The Empire of Ice Cream (6 page)

“His apelike hands swept across the curves of her body,” I said from the corner of my mouth, our lips still pressed, and my hands did.

She stepped back, and in one fluid motion lifted her damp dress off over her head. “Zel disrobed in a fit of passion,” she said, breathing heavily.

When she stooped to remove her undergarments, I undid my trousers and let them drop to the floor, not forgetting to add, “He grew brave in his desire and followed her example.”

Maylee left me and went back to the table. Over her shoulder she verily shouted, “There was no bed, so they made do on his workbench.” With this, she bent forward and with one sweep of her arm sent the teacups and ashtray and cigarettes onto the floor.

“He approached her from behind,” I said.

“His member was pulsing with all the energy he'd brought with him from the mountain,” she said.

I looked down and even in my fog was surprised to see that she was right.

“She gasped as he entered her,” she gasped.

I tried to say, “With slow thrusts, he vented his passion,” but it sounded as a series of short grunts.

Maylee missed a line or two, herself, in which she was to have described Zel's own pleasure, I'm certain, but filled in with panting and a protracted groan.

For a span of time, I was lost to my life, my role in the story, transported beyond the Bolukuchet, flying somewhere above the rain.

As I pulled out of her, Maylee said, “Time passed,” and reached down to grab the cigarettes and ashtray off the floor. We lit up and took our seats at the table, both still heaving from the encounter.

When we had managed to catch our breath, she said, “The townspeople started to become wary of the arrangement between Zel and Jupiter. She was spending far too much time out at his shop. Something about her look had changed.”

“Late one afternoon,” I said, “Jupiter was visited by the sheriff, a man who had been close friends with old Fergus. He warned Jupiter that people were suspicious and if he wanted the best for Zel, he should leave town immediately.”

“Yes,” said Maylee, “but what he did not know was that the sheriff had also, that very evening, warned Zel to stay away from Jupiter. As soon as it got dark, though, she sneaked out and made for his shop.”

We both stood at this point and each walked halfway around the table to meet face to face. “She confronted him as he was clasping shut his suitcase,” I said.

“Where are you going?” asked Zel.

“I must leave,” said Jupiter.

“I'm coming with you,” she said.

“No, you can't,” he told her. “It will end in tragedy.”

“
I'm coming!
” screamed Maylee, with all the pain of injustice and loss.

“He simply shook his head, tears in his eyes,” I said.

“Her anger at the world turned to rage.”

“She struck out at him,” I said, but did not see Maylee's fist coursing through the air. Her punch landed square on the right side of my mouth. I staggered back and then fell to my knees. My lip was split and I could taste blood. I spit, and a tooth came with it out onto the wooden floor. “He betrayed her,” I said, my hand covering my mouth.

Maylee bent over and lifted the tooth, her eyes widening as if it glinted like a diamond. She looked up at me. “Because he loved her,” she said.

With this, the spell instantly lifted, more rapidly than a curtain closing, with the speed of falling rain, and, without conversation, we both staggered to the bed and fell into a bottomless sleep.

In the morning, I woke to find her gone, but her scent remained upon the pillow. What I remembered most clearly from the bizarre play we had enacted the previous day was that when she had struck me, in the moment or two when I thought I might pass out, I had realized I must leave the district.

That afternoon, after hurriedly packing and leaving much behind, I left the Bolukuchet and traveled for many days back to the city. At first the change was frightening, and I moved through the days like a somnambulist directed by commands that came from my dreams. Somehow I managed to make all the right moves, and it was not long before a memory of my life prior to the Bolukuchet returned to me and I began to feel at home in my new surroundings.

As soon as I had established myself, gotten a place and employment, I wrote to Maylee, care of Mother Carushe, to see if I could persuade her to join me. Oddly enough, all of my letters, more than three dozen, returned unopened with an explanation that the address could not be located. I sent another batch to Munchter's café, to Meager's, and the results were precisely the same.

