The Empire of Ice Cream (27 page)

I peered back over the fallen trunk and watched for a while, braver now that I probably wasn't going to see Charlie. We sat there in the cold for two straight hours and I was starting to shiver. “Let's go home,” I whispered.

“Okay,” said Jim. “They're almost done.” Still he sat watching, and our hiding and spying reminded me of the prowler.

From out on the lake, one of the cops yelled, “Hold up, there's something here.” I stuck my head up to watch. The cop started turning the crank, reeling in the rope. “Looks like clothing,” he called to the other cops on the bank. “Wait a second …” he said. He reeled more quickly then.

Something broke the surface of the water near the back of the boat. It looked like a soggy body at first, but it was hard to tell. There were definitely pants and a shirt. Then the head came into view, big and gray, with a trunk.

“Shit,” said Jim.

“Mr. Blah-blah,” I whispered.

“Hand me the camera,” said Jim. “I gotta get a picture of this.”

He snapped it, handed me back the camera, and then motioned for me to follow him. We got down on all fours and crawled slowly away from the fallen tree. Once our escape was covered by enough trees and bushes, we got to our feet and ran like hell.

We stood behind the Hossetters' place, still in the cover of the woods, and worked to catch our breath.

“Blah-blah,” said Jim, and laughed.

“Did you put him in there?” I asked.

“Blah,” he said, and shook his head. “Nah, Softee molested him and threw him in there.”

“Get out,” I said.

“Probably Stutton and his horrible dumpling sisters found him and took him to the lake. They're always back here in the woods,” he said. “We should have had Mary predict where Mr. Blah-blah would be.”

“But then where's Charlie?” I asked.

He brushed past me and jumped the stream.

I followed him across the stream and stayed close as we moved through the backyard and around the house to the street.

When we arrived home, I was relieved to find that my mother wasn't sitting at the dining room table. We had a chance to stash the camera and binoculars. The door to Nan's was open. I could hear Pop in their figuring his system out loud and, without looking, knew Mary was beside him. Jim took our spying implements upstairs, and I walked down the hallway toward my parents' room to see if my mother was up yet. She wasn't in her bed, but when I passed by the bathroom door, I heard her in there retching.

I knocked once. “Are you okay?” I called.

“I'll be right out,” she said.

It had been obvious since the start of the school year that Mr. Rogers, the librarian, had been losing his mind. During his lunch break, when we were usually laboring over math in Krapp's class, the old man would be out on the baseball diamond, walking the bases in his rumpled suit, hunched over, talking to himself, as if he were reliving some game from the distant past. That loose dirt that collected around the bases, the soft brown powder that Stinky Steinmacher ate with a spoon, would lift up in a strong wind, circling around Rogers, and he'd clap as if the natural commotion was really the roar of the crowd. Krapp would look over his shoulder from where he stood at the blackboard and see us all staring out the window, shake his head, and then go and lower the blinds.

The loss of his giant dictionary seemed to be the last straw for Rogers, as if it was an anchor that kept him from floating away. With that gone, as my father would say, “He dipped out.” Each week we would be delivered to the library by Krapp and spend a half-hour there with Rogers. Of late, the old man had been smiling a lot like a dog on a hot day, and his eyes were always busy, shifting back and forth. Sometimes he'd stand for minutes on end, staring into a beam of light shining in through the window, and sometimes he'd be frantic, moving here and there, pulling books off the shelves and shoving them into kids' hands.

Jake Harweed was brutal to him, making hand motions behind the librarian's back, coaxing everyone to laugh (and you had to laugh if Jake wanted you to). Jake would knock books off the shelf onto the floor and just leave them there. For Rogers to see a book on the floor was a heart-rending experience, and one day Harweed had him nearly in tears. I secretly liked Rogers, because he loved books and had a sense that there was something alive in them between the covers, but I couldn't let on that I wished the others would just leave him alone. Still, he was beginning to put even me off with his weirdness.

