The Empire of Ice Cream Page 30

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” the tall one said, pointing to the sleeping woman.

  The giant stared hard and eventually smiled.

  “We can set it up so that she’ll be willing to marry you in exchange for our freedom.”

  “How will you work such a miracle?” asked the giant.

  “We’ll talk you up for a couple of weeks,” said the man with white hair, “make you seem like a prince.”

  “You’ve got two weeks,” said the giant.

  As soon as the woman awoke, they started to work on her. “You’ve got to say one thing for that giant …” “It must be pretty satisfying to be a giant …” “Did you see him punch that goat …?” “His gold could sink a fleet of ships …”

  Every time the tall man and the man with white hair got on the subject of the giant, though, the woman would say, “I don’t care, I hate that bastard.” She was always at the bars screaming at him, “You’re a big loaf of shit!”

  The giant would watch her body tense against the wooden bars, smile, and go about his business. In the mornings, after a breakfast of calf kidney pie, he’d count his gold. At midday, he’d dress in a tweed suit, take his tall hat and cane, the handle knob of which was a fossilized human head polished to a shine, and go out to work, selling magic beans door to door. He’d sent for the beans from an ad in the back of a magazine, and they were purported to grow into enormous stalks that reached the clouds. In the evenings, he’d play opera records—arias sung by the giantess Ybila, Diva of the Dog Spine—and the people in the cage would hear the melancholic strains of music wafting down the hallway from some other room in the house accompanied by titanic, mournful sobs.

  The two men said everything they could think of to convince the woman the giant wasn’t so bad—even that they thought of him as a kind of father figure. But the sneer never came off the woman’s face. The days slipped by and they could feel themselves getting heavier. When they perspired, the sweat rolled from their pores, thick and amber like motor oil. They all had to take off their clothes because they had outgrown them. The giant often poked their stomachs and thighs with the long, sharp fingernail of his pinky. These jabs reminded the men that their two weeks were almost up.

  On the night before the giant was prepared to eat them for breakfast, the two men cornered the woman against the bars of the cage and threatened her. “The only way we’re all going to live is if you agree to marry the giant,” the man with the white hair told her. The tall man wrapped his long fingers around her throat. “If you don’t agree, I’ll kill you right now,” he said. The woman spit in the tall man’s face, and he started to choke her. The man with the white hair punched her flabby stomach. Finally, they dropped her to the floor of the cage. “Yes or no?” they asked, one at a time. She nodded.

  The giant came in wearing a bib that morning. “Well, well,” he said in a thundering voice, “am I to have a meal or a marriage?”

  The two men looked over at the woman. She smiled at them.

  “Will you be my wife?” the giant asked, retrieving a monocle from his vest pocket. As she stepped forward, he eyed her up and down.

  She stood just to the side of the cage door and said, “I’d rather marry a slug.”

  The monocle fell out of the giant’s eye.

  The men started for the woman. The giant gave a shrill cry of anguish and then smashed his hand through the cage door, grabbing the two just before they reached the woman. He ate the right leg of the man with white hair; blood raining down to sizzle and pop on the coals beneath the rotisserie. The screams were like the screams of dying mice in the enormous kitchen. When the woman saw the giant eat the head off the tall man, she jumped out of the hole in the cage and fell onto the slab of cow that was turning on the spit. As it spun, she raced across its slick surface, her feet burning with each step, and then leaped clear of the coals below, landing on the cobblestone floor.

  The giant, still munching, tried to stomp her, but even with all her new weight she was too quick for him. He started after her as she made for the huge door of the kitchen. Not too far down the hallway lined with boars’ heads, he scooped her up in his bloody hand. He did not eat her, though; he put her in his pocket and left his house.

  Down the lane he went until he came to a cottage. He knocked on the door and another giant answered.

  “Come in,” said the second giant, whose head was that of a parrot and whose fingers were flexible as if made of rubber.

  The first giant took the woman out of his pocket and held her at eye level. “Do you want her?” he asked. “I’m stuffed.”

