The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  The boatman waded in and beat him wildly, striking him again and again. With each blow, Charon felt some infinitesimal measure of relief from his own frustration. When he was finished, the agitator lay in a heap on deck, nothing more than a flesh bag full of broken bones, and the other passengers shuffled their feet sideways so as not to touch his corpse.

  Only later, after he had docked his boat in the lagoon and the winged demons had flown out of the pit to lead the damned up the flint hill and down along the spiral path to their eternal destinies, did the boatman regret his rage. As he lifted the sack of flesh that had been his charge and dumped it like a bale of chum over the side, he realized that the man’s hysteria had been one and the same thing as his own frustration.

  The sun sounded its death cry as it sank into a pool of blood that was the horizon and then Hell’s twilight came on. Charon dragged himself up the hill and went inside his home. Before pure night closed its fist on the riverbank, he kicked off his boots, gnawed on a haunch of Harpy flesh, and lit the tallow that sat in its holder on the table. Taking his seat there he stared into the flame, thinking of it as the future that constantly drew him forward through years, decades, centuries, eons, as the past disappeared behind him. “I am nothing but a moment,” he said aloud and his words echoed around the empty skull.

  Some time later, still sitting at his chair at the table, he noticed the candle flame twitch. His eyes shifted for the first time in hours to follow its movement. Then the fire began to dance, the sheets of flesh parchment lifted slightly at their corners, the bat bones clacked quietly overhead. Hell’s deceptive wind of memory had begun to blow. He heard it whistling in through the space in his home’s grin, felt its coolness sweep around him. This most complex and exquisite torture that brought back to sinners the times of their lives, now worked on the boatman. He moved his bare feet beneath the table and realized the piles of sand lay beneath them.

  The image began in his mind no more than a dot of blue and then rapidly unfolded in every direction to reveal a sky and crystal water. The sun there in Oondeshai had been yellow and it gave true warmth. This he remembered clearly. He’d sat high on a hill of blond sand, staring out across the endless vista of sparkling water. Next to him on the left was Wieroot, legs crossed, dressed in a black robe, and sporting a beard to hide the healing scars that riddled his face. On the right was the young woman with the shining black hair and the red dot of a birthmark beneath her left eye.

  “… And you created this all by writing it in the other world?” asked Charon. There was a breeze blowing and the boatman felt a certain lightness inside as if he’d eaten of one of the white clouds floating across the sky.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” said Wieroot, “although it’s a shame you’ll never get a chance to put it to use.”

  “Tell me,” said the boatman.

  “God made the world with words,” he said in a whisper.

  Charon remembered that he didn’t understand. He furrowed his brow and turned to look at the young woman to see if she was laughing. Instead she was also nodding along with Wieroot. She put her hand on the boatman’s shoulder and said, “And man made God with words.”

  Charon’s memory of the beach on Oondeshai suddenly gave violent birth to another memory from his holiday. He was sitting in a small structure with no door, facing out into a night scene of tall trees whose leaves were blowing in a strong wind. Although it was night, it was not the utter darkness he knew from his quadrant of Hell. High in the black sky there shone a bright disk, which cast its beams down onto the island. Their glow had seeped into the small home behind him and fell upon the forms of Wieroot and the woman, Shara was her name, where they slept upon a bed of reeds. Beneath the sound of the wind, the calls of night birds, the whirr of insects, he heard the steady breathing of the sleeping couple.

  And one last memory followed. Charon recalled Wieroot drawing near to him as he was about to board his boat for the return journey.

  “You told me you committed murder,” said the boatman.

  “I did,” said Wieroot.

  “Who?”

  “The god whose skull you live in,” came the words, which grew faint and then disappeared as the night wind of Hell ceased blowing. The memories faded and Charon looked up to see the candle flame again at rest. He reached across the table and drew his writing quill and a sheaf of parchment toward him. Dipping the pen nib into the pot of blood that was his ink, he scratched out two words at the top of the page. My Story, he wrote, and then set about remembering the future. The words came, slowly at first, reluctantly, dragging their imagery behind them, but after a short while their numbers grew to equal the number of sinners awaiting a journey to the distant shore. He ferried them methodically, expertly, from his mind to the page, scratching away long into the dark night of Hell until down at the bottom of the spiral pit, in his palace of frozen sighs, Satan stopped laughing.

