The Empire of Ice Cream Read online

  Jim finally came home, and my mother took Mary off to bed, telling Jim and me it was time to go up. We gathered all of the candy together and put it in the community pot, a huge serving bowl that otherwise only got used on Thanksgiving. As we headed up the stairs, Jim whispered behind me, “We egged the hell out of Hickey’s house, and almost got away without anyone seeing us. But I saw Will’s weasel face at the upstairs window. I doubt he’ll tell his parents since we’d kick his ass, but watch out for him. I’m sure he saw me.”

  That was the news I was left with at my bedroom door, and suddenly I was no longer tired. The threat of Hickey’s revenge was enough to revive me, but since he wasn’t there at that moment with his sharp knuckles it eventually receded, and I lay in bed, reviewing the night, the costumes, the thrill of running away across the field at Southgate, the agonized form of Peter Milton, which had brought a sense of genuine horror to the holiday. Then, of course, I came to the incident with the pipe smoke, and the memory of the white car pulling away from the curb made me realize that something was missing. I got out of bed and quietly made my way down stairs to the dining room. There, I dug through the giant bowl of treats we had all three collected.

  What was missing were the plump, ripe figs that each year Mr. Barzita wrapped in orange or black tissue paper and tied at the top with ribbon. I saw in my mind a fleeting image of his knotted old fingers, shaking slightly, making a bow. They were a Pine Avenue tradition, but this year there were none. I thought back through the night, and realized that his house had been dark, and he hadn’t been at his front gate to meet us and drop one of his “beauties,” as he called them, into our sacks. In the rush and fever of greed we hadn’t noticed his absence but simply moved on to the Blairs’ house. Then I worked away at a dark spot in my memory, clawing through the sugar haze, the night, the turmoil, trying to remember if the white car had been parked in front of his house when we had first passed it early on in our travels, for it was old man Barzita’s place it had pulled away from when Mary and I noticed it this evening. Perhaps I had my mask on, or my thoughts were caught up still with the glittering handful of silver-wrapped Chunkies that Mrs. Ryan had dropped into my sack, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t remember those minutes.

  Instead, I pictured Barzita as a young man, stepping out of that disease-laden room during the war. I wondered if the prowler, the man in the white coat, who had become for me, Death himself, had appeared on Halloween to finally claim a man who by all accounts should have perished years before in another country, in a mountain base stricken with meningitis. The possibility scared me more than any threat posed by Will Hickey.

  For solace, I walked down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom, forgetting that my mother had passed out on the living room couch. My heart sank as I viewed the empty room. The light was on, as it always seemed to be, but the bed was unmade, my father’s work clothes from earlier in the week lay in a pile on the floor.

  As I stood there in the doorway, the weariness that had sway over me earlier returned and I yawned. I tottered forward into the room and crawled into my parents’ bed on my mother’s side. The mattress was soft and I sunk into it. Immediately I noticed the aromas of machine oil and my mother’s deep powder, work perfume and these scents combined, their chemistry making me feel safe. I lifted the red, bug-crushing weight of The Complete Sherlock Holmes from the night table and turned to “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The print was very small and in double columns, the pages tissue thin. I found the place where I had left off in my own copy and started reading. Not even a minute went by and the tiny letters began moving like ants. Then gravity took over and my arms couldn’t hold the volume up. As the open red book settled onto my chest, I settled into sleep.

  I dreamed Halloween and an egg battle on the western field beneath the moon at Southgate. Stinky Steinmacher’s little brother, Gunther, hit me in the head with an egg and knocked me over. When I opened my eyes, all the kids from both sides were gone, and the man in the white coat was leaning over me to lift me up. I pretended to still be asleep as he carried me, the wind blowing fiercely, toward his car parked by the basketball court. He said in an angry voice to me, “Come on, open your eyes,” and then I did and it was morning and I realized his voice had been Jim’s. “You’ll be late for school.” I was in my own bed, upstairs in my room.

  It was a rush to get ready, and all three of us kids were groggy. I remembered at the last second to take my report for Krapp from beneath its tomb of six books. Mary and I made it to school just before the bell rang, and we hurried to our classrooms. I was in my seat no more than five minutes before Krapp stood up from his desk and said, with a grim smile on his face, “Hand me your reports.” As soon as he said it, I looked around and could tell all of those who’d let Halloween enchant them into inaction by the flush of red that spread across their faces. “Who doesn’t have it?” said Krapp. Five trembling hands went up. He lifted his grade book and recorded the zeros with excruciating precision, saying with each one, “A zero for you and two detentions.” Someone behind me started crying, but I didn’t dare turn around and look.

  Krapp swept down the aisle, taking reports, and I held mine out to him. Just before his fingers closed on it, I noticed on the front cover, I had misspelled Greece. Instead of writing it the right way, I had written The Glory That Was Grease. He took it all in in a second, the cut out picture of the old Mexican woman in the shawl, the misspelling, and shook his head in disgust. He added the paper to the stack in his other hand, and what he didn’t notice, I did. The back of the bottom page, which held the samples of exports, was completely discolored with huge dark stains.

  That paper came back to me the next day, bearing an F grade and the words plagiarism and a stinking mess written across the woman’s wrinkled cheek. Between the molded cheese, rotten olive, and cigarette stench, it smelled like shit. I brought it home and showed it to Jim. He shrugged and said, “That’s the breaks.” He told me not to tell our parents about it. “They won’t even notice, they’re so busy with work and—” He tilted his head back and brought his arm up as if drinking from a big bottle. “Take it outside and bury it,” he said. “It smells like a dead man’s feet.” So I did, feeling betrayed and knowing that no good would come of it. Mary watched me dig a hole with the shovel. When I was done laying the foul muddle to rest and had tamped down the dirt, she put a rock on top to mark the grave.

