Dairy Queen Days

by Robert Inman

  Joe Pike switched off the diesel and it died with a rumbling cough. The crowd swarmed up around them, everybody yelling at once. “What’s the charge?” Joe Pike asked Cicero.

  Cicero lowered his pistol, then stuck it in the holster. “Disturbing a crime scene,” he said without hesitation. His voice was steel-hard and unyielding. “Malicious destruction of town property. Malicious destruction of state property. Inciting a riot. Theft and unauthorized use of a vehicle. Failure to obey the order of an officer of the law. Failure to yield the right of way. Failure to give a proper turn signal. Reckless endangerment. Unauthorized use of a public facility.” He stopped, thought for an instant, then added for good measure, “Failure to obtain a parade permit.”

  “Cicero,” Joe Pike said quietly, “there wasn’t nothing malicious about it.”

  “What in the hell do you think you were doing?” Cicero demanded.

  Suddenly, Trout knew. He knew exactly. It was so obvious. “I know,” he spoke up.

  Cicero stared at him. Trout looked at Joe Pike, then back at Cicero. “Making a tennis court.”

  “That’s right,” Joe Pike said.

  “Did you know about this?” Cicero asked icily. Trout felt as if he might be a candidate for the charge of accessory before, during and after the fact.

  “No he didn’t,” Joe Pike said. “It was all my idea and all my doing.”

  “Well,” Cicero said between clenched teeth, “you have royally pissed me off, Joe Pike. And by God, you are going to jail.”

  * * * * *

  He felt like a freak at the Dairy Queen as the afternoon wore itself out, the sole survivor of some terrible natural disaster. Herschel and Keats didn’t have a lot to say to him, nothing at all about the events of the morning in town. But he could feel both of them cutting glances at him now and again, perhaps expecting him to come unglued and start screaming and throwing things. But he was quite beyond all that. He was simply numb. Burned out, like an electric motor run too long under too strenuous a load. He even imagined (surely it was his imagination) the acrid smell of melted bearings and wires. It became so strong at one point that he went to the bathroom in back and checked the mirror to see if he had smoke drifting from his ears or a scorched look about his hairline. But there was only his own vacant stare looking back at him -- hollow-eyed and slack-faced. But what could he expect? It had been a long night and an interminable day.

  Joe Pike was in the city jail, or what passed for a jail -- a one-cell cubbyhole at the rear of the police station. Uncle Cicero had handcuffed him (proper police procedure) and taken him straight there, leading him away from the bulldozer through the crowd that grew by the minute as word spread of the ruckus, every step dogged by the Channel Five TV crew, shouting questions at Cicero and Joe Pike, none of which they answered. “No comment,” Uncle Cicero kept saying grimly. “No damn comment.” Part of the crowd stayed at the park to gawk at the wreckage of the grounds and bandshell, but a good many followed Cicero and Joe Pike as they walked -- Cicero with a firm hand on Joe Pike’s arm -- down the sidewalk to the police department and disappeared inside. Trout followed at a distance, not knowing quite what to do or who to ask. He looked around for Aunt Alma, but she was nowhere to be seen. He learned later that she had fled back to her house and had driven the Packard to the mill. Uncle Cicero was up to his ears in police business. And Uncle Phinizy was in the hospital in Thomson.

  Trout stood for awhile at the edge of the crowd that milled about in front of the police station, watching as people took turns pressing their faces against the plate glass window to peer inside. Nobody said a word to him, but he could feel the breath of their whispers: That’s him. Joe Pike’s young’un. Mama’s at the Institute and daddy’s in jail. There were even a few faces he recognized from his brief stay at Moseley High School. They stared unabashedly. HEADLINE: INVISIBLE STUDENT SPOTTED. But they did not speak. After awhile, Uncle Cicero came to the door of the police station and leaned out and said, “Y’all go on home. Ain’t a thing here to see. Go on, now.” As the crowd began to drift away, somebody pointed out Trout to the Channel Five crew, and when they started in his direction, he slipped down an alleyway and took a circuitous route back to the parsonage. He locked the front door and took the phone off the hook and sat for a long time in one of the big overstuffed chairs in the living room, waiting for something to come to him. Nothing did.