  Boatman’s Holiday

  Story Notes

  Neil Ayres, a writer from the UK, contacted me about an anthology he was involved with, entitled Book of Voices, to be published by Flame Books. The proceeds of the book will support writers in Sierra Leone, part of PEN’s Africa 05 project. I was thankful for the opportunity to have a chance to submit a story, and I congratulate Neil, editor Mike Butscher, and the other authors for devoting their time and energy to a worthwhile cause. The loose theme of the book was imprisonment. At first, I had a hard time coming up with a story. Just thinking about what’s gone on politically and socially in Sierra Leone in the past few years, and then comparing that to what I saw outside the window in my sleepy little South Jersey town, I became aware of a rather large disconnect. I realized that for me to come up with anything that would bear some meaning for those to whom the book’s efforts are dedicated, the story would have to tend toward the mythic. Before I had any story at all, I had a title rolling around in my head for a while, which I didn’t associate with this project. I don’t know where “Boatman’s Holiday” came from, but every once in a while I’d take that title out in my mind and roll it around a little. One day, I was looking at a book of illustrations by Doré, which contained a few plates from his illustrated Dante. One was of Charon, the boatman of Hell. The idea for the title and the picture collided in my head, and I saw this story all at once. I meant to use some of the images I still remembered from having read The Inferno, but I also wanted to customize this vision to suit myself. The prospect of messing with this rich mythical figure and landscape got me excited and, after that, I wrote the piece pretty quickly.

  Botch Town

  It all began in the last days of August when the leaves of the elm in the front yard had curled into crisp, brown tubes and fallen away to litter the lawn. I remember I sat at the curb that afternoon, waiting for Mr. Softee to round the bend at the top of Pine Avenue, listening carefully for that mournful knell, each measured ding both a promise of ice cream and a pinprick of remorse. Taking a castoff leaf into each hand, I made double fists. When I opened my fingers, brown crumbs fell and scattered on the road at my feet. Had I been waiting for the arrival of the stranger, I might have understood the sifting debris to be symbolic of the end of something. Instead, I waited for the eyes.

  That morning, I’d left the house early under a blue sky, walked through the woods and crossed the railroad tracks away from town, where the third rail hummed and lay in wait, like a snake, for an errant ankle. Then, along the road by the fastener factory, back behind the grocery, and up and down the streets, I searched for discarded glass bottles in every open garbage can, dumpster, forgotten corner. By early afternoon, I’d found three soda bottles and a half-gallon milk bottle. At the grocery store, I turned them in for the refund and walked away with a quarter.

  All summer long, Mr. Softee had this contest going. With each purchase of twenty-five cents or more, he gave you a card: on the front was a small portrait of the waffle-faced cream being pictured on the side of the truck. On the back was a piece of a puzzle
that, when joined with seven other cards, made the same exact image of the beckoning soft one but eight times bigger. I had the blue lapels and red bow tie, the sugar-cone-flesh lips parted in a pure white smile, the exposed, towering brain of vanilla, cream kissed at the top into a pointed swirl, but I didn’t have the eyes.

  A complete puzzle won you the Special Softee, like Coney Island in a plastic dish—four twirled Softee loads of cream, chocolate sauce, butterscotch, marshmallow goo, nuts, party-colored sprinkles, raisins, M&M’s, shredded coconut, bananas, all topped with a cherry. You couldn’t purchase the Special Softee, you had to win it, or so said John, who, through the years, had come to be known simply as Softee.

  Occasionally John would try to be pleasant, but I think the paper canoe of a hat he wore every day had soured his disposition irreparably. He also wore a blue bow tie, a white shirt, and white pants. His face was long and crooked, and, at times, when the orders came too fast and the kids didn’t have the right change, the bottom half of it would slowly melt—a sundae abandoned at the curb. His long ears sprouted tufts of hair as if his skull contained a hedge of it, and the lenses of his glasses had internal flaws like diamonds. In a voice that came straight from his freezer, he called my sister, Mary, and all the other girls, “Sweetheart.”

