by Farris, John
“But it was you, Virg. You’re the one who put us up to it that day. If any one of us is responsible for Buster’s death—”
“—it’s the boy who took the handbrake off so’s the truck would roll. And that boy, I clearly recollect, was Layne Bannixter.”
—
Her name was Chyla. She was thirteen and lived with her aunt and six other children in the all-black section of Cromartie, Tennessee, known as Sandy Cross. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, and although the house was small, her aunt Earline and the man she had lived with off and on for most of her adult life and who had fathered five of her six kids kept it in good repair. There were three bedrooms and a screened porch on the back, which was also okay for sleeping except during the three cold months of the year. Chyla shared a mattress and a bureau drawer with her cousin Jonella, who was her age less one day. They got along fine. Both Chyla, who was close to six feet tall, and Jonella played basketball and were active in church work at Cosmopolitan Africa Baptist on South Fourteenth Street.
Chyla didn't know much about her mother except that she had been smart in school and played the guitar. Also she was in frail health most of her nineteen years. Some white men who were probably Kluxers had got hold of her one terrible night and raped her, and although the shock addled her and ruined what was left of her health, still she lingered long enough to give birth to Chyla. Chyla had her late mother’s agreeable disposition and her unknown father’s build: long arms, high shoulders. She had a lovely toffee color and thoughtful ways. But she could show a spark of temper, too, especially when Jonella was being inconsiderate.
“That’s about the twentieth time you be getting up to go to the bathroom! What’s the matter with you tonight, Jonella?”
“Ain’t gone to no bathroom.”
“Well, what’re you jumping up and down for then? You’re worse than having fleas, you know that, girl?”
“Hush up and I might tell you something.”
Chyla turned over on her side on their common mattress and drew her knees up defensively. “You don’t be knowing a thing I wants to hear this time the night.”
“Said he was coming this way for sure,” Jonella muttered. “Oh, Lord, you are gone make me nothing but crazy! Who was it said?”
“Billy B. Bone, that’s who.”
“Billy B. Bone, what do that scoundrel know?”
“Billy B. saw the man, last night at the playground! So I just know he’s gone be coming around here tonight.”
“How could you know a thing like that?”
“I get flashes, that’s how. You know I be’s getting psychiatric flashes.”
“Here you go again.”
“Didn’t I tell you the day before we played we be winning the Church League basketball tourniquet? Didn’t I say how many points we win by?”
Chyla groaned and wrapped her pillow around her head. She was dozing, finally, when Jonella kneeled on the mattress again and shook her.
“Go away!”
Jonella shook her more forcefully. “Listen!”
Chyla sat up and heard it, distantly: cheercheer—
“Oh, so what?”
“I’m gone get me some of his ice cream, that’s what. I got me a quarter, you want some, too?”
“Huh-uh. You knows you can’t buy no ice cream you wants to put in your mouth for no quarter! Have some sense.”
“Yes you can! And it’s the best ice cream in the world. That’s what everybody says.” Jonella began to tickle and wheedle. “Come on, girl, I don’t want to be gone all by myself.”
“What time is it anyhow?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll go with you, but we gots to put Squatty on a chain.”
“Now you’re talking.”
The two girls dressed and crept off the porch and requisitioned the family dog, part pit bull and part Rottweiler. They could hear the Cheer-i-o ice cream truck approaching on Twelfth Street, loud enough to wake up the whole neighborhood. But they encountered only a few other kids, also stealing out of their houses with grins and small change. They looked at each other secretively, knowingly, but nobody said anything. Chyla gave her close-cropped head a scratching and yawned, but she was beginning to be caught up in the furtive excitement of meeting the ice-cream man. With Squatty along, she knew they had nothing to fear.
The Cheer-i-o Ice Cream truck was all lit up—in fact it threw off light in a cold and ghostly nimbus. By the time they reached it, kids were on both sides of Twelfth Street, waiting almost reverently as if they were lined up for communion at church.
What is this? Chyla thought, but her heart was pumping madly and she was salivating.