  About two o’clock he got on the motorcycle and headed downtown. The bulldozer was gone from the park and so were most of the people. Instead, there were two stake-body trucks from the mill and several men at work, one group sweating profusely in the early afternoon heat as they cleaned up the splintered pieces of the bandshell for hauling away, another group laying slabs of new green sod where the bulldozer had ripped up the grass. The downtown sidewalks were all but deserted. Trout parked in front of the police station and walked up to the door, above which a small air conditioning unit throbbed, dripping water onto the sidewalk. Trout stepped around the puddle, opened the door and went in. Calhoun was sitting on the edge of a desk, thumbing through a copy of Motor Trend. He looked up and closed the magazine as Trout entered but kept his thumb in his place.

  “I’m Trout Moseley,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” Calhoun answered.

  “Can I see my dad?”

  “Guess you’ll have to Cicero about that.” Calhoun didn’t sound unfriendly, just noncommittal.

  “Where is he?” Trout asked.

  Calhoun looked out through the plate glass window. “Over yonder.” Trout looked and saw Cicero and the two men from the state crime lab in the middle of the vacant lot across the street. They had erected an open-sided tent over the crime scene to shade them from the sun. One of the men from the crime lab was in a shallow hole, handing up pieces of what Trout took to be skeleton to the other, who put them into a big plastic bag. Cicero watched, hands on hips.

  “Could you ask him?” Trout asked Calhoun.

  Calhoun shrugged, put the magazine down on the desk, started toward the door. “You could call him on the radio,” Trout offered, trying to be helpful.

  Calhoun went back to the desk, picked up the microphone of the police radio and pressed a button. “Base to Unit One.”

  Across the street, Trout saw Cicero take his walkie-talkie out of its belt holster and hold it up to his mouth. “Whatcha want, Calhoun?” Cicero’s voice came tinnily through the radio.

  “Trout Moseley’s over here. He wants to see the preacher.”

  “Well, let him,” Cicero said. “I’ll be over there in a minute.”

  Calhoun led him through a door and down a narrow hallway to the single cell where Joe Pike was propped on an old Army cot. It had a clean mattress but nothing else. It was stiflingly hot. This part of the police station wasn’t air conditioned. And it was badly lit from a single overhead lightbulb and a small barred rectangle of window high on the back wall. Joe Pike didn’t say anything as Calhoun unlocked the cell door, let Trout in, then locked it back and left. The springs of the cot creaked in protest as Joe Pike swung his legs over the side of the cot and made room for Trout to sit down.

  “Are you okay?” Trout asked.

  Joe Pike nodded at the wall opposite the cot and Trout looked up and saw a large poster displaying traffic signs in reds and yellows with a word of explanation beneath each. “I’ve been studying,” he said. “Cicero says most of the people he puts in here are charged with a traffic offense of some kind, so he put up the poster as a gesture toward driver education.”

  “Why did you do that?” Trout asked.

  Joe Pike sighed. He looked awfully tired and the hot, cramped cell seemed to diminish him physically. He didn’t say anything for a long time. But Trout waited. This time, he would get an answer if it took until next week.

  Five minutes passed, perhaps more. And finally Joe Pike said, “It’s your fault.”

  “What?”

  “And I’m glad it is. This morning, sitting there on the steps. Or at
least, me sitting and you jumping around yelling about this pissant town and no tennis court.”

  “Daddy, I didn’t mean…”

  “No,” Joe Pike stopped him. “I know you didn’t. But I got to thinking, sitting over there later in Alma’s parlor, that’s what I should have done back yonder when my daddy and I used to get crossed up. I was way bigger than him, but I never thought of it that way. I always felt like a small, runny-nosed kid, especially after he got through cutting me down. He could use his voice like a switchblade.” Joe Pike stopped and looked down at his hands and Trout could see the exquisite pain in his father’s face. “There were times,” he went on softly, “there were times I should have stomped my foot and raised hell and said, ‘Leland Moseley, you are full of shit.’ But,” he shrugged, “I never did.”

