The Empire of Ice Cream (19 page)

“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.”

“What happened to the hermit?” asked Jim.

“During a bad winter, someone found him in the middle of the field by his cave, frozen solid. In the spring, they buried him there among the wild asparagus.”

After lunch, we put George on the leash and took him out in the backyard. Mary didn't go with us because she decided to have a session with her make-believe friends, Sally O'Mally and Sandy Graham, who lived in the closet in her room. Once in a while, she'd let them out and she would become Mickey and they would go to school together down in the cellar.

Jim had the idea that we could use George to track the pervert. We'd let him smell the ladder, he'd pick up the scent, and we'd follow along. David Kelty joined us in our backyard where the ladder again lay propped against the side of the toolshed. For a while, we just stood there waiting for the dog to smell the ladder. Then I told Jim, “You better rev him up.” To rev George up all you had to do was stick your foot near his mouth. If you left it there long enough, he'd start to growl. Jim stuck his foot out and made little circles with it in the air near George's mouth.
“Geooorgieeee,”
he sang very softly. When the dog had enough, he went for the foot, growling like crazy, and fake biting all over it—a hundred fake bites a second. He never really chomped down, but he worked a sneaker over pretty thoroughly.

When he was revved, he moved to the ladder, smelled it a few times, and then pissed on it. We were ready to do some tracking. George started walking and so did we. Out of the backyard we went through the gate by Nan's side of the house, over the slates and under the pink blossoms of the prehistoric mimosa tree to the front yard, and then down the block.

Around the corner was Southgate school, a one-story structure of red brick, which was a big rectangle of classrooms with a courtyard of grass at its center. On the right-hand side was an alcove that held the playground for the kindergarten—monkey bars, swings, a seesaw, a sandbox, and one of those round, turning platform things that if you got it circling fast enough, all the kids would fly off. The gym was attached on the left-hand side; a giant, windowless box of brick that towered over the squat main building.

The school had a circular drive in front with an elongated, high-curbed oval of grass at its center. Just west of the drive and the little parking lot there were two asphalt basketball courts; and then a vast field with a baseball backstop and bases, where on windy days the powdered dirt of the baselines would rise in cyclones. At the border of the field was a high barbed-wire-topped fence to prevent kids from climbing down into a crater-like sump. Someone long ago had used a chain cutter to make a slit in the fence that a small person could pass through. Down there in the early fall, among the golden rod stalks and dying weeds, it was a kingdom of crickets.

Behind the school were more vast fields of sunburnt summer grass cut by three asphalt bike paths. At the back, the school fields were bounded by another development, but to the east lay the woods: a deep oak forest that stretched well into the next town and south as far as the railroad tracks. Streams ran through it, as well as some rudimentary paths that we knew better than the lines on our own palms. A quarter-mile in, there lay a small lake that we had been told was bottomless.

That day, George led us to the boundary of the woods, near the pregnant swelling of the ground known as Sewer Pipe Hill. We stood on the side of the hill where the round, dark circle of the pipe faced the tree line. Some days a trickle of water flowed from the pipe, but now it was bone dry. Jim walked over to the round opening, three feet in circumference, leaned over, and yelled,
“Helloooooo.”
His word echoed down the dark tunnel beneath the fields of the school. George pissed on the concrete facing that held the end of the pipe.

“X marks the spot,” said Jim. He turned to David. “You better crawl in there and see if the prowler is hiding underground.”

David rubbed his head and stared at the black hole.

“Are you my right-hand man?” asked Jim.

“Yes,” said David. “But what if he's in there?”

“Before he touches you, just say you're making a citizen's arrest.”

Kelty thought about this for a moment.

“Don't do it,” I said.

Jim glared at me. Then he put his hand on David's shoulder and said, “He saw your mom's ass.”

David nodded and moved toward the pipe. He bent down, got on his knees at the opening, and then shuffled forward into the dark a little way before stopping. Jim went over and lightly tapped him in the rear end with the toe of his sneaker. “You'll be a hero if you find him. They'll put you in the newspaper.” David started crawling slowly forward and in seconds was out of sight.