Dairy Queen Days

by Robert Inman

  “It’s not company.” She held her sketch pad tightly under her arm. She was wearing perfume again.

  “What is it?”

  She ignored the question. “How’s your sunburn?”

  “Better. But don’t hold on too tight. Want me to hold your pad?”

  “Of course not.” She struggled onto the seat behind him, thrusting the crutches under his arms and across the handlebars. Then the pad slipped from her grasp, fell onto the ground next to the motorcycle and flopped open. Trout stared, eyes widening. “Whoooo,” he said softly. A nude woman. High, arching breasts, narrow waist, slim thighs and legs, all soft lines and curves in thick pencil strokes. Trout felt himself stir.

  “Give me that!” she barked.

  He kept staring. “You’re pretty good.”

  She rapped him sharply in the side with one of her crutches.

  “Ow!”

  “Stop looking. Pick it up and give it to me. Right now!” She rapped him again, harder this time.

  “Awright! Damn!” He reached over, straining to keep the motorcycle balanced, picked up the sketch pad by its spine, letting it close. She snatched it out of his hand. He twisted on the seat and looked back at her. Her face was beet-red. “What…”

  “None of your goddamn business!”

  And it wasn’t, he kept telling himself all the way to the Dairy Queen. But he couldn’t help thinking about it. The nude woman hiding in the thick pages of the sketch pad had Keats’ face. But the body was that of a woman who stood upright, proud and unfettered. A woman who had no need of crutches.

  They said hardly a word all morning. Herschel showed him how to make a milk shake and a banana split and a Blizzard, how much chili to put on a foot-long hot dog, while Keats tended the window and kept her distance, closed-off and sullen. Then it was noon and the rush began and it took all three of them to keep up with the crowd. He tried to help, but he was slow. She was impatient, snatching things away from him when he was half-finished, fixing them herself. His irritation grew. Finally, she reached for a milk shake he was holding under the whirring blade of the stirrer.

  “Give me that!” she barked.

  “I can do it myself,” he shot back.

  “People don’t have all day waiting for you to fumble around!” She reached for it again and he jerked it away from her, slopping some of it on the floor. “You’re making a mess!” she cried. “Get out of the way!”

  “Hey!” Herschel yelled. “Cut it out! You wanna fight, take it outside. Draw a crowd and sell popcorn.”

  “He’s…” Keats started, but the look on Herschel’s face cut her off.

  She turned with a huff back to the counter, slid open a window with a jerk. Joe Pike Moseley peered in, taking stock. “Morning. Y’all okay in there?”

  “It’s Amateur Hour,” Keats snapped.

  “Keats!” Herschel warned.

  “Awright. Awright.”

  Herschel looked over at Trout. “You gonna fix the milk shake or not?”

  “It’s fixed,” Trout said, seething, trying to keep his voice under control. He felt an urge to kick one of Keats’ crutches out from under her. She was maddening. She made him feel like a kid with a wet diaper.

  “Well, give it here,” Herschel said.

  Trout held out the milk shake. “Put a cover on it.” Trout fitted a plastic cover over the shake, held it out again. “Straw and napkin,” Herschel said. Herschel took the shake, straw and napkin, passed it through the window to a woman who was waiting.

  “Wanna wait on your daddy?” he asked Trout.

  J oe Pike had on a fresh white shirt. He smelled like a bath. And he was wearing the amoeba tie again. Trout looked past him into the parking lot. Grace Vredemeyer was sitting in the front seat of Joe Pike’s car. She waved to Trout. She, too looked fresh from a bath, wearing another of her floral print summer dresses with a lot of neck and shoulder showing. “Visiting the sick and shut-in?” Trout asked.

  Joe Pike glanced back at Grace in the car. “Grace sings to ‘em, I bring glad tidings.” Grace waved to Joe Pike.

  “Daddy…”

  Joe Pike turned back to him. “Uh-huh.”

  Don’t you see… But he didn’t, that was obvious. Finally Trout asked, “You want to order?”

  “Two foot-longs, large order of fries, a chocolate shake and a vanilla shake.”

  “What happened to salad?”