  Trout felt his heart wrench. He had never heard anything quite so nakedly honest from his father. He put a tentative hand on Joe Pike’s arm.

  “I guess that’s what I was doing today,” Joe Pike said. He turned and looked into Trout’s eyes. “I love you, son. I guess I’m trying to make up for some things. For you, and for me.” A wan smile then. “I guess I really tore up the pea-patch, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Trout said. “I guess you did.”

  And then Trout felt a flush of anger. It baffled him at first, but then he began to see where it came from. Dang you, Joe Pike. Easy enough for you to jump on a bulldozer and go settle an old score, just like you jumped on the motorcycle and high-tailed it to Texas. My fault? No sirree. Don’t try to put this monkey on my back.

  Trout asked, “When are you gonna get out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you, what do they call it, post bond?”

  “I can, but Cicero says I’ve got to have a bond hearing. Meantime, I guess I’ll have to sit here and ponder the consequences of my transgression.”

  “And what am I supposed to do while you stay in here pondering your consequences? Fend for myself?”

  Trout could hear his voice rising. So could Joe Pike. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He stayed that way for a long time, his only movement the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. Out in the alley behind the jail, Trout could hear voices. Small boys, from the sound of it, giggling. Then a rock hit the bars of the high window with a clank. Trout stood up on the edge of the cot and looked out the window. “Cut that out or I’ll whip your ass,” he said without rancor. And the boys, three of them -- barefoot and shirtless -- fled. Then he sat back down. “I understand what you’re saying about the bulldozer and all. But where does that leave me, Daddy? It may make you feel better to tear up the pea-patch, but for me, it’s just one more piece of …”

  “Shit,” Joe Pike finished for him.

  “Yeah.”

  “You need something solid. Something you can count on.”

  “Yeah.”

  Joe Pike opened his eyes now. If he took offense, he didn’t show it. “I’m not a very practical man,” he said. “I always depended on your mother for that.”

  “If Mama had been here, she would have told you to…” What? Grow up? Stop trying to be Jesus? Something like that. Big old Joe Pike -- a Goodyear blimp of a man, tethered to earth by the firm hand of a tiny determined woman. Even in the months before they took her away, even in the depths of her great blank silences, her mere presence had kept him anchored. It was only when she left that he began to drift, finally fading into the distance on the motorcycle. It all, Trout thought, keeps coming back to Mama.

  Just then, the door down the hallway opened and Cicero walked toward the cell. He peered in. “How y’all?”

  “Just great,” Trout said.

  “Trout, I’m sorry about all this. But I got to do my job. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Joe Pike,” Cicero said, “I’m gonna go get us some lunch. I’ll bring you a plate from the Koffee Kup.”

  J oe Pike didn’t answer.

  “Want something to read? Maybe something out of your study at the church?”

  J oe Pike waved at the traffic signal poster on the wall. “I think I’ll just ponder this, Cicero. It’s all about figuring out how to get where you’re going without running over anybody.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cicero agreed.

  “Things calmed down?” Joe Pike asked.

  “Pretty much,” Cicero said. “Too hot to be loitering around. And the Channel Five bunch gave up and went back to Atlanta. I think they went over and interviewed Wardell about the union bidness before they left. They got their whole evening newscast out of Moseley tonight.”

  “Why were they here is the first place?”

  Cicero waved toward the vacant lot. “Human remains. Ain’t nothing excites TV folks like human remains. Everything else just fell into their laps.” Cicero shook his head, marveling. “Ain’t it the damndest thing. Not a thing worth telling has happened in Moseley since the furniture store burned down and now three stories in one day.”

  “Yes,” Joe Pike agreed, “it has been an auspicious day. I feel honored to have been part of it.”

  Trout and Cicero looked at Joe Pike and then they looked at each other. Cicero gave a little shake of his head. Was it history or random chaos? They wouldn’t know for a good while. Trout had learned that much from listening to Uncle Phinizy. “Where historical significance is concerned,” Phinizy had said, “it’s hard to tell a volcanic eruption from a fart in the wind until a century or so has passed. A hundred years from now, Moseley, Georgia may be just a fart in the wind.” Thinking back on the events of the past eight hours, Trout understood. It was impossible to make any sense of it. A hundred years would do wonders for perspective. A good night’s sleep would help.

