The Empire of Ice Cream (31 page)

My father sat down at the top of the hill and took out his cigarettes. As he lit a match and cupped it in his hands, catching its spark at the end of his smoke, he said, out of the side of his mouth, “You better go down there and investigate.” We didn't need to be told twice, but charged down the hill, whooping, and the birds took off, lifting into the sky in waves. It felt for a second, as we charged downhill, like I could lift into the air, myself. Jim tripped and rolled a quarter of the way down, and, seeing him, Mary followed his lead, fell, and rolled the rest of the way.

We stayed down there, by the water, for a long time, skipping stones, dueling with driftwood swords, watching the killifish swarm in the shallows. An hour or two passed, and when Jim and Mary decided to try to catch one of the fish with an old Dixie cup they found in the sand, I looked up at my father just sitting there. I sidled away from them and went back up the hill. During the climb, I lost sight of him, as I could only see a few feet ahead of me with the steep incline, but when I got to the top and he came into view, I noticed that he had his glasses in his hand. I think he had been crying, because as soon as he saw me coming, he wiped his eyes and put the glasses back on.

“Come here,” he said to me. “I need some help.”

I walked over and stood next to him. He reached up, and placing a hand lightly upon my shoulder, stood, making believe he was using me as a crutch. “Thanks,” he said, and for a brief moment, he put his arm around me and hugged me to him. My face went into the side of his coarse, plaid jacket, and I smelled the machine oil. Then he let go and called for Jim and Mary to come back.

We stopped on the way home and had dinner at a chrome diner. My father ordered meat loaf and we all ordered meat loaf too. No one spoke all through dinner, and when the ice cream came, he said to us, “How are you all doing in school?”

I felt Jim lightly kick my shin under the table as he said, “I'm doing great.”

“Good,” said Mary.”

I said nothing at first, but Jim kicked me again, and I said, “Doing fine.”

Mary, in her Mickey voice, said, “Could you possibly …?” But my father didn't notice or chose not to notice and called for the check.

By the time we got back home it was dark out. We got ready for bed, and then sat in the living room. My mother was up and around and feeling good. She played the guitar and sang us a few songs. My father, like in the old days, read some poems to us from his collection of little red books—
The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, and
Crossing the Bar
. That night, I slept well, no dreams, and the antenna whispered instead of moaned, like the music of a very small violin.

I looked up Mr. Barzita's phone number in the book, and began calling his house every day after school, but there was never an answer. I asked Nan and Pop if they had seen him, but they both told me no. Pop asked me why I wanted to know, and I just shrugged and said, “Because I haven't seen him around.”

“Do you ever see him during the winter?” asked Nan.

It was true, he rarely showed himself after Halloween, and the weather had really gotten frigid. Mid-November and the temperature had dropped into the teens for a week straight. We prayed for a snowstorm, but it seemed like even the sky was frozen solid. Jim and I rode over to Babylon on our bikes on Saturday afternoon and went skating on Argyle Lake, but otherwise, I just stayed inside, reading and catching up on my journal, filling in those members of our neighborhood I'd yet to capture in words.

There was one old lady who lived over by Southgate, and I always forgot her name. It was written on her mailbox, but on the way home from school I kept forgetting to check it. I had a good story about her occasionally going door-to-door, like trick-or-treating, asking everyone on the block for a glass of gin. Her dog, Tatel, a vicious German shepherd, was worth a few lines, especially concerning the time it chased the mailman up the Grimms' elm tree. I had a fine description of this old woman's white, hag hair, her skeleton body, and how her sallow skin fit her skull like a rubber glove you could pick a dime up while wearing, but no name. The cold snap had broken and the temperature had risen slightly, so, to just get out of the house and get some fresh air, I put George on the leash and we took a quick walk around the block.

I wrote her name in my mind, in script, three times—
Mrs. Homretz
—while George peed on the post of her mailbox. The sky was overcast, and even though the wind blew, it was mild enough to keep my jacket open. When I was sure I had it memorized, I turned to start home. Lucky for me I looked around when I did, because just then, rounding the turn on Pine and heading straight for me were three kids on their bikes—Will Hickey, Stinky Steinmacher, and Justin Wunch.

