by Nick Stokes
for his bike. Indeed, he must have been the new guy (though he was rather old), to be relegated to this virtually childless corner of the park. I stood and made to intercept him. I noticed that the homeless woman was of Native American heritage. Her bags, as I’ve said, remained a mystery, and her eyes remained closed.
The ice cream man saw me approaching, pedaled hard toward me, said “Whoa horsey,” and stopped. He was a black man in a white outfit and white paper hat. I was a white boy. (At this later date I know that these facts carry socio-historo-cultural connotations, but I knew it not then. Now, he sounds like the old crutch of the old wise black slave, but he was no slave; color is just often the first thing one notices. I observed that he was black and I was white because we were, and I relate the details to you now to paint the story as clearly as possible. There is no social commentary in his blackness or my whiteness; we were born thusly, with different color skin, which is nothing but an incidental fact. He was also old and I was young. This information is only meant to inform you.) Sometimes, ice cream men dress up as clowns or ride around with carnival music; he did neither. I appreciated his straightforward approach, cleansed of obfuscation and fake fun. He was about the ice cream.
Leaning on his handlebars, he said, “You son, want some ice cream.”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I would very much like some ice cream.”
He asked how much money I had, and I told him two dollars. He said that I needed two scoops then.
“Yes sir, I do,” I said.
He smiled and went to the cart. He was a lanky gentleman. He wore a gold chain that clinked as he moved. He opened a sliding door on top of the cart, and as heat was sucked into the cooler, steam formed in the air above it. The man invited me to look in the cart and choose my flavors. I waved away the steam and saw six cylindrical containers, each a different color. Red, orange, yellow, green, white, and brown. The brown was chocolate, the white vanilla, and the red strawberry; that much I knew. There was more chocolate gone than anything else; next was vanilla. I was not an adventurous boy by nature, but before this gentleman I could not order chocolate and vanilla. For some reason, I did not wish to appear just another imbecilic boy. I wished to make an impression. I chose orange and green, the surfaces of which were smooth and untouched.
“You’re a boy with some spirit, aren’t you?” he said. “Bet you causing mom and dad all sorts of grief aren’t you? That’s the kind of boy I was too.”
“I don’t have a father,” I said confidently.
He took a scoop from a homemade holster and bent over the ice cream cart. His right arm dipped into the cooler to the elbow as he scooped a scoop and brought it out, green first, and pressed it into the sugar cone in his left hand. He said that was all right, that a long time ago he had a boy, but not anymore, so maybe we weren’t so different. He scooped the orange, sweat dripping from his nose and chin into the cooler, and pressed it atop the green. I said he should meet my mother. He gave a deep laugh, wrapping a napkin around the cone and handing it to me by the wider top part of the cone, so that I could take it by the narrow point. That was the first time I realized an ice cream cone is like a sword hilt. He said he wasn’t opposed to the idea, and asked if I thought she was his type. I gave him two dollars and said, “Yes sir, she is rather fond of ice cream.” He laughed louder this time, pocketing my money and closing the cooler. It occurs to me now that there must have been blocks of ice in the bottom of the cart, or I suppose something more complicated such as a compressor, though I did not think of how to make cold then. He said he was here every Saturday without fail through the month of October, after which he’d be heading south. But he would be happy to make her acquaintance, because if there’s one thing he had to give, it’s ice cream. Holding the cone near my face, I noticed that there were chocolate flecks in the green and white swirls in the orange. That was fine, another fact necessitating neither joy nor consternation. As I looked at the ice cream though, I apparently unwittingly began to tip the structure towards the horizontal. The ball of orange rolled off and plopped on the ground. A twig stuck through it and some of the dirt it had tossed in the air when it landed settled, dirtying its orange surface. I looked at the dirty ball of orange and wanted to kick it. I noticed then that the ice cream man also wore white shoes, immaculately white shoes. I could not kick the orange ball; I might dirty his shoes. I could not look up from the orange ball. I had no money, and I was old enough to know what it meant when my mother told me that nothing in life was free. I had had no special attachment to the orange ice cream, but now that it was gone, I felt its absence like a weight on my eyeballs. The ice cream began to melt almost instantly, losing its spherical shape. I could not look at the ice cream man. I stared at the orange blob I had lost.
