Ice-Cream Headache

by James Jones

  It had all started a week ago, exactly one week ago, when he returned from CMTC camp at the Army fort Fort Harrison in Indianapolis. He had brought home with him a brand-new pornography collection.

  There had been no chance that his father would spring with the money to send him—or Emma—to summer camp this year, just as he had not done last year either, or any of the four years before that. So Tom had signed himself up with the Civilian Military Training Corps, taken the physical exam and gone to Indianapolis at government expense. It was the first time he had been away from home on his own and he had learned a lot, mostly from the older boys in CMTC, who were all quite happy to break him in to life in Indianapolis. One of the first things he learned was that downtown in the low dive section where the whores were were certain shops, usually disguised as antique shops, which specialized in selling pornography under the counter. This pornography was not like the badly smudged photos and comic-strip books you could buy at the shoeshine shop in his hometown. This pornography was real modern-day glossy photographs, of real live people, well composed and well focused. You could see everything, and the people were doing just about everything. Since he did not go to the whores himself (he had never been with a woman yet and anyway he was afraid of catching a disease) he had spent every dollar he had, and every dollar he could scrape together or get his father to send him, on the pornography.

  It was Emma who had found it. How, he didn’t know. She had come into his room and lain on his bed while he was unpacking, but that had not bothered him. The stuff was all in a plain brown paper envelope, and he had put it quietly into his handkerchief drawer to wait until he was alone to hide it. He had already picked out his hiding spot even before he got home. In this rented house the never-used trapdoor to the attic, papered over the same color as the ceiling, was in his room; by pushing that up he could slip the brown paper envelope up onto a couple of rafters. This he had done, after Emma left. Two days later when he went to look for them again, three of his best pictures were missing. Furious, he had scoured her room and found them. And that was how it all had started. She had put them down among her lingerie in her underwear drawer, a stupid place to put them.

  When he accosted her, she confessed and then she started to cry. She herself did not really know how she had known, either. Something about the way his back looked as he so quietly put the envelope in the drawer had told her, given her a hunch, that whatever it was it was something sexy, something dirty. Later when she looked and found the envelope gone, she had gone automatically to the little attic trapdoor as the hiding place.

  It had never occurred to Tom that girls might have dirty thoughts, sexual thoughts, too, the way boys did. Girls to him had always been objects of desire, basically anti-sexual creatures, and therefore unattainable objects of desire, after which he chased eternally and never reached. Almost all the boys he knew played with themselves, and quite openly, and sometimes even in groups. It was understood that it was dirty and therefore fun, that if parents or grownups caught you, you would be given a whipping or punished, but they all did it anyway. But it had never occurred to him that girls might.

  Such, he soon found out, was not at all the case, or not Emma’s case. Caught, and in his power, she went further and confessed she and Joan had been doing things like that, looking, and touching themselves, for years. Then, stopping her crying and looking at him shrewdly, she had offered to arrange a meeting with Joan. Or, failing that, if Joan balked, to arrange for him to come upon them unexpectedly and catch them. But she hadn’t had to. Joan had agreed quite readily enough.

  On his bed Tom felt flushed all over. They had done nothing together yet, he and Emma, only looked. But Tom had some ideas about things he wanted to do, scenes out of his new pictures, when he got the two of them together. Feverishly, he fell asleep.

  When he woke it was after lunchtime, Emma had clearly already gone, and he was still feverish. Still on the bed, he stretched himself. He felt hot all over. His face was flushed, and even his eyes felt hot behind their lids. If that was the way sex made you feel, then it was not at all all that pleasant. But when he thought of what was in store for him this afternoon, he felt hotter still. He got up a little woozily and unlocked the door.

