Dairy Queen Days

by Robert Inman

  “I figured…well, Aunt Alma…”

  “Let me tell you about Cicero.” Phinizy fished in the crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes on the table, lit another cigarette and took a drag. “He was a military policeman in the Army. Went to Korea, got shot, won some medals. Then came back here and married Alma.” A smile played across Phinizy’s face. “They eloped.”

  “You mean…” Trout’s imagination conjured up a picture of Cicero climbing a ladder to Alma’s second-story bedroom window, spiriting her away. No. Cicero might be the kind of person who would climb up a ladder, but Alma was not the kind who would climb down one. Still, the thought of Cicero and Alma running off to get married…

  “Cicero came to the house and got her while Leland was at the mill one day. They stopped in Augusta and got a Baptist preacher to perform the vows, then called from Savannah that night to say they had gotten married.”

  “What did Grandaddy Leland do?” Trout asked.

  “Threw a fit. I think it was the thought of the marriage being performed by a Baptist that made him the maddest.”

  “What did he do when they came home?”

  “He ranted and raved for awhile. Made life miserable for Cicero. The boy really put up with a lot. But then Alma went to Leland and told him if he didn’t get his fanny off his shoulder, she and Cicero were going to leave. It scared the hell out of Leland. Joe Pike had already high-tailed it off to Texas to play football, and Leland could stand just so much orneriness from his young’uns. So he set Cicero up in the hardware business.”

  “And the police chief job?”

  Phinizy smiled again, savoring a thought. “Cicero did that on his own. The old chief, Max Cotter, fell dead as a wedge from a heart attack right in the middle of a town council meeting one night. Cicero was there, and he jumped up and said, ‘I’ll take it.’ So with Max lying there bug-eyed on the floor, they made Cicero police chief. Nobody liked Max anyway.”

  “Gee…” Trout said.

  “Now, about the hardware store. How do you think Cicero’s doing?”

  Trout shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s got all these plans. Knocking out walls, clearing the lot and stuff.”

  “Uh-huh. And how do you think he’s gonna pay for Cicero’s Do-It-All?”

  “Aunt Alma?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He acts kinda nervous about it. I don’t think he told her what he was gonna do.”

  Phinizy nodded thoughtfully. “Things are not always as they seem,” he said after a moment.

  “What do you mean?” Trout asked.

  Phinizy held up the book he had been reading. “Hugo Black.”

  “What?”

  “You know who he was?”

  “No sir.”

  “United States Senator from Alabama, elected with the help of the Ku Klux Klan. Then Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court. He became a champion of individual rights. I’ll bet those Kluxers in Alabama thought he’d sold out on them. But old Hugo was just biding his time. He needed the Klan to get to the Senate, but when he got to the Court, he cut loose.”

  Trout stared at him. So?

  “You see where I’m headed?” Phinizy asked. His voice was patient, like a teacher with a dull student.

  “Not exactly,” Trout confessed.

  “Things are not…” he waited for Trout to finish.

  Trout felt blank, his mind sucked dry by the heat. He tried to concentrate. Then the light came on. “…always as they seem.”

  “Bingo,” Phinizy said. “Now, extrapolate.”

  “What?”

  “Hugo Black,” he held up the book. “Cicero,” he pointed in the general direction of the hardware store.

  Trout considered. “Is Cicero going to cut loose?”

  “I believe that is exactly what he is doing.”

  “Can he? On his own?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Profit and progress,” Trout repeated Cicero’s mantra.

  Phinizy nodded.

  “He doesn’t need Aunt Alma’s money?” Trout asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why is he so nervous about her?”

  “Because he’s in love with her.”

  It was an incredible thought and it did a little ricochet number on the inside of his head. Aunt Alma was…Aunt Alma. It was as difficult to think of her as a, well, a love object, as it was to imagine her climbing down a ladder to elope. Things are not always as they seem. Then another thought that brought a despairing thought: how do you ever know what is real? It was too much. He stood, propelled upward by confusion.

  “You look a bit peaked,” Phinizy observed drily.

  “I’m having a brain fart,” Trout said. “I’ve got to go.”

