy,” he said.

“How?” was all I could manage, I was shaking so badly.

“Mary ran home and told me,” he said.

“Did you kill him?”

He shrugged.

Hickey lived, and his mother called our house that night complaining that Jim was dangerous, but Mary and I had already told our mother what had happened. I remember her telling Mrs. Hickey over the phone, “Well, you know, you play with fire, you're liable to get burned.” When she hung up the phone, she flipped it the middle finger, and then told us she didn't want us fighting anymore. She made Jim promise he would apologize to Hickey. “Sure,” he said, but later, when I asked him if he was really going to apologize, he said, “Yeah, I'm going to take him to Bermuda.”

In reality, the start of school was an afterthought, because the prowler had surfaced twice again. The Graves's teenage daughter, Marci, spotted him spotting her sitting on the toilet late one night. The Stutton kid, Kenny, who regularly proclaimed in school that he would someday be president, found the shadow man in their darkened garage, crouching in the corner behind the car when he went out there with the empty milk bottles after dinner. As he told Jim and me later when we went to talk to him about it, “He ran by me so fast, I didn't see him, but his air was cold.”

“What do you mean his air was cold?” asked Jim.

“It smelled cold.”

“Unlike yours?” said Jim.

Kenny nodded.

That evening, down in the cellar, Jim made tiny, red flags out of sewing needles and construction paper, and stuck them into the turf of Botch Town at all the spots where we knew the prowler had been. When he was done, we stepped back and he said, “I saw this on
Dragnet
once. Just the facts. It's supposed to show the criminal's plan.”

“Do you see any plan?” I asked.

“They're all on our block,” he said, “but otherwise it's just a mess.”

Apparently, we weren't the only ones concerned about the prowler, because somebody called the cops. Thursday afternoon, a police officer walked down the block, knocking on people's doors, asking if they had seen anything suspicious at night or if they had heard someone in their backyard. When he got to our house, he spoke to Nan. As usual, Nan knew everything that happened on the street and she gave him an earful. We hid in the kitchen and listened, and in the process learned a tidbit we had been unaware of. It so happened that the Farleys had found human shit at the bottom of their swimming pool, as if someone had sat on the rim and dropped it.

When the cop was getting ready to leave, Jim stepped out of hiding and told him we had a footprint we thought belonged to the prowler. He smiled at us and winked at Nan, but asked to see it. We led him back to the shed, and Jim went in and brought out the hatbox. He motioned for me to take the lid off and I did. The cop bent over and peered inside.

“Nice job, fellas,” he said, and took the box with him, but later on, when I walked George around the block that night, I saw the pink cardboard, the poodle, and the Eiffel Tower jutting out of the Mardinellas' open garbage can at the curb. I went over to it and peeked under the lid. The footprint was ruined, so I decided not to tell Jim.

As George and I continued on our rounds, the autumn came. We were standing at the entrance to Southgate; there was a full moon, and suddenly a great burst of wind rushed by. The leaves of the trees at the boundary of the woods over beyond Sewer Pipe Hill rattled, some flying free of their branches in a dark swarm. Just like that, the temperature dropped, I realized the crickets had gone silent, and I smelled a trace of Halloween.

Down the block a wind chime that had been silent all summer sounded its cowbell call, and I turned and looked over at the Fuscias' house; the last one before the school. Their lighted window brought me a memory of their pet rabbit, Dibby, who had chewed through its wooden crate and then chewed a hole in the wall. It was never found and now either lived or died somewhere inside the darkness behind the walls of their house. Mrs. Farley had announced, at one of the wine-in-a-teacup afternoon gatherings of the ladies, presided over by Nan, that Amy Fuscia, who was in Mary's grade, lived in fear that the creature would crawl out of the wall some night and seek revenge on her, and she wet her bed every night since its escape.

I looked up at the stars and felt my mind start to wander, so I sat down at the curb and George sat next to me. That day in school they had herded us into the cafeteria and showed us a movie,
The Long Way Home from School
. It was about kids playing on the train tracks and getting killed by speeding trains or electrocuted on the third rail. The guy who spoke the stories looked like the father from
Leave It to Beaver
. He told one about kids thinking it was fun climbing onto train cars and running across the tops. Little did they know that the train was about to pull out, and when they showed it start to move, he said, “Oops, Johnny fell in between the cars and was crushed to death by tons of steel. It's not so much fun when you're flat as a pancake.” After that came a scene of a kid shooting a slingshot at a moving train, that jumped right into another scene of a little girl on board in a passenger compartment with her hand covering her eye and blood dripping down across her face while the landscape rolled by. “Nice shooting, Cowboy,” the guy said.

After the movie, they made us line up out in the hallway on our knees with our heads down and pressed into the angle where the floor met the wall. “Cover the back of your head by locking your fingers behind it. This will protect you from flying debris,” said Mr. Tary, the principal, as he rubbed his throat. He was always rubbing his throat. We were led to believe, without anyone coming right out and making the claim, that this maneuver on the floor would save us if the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on our town.

My mother had told us if the air raid siren ever really went off, I was to get home. She and my father had devised a plan. The minute the siren sounded someone was supposed to shovel dirt into the window wells of the cellar and then get all the mattresses from the house and lay them out on the first floor to block the radiation from seeping down. At one time they had stocked a bunch of cans of food in the cellar and gallons of water with a drop of bleach in each one to keep them fresh. But as time went on, the supplies dwindled to a single can of Spam and a bottle of water that had gone green. As George and I got up and headed back, I daydreamed a
Twilight Zone
scenario of us projecting ourselves into the world of Botch Town to escape the horrible death of atomic bombs in the wider world.

At home, the wine bottle sat on the kitchen counter, empty, and my mother had passed out on the couch. There was a cigarette between her fingers with an ash almost as long as a cigarette. Jim pointed it out to me. Then he went and got an ashtray that was half a giant clamshell we had found on the beach the previous summer, and Mary and I watched as he positioned it under the ash. He gave my mother's wrist the slightest tap, and the ash dropped perfectly into the shell.

I wedged a pillow under her head as Jim took her by the shoulders and laid her down more comfortably on the couch. Mary fetched the
Sherlock Holmes
. Jim opened it to “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” the story that obsessed her as a writer, and gently placed the volume, binding up, its wings open like those of a giant red moth, on her chest.