The Empire of Ice Cream (5 page)

As soon as the door was closed, I went into the back room and brought a blanket to wrap around her shoulders. She thanked me, her teeth still chattering, and I ushered her over to a chair at the small table near the veranda. Shutting the glass doors to keep the chill off her, I then sat down in the opposite seat. Before I could speak, she lifted a small leather pouch with a drawstring onto the table.

“From Mrs. Strellop,” she said.

“How so?” I asked.

“She told me many times, especially in her last weeks, that if anything should happen to her, I should give this to you.”

“What's in it?”

She shook her head.

I reached out and grabbed the satchel, pulling it along the table toward me. As I undid the drawstring, Maylee said to me, “Would you like me to leave?”

I laughed. “No, at least get warmed up before going back out in it.”

She nodded, looking relieved.

Then I opened the pouch, and a familiar scent wafted up. I lifted the bag and held it to my nose for a moment. “Foxglove tea,” I said with a smile.

“Oh, yes,” said Maylee, leading me to believe that she had tasted the strange brew.

“Shall I make some now? It might warm you a little.”

“Please,” she said.

I went immediately over to my stove, got a fire going, and put a kettle of water on. As I filled the big copper tea ball, I noticed for the first time that the stuff was multicolored, made up of flecks of red and yellow, a pale green and some miniscule blue nuggets, suggesting that there were other ingredients in it besides the dried petals of its namesake. It struck me then that perhaps there was no foxglove in it at all, that it had just been a name the missus had assigned it.

I rejoined Maylee at the table while waiting for the water to boil. “You knew Mrs. Strellop quite well, didn't you?” I asked, lifting my cigarettes off the tabletop. I offered one to her, and she accepted. Striking a match, I lit my own and then reached across to share the flame.

She took a drag and nodded. “I saw her every day. I would bring her vegetables from the barge that comes down from the farm country. She gave me three dollars for my effort, which I had to give to Mother Carushe, but then Mrs. Strellop would also give me a cup of this tea. ‘Just for you, my dear,' she'd say.”

“That tea is something, isn't it?” I asked, laughing.

“I'd take the tea and sit with her for an hour. She always had some story to tell. It was so relaxing. But when it was time for me to leave, I could never remember a single word she had spoken.”

“You don't have to tell me. I sat whole nights with her and can't recall a blessed thing.”

“I think she was a witch,” said Maylee.

I laughed, but this time she didn't. “What makes you say that?” I asked.

“When I would return home in the afternoon from taking the vegetables to Thanatos, Mother would bless me with a special holy water she kept in a bottle that had the shape of a saint before accepting the three dollars. Then she would take the bills and put them in the icebox for a day before spending them. I think she was afraid of Mrs. Strellop.”

“If you don't mind my asking, how is it working for Mother Carushe?” I said, trying to hide behind my cigarette. I thought for a moment I had offended Maylee, but then I realized she was really considering my question.

“I have been in the district for only six months, and … May I be frank with you, Mr. Jonsi?”

“Please,” I said, “just Jonsi, no mister necessary. And there is nothing left in the world that will offend me. I'm not after the details; I just like to hear how others live. You know, sort of as a barometer for my own life.”

“Well, I and the other three young women who work for Mother, we are supposed to be prostitutes—no sense in trying to dress it up. Not the life I had at one time envisioned for myself. There was a period when I had designs on being an actress and saw myself delivering great speeches from the stage. I might even have had some talent for it, but I allowed myself to be drawn away from my dream by a loathsome man who eventually left me stranded and broke.”

“I can commiserate,” I said.

“But that's all in the past. One needs to survive. But, sir, there is something wrong with the gentlemen of the Bolukuchet,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling some vague offense.

“I have had only five commissions so far in the time I have been here, and every one of them …” Here she grinned slightly and stubbed out her cigarette. “Limp as dishrags.”

I couldn't help but laugh, for a variety of reasons.