  Earlier in the season, one late afternoon, my brother, Jim, said to me, “You wanna see where Softee lives?” We took our bikes. He led me way up Higbee Lane, past the shoe store and Paumonok School, up beyond Our Lady of Lourdes. After an hour of riding, he stopped in front of a small house. As I pulled up, he pointed to the place and said, “Look at that dump.”

  Softee’s truck was parked on a barren plot at the side of the place. I remember ivy and a one-story house, no bigger than a good-sized garage. Shingles showed their zebra stripes through fading white. The porch had obviously sustained a meteor shower. There were no lights on inside, and I thought this strange because twilight was mixing in behind the trees.

  “Is he sitting in there in the dark?” I asked my brother.

  Jim shrugged as he got back on his bike. He rode in big circles around me twice and then shot off down the street, screaming over his shoulder as loud as he could, “Softee sucks!” The ride home was through true night, and he knew that without him I would get lost, so he pedaled as hard as he could.

  We had forsaken the ostentatious jingle bells of Bungalow Bar and Good Humor all summer in an attempt to win. By the end of July, though, each of the kids on the block had at least two near-complete puzzles, but no one had the eyes. I had heard from Tim Caliban, who lived in the development on the other side of the school field, that the kids over there got fed up one day and rushed the truck, jumped up and swung from the bar that held the rearview mirror, invaded the driver’s compartment, all the while yelling, “Give us the eyes. The fuckin’ eyes.” When Softee went up front to chase them, Tim’s brother, Bill, leaped up on the sill of the window through which Softee served his customers, leaned into the inner sanctum, unlatched the freezer, and started tossing Italian Ices out to the kids standing at the curb.

  Softee lost his glasses in the fray, but the hat held on. He screamed, “You little bitches!” at them as they played him back and forth from the driver’s area to the serving compartment. In the end, Bill got two big handfuls of cards and tossed them out on the lawn. “Like flies on dogshit,” said Tim, describing the scene. By the time they realized there wasn’t a pair of eyes in the bunch, Softee had turned the bell off and was coasting silently around the corner.

  I had a theory, though, that day at summer’s end when I sat at the curb, waiting. It was my hope that Softee had been holding out on us until the close of the season, and then, in the final days before school started and he quit his route till spring, some kid was going to have bestowed upon him a pair of eyes. I had faith like I never had at church that something special was going to happen that day to me. It did, but it had nothing to do with ice cream. I sat there at the curb, waiting, until the sun started to go down and my mother called me in for dinner. Softee never came again, but as it turned out, we all got the eyes.

  My mother was a better painter than she was a cook. I loved her landscape of the snow-covered peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, rising above the clouds while gazelles grazed in the savannah of the foreground, but I wasn’t much for her spaghetti with tomato soup.

  She stood at the kitchen stove over a big pot of it, glass of cream sherry in one hand, burning cigarette with a three-quarter-inch ash in the other. When she turned and saw me, she said, “Go wash your hands.” I headed down the hall toward the bathroom and, out of the corner of my eye, caught sight of that ash falling into the pot. Before I opened the bathroom door, I heard her mutter, “Could you possibly …” followed hard by the mud-sucking sounds of her stirring the orange glug.

  When I came out of the bathroom, I got the job of mixing the powdered milk and serving each of us kids a glass. At the end of the meal there would be three full glasses of it sitting on the table. Unfortunately, we still remembered real milk. The mix-up kind tasted like sauerkraut, and looked like chalk water with froth on the top. It was there merely for show, a kind of stage prop. As long as no one mentioned that it tasted horrible, my mother never forced us to drink it.

  In the dining room where the walls were lined with grained paneling, the knots of which always showed me screaming faces, Jim sat across the table from me, and Mary sat by my side. My mother sat at the end of the table beneath the open window. Instead of a plate she had the ashtray and her wine in front of her.

