The Empire of Ice Cream (53 page)

“We're going to make it,” I said to Jimmy, and he didn't smile, but he looked less frightened. That subtle sign helped me stay my own confusion, and I just started talking to him, saying anything that came to mind. By the time we reached the bridge and were passing under it, I realized I had been laying out my life story, and he was seeing it flash before his eyes. I did not want to die that afternoon with nothing to show but scenes of the bay and my hometown. What I wished I could have shared with him were my dreams for the future. Then I noticed a vague spark in his gaze, a subtle recognition of some possibility. That's when the full brunt of the storm hit—gale-force winds, lashing rain, hail the size of dice—and I heard above the shriek of the wind a distinct cracking sound when the prow slammed down off a huge roller. The boat was breaking up.

With every impact against the water came that cracking noise, and each time it sounded, I noticed the kid's skin begin to tear. A dark brown sludge seeped from these wounds. Tears formed in his big eyes, became his eyes, and then dripped in viscous streams down his face, leaving the sockets empty. The lightning cracked above and his chest split open down to his navel. He opened his mouth and a hermit crab scurried out across his blue lips and chin to his neck. I no longer could think to steer, no longer felt the cold, couldn't utter a sound. The sky was nearly dark as night. The boat fell off a wave into its trough, like we were slamming into a moving truck, and then the wood came apart with a groan. I felt the water rising up around my ankles and calves. Then the transom split off the back of the boat as if it had been made of cardboard, and the engine dropped away out of my grasp, its noise silenced. One more streak of lightning walked the sky, and I saw before me the remains of the kid as John Hunter had described them. The next thing I knew, I was in the water, flailing to stay afloat amidst the storm.

I was a strong swimmer, but by this point I was completely exhausted. The waves came from everywhere, one after the other, and I had no idea where I was headed or how close I had managed to get to shore. I would be knocked under by a wave and then bob back up, and then down I'd go again. A huge wave, like a cold, dark wing, swept over me, and I thought it might be Death. It drove me below the surface where I tumbled and spun so violently that when I again tried to struggle toward the sky, I instead found the sandy bottom. Then something moved beneath me, and I wasn't sure if I was dreaming, but I remembered my father riding me on his back through the ocean. I reached out and grabbed onto a pair of shoulders. In my desperation my fingers dug through the flesh and latched onto skeleton. We were flying, skimming along the surface, and I could breathe again. It was all so crazy, my mind broke down in the confusion and I must have passed out.

When next I was fully aware, I was stumbling through knee-deep water in the shallows off Gardner's Park. I made the beach and collapsed on the sand. An hour passed, maybe more, but when I awoke, the storm had abated and a steady rain was falling. I made my way, tired and weak, through the park to Sunrise Highway. There, I managed to hitch a ride back to the docks and my waiting car. It was late when I finally returned to the Alamo. I slipped off my wet clothes and got into bed. Curling up on my side, I quickly drifted off to sleep, the words of the old crone's rosary washing over me, submerging me.

The next day I called the police and reported the loss of my boat, so that those at the dock who found my slip empty wouldn't think I had drowned. Later on, when I was driving over to my mother's house, I heard on the radio that the storm had claimed a life. Downsy's boat was missing at the dock. Ironically enough, they found his body that morning washed up on the shore of Grass Island.

A few days later, some startling debris was discovered on the beach at the south end of Gardner's Park, close to where I had come ashore. Two hikers came across pieces of my boat, identified by the plank that held its serial numbers, and a little farther up the beach, the remains of Jimmy Trentino.

I went to two funerals in one day—one for a kid who never got a chance to grow up, and one for a guy who didn't want to. Later that evening, sitting in a shadowed booth at the back of The Copper Kettle, John Hunter remarked how a coffin is like a boat for the dead.

I wanted to tell him everything that happened the day of the storm, but, in the end, felt he wouldn't approve. He had sternly warned me once against blabbing—even when drunk—about a bed I might be seeding for the coming season. “A good man knows when to keep a secret,” he had said. Instead, I merely told him, “I'm not coming back to the bay.”

He laughed. “Did you think you had to tell me?” he said. “I've seen you reading those books in your boat on your lunch break. I've seen you wandering around town late at night. You don't need a boat to get where it's deep.”

I got up then and went to the bar to order another round. When I came back to the booth, he was gone.

I moved on with my life, went back to school, devoted more time to writing my stories, and through the changes that came, I tried to always be sure of myself. In those inevitable dark moments, though, when I thought I was about to panic, I'd remember John Hunter, his hand reaching down to pull me from the water. I always wished that I might see him again, but I never did, because it couldn't be any other way.

The Trentino Kid

Story Notes

“The Trentino Kid” came right out of my clamming years. I'd come near to flunking out of high school and when I made my first foray into higher education, Suffolk Community College, I did flunk out. I remember, somewhere around the end of that first semester at Suffolk, I found my Psych textbook under about 150 empty beer cans in the back seat of my three-door Buick Special and realized the gig was up. Then I began on a series of crap jobs from loading trucks to cleaning toilets to working in metal shops. Eventually, I saved up enough money to buy a clam boat and took to working the Great South Bay off the southern coast of Long Island. This was hard work, but for a time there, when I was eighteen to twenty, it was the greatest job ever—I made my own hours, the pay was good, and I was outside all the time. Something about that work matured me to an extent, and I finally realized there were other things I wanted to do with my life. The story of the Trentino kid is true: This kid, younger than me, who we'd let play basketball with us older guys, did drown while clamming, having walked in off the shore with a basket in an inner tube and a scratch rake. When his old man showed up at the dock and asked us not to forget his son—that was one of the saddest things I've ever witnessed. The death of that boy haunted me all summer and through the fallow months of the winter, and might have been one of the main reasons for my getting it together to go back to school. This was the fastest story I ever wrote. Three days. It appeared in Ellen Datlow's ghost story anthology
, The Dark,
which won the 2004 International Horror Guild Award
.