  After thinking for a moment the second giant said, “Let’s juice her.” They took her into the parrot-head giant’s kitchen, where he made his potions and medicines, and turned the juicer on. The first giant dangled her over the opening, the stainless steel blade whirring below, and said, “Goodbye. I think I could have loved you.”

  At the last instant, the woman said, “I’ll marry whichever one of you can beat the other in a fight.”

  The giants looked at each other and nodded. They placed her in a glass box on the coffee table, latched the lid, and went to fetch their weapons. An hour later, in a clearing in the forest, the glass box holding the woman rested upon a tree stump in full view of the battleground. The parrot-head giant held a chrome steel pole with a pointed tip that glinted in the sun. Sea-green feathers at the back of his neck ruffled, his orange bird eyes twitched up and down, his black tongue played with the lower tip of his beak. The other giant held a club with spikes he had somehow made into a torch.

  A leaf fell from a nearby tree and that was the sign to begin. They locked in combat, steel jabbing knee joints and fire raging across a feathered skull. Mighty squawks and groans filled the clearing. Strips of flesh, spurts of blood, singed feathers, and blue down as soft as a dream of water flew from them, littering the forest floor. The fight ended when the parrot-head giant drove his beak into the heart of the other giant and killed him. By that time, though, the parrot-head was irreparably charred. He staggered backward, gave one insignificant squawk, and fell dead.

  The woman remained trapped in the glass box, growing thin while watching the flies as big as pigs come to feast on the remains of the giants. Birds of prey swooped down to tear off hunks of flesh from the corpses. A crow came along one day and, after eating the giants’ eyes, snatched the glass box in its talons and flew off. The bird flew higher and higher, past the blue sky and into the night above, singing a birdsong that rattled the glass of the box. Out past Mars and Jupiter, it flew with ease. The woman in the box marveled at the stars and the sight of other worlds.

  Then a sun exploded and the shock waves engulfed the bird and the woman in oblivion. When she woke, the woman found herself in a kitchen on her knees.

  “What happened?” her husband asked as he leaned over to help her up.

  “Nothing,” she said, “nothing.”

  “You’ve got to go to the doctor,” he said, helping her into a chair.

  “Tomorrow,” she promised. She finished making dinner, and the family sat down to eat. She discovered that she had made chicken and stuffing and corn.

  When dinner was finished and the coffee was served, she turned to her husband and said, “What’s my name?” He was about to reply, but then he looked off into the distance as if he had forgotten the question. She, herself, could not remember his.

  “What’s my name?” she asked each of the children, but each of them shrugged and shook their heads. Only then did she notice how unfamiliar the floral wallpaper was and that there were two cats instead of the usual one. What little she remembered was scattered and incoherent, but it was a near certainty she had not yet been married. She laughed to cover her fear. Her husband and the children laughed too.

  As soon as she could, she cleared the dishes and announced that she was taking the garbage out. With the sagging plastic bag in her hand, she walked past her family watching television in the living room and said, “Be right
in.” As soon as she got outside and closed the door behind her, she dropped the bag and ran.

  Before the night was over, she managed to find an unlocked car in which someone had left their keys. She fled town and headed out on the interstate. When she finally came to a stop, it was only because the ocean lapped the sand in front of the car. She got out and wandered up the beach.

  Later that day, she found a small, deserted shack of a house on a dune overlooking the ocean. It had a fireplace and chimney, two warped glass windows that faced the surf, and comfortable furniture fashioned from the bones of whales, the cartilage of a giant manta ray. There was a parlor, a bedroom, and a kitchen. The absence of a bathroom was made up for by a roofless, wooden outhouse at the base of the dune, hidden amidst brambles and tall sea grass. She wasted no time but on that first day began to put the small house in order. Creating a broom from a stick of driftwood and sea grass, she proceeded to thoroughly sweep the place free of spider webs and sand.

