We were told in our first days there that we were all going to go to a top class university and a professional career. Our form teacher said,
“This school has the reputation of being the best in England, and your destiny is to make a professional career after going to university. Most of our Upper Sixth leavers go to Oxbridge.”
It meant little to us. The targets he was telling us were seven years away and we were eleven years old. Half a lifetime. And where is Oxbridge? It’s not in the atlas I looked for it in. The other thing was that he expected us to fit into some mould like we weren’t people, but meat pies on a conveyor belt.
There are four of us in our gang. Walrus is a fat boy. He’s not built like Billy Bunter, but he is overweight, lazy and a bit of a bully. We all are some of the time. One of our targets is the very wimpish Three T’s, who we usually call Tease. We also target the weaker teachers. There are others as well. Take The Blob, for example. A couple of months ago Walrus and me were going through the park to our bus stop and the Blob was ahead of us walking quickly to his bus stop. When he walks he keeps his knees together like he’s wet himself or needs the toilet. When he runs it looks like a silent movie. Walrus and me were behind him, poking fun at him and he was ignoring us and Walrus got angry. He suddenly screamed ‘Banzai!’ and ran at The Blob with his arms outstretched, jumped on his back and they crashed to the ground. When I caught up The Blob’s nose was running with snot and blood. Walrus was playing the Japanese kamikaze pilot. He’d crashed into his target and now he was dead, lying on his back across The Blob’s back. I was killing myself laughing. I hauled the Walrus away – a minor triumph because he’s big and I’m a runt. We went on our way to catch the bus, leaving the snivelling Blob in our wake.
I don’t know why we do this sort of thing. I suppose it’s to do with being a part of something rather than a loner like Tease or The Blob. I mean, when you’re bottom of the bottom class and not even good at sport you’ve got to compensate somehow.
We thought Tease was no good at anything. He did badly in lessons (though I did worse) and wasn’t part of any group. Like the Lone Ranger without Tonto and the glory. He got his nickname because his parents had him baptised Timothy Thomas Taylor. He was the butt of loads of bad mouthing and bullying, but mostly he was totally ignored, sent to Coventry. I can’t even remember a teacher asking him a question in class, so they obviously thought he was worthless too apart from Olly who made him the book monitor. Even so, this story is mainly about him.
Lots of our teachers write textbooks. It’s funny, but the school buys them in by the ton for the greater benefit of the boys and the greater pay packet of the masters. I remember the impression one such volume made on the head of the lad in front of me in a maths class when he wasn’t paying attention. Mr Marsh, known as The Bog, always wandered around with the book he’d written as his favoured assault weapon in the Battle Against Ignorance. Book met head and won the battle.
Schoolboys are cruel animals, especially in gangs, groups or whatever. One day stands out especially. Before Registration began Tease had been reduced to tears. Walls is my best friend. Well, his dad is a wholesaler in the city, and I reckon Walls had some of that breeding in his blood, because he sold Tease as a slave to his big brother’s class. I found out later that Tease had been shoved into the narrow space behind the classroom door and gobbed on by a group of his new owners. Perhaps being ignored wasn’t so bad after all! He didn’t turn up for first lesson. He missed dodgems.
Samuel Cohen is a really nice guy for a teacher. We all call him Sid on account of him being Jewish – it’s rhyming slang. He teaches French and had we know he will help us if we go to him individually – he’s a caring teacher. We treat him badly when we’re in class though. He’s no good with boys whose ambitions exclude mastering the French language. And we are three gamma, the lowest of the low, with a built in ambition to do little and do it badly.
Our desks are ancient, so old that some of the graffiti carved onto them is in hieroglyphics! They have lids you can lift to reveal the sweet wrappers, dust, and old chewing gum of every age since the Romans. Sometimes you might find the odd book in there. The lid slopes gently, perfect for rolling pens and pencils when there’s nothing else to relieve the droning of the masters. Beyond the hinge is a narrow strip of desk top, with a groove for non-rolling writing sticks and a hole for an inkwell that doubles as an oubliette for our sweet wrappers. We learned about oubliettes in Happy Jack’s History class a couple of years ago before he had his breakdown. Anyway, these desks are attached to bench seats by what looks like the runners of some abandoned sledge. Together the desk and bench make the dodgem, and we each have one.
Of course, fairground dodgems have metallic floors to run on and that wire mesh ceiling to give an electric charge to power the motor. In Sid’s classroom the motor is our legs and the power is our imagination. Whenever Sid turns to use the blackboard to explain grammar like the future perfect (he always tells us ours won’t be) that’s when three gamma swap places in the room taking our desks with us. And just like the fairground, the object is to avoid crashing. It’s strange that no one’s been caught. It’s as if he knows it’s happening but doesn’t want to be bothered giving us detentions. There’s not many who would choose to spend more time with us than they have to. Or perhaps he reckons boys will be boys and lets us get away with it. I hope not – it’d be less fun.
Walls is tall for his age, and beanpole thin. We always call him Walls, not Bricks or Sausage or Ice Cream, just Walls. It was Walls who introduced me to nitrogen tri-iodide, a distant relative of TNT. It’s easy to make, and if you get to school early enough, after the cleaners had finished in the labs, but before the technicians and teachers arrive, you can whip up some tri paste to use during the day.
On the same day we sold Tease to Big Walls’ class he arrived back with us after missing dodgems, into time for English. It’s hard to get away with anything in John Oliver’s lessons. He’s a strict unjust bastard, no mistake. But Walls had some tripaste, and you couldn’t let it dry out, because then it becomes really unstable. Apparently dry tri can explode at the touch of a feather.
‘Olly’ Oliver is a man of habit. In fact he’s predictable and even obsessive about routines. On the other hand he’s unpredictable and unreasonable when his routine is disturbed. That’s why we thought it was strange at the start of the year he came late week after week for this lesson with us on Tuesdays. A rumour began that he had a free period before us and spent it screwing one of the other queens on the staff. Later on we found out that he had a games lesson before our English period. It didn’t stop the bonking rumours though. Shower room romps are common in school if the rumours are true.
Anyway, Walls had a few minutes to spare before Olly arrived. He set to with the explosive, smearing some on the door frame and then some on Tease’s bench where it made contact with the girder frame when he sat down. We were doing Hamlet and Walls went through the stack of books quickly, with tri painted on the cover of every seventh copy. Then to finish off his supply he put tri paste on the soles of his shoes and the same on some other boys’ shoes. He went back to his place, walking on his heels, and stood, as we all had to, for the teacher to come. Tease arrived and, as he always used to, he scurried to his place without raising his eyes from the floor two paces in front of him.
A couple of boys with seconds hands on their watches whispered a countdown from twenty seconds to ten. Ten seconds later Olly walked in – on schedule as always. He swung the door which shut with an expectedly loud bang which Olly didn’t seem to notice.
“Taylor, the books.” An abrupt command from an English teacher with, maybe, thirty thousand words in his vocabulary, but obviously not happy about wasting a verb on Tease. Tease shuffled to the book stack unaware of the prank which Walls had set up.
Olly sat on the corner of his desk, arms folded, right over left and under, and his legs wrapped round the table leg, left over right and behind, like a bloody reef knot. He expects speed so Tease was almost hurling the books onto our desks. On the seventh desk there was a louder impact noise. Olly looked at Tease who stared at Hamlet, each accusing the other of doing something wrong. Tease looked like a boggle eyed baby, unsure whether the squeaky toy is fun or a threat.
“Get on with it, Taylor.” A tired, I’ve-seen-it-all-before tone.