  As he did, his eye fell on the letter lying on his working table, his study table, and he paused. It was a letter of commendation from the General commanding the Army fort in Indianapolis. The night before breaking camp to go home Tom had been on guard duty, and there had been a cloudburst. The General’s two small children had taken refuge from the downpour on the ring platform under the roof of the fort’s boxing arena, and when the cloudburst filled the natural hollow waistdeep with water that couldn’t run off fast enough, had become marooned there. On the second or third tour of his ten o’clock shift Tom had heard them calling and, flashing his light down there, had found them. The little girl was crying. Not knowing whether to call the Corporal of the Guard for such a thing—afraid to really, embarrassed to—and already soaking wet anyway, he had waded out to them and, feeling both magnanimous and a little heroic, had carried them both back, first one, then the other, through the cold waistdeep water to the safety of the bleachers. The boy of ten, who already had about him the authority of at least a Lieutenant Colonel, had asked him his name. Next day the letter had been delivered to the Captain of his company for him. More important, he had slept the rest of the night, if you could call it sleep, in his wet clothes on his bare cot under his one blanket, shivering and shaking, since there was no provision for the Guard to change its clothes. He had been sure he was going to get a bad cold, but there had been no after-effects at all.

  That had been exactly eight days ago, Tom mused woozily, looking at the letter. He knew it didn’t really mean anything, but even so he had thought of having it framed. It was his only trophy he had brought home from Indianapolis. He had been runner-up in the boxing tournament, and he had been second choice for a scholarship to a military academy. If the damned letter had arrived two or three days earlier, he might have—probably would have—won the scholarship. But if he had, his damned father in his total inertia would never have come up with the minimum tuition money for him to accept it. He turned and went downstairs.

  His mother had gone out to one of her club meetings. He had not had any lunch. He had ten or fifteen minutes to kill before three o’clock. He went to the refrigerator. As heated-up and excited as he felt, he did not want to eat anyway. In the icecube freezing compartment there was a square quart bucket of strawberry ice cream and he sat down with it at the silent kitchen table. In three minutes he had eaten so much of it so fast he had a piercing headache, exactly as if somebody had struck him between the eyes with a sharp-pointed hammer. He had to quit and let it subside before he could finish the rest of it. It made him think of his grandfather. How the old guy was always feeding them ice cream like that, when they were little, and then laughing at them. He chuckled. Maybe the old son of a bitch did it on purpose, some kind of sadism. “Mark of Cain.” “Mark of Cain” was right, all right. Tainted blood!

  He was surprised to find that the ice-cream headache did not go away when he went out and got on his bike to ride across town, instead it got worse. Never had he felt like this before. He had been pretty excited and hot at times, but never like this. But then never before had he ever had a prospect like this before him, two whole girls, who would do anything, or practically anything. His ears felt fiery. His eyes felt like two hot burning coals in their sockets. And he noticed that when he exhaled through his nose, his breath actually burned his upper lip. When he rode in and out of the shade into the hot September sunshine, it actually made him feel faint. But he felt faint all over with excitement anyway.

  It was a long ride, ten minutes, from where they now lived back across town to the high-class section where they used to live. This seemed symbolic to Tom and he snorted. He did not try to go through his own old driveway and backyard where strangers lived now, but rode on around the block an
d came to his grandfather’s deserted house from the front, up its driveway which ran across the porticoed front, but which also ran around to the back. He half-hid his bike by wheeling it up the two steps and inside the latticed backporch. The girls’ bikes were not there, but that didn’t mean anything. They would have left theirs at Joan’s. Maybe they were already there, he thought secretly, cozily, already waiting for him, whispering and rustling and tittering and touching themselves. He went around to the basement window he knew was not locked.

  It was while he was sliding up the sash of the basement window that he realized he had a bad stitch in his side. He had not thought he was riding that hard or that fast, but every time he took a deep breath now it hurt him. Once inside the window, which opened onto the cellar stairs, the column of air that flowed past him from the depths of the cellar cooled him off a little. He shivered twice violently. His head still throbbed with that damned ice-cream headache which would not go away. Slowly he climbed the stairs into the kitchen.