  He was almost out the door when Phinizy stopped him. “Trout…” Trout turned back. Phinizy was lighting another cigarette. He took a short puff, spat the smoke impatiently. “Did you ever think about talking to your mother about any of this…this stuff that’s eating at you?”

  Trout stared at him, dumbfounded. “Mother?”

  Phinizy looked at him for a long moment, expressionless, then picked up his book and resumed his reading.

  * * * * *

  Trout lay awake for a long time, thinking about all that had transpired in the brief space of a day, piling in on top of a week, a month, a year when things seemed to happen so fast that there wasn’t time to keep up, much less make sense.

  The thing was, people kept surprising him.

  He had thought at the beginning that it would be enough to get some answers about his mother and father, and if he at least understood what had happened with them, he could make things right again. But then all these other people came crowding in, loud and insistent, muddling the picture. Instead of just dealing with Joe Pike and Irene, there was this whole new cast of characters he had never considered and even the ghosts of some who weren’t around anymore. All of them, connected in ways he hadn’t fathomed. And constantly revealing new quirks and secrets. Moving targets in a funhouse shooting gallery, changing shapes and colors before his eyes.

  Aunt Alma. Eloping, for God’s sake. With Uncle Cicero. For one thing, he couldn’t imagine straight-laced Alma Moseley being that passionate about anyone. Uncle Cicero was a truly nice guy, but not the kind, he thought, that a woman would lose her head over, even years before when she was young and perhaps foolish. But she had. She had had the hots for Cicero, who had wooed her and won and had spirited her away from right under Leland Moseley’s nose. It cast both of them in an entirely new light – especially Aunt Alma. She might hold forth at length on “remembering who you are” and all that stuff, but somewhere deep in her soul there was a spark of rebellion, or had been for at least one incredibly brazen moment.

  It also made Trout smile to imagine Grandaddy Leland having a fit. He would have given a princely sum to have seen it.

  Leland had died when Trout was six years old, and Trout’s memory was of a tall, spare man with thinning gray hair and absolutely no sense of humor who always wore a vested suit, even when he played horseshoes.

  Trout remembered a long-ago summer afternoon, he and Eugene pitching shoes with Leland at the horseshoe pit Leland had set up. Two metal stakes, each surrounded by a broad bed of sand carved from the neatly-trimmed grass of the back yard. Eugene was several years older than Trout, but still a young boy, barely able to toss the heavy iron shoe from one metal stake to another. Trout couldn’t reach the other one at all. Eugene protested: the boys should be allowed to move closer than Leland. But Leland would have none of it. Trout could remember him, all gray pinstriped and vested, peering down from great height through his wire-framed glasses, saying, “That’s the rule. Play by the rules or don’t play.”

  So Eugene, who had a streak of rebellion himself, put down his horseshoe and went in the house. Leland never gave him a look. He and Trout played horsehoes by Leland’s rule – Leland flinging the metal shoe with practiced ease, making several ringers; Trout, th
rowing with all his might but barely able to get his own shoe halfway to the stake. It wasn’t much fun, but Trout was not the rebellious type.

  After awhile the back door opened and Aunt Alma shooed a pouting Eugene off the back porch and down the steps. “Eugene wants to play,” Alma said to Leland.

  “No I don’t,” Eugene said. “I don’t want to play. Mama’s making me play.”

  “He’ll have to play by the rules,” Leland said.

  “Of course,” Alma said.

  And Eugene played. His defiance, at that point, had limits.

  That early impression, and all Trout had heard since, added up to this: Leland Moseley was a tight-ass. He had, from all accounts, a rather severe notion of How Things Ought To Be and what it meant to be a Moseley in Moseley. But his daughter had chosen a man who was about as un-Moseley as you could get, and worse than that, run off with him. It was a kind of blasphemy. Trout wondered if it had contributed to Leland’s demise. And if it had, did it haunt Aunt Alma? Would that explain a lot?

  Aunt Alma was enigma enough. But there was also Cicero, still full of surprises. A successful and savvy merchant with the vision to imagine such a thing as Cicero’s Do-It-All rising from the town’s rubble. Moseley, Georgia was dead for all intents and purposes, as dead as the poor soul whose bones had rested for so long beneath the weed-grown lot where the furniture store had once stood. But Cicero had, entirely on his own, decided to dig it all up and strike out boldly, much the same way he had talked Alma into eloping, and later, seized upon the police chief’s job. Cicero was, more than Trout had ever imagined, very much his own man. That was a very big thing. And more than that, he was -- if you could believe Phinizy – still very much in love with Alma. It was bound to be a perilous balancing act for Cicero -- being his own man and yet loving Aunt Alma, who seemed so desperately fierce in molding people and things to her expectations. How did Cicero manage it?

  But at the very bottom, there was the basic question: what did all this mean to sixteen-year-old Trout Moseley, who was partly the product (through genetics or influence) of all these people with their stubborness and defiance and loyalties and visions, their rigidity and angst and despair. Things were indeed not as they seemed. There were all sorts of possibilities where none had seemed to exist. Other people took control of their own lives and saved their own asses, as Phinizy said he must do. And there appeared to be all sorts of ways of doing it. What was his?

  Funny thing, the one person among the bunch he seemed to understand least was his mother. Fruit of her womb, yet stranger to the secrets of her mind. And odd that Phinizy had invoked her name this very evening in the face of Trout’s puzzlement. Did you ever think of talking to your mother? What kind of cockeyed comment was that? Heck, they woudn’t even let him close to his mother. She could be a hostage of terrorists, for all the good it was doing Trout Moseley.

  Trout sighed wearily. For the moment, it was too much. He was very tired -- from all this thinking, and from the long, eventful day. So he raised up and fluffed the pillow under his head and settled back into it and began to will himself to stop thinking and go to sleep.

  He had just about drifted off when he heard Joe Pike prowling the house. He had on his cowboy boots. Clump. Clump. Out of his room, down the hall and into the kitchen. It was a noisy house, plaster walls and ceiling and hardwood floors. You could hear everything, especially if you were trying to go to sleep. After a moment, the refrigerator door slammed. Clump. Clump. Joe Pike strode back up the hall to the opposite end of the house, into the living room. The sofa creaked. Trout heard the tinkle of silverware against ceramic. Joe Pike was eating ice cream. A huge mound of vanilla, he imagined (vanilla was all they had in the fridge and Joe Pike never ate a small portion of ice cream) topped with Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup. After awhile, the sofa creaked again. Clump. Clump. Back down the hall to the kitchen. Water running in the sink, rinsing out the ice cream bowl. Had he put the ice cream back in the freezer? He was as likely to leave it out as not. They lost a lot of ice cream that way. Should Trout get up and check? He threw back the sheet, considered, re-covered himself. To hell with it. A grown man who couldn’t remember to put the ice cream back in the freezer… Clump. Clump. Back to Joe Pike’s room. The door closed. The bed creaked. Did he still have on his cowboy boots? Then the radio, tuned as always to the Oldies station in Atlanta. The Platters: Yoo-hoo-hoo’ve got the magic touch… Trout thought of Joe Pike and Irene dancing in the kitchen on some distant evening when the Platters weren’t quite as oldie as they were now. Perhaps Joe Pike thought of it too. He switched off the radio. A long silence. And then the bed creaked again. Clump. Clump. The door opened, Joe Pike walked back down the hall to the kitchen. But this time he didn’t stop. The back door slammed. Trout waited, anticipating the rumble of the motorcycle’s engine. Would Joe Pike remember to check the gas tank? There hadn’t been much left in it when Trout arrived home in the early evening. He meant to gas up in the morning. If Joe Pike went out riding tonight, he would likely run out of gas and have to call Trout to come get him. Trout reached for the bed sheet again. But there was no motorcycle sound. Perhaps Joe Pike had gone for a walk. Where would he walk to this time of night? Oh, shit.

  Trout waited for a long time, imagining the worst. He waited for perhaps fifteen minutes. Long enough, he thought. Then he got up, padded to the kitchen. The ice cream container was on the counter, beginning to ooze around the bottom, a puddle of melted vanilla spreading across the formica. Trout wiped off the bottom of the box with a dishrag and put it back in the freezer. Then he picked up the telephone and dialed. She answered on the third ring, and she didn’t sound like someone who had been asleep.

  “Leave my daddy alone,” Trout said. And he hung up.

  Trout didn’t sleep. He lay staring at the ceiling for another hour or so until he heard the back door open and Joe Pike came in. Clump. Clump. The door to Trout’s room swung open, light spilled in. Joe Pike stood there, massive, filling the doorway. His face was shaded by the hall light behind him, but Trout could tell that Joe Pike was powerfully agitated. He seemed to vibrate. Trout felt a sudden rush of dread. HEADLINE: FATHER BEHEADS SON, BLAMES PHONE CALL.

  “Think about the second coming,” Joe Pike said, his voice a couple of octaves higher than normal.

  Trout’s mouth dropped open. He had no idea what to think about the second coming. So instead he asked, “Where have you been?”

  “Over at the church,” Joe Pike answered.

  Trout turned on his bedside lamp. Even in its weak light, Joe Pike looked flushed and fevered. His hands gripped the door frame. Samson holding up the pillars of the temple to keep it from crashing on his head. “What about the second coming?” Trout asked, thinking that at least something needed to be asked.

  “Imagine this,” Joe Pike said, the words rushing out. “Imagine that someday we discover something really big out there.” He swept one hand toward the heavens. “Some concept so complex and yet so pure and simple that it explains everything. What’s smaller than small, what’s beyond beyond. What if we wretched little human beings with our muddled minds and corrupted spirits suddenly stumble onto the big answer. And at that very instant of discovery God says, ‘Okay, that’s what I was was waiting for. Curtain down. Come on home.’ And that’s the second coming. Not God coming to us, but us coming to God.”

  Trout felt a rush of something near panic. The second coming? It was something Joe Pike needed to talk to the Bishop about. Trout threw back the sheet and swung his legs over the side of the bed, then realized as his feet hit the floor that he really did, for a moment there, intend to call the Bishop. Mister Bishop, sir, this is Trout Moseley. Could you hop in the car and run over and talk to my daddy about the second coming? I’ll try to keep him calm until you get here. But he didn’t stand up, just sat there on the side of the bed staring at Joe Pike, whose forehead was dotted with sweat, who made hissing sounds through his clenched teeth. No, the Bishop probably shouldn’t see this after all.


  Joe Pike released the door frame and took a big step into the room. The floor shook a bit under his weight. “Don’t you see how logical it is?” he demanded. He was almost shouting now. His voice, his presence filled the room, squeezing all the air out, making it hard to breathe. “What separates us from the rest of creation?” He rapped on his skull again. “Our minds! We can think! We can imagine! So doesn’t it stand to reason that we can figure out the secret of creation and what the dickens we’re all doing here?”

  “I suppose,” Trout said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Yea, verily!” Joe Pike exploded. And then all the air seemed to suddenly go out of him with a whoosh. His arms fell to his sides, his shoulders slumped. He stared at the floor. “I’m failing,” he said. He waved a hand weakly in the direction of the church building next door. “I’ve got all these questions. And when I ask ‘em, folks just panic. They’re good people. Good, Christian people. But they just want me to tell ’em everything’s okay. And I can’t do that. It’s just playing games.” He shook his head and his voice was heavy with despair. “Just playing games.”

  Trout could see that his father was in pain, real pain, and that he needed, at the least, acknowledgement. Back on Easter Sunday in Ohatchee, Trout should have gone to the pulpit and put his arms around Joe Pike. But he didn’t. And Joe Pike had ridden off to Texas. It could happen again, Trout thought. And he just couldn’t stand that. So he stood up and walked quickly to Joe Pike and put his arms around him, at least as far as he could reach. He held on for dear life, and he felt true fear for the first time. Not just unsettledness or uncertainty, but cold gnawing fear that what little he had left that was halfway sane was about to come completely unravelled.

  On top of the dresser next to the door, Irene’s statue stood still and mute. The boy, whispering in the girl’s ear. The secret? Hell, Trout thought, that kid doesn’t know jack. Nobody does.

  * * * * *

  Trout woke to the ringing of the telephone. It jangled several times, tugging him up from a deep well of troubled sleep. Then it stopped and he heard Joe Pike’s rumbling voice, unintelligible, in the kitchen and he wondered if his father had ever gone to bed. He began to drift off again and then he jerked awake and looked at the clock on his bedside table. 6:15. Who would be calling at 6:15? Then he knew.