The truck stopped but the monotonous musical invitation continued. The driver’s door opened and Buster Dockins stepped down to the street. He was dressed all in crisp, frosty white, even his bow tie. There was frost like sequins in his frowsy red hair. His eyes were manic with delight.
“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”
They all hollered back at him. “We scream for ice cream!” It was a party. But just for kids. No curious or indignant older people had shown their faces anywhere. The neighborhood dogs were quiet, too. Only Squatty whined and fidgeted on the chain Chyla was holding.
Buster Dockins shaded his eyes and stood on tiptoe and looked around at the assembly.
“W-who’s going to be first tonight?” he said.
The slight stutter was disarming. But Chyla observed a light in his eyes that gave her heartburn. She pulled on the dog chain, pressing back into the dark beneath a fragrant old sycamore tree. The movement attracted Buster’s attention. His sausage lips worked ecstatically. He tippy-toed to the side of his colorful truck and unlocked a door.
As soon as he opened it the air turned blizzardly white around his head; he looked, momentarily, lifeless as a snowman. Then he reached into the freezer compartment and with a flourish pulled out a large ice-cream bar in a pink and gold wrapper. He turned and headed straight down the street.
Chyla knew from the instant he turned that he was coming to her. She reeled in Squatty until his front paws were inches off the ground, and stood tall and quiet, her eyes on Buster Dockins. There were spit bubbles at the corners of his mouth frozen like delicate crystal spheres. Everything about him was dead zero cold, and she started to quake when he was still six feet away.
“J-just what you’ve been b-been waiting for!” Buster Dockins said, and the air was filled with the tiny glittering balls of spit. Up close she could see he had a wry neck, with a big lump under one ear. He held out the ice-cream bar to Chyla.
Chyla hesitated. Then she snatched the ice cream with her free hand, afraid to touch any part of the Cheer-i-o man. She turned to the awestruck Jonella and said, “Pay him.”
“N-noooo,” Buster said, grinning. But there was that light in his eyes, and her heart was fulminating from emotions she seldom allowed. Hate. Rage. “F-first one’s on me.”
“Then hold the dog,” Chyla said calmly to Jonella. She peeled the wrapper off the ice-cream bar and saw that it was in the shape of a tall man with squared-off shoulders like her own. The figure was executed entirely in chocolate except for his vanilla-pale face. So. A white man. She didn’t have to ask herself which one. Saliva wormed its way down her chin. She looked up at Buster. Chyla recognized the light in his eyes now. She’d been hearing about the source of that light since she was old enough to attend church, and now she knew it was actual, the preachers hadn’t exaggerated one bit.
“G-go ahead,” Buster Dockins said eagerly. “Get even."
Chyla nodded. She put the ice-cream figure between her lips, then her teeth.
She bit off the head.
Scrumptious.
—
After looking for him for a couple of days, Layne caught up to Kent Bafler in a Nashville neighborhood. He was going door-to-door with his religious tracts. He didn’t recognize Layne, and acted a little edgy when Layne identified himself.
&nbs
p; “Old buddy, it seems we have a problem.”
Kent patted a folded handkerchief at his wispy hairline. It was ninety-six on the street. His tie was old-fashioned. His squalid shoes were giving out. His eyeglasses needed repairing.
“The heavenly Father will joyfully provide help to the honest-hearted. ”
“Five of us are dead,” Layne said. “You must have heard. Last week it was Toot Embry and Virg Constable. That leaves you, me, Papa John.”
Kent Bafler looked him in the eye, mildly, looked away. He blotted more perspiration. “Only those armored in spirituality can hope to stand fast against the machinations of the Devil.”
“I don’t know if it’s the Devil or not. I don’t know what’s going on, frankly. But we have to fight this thing. We need your help.”
Bafler nodded. “Of course! You know I’ll pray for you. But you must give up the ways of the sinner and embrace Jah Jehovah.”
“Prayer’s not going to do us a bit of good. Come down out of the clouds, Kent.”
