The Empire of Ice Cream Page 14

  My room was dark, and though it had been warm all day, a cool end of summer breeze now filtered in through the screen of the open window. Moonlight also came in, making a patch on the bare, painted floor. From outside, I could hear the chug of the Farleys’ little pool filter next door, and beneath that, the sound of George’s claws, tapping across the kitchen linoleum downstairs.

  Jim was asleep in his room across the hall. Below us, Mary was also asleep, no doubt whispering the times tables into her pillow. My mother, in the room next to Mary’s, I could picture, lying in bed, her reading light on, her mouth open, her eyes closed, and the thick, red volume of Sherlock Holmes stories with the silhouette cameo of the detective on the spine, open and resting on her chest. All I could picture of Nan and Pop was a darkened room and the tiny, glowing bottle of Lourdes Water in the shape of the Virgin that sat on the dresser.

  I was thinking about the book I had been reading before turning out the light—another in the series of adventures of Perno Shell. This one was about a deluge, like Noah’s flood, and how the old wooden apartment building he lived in had broken away from its foundation and he and all of the other tenants were sailing the giant ocean of the world, having adventures.

  There was a mystery about the Shell books, because they were each published with a different author’s name, sometimes by different publishing companies, but all you had to do was read a few pages and it was easy to tell that they were all written by the same person. I would never have discovered this if it wasn’t for Mary.

  Occasionally, I would read to her, snatches from whatever book I was working through. We’d sit in the corner of the backyard on the lower boards of the fence, in the bower made by forsythia bushes. In there, amidst the yellow flowers one day, I read to her from the first Shell book I had taken out: The Stars Above by Mary Holden. There were illustrations in it, one per chapter. When I was done reading, I handed the book to her so she could look at the pictures. While paging through it, she held it up to her face, sniffed it, and said, “Pipe smoke.” Back then, my father smoked a pipe once in a while, so we knew the aroma. I took the book from her and smelled it up close, and she was right, but it wasn’t the kind of tobacco my father smoked. It had a darker, older smell, something like a horse and a mildewed wool blanket, a captain’s cabin. I got an image of the silhouette of Holmes on the binding of my mother’s book. His pipe had a stem that dipped in a curve like an S and the bowl had a belly.

  When I walked to the library downtown, Mary would walk with me. She usually never said a word during the entire trip, but a few weeks after I had returned The Stars Above, she came to me while I was searching through the four big stacks that lay in the twilight zone between the adult and children’s sections. She tugged at my shirt, and when I turned around, she handed me a book: The Enormous Igloo by Duncan Main.

  “Pipe smoke,” she said.

  Opening the volume to the first page, I read to myself, “Perno Shell was afraid of heights and could not for the world remember why he had agreed to a journey in the Zeppelin that now hovered above his head.” Another Perno Shell novel by someone completely different. I lifted the book, smelled the pages, and nodded.

  I wanted Perno Shell to stay in my imagination until I dozed off, but my thoughts of him soon grew as thin as paper, and then the persistent theme of my wakeful nights alone in the dark, namely Death, came clawing through. Jimmy Bonnel, a boy who’d lived up the block, two years younger than me and two years older than Mary, had been struck by a car on Montauk Highway one night in late spring. The driver was drunk and swerved onto the sidewalk. According to his brother, Teddy, who was with him, Jimmy was thrown thirty feet in the air. I always tried to picture that: twice again the height of the basketball rim. We had to go to his wake. The priest said he was at peace, but he didn’t look it. Lying in the coffin, his skin was yellow, his face was bloated, and his mouth was turned down in a bitter frown.

  All summer, he came back to me from where he lay under the ground. I imagined him suddenly waking up, clawing at the lid as in a story Jim had once told me. I dreaded meeting his ghost on the street at night when I walked George around the block alone. I’d stop under a streetlight and listen hard, fear would build in my chest until I shivered, and then I’d bolt for home. In the lonely backyard at sundown, in the darkened woods behind the school field, in the corner of my night room, he was waiting, jealous and angry.