Acknowledgments

Any writer who's had even one book published knows that it takes a group effort to get that book into the hands of the reading public. Listed below, though not in order of importance—as they were all equally and absolutely integral to the final product—are my compatriots in publishing
The Empire of Ice Cream
. I thank each and every one of them for their dedication and hard work in making this collection possible.

Gary Turner, publisher of Golden Gryphon Press, has done an amazing job of bringing readers quality books by quality writers. GGP can claim a large share of the responsibility for keeping the short story collection alive and vibrant in the realm of Fantastic Literature. First, as a reader, I want to thank Gary for doing what he does; and then I want to thank him for publishing a second collection of my work.

Marty Halpern, who also edited my collection
The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories
for GGP, did his usual, wonderful job on this collection. His dedication to the material, his attention to detail, and his ability to see a disparate group of stories as an integrated collection, make him one of the very best editors of short story collections in the field.

Jonathan Carroll's novels and stories are perceived by many as existing in the marchland between what is called “mainstream literature” and the genre of the “dark fantastic.” At first glance, this might seem true, but for those of us who have read most, if not all, of his fiction and are inspired by it, we understand that Carroll's work transcends these simplistic attempts at definition. We are aware that his fiction is its own unique country. The most effective passage of contemporary fiction I've read can be found in the closing pages of his novel,
The Wooden Sea
—a scene in which a man digs a grave. I'm grateful for his having taken the time to write the introduction for this collection.

John Picacio's incredible cover art has finally come to the attention of both major publishers and the Hugo Awards. I feel blessed to have met him at the outset of his career; otherwise, we may not have been able to engage his time and talents for this cover. His style is both easily recognizable and powerfully original. John's cover for my previous GGP title,
The Fantasy Writer's Assistant
, was easily my favorite cover of any of my books—until, of course, this one. His artistic vision continues to grow and change with each new piece, and I believe that when all is said and done, John Picacio will be considered one of the greats.

Howard Morhaim's advice, encouragement, and guidance are behind every book of mine that gets published. One couldn't ask for a better agent.

In addition to those listed above, I'd like to thank all of the editors who published the works found herein—their editorial insights and help made each of these stories stronger. Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't give a nod to Bill Watkins, Rick Bowes, and Mike Gallagher who read all of these stories before they were sent out and gave me valuable feedback with which to make them better.

About the Author

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels
Vanitas
,
The Physiognomy
,
Memoranda
,
The Beyond
,
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
,
The Girl in the Glass
,
The Cosmology of the Wider World
, and
The Shadow Year
. His story collections are
The Fantasy Writer's Assistant
,
The Empire of Ice Cream
,
The Drowned Life
, and
Crackpot Palace
. Ford has published over one hundred short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, from the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
to
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories
. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edgar Award, France's Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, and Japan's Hayakawa's SF Magazine Reader's Award.

Ford's fiction has been translated into twenty languages. In addition to writing, he has been a professor of literature and writing for thirty years and has been a guest lecturer at the Clarion Writers' Workshop, the Stone Coast MFA in Creative Writing Program, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch Writers' Workshop. Ford lives in Ohio and currently teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“The Annals of Eelin-Ok,” first published in
The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm
, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Tor, 2004.

“The Beautiful Gelreesh,” first published in
Album Zutique
, edited by Jeff VanderMeer, Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2003.

“Boatman's Holiday,” first published in
Book of Voices
(a Sierra Leone PEN benefit project), edited by Mike Butscher, Flame Books UK, 2005.

“Botch Town,” copyright © 2006 by Jeffrey Ford. Previously unpublished.

“Coffins on the River,” first published in
Polyphony
3, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, Wheatland Press, 2003.

“The Empire of Ice Cream,” first published online on SCIFICTION, February 26, 2003.

“Giant Land,” first published in
The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives
#2, 2005.

“The Green Word,” first published in
The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest
, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Viking, 2002.

“Jupiter's Skull,” first published in
Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy
, edited by Al Sarrantonio, Roc, 2004.

“A Man of Light,” first published online on SCIFICTION, January 26, 2005.

“A Night in the Tropics,” first published in
Argosy Magazine
, January/February 2004.

“Summer Afternoon,” first published in
Say … is this a cat?
, edited by Christopher Rowe, The Fortress of Words, 2002.

“The Trentino Kid,” first published in
The Dark: New Ghost Stories
, edited by Ellen Datlow, Tor, 2003.

“The Weight of Words,” first published in
Leviathan Three
, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre, Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2002

Copyright © 2006 by Jeffrey Ford

Introduction copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Carroll

Cover design by Jamie Keenan

ISBN: 978-1-4804-1106-7

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.