In fact, no matter whom I asked or what inquiries I made at libraries or post offices, no one had ever heard of the Bolukuchet. Although my new life was fast paced and the basic excitement and wonder of mere existence had mysteriously returned to me, I missed my old friends and the tired, decrepit district. Luckily I had taken with me the pouch of foxglove tea. At first I imbibed it to try to discover how exactly Zel Strellop had come by Jupiter's skull, but that part of the story was not to be mine. I did, though, revisit my memories of nights at Munchter's, the fireflies in the forest across the canal, Meager showing me the finest prism he had ever created and the blizzard of color with which it filled the room, the soulful tunes of Bill Hokel's mouth organ, et cetera. When these visions came to me, I made them into poems. Years passed and I had enough to collect into a book, which was miraculously published. Its title—
Jupiter's Skull
.

The book won great renown, and I was asked to give readings at colleges and libraries and coffee shops. When I was interviewed, the question most often asked was, “How did you dream up a place like the Bolukuchet?” I would answer every time that I had lived there, which would cause the interviewer to smirk or smile as if we were complicit in the lie I was telling.

Many years later, on a rainy night, I gave a reading at a local bookstore. Afterward, as was my practice, I sat at a table and, one by one, people who'd purchased a copy of my book would come forward and I would sign it and chat with them briefly. At the end of a modest line, a woman stepped forward. Before I looked up to take in her face, she said to me, “I bet you could use a Lime Plunge right now.”

She had my attention instantly. She was rather plain but pleasant looking in her appearance: brown hair, medium build, late middle age, dressed in a yellow raincoat. “Last week I was in Munchter's,” she said.

“Finally,” I said, “someone who's been to the district.”

“I know,” she told me, “out here it's as if it never existed.”

She told me that Munchter and Meager and the rest of the old crew were still fine, and that she had read my book and I had captured them perfectly.

“Did you know a young woman, Maylee?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, not so young, really. She owned a little shop, Thanatos, over near the canal. Very long, gray hair, wrapped twice around her neck? I went there often and had tea with her. We rarely used her first name, though. She preferred Mrs. Strellop. I'm sorry to tell you that she passed away only a few days before I left.”

“By her own hand?” I asked.

“Why, yes. I wasn't going to say, but I believe it was cyanide.”

“And the skull?”

“A woman's skull? Zel, was the name she had for it. Apparently there was an entire story associated with the thing.”

“I see,” I said.

Before this woman left, she shook my hand, and when she smiled, I noticed the gap from a missing tooth. “Well,” she said, “it's good to be back from the district.” Then she left the store, and I watched through the window as she disappeared into the rain.

Jupiter's Skull

Story Notes

The writer and anthologist Al Sarrantonio is one of the first people I met when I entered the speculative fiction trade back in 1997. We've kept in touch and remained friends through the years. One of the first things Al told me was, “When you're a writer, your neighbors are going to think you're a weirdo. There's two ways to avoid that. Either join a local bowling league or every time you have a book come out, walk up to each of their doors, knock, and hand them a copy of the book. After a while you just become the poor schmuck who writes the books and everything will be fine.” If you live in suburbia like I do, it's good advice. So, when Al was doing his anthology
Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy,
he asked me for a story, and I was happy to comply. This piece took a long time gestating, and when it finally began to show itself, I had no idea where it was going. This was one of those stories where the drama in my mind was only ever about a sentence or two ahead of my typing fingers. I love working that way, and my own method of invention mirrored the process that the narrator and Maylee go through in creating their own story
.