  George came up the stairs and stood beside my bed. He looked at me with his bearded face, eyes glinting in the moonlight, and then jumped aboard. He was a small, schnauzer-type mutt but fearless, and having him there made me less scared. Slowly, I began to doze. I had a memory of riding waves at Fire Island and it blurred at the edges, slipping into a dream. Next I knew, I suddenly fell from a great height and woke to hear my father coming in from work. The front door quietly closed. I could hear him moving around in the kitchen. George got up and left.

  I contemplated going down to say hello. The last I saw him was the previous weekend. The bills forced him to work all day. There were three jobs: a part-time machining job in the early morning, then his regular job as a gear cutter, and then nights, part-time as a janitor in a department store. He left the house before the sun came up every morning and didn’t return until very near midnight. Through the week, I would smell a hint of machine oil, here and there, on the cushions of the couch, on a towel in the bathroom, as if he were a ghost leaving vague traces of his presence.

  Eventually, the sounds of the refrigerator opening and closing and the water running stopped, and I realized he must be sitting in the dining room, eating his pile of spaghetti, reading the newspaper by the light that shone in from the kitchen. I heard the big pages turn, the fork against the plate, a match being struck, and that’s when it happened. There came from somewhere outside the house the shrill scream of a woman, so loud it tore open the night.

  When I came downstairs the next morning, the door to Nan and Pop’s was open. I stuck my head in and saw Mary sitting at the table in the kitchenette where the night before she had made cigarettes. She was eating a bowl of Cheerios. Pop sat in his usual seat next to her, the horse paper spread out in front of him. He was jotting down numbers with a pencil in the margins, murmuring a steady stream of bloodlines, jockeys’ names, weights, speeds, track conditions, ciphering what he called the McGinn System, named after himself. Mary nodded with each new factor added to the equation.

  My mother came out of the bathroom down the hall in our house, and I turned around. She was dressed for work in her turquoise outfit with the big star-shaped pin that was like a stained-glass window. I went to her and she put her arm around me, enveloped me in a cloud of perfume that was too much powder, and kissed my head. We went into the kitchen, and she made me a bowl of cereal with the mix-up milk, which wasn’t as bad that way, because we were allowed to put sugar on it. I sat down in the dining room and she joined me, carrying a cup of coffee. The sunlight poured in the window behind her. She lit a cigarette and dragged the ashtray close to her.

  “Friday, last day of vacation,” she said. “You better make it a good one. Monday is back to school.”

  I nodded.

  “Watch out for strangers,” she said. “I got a call from next door this morning. Mrs. Kelty said that there was a prowler at her window last night. She was changing into her nightgown, and she turned and saw a face at the glass.”

  “Did she scream?” I asked.

  “She said it scared the crap out of her. Bill was downstairs watching TV. He jumped up and ran outside, but whoever it was had vanished.”

  Jim appeared in the living room. “Do you think they saw her naked?” he asked.

  “A fitting punishment,” she said. And as quickly added, “Don’t repeat that.”

  “I heard her scream,” I said.

  “Whoever it was used that old ladder Pop keeps in the backyard. Put it up against the side of the Keltys’ house and climbed up to the second-floor window. So keep your eyes out fo
r creeps wherever you go today.”

  “That means he was in our backyard,” said Jim.

  My mother took a drag of her cigarette and nodded. “I suppose.”

  Before she left for work, she gave us our list of jobs for the day—walk George, clean our rooms, mow the back lawn. Then she kissed Jim and me, and went into Nan’s to kiss Mary. I watched her car pull out of the driveway. Jim came to stand next to me at the front window.

  “A prowler,” he said, smiling. “We better investigate.”

  A half-hour later, Jim and Mary and I, joined by David Kelty, sat back amidst the forsythias.

  “Did the prowler see your mother naked?” Jim asked David.

  David had a hairdo like Curly from the Three Stooges, and he rubbed his head with his fat, blunt fingers. “I think so,” he said, wincing.