  Here it all was: the old high-ceilinged elegant rooms with their moulded plaster mouldings and their mirrors still fastened to the walls behind their wooden or plaster columns or above the fireplaces. The cut-glass chandeliers still hung from the middles of the rooms. Only the furnishings, the rich old rugs, the wall tapestries, the elegant old furniture, were missing. Tom went from the sunroom with its wall of glass windows to the east to catch the winter morning sun, through the diningroom whose long hand-waxed table was gone with its twelve chairs, through the parlor itself into the hall where the big winding staircase was. Across the hall from the parlor was the old music room, empty too.

  He leaned his hand against the huge carved newel post. They would almost certainly be upstairs. One of the five bedrooms on the second floor still had an old bed in it intact with mattress. Emma knew where it was and that was where they would be. Excitement ran all through him. He had never been so hot. He started up the curving stairs and then stopped. He was so excited he was weak, and his knees were shaky. His breath was coming in short panting gasps, and wherever his breath flowed against the skin of his face it burned. He hesitated a moment and then sat down on the stairs and leaned back against the wall to catch his breath. Could sexual excitement, just plain sexual excitement, do all that to you? make you weak in the knees and out of breath? He guessed it could. He listened hard, and was sure he heard whispering and movement upstairs.

  After a minute he got up again. He had to get up there, and right away; now. He had never been so excited and so hot in his life. This time he made four steps before he had to stop. Then he sat down again. His breath coming in short gasps, he rested his head back against the wall and stared at the huge wall painting two floors tall where it leaned above him at the bend of the stairs with its 18th century colonial figures in their knee britches and long dresses. He remembered how he had used to believe, even though you could feel with your hand the plaster of the wall under the painting, that the painting was a secret panel which opened onto a secret corridor and rooms in the middle of the house. It was when the cock-hatted, high-coiffured figures in the painting seemed to move, and then to actually change places in it, that he realized he wasn’t just only all excited and sexually hot, he was sick. Tom Dylan was sick.

  He blinked, and the figures seemed to sort of move, reapportion themselves and go back to their original places. He felt woozy and half-drunk all over, and when he stuck out his lower lip and exhaled his hot breath up across the plain of his face, it actually seemed to sear his nostrils and lower lids. And when he shook his head the headache was still there, even stronger although the ice-cream which had caused it had long since been ingested. So was the stitch in his side still there, but now it was on both sides at once.

  Somewhere, he did not know just where, the sexual heat and sexual excitement he had felt had ceased to be sexual excitement and become something else, a raging fever apparently. How could that have happened? It confused him. The two seemed to have fused in him, run together and into each other, so that he did not know when he was feeling sexual excitement or a fever, or both. He was as weak as a kitten. And the weakness wasn’t excitement weakness, it was sickness. Oh, no! he thought with a kind of silent inward wail of despair, Oh, no! There they were, up there, waiting for him. He was sure he had heard them. Two girls, ready to do anything he wanted. So near. He had waited for this a long time. He had waited for it all his life!

  He struggled to his feet, took two more steps up the stairs and had to sit down quickly. How could this have happened to him? How could it have? Could it have been that cold wet night in the shivering Guard tent? But that had been eight days ago. Should he call to them? But what good would that do? Could they help him up the stairs? and place him on the bed between them? They wouldn’t. And by some adult instinct in his boy’s psyche he knew that if the opportunity was lost now, it would never come again. Girls were notoriously fickle about their sex. The chance was here and it had to be seized now. And yet he couldn’t.

  God. Was it going to go on like this forever? Runner-up in the boxing tournament? Second choice for the scholarship? Always a bridesmaid and never a bride? Was it some kind of punishment? Sitting on the stairs, he shook his drooping head, and noted that his ice-cream headache had gotten even worse.

  Besides, he was scared now. He wanted to be home. He was really sick. Slowly he stood up, and looked up at the fortress heights of that second floor which he had not been able to scale. Then he looked down the length of the staircase, and began to beat his retreat back from the high point of his advance. He had made it up ten steps. The staircase, and the bannister which he clutched, as if they were made of flexible materials seemed to sway back and forth weirdly with each step down.