“There he is!” cried Hickey, and I saw all three of them lift their asses off their seats and press down hard on their peddles for a burst of speed. Even before my heart started pounding, and I felt the fear explode inside me, I ran. They had blocked off my direct escape to home, and were gaining on me too fast for me to take the corner at Sylvia in order to make my way around the block back to Pine. They'd have been on me before I reached Tommy Brown's house in the middle of that street. Instead, I made a beeline for Southgate and the woods, thinking they might stop chasing me once they hit the tree line.

George easily kept pace with me as we made our way across the field and then down the slope of Sewer Pipe Hill. I chose the main path, thinking that if they did come after me, I'd get as far into the woods as possible before cutting into the trees and underbrush. At the last second I would head south toward that spit of woods that extended into the backyards of the Stuttons' and Hossetters'. If I could make it that far, I could get back on to Pine close to my house and be home before they caught me. I stopped on the path to listen for them. The pounding in my ears was too loud at first, but then I heard Stinky give a battle cry. The sound of bikes breaking twigs, rolling over fallen leaves, followed.

We were off again, down the trail, branches whipping my face, ruts stumbling me. I tried not to think about what would happen if they caught us. George would hold his own against them, but just picturing Hickey's fists made me go weak inside.

“He's right in front of us,” Wunch yelled, and I knew they could see me. I left the path and cut into the trees. They continued behind me, but the underbrush and fallen logs slowed them down, and it sounded as if they had left their bikes behind. If you were a coward like I was, it was a good thing to be a fast runner, which I also was. I ran for another five minutes at top speed, and then I had to stop, not because I was winded, but the lake spread out in front of me. I'd trapped myself.

I knew that if I had to turn either right or left they would easily catch me. The lake was still frozen from the cold snap, but a thin layer of water covered the top as it had begun to thaw. I put a foot out onto the slippery surface and slowly eased my weight down. It held me. George was uncertain of the ice and I had to drag him along behind. I took slow, careful steps forward. By the time they'd broken through the trees at the edge of the lake, I was about fifteen feet from shore. I didn't look back, although they were calling my name and saying I was a “fairy” and a “scumbag” and a “piece of shit.” George didn't like the situation at all and began to growl low in his throat.

“Egg my house?” I heard Hickey scream, and then I saw a rock whiz past my head, hit the ice and slide three quarters of the way to the opposite shore.

“Let's go get him,” yelled Steinmacher, and they must have stepped onto the ice together, because I felt the entire surface of the lake undulate and make a growling sound like George just before he got down to business chewing a sneaker. Following that, there came from behind me a cracking noise, like a giant egg hatching, and a splash. I looked over my shoulder and saw Wunch standing three feet from shore, up to his waist in brown water. I kept going forward as they helped him out of his hole and retreated.

Their extra weight on the ice must have made it unstable, because now with each step I took I could hear tiny splintering noises and see fissures grow like veins in the clear, frozen green beneath each sneaker. The wind was blowing fiercely out there in the middle of the open expanse, and my sense of victory that they had turned back suddenly vanished, replaced by the prospect that the lake might, at any moment, open up and swallow me. That's when the rock hit me in the back of the head, and I went down hard on my chest and face. I heard a great fracturing sound and my mind went blank as much from fear as from the concussion.

When I finally opened my eyes, I remained splayed out, listening. I heard the wind, dead leaves blowing through the woods, George quietly whimpering, and a very distant sound of laughter, moving away. Every now and then the ice would make a cracking noise. I was soaked from having fallen in the film of water atop the frozen surface, and it came to me slowly that I was shivering. With the slowest and most cautious of movements, I got to my knees. Once I achieved that position, I rested for a moment, my head still hurting and dizzy. My next goal was to stand, and I told myself I would count to thirty and then just stand up and get to shore.

