Dairy Queen Days

by Robert Inman

  “I’m fine. Just a little smoke. I don’t think Uncle Phin’s doing too good, though. They’ve called the ambulance.”

  Earl got an oxygen bottle from the fire truck and followed Trout around the side of the house to the back yard. Phinizy was sitting in the grass, his back propped against the side of the steps, eyes shut, looking wretched. Cicero was kneeling beside him, fanning him with a folded section of newspaper.

  Earl clamped the oxygen mask gently over Phinizy’s mouth and nose. “Breathe deep, Mr. Moseley,” Earl said. Phinizy took several shallow breaths, then he mumbled something, but they couldn’t tell what he said because of the oxygen mask over his mouth. Earl took the mask off. “What’s that?” But Phinizy didn’t say anything else and Earl put the mask back on.

  “Is he gonna be okay?” Trout asked.

  “I imagine he’ll be fine,” Cicero said. “We’ll get him over to the hospital at Thomson and get him checked out.”

  While they waited for the ambulance, Trout climbed the steps and peered into the kitchen. The windows above the sink were open, but the smoke was still thick and Trout felt a rush of nausea. He started to turn away, but then he noticed the peg just inside the back door where Rosetta always hung her coat and hat. She wouldn’t have been wearing a coat on a hot summer day, but she never went anywhere without her hat. There was no hat on the peg now. But her apron was hung neatly.

  Link Tedder came up the steps then, carrying a large fan. “‘Scuse me,” he said to Trout, and Trout stepped aside as Link set the fan just inside the doorway and disappeared inside with the plug. After a moment the fan hummed to life, drawing smoke out of the room, and Trout went back down the steps and stood looking down at Uncle Phinizy. Some of his color was beginning to return. And then Trout heard the siren of the ambulance -- faint at first as it barreled down the road from the interstate and then louder as it turned at the intersection downtown and wailed to a stop in front of the house. Two medics hustled around the corner of the house with a stretcher and the rest of them stood back as the medics fussed over Phinizy, checking his pulse and blood pressure and listening to his heart and lungs with a stethoscope.

  “Is he okay?” Trout asked.

  “Stable,” one of the medics said. “But his lungs sound like a diesel truck with one cylinder misfiring.”

  They loaded Phinizy on the stretcher and Cicero and Earl helped them carry it around front and load it into the back of the ambulance. “Any of y’all want to ride with us?” one of the medics asked.

  “I’ll go,” Trout said quickly.

  “No,” Cicero said. “You don’t look so hot yourself, Trout. You need to stay here and get your legs back under you.” He looked around. “Where’s Joe Pike?”

  “He left,” Trout said. “Before the fire.”

  “I’ll go,” Earl said. “Y’all come on when you can.”

  Cicero clapped him on the shoulder. “I ‘preciate it, Earl.”

  Earl climbed into the ambulance with the stretcher and one of the medics and the other one closed the rear doors and jogged around to the cab and climbed in. Then Cicero got out in the street and stopped traffic while the ambulance pulled into the driveway and backed up and roared away toward Thomson.

  Trout and Cicero went inside then. The whole house smelled of smoke, acrid and depressing. Alma was sitting alone in the living room, at one end of the sofa with the open windows at her back. She stared at her hands, folded neatly in her lap. “Are you all right, hon’?” Cicero asked. She didn’t answer, and he went on toward the kitchen.

  Alma looked up then. “Trout,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Come sit with me.”

  He sat down next to her on the sofa and she took one of his hands in hers. “You saved my house,” she said softly.

  “Aw, I didn’t…”

  “Yes you did,” she insisted. “Thank you.” She looked at his arms then. “You got burned.” The bare skin below his tee shirt was mottled with red splotches where the grease had spattered. He felt the stinging then. He hadn’t even noticed. Alma rose. “I’ll get some ointment. You sit right here.”

  She came back in a minute with a tube of ointment and sat beside him and spread it liberally on his arms, her fingers cool and gentle. Trout looked into her face. She seemed very close to tears.

  “Thank you,” she said again when she was done.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” Trout said.