  Mounted on the wall in the bedroom were an old fishing rig with thick, string line, a reel that used no bale, and a heavy, treble-hooked lure made to appear like a silver baitfish moving through the water. In the late afternoon, she took this pole down to the shore and cast out the line toward the setting sun. Twice the string snarled, and twice she patiently unraveled it. She cast and reeled in, cast and reeled in, and not until night had descended and the moon had begun to rise did she feel a tug at the end of the line. That sudden resistance told her she would survive.

  Her first fish, with human eyes, thick lips, and a top fin like a lady’s fan, glinted in the moonlight as she reeled it onto the sand. It wheezed horribly, drowning in the atmosphere, and rolled its eyes up to look into hers. She could feel it silently pleading with her to spare its life. Although it pained her to watch the fish die, there was nothing else she could do as her hunger had made her weak and desperate. She took her catch home, and then scoured the dunes for driftwood. The sticks of wood she formed into a teepee, and then filled the pyramid inside with balled-up pages from a yellowed newspaper she’d discovered earlier while cleaning the house. In her jeans, she’d been carrying a cigarette lighter that she put to use, sparking a fire to life. It burned bright orange in the night, embers drifting high up into the darkness.

  The fish tasted of saffron and renewed her strength. That night, in the whalebone bed, she wondered where she had come upon the cigarette lighter and if it was a link to her true past. When she fell asleep, she dreamed of the fish. It lay next to her in the bed and with its wheezing, dying voice, told her that when the giant had kidnapped her, she had been running away.

  “From what?” she asked.

  “From the little people,” said the fish. It grew wings then and lifted into the air to fly in circles above her head.

  She woke suddenly to find a bat flying in the same circles above her. Rolling off the bed, she crawled to where she had left the homemade broom. Once it was in her grip, she felt some courage. She swiped the air frantically, chasing the bat into the parlor. While continuing to swing the broom with one hand, she managed to open the front door and the intruder flew past her into the night. She did not go back to bed but stepped outside onto the dune. The breeze moved through the grass and the ocean lapped the shore in the moonlight. She contemplated her dream and briefly recalled an apartment in a city, a burning candle, an aria on the stereo, a broken wine bottle, the hands of a clock, a suitcase. Then crumbs of moments, the inconsequential debris of separate days, followed in a trail through her memory only to end in the gullet of a giant.

  Many useful and marvelous things washed up after storms, and she walked the beach each morning to collect this bounty. Candles; kegs of grog; the horned, triple-socket skull of some unknown beast; a mirror from China whose stamped tin backing held the image of a dragon; mangoes; clothes made of vines from jungle towns half a world away; and a brown bottle, smelling of medicine, sealed with wax, ferrying one ringed finger and a message that read HELP! She slipped the ruby ring on her own finger and buried the rest. Once she found a knife that never dulled, once a leather-bound book wrapped in oilcloth titled The Grammar of Constellations. She read through its soggy pages at night by the glow of a candle while the creepers sang in the dunes.

  Throughout the remainder of the summer and into the early autumn, she swam every day in the ocean. Her health slowly returned through a combination of this vigorous exercise and her simple diet of fish, clams, and berries from the nearby woods. Time, itself, withered, came apart at the seams, and was carried away on the tide. In the perfect calm of long afternoons, she sat at the water’s edge and let her imagination blossom, following incredible story lines suggested by the items she found while beachcombing. For the most part, she went without clothing, and her skin bronzed. Her hair grew long and wild. The muscles of her arms and legs took on sleek definition. Whereas earlier, she had kept the dragon mirror facedown on the windowsill of her bedroom, by the time the geese flew south in formation, she had mounted the mirror on the wall in order to see herself each morning. Not knowing her name, she told her reflection her name would be Anna.

  In mid-autumn, just before the ocean became far too cold for swimming, she woke one morning and looked out to sea. There, on a sandbar that had formed overnight, only a hundred yards from shore, lay what remained of a large wooden sailing ship. Without a second thought, she dove into a wave and swam out to it. As she drew closer, she could see that it had an enormous hole in its side. The hulking craft listed, its tall, cracked mast angled against the horizon. By the time she reached the sandbar, the tide had receded and the majority of the hull was visible above the waterline. She entered the craft through its gaping wound.