  Trout rose from the cot. “I’ve got to go to work. Can I get you anything?”

  Joe Pike smiled and licked his lips. “A dollar cup of Dairy Queen vanilla.” Cicero opened the cell door and Trout stepped out into the hallway while Cicero closed it back and locked it. As Trout turned to go, Joe Pike said, “Trout, you may be a little too practical. You worry too much. Try to relax a little. Or failing that, try to find you a woman who’s got a wild hair up her butt.”

  He came to himself standing in the Dairy Queen with Keats’ hand on his arm. He was at the ice cream machine, hand on the lever, a cup beneath the spout. The cup was empty. Had he been asleep? No, just missing in action for a moment. He was long past fatigue, floating somewhere between wakefulness and a soft twilight.

  “Let me do that,” Keats said gently. She took the cup from him. “A shake?”

  “What?”

  “Were you making a shake?”

  Trout tried to remember. It was like swimming through yogurt. “I think so.”

  “What flavor?”

  He shrugged. Keats turned to the window where a man dressed in wilted khaki work clothes and wearing an ACE PLUMBING cap peered in, frowning. Keats slid the window open. “What flavor shake did you order, sir?”

  “Strawberry.” He nodded at Trout. “Something wrong with that boy?”

  “No sir,” Keats answered and slid the window closed again. “Sit,” she ordered Trout, pointing to a stool. He sat watching while she mixed up the shake, passed it through the window and collected the man’s eighty-five cents. There were several cars in the parking lot, an older couple at the picnic table, but for the moment, no one at the window. It had been a busy late afternoon, and if custom held, it would be a busy evening. Here in the grip of Georgia summer, the Dairy Queen was an oasis, a moment’s relief from heat and boredom for the locals and from road-weariness for the I-20 traffic. Business had never been better, Herschel said.

  “Where’s Herschel?” Trout asked.

  Keats wiped the counter with a washcloth. “Gone to get a TV.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s almost six o’clock.”

  “So?”

  “The news, dummy.”

  “Oh.”

  “D
on’t you want to see it?”

  “Not really.”

  Keats finished with the counter and hung the washcloth on the edge of the sink. She moved so efficiently about the cramped quarters of the Dairy Queen, you sometimes forgot that she was on crutches. “Well, I do,” she said. “My daddy’s gonna be on.”

  “So is mine,” Trout said, making a face.

  Keats leaned against the counter, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “Take fame where you can find it.” She could really look nice when she smiled, Trout thought. It even made her eyes look softer, as if the smile muscles released a pigment that changed steel gray to a nice blue.

  Herschel came in the back door then, carrying a small black-and-white television set. He set it on the counter, plugged it in and raised the rabbit ears. The picture from Channel 5 over in Atlanta was grainy and it drifted in and out, sound disappearing with picture in a swarm of static. And just as Eyewitness News at Six came on, there was a rush of customers. But Herschel opened the window and called out, “Be just a minute folks.” And through hiss and snow, they watched as Gordon Goodnight the anchorman said, “It was quite a day in Moseley,” and then showed them.

  The reporter who had been in Moseley that morning had decided to take a somewhat lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek approach. He folded the three events -- human remains, bulldozer escapade and union movement at the mill -- into two minutes of gee-whiz-you-won’t-believe-this. There was Uncle Cicero presiding over the unearthing of the skeleton, Joe Pike and Trout on the bulldozer as it plowed through the bandshell, Uncle Cicero again, escorting Joe Pike to jail. The sound and picture faded just as he started to say, “No damn comment,” so that they couldn’t tell whether Channel 5 had bleeped out the “damn.” But it returned in time to see pictures of Moseley Mill with Wardell Dubarry standing just outside the gate saying how the mill workers wanted “a decent wage and a fair shake” and had just today submitted a petition to the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. All but five of the workers, he said, had signed the petition. The holdouts, he said, were toadies for the Moseley family.