Ice-Cream Headache

by James Jones

  The rest was an anticlimax. Everybody, even the crowd, knew it was over. For the next three games the Baron played grimly. Several times he staggered and nearly fell, and twice he, and John with him, went down on one knee. But it was all only a formality. And then it was finally over. Knowing what he must do, now, he walked slowly over to the umpire’s stand on the little porch in front of the grandstand to congratulate his opponent. And almost physically sick with excitement and emotion, the nerves in his arms and legs tingling with it, John dropped the racket and balls on the porch in beaten defeat and started around the garage to where the tree house was, out in back of it, to do what he always wanted to do when he felt like this. He wanted to play with himself. It was then that his mother’s voice followed him from out of the kitchen, where she was fixing the refreshments.

  “Johnny! Johnny! What are you doing out there, falling around like that?”

  “Playing,” he said grimly, his face a mask of German iron control, as became a Prussian.

  And as he went on to the tree house, his peepee throbbing in his pants, behind him he heard his mother say laughingly to the Wisdom Club bridge lady who was helping her:

  “Playing! Oh, well, you know how children are. They’re always playing some little game or other when they’re by themselves.”

  The Ice-Cream Headache

  This one’s really a bonus. Not even conceived except as a vague brief note when the Introduction for this collection was written, it was intended originally as simply another of the fairly uncomplex childhood stories mentioned earlier. Then it got away from me. The “near-but-not-quite-incest” thing, a much commoner experience in America than commonly admitted, got taken over by the failed-family theme and an attempt to understand the curse of family alienation and where it came from to so many of us in those years. And that, of course, changed everything. I think it’s better for the change. It was begun several months after Go to the Widow-Maker, that much misunderstood novel, was finished and handed over: ten years and three novels later than the last group of four stories, three of them also childhood stories; and it took a little over two months to write.

  THERE WAS NOTHING SO Faulknerian about the town, but there was sure something very Faulknerian about the family. Tom Dylan thought this gloomily. He was sitting on his stopped bike with his empty paperbag down his back and looking across a wide lawn through the faint predawn light of another summery day at the dark un-lived-in shell of his grandfather’s columned old colonial mansion on West Main Street. The house was a part of his paper route, but where lights would soon be coming on in the other big houses on West Main no lights would be coming on in there. Well. He was meeting two girls in there at around three o’clock this afternoon. One of them was his sister. The thought made his heart pound. Almost seventeen, tall and lanky, with a hawk’s nose, he pushed off with his right leg and rode the bike on in toward the middle of the town.

  It was one of those Middlewestern villages in western Indiana which, in this modern age of 1935, liked to call themselves cities. Tom grinned. It had a courthouse with a square of grass around it from which the old trees had been cut down and around that a square of business buildings variously labeled 1880 or 1904 or some such year to indicate their date of construction. It all looked Faulknerian enough. But the town had not suffered in the Civil War as Faulknerian towns had suffered, because Indiana was Northern. This particular town had not suffered since the Campaigns of Mad Anthony Wayne for the Indiana Territory which meant, since the town had not even existed then, never.

  The family was different. The family had suffered. Or thought it had. Which was almost as good. Certain members of it like his mother believed certain members of it, themselves, had suffered greatly. And that was about as good as real suffering and might even, in a pinch, be taken for real suffering. What the Dylan family had suffered from was, mainly, pride. Good old human pride, the stuff that made the spheres revolve and the world go round, as humans liked so much to say of it. But which also caused more stubborn bitchery, hardheaded meanness, hate, destruction, murder and organized mayhem than could be found anywhere else in the animal kingdom all put together. Good old old-fashioned American, Middlewestern, kill-me-but-I’ll-never-budge pride.

  Tom stood up on his pedals and began to pump up the short steep hill to the town square. He figured he was the only person in town, except for the librarian, who had ever even heard of this guy Faulkner. Certainly there were no other return dates stamped in the books the librarian had suggested for him. On the square he turned right toward the newsstand.