  I stood above Botch Town, surveying its length and breadth, and noticed that, since Jim had started wrestling, taken up with a new group of friends, stayed away from the house as much as possible, a thin film of dust had settled on his creation. At first I imagined it to be the result of a minor snow squall, the kind that had already happened in early November, but snow was white and I couldn’t ignore that this film was gray. Then I imagined it to be a sleeping powder, like a sprinkling of magic dust from an evil magician in a fairy tale. The town appeared quiet, as if in sleep, and there was a certain loneliness that pervaded the entire expanse. Nothing much had moved since last I had looked down upon it before Halloween. Charlie still lay in the lake, Nick was still at work on his car, Mrs. Ryan, no doubt seized by weariness, had rolled forward onto her stomach to sleep.

  The only change I noticed was that Mary, obviously out of fright at having seen the face at her window, put the prowler behind our own house. Of course, in reality he was long gone, and had probably spied on a dozen other families since he’d looked in on her. The repair to Mrs. Ripici’s roof had still not been completed, and although the Hossetters had been gone for months, the figure of Raymond, the oldest boy, still lay, sleeping, behind the house. I wondered if this was to be the end of Botch Town. If Jim, getting older now, would forsake it, and it would continue to sleep and slowly decompose until the clay figures cracked and turned to dust and the cardboard houses wilted down and lost their forms. There was some connection between the sorry nature of Botch Town and our family, but whatever that connection was remained unclear to me and no
manner of dredging with sharp hooks would bring it up.

  I walked over to a corner of the cellar where there was a box of old toys we no longer played with. Searching through it, I found the item I remembered from long ago that I had once seen amidst its jumble. It was a Matchbox car, a reproduction of a hearse—long and black. The back doors opened and there had once been a little coffin that slid inside that you could close the doors on. Using Jim’s supplies, I painted this car white and, while still wet, set it down on Pine Avenue, parked in front of Mr. Barzita’s place. Then, after taking one more look at the entire board, I reached out over it and turned off the sun.

  My father miraculously appeared in his bed Sunday morning. I happened to go down the hall to the bathroom and on my way out noticed him lying there asleep next to my mother. The sight of him startled me, and I went upstairs to tell Jim, who was still sleeping. He got up and followed me down the stairs. I went in and told Mary. Nudging her awake, I said, “Hey, Dad’s home.” She joined Jim and me, and we took up positions around the bed, staring and waiting. After quite a while, my father suddenly sat up and opened his eyes as if a nightmare had awakened him. He shook his head and breathed out, like a sigh of relief, and smiled at us.

  We learned that not only was he there, but he would be home for the entire day. After he got up and had his coffee, he asked us if we wanted to go out for a drive. “Where?” asked Jim.

  “I don’t know. We’ll find out when we get there,” he said.

  We went out and piled into his car, Jim in the passenger side of the front seat and Mary and me in the back. It was cold out, but they opened the windows up front and we drove along with the radio blaring and the wind blowing wildly around us. No one said anything. My father pulled over at a roadside hot dog stand. We ordered cream sodas and those hot dogs that snapped when you bit them, covered in cooked onions and mustard. Sitting on overturned milk crates a few feet from the hot dog stand, we ate in silence. Then we got back in the car and drove fast, and I had a feeling of freedom, of skipping school, of running away.

  When we had gone many miles and there was no hope of turning back, Mary leaned over the front seat and said, “We didn’t go to church today.”

  My father turned and looked at her for a second, smiling, “I know,” he said, and laughed out loud.

  We wound up at a huge park on the north shore. The parking lots were almost empty even though the day was beautifully clear. We parked in the middle of this concrete expanse, surrounded by woods on three sides.

  “Which way will we walk?” my father asked me.

  I pointed to the west because it seemed like it would take us the farthest from the road and away from the parking lots.

  “Okay,” he said, “and they’re off …”

  We got out of the car, zipped up our coats, and started in that direction. Jim moved right up next to our father and tried to match him step for step. I had wanted to be there, next to him, but I didn’t make a fuss about it. Mary and I brought up the rear. We left the concrete behind and stepped into the shadows beneath the tall pines. There was a half-foot of fallen oak leaves and brown pine needles on the ground, and Mary and I shuffled our feet, occasionally kicking them into the air. She found a giant, yellow leaf as wide as her face, poked two eyeholes into it and held it up by the stem as a mask.

  We walked along a path for quite a while, saw crows above in the treetops, and came to a clearing where my father held his hand up and then put his finger to his lips. We three kids stopped walking, and he crouched down and pointed into the trees on the other side of the clearing. Standing there staring at us was a huge deer with antlers. A whole minute went by, and then Mary said, “Hello,” and waved to it. The deer sprang to the side and disappeared back into the woods.

  In the clearing, we were standing on a patch of sand. My father looked down. “Tracks,” he said. “A lot of them came through here in the last few hours.” He then found a fox track and showed it to us as well. After the clearing, we changed direction, unanimously deciding, without saying so, that we’d follow the deer. We never saw it again for the rest of the day, but the trail we took led us to a huge hill. My father took Mary by the hand to help her and we all scrabbled up the hill, slipping on the fallen leaves and resting from time to time against the trunks of trees.

  As it turned out, the deer had led us in the right direction, for as we crested the top of the rise, the trees disappeared and we could see out across the Long Island Sound all the way to the shore of Connecticut. The vast expanse of water was iron gray and choppy, dotted with white caps. A strong wind blew in our faces and it was exhilarating. The hill was covered in grass all the way down the other side and devoid of trees. At its base was a little inlet that, farther west, skirted the set of sand dunes between us and the sound. It was as wide as two football fields and as long as four, its surface rippling in the wind. An army of white birds stood along its shore, pecking at the wet sand.

  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 himse
lf 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.