The fourteenth book banged down and Tease’s face began to crumple into pre-blubberdom. Books twenty-one and twenty eight sent him beyond tears to terror and though his eyes pointed down at the parquet he was focussed on the imaginary hole he wished he could hide in.
“Get out of my classroom, boy! You’re wasting our oxygen in here!” Olly never raises his voice. He always raises a smile from those of us who enjoyed persecuting Tease. Tease shuffled out, head sunk into his chest, and missed the second lesson of the day. Olly didn’t invite back until five minutes from the bell. The lesson had been uneventful apart from occasional minor explosions from the soles of forgetful boys’ shoes. Then Tease was summoned.
“Someone call that insignificant pestilence back in”, Olly had said. More smirks from the nitrogen tri iodide gang. Tease had been crying, but wasn’t now. He guessed correctly that injustice was about to be done to him by a man who rarely changed his mind. Mr Oliver sentenced the innocent boy to detention for three nights, an hour each one. Talking in the gang at dinner time we all decided that this wasn’t fair, but none of us would go to Olly and own up? He was well known for over the top punishments and, to be honest, part of the little fun we had in his lessons was to see how severe he would be over minor matters. Like all bullies we are cowards; we stayed mum.
Tease stayed away from school for two weeks after that. Strange, but we kind of missed him. It was as if our purpose as a gang had been taken away from us. We still broke the rules when we thought we could get away with it and made jokes at the expense of boys we knew wouldn’t retaliate. Olly found other victims for his sarcasm. It wasn’t the same though. It was like an endangered species had died out and, even though we were responsible, we regretted it.
Thursday two weeks later he returned. It was only afterwards that I remembered that Tease looked different. He wasn’t staring at the ground as if it was going to turn on him as well. He held his head up and there was a trace of a smile too.
Thursdays begin with whole school Assembly in the main hall. Olly always played the piano. That day we paraded in. It was the same routine, neat rows of students trooping to the neat rows of chairs with the form teacher sitting at the end. We sat. The headmaster arrived and we stood. We sat again. He read notices that we took no notice of, usually comments about behaviour and then announced the hymn we were to sing. We stood – again. This Thursday we were to sing what he called ‘the school hymn’. It wasn’t though, because it was written centuries before the school was thought of, by Isaac Watts and even he wasn’t the original author, because it was cribbed from some psalm. I get detentions for cribbing work, but Watts got famous for Oh God, our help in ages past.
The sound of twelve hundred boys getting up isn’t loud, but when they get ready to sing, or rather to mumble a hymn, there’s so much throat clearing and coughing it’s like dredging the Suez Canal. Olly strode over to the piano. He extended his arms like he was a concert pianist to get his cuffs out of the way and started the intro which is always the first line without the words. If we had been singing we would have managed to get out ‘Oh God’ before the explosion. Pandemonium broke out like I’ve never seen it before. Chairs got tipped up, pupils ran in all directions and the head vanished into the wings of the stage. There were only two people still sitting. Olly had his hands on the keyboard of the piano which had had its front and back splintered. He was crying and gazing at his scorched trouser legs. The other person still sitting was Tease, and a look of intense satisfaction filled his face.
The greatest prank in the history of the school was by someone who was the greatest wimp. We never saw Tease again after that Thursday. Olly didn’t stay much longer either. He left at the end of term, a broken man.
Friday, 30 November 2007
Late Night Fright
As I lay there thinking about how to get to sleep the thought of sheep failed to work its magic. I had been woken so many times during the previous night – perhaps I should count them instead, but no! Thinking of waking is wakening.
I decided instead to try to remember the classics of English literature that had to be learnt by heart when I was a nipper. And then it came to me,
“'Fear not, till Birnam wood Do come to Dunsinane:' and now a wood Comes toward Dunsinane.”
For ages people have wondered about hidden meanings in Shakespeare, and only I realised that Macbeth was being chased by copse.
Mustn’t dwell on it, move on. But wait! If Mr. Potato Head was suspected of a crime would they send for the Peelers?
And what if the spiders were found guilty of killing flies, would the bluebottles go after them? The sheep were loitering in the meadows, the cows had broken into the cornfields, and the boys in blue were all asleep. The refuse truck was being used as a getaway vehicle and the filth was following it! Nee Nah Nee Nah.
A ten shilling note for the first person to commit the crime of thieving the plumbing, or to put it another way, Old Bill for taking the copper!
This is driving me crackers! Why does my head ache so much? Sleep, please, sleep! I can’t think of sheep now because the pigs will get them. Aaagh!!
But I’ve got to sleep now – work tomorrow.
I could resign. Hand in my notice. Even claim against them, because it’s stopping me sleeping, working at Bobby’s Cheese Shop.
I decided instead to try to remember the classics of English literature that had to be learnt by heart when I was a nipper. And then it came to me,
“'Fear not, till Birnam wood Do come to Dunsinane:' and now a wood Comes toward Dunsinane.”
For ages people have wondered about hidden meanings in Shakespeare, and only I realised that Macbeth was being chased by copse.
Mustn’t dwell on it, move on. But wait! If Mr. Potato Head was suspected of a crime would they send for the Peelers?
And what if the spiders were found guilty of killing flies, would the bluebottles go after them? The sheep were loitering in the meadows, the cows had broken into the cornfields, and the boys in blue were all asleep. The refuse truck was being used as a getaway vehicle and the filth was following it! Nee Nah Nee Nah.
A ten shilling note for the first person to commit the crime of thieving the plumbing, or to put it another way, Old Bill for taking the copper!
This is driving me crackers! Why does my head ache so much? Sleep, please, sleep! I can’t think of sheep now because the pigs will get them. Aaagh!!
But I’ve got to sleep now – work tomorrow.
I could resign. Hand in my notice. Even claim against them, because it’s stopping me sleeping, working at Bobby’s Cheese Shop.
On the Edge
The wind ruffled his hair. He shivered as the cold cut through his inadequate clothing. Stupid, really, to leave his coat in the house, but it made little difference now.
He looked out at the grey waves. Grey sky, grey waves, grey inside as well. It may be the season of goodwill and all that, but he felt that nothing could lift his spirits now.
The wind was becoming more powerful and the surface of the water danced manically to its rhythm. He heard the trees further along the cliff creaking as they bent away from the wind, unlike old men who bend into it.
Old man. When did that happen? Who sprung that surprise on him? He’d always been a twenty seven year old, well since he was twenty seven, but trapped in an aging body. But now he was old. His body ached from the moment he got up until he went to bed, and then it ached some more throughout the night. The chemical cocktail the doctors prescribed hardly helped. They only treated the symptoms of his complaint anyway. The problem was degenerative; there was only one way to stop it.
In the old days Christmas Day had always included a walk along the cliffs. It was a way to walk off the festive feast and an escape from the lure of possessiveness over presents. Half the presents in the morning, then the rest after the cliff walk was the rule. It gave the kids time to appreciate how lucky they were.
Rain began to fall. His ears hurt from the cold. He looked down at the rocks at the cliff’s foot and for a while watched the waves crash over them. It was like life, the way that events crash one after the other over you, but you’re still you when they ebb.
His thoughts were interrupted by a voice, his daughter’s. The kids were going to open some more presents. Time to go in.
He looked out at the grey waves. Grey sky, grey waves, grey inside as well. It may be the season of goodwill and all that, but he felt that nothing could lift his spirits now.
The wind was becoming more powerful and the surface of the water danced manically to its rhythm. He heard the trees further along the cliff creaking as they bent away from the wind, unlike old men who bend into it.