  “Tonight,” Joe Pike answered. “You can’t visit the sick and shut-in on rabbit food.”

  “Glad tidings.”

  “Yea, verily.”

  Trout got up the order himself, took his time about it while several other customers came and went. He put everything in a cardboard carrier and delivered it to the window. Joe Pike was beginning to wilt in the heat. He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. The collar of his shirt sagged. Out in the car, Grace Vredemeyer still looked perky. But she had rolled down both front windows. Trout opened the window, pushed the items through. “Four eighty-nine,” he said.

  Joe Pike fished in his pocket and pulled out a five. Trout handed it to Herschel, who rang up the cash register. “We’re going to Augusta,” Joe Pike said. “Grace’s second cousin had open heart surgery yesterday.” Trout imagined Grace bursting into song in intensive care. HEADLINE: MAN DIES WITH GRACE.

  “Do you accept tips?” Joe Pike asked.

  “No sir,” he said as he handed over the change.

  “See you for supper.”

  Keats snorted loudly as Trout closed the window. “Maybe he oughta put in tomorrow’s order today. So you’ll have it on time.”

  She glared at him, but Trout didn’t say anything and she turned back to the grill where she was tending several sizzling hamburger patties. He looked at Herschel, who shook his head. Cool it. Trout took a deep breath and nodded. And he thought longingly of the hardware store.

  The lunch crowd had barely cleared out when black clouds began to gather and the wind picked up, skittering bits of trash and dust across the parking lot. Herschel turned on the radio -- the station over in Thomson -- listening for a tornado warning. But it was just a nasty line of thunderstorms, the announcer said, barreling through on its way from Atlanta toward the coast. Marching to the sea like Sherman, the guy on the radio said. War is hell, but y’all just keep listening to ol’ Dan here ’cause we’ve got more Country Memories and a special on fryers at the Dixie Vittles Supermarket.

  Herschel stood next to Trout at the counter, peering out at the clouds. They were thickening fast -- big, black nasty-looking things, boiling over the horizon from the west. A big truck pulling a flatbed trailer eased by on the road, slowing for the interstate ramp. A blue tarpaulin covered the cargo and a loose corner of the tarp was flapping in the wind. “War,” Herschel snorted. “Shit. What does that doofus know about war?”

  “Maybe he was in Vietnam,” Trout said.

  “Naw. I know him. He’s been over here trying to sell me some advertising.”

  “Did you buy any?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t advertise a Dairy Queen. It’s just here. You either want it or you don’t.”

  Trout thought about that. Maybe Joe Pike was close to the truth after all. “My daddy says Dairy Queen is a religious experience.”

  Herschel shrugged. “Well, I don’t know anything about that. I ain’t religious anyhow.”

  “What if you advertised and business got better?”

  “What am I gonna do with it? Build another Dairy Queen next door? Then I got two of everything.”

  “You could add a drive-in window,” Keats said. She was sitting on a stool over to the side, crutches propped against the wall, working away on her sketch pad. She didn’t look up.

  “I already got a drive-in window,” Herschel said. “Folks drive in, come up to the window.”

  “Not when it rains, they don’t,” Keats said. “If you had a real drive-in window with a cover over it, they could order
from the car and get what they want without getting wet.”

  “Rain don’t last forever,” Herschel said. “People oughta stay home when it’s raining. Only doofuses get out in the rain.”

  “Like the Army,” Keats said.

  “Oh, hell yes. That’s why I became a cook. It don’t rain in a mess hall.”

  Keats sketched away, her hand making broad strokes on the pad. She glanced up, caught Trout watching her. He raised his eyebrows, questioning. Another nude? Keats stuck out her tongue at him, but there wasn’t any malice in it. God, he thought, she can turn it on and off. She could drive you plain crazy if you let her. Keats went back to her drawing. “Is the Army a bunch of doofuses?” she asked Herschel.

  “Only the majors.”

  “Why majors?” Trout asked.

  Herschel smirked. “It’s part of the job description. Enlisted men do most of the work in the Army. Lieutenants and captains do a little, not much. Colonels and generals give the orders. And majors just, well…”

  “Doofus,” Trout offered.