  “A fitting punishment,” said Jim.

  “What do you mean?” asked David.

  “Think about your mother’s ass,” said Jim, laughing.

  David sat quietly for a second and then said, “Yeah,” and nodded.

  Mary took out a Laredo cigarette and lit it. She always stole one or two when making them. No one would have guessed. Mary was sneaky in a way, though. The favorite song of her life would end up being “Time of the Season” by The Zombies, so that gives you a clue. Jim would have told on me if I’d smoked one. All he did was tell her, “You’ll stay short if you smoke that.” She took a drag and said, “Could you possibly …” in a flat voice.

  Jim, big boss that he was, laid it out for us. “I’ll be the detective and you all will be my team. Jeff,” he said, pointing to me, “you have to write everything down. Everything that happens has to be recorded. I have a notebook upstairs to give you. Don’t be lazy.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Mary,” he said. She just kept nodding as she had been. “You count shit. And none of that Mickey stuff.”

  “I’m counting now,” she said in her Mickey voice.

  We cracked up, but she didn’t laugh.

  “David, you’re my right-hand man. You do whatever the hell I tell you.”

  David agreed, and then Jim told us the first thing we needed to do was look for clues.

  “Did your mother say what the prowler’s face looked like?” I asked.

  “She said it was no one she ever saw before. Big eyes, big teeth, and really white, like he hadn’t seen the sun all summer.”

  “Could be a vampire,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a vampire,” said Jim, “it was a pervert. If we’re going to do this right, it’s got to be like Science. There are no such things as vampires.”

  Our first step was to investigate the scene of the crime. Beneath the Keltys’ second-floor bedroom window, on the side of their house next to ours, we found a good footprint. It was big, much larger than any of ours when we measured next to it, and it had a design on the bottom of lines and circles.

  “You see what that is?” asked Jim, squatting down and pointing to the design.

  “It’s from a sneaker,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I think it’s Keds,” said David.

  “What does that tell you?” asked Jim.

  “What?” asked David.

  “Well, it’s too big to be a kid, but grown-ups usually don’t wear sneakers. It might be a teenager. We better save this for if the cops ever come to investigate.”

  “Did your dad call the cops?” I asked.

  “No, he said that if he ever caught who it was, he’d shoot the son of a bitch himself.”

  It took us about a half-hour to dig the footprint up, carefully loosening all around it and scooping way down beneath it with the shovel. We went to Nan’s side door and asked her if she had a box. She gave us a round, pink hatbox with a lid that had a picture of a poodle and the Eiffel Tower on it.

  Jim told David, “Carry it like it’s nitro,” and we took it into our yard and stored it in the toolshed back by the fence. When David slid it into place on the wooden shelf next to the bottles of bug killer and the shears, Mary said, “One.”

  Nan made lunch for us when the fire whistle blew at noon. She served it in our house at the dining room table. Her sandwiches always had butter, no matter what else she put on them. Sometimes, like that day, she just made butter and sugar sandwiches. We also had barley soup. Occasionally she would make chocolate pudding for us, the kind with a two-inch vinyl skin on top, but usually dessert was just a sugar-calloused digit she called a ladyfinger.

  Nan had gray, wire-hair like George’s, big bifocals, and a brown mole on her temple that looked like a squashed raisin. Her small stature, her dark and wrinkled complexion, the silken black strands at the corners of her upper lip, her high-pitched laughter made her seem to me at times like some ancient monkey king. When she’d fart while standing, she’d kick her left leg up in the back, and say, “Shoot him in the pants, the coat and vest are mine.” Every morning she’d say the rosary, and at night sometimes; in the afternoon when the neighborhood ladies came over to drink wine from teacups, she’d read the future in a pack of playing cards.

  Each day at lunch that summer, along with the butter sandwiches, she’d also serve up a story from her life. That first day of our investigation, she chose to tell us one from her childhood, at the turn of the century, in Whitestone. Through the hot high noons of June and July, we had come to know that town out of her distant past where her father was the editor of the local paper, the fire engines were pulled by horses, Moisha Pipick, the strongest man alive, ate twelve raw eggs every morning for breakfast, Clementine Cherenete, whose hair was a waterfall of gold, fell in love with a blind man who could not see her beauty, and John Hardy Farty, a wandering vagrant, strummed a harp and sang, “Damn the rooster crow.” All events, both great and small, happened within sight of a much-referred-to landmark, Nanny Goat Hill.

  “A night visitor,” she said when we told her about the footprint we had found and preserved in the hatbox she had given us. “Once there was a man who lived in Whitestone, a neighbor of ours. His name was Mr. Weeks. He had a daughter, Luqueer, who was in my grade at school.”

  “Luqueer?” said Jim, and he and I laughed. Mary looked up from her soup to see what was funny.

  Nan smiled and nodded. “She was a little odd. Spent all her time staring into a mirror. She wasn’t vain but was looking for something. Her mother told my mother that at night the girl would wake up choking, blue in the face, from having dreamt she was swallowing a thimble.”

  “That wasn’t really her name,” said Jim.

  “As God is my judge,” said Nan. “Her father took the train every day to work in the city and did not come home until very late at night. He always got the very last train that stopped in Whitestone, just before midnight, and would walk home through the streets from the station, stumbling drunk and singing in a loud voice. It was said that when he was drunk at a bar, he was happy-go-lucky, not a care in the world, but when drunk at home, he hit his wife and cursed her.

  “One night in the fall, around Halloween time, he got off the train onto the platform at Whitestone. The wind was blowing and it was cold. The station was empty but for him. He started walking toward the steps that led down to the street, when from behind him he heard a noise like a voice in the wind. OOOOoooo was what it sounded like. He turned around, and at the far end of the platform was a giant ghost, eight feet tall, its white form rippling in the breeze.

  “It scared the bejesus out of him. He ran home, screaming. The next day, which was Saturday, he told my father that the train station was haunted. My father printed the story as a kind of joke. No one believed Mr. Weeks because everyone knew he was a drunk. Still, he tried to convince people by swearing to it and saying he knew what he saw and it was real.

  “At the end of the following week, on the way into the city on Friday, he told one of the neighbors, Mr. Hardy, who rode in with him at the same time, that the ghost had been there on both Monday and Wednesday nights.
On these occasions it had called his name. Weeks was a nervous wreck, stuttering and shaking while he told of his latest encounters. Mr. Hardy said Weeks was a man on the edge, but before getting off the train in the city, Weeks leaned in close to our neighbor and whispered to him that he had a plan to deal with the phantom. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and Mr. Hardy said he already smelled liquor on Weeks’s breath.

  “That night, Weeks returned from the city on the late train. When he got off onto the platform at Whitestone, it was deserted as usual. The moment he turned around, there was the ghost, moaning, calling his name, and now, for the first time, coming at him. But that day, in the city, Weeks had bought a pistol for four dollars. That was his plan. He took it out of his jacket, and tried to aim it, even though his hand was wobbling terribly from fear. He shot four times, and the ghost collapsed on the platform.”

  “How can you kill a ghost?” asked Jim.

  “It was eight feet,” said Mary.

  “It wasn’t a ghost,” said Nan. “It was his wife in a bed sheet, standing on stilts. Her brother had been a performer, who had a pair of stilts, and she borrowed them from him for the get-up. She wanted to scare her husband into coming home on time and not drinking. But he killed her.”

  “Did he get arrested for murder?” I asked.

  “No,” said Nan. “He wept bitterly when he found out it was his wife. When the police investigation was over and he was shown to have acted in self-defense, he abandoned his home and Luqueer, and went off to live as a hermit in a cave in a field of wild asparagus at the edge of town. I don’t remember why, but he eventually became known as Bedillia, and kids would go out to the cave and scream, ‘Bedillia, we’d love to steal ya!’ and run when he chased them. Luqueer got sent to an orphanage and I never saw her again.”