  “This is your home,” she said. “You saved your home.” She put the tube of ointment on the lamp table beside the sofa, then wiped her hands absently on the skirt of her red dress, leaving a greasy mark. Trout stared at it, but Alma seemed not to notice. My home? What a strange thing to say. After a forgettable succession of parsonages, the thought of “home” as some specific physical place was foreign to him. Not this house, certainly. This was Aunt Alma’s house.

  Alma took his hand in hers again and they sat without speaking for awhile. Out in front of the house, the crowd had thinned out, the first rush of excitement over, and those who remained talked in hushed tones, as if not quite comprehending that a disaster could actually strike the Moseleys. The engine of the fire truck throbbed on for awhile, but then Fleet Mathis turned off the pump and Trout could hear Fleet and Earl stringing out the hose along the street, letting the water drain out before they coiled it neatly in the back of the truck. There were noises back in the kitchen, men walking about, the soft cadence of Judge Lecil Tandy’s voice, the scrape of a piece of furniture being moved. But it was all a background. Here in the living room, it was still and quiet. And Aunt Alma seemed somehow…what? Softer, perhaps.

  When she finally spoke, it startled Trout a bit. “Sometimes I feel all alone,” she said. He looked up at her face, saw the tiny wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, more of them and deeper than he had noticed before. He realized it was the first time he had really looked at Aunt Alma. There was, about Alma, something that made you keep a wary distance, look just beyond instead of at. But now he looked. And he heard something almost childlike in her voice, something sad and wistful. He watched and waited. And listened.

  “I didn’t want this.” She made a wide, slow sweep with her hand. And Trout understood that she meant more than the house. Much more. Perhaps, everything. Her hand dropped back onto his. “I wanted…” her voice trailed off and she looked away and shrugged. “But there was no one else. So I did what I had to do. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Trout said.

  “It has been,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “very, very hard. The others, gone. Papa dead, Joe Pike gone to preach, Eugene to Atlanta. And things changing. Beyond my control. I have done the best I could.”

  “I’m sure you have, Aunt Alma,” Trout tried to be helpful.

  She turned to him with a quick jerk and squeezed his hand. “And now it’s yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “I didn’t know if you had it in you, Trout. I confess I had my doubts.” Her voice was urgent now. “Until this morning. What you did…it was splendid. It’s the way a Moseley behaves.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. Take charge. Get things done. It gives me strength to go on, Trout. To fight this union nonsense. To keep things under control until you’re ready.” She patted his hand. “I’m very proud of you, Trout.” She gave him a lovely smile. “You’re my hero.”

  Trout tried to feel a little heroic, but he didn’t. Not in the least. Instead, he felt incredibly weary. It was just too much. He wanted to go somewhere and hide, but he couldn’t for the life of him think where that might be. There seemed to be no refuge. Perhaps the best place would be home in bed. A quiet nap before he had to go to work at the Dairy Queen at three. Ah, the Dairy Queen. Whipping up a Blizzard or fetching a Dilly Bar from the freezer. It was so uncomplicated.

  Alma sighed, interrupting his thought of sleep. “Good God, what a morning. Rosetta must have panicked when the fire broke out. Why on earth didn’t she
warn us?”

  Trout started to say something about the apron hanging neatly on the peg by the back door, but he thought better of it. There would be plenty of time to get into that. Uncle Cicero would conduct a thorough investigation and no doubt come to the same conclusion Trout already had. Et tu, Rosetta?

  The firefighters clumped through the hallway on their way out the door, trailed by Uncle Cicero, who stopped and looked into the living room. “Y’all all right?”

  “Yes,” Alma said. “We’re all right.”

  She and Cicero looked at each other for a long time. Trout tried to fathom what passed between them, but he couldn’t. Alma had a look of exquisite pain on her face. And Cicero looked thoroughly in charge of things. There was a firm, even set to his mouth. A reversal of roles? Or a reversion to old roles? Trout thought again of Cicero, spiriting Alma away from under Grandaddy Leland’s nose. And again, it made him smile.

  And then the portable radio at Cicero’s hip crackled to life. “Cicero, this is Calhoun.” Calhoun was Cicero’s only police department employee, an excitable man in his early twenties with an unruly head of red hair. Just now, he sounded excited.

  Cicero pulled the radio out of its leather holster and fingered the button on the side. “Calhoun, how many times have I got to tell you, observe proper radio procedure. What you say is, ‘Unit Two to Unit One.’”

  “Cicero,” Calhoun said insistently, “you better get down here.”

  “Where?”

  “The crime scene.”

  “What’s going on, Calhoun?”

  “The preacher’s got the bulldozer.”

  TWELVE

  Uncle Cicero headed for his police cruiser, parked across the street in front of the parsonage, Aunt Alma and Judge Tandy right behind him. Trout set out at a dead run. By the time he covered the two blocks to downtown, Joe Pike was backing the bulldozer out of the vacant lot, ripping away the length of yellow tape Cicero had put up yesterday to cordon off the crime scene. The big orange machine eased between the van from the state crime lab and a Bronco with CHANNEL 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS emblazoned on the side, grinding the concrete of the curb beneath the treads.

  There was a good-sized crowd: two men from the crime lab in white coats, the Channel 5 crew, Calhoun and a lot of other local folk. They lined the sidewalks and milled about in the street -- gawking, pointing, talking excitedly -- but they were all staying well out of Joe Pike Moseley’s way, including Calhoun. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of the police station, walkie-talkie in hand. The reporter and cameraman from Channel 5 were trying to interview him, but Calhoun seemed beyond words, mouth hanging open wide enough to let in a good-sized swarm of flies.

  Joe Pike was playing the levers and pedals of the bulldozer -- backing well out into the street, then wheeling neatly about and pointing the nose of the machine westward. The yellow crime scene tape, caught on the rear of the machine, streamed out behind like the tail of a kite. Traffic in both directions came to a halt -- a line behind the bulldozer, stretching back toward the mill end of town, several other vehicles stopping dead in the street as they approached from the opposite direction. Beyond the traffic in front, Trout could see Uncle Cicero’s police cruiser, blue light flashing. And beyond that, in front of Aunt Alma’s house, the fire truck and the garbage truck still parked at the curb. There were people on the sidewalk there too, peering down the street to see what the commotion was all about.

  Trout looked up at Joe Pike. He looked feverish and agitated, much as he had looked as he had stood in the doorway of Trout’s room last night, babbling about the second coming. But there was a difference. Joe Pike looked quite resolute, as if he had come to some fairly significant decision. He had a cigar jammed in his mouth. Trout yelled over the rumble of the bulldozer engine, “What are you doing?”

  Joe Pike took the cigar out of his mouth. “Come on up and you’ll see,” he yelled back.

  He held out a hand. Trout hesitated, as he had in the church in Ohatchee and early that morning in Aunt Alma’s living room. But then he thought, Not this time. He smelled another disaster, and he hadn’t the foggiest idea what he could do about it, but he knew that he must not watch from the sidelines with his thumb up his ass. So he reached up and Joe Pike’s big hand swallowed his own and Joe Pike gave a tug and Trout scrambled up the side of the bulldozer and settled onto the seat. He saw that Joe Pike was wearing his scuffed brown cowboy boots. They seemed to appear like apparitions whenever some kind of storm was about to break.

  “Are you going to Texas?” Trout asked.

  “Not quite that far.” Joe Pike moved a couple of levers and stomped on a pedal. The big diesel engine roared and Trout could feel the vibration through his spine. Black smoke belched from the stack behind the cab. Traffic was piling up in front of them and Trout could see Uncle Cicero, Aunt Alma and Judge Tandy getting out of the police cruiser, heading toward them on foot. Cicero and Alma were walking fast, Judge Tandy bringing up the rear.

  Joe Pike moved some more levers and the bulldozer lurched into motion. Trout lost his balance and almost tumbled off the seat, but Joe Pike grabbed him by the arm. “Hang on!” Trout grabbed a handhold on the edge of the seat, another on the metal cage covering the cab over his head.

  The first vehicle in line just ahead of them was a grimy pickup truck. A woman was behind the wheel, peering through the mud-spattered windshield, her eyes growing wide as the bulldozer headed in her direction. Joe Pike waved, motioning her out of the way. She yelled something, then threw the truck into gear, backed up in panic, and smashed into the front of the Merita Bread delivery van. The van driver responded with an angry bleat of his horn and the woman snatched the pickup into forward and cut hard right, leaping out of the way of the oncoming bulldozer just in time, lurching to the side of the street. The pickup shuddered to a halt with its front wheels up on the sidewalk. Through the window, Trout could see the woman screaming. But he couldn’t hear her over the roar of the bulldozer engine. Joe Pike didn’t seem to pay any attention. The van driver jumped out, surveyed the damage to the front of his truck, then jumped back behind the wheel and pulled over to the left in front of the Koffee Kup Kafe.