“Yes, they have money and they have an idea they would like to spend time with me, but when I get close to them, they back away. Instead of me taking them in hand, they want to hold
my
hand. And they are paying astronomical sums for this. One fellow last month had me simply sleep for an hour in the bed next to him. He never laid a finger on me. When I got up to leave, he sniffed the pillow where my head had been and started crying.”

“An interesting observation,” I said.

“Granted, I have only been with five of them, but I sense it, a plague of deep sorrow, shall we say?”

Luckily, the water came to a boil then and I got up and prepared us each a cup. The perfumed-forest aroma of it was comforting, and for the first time since the rains started, I felt a measure of peace. Maylee and I did not speak while taking the tea. She stared at the table, and I at the pressed tin design of the ceiling. During this long pause, the sound of the rain changed from monotonous to beautiful. Out on the street someone yelled. I closed my eyes and remembered the cool of the evening, sitting in the doorway of Thanatos, watching the patterns of fireflies at the edge of the forest across the canal. Mrs. Strellop's voice started in my memory and then spiraled down through the center of my being, leaving a sense of calm in its wake.

I rested my cup on the table, empty, just as Maylee did hers. She looked over at me, her eyes not half so big anymore, and smiled.

“And Mrs. Strellop told me that you are a poet,” she said, her words having slowed to a drawl.

I laughed and shook my head. “I sniff the pillow of poetry and weep,” I told her, preparing to forge forward with an honest recitation of my own days to even the account, but she abruptly cut me off.

“—Wait,” she said, and held up her hand. “That is the first time I ever remembered something Mrs. Strellop had told me.” She breathed deeply. “What a sense of relief.”

“I can imagine, believe me,” I said, and clapped for her.

“Oh, my god, there's something else …
something else
,” she nearly yelled, squirming in her seat. “That odd skull she had. Do you remember it?”

“Of course,” I said.

“She called it Jupiter.”

I scanned my memory, and sure enough, yes, in that moment, I remembered her telling me the same. That crumb of information shifted like a grain in a sand pile, and with the insignificant revelation something else became clear to me. “My turn,” I said. She looked on excitedly. “He was a throwback, not quite a man—”

“Or more than a man,” she said quickly. “Did they not find him in a mountain valley in the range that overlooked her village?”

I pushed my chair back from the table. “The old hunter Fergus brought him back from an expedition into the clouds. From the altitude to which he climbed he could see the planets clearly, and Jupiter watched him like an eye the night he captured the strange lad in a trap that was a hole dug like a grave and covered with flimsy branches.” For the last half a sentence, she recited the words with me.

We sat for a moment in stunned silence, and then she said, “I feel light headed … but not dizzy. Like I'm waking up.”

“Every time you voice a string of Mrs. Strellop's words,” I said, “the next comes into my mind.”

“Yes,” she said, “like a magician pulling scarves from his pocket.”

“What now?” I asked.

“Fergus believed him to be more ape than human.”

“He brought Jupiter back to the village and put him on display in a cage made of branches lashed with lanyards.”

“Each of the townspeople paid a silver coin to see him; covered from top to toe with a reddish brown fuzz, cranium like a cathedral, thumbs on his feet, and jutting jaw,” she said, staring at the wall as if the cage was there and she was seeing him. She shook her head sadly.

“For a time he was a renowned attraction and many came to view him,” I added.

Maylee sighed. “And then like everything—for some, even life itself—the sense of wonder wore off.”

“Fergus spent so much time with the wild boy that he came to realize the boy was more human than ape, and the lad learned to read and write and speak perfectly.”

“He was no longer confined to the cage,” she said, as if reading from a book, “but went about in human clothes, helping the aged hunter, now wracked with arthritis, get through his days.”

“Actually,” I said, as if setting her straight, “this Jupiter, this beast boy, was quite a prodigy. Fergus taught him to carve wood with a knife, and the hairy apprentice created a likeness of his master, his father, from a log of oak that stood six feet tall and perfectly mirrored the hunter.”