Old man. When did that happen? Who sprung that surprise on him? He’d always been a twenty seven year old, well since he was twenty seven, but trapped in an aging body. But now he was old. His body ached from the moment he got up until he went to bed, and then it ached some more throughout the night. The chemical cocktail the doctors prescribed hardly helped. They only treated the symptoms of his complaint anyway. The problem was degenerative; there was only one way to stop it.
In the old days Christmas Day had always included a walk along the cliffs. It was a way to walk off the festive feast and an escape from the lure of possessiveness over presents. Half the presents in the morning, then the rest after the cliff walk was the rule. It gave the kids time to appreciate how lucky they were.
Rain began to fall. His ears hurt from the cold. He looked down at the rocks at the cliff’s foot and for a while watched the waves crash over them. It was like life, the way that events crash one after the other over you, but you’re still you when they ebb.
His thoughts were interrupted by a voice, his daughter’s. The kids were going to open some more presents. Time to go in.
Ice Cream
It was one of the hottest summers I can remember. The sidewalks melted, the parks turned burnished brown and all the stray mutts disappeared under the trailers on the edge of town or so it seemed. Mississippi was at the centre of a high pressure system that stayed put and frazzled the whole of the old confederacy from Georgia to Texas. That’s where I live – San Angelo, Tom Green County, Texas, USA.
It was that summer two years ago that me and my brother went into business the first week of July. Vince was just over 15 and in 9th grade. I was close to 14. We were like close in age but he’d gotten to the stage that he didn’t want to have his kid brother around, while I was always looking up to him. It caused sparks to fly sometimes when he’d yell or push me away ‘cos I was busting up the image he was trying to create with his friends at school.
But this particular summer, this start of July, it was so damn hot no one was doing anything, ‘cept staying in the shade and sweating. Some guys I knew went out to the O C Fisher Reservoir to swim, but it’s a hell of a way and costs three bucks when you get there. Anyhow I don’t much like to swim. It means taking off my glasses and then I can’t see people so good.
Some folks had more to do than sit around finding shade or a swimming pool; like Dad. He worked at Hirschfeld Steel, over the west side of town. It brought in good money, especially if he did double shifts. And Mom’s job at Goodfellow Air Force Base helped too. She was a cook in the dining facility, she didn’t fly planes or do intelligence work there. But Vince and me, we just sat under the porch swatting flies and cussing the sun.
Well, on the Wednesday, I think it was, a huge truck rolled down North Marie Street and turned into Spaulding where we live. It was white and had like a yellow bar painted all along the bottom of the trailer. Huge letters on the side spelled out united in capitals. van lines was painted below that in smaller letters. It had come for the Parker’s furniture and stuff. They lived a few doors from us, on the corner of North Schroeder. I guess the truck driver came up that way so he could turn that long trailer into the road easier. Mr Parker - he was really Lieutenant Parker - was being stationed away from Goodfellow where Mom worked. They were off to Ohio. He’d been posted to Wright Patterson Base, near Dayton. Frances told us he’d been promoted. That was his daughter. She was in my class at school. We used to call her Fess after the guy who played Davy Crockett on TV years ago, Fess Parker. He was raised somewhere near San Angelo, so we all knew about him, him being local and all.
The truck got filled up real quick. I mean, if you think about how much stuff collects in a house over the years, and Fess had been around since second grade, well it’s a helluva lot of things to shift. The four guys got a big sweat on, carrying tables and chairs and the TV and everything. Every so often Vince and me we would see them stop for a chilled soda or ice cream that they’d pick up from the Town And Country Food Store over on Pulliam Street. Perhaps they were wondering whether doing their kind of work at night might be better than in this heat. I certainly thought about that, but it seemed adults don’t always act sensible like that. They get all hot doing work in daytime and sit doing nothing when it cools down. Me and Vince were like the opposite that week. Until the Parker’s furniture got took away at the end of that day.
Fess came over with her Mom and Dad that evening to say their goodbyes to my folks. They were flying out by an overnight flight. The car had gone in the mover’s trailer with the other stuff. Guess really they didn’t have too much stuff after all. Maybe that’s ‘cos of him having to be stationed every five or six years somewhere different. Well they left us a house key because the real estate people hadn’t sold it yet and the Lieutenant wanted my Dad just to keep his eye on the place.
Next day Vince and me decided, well he decided, we should go have a look at the Parker place. It was still hot and he said we might get more shade there. I don’t know why that should be the case but it was too hot to argue and I was too bored doing nothing again. Their place was like ours and all the other houses on this part of Spaulding Street. Grey painted walls with white supports for the porch. Vince unlocked the door. It was spooky the way that even with sneakers on our footfalls echoed around the empty husk that only yesterday had the Parker family living there. It was cooler than our porch, so exploring the place wasn’t going to get us a sweat on. We went into the kitchen where the yellow wood doors of the units were all still open as if a last minute check had been made to make sure every last grain of rice had been packed. It was there in the kitchen we saw the freezer, one of those long chest type freezers with a couple of wire baskets inside.
I asked Vince, why would they leave the freezer? He said maybe it was broken and I got the plug from the floor to try it. There was nothing. The low hum that tells you a freezer is looking after your food was missing. I said to Vince, it’s dead and he grunted. I said that’d be why the removers kept on going to the store for the sodas and ice cream. Vince called me a genius. I hadn’t a clue what he was going on about but he suddenly began to rush around like a wasp was in his shirt. He looked at the doorway and then the freezer and back. Then he came over to where I was and he began to look at, no, to study the dead freezer. He said he reckoned the motor was bust. I could see him looking for a way to get at the motor so he could mess about with it. Vince loved to mess about with stuff like that; he took watches apart so he could fix them even if they weren’t broke. I got to give it to him he was good at that stuff.
Vince asked me how much money do you have and I said I’d got about twenty dollars stashed away back home. So how do you fancy doubling it, he wanted to know. I said sure and he said we were going into the ice cream business. Then I understood. It was perfect. The Parker house would be like a base for us, until it got sold anyway. No one needed to know what we were doing so we could risk failing without looking stupid. But, hey, we weren’t going to fail. How could we during this heat wave?
One of the most dangerous things in my almost fourteen years was trying to stop Vince when he was setting about doing something. He usually flew into a blind rage when I did that kind of thing, but I had to know what the whole plan was in more detail. That’s the way I am; he’s a doer, I’m a thinker. So I asked him. It might have been the heat, but he didn’t lay into me this time. It was almost like he was saying to himself, hey, yeah we got time so we might as well talk. Well, talk we did. The freezer was going to stay put. The Parker place was our base and when Mom and Dad had gone to work we would go to work too. Vince told me I was going to buy the ingredients for the ice cream while he repaired the freezer. He’d pay me back his share of the cost later when we’d gotten home. It felt perfect. Except I didn’t know what went into making ice cream. So go and read what it says on a tub down the Town And Country Store, Vince snapped. I supposed that made sense. What if you can’t get the motor going and I’ve spent my money on that stuff, I wanted to ask, but Vince hadn’t met a gadget yet that got the better of him so I took it on trust he’d pull this off.
I set off back to our place while Vince began to take the casing from the front of the motor. It was hot yet I wanted to rush. I was going to make a fortune, but I was going to do it with my brother Vince. Like I said, I was at that stage that I idolized him and now he was letting me in on his scheme. I smiled all the way home as I realized this and I grabbed my stash and headed out again to the Town and Country store. I ran round the block, up North Marie and onto Pulliam Street. I’d brought a notepad and pencil so I could write down the ingredients and I went straight to the ice cream freezer.