  The bulldozer plowed ahead. Trout looked back to see the crowd falling in behind, led by Calhoun and the Channel Five crew. The cameraman was running about, getting shots of the bulldozer and the crowd from all angles. They were all stepping over chunks of broken asphalt. The big steel treads of the bulldozer were chewing up the street. “You’re tearing up the street,” Trout shouted to Joe Pike.

  “Yeah,” he shouted back, “a dozer will do that.”

  Cicero and Alma were there now, Cicero out in the middle of the street, Alma standing on the sidewalk with a look of utter horror on her face. Joe Pike waved to her, but she didn’t move a muscle. Judge Tandy came up beside her, badly winded. He saw Alma’s expression, put his arm tentatively around her shoulders, then took it away.

  “Stop, Joe Pike!” Cicero yelled up at the oncoming bulldozer.

  Joe Pike cupped his hand behind his ear. “Can’t hear you!” he yelled, although Trout had heard Cicero plainly.

  “He said stop,” Trout shouted to Joe Pike.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  But he didn’t. The bulldozer bore down on Cicero. He reached for his pistol. Trout’s heart leaped to his throat as Cicero’s hand tightened around the grip. Then he took it away, shook his head and stepped nimbly to the side as the bulldozer went past. Cars were pulling over to the side, backing into alleyways, fleeing in the opposite direction. Down at Aunt Alma’s house, Trout could see the fire truck pulling away from the curb with everybody hanging on, turning into the parsonage driveway, backing into the street, and heading toward downtown. But it didn’t go far. Traffic snarled, two cars bumped together and stalled. The street ahead was completely blocked. Trout looked at Joe Pike. Joe Pike shrugged.

  It didn’t matter. Because Joe Pike wheeled the bulldozer suddenly to the left and pointed it at the sidewalk
. He didn’t slow until it had lurched up over the curb and reached the edge of Broadus Moseley’s park. Then he stopped. And lowered the bulldozer blade. THUNK. It landed in the grass just inside the sidewalk. Then Joe Pike shoved the bulldozer into gear again and plowed into the park, ripping up a wide swath of bermuda grass and baring the earth so long ago covered at the behest of Moseley’s patron saint.

  Trout had a sense of pandemonium on either side of them -- people running back and forth, arms waving, a flash of blue police uniform. But he was transfixed by what the bulldozer was doing to the park. He glanced up at Joe Pike, but he was intent on his work, arms and feet in motion as he shifted levers and mashed footpedals. They were headed now for a big oak tree. Trout flinched, preparing himself for impact. But Joe Pike wheeled neatly around the tree and took dead aim on the bandshell. Holy shit! The blade hit the concrete sidewalk in front of the bandshell first, scooped it up and tossed it aside as if it were styrofoam. Then Joe Pike flicked a lever and the blade rose about a foot and the bulldozer hit the bandshell with a crash of splintering timber. This time, Trout didn’t even flinch. It seemed suddenly that nothing could stop Joe Pike Moseley and that no harm could come to him or his son sitting up here on the seat beside him. This might be senseless destruction or calculated purpose. Nothing to do but hang on and find out. Beams toppled, the roof collapsed, the flooring buckled and came up in big chunks of wood. The bulldozer never slowed. It crunched through and over debris, then the blade bit into the ground again, gouging up another swath of grass and earth.

  Suddenly, Uncle Cicero was up there in the cab with them, hanging onto the metal cage next to Trout with one hand, pointing his pistol at Joe Pike’s head with the other. Cicero yelled, “Joe Pike, you’re under arrest!”

  “No!” Trout screamed in horror.

  Joe Pike looked over at Cicero, gave a huge sigh, and stopped the bulldozer. It idled for a moment. “Cut it off!” Cicero commanded. Cicero was mad as hell, face flushed and nostrils flaring.