“In one night were 185,000 Assyrian soldiers slain by just one angel sent by the almighty Jehovah.” Bafler opened the bulging leatherette case he was carrying. “Here. Read. Save yourselves. We were all sinners, but I enlisted in the kingdom and I have no fear.” His hands were slippery; he dropped several of the tracts and a paperback book on the sidewalk. “I’m not afraid of the wicked spirit forces! What is death but a profound sleep; afterward Jesus has promised, those deserving of the kingdom will be resurrected. Deliverance is assured for His servants!”
They both heard the chimes of the ice-cream truck. Bafler’s head jerked up. He stared wildly down the street.
Layne, his own nerves half-shot, took a long look and said, “Mayfield Dairy. Kent, let me buy you a drink. We both need one. Maybe if we talk about this, we’ll come up with something—”
“No, no, I have to get on with my work in Jah Jevohah’s name. It was—it was nice seeing you again, Layne. If you see any of my family, tell them I’m well and happy and witnessing every day, and soon peace will reign on the earth for those who are not deceived. Tell them, tell them I will not die, none of us who keep the faith will truly die!”
—
When Angela rolled over and felt for Layne in the bed, she didn’t find him. There was a cool breeze coming through the open windows of their bedroom. The blinds were half-raised. She sat up and saw him on the window seat naked except for boxer shorts. He was smoking, a habit he’d given up more than a year ago. He was gazing at the street, the bottom of the hill lit by a couple of high lamps at either end of the whitewashed barricade. Sycamores and elm trees threw jigsaw shadows across the asphalt and the front of the house, vacant for the summer, on a terrace opposite their own house. She put a hand on his slippery shoulder and he looked up.
“Tonight again?” she said.
“I just can’t sleep.”
“Thinking about the West End Bunch?”
“Yeh.”
“There aren’t any answers, are there?”
“I don’t know of any.”
“Come back to bed.”
“I’ll just finish this,” he said of the cigarette in his hand, but by the time he had drawn it down to a half-inch stub Angela was curled up on her side in the middle of the bed, fast asleep again.
Before lighting another cigarette Layne went out and down the hall to make sure MaryLyn and Toby were locked in their rooms. Then he stationed himself again on the window seat, eyes on the street, hearing nothing but the light wind, the ticking of the clock, Angela breathing deeply.
Cheerio. Cheerio.
Layne’s head snapped up. His mouth was dry and tasted bad from the cigarettes. He glanced at the clock. It was twenty-five after three.
CheercheercheerCHEEEERRRRRRR-IIIIIIII-OOOOO-OOOOOOO.
“Hello, you bastard,” Layne whispered.
The ice-cream truck was parked at the foot of the hill, wreathed in icy fumes.
Buster played the enticing tune again.
Layne heard Toby at the door of his room, rattling the knob. Crying.
“Let me out! I want to get some! I want to get some!”
MaryLyn, too, struggling to unlock her door. “Daddy, it’s the ice-cream man!”
“Damned if I don’t know it,” Layne muttered, staring at the foggy truck, hairs standing up on the back of his neck. He’d been almost nose to nose with a green mamba on a tree in southwest Africa, he’d stared down an angry man with a sjambok in his fist, but the fright he’d felt on those occasions couldn’t compare with this.
Toby was trying to break his door down with the stool he stood on to reach the top shelf in his closet. But Angela didn’t stir in her bed.
“Show yourself,” Layne said through gritted teeth. “I want to see you, Buster.”
“CHEEEEERRRRRRIIIIIIOOOOOO!”
Glass shattered at the back of the house.
Layne was up and running barefooted with the keys to the bedroom doors. He opened MaryLyn’s door first. She had smashed one of her windows with something, tied a knotted sheet to the bed.
He couldn’t get near the window because of the broken glass on the floor. He turned and ran down the stairs and out the front door in time to see MaryLyn, in her nightshirt, flying across the front lawn toward a footbridge that crossed the creek.
Cheercheercheercheercheer
He caught up with MaryLyn on the other side of the footbridge, before she could clamber up the steps to the street and the edge of the billowing ice cloud that surrounded Buster Dockins’s truck. She was wild in his arms, her eyes blank as ancient pennies.