  “Exactly.” He waved at the gathering storm. “Major sits around with his thumb up his butt until it rains. Then he says, ‘Hey, it’s raining! Let’s get all the troops out and go for a hike, whattaya say!’ Poor dumb grunts are slogging through the mud in full field pack, rain dripping down the backs of their ponchos. And where’s the major?”

  “Taking a nap.” Trout offered, getting into the spirit of it.

  “Going to the Dairy Queen,” Keats one-upped him.

  Herschel laughed, a kind of cackling explosion. It was infectious -- laughing at laughter -- and Trout and Keats joined in. Laughter bounced off the chrome and formica like shards of light and settled about them, keeping the weather at bay. On the radio, ‘Ol Dan was playing Country Memories and selling fryers. The wind whistled at the eaves of the building. An overhead fluorescent fixture hummed contentedly. Trout felt a rush of relief. It had been a tense morning -- Joe Pike on the bulldozer, Uncle Cicero’s disappointment, Aunt Alma’s angry disgust, Keats’ snarling impatience. He felt the hard knot in his stomach, the tightness around his shoulder blades, unwind. Then he thought that it had been a good while since he had laughed at anything much, a good long while since he had indulged in lazy, go-nowhere talk that made you feel like a cat stretching into sleep. The Dairy Queen, even with maddeningly unpredictable Keats sitting over in the corner stroking her sketch pad, suddenly felt almost safe. A haven where laughter was possible. No theological angst, no industrial crisis, no grand plans for progress. A Dairy Queen should be a place that made people happy, if only just for the few moments that a banana split lasted. He could stay here, he thought. Maybe a cot in the back. He wasn’t hard to please.

  “Well,” Herschel said. “I gotta go to the bank. Might as well do it while there ain’t no customers.”

  Keats looked up. “You’ll get wet. Doesn’t that make you a doofus?”

  Herschel took off his cap and apron, opened the cash register and took a vinyl bank bag out of the cash drawer. “Nope,” he grinned. “They got a drive-in window at the bank.” He started toward the back door, then stopped and turned back to them. “I don’t know what kind of burr you two have got under your saddles, but I want you to work it out while I’m gone. When I get back here, I wanna see smilin’ faces. Happy campers. Capiche?”

  “Okay,” Trout said.

  Herschel looked over at Keats. She was deep into the sketch pad. Scratch-scratch. “Keats…” She waved one hand, kept working with the other. Herschel turned back to Trout. “There’s a gun in the drawer under the cash register. If she doesn’t get her fanny off her shoulder, shoot her.”

  The storm broke just as Herschel pulled out of the parking lot in his panel truck. One moment it was just dark clouds and skittering dust, and then there was a terrible crack of thunder and the rain exploded -- sweeping up in a shimmering wall from the interstate, fierce and wind-driven, splattering the pavement like machinegun fire, whipping under the overhang out front, spraying the plate glass window. On the radio, ‘Ol Dan was playing Johnny Cash: “Five Feet High and Rising.” We better get out in our leaky old boat. It’s the only thing we got left that’ll float…

  Trout leaned across the counter and stared out. The rain was so thick now you could hardly see the road. Then there was a brilliant flash of lightning and a thunderbolt so close he could feel the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He jumped, then backed away from the counter, bumped into the ice cream machine and felt the cold touch of chrome on his arm, eased away from that. He looked over at Keats. She was hunkered over the sketch pad, pencil poised in mid-air, looking at him. No, not really at him, the way you would look at a person’s face if you wanted to make a connection. Her gaze was fixed on some point near his waistline, maybe a bit below. Her eyes were squinched in concentration and she seemed to be totally oblivious to the storm raging outside or his nervous dancing about. Then all of a sudden she seemed to see him, standing there gawking at her. And she blushed furiously, her face turning the color of a ripe watermelon. She turned away with a jerk, looked out the window.

