The Good Humor Man

by Andrew Fox

  “Heh. Yeah.” She smiles ruefully, multiplying the tiny age lines around her eyes. “But you can’t expect kids today to put up with what our generation did, Lou. Blair’s seen the pictures of me pregnant with Will. I was El Blimpo, remember? She’s heard how long it took me to drop all that excess blubber. Asking her to get pregnant au naturel would be like asking her to cut off her arm.” She doffs her apron and puts her arm around my waist. “C’mon into the dining room. The kids are about to light the candles. Then we’ll eat.”

  The guests are all gathered around the ornate brass menorah, the ceremonial candelabra with its branches for each of the eight days of Hanukkah. Although I’ve never been particularly religious, I have warm feelings for this holiday, with its symbolism of ever-increasing light. Tonight six candles will be lit.

  Blair, the youngest person present, sings the ancient prayers of praise in Hebrew and then in English, while touching the wick of each candle with the flame of the shamas, the lead candle. The sixth candle, the one for tonight, isn’t seated firmly enough. Blair jostles it with the shamas while trying to light it. The burning candle falls onto the tablecloth.

  Blair’s face goes white. “Damn — so clumsy —”

  Not wanting Cindy’s heirloom tablecloth to get burned, I reach for the wick. “It’s all right —” My fingers burn as I snuff out the fire.

  “Lou, your fingers — let me get some first aid cream,” Cindy says.

  “Not necessary. I’m fine.” I take a knife and dig the excess wax from the candle holder, then reset the candle in the menorah. “Go ahead, Blair. Finish the prayers.”

  Cindy makes an ice pack for me nevertheless. The guests and I sit ourselves around the dining table. The long table is covered with platters of fruits, vegetables, and prime cuts of Leanie-Lean meats. Cindy emerges from the kitchen with the pièce de résistance — a heaping tray of steaming, crispy latkes. We all applaud. Especially this ex-Good Humor Man.

  The oldest among us look the happiest. I watch guests in their sixties or seventies eagerly place three or four latkes on their plates at a time. Blair, however, quivers with distaste as she reluctantly spears one small potato pancake, then cuts it in half and quickly shoves the other half onto her husband’s plate.

  I take three, plus a generous helping of the sour cream Cindy has managed to conjure up. If there are any latkes left over, I may ask Cindy if she’d wrap some up for my father. The aroma… it’s as if I’m standing in my mother’s kitchen again. I dip a latke in the sour cream and take a bite. It’s just as delicious as I remember. Maybe more so this year, because this is the taste of hope, of fresh beginnings.

  The room is quiet. The only sounds are the crunching of latkes and faint music outside, coming from somewhere down the road. It gets gradually louder, as if it’s coming closer.

  That first latke goes sour in my stomach.

  The approaching music is the false cheer of a calliope.

  CHAPTER 6

  I glance around the table. The pit of my stomach begins to churn. Some of the others hear the music, too. I see the anticipatory dread in their faces. And worse, accusation, aimed at me like a blowtorch blast.

  Maybe the truck is going to another house? The calliope gets louder. Cindy catches my eye. I feel sick. I desperately shake my head, struggle to wordlessly convey I don’t know a thing — this has nothing to do with me…

  I hear the truck come to a halt, then the clatter of doors being shoved open, men grunting beneath the weight of equipment, disposal pots banging as they’re unloaded. It’s all so familiar. Only I’ve never heard it from this side of the equation before.

  Blair spits out the piece of latke and hides it in her napkin. Her act unfreezes everyone else at the table. Plates clatter and water glasses spill. Guests rush to the kitchen garbage disposal or bathrooms. Many will force themselves to vomit; I’ve seen all this before.

  But it’s too late. Already the Good Humor Men are smashing in the door. I stay at the deserted table, eating my last two latkes. I know better than to try to hide the evidence of my “crime.” I have my credentials on me. Perhaps by confronting these men calmly, as a colleague, I can convince them that nothing illegal has occurred, that Cindy obtained a special religious exemption for using the oil… even though no such exemptions exist.

  An axe blade bursts through the front door. The first Good Humor Man enters my cousin’s house. And my world is plunged into queasy, inexplicable nightmare again.

  It’s Mitch.

  ‘Aww, fucking hell,” he says when he sees me. “I didn’t want to believe you’d really be here.”

  He can’t be here. This is thirty miles south of the edge of our district.

  “You — you have no enforcement powers here,” I say. “You don’t have… what is your authority to make a raid outside our district?”

  “My district, you mean. Didn’t you just quit us?”

  “Yes. I did.” The anger and hurt in his voice hit me like burning arrows. But again I ask, “What is your authority?”

  “Special dispensation,” he says slowly, his eyes tracing the trail of latkes crushed into the carpet. Brad and Alex, Jr. enter, Brad carrying the dragon, Alex bowed beneath the weight of the clumsy disposal tubs. Brad sprints into the other rooms to round up the guests. His eyes don’t meet mine. But Alex’s eyes do. He stares at me with the shocked, stung look of a little boy who has caught his father making love to a mistress.

  “The local crew gave us permission to operate on their turf,” Mitch says. “When I explained it might involve a case of corruption inside our unit, they didn’t have any choice but to say yes.”

  Brad ushers the guests back into the dining room. Several of them stare fearfully at his flamethrower. Grown men playing soldier. Why didn’t I ever let myself see it before? Because I was one of the toy soldiers.

  Someone is hanging back in the hallway. Brad grabs her arm and pulls her roughly into the room. It’s Blair. The poor thing wipes flecks of vomit from the corners of her mouth.

  “Brad!” I shout, standing. “Don’t be rough with her. With any of them. It’s not necessary.”

  “Lou?” Cindy stands at the edge of the crowd, an oven mitt still dangling from one hand. “Lou, these are… friends of yours? Can’t you make them go away?”

  “Cindy, please believe me, I don’t have anything to do with this —”

  Her voice is plaintive, quivery, almost childlike. “Can’t you make them go away?”

  I turn to Mitch, my oldest friend, hoping I’ll find some pity in his weathered face. I don’t see what I’m hoping to see. He jerks his head toward the door. “Lou. Let’s you and me step outside a minute.”

  Out on the porch, Mitch whirls on me, his face distorted with fury. “Lou, how could you do this to me?”

  I’m momentarily wordless, stunned that he can view himself as the injured party. He sticks his contorted face close, too close, to mine. “Do you realize the position you’ve put me in? What the fuck do twenty-five years of friendship mean to you? Don’t you have a single goddamn thing to say for yourself?”

  “Who was the informant, Mitch?”

  “What?”

  “Who told you I’d be here, and that latkes would be on the menu?”

  My unexpected question deflates his anger. Fury gone, he looks like a graying sixty-six-year-old man again. “Hell, I can’t tell you that. You know better than to ask that, Lou.”

  I nod. He chews his bottom lip, twists the axe handle in his hands. “Lou… I don’t understand any of this.” He stares at the ground. “Why you quit. Why I found you in the middle of this crime scene. Maybe you’re hacked off at what happened the other day in Mex-Town. About me and the boys not being there to back you up when you needed us. Maybe this is your way of gettin’ even. I don’t know.” He looks up, and his voice gets stronger. “But what I do know is that we’ve been friends for an awful long time, Lou. I don’t like throwin’ friendships away.”

  “I don’t either.”


  “Good. I’ll make you a deal. Come back inside with me and help finish up the raid. Let’s pretend this quitting business of yours never happened. Agree to come back to the unit, and I’ll explain to the other guys that this was a sting operation, that you were on the side of the angels the whole time. How about it, Lou? Can we make these last three days just disappear?”

  Becoming a Good Humor Man again… that rates dead even with necrophilia and cannibalism on my “to-do” list. But I’d eat my own arm if it would save my family from humiliation and financial hardship. “I’ll rejoin the unit, Mitch, on one condition. You let the others know this was all a mistake. The three of you leave those people in there alone. My family and all their guests.”

  His eyes fall to the ground again. He shakes his head slowly. “You’re asking too much.”

  “Why? Why too much?”

  “That should be goddamned self-evident, Lou.” His fury reawakens. “Brad and Alex saw what those people dumped in the toilets. They watched those girls in there make themselves throw up. What do you expect me to tell them, huh? How am I supposed to keep their respect, their allegiance, if I tell them some bald-faced lie? It’d mean the end of the unit!”

  “You’d be lying to them anyway,” I say as calmly as I can manage. “You want things between us to go back to how they were? I’ve told you what I need.”

  His half-hissed obscenity barely reaches my ears before he swings his axe in a violent arc, embedding its blade in one of the porch’s wooden posts. “It’s impossible!” he shouts. “Why are you being such a suicidal asshole? Those people in there — they’re going down no matter what you do. You can save yourself, save your reputation, and they’re going down. Or you can sacrifice yourself, like some fuckin’ idiot, and they’re still going down. So what’s the goddamn difference, Lou?”

  He doesn’t see it. He doesn’t see the difference, and that is terribly sad. “‘Those people’ are my family, Mitch. If you can’t see a difference between my betraying them and my standing with them… then our friendship is done.”

  I see something break behind his eyes. I’ve done it. I’ve stepped into the abyss.

  I follow Mitch back into the house. Cindy’s guests are doctors, engineers, and architects. Most of them have probably never even been issued a traffic citation, and now each of them will have this century’s scarlet letter permanently affixed to their record and reputation: “G” for Glutton. Their eyes beseech me for mercy, as though I control their fates. But I’m plummeting through the abyss right alongside them.

  “Collect their health system cards,” Mitch says to Brad. He indicates me with a twitch of his thumb. “His, too.”

  I open up my wallet and remove the laminated card. Sixty-eight years old. I’d better pray for good health.

  Cindy watches me hand over my health card. Her last shred of hope that I might be able to stop all this dies. Tears begin flowing down her sunken face.

  I can’t bear to see it. “Cindy, I did all I could. I tried…”

  My pleas die in my throat when I see her look to Will and Blair. They haven’t lost only their health cards today. All chance of government grants for child-bearing just evaporated. Without those grants, their hopes for children have evaporated, too.

  Oh, God. I’m dragging the future down with me. I need more than anything in the world to comfort them. But Buddy, Will’s father, blocks my way.

  “I never did like you,” he says in a clipped voice, “you son-of-a-bitch.”

  His fist in my abdomen comes almost as a relief.

  Home again, home again…

  The cedar trees that line my driveway look like towering wraiths in the moonlight, monoliths waiting to fall and crush me. My floodlit house beckons to me, an oasis of sanity and safety. It’s an illusion. None of this will be mine much longer. Without the lease payments from the city, denuded of income, it won’t be very many months until the bank forecloses and I’m put out on the street.

  As soon as I open the front door, it hits me — the sickly sweet odor of clove cigarettes. He’s not wasting any time.

  “I know you’re here,” I cry, turning on all the light switches within reach. I’m on my own — no Mitch or Brad to back me up; no friendly San Bernardino police.

  “I was not making any attempt to conceal myself, Dr. Shmalzberg.” The Ottoman steps into the light, a grinning battle tank wrapped in emerald silk. “I trust you enjoyed a pleasant holiday meal with your family?” His voice, falsely sweet as poisoned syrup, wraps itself around a brief chuckle.

  “You should’ve left my family out of this.” I pray my voice isn’t as tremulous as it sounds inside my head.

  “I ‘should have’? Ahh, but Dr. Shmalzberg, you ‘should have’ cooperated more fully. Actually, I must tell you that I am very pleased with the way events have unfolded. There is great pleasure to be had in squeezing the testicles of the arrogant. And you were arrogant, Doctor. Did I not tell you that your life was no more secure than a house of playing cards? But did you pay heed to this most considerate warning? You did not. And so I applied a slight tap of my fingertip to a card on the bottom tier.” He makes a fluttering, falling motion with his fingertips. Glowing ashes from the tip of his cigarette land on my waiting-room chairs, etching black burn marks in the upholstery.

  “You’ve accomplished nothing,” I say, sounding unconvincing even to myself.

  “Nothing?” He raises half of that single thick eyebrow which borders the top of his face. “I have rendered you more receptive to bribery by severely decreasing your ability to earn income. At the same time, I have made threats of personal harm more credible.”

  “Bribery?” I say, grasping desperately at any tangent which might give me time to think. “So you’re still willing to discuss payments?”

  He takes a long, slow drag from his cigarette. “Although I personally would not extend the graciousness of an offer of remuneration to you a second time, my master has directed me to demonstrate the benevolence of his regime by granting you the opportunity to efface your initial misjudgment. However, please understand that even such benevolence as his is not infinite. A second error on your part will free me to apply my… discretion.” His black pupils gleam with anticipatory happiness.

  “How much money are we talking about?”

  “That depends entirely on the value of your service. Accurate information which leads me to the recovery of the Noble Blessed Troubadour’s preserved remains — information which will be validated by my continuing custody of your person — will result in a substantial reward: either a wire transfer of forty-thousand golden dinars from my master’s treasury, or a less valuable but more immediate cash payment of one hundred thousand of your American dollars. The actual handing over of said remains will increase your reward by a factor of three.”

  “The dollars — you have them on you?”

  The Ottoman grins broadly. “The voraciousness of your greed is pleasing. Be assured that the precious dollars are most readily available. I take it that you will be providing information which will allow us to take a productive journey together?”

  I could drive with him to Graceland. I could turn him loose on the King’s heirs, then take his filthy reward money and run. Maybe it would be enough for me to start over with again.

  But I can’t do it. Selling the Elvis to Graceland was one thing — I did it to pay for Emily’s treatments. But selling him to a foreign government… the “Noble Blessed Troubadour” is as much a part of America as Mount Rushmore. No matter how powerful the French Caliphate has become, no matter how rich, they don’t have the right to tear away a chunk of America.

  I won’t be a traitor to my country. And I won’t betray my father again. I already sold my birthright once.

  The stiffening tendons of his hands provide evidence of his growing impatience. “I can do better than provide information,” I say. It’s crazy, this ember of a plan. It’s reckless and crazy and painfully disrespectful to my wife; but it’
s the only plan I can think of.

  “Better than information… I can provide the Elvis.”

  “I thought as much, Doctor.” The hands relax. “How much the better for you. Lying is a blot upon the soul.”

  I walk into my study, the Ottoman a step behind me. I unlock the cabinet where I keep Emily, only sliding it far enough open to reveal one of her two vacuum jars. I remove it and hand it to him.

  He slowly turns the jar in his enormous dark hands, peering into its depths like a fortune teller consulting a crystal ball. “I am greatly surprised. To keep such a valuable possession in such an unprotected hiding place…”

  “I wanted to keep it close and handy. I had no reason to think anyone besides my father knew it existed.” He’s keeping both the vacuum jar and me in his field of vision. I’ve got to get him to turn away, just for a few seconds, long enough for me to find something to clout him with.

  “This artifact… it is not all that I expected.” He holds the jar higher, closer to the dim overhead light. His voice grows colder. “My sources told me I would be acquiring between ten and twelve pounds of the Noble Blessed Troubadour’s substance. I judge this container to hold no more than six pounds.”

  “Then your sources obviously knew next to nothing about liposuction procedures. Any old-time practitioner would’ve told you that six to eight pounds is the maximum volume of fat that can be safely removed during a single procedure. And Elvis only had time for one session before he died.”

  He sets the vacuum jar down on my desk. “I must warn you, Doctor… it is not necessary for me to rely upon your word alone that the tissues preserved within this jar are, indeed, the tissues I have sought. My master thought it prudent to provide me testing equipment. The hair of the Troubadour was less difficult to acquire than the fat has been. Having a few strands in my possession provides a fool-proof insurance against wasting my ruler’s treasure upon counterfeits.”