The moment I started counting, I thought of Mary. When I reached twenty-five, I happened to look down, and staring up at me through the green ice was a pair of eyes. At first I thought it was my reflection. I leaned down closer to the surface to see, and there, beneath the ice, was the pale, partially rotted face of Charlie Eddisson. His hair was fixed solid in a wild tangle, much of the whites of his eyes had gone brown, and they were big and round like fish eyes. His mouth was open in a silent scream. Next to his face was the palm of one hand, and I could barely see past his wrist as the forearm disappeared into the murk below. His glasses were missing and so was the flesh of his right cheek.

When I screamed, I felt as though he was screaming through me. Dropping George's leash, I scrabbled to my feet, and, slipping and sliding, ice cracking everywhere around me, I ran straightforward toward the shore, twenty yards away. In the midst of one step I felt the ice crack and give way beneath my heel, but I was already gone. The dog and I reached the shore at the same moment and we both jumped the last few feet over the thin ice at the edge.

Chattering like mad and half-frozen, I came out of the woods through Hossetters' backyard. My pant legs were stiff as was the front of my shirt. When I walked through the front door of our house, the warmth thawed my fear and I began to cry. My mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen, but she just called, “Hello,” and didn't come in. I went upstairs to my room, pulled off the wet things, and got into bed. Until I was called to dinner, I lay under the covers, shivering.

I never told anyone except Mary that I'd seen Charlie under the ice of the lake, and when I told her she'd been right the whole time, all she said was, “I know.” I told her to keep the secret and she just nodded, which with Mary was as good as a written contract. The reason I never spoke up about it was that I couldn't bear the thought of Charlie's mother seeing him the way he was. I thought she would die on the spot if she did, so I held him in my mind, the way the lake held him, and most times he lay at the dark bottom, but sometimes he'd surface.

Two days later, Mr. Barzita's next-door neighbor, Mrs. Blair, suddenly realized that she'd not seen him since the day before Halloween and went to his house to check up on him. The doors were locked from the inside, so she looked in all the windows. It was while kneeling on the ground, staring down into one of the window wells, the same way Jim had spied what we'd gotten for Christmas, that she saw his shadowy figure hanging, a rope around his neck, from the ceiling rafters of his cellar.

I figured, after much thought, that the man in the white coat couldn't collect Barzita's soul unless he willingly committed suicide and that Charlie'd been killed because the old man had at first refused. I also realized the stranger had been after me next, the second weakest kid in town, but somehow Barzita had finally found the courage to pay up on the deal he'd made to avoid death in the mountains so long ago.

If this all sounds crazy, consider the fact: In the spring, when Barzita's son came to town to sell his father's house, he had a yard sale of all the stuff he'd found in it. I saw, while passing by on my bike, my sweater lying on a table by the curb.

That old white car was never seen again on Pine Avenue and the only smoke we smelled afterward was that of piles of leaves burning in subsequent autumns, not to mention the time Mrs. Kelty found out her husband was having an affair with Mrs. Graves and burned all of his belongings in a big blaze on the front lawn. The pale stranger's face never again showed itself at our night windows, but even though he was gone, I could feel his presence had changed me in some way. Maybe it was because of what I knew and couldn't tell but could only secretly write, which I did through the frozen, snowy days of winter; the antenna moaning above me.

As for Botch Town, it's still there, sitting in the cellar astride the sawhorses. Through the years, the clay citizens have carried on with their lives, and although the wizard's dust is deep and the sun no longer shines, they still, from time to time, stare up into the darkness, half-hoping, half-dreading, they'll see the eyes.

Botch Town

Story Notes

As a way to commemorate the publication of their twenty-fifth book, Golden Gryphon Press published an anthology with stories by most of the authors they'd worked with up to that point in time. That book is
The Silver Gryphon,
and I had a story in it, “Present from the Past.” If you were kind enough to have read that story, you'd know that at the end the narrator finds a black-and-white-bound notebook he'd hidden beneath a tree many years earlier when he was a child. “Botch Town” is the contents of that notebook. It's a story of another time and place, a homage of sorts to the town where I grew up and the people who lived there. Like any group of people from any time and place, they exhibited traits of courage and honesty and love and stupidity and selfishness and cruelty. In other words, they were all, in their own way, doing their best to live a life. They've stayed with me through the years and their acts and stories have fortified my own life, especially Jim and Mary and Dolores, for whom this piece is dedicated
.