  Save for the wide beam of daylight that entered, focused like a spotlight, it was dark inside the wooden giant. The boards creaked with every wavelet that rolled beneath it, and crabs scurried here and there over the sodden goods of the hold. Coming upon a passageway that led above, she leaned to her side and scrabbled up a set of steps to reach a middle deck. There she found the galley and rows of bunks for the missing sailors. Just beyond the sailors’ quarters she discovered what appeared to be the captain’s cabin. A globe, a compass, charts, piles of books lay scattered about as if a miniature typhoon had been loosed in the small compartment.

  She looked around for things that might be useful back at her home. In her search, she came upon the captain’s log. She opened it in the middle and began to read by the light that slipped in from a small hole in the deck above. The first thing she learned was the name of the ship, the Lonreat, which hailed from a place called Neerly. She flipped then to the last entry and read:

  I have sent the men off on the life boats, for the ship is rapidly taking water through a hole suffered by way of the dragon-headed cannons of the pirate junk, Jade Bloom. They engaged us in battle as we sailed southward on our return trip from trading in Giant Land. The only thing that saved us from certain death was a sudden storm that distracted our pursuers’ intentions from that of battle to merely saving their own lives. Perhaps we were cursed by our unusual cargo, the great crystal ball containing the severed head of Mar-el-mar, or perhaps because normal men were never really meant to engage in commerce with giants. From the sound of the winds up on deck, it is a good bet I will never get a chance to figure it out.

  My only hope is that some of my men will survive the storm. I go now to strap myself to the wheel. There may be a chance that I can beach the Lonreat somewhere. I have given myself a reminder to thank God if I should survive this calamity and return to Neerly. I would mark the time here, but unfortunately I lost my watch in our fray with the pirates.

  Anna skipped back through the pages. In the middle of the log, she read an account of the captain and his crew, when in Giant Land, being entertained by the diva Ybila. They had to climb all day up the side of a mountain, to a high ridge known as the Dog Spine, and there in an amphitheater hewn from solid rock, under the stars, the graceful behemoth sang an aria title
d “What Is My Name?” The captain attests that her voice had a sweetly melancholic affect upon his men, and they were plunged into a state not dissimilar to that of the reveler upon opium. I thought back through my life—the journeys, the people, the places, the joy and sorrow—and discovered a vast ocean inside of me, he wrote.

  Up on the main deck, beneath the tattered shreds of sails flapping in the breeze, she came upon the skeletal remains of the captain. He was lashed to the ship’s wheel by a leather belt, still standing upright in a pose that suggested he was scanning the horizon. She thought it a shame that he did not know that he had finally found a place to beach the ship. He wore a jacket with golden designs stitched above the pockets, a hat, and tall boots. Tied around his left index finger was a length of royal blue thread, no doubt the reminder to thank the Almighty. Anna, beset by the tragic end of the good captain, fled the ship by diving headlong into the rising tide. The next morning, the Lonreat had vanished.

  In winter, the night skies were clear, and she read their grammar. The icy prose told her she was only dreaming that she was asleep and dreaming, and that really she was awake in a dream of reality made actual by the ocean, and the stars, and the wind in the dunes. She didn’t really understand but felt in her heart it was true. Then, one night, a star fell, trailing a fiery veil, and slipped into the ocean with a distinct fizzle. A wisp of smoke curled up around the milky moon. This radically changed the grammar of constellations and made the old rules false, initiating a wicked freeze.

  The ocean turned to ice, and wrapped in all her garments, those made of vine, the brocaded paisley shawl, obviously from the closet of a long dead queen, the Sherpa’s cap, and sealskin boots, she ventured out among the crystal waves beneath a perfectly blue sky. Up and over, up and over, she went, exploring. Three hundred yards from shore, she found a wooden crate, the top missing. Lying in it was a human figure made of wax—an elegant woman, naked, with a wig of chestnut horsehair and delicate tattooed eyebrows, lashes, and pubic hair.