  He made it to the basement window and out and around to his bike. Maybe it was a punishment, a bad punishment. Maybe he was going to die, as a punishment. Pictures of his grandfather in his youth rose up around him, those old tintypes, with the hard eyes, and the mustache which hid the mouth so you could not see if it was gentle or stern. But you knew it was stern. Because in the movie his grandfather striding down Main Street on Saturday night in his Western hat had begun to pistolwhip over the head a roustabout who, bleeding, turned out to be Tom’s father while Tom, a very little boy, hid behind the bank building beside the filling station and watched. All he wanted now was to be home, as fast as possible. Home with his mother. Yeah, a lot of help she would be. A lot of help. The white cardboard placard said in bold black letters below the stern eyes, Wyatt Earp mustache and long black hair, EDWARD DYLAN FOR SHERIFF. Across the top in smaller letters was printed TRUST YOUR LAW. The right eye and eyebrow turned slowly into one of the women’s crotches from one of his pornographic pictures. Slowly it winked at him. The woman’s face smiled at him from above it. Then it began to revolve. Then the left eye and eyebrow turned into another one from another picture. The widow’s peak at the hairline became a third, the mustache over the mouth a fourth. Then the entire picture became covered with them, revolving, revolving.

  The bicycle seemed to be driving itself. Breasts, crotches, delicious shaved armpits, delicious unshaved armpits, sixguns, mustaches, Western hats all revolved around each other now, turning, merging, separating, disappearing, reappearing, glaring and then dimming as great lights flashed. Tom shut his eyes, but the pictures did not go away anyway. His grandfather’s placard had faded away somewhere. Then it came back, zooming to hugeness with a screaming noise. Punishment! Punishment! Tom kept his eyes closed. The bike pedals felt light as feathers. Then he heard Doctor Sachs’s voice say somewhere, “I think it’s passed.” He opened his eyes and saw Doctor Sachs’s haggard face staring down at him in the bed. It appeared to be his mother’s and father’s bed, in their bedroom. His mother, haggardfaced also, was standing down at the foot of it, looking at him too. He could see them, but he could not understand them.

  “You’ve had several pretty bad days there, boy,” Doc Sachs said with a tired smile. “A lot of pe
ople don’t get over double lumbar pneumonia.”

  Tom did not understand him. He could only breathe in the very top part of his chest without it hurting him. But he felt he had to try to explain it to them anyway. “It’s not that,” he said clearly. He knew what he was saying, but his mouth did not feel as though it was working right. “Nothing’s that bad. Nothing is ever that bad. There’s nothing in the world that’s ever that bad. And they should never have let him do it to them. Guilty like that.”

  “What’s he talking about?” he heard his mother say.

  “Don’t know. Mumbling something about guilt,” Doc Sachs said. “He’s still pretty delirious, with the fever.”

  Tom looked at his mother. She was so awful. The poor thing. She had cared, he guessed, from her face. Suddenly the woven wicker floorlamp with its faded pink shade appeared in front of and over her but he could still see her through it like the two images in a double-exposed photographic negative. “And I’ll fix it for you,” he babbled. “I promise I will.” He made a claw of his fingers and clawed the air with them, as if combing something. “I’ll buy you a new one. A whole brand-new one if you want it. When I make the money.”

  “What’s he talking about now?” Doc Sachs asked.

  “I don’t know,” his mother said.

  Tom found he didn’t know himself. “A new one,” he insisted. If only she would understand. Or anybody. Guilt? Guilt?

  “He’ll be all right now,” Doc Sachs said, and sighed, getting up. “He’s a tough kid. All the Dylans are tough. He’s probably got a helluva headache, right now. That fever and all.”

  A Biography of James Jones

  James Jones (1921—1977) was one of the preeminent American writers of the twentieth century. With a series of three novels written in the decades following World War II, he established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern soldier’s life.