  That house. Tom could barely remember his grandfather as he had been in life. What he really remembered were the pictures and old tinplates of him as a younger man that they had in their house and in the old albums, and these became confused with the real old man. The grandfather, dead now in the 1930s, dead in fact since September 1929 just a few weeks before The Crash which would have ruined him had he lived but which instead ruined only his heirs, whom he left extremely well-provided-for, could be traced as the source of the Dylan pride and a lot of the Dylan suffering. Of course, both might have extended back into the past beyond him and so have been carried forward through and after him into the future like relay runners carry and pass a baton among them, Tom thought. But in 1935 nobody in the family knew or remembered or cared about anyone before him, so they were not equipped to say. If they had been, it would not have helped them. As far as they were concerned, it had begun with him. Even the two grandchildren knew that much. He loomed over them all like stern, giant, frock-coated apparition, waving—or perhaps signaling—to them from back there, back there in the past from on the other side of that Big Crash he had been unable to save them from.

  Tom checked in at the newsstand, turning over two extras to the proprietor, a mealy-mouthed little man who was nice in spite of himself. He had been a tall, dark, ramrod-straight man, the grandfather, with heavy dark eyebrows, a long flowing black mustache, hard black eyes, (but that was those pictures, now, wasn’t it?) and long sleek black hair which he wore long to the nape of his neck and only had trimmed in the dark of the moon, which accounted, he said, for why it stayed black, which it did, up to and after his death at the age of 72. He looked in fact not unlike, looked extremely like, the photos of Wyatt Earp taken in Tombstone at the time Earp had shot and killed the terrified Mexican horse-handler after the famous full count of three, Earp the great Earp, whom the grandfather almost certainly had admired, Tom suspected, at least in his youth and younger married years. Which were the only years that counted as far as his four sons were concerned. If he had perhaps mellowed later, that could be of no damned help to the already warped family.

  It was rumored in the town that the grandfather was a quarter Indian, a rumor he enjoyed and did nothing to dispel. The story was that his father’s father as a young man, while on a staples-buying trip to Evansville for the family farm in the lower backwoods riverbottom part of the county, had come upon a young and near-dead Cherokee squaw in a ditch by the side of the road during the time of the Removal and had brought her home in the wagon with the staples, later to marry her after she healed and grew up a little. Unfortunately, this was not recorded in the family Bible since the family Bible was only begun with the grandfather’s father, after the old family Bible was burned with the old family farmhouse. But the grandfather, always a somewhat secretive man, never denied it. Certainly the burning of the old family Bible was a fact. Certainly the grandfather looked Indian. And this, plus the fact that he had twice been Sheriff of the county before turning to the Law as a profession, had caused him to be looked at with a certain amount of awe and respect and even fear in the town, as he, quietly and ramrod-straight right up into his seventies, walked its streets tall and stern and reserved and stately. The town had grown modern in The Boom of the 1920s and by then even sported a Country Club, but its moderns still could not entirely forget the town’s raw wild wide-open days in the 1890s when it had been an oil-boom town and the gra
ndfather had been its Sheriff. In his later years, when he “had perhaps mellowed,” he maintained and cherished a considerable collection of brass knuckles, bowie knives, pepperpots and pistols which he had taken away from roustabouts and drunks during his two terms as Sheriff. The town, even from the deep-porch, bungalow-style veranda of its modern 1920s Country Club, could never quite forget that. Neither could the two grandchildren forget it, since in his elder years he had used to take the collection out and let them play with it. Tom wondered what had ever happened to it. Probably his lawyer uncle had it. Or rather, his uncle’s widow—his lawyer uncle’s latest, last widow. He—and through him she—had wound up with just about everything, including the old house.

  Outside the newsstand it was full summer daylight now but almost nobody was out and moving yet. Tom grasped his bike’s handlebars with indecision. He didn’t want to go home now. His mother would just be up, and slopping up the breakfast in her sloppy robe in the kitchen. His father would be climbing out of bed coughing, with the slow movement and huge paunch of a dedicated drunk, getting ready to go down to his tiny veterinarian’s office. And Tom didn’t want to see his sister now, this morning, under normal home breakfast conditions. When he thought of her, and her friend, his heart pounded again. He would see her later in the morning when his mother was busy with her eternal, and complaint-ridden, housecleaning.