Maylee did not immediately reply, and for a moment, I feared she had lost the thread of events, until she finally blurted out, “Then Jupiter grew, tall and strong—”

“Like this,” I said, and not even knowing what I was about, stood up as if carved from words and animated only by the story. I thrust my chest out and flexed my biceps. My bottom jaw pushed forward and, furrowing my brow, I bent my knees slightly and took slow, big steps in a circle.

“That's him,” she said. “But then Fergus died.”

I felt the air leave me as if I'd been punched in the stomach, and, retaining my simulation of Jupiter, I hung my head and slouched forward. “And the boy was set adrift in an alien world,” I said.

“Your eyes,” said Maylee.

I could feel the tears on my cheeks. “Time passed,” I said, and, with this, sat down and lit two cigarettes, passing one to my guest. We smoked in silence, time passing, but I felt the persistence of the tale like a slight pressure behind my eyes, in my solar plexus. The tea had me in its fog. The light from the lamps appeared unnaturally diffuse, and I heard, whisper soft, traces of a children's choir emanating from my ears. Still, one small part of me clung to reason, and in that thimble of rational self, I trembled with wonder and fear at what was happening.

Maylee stubbed out her cigarette and said, “After Jupiter buried Fergus, he set about making the bottom floor of the old man's home into a shop from which to sell his remarkable carvings.”

Her words again initiated the story, which broke open inside of me like the monsoon, washing away any volition on my part. I stood and assumed my primate pose. “He created beautiful objects with his knife,” I said. “Animals of the forest so lifelike, customers swore they moved, circus acrobats whose hands clasped the trapeze, monsters full of dignity and courage.” My fingers wriggled with the grace of snakes as I turned and carved an invisible figurine.

“The people of the town remained wary of Jupiter, afraid of his size and skeptical of his intelligence. To them he was either a horrid freak or the result of a deal with the devil, but never human,” she said, and slowly stood.

She turned her back on me and took two steps as I added, “They did not mind him so much as long as he remained in his shop, a curiosity to visit every now and then and buy a gift from for the holidays or a wedding, but they did not want him on their streets. For his part, Jupiter longed for companionship, someone with whom to discuss what he had read, the mundane events of his every day.”

“He felt their distrust for him on the street, so one day he hired a young woman to bring him groceries from the market each afternoon. Her name was Zel Strellop, a kind girl, unafraid of Jupiter's demeanor and enchanted by his craft,” said Maylee, dropping the gray blanket from her shoulders and spreading her arms wide as if breaking free from a cocoon.

I could almost see a young Mrs. Strellop in the features of Maylee, and I wondered if to her I appeared as Jupiter. The story possessed us yet more fully, and although we continued to tell it as we spoke, we began simulating every little action our two characters might have undertaken. I noticed that when she told the words of Zel, her voice changed, becoming higher and lighter, and that my own words, when quoting Jupiter, were far more bass than I was accustomed to. For the exposition, our voices remained our own. We moved in and around the apartment, no longer allowing the table to separate us.

There was a series of meetings between the wood carver and the young woman, and they grew increasingly interested in each other. I felt the flame of attraction spark to life in my chest, felt weak in the knees as Maylee, as Zel Strellop, approached, lightly touched my arm, whispered a secret to me, and finally kissed me for the first time, gently on the lips. I wanted it to continue, but Maylee broke it off and fled to the stove that stood in for Zel's parents' house.

“And then,” said I, “Jupiter wrote her a poem to express his love for her,” and I walked over and sat hunched at my writing desk. My knife hand reached for the pen. I lifted it and wrote rapidly.

When the sun is high

I watch out the window

for a cloud of dust in the distance
,

you on the path
,

bringing me oranges, melons, and plums
.

My impatience is sharp

and carves your likeness

on every moment
.

The instant I had penned the last word, Maylee swept the paper away and pressed it to her breast. I stood and turned to face her. “And they kissed more heatedly,” she said, and we did.