A Night in the Tropics

The first bar I ever went to was The Tropics. It was, and still is, situated between the grocery store and the bank along Higbee Lane in West Islip. I was around five or six, and my old man would take me with him when he went there to watch the Giants games on Sunday afternoons. While the men were all at the bar, drinking, talking, giving Y. A. Tittle a piece of their minds, I'd roll the balls on the pool table or sit in one of the booths in the back and color. The jukebox always seemed to be playing “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin, while I searched for figures, the way people do with clouds, in the swirling cigar and cigarette smoke. I didn't go there for the hard-boiled eggs the bartender proffered after making them vanish and pulling them out of my ear, or for the time spent sitting on my father's lap at the bar, sipping a ginger ale with a cherry in it, although both were welcome. The glowing, bubbling beer signs were fascinating, the foul language was its own cool music, but the thing that drew me to The Tropics was a thirty-two-foot vision of paradise.

Along the south wall of the place, stretching from the front door back to the entrance of the bathrooms was a continuous mural of a tropical beach. There were palm trees with coconuts and stretches of pale sand sloping down to a shoreline where the serene sea rolled in lazy wavelets. The sky was robin's egg blue, the ocean, six different shades of aquamarine. All down the beach, here and there, frozen forever in different poses, were island ladies wearing grass skirts but otherwise naked save for the flowers in their hair. Their smooth brown skin, their breasts, their smiles were ever inviting. At the center of the painting, off at a distance on the horizon, was depicted an ocean liner with a central funnel issuing a smudgy trail of smoke. Between that ship and the shore, there bobbed a little rowboat with one man at the oars.

I was entranced by that painting and could sit and look at it for long stretches at a time. I'd inspected every inch of it, noticing the bend of the palm leaves, the sweep of the women's hair, the curling edges of the grass skirts, which direction the breeze was blowing and at what rate. I could almost feel it against my face. The cool clear water, the warmth of the island light, lulled me into a trance. I noticed the tiny crabs, shells, starfish on the beach; the monkey peering out from within the fronds of a palm. The most curious item, though, back in the shadows of the bar, just before paradise came to an end by the bathroom door, was a hand, pushing aside the wide leaf of some plant as if it were
you
standing at the edge of the jungle, spying on that man in the rowboat.

Eventually, as time went on and life grew more chaotic, my father stopped going to The Tropics on Sundays. Supporting our family overtook the importance of the Giants, and until my mother passed away only a few years ago, he worked six days a week. When my own bar years began, I never went there as it was considered an old man's bar, but the memory of that mural stayed with me through the passing seasons. At different times in my life when things got hectic, its placid beauty would come back to me, and I'd contemplate living in paradise.

A couple of months ago, I was in West Islip visiting my father, who still lives, alone now, in the same house I grew up in. After dinner we sat in the living room and talked about the old times and what had changed in town since I'd been there last. Eventually, he dozed off in his recliner, and I sat across from him contemplating his life. He seemed perfectly content, but all I could think about were those many years of hard work drawing to a close in an empty house, in a neighborhood where he knew no one. I found the prospect depressing, so as a means of trying to disperse it I decided to go out for a walk. It was a quarter after ten on a weeknight, and the town was very quiet. I traveled up onto Higbee Lane and turned down toward Montauk. As I passed The Tropics, I noticed the door was open and the old beer sign in the window was bubbling. No lie, the jukebox was softly playing Bobby Darin. Through the window I could see that the year-round Christmas lights bordering the mirror behind the bar were lit. On a whim, I decided to go in and have a few, hoping that in the decades since I'd last been in there no one had painted over the mural.

There was only one patron, a guy sitting at the bar, who was so wrinkled he looked like just a bag of skin with a wig, wearing shoes, pants, and a cardigan. He had his eyes closed, but he nodded every now and then to the bartender, who towered over him, a huge, bloated hulk of a man in a T-shirt that only made it a little past the crest of his gut. The bartender was talking almost in whispers, smoking a cigarette. He looked up when I came in, waved, and asked me what I wanted. I ordered a VO and water. When he set my drink down on a coaster in front of me, he said, “Play much hoop lately?” and smirked. I'm no paragon of physical fitness, myself, these days, so I laughed. I took it as a joke on all three of us beat-up castaways in The Tropics. After paying, I chose a table where I could get a good look at the south wall without rudely turning my back on my bar mates.