  “It’s rib stickin’ good,” said Jim, and added a knifeful of margarine to his plate. When the orange stuff started to cool, it was in need of constant lubrication to prevent it from seizing.

  “Shut up and eat,” said my mother.

  Mary said nothing. I could tell by the way she quietly nodded her head that she was being Mickey.

  “Softee never came today,” I said.

  My brother looked up at me and shook his head in disappointment. “He’ll be out there at the curb in a snow drift,” he said to my mother.

  She laughed without a sound and swatted the air in his direction. “You’ve got to have faith,” she said. “Life’s one long son of a bitch.”

  She took a drag on her cigarette and a sip of wine, and Jim and I knew what was coming next.

  “When things get better,” she said. “I think we’ll all take a nice vacation.”

  “How about Bermuda?” said Jim.

  In her wine fog, my mother hesitated an instant, not sure if he was being sarcastic, but he knew how to keep a straight face. “That’s what I was thinking,” she said. We knew that, because once a week, when she hit just the right level of intoxication, that’s what she was always thinking. It had gotten to the point that when Jim wanted me to do him a favor and I asked how he was going to pay me back, he’d say, “Don’t worry, I’ll take you to Bermuda.”

  She told us about the water, crystal blue. So clear you could look down a hundred yards and see schools of manta rays flapping their wings. She told us about the pure white beaches with palm trees swaying in a soft breeze filled with the scent of wildflowers. We’d sleep in hammocks on the beach. We’d eat pineapples we cut open with a machete. Swim in lagoons. Washed up on the shore, amidst the chambered nautilus, the sand dollars, the shark teeth, would be pieces of eight from galleons wrecked long ago.

  That night, as usual, she told it all, and she told it in minute detail, so that even Jim sat there listening with his eyes half-closed and his mouth half-open.

  “Will there be clowns?” asked Mary in her Mickey voice.

  “Sure,” said my mother.

  “How many?” asked Mary.

  “Eight,” said my mother.

  Mary nodded in approval and went back to being Mickey.

  When we got back from Bermuda, it was time to do the dishes. From the leftovers in the pot, my mother heaped a plate with spaghetti for my father for when he got home from work. She wrapped it in
wax paper and put it in the center of the stove where the pilot light would keep it warm. Whatever was left over went to George the dog. My mother washed the dishes, smoking and drinking the entire time. Jim dried, I put the plates and silverware away, and Mary counted everything a few dozen times.

  The garage of our house had, five years earlier, been converted into an apartment and my grandparents, Nan and Pop, lived in there. A door separated our house from their rooms. My mother knocked, and Nan called out for us to come in.

  Pop took out his mandolin and played us a few songs: “Apple Blossom Time,” “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” “Good Night Irene.” All the while he played, Nan chopped cabbage on a flat wooden board with a one-handed guillotine. My mother rocked in the rocking chair and drank and sang. The trilling of the double-stringed instrument accompanied by my mother’s voice was beautiful to me.

  Over at the little table in the kitchenette area, Mary sat with the Laredo machine, making cigarettes. My parents didn’t buy their smokes by the pack. Instead they got this machine that you loaded with a piece of paper and a wad of loose tobacco from a can. Once it was all set up, there was a little lever you pulled forward and back, and presto. It wasn’t an easy operation. You had to use just the right amount to get them firm enough so the tobacco didn’t fall out the end.

  When my parents had first gotten the Laredo, Mary watched them perform the process and was fascinated. She was immediately expert at measuring out the brown shag and never got tired of it. A regular cigarette factory once she got going; Pop called her R. J. Reynolds. He didn’t smoke them, though. He smoked Lucky Strikes, and he drank Old Grand-Dad, which seemed fitting.

  Jim and I, we watched the television with the sound turned down. Dick Van Dyke mugged and rubber-legged and did pratfalls in black and white, perfectly synchronized to the strains of “Shanty Town” and “I’ll Be Seeing You in All the Old Familiar Places.” Even if they weren’t playing music, we wouldn’t have been able to have the sound up, since Pop hated Dick Van Dyke more than any other person on Earth.