“LetgoletgoIwant—”
Layne slapped her. She went rigid, then sobbed, spraying his face with tears.
“I hate you!”
“No, honey, no, stay away from the ice-cream man! He wants to hurt Daddy!”
“Noit’sthebesticecreamintheworldandyou’readirtyLIARliarLIAR!”
Layne carried her back across the footbridge, looking up at the street. No more Cheer-i-o. The frigid cloud was dissipating; he could barely make out the shape of the truck as it drove slowly up the street. In moments it had disappeared.
He stood on the lawn with the limp girl in his arms, staring up Oak Hill. So now he knew something he could use to stay alive a little longer while he laid plans to get rid of Buster.
With the kids under lock and key again in Toby’s room he got Angela up. No easy matter. She had slept as if drugged, oblivious to the uproar, but that was probably part of it, he thought.
He spent an hour and a half explaining it to her, as dispassionately as he could manage.
Angela stared at him as if he were mad. Then she tried, pitifully, to humor him. Then she wanted to call her parents. Patiently Layne went through the whole thing again. Angela broke down in hysterics.
By the time she was over it, Layne had her and the kids packed.
—
He was back in town by five the next afternoon. He didn’t like the way the house felt with Ange and MaryLyn and Toby gone. But they would be safe at his parents’ place outside Cincinnati. And he had at least four hours until it was dark.
Some of that time he spent in his well-equipped basement workshop welding nipples to narrow copper tubes, a lot of tubing, and constructing his nets of flimsy chicken wire. The bumper on the front of his Silverado pickup was chrome steel, an inch and a half thick. He needed only to do something about protecting the windshield before he drove across town to pick up the most essential items in his arsenal.
—
“Suppose he don’t show tonight?” Papa John said. He shifted his bulk in the chair he’d pulled up to the living-room windows and sighed. “The fool things we do when we’re kids. What did Virg threaten you with if you didn’t do like he said and take the brake off Buster’s truck?”
“The usual. Pain and humiliation in equal measure.” Layne rubbed his jaw, thinking about the day it had happened. Though his hand was well scrubbed, it still smelled faintly of
the storm sewer where he’d been working the last hour before midnight.
“Buster’s truck was parked up there in front of Jo Denny Battle’s house. But he didn’t have the wheels turned against the curb like he ought to have done.”
“No.”
“So Virg gave him a five to make change, and when Buster had a handful of quarters and fifty-cent pieces, Virg pretended he’d been shoved by somebody and rammed a shoulder into Buster. And some of that silver went rolling down the hill with Buster in hot pursuit.”
“That’s when I climbed up in the cab of the truck and let the brake off. At least I had sense enough to make sure there weren’t any little kids standing behind it.”
“What you figured on, the truck would just roll down the street and into the barricade, with no harm done; except Buster would’ve been dancing up and down on the sidewalk fit to pop a blood vessel, and everybody having a good laugh at his expense.”
Layne nodded. “About the size of it. But I never checked where the front wheels were, so the truck didn’t roll straight. Buster was down on his hands and knees trying to fish some change up out of the storm sewer. I don’t know why he never heard us yelling. Maybe he was a little deaf. Maybe his hand got stuck in the grate. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve wished—”
“You didn’t show good judgment, but it was an accident.”
“Because of me, five men are gone. Somewhere.”
“Think it’ll help if old Buster gets us, too? Let’s keep our minds on the business here.” Papa John tipped his head back and swallowed the last of his Michelob. “It’s early yet. Think I’ll just tap another of these. How about you, Layne?”
“No. Help yourself,” Layne said, staring glumly at the street, which was well lighted in the vicinity of the barricade. He and Papa John had concealed the booby traps well. But then there was no telling just what they were dealing with.
Papa John heaved himself out of his chair on the third try and walked ponderously through the dining room, the chandelier shaking overhead. Layne uneasily checked his watch, then turned his head and called, “John? Any of your brood mad enough to want to kill you?”
He heard the refrigerator door open. Papa John laughed.