On the Monday morning following the dredging, we had library. Rogers sat in his little office nearly the entire time we were there, bent over his desk with his face in his hands. Harweed started the rumor that he kept
Playboy
magazines in there. When the time was almost up, he came out to stamp the books kids had chosen. Before he sat down at the table with his stamp, he walked up behind where I was standing, put one hand on my shoulder, and then reached up over my head to the top shelf where he pulled a thin volume from the row.

“You'll need this,” he said, and handed it to me. He walked away to the table then, the kids lined up with their selections, and he began stamping them.

I looked down at the book he had handed me. On the cover, behind the library plastic, was a drawing of a mean-looking black dog. Above the creature in two rows of words, yellow letters made of lines like saber blades, was the title:
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I never got the chance. News spread quickly through the school the next day that he had been fired because he was so old he went nuts. Having the
Baskervilles
in my possession was, at first, an unsettling experience. It felt like I had taken some personal belonging of my mother's, just as if I had appropriated my father's watch or Nan's hairnet. The book itself had an aura of power around it that prevented me from simply opening the cover and beginning. I hid it in my room, between the mattress and box spring of the bed. For the next few days, I'd take it out every now and then and hold it, look at the cover, gingerly flip the pages. Although by this time my mother only used the big, red volume of
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
as an anvil in her sleep, there was a time when she had avidly read it over and over. She read a wide range of other books as well, everything from Tchaikovsky's
Letters To His Family
to
The Naked Ape
, but always returned to detective stories. She loved them in every form, and before we went broke, spent Sunday mornings consuming five cups of coffee and a dozen cigarettes, solving the mystery of the
New York Times
crossword puzzle.

Painting, playing the guitar, making bizarre collages were mere hobbies compared to my mother's desire to be a mystery writer. Before work became a necessity for her, she'd sit at the dining room table all afternoon, the old typewriter in front of her, composing her own mystery novel. I remembered her having read me some of it. The title was
Something by the Sea
, and it involved her detective Milo, a farting dog, a blind heiress, and a stringed instrument to be played with different colored glass tubes that fit over one's fingers. Something by the Sea was the name of the resort where the story took place. All the while she wrote it, she kept
Holmes
by her side, opened to “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

My fear of starting the library book lasted nearly a week until one night at dinner when my mother told a story about a friend of hers when she was younger. From the state she was in, I was sure her conversation was headed directly toward Bermuda but instead it veered off into an odd detour about Kenny Boucher. He was a boy in her class in grade school, and he stuttered and was very timid, but she involved him as a co-conspirator in all of her evil plots. One was the distribution of Ex-Lax to the kids in the neighborhood under the false claim that it was free chocolate. “It was a shit storm,” she said, laughing into her wine.

Another had to do with a giant box they had found at the curb on junk day. They cut a little door out of it and then strung the inside with wads of chewed gum that they stretched into spider webs. When their work was done, they invited friends to enter their clubhouse. Kids emerged covered in gum, their clothes ruined, their hair matted with it.

When Jim and I asked to hear more of her adventures with Kenny Boucher, she shook her head and looked sad. “He died,” she said. “He had this disease called Saint Vitus Dance that would make him spin around out of control every once in a while. He had an attack of it one day, fell down in the street, and drowned in a puddle before anyone found him.” She fell into a sullen silence and said nothing else for the rest of the night until she sent us to bed.

Upstairs, I thought about the affect her memory had on her and realized that maybe there was something in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
that could tell me a secret about her. I passed up Perno Shell and pulled the book out from under the mattress. That night I stayed up late and read the first few chapters. In them I met Holmes and Watson. The book was not hard to read. I was used to the British voice in it as my father, when we were younger, read us a lot of books by Kipling and Rider Haggard. I was interested in the story, and liked the character of Watson very much, but Holmes was something else.

The great detective came across to me like a snob, the type my father once described as “believing the sun rose and set from his asshole.” The picture of him in my mind was something like a mix between Perno Shell and Phineas Fogg, but his personality was pure Krapp. When told about the demon hound, Holmes replied that it was an interesting story for those who believed in fairy tales. He was obviously, “not standing for it.” Still, I was intrigued by his voluminous smoking and the fact that he played the violin.