Water. No problem. Sugar. OK. Vegetable oil. What kind? I expect I’d find something that worked. Glucose syrup? Lactose reduced whey powder? What kind of stuff is that? By the time I reached the coloring and flavoring I was writing words that some guy must have invented as a joke. Carrageenan? Curcumin? Hell, I didn’t realize this would be so hard. Just as I was going to start to look for the whey powder – I’d decided to go for the difficult things first – the store security guy came over looking kind of mean as he always did. He was a fat old man, older than my dad anyhow. He was the kind of guy that all stores try to find, especially during school vacation, because he had a deep dislike of kids. An old lady could raid the store with a shotgun and get away with it, but let a kid walk his aisles and old Stumpy would get rattled. We called him Stumpy on account of him having two fingers bitten off by a horse when he was a kid.
‘What are you doing, son’, he wanted to know. I told him I was doing a health check on the store for a school project and I’d just found something that stunk. It was stupid but the idiot always got me steamed up just by being there in that uniform that made him think he was the boss. He got the message and he began to look meaner and come toward me.
‘What you writing there?’ he asked me and I told him it didn’t concern him. He made a grab for my notebook and I slipped past him over to the pizzas and away toward the checkout. I didn’t look back, so I don’t know if he followed me or not, but I got out of that store pretty quick, and probably twice as quick as Stumpy could waddle. But now I was stuck. I had a list of stuff that I didn’t understand and I couldn’t go back into the store until Stumpy’s shift was finished in case he made more trouble for me.
I decided to go back to Vince and see how he was getting on. I thought he’d be mad with me for not getting the supplies but he was more interested in dismantling the motor. So what are you going to do now, Tony, he asked me. I said I was thinking that a library might be a better place to get a list of ingredients and told him about the strange names I’d found on the packaging. Sounds like some science fiction stuff like you get in Star Trek, he said. Yeah, it did. The planet Curcumin attacked by the Diglycerides of Fattyacids. Only Captain James T Kirk can rescue them! Fire the Carrageenan Stabilisers, Scotty! Are you still here, Vince said? I thought you were going to the library.
I’d gotten carried away I suppose, but truth is that old library is a fair distance from our place and it wasn’t getting any cooler. The sky was cloudless, like a light blue electric blanket up there. The heat pushed down on me as I stepped out the Parker place and turned right down Spaulding. The houses on Spaulding are set right back so even if I’d walked on the south side of the street there would be no shade. By the time I crossed the river at North Archer Street I was dripping with sweat. I’d gone maybe a quarter mile at most. The Library was way over on West Beauregard Avenue. I had a five mile round trip to make. I decided to take it easy and not rush. It took me forty minutes just to get to North Main Street. I’d stopped at Food Basket to get me a soda, but when I’d gotten in the store I changed my mind and bought a liter of water. Soon as I got outside half that water was over my head, in my hair and trickling down my back. It felt so good and cool and so much cleaner but I knew that wouldn’t last. By the time I reached the library the water had probably dried off, but I was wet with sweat so I can’t really say.
Where to start? I tried Encyclopedia Britannica first. It was hopeless. Stuck between ‘ice climate’ and ‘ice-crystal cloud’ was a few hundred words about the Romans and nutrition. I went to the librarian and asked where can I find out how to make ice cream. She pointed me at the cookery books. I was glad there weren’t many people there. I didn’t want to be seen looking for recipes, I reckoned it wasn’t the kind of thing boys do. Then I found a couple. They were pretty much the same as one another. And they were so simple. All those weird things on the tub in the store, they were missing entirely. I went to a Webster dictionary and looked to see what it was that the stores were feeding us instead of these more wholesome ingredients. It said, glucose 1: a crystalline sugar C6H12O6; specifically: the sweet colorless soluble dextrorotatory … Ok. So that’s sugar I guessed – did I really need to read the whole entry? For lactose I read, a disaccharide, C12H22O11, present in milk, that … It mentioned milk and that was good enough for me. I also tried whey (the watery part of milk that is separated from the coagulable part or curd that is rich in lactose, minerals, and vitamins and contains lactalbumin and traces of fat) and then carrageenan (any of a group of closely related colloids derived from Irish moss and several other red algae). Why the hell is it that a book that’s supposed to help you understand words uses words you don’t understand? Still, I got the gist that they meant sugar and milk and they were already in the recipes I found. I decided Irish moss was a no no. I’d got enough to do without going to a plant store. There was nothing like it in the recipe books anyhow.
I put the books back on the shelves, thanked the librarian and went out. The heat hit me. Inside the library was air conditioned. I’d forgotten the heat in spite of it being ice cream I was finding out about. Walking by the Concho would be easier than being out on the sidewalks, so I headed for the river. I headed back along East Beauregard and cut across to the parkland south of the river on Rio Concho Drive. It’d probably take longer but be cooler. I could go up North Bell Street from Roosevelt. I wondered how Vince was doing.
When I got back to the Parker’s old house it was locked. I looked in the yard. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s where I would’ve looked if Fess still lived there and if I wanted to see her. There’s no way Vince would be there, he’d be back home more than likely, so I set off there. He was on the porch with Sarabeth just goofing around. Sarabeth was his girlfriend at that time. His face told me I should butt out and like disappear. Oh boy was I pissed about that. I’d walked near six miles in this furnace of a day, gotten the info that he told me to and he wasn’t even doing nothing about the freezer. I stomped onto that porch and swore. I was so mad I can’t even remember what I called him. Then I shoved open the screen door and went to my room for a lay down. Seconds later Vince came storming in and started in on me about swearing in front of Sarabeth as if she wasn’t the school’s number one foul mouth. He only managed to land a couple of punches before I got past him and out through the back onto the patio. I don’t know if he followed me ‘cos I flung myself over the fence and into North Marie Street. It was the second time I’d hightailed it from someone that day. I’d no idea what I was doing but I found myself at the Town and Country Store before I stopped running.
By now Stumpy would have gone home I hoped as I went in. I got out the notebook that I’d got the recipes down in and went round the store looking for the ingredients. It was no big deal ‘cept I didn’t know how much ice cream we were going to make. I decided to add up how much the recipe I’d got cost and then see how many of those amounts I could get out of twenty bucks. There was nothing to it, except finding vanilla was a bit of a hassle. I was looking for a fairly big packet or jar, but when I saw it it was a small bottle. I mean really tiny, and it cost more than the other stuff together. Still, it would last a while and I had enough to get the other things once over again.
Back home Sarabeth had already gone and Vince was on the porch looking hot and mean. I was safe - it wasn’t my fault this time. It seemed that Sarabeth had backed out of some date at the movies or something and Vince was all sour about it. Turned out later that she did go to the movies but it was with Emilio Perez. Vince and him had a big fight about her and Vince got pasted. That’s what happens when you fight a jock that’s headed for a college boxing team. Sarabeth dumped Perez after a couple of dates anyhow showing that I was right about her all along. She was like test driving all the guys in her class.
I showed Vince the bag of stuff I’d bought, told him how much I’d spent. You’ve done good, he told me. He said he’d got the motor going in the freezer and it was like charging up to get cold enough. I asked him about boxes to keep the ice cream in and he said he took some over to Fess’s while I was gone in the morning. I knew then that our fight had been ‘bout nothing. He’d fixed the freezer and gone home instead of waiting for me ‘cos I’d took so long. I guess I had to apologize then and it was ok after that. We both of us blamed the hot day for our tempers.