  The other boys who had had to come back to the newsstand for something or other were dispersing on their bikes toward their homes. About the only thing open this early in the morning were the two jerrybuilt little shack restaurants on North Street behind the bank. They opened early for the five o’clock shift at the chemical plant. Tom headed his bike there. After he had eaten a hot greasy hamburger and drunk a half-pint milk bottle of chocolate milk, he left his bike leaning against the brick of the bank building and after looking around sneaked in between the two shack restaurants to a high weedgrown wooden wall. Pulling out two seemingly solid planks he slipped behind them and was under a head-high wooden truck ramp that belonged to the lumber yard which occupied the interior of the block. Closed in on three sides by wood and on the fourth by the poured concrete beginning of the ramp, just enough light filtered in through the planks to make it possible to see. He called this his thinking place. He had four others scattered around town. Putting his back against the concrete and squatting on the gritty cinder and earth floor, he pulled his knees up to his chin and sat looking at a smooth white stone he called his spitting stone. Thomas Wolfe had the same kind of crazy nutty family in his two books but he didn’t get the same kind of sense of doom in his family that this guy Faulkner got into his. After a minute a truck rumbled up the ramp shaking cinder dust down on him and he began to practice spitting at the stone. That house. Mansion. He couldn’t get that big rich empty mansion out of his mind. Today. Usually it didn’t bother him. For some reason it did today.

  But it was his own four stalwart sons who were most unable to forget the grandfather’s days as Sheriff, Tom thought. As small boys they had used to watch from hiding places as he would walk sternly up to some drunken oilfield roustabout, take from him his pistol he had just fired in jest down the crowded Saturday night street and pistolwhip him over the head with it before escorting him to the jail. They couldn’t forget it because he had employed the same style and methods to raise and educate his sons. He was Protestant, sternly religious, and a teetotaler. And like any proud, serious man of his generation he meant to bring his sons up the same way. To spare the rod was to spoil the child. It was a common enough philosophy in America in 1900. It was practically universal. Sternly, like any of the twenty other most successful men of his period in the town who now owned the large homes with the big lawns along East and West Main Streets, he applied it. Why, then, hadn’t it worked? With his sons. It had worked with the sons of his friends. And they still had the big houses to prove it. What was the fatal flaw? Where the error? Four sons, and four failures. Tom could almost feel himself feeling the grandfather’s horrified thinking. Four sons, four drunken weaklings. A hundred percent reading, that. It seemed highly unlikely that anyone would have four failures out of four sons simply by accident. Perhaps unfortunately, he did not live to see the total working out of their collective failed destinies, but it was almost certain that he had already suspected and anticipated them. That almost surely was why he put so much of his hard-earned life’s savings at the Law into Insul stocks for them, to take care of them the rest of their lives. Having—he believed—rectified, or at least covered up for, whatever the mistake was he had made in raising them or the fatal flaw he had transmitted to them in his seed, he could die peacefully. And in fact the last words he was supposed to have said were, “I’ve left you all well-provided-for.” Then he turned on his side with his face to the white hospital room wall and tiredly, even almost blissfully as one of his sons was to say, sighed his last. Some people were just lucky, another, more bitter of his sons was to say, later; because The Crash was not long in coming.

  The two little grandchildren were not in on any of this, since they were hustled outside by their weeping mother and not allowed back in the white room until “It” was over, on the theory that the sight of death might scar their precious little souls. But they had speculated and whispered between themselves, and of course they heard all the endlessly repeated family stories about it all, that were told over and over. Their father maintained that had grandfather lived he would have anticipated The Crash it and sold all his “Instul Stocks” for lots of money. They knew that this disease and demise had to do with his “prostrate.”

  It was Tom’s own personal theory that he, the grandfather, was almost certainly very highly oversexed, had frustrated and stifled that part of himself in him, and so instead had just taken it out on his four sons, in meanness. People did that. Only, how did you know with people like that from a generation like that that was all so stuffed up shut and ignorant. He doubted his grandfather had ever even heard the word oversexed. And yet there was something very sensual about him, especially in those older pictures of him, when he was younger. Anyway, whether he was or not, all of his four sons were, and so were his two grandchildren. Tom did not think it unreasonable to assume the old man had passed it on—from wherever he had gotten it.

  So there they all were: the four brothers—now—and no longer the four sons, and the wives of the three of them that were married, and the two small grandchildren, brother and sister, all crowded together around the deathbed in the white room in the town’s doctor-owned “Sanitarium.” It was just about the last time that they would all ever be together again at the same time. The last time would be after The Crash itself.

  Even without the upcoming Crash, Tom mused, and their sexual heritage whatever it was, they were perhaps ill-equipped to be on their own. He worked his mouth for a minute and then jetted spit at the white stone and hit it dead center. Perhaps the grandfather should never have insisted they all become veterinarians. But in the 1900s who could have guessed that the horrible smoke-belching horseless carriages of that decade would turn into the beautiful, stream-lined, carbon-monoxide-producing Stutz Bearcat of the 1920s. The grandfather was a lover of fine horseflesh and in those earlier decades kept a beautiful pair of beautifully trained carriage horses as well as his own fine saddle horse in his own carriage house behind the big house and wide lawn on West Main Street. The four boys had been taught to take care of horses since early childhood. What could be a better or more honorable profession for them. The grandfather refused to believe that fine horses could ever be replaced by unthinking, unfeeling mechanical monstrosities. It just simply wouldn’t happen. And since it wouldn’t, the idea was that after their training as vets he, the grandfather, would lay out the capital to set them all up in top-flight, very high-class livery stables in various county seats across that part of the state. And of course back then, in the 1900s, the strict social hierarchy which places lawyers first, doctors second, dentists third, and veterinarians fourt
h and last, so that no one would invite a dentist or a vet unless nothing else was available—that unbreakable social structure had not yet been constructed and imposed upon Middlewestern America. How, in 1907, could the grandfather have anticipated that.

  The rest of it was done by the cars. As, in the 1910s, the automobile industry grew and as large, elaborate and expensive livery-stable establishments dwindled and finally disappeared in the ’20s, it was one thing to be the rich fashionable owner and sole proprietor of a big livery stable, and quite another to be the little man who doctored people’s cats and dogs and was without the necessary training or permission to doctor people and whom nobody invited. In a way, Tom mused, spitting morosely and hitting off center this time, in a way an era had ended in America then: When the grandfather had “read Law,” he had not been required to go to any school or college and had merely apprenticed himself to a local judge; and the local doctor in whose Sanitarium the grandfather died had learned his trade by simple trial-and-error practice, while his wife sat with him in the operating room on a stool and from a Surgeon’s Manual read to him where he was supposed to cut. By the 1920s such easy going methods were finished. Still, in the 1920s with the grandfather ladling out the money from his apparently inexhaustible supply and having no necessity to do anything but drink at the Country Club and flirt and maybe play a little golf, it was not so bad being a vet with a dwindling livery stable. But The Crash would take care of that, too.

  They had not all four actually become veterinarians, in fact. Just the first son and the third son, Tom’s father. The first son didn’t really give a damn what he became, since all he really cared about was gambling, drinking and whores. Tall, ramrod-straight like the grandfather and ice-faced, he was the unmarried one, the bitter one who later had called the grandfather smart, or at least lucky, for having died when he did. He and the grandfather hated each other with cold implacability. He had wound up with his own dwindling—and neglected—livery stable in another county seat over near Evansville, while spending all his serious moments gambling in Evansville or Cincinnati. But the second son had rebelled. He did not like animals, and never had. Especially horses. When presented with his older brother’s tools, instruments and textbooks and ordered off to vet’s school he had run away from home and apprenticed himself to a drunken carpenter and cabinet-maker in a nearby town and become a drunken carpenter and cabinet-maker himself. Though he was still underage the grandfather did not try to bring him back. Instead he publicly disowned him as his son and disinherited him. A lean, gnarled, twisted man, bent from leaning over his cabinetry and carpentry tools, he and the grandfather loved each other as implacably as the grandfather and the oldest son hated each other. But this did not help make it possible for them to speak to each other during the next twenty years, and he did not get reinstated to his inheritance until the last weeks of the grandfather’s final illness, so that he had very little time to get used to it or enjoy it before The Crash wiped it out and forced him back to being a drunken carpenter again. But it was the fourth son, the “baby”—whom the other three insisted had been “babied,” all his life—who was the lucky one. By the time he was old enough to go off to vet’s college, inheriting from the third brother, Tom’s father, the tools and textbooks the third brother had inherited from the first, the grandfather had seen his mistake—if not about the low position of the veterinarian in the emerging social scale, at least about the emergence of the automobile. He was shipped off to law school, from which he graduated to become the grandfather’s law partner. After the grandfather’s death he inherited the law practice. But even that could not help him when The Crash came and everything was in Insul stock. After getting involved in a bootleg liquor deal while running for District Judge the very next year, he was forced to leave town. He went, leaving his wife behind him, but this did not stop him from taking with him everything else left of the family inheritance that was not nailed down, including the grandfather’s pistol collection, ownership of the family farm in the riverbottoms, and ownership of the big house on West Main Street, just how nobody ever quite knew. Mainly it was in fees for having done the legal work of the inheritance for all of them.