  He realized all of a sudden that she did this a lot -- looking at him when she didn’t think he saw, head cocked to the side, eyes lingering on odd places. She was…she was…studying him. No. More than that. Undressing him. Good God! He felt incredibly vulnerable, as if he had stumbled naked onto a stage, blinded by footlights and hearing a sudden murmur of people out beyond in the darkness. Pointing. Laughing. Blood rushed to his face and neck, pounded in his ears, swelled in his groin. He fought the urge to double over, covering himself.

  The wind howled, the rain pounded the roof, the air exploded with one peal of thunder after another. There was a great yawning space between them there in the flourescent-lit sanctuary of the Dairy Queen. And this sudden, unnerving knowledge that froze him in place and made escape impossible.

  He took a deep breath. “If you’re gonna draw pictures of me, the least you could do is let me see.”

  “They’re not…they’re not you,” she stammered. He could see that she was rattled. Caught red-handed, like some Peeping Tom looking in his bedroom window. “You saw…”

  “Just one,” he said. His voice was a hoarse croak. “It was…”

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s lots of stuff in there. You’re messing with that thing all the time. Looking at me. Like I’m on display or something.” He took a step toward her, holding out his hand.

  “No!” she cried, clutching the sketchbook to her. “I told you, you’re NOT IN THERE!”

  “Then why do you keep looking at me like that?”

  There was a long, painful silence. She stared at the floor, wrapped around the sketchbook. Then she looked up at him. “I can’t do men.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what men look like.”

  He laughed. “What the heck, Keats. Half the people in the world are men.”

  “I mean…” she shrugged, “without any clothes on.”

  He stared at her. “What are you, some kind of nut?”

  “No. I’m an artist.”

  “Naked men?”

  “No. I just told you, I can’t do men. I can’t get it right.” She rushed on in a torrent of words. “I know what a woman looks like. I can stand in front of a mirror and, ah, you know. See everything. The…” she caressed the air, making a curve with her hand, “…way the lines go and all. But I’ve never seen a man. Without his clothes on.”

  “For God’s sake, go to the library. They got pictures of statues.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  Trout held his breath, then let it out with a whoosh. “Sheeez.” He slumped down on a stool, looking at her huddled over there in the corner. She looked very small, not very dangerous now. He could imagine how it must be with her. She had some talent. She wanted to be an artist, maybe go off to school and study. But there were too many reasons why she never would. Never could. It just wouldn’t eve
r happen because there was just too much she couldn’t escape. One part of him wanted to feel sorry for her. But another part was angry and indignant because of her foul attitude in general and what she was doing to him in particular. So she hunkered over there in the corner, looking a little pathetic and -- he knew -- hating that because she hated being thought of as pathetic.

  Trout felt, for the very first time with her, that he had the upper hand. It gave him a sense of power, a feeling of being in control. And he hadn’t felt that way in a good while. About anything. It was like a narcotic. “You give me the creeps.”

  “I’m just trying to imagine…”

  “It’s sick.”

  “No it’s not! There’s nothing sick about the human body.”

  “It’s sick when you sneak around trying to undress people who don’t want to be undressed.”

  “Look,” she protested, holding up the sketch book. “this isn’t some filthy little girlie magazine like you guys hide under the mattress. It’s art. This isn’t the Dark Ages, for God’s sake. And besides, I’m not sneaking.”

  “It’s like you’re stealing something from me. It’s like…like…rape.”

  “Oh come off it, Trout,” she said, her voice thick with disgust. “Get a life, huh? So, I imagine what you look like with your clothes off. Big deal!”

  And suddenly she was in charge again, putting him on the defensive, making him feel like a naughty puppy. But she wasn’t finished. “You could…” she paused for a moment and a smile flickered at the edges of her mouth, “…you could pose for me.”

  “You mean…”

  “Sure. Take all the mystery out of it.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said softly. “You are truly screwy.” This was, he thought, about the weirdest thing he had heard in a long string of weirdness. Not the idea of being naked with a girl. He had almost been back in Ohatchee with Cynthia Stuckey. But sitting there naked while she drew a picture of you? And that’s all? That was entirely different. Interesting, maybe even more than that. But definitely different. It made him squirm with heat and strangeness, all at once. He had no idea how to proceed from here.

  And then, oddly, rescue came from the most unexpected source.