We went over to our base. It was going to be another couple of hours before Mom got in and Dad was another hour after that, so we had time to make a start on the ice cream. Vince opened up and we went into the kitchen. There was a small heap of Tupperware boxes on the counter, all cleaned and ready. Vince was real keen on this, I reckoned. I unloaded the bags and put the stuff into groups, sugar, cream, condensed milk and, on its own, the vanilla essence. I got the notebook out of my back pocket and read out the instructions. Two quarts of cream, two thirds cup of sugar, a tablespoon of vanilla, a small tin of condensed milk. Pour it all into a mixing bowl and mix ‘til smooth. Transfer the whole mixture into your White Mountain ice cream maker and freeze. Shit, Vince said quietly. You got a recipe from an ice cream maker recipe book I reckon. It’s not helpful, kiddo. Still, it can’t be too hard, I reckon. Get on home and fetch us a cup and a tablespoon, he told me. Oh, and a mixing bowl and wooden spoon, he added.
This time I was excited and dashed along the street to get the things so we could mix our ice cream up. As I ran into the house the phone began to ring. It was Mom. She’s going to be late home, she said to me, and would Vince and me get something to eat. I said I wanted taco and she told me that was OK and she’d pay me back when she got home. Great, I thought to myself, I just love Taco Bell and Vince does too so there won’t be any arguing about it. I picked up the things we needed and put them in a bag, took them back to Vince. We’re going to have Taco Bell tonight, I said to him and he said, yeah, here take this and go fetch it now ‘cos I’m hungry. He handed me a twenty and said he’d start on the mixing. Well, I thought I might have liked to do that but going to Taco Bell was good too, so I went off to Pulliam Street again and got our order in. When I got back we went into the room at the front of Fess’s old house and we tried the fan which worked great. We sat on the floor and ate our tacos. I’d got some soda as well so we were doing really good there in that empty house.
After we finished I went and looked at what Vince had been doing since I went for the food. The ingredients were all mixed up well and sitting there in this big bowl. What we didn’t know was how to go on from there. Vince was all for putting it into the Tupperware and hoping for the best. I remembered the change from Taco Bell just then and gave it back to him. I said how the ice cream might not freeze properly in the middle if we just did that and then it would be a waste ‘cos no one would buy ice cream like that. I dipped my finger into the bowl and tasted the mix. It was good, maybe a bit sweet, but I liked sweet things. I asked Vince, have you tasted this and he said he had. He asked me what would I suggest and I had to think hard ‘cos I hadn’t a clue how to make the ice cream freeze right. So as he was starting to put the mix into the Tupperware I came up with an idea that we might phone someone and ask, and I asked him if he knew who might know. Then he said I was a genius, and I think he wasn’t being sarcastic, ‘cos he said we should call Grandma.
We left the Parker place and went back home together to make the call. Vince made the call and asked Grandma if she knew what to do. He told me afterwards that she had said making ice cream was a great idea and that we just had to make sure it didn’t get too frozen too quick and we would need to stir it from time to time while it was freezing to make sure the middle was ok. Vince said thanks to her and we finished the call. Then Vince saw that the answer machine had a message. Probably from one of Mom’s friends, he said, and that was the most likely thing, knowing how much time she was on the phone. We left the message as it was, waiting for her to get it when she got home.
The ice cream mix sat like creamy snow in the bowl and we carefully poured it into the plastic boxes like Grandma had told Vince. It was near five o’clock now and Mom’s usual home time. Grandma had said to stir the mix after a couple of hours in the freezer, and then again a couple of hours later after that. I hoped she was right and I was looking forward to Vince and Tony being the new Ben and Jerry. We put those tubs of ice cream into the freezer, handling them like they were eggs and making sure we spilled none of the mix. How are we going to get to stir them I asked Vince and he said he’d go to the movies even though Sarabeth wasn’t going, so he could visit the house before he set off and again when he got back before coming home. It made me a bit sad that I couldn’t help, but it wasn’t as if Vince was muscling in. The whole thing was his idea in the first place anyhow, so I said, ok good plan. We just sat a while after that and talked about nothing much.
Near six o’clock we went back home. There was no sign of anyone so we just sat and watched TV. It was going to be Smallville at seven or Terminator right now and Vince suggested we toss a coin. Terminator won. He always did! So we sat and drank some juice and watched Arnie chase Sarah Connor and scare the crap out of her yet again. How many times had we seen it, but we still loved it.
It had just got to the sex scene between Sarah and Kyle when I noticed the time. I always get distracted when that stuff gets started in a movie or on TV. It was near seven. Mom wasn’t in and there was no sign of Dad. I wandered over to the window and looked out, and then went onto the porch. Vince was still watching the movie. I looked up and down the street. There were people out on their porches keeping cool and some were watering the grass in a brave attempt to make it more green than brown. No sign of Mom or Dad. I went back in and reminded Vince about the ice cream. He said, shit yeah. I’ll see you later, kiddo, he said to me and hightailed it out. I sat and watched some more of the movie, but I was bored on my own and restless. I got up and paced around. I wished I’d gone to see the ice cream with Vince. I could have ‘cos Mom and Dad were both out. Then I remembered Mom’s friend on the answer machine and decided to see what she wanted.
I got to the phone as I heard the front door shut, so I put it down and went to say hello to Mom or Dad. I realized I had gotten worried with them being so late. It was Vince just coming in. He told me he was worried about Mom and Dad as well and thought he’d better stay with me ‘cos they’d be mad if he left me on my own. The ice cream was swell, he added. Little crystals were forming and he’d stirred it and it was getting nice and cold and thick. I told him I was going to listen to the phone message for Mom in case it was something she should have answered earlier and we could tell whoever it was she was late tonight and sorry, could she ring when she gets in. Vince said fire ahead and went back to The Terminator.
I lifted the phone again and rang the number for the messages. The electric lady told me I had two messages to listen to and I pressed to hear the first. It was Mom. She’d called when we were having our Taco Bells to say that she and Dad were going to be really late and for Vince not to go out with Sarabeth, but stay in with me. She said she’d ring again later. She didn’t say where she was or why she was late. That was unusual, but I didn’t notice then, only later. I called through to Vince what the message was, and he said we must be mind readers because we’d got it right without being asked. I said there was another message and he said, what is it. I don’t know yet, I told him, I’m just going to listen to it. I deleted Mom’s message and pressed to listen to the other one. It was Mom again. She’d called just before six, right before we got back in. She wanted to know why we weren’t in, but we couldn’t answer because we weren’t there. Then I went cold and my hair prickled on my neck. She was saying that Dad was in the hospital.
I told Vince and we both went straightway to the hospital which isn’t far along Pulliam Street on the east side of town, right by Quicksand Golf Course where Vince and me sometimes played. In the hospital lobby Vince asked the receptionist where Dad was likely to be. Well that receptionist, she looked on her computer and she couldn’t find Dad’s name anywhere so she asked Vince if he was sure it was this medical centre that Dad had gone to. Mom hadn’t said anything about that. The receptionist said she would make a couple of calls for us and in less than 10 minutes she’d found Dad at the San Angelo Community Medical Center. That’s right over the west side. Two buses ‘cept they don’t run after six thirty. Vince said he could probably manage a cab fare so we went to the car parking area of the hospital and talked to one of the drivers. Vince persuaded him to let us both go for the price of one which was mighty generous ‘cos otherwise we couldn’t have both gotten out there.
San Angelo Community Medical Center is a much bigger hospital but it was just as easy to enquire about Dad. The receptionist here asked who we were and was about to ask all sorts of questions to find out if we were goofing or for real. I lost it then, though. I was so worried not knowing what had happened to Dad that I just began sobbing. I reckon that was proof enough for the receptionist that we were who we said and she told us which way to go and even got some janitor type guy to show us. Mom was waiting in the corridor near the room Dad was in. The receptionist had phoned ahead and a nurse told her we were there. She was surprised. She’d said we were to stay home when she phoned and that she’d call about nine to tell us what was happening and not to worry. I guess I’d panicked about Dad being in hospital and put the phone down before all that stuff came out.