Then I felt his hand, a scratchy hand, on mine, rotating it. “Hold it up son, straight up and down. Like it's a torch, so you don’t get burned. Or like a sword. Never let your sword down.” He pulled me a step closer to the cooler and, all while firmly holding my hand holding my cone, slid open the cooler again, scooped up another scoop of orange, and pressed it down firmly on the green.
Even though I knew it was really he holding my hand holding the cone, it felt good to feel like I was holding the cone steady while he pressed down on it.
He said, “There you go,” and let go and began to close up shop again. I admitted as how I had no more money. “Ain’t no thing son. I don’t want what you ain’t got anyhow.”
I asked if he was going to be here tomorrow. He said yes, he was here Sundays too. I said maybe I’d see him then, tomorrow.
“Maybe so,” he said. “That’d suit me just fine. Meantime, keep your sword up, all right?”
“Yes sir,” I said as he got on his bike.
Then he said, “And don’t forget to eat it too, son.” He rode off, bouncing and jangling, and I took a bite of orange ice cream, having caught on to what he was implying.
My first observation was that it was cold. Second, it tasted orange. Third, I liked it. I was just a boy you know; I didn’t yet have the refined palate to comment upon the body or the tannins or the earthy hints of coffee or chocolate or the fruity insinuations of blueberry or cherry. I didn’t even know the nature of the white swirls. (I have since learned that, in ice cream, such white swirls are typically marshmallow, and that marshmallow typically adds very little flavor to ice cream. I understand that I am blurring the line between subjective opinion and objective fact, but the tastelessness of marshmallow in ice cream does seem, from my investigations, to be a widely held belief.) I do not know as I had ever had orange ice cream prior to that moment. Now I had. Orange was clearly suited to ice cream. I licked a protrusion of the green. Mint chocolate chip I recognized immediately. A favorite of my mother. Also quite delicious. I have rarely, let me say never, met an ice cream I did not enjoy on some level.
Ice cream on an Indian summer day in the park, what could be better? I was the type of boy who had such thoughts. I whittled the ice cream down to what I felt was safe to walk with before I began to walk. The ice cream man was out of sight, in some more profitable realm I hoped. Tomorrow, perhaps my mother would join me. I began to make my way back to my bike. I was satisfied with how my afternoon had passed. Surely it was time to return home.
The sunlight was landing at more of a slant. The young men threw their Frisbee incessantly. The toddler, likely weary now, let himself plop down on his butt, using his diaper to pad his fall, though in truth he fell from no great height. His mother looked at her watch, a sparkly thing about her wrist, and without delay scooped him up and purposefully strode in a northwesterly direction. The thin crowd thinned further. I heard a fearful sound and looked over my shoulder: a phalanx of children approached my peaceful realm. A ball of some sort was tossed in the air. I could hear guffaws and quacks and ear-piercing screams and honks and snatches of song, but they were not yet near enough for visual confirmation of the gaggle’s composition. Voice is an unreliable tool for identifying the age, gen
der, or race of children, as their voices have yet to crack. In actuality the nature of these children was irrelevant; they were just children horsing around. I did not assume their intent was malevolent, but even if their pursuit was naught but innocent amusement (and that would be assuming children do not have the holes in their hearts which plague adults), it would not be easy for a child like me to remain unnoticed on the sidelines. They had no discernable supervision. I picked up the pace, in the interest of self-preservation. It was without a doubt high time for leave-taking.
And yet, when I arrived at my bike and my root and my dented grass and my familiar shards of leaves and discarded butts, I was given pause. For one thing, having left my spot and returned, I found that I was fond of it. Now that I had known it, I felt some ownership. It was like the end of a novel whose details and inner workings you have become intimate with. You know it must end, but you wish it wouldn’t. And yet, while you wish it wouldn’t end (because, by freely giving yourself over to the author’s sure hands, hands that turn your attention to certain details, hands that juggle all the details you have a hard time holding onto, hands