The days sank deeper into autumn, rotten to their cores with twilight. The bright warmth of the sun only lasted about as long as we were in school, and then once we were home, an hour later, the world was briefly submerged in a rich, golden aura, a honey glow, that was both beautiful and sad, gilding everything, from the barren branches of willows to the old wreck of a Pontiac parked alongside the Miltons' garage. A minute after that, the tide turned, the sun suddenly appeared a distant star, and in rolled a dim gray wave of neither here nor there that seemed to last a week each day, its shadows enhanced by our steamy exhalations and the smoke of burning leaves.

The wind of this in-between time made me always want to curl up inside a memory and sleep with eyes open. Dead leaves rolled across lawns, scraped along the street, quietly tapped the windows. Jack-o'-lanterns with luminous triangle eyes and jagged smiles turned up on front steps and in windows. Rattle-dry cornstalks bore half-eaten ears of brown and blue kernels like teeth gone bad, as if they had eaten themselves, the way kids wore and then chewed the ultimately unsatisfying licorice/root beer gunk of wax teeth. Scarecrows hung from lawn lampposts or stoop railings, listing forward, disjointed and drunk, dressed in the rumpled plaid shirts of long-gone grandfathers and jeans tied up with a length of rope. In the true dark, when walking George after dinner, these shadow figures often startled me when their stitched and painted faces took on the features of Charlie Eddisson or Jimmy Bonnel.

Halloween was close, our favorite holiday because it carried none of the pain-in-the-ass holiness of Christmas and still there was free candy. The excitement of it crowded all problems to the side. The prowler, Charlie, school work were overwhelmed by hours of decision as to what we would be for that one night—something or someone who wasn't us, but who we wished to be, which I suppose ended up being us in some way. I could already taste the candy corn and feel my teeth aching. My father had given me a dollar and with it I'd bought a molded plastic skeleton mask that smelled like fresh BO and made my cheeks sweat.

At the time, the only thought I had about that leering bone face was that it was cool as hell, but maybe, in the back of my mind, I was thinking of all those eyes out there trying to look into me, and it was a good disguise because it let them think they were seeing deep under my skin even though it was only an illusion. I showed the mask to Jim, and he told me, “This is the last year you can wear a costume. You're getting too old. Next year you'll have to go as a bum.” All the older kids went around trick-or-treating as bums—a little charcoal on the face and some ripped up, baggy clothes.

Mary decided she would be the jockey, Willie Shoemaker. She modeled her outfit for Jim and me one night. It consisted of baggy pants tucked into a pair of white go-go boots, a baseball cap, a baggy, patchwork shirt, and a piece of thin curtain rod for a jockey's whip. She walked past us once and then looked over her shoulder. In the high nasal voice of the TV race announcer, she said, “And they're off …” We clapped for her, but the second she turned away again, Jim raised his eyebrows and whispered, “And it's Cabbage by a head.”

Then, only three days from the blessed event, Krapp threw a wet blanket on my daydreams of roaming the neighborhood by moonlight, gathering, door-to-door, a Santa sack of candy, turning the joyous sparks of my imagination to smoke, which leaked out my ears and mixed with the twilight. He assigned a major report that was to be handed in the day after Halloween. Each of us in the class was given a different country, and we had to write a five-page report about it. Krapp presented me with Greece, as if he were dropping a steaming turd into my open Halloween sack.

I should have gotten started that afternoon when school let out, but instead I just sat in my room staring out the window. When Jim got home from wrestling, he came into my room and found me still sitting there like a zombie. I told him about the report.

“You're going to be doing it on Halloween if you don't get started,” he said. “Here's what you do. Tomorrow, right after school, ride down to the library. Get the G volume of the encyclopedia, open it to Greece, and just copy what they have there. Write big, but not too big or he'll be on to you. If it doesn't look like what's written there will fill five pages, add words to the sentences. If the sentence says, ‘The population of Greece is one million,' instead you write like, ‘There are approximately one million Greeks in Greece. As you can see, there are many, many Grecians.' You get it? Use long words like ‘approximately' and say stuff more than once in different ways.”