Dad was going to be in hospital a few days, Mom told us, ‘cos he’d had an accident at work and smashed a couple of bones in his leg real bad so they needed to operate. She said the operation had worked OK but they had to keep him in a while to make sure the bones set right and that the pins he’d had put in his leg were going to be fine. I didn’t really understand about pins like this and got an image of diaper pins in my head that made me start off giggling. Vince and Mom laughed too when I told them what it was I was laughing about. Maybe we all needed that laughter to quiet down our worries. I asked, can we go see him but Mom said he’d been drugged up to the eyeballs and would be asleep best part of tomorrow morning too by the look of him. She said we’d all go down in the afternoon tomorrow to visit ‘cos she was taking some vacation time from work so as to help him get settled in back home next week, and she might as well start with the day off tomorrow.
On the way out to the car she asked where had we been that the phone never got answered. I looked at Vince and he kind of looked at me too and we knew our secret was going to have to be shared so we told Mom about the newest ice cream factory in town. She thought it was amazing that we’d done all that stuff today, but she wasn’t happy about us using the Parker house in case it got in the way of the realtors selling it. I may be able to help with that, she said and then she changed the subject. We stopped and showed her what we’d done before going home and we stirred the settling crystals like Grandma had told us.
Next day Mom told us she had spoken to Fess’s mom after we’d gone to bed. She’d asked about the freezer seeing it was rightly theirs, but she’d answered that it was going to be thrown away and if we’d got it working we could have it. Mom said we’d need to get it across to our garage and we reckoned that would be OK the two of us together could handle it. Mom came with us and that was good ‘cos that old freezer was heavier than we’d thought. Good job too we went that morning for it. Realtors came round from Bates-White and that place was sold in the afternoon. That was while we were visiting Dad. He was still real sleepy on account of the drugs they’d given for the pain. We didn’t see his leg which was a pity because I wanted to see them pins, but it was all wrapped up anyhow and under a steel frame to stop the bedding from tangling with the wounds. We told Dad all about yesterday but he was so tired I don’t think he took in most of it. Still it was good to see him and that he was going to be alright after some weeks at home getting physiotherapy, which is exercises to get the use back after you’ve hurt your leg or arm bad.
It was Saturday and the heat wave was still with us. As well as visiting Dad we had looked after the ice cream and helped Mom move stuff around the house so Dad could manage to move about some after he got home. Late afternoon we checked the ice cream again and started talking about marketing it. I reckoned we could maybe sell it along our street to the neighbors. Vince said it’d have to be a good price and we worked around that trying to match how many helpings we could get out of the stuff we’d made and dividing that into the costs so far, as well as thinking about how much Ben and Jerry’s and other brands were. We reckoned that the whole lot could maybe double our money if we could persuade people to buy it. Vince said that for the first time out we might take some teaspoons and like offer a taster to people who showed some interest. It’d mean we made less money but we’d get a clientele, he said, so I said yes and we began to talk about getting it along the street without spoiling.
Vince and me both have skateboards and so I said we could somehow strap the tubs we had to the skateboards and pull them along on string. Vince said it was a cool idea which made me laugh ‘cos it was ice cream we were talking about. Then we hit on the name ICE SKATE for the product with it being ice cream on a skate board. I suppose an alternative would have to be ‘cream board’ but that’s stupid. We went together to the Town And Country Store to get plastic teaspoons and some small pots to serve it in, then we made a sign to advertise it which I would wear round my neck and then we were ready. Tomorrow we could sell the ice cream.
The weather reports on the TV were all saying that the hot weather would last. I reckon if it hadn’t we’d have to eat the ice cream ourselves. Just before noon we went out. Just like every day this week there were folks sitting on their porches, but as it was a Sunday there were parents as well as kids. We got just the right timing because some of them decided to buy some to eat after their dinner. We sold a tub and a half and started showing a profit even with the cost of the plastic spoons included. In the afternoon Mom went to see Dad again and told us we should make some more ice cream if the weather was going to hold so we did. Vince told her he was going round to Sarabeth’s later and she said OK but what about Tony and I said I’d watch a movie on the TV.
The store was open even though it was Sunday and we got enough supplies for ice cream that would make twice as much more as we had already and I’d said to Vince we should get some melon or strawberries and mash them to make a flavor instead of vanilla. He said that would be good. We found chocolate sauce in the Town And Country and bought some as well as strawberries. That afternoon we made our first flavored ice cream and it tasted real good in the mix. Vince left me to put it in the tubs and the freezer so he could go see Sarabeth.
I was watching the movie on TV when there was a knocking on the door. It was Jake from school. He asked is your Mom or Dad in and I told him about Dad being in hospital but he just interrupted. He said there was going to be a big fight and that Vince was after Emilio Perez who was a year or more older than him. I picked up the key and went out with Jake, locking the door after me. He wasn’t sure where the fight was or if it had begun but he reckoned it would be either at the Perez place or down by the golf course. He said that Vince was yelling about Perez taking his girl. Lots of the boys with girlfriends went down to the Quicksand Golf Course when they were hanging out to try to get somewhere private, I suppose. I told Jake that was probably where Vince was going if Emilio was with Sarabeth. There was a small crowd there already. The news of the fight had spread pretty quick because no one liked Emilio Perez. They cheered him when he was playing ball or boxing for the school, but that was school being supported. Away from the games Perez threw his weight around and behaved like we all owed him bigtime for something. Most of the crowd was screaming Vince’s name but it wasn’t helping, he was being pulped. Sarabeth was in the ring around the fighters and she was smirking, enjoying seeing Vince get beat. I couldn’t get near yet. Perez’s great fist had Vince’s shirt all bunched up against his throat and he was slapping Vince about. I couldn’t hear his words but he was saying something right into Vince’s face and I could see spit coming from his mouth as he spat out his hate for my brother. I could sense myself getting angrier and angrier.
Like I said, Perez was about three years older than me. And Vince is the sports type in the family; I’m a bookworm, but I wasn’t about to see him beat over a girl, especially by the school bully, especially a girl like Sarabeth. I looked around for a weapon I could use. We were just off the 17th fairway and there were some bushes nearby so I went and looked for a branch or something and found one about half the thickness of my wrist, but it was strong. I picked it up and went back to the fight, pushing through the circle. As I got back Perez landed a low punch that made the kids watching cuss him out loud and call for Vince to lay into him, but Vince was falling to the ground. Perez was calling Vince an eyetie loser and that made me even madder. One of the things I love most about my Dad being my Dad is the Italian American accent he has like in gangster movies, and this Perez was now insulting the whole family. He was sitting atop Vince and pounding his chest and face but he soon stopped ‘cos I whacked him real hard across his back. Whack! I hit him again opening a wound on his head and WHACK! Even harder this time, I came with a back hand hitting his chest and left arm about the same time. I couldn’t hear anything but the branch hitting this heap of shit in front of me and I couldn’t see anything but the look of fear as he realized he was hurting for a change. I didn’t stop hitting him. The guy yelped like a scalded cat and fell off of Vince, and then I noticed near everyone was yelling and calling my name. I backed off. I realized I’d hit the school bully and he was going to want to paste me like he’d been pasting Vince, but Vince, he took control now and rolled over onto Perez hitting him just one time in the middle of the face. Emilio Perez screamed again as his nose sort of collapsed to one side. There was blood all over from the gash I’d given him and out of his broken nose. Vince got up and yelled something about never even thinking about taking on the Mazzi family again or else. All these people were round us patting our backs and stuff like that. We were like heroes. Sarabeth was nowhere to be seen. Someone yelled, Vince, you’d better get something cold against your eye, and I said to Vince I thought we had the issue of cold already covered meaning the ice cream. He grinned, put his arm round my shoulders and that’s how we walked the rest of the way home.
When we got home the remainder of the posse that was with us each got some of our ice cream for nothing. Vince said that it was called a loss leader and they’d all want to come back for more while the heat wave lasted.
It did last …
…and they did keep coming back.
It was that summer two years ago that me and my brother went into business the first week of July. Vince was just over 15 and in 9th grade. I was close to 14. We were like close in age but he’d gotten to the stage that he didn’t want to have his kid brother around, while I was always looking up to him. It caused sparks to fly sometimes when he’d yell or push me away ‘cos I was busting up the image he was trying to create with his friends at school.
But this particular summer, this start of July, it was so damn hot no one was doing anything, ‘cept staying in the shade and sweating. Some guys I knew went out to the O C Fisher Reservoir to swim, but it’s a hell of a way and costs three bucks when you get there. Anyhow I don’t much like to swim. It means taking off my glasses and then I can’t see people so good.
Some folks had more to do than sit around finding shade or a swimming pool; like Dad. He worked at Hirschfeld Steel, over the west side of town. It brought in good money, especially if he did double shifts. And Mom’s job at Goodfellow Air Force Base helped too. She was a cook in the dining facility, she didn’t fly planes or do intelligence work there. But Vince and me, we just sat under the porch swatting flies and cussing the sun.
Well, on the Wednesday, I think it was, a huge truck rolled down North Marie Street and turned into Spaulding where we live. It was white and had like a yellow bar painted all along the bottom of the trailer. Huge letters on the side spelled out united in capitals. van lines was painted below that in smaller letters. It had come for the Parker’s furniture and stuff. They lived a few doors from us, on the corner of North Schroeder. I guess the truck driver came up that way so he could turn that long trailer into the road easier. Mr Parker - he was really Lieutenant Parker - was being stationed away from Goodfellow where Mom worked. They were off to Ohio. He’d been posted to Wright Patterson Base, near Dayton. Frances told us he’d been promoted. That was his daughter. She was in my class at school. We used to call her Fess after the guy who played Davy Crockett on TV years ago, Fess Parker. He was raised somewhere near San Angelo, so we all knew about him, him being local and all.
The truck got filled up real quick. I mean, if you think about how much stuff collects in a house over the years, and Fess had been around since second grade, well it’s a helluva lot of things to shift. The four guys got a big sweat on, carrying tables and chairs and the TV and everything. Every so often Vince and me we would see them stop for a chilled soda or ice cream that they’d pick up from the Town And Country Food Store over on Pulliam Street. Perhaps they were wondering whether doing their kind of work at night might be better than in this heat. I certainly thought about that, but it seemed adults don’t always act sensible like that. They get all hot doing work in daytime and sit doing nothing when it cools down. Me and Vince were like the opposite that week. Until the Parker’s furniture got took away at the end of that day.
Fess came over with her Mom and Dad that evening to say their goodbyes to my folks. They were flying out by an overnight flight. The car had gone in the mover’s trailer with the other stuff. Guess really they didn’t have too much stuff after all. Maybe that’s ‘cos of him having to be stationed every five or six years somewhere different. Well they left us a house key because the real estate people hadn’t sold it yet and the Lieutenant wanted my Dad just to keep his eye on the place.
Next day Vince and me decided, well he decided, we should go have a look at the Parker place. It was still hot and he said we might get more shade there. I don’t know why that should be the case but it was too hot to argue and I was too bored doing nothing again. Their place was like ours and all the other houses on this part of Spaulding Street. Grey painted walls with white supports for the porch. Vince unlocked the door. It was spooky the way that even with sneakers on our footfalls echoed around the empty husk that only yesterday had the Parker family living there. It was cooler than our porch, so exploring the place wasn’t going to get us a sweat on. We went into the kitchen where the yellow wood doors of the units were all still open as if a last minute check had been made to make sure every last grain of rice had been packed. It was there in the kitchen we saw the freezer, one of those long chest type freezers with a couple of wire baskets inside.
I asked Vince, why would they leave the freezer? He said maybe it was broken and I got the plug from the floor to try it. There was nothing. The low hum that tells you a freezer is looking after your food was missing. I said to Vince, it’s dead and he grunted. I said that’d be why the removers kept on going to the store for the sodas and ice cream. Vince called me a genius. I hadn’t a clue what he was going on about but he suddenly began to rush around like a wasp was in his shirt. He looked at the doorway and then the freezer and back. Then he came over to where I was and he began to look at, no, to study the dead freezer. He said he reckoned the motor was bust. I could see him looking for a way to get at the motor so he could mess about with it. Vince loved to mess about with stuff like that; he took watches apart so he could fix them even if they weren’t broke. I got to give it to him he was good at that stuff.
Vince asked me how much money do you have and I said I’d got about twenty dollars stashed away back home. So how do you fancy doubling it, he wanted to know. I said sure and he said we were going into the ice cream business. Then I understood. It was perfect. The Parker house would be like a base for us, until it got sold anyway. No one needed to know what we were doing so we could risk failing without looking stupid. But, hey, we weren’t going to fail. How could we during this heat wave?
One of the most dangerous things in my almost fourteen years was trying to stop Vince when he was setting about doing something. He usually flew into a blind rage when I did that kind of thing, but I had to know what the whole plan was in more detail. That’s the way I am; he’s a doer, I’m a thinker. So I asked him. It might have been the heat, but he didn’t lay into me this time. It was almost like he was saying to himself, hey, yeah we got time so we might as well talk. Well, talk we did. The freezer was going to stay put. The Parker place was our base and when Mom and Dad had gone to work we would go to work too. Vince told me I was going to buy the ingredients for the ice cream while he repaired the freezer. He’d pay me back his share of the cost later when we’d gotten home. It felt perfect. Except I didn’t know what went into making ice cream. So go and read what it says on a tub down the Town And Country Store, Vince snapped. I supposed that made sense. What if you can’t get the motor going and I’ve spent my money on that stuff, I wanted to ask, but Vince hadn’t met a gadget yet that got the better of him so I took it on trust he’d pull this off.
I set off back to our place while Vince began to take the casing from the front of the motor. It was hot yet I wanted to rush. I was going to make a fortune, but I was going to do it with my brother Vince. Like I said, I was at that stage that I idolized him and now he was letting me in on his scheme. I smiled all the way home as I realized this and I grabbed my stash and headed out again to the Town and Country store. I ran round the block, up North Marie and onto Pulliam Street. I’d brought a notepad and pencil so I could write down the ingredients and I went straight to the ice cream freezer.
Water. No problem. Sugar. OK. Vegetable oil. What kind? I expect I’d find something that worked. Glucose syrup? Lactose reduced whey powder? What kind of stuff is that? By the time I reached the coloring and flavoring I was writing words that some guy must have invented as a joke. Carrageenan? Curcumin? Hell, I didn’t realize this would be so hard. Just as I was going to start to look for the whey powder – I’d decided to go for the difficult things first – the store security guy came over looking kind of mean as he always did. He was a fat old man, older than my dad anyhow. He was the kind of guy that all stores try to find, especially during school vacation, because he had a deep dislike of kids. An old lady could raid the store with a shotgun and get away with it, but let a kid walk his aisles and old Stumpy would get rattled. We called him Stumpy on account of him having two fingers bitten off by a horse when he was a kid.
‘What are you doing, son’, he wanted to know. I told him I was doing a health check on the store for a school project and I’d just found something that stunk. It was stupid but the idiot always got me steamed up just by being there in that uniform that made him think he was the boss. He got the message and he began to look meaner and come toward me.
‘What you writing there?’ he asked me and I told him it didn’t concern him. He made a grab for my notebook and I slipped past him over to the pizzas and away toward the checkout. I didn’t look back, so I don’t know if he followed me or not, but I got out of that store pretty quick, and probably twice as quick as Stumpy could waddle. But now I was stuck. I had a list of stuff that I didn’t understand and I couldn’t go back into the store until Stumpy’s shift was finished in case he made more trouble for me.
I decided to go back to Vince and see how he was getting on. I thought he’d be mad with me for not getting the supplies but he was more interested in dismantling the motor. So what are you going to do now, Tony, he asked me. I said I was thinking that a library might be a better place to get a list of ingredients and told him about the strange names I’d found on the packaging. Sounds like some science fiction stuff like you get in Star Trek, he said. Yeah, it did. The planet Curcumin attacked by the Diglycerides of Fattyacids. Only Captain James T Kirk can rescue them! Fire the Carrageenan Stabilisers, Scotty! Are you still here, Vince said? I thought you were going to the library.
I’d gotten carried away I suppose, but truth is that old library is a fair distance from our place and it wasn’t getting any cooler. The sky was cloudless, like a light blue electric blanket up there. The heat pushed down on me as I stepped out the Parker place and turned right down Spaulding. The houses on Spaulding are set right back so even if I’d walked on the south side of the street there would be no shade. By the time I crossed the river at North Archer Street I was dripping with sweat. I’d gone maybe a quarter mile at most. The Library was way over on West Beauregard Avenue. I had a five mile round trip to make. I decided to take it easy and not rush. It took me forty minutes just to get to North Main Street. I’d stopped at Food Basket to get me a soda, but when I’d gotten in the store I changed my mind and bought a liter of water. Soon as I got outside half that water was over my head, in my hair and trickling down my back. It felt so good and cool and so much cleaner but I knew that wouldn’t last. By the time I reached the library the water had probably dried off, but I was wet with sweat so I can’t really say.
Where to start? I tried Encyclopedia Britannica first. It was hopeless. Stuck between ‘ice climate’ and ‘ice-crystal cloud’ was a few hundred words about the Romans and nutrition. I went to the librarian and asked where can I find out how to make ice cream. She pointed me at the cookery books. I was glad there weren’t many people there. I didn’t want to be seen looking for recipes, I reckoned it wasn’t the kind of thing boys do. Then I found a couple. They were pretty much the same as one another. And they were so simple. All those weird things on the tub in the store, they were missing entirely. I went to a Webster dictionary and looked to see what it was that the stores were feeding us instead of these more wholesome ingredients. It said, glucose 1: a crystalline sugar C6H12O6; specifically: the sweet colorless soluble dextrorotatory … Ok. So that’s sugar I guessed – did I really need to read the whole entry? For lactose I read, a disaccharide, C12H22O11, present in milk, that … It mentioned milk and that was good enough for me. I also tried whey (the watery part of milk that is separated from the coagulable part or curd that is rich in lactose, minerals, and vitamins and contains lactalbumin and traces of fat) and then carrageenan (any of a group of closely related colloids derived from Irish moss and several other red algae). Why the hell is it that a book that’s supposed to help you understand words uses words you don’t understand? Still, I got the gist that they meant sugar and milk and they were already in the recipes I found. I decided Irish moss was a no no. I’d got enough to do without going to a plant store. There was nothing like it in the recipe books anyhow.
I put the books back on the shelves, thanked the librarian and went out. The heat hit me. Inside the library was air conditioned. I’d forgotten the heat in spite of it being ice cream I was finding out about. Walking by the Concho would be easier than being out on the sidewalks, so I headed for the river. I headed back along East Beauregard and cut across to the parkland south of the river on Rio Concho Drive. It’d probably take longer but be cooler. I could go up North Bell Street from Roosevelt. I wondered how Vince was doing.
When I got back to the Parker’s old house it was locked. I looked in the yard. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s where I would’ve looked if Fess still lived there and if I wanted to see her. There’s no way Vince would be there, he’d be back home more than likely, so I set off there. He was on the porch with Sarabeth just goofing around. Sarabeth was his girlfriend at that time. His face told me I should butt out and like disappear. Oh boy was I pissed about that. I’d walked near six miles in this furnace of a day, gotten the info that he told me to and he wasn’t even doing nothing about the freezer. I stomped onto that porch and swore. I was so mad I can’t even remember what I called him. Then I shoved open the screen door and went to my room for a lay down. Seconds later Vince came storming in and started in on me about swearing in front of Sarabeth as if she wasn’t the school’s number one foul mouth. He only managed to land a couple of punches before I got past him and out through the back onto the patio. I don’t know if he followed me ‘cos I flung myself over the fence and into North Marie Street. It was the second time I’d hightailed it from someone that day. I’d no idea what I was doing but I found myself at the Town and Country Store before I stopped running.
By now Stumpy would have gone home I hoped as I went in. I got out the notebook that I’d got the recipes down in and went round the store looking for the ingredients. It was no big deal ‘cept I didn’t know how much ice cream we were going to make. I decided to add up how much the recipe I’d got cost and then see how many of those amounts I could get out of twenty bucks. There was nothing to it, except finding vanilla was a bit of a hassle. I was looking for a fairly big packet or jar, but when I saw it it was a small bottle. I mean really tiny, and it cost more than the other stuff together. Still, it would last a while and I had enough to get the other things once over again.
Back home Sarabeth had already gone and Vince was on the porch looking hot and mean. I was safe - it wasn’t my fault this time. It seemed that Sarabeth had backed out of some date at the movies or something and Vince was all sour about it. Turned out later that she did go to the movies but it was with Emilio Perez. Vince and him had a big fight about her and Vince got pasted. That’s what happens when you fight a jock that’s headed for a college boxing team. Sarabeth dumped Perez after a couple of dates anyhow showing that I was right about her all along. She was like test driving all the guys in her class.
I showed Vince the bag of stuff I’d bought, told him how much I’d spent. You’ve done good, he told me. He said he’d got the motor going in the freezer and it was like charging up to get cold enough. I asked him about boxes to keep the ice cream in and he said he took some over to Fess’s while I was gone in the morning. I knew then that our fight had been ‘bout nothing. He’d fixed the freezer and gone home instead of waiting for me ‘cos I’d took so long. I guess I had to apologize then and it was ok after that. We both of us blamed the hot day for our tempers.
We went over to our base. It was going to be another couple of hours before Mom got in and Dad was another hour after that, so we had time to make a start on the ice cream. Vince opened up and we went into the kitchen. There was a small heap of Tupperware boxes on the counter, all cleaned and ready. Vince was real keen on this, I reckoned. I unloaded the bags and put the stuff into groups, sugar, cream, condensed milk and, on its own, the vanilla essence. I got the notebook out of my back pocket and read out the instructions. Two quarts of cream, two thirds cup of sugar, a tablespoon of vanilla, a small tin of condensed milk. Pour it all into a mixing bowl and mix ‘til smooth. Transfer the whole mixture into your White Mountain ice cream maker and freeze. Shit, Vince said quietly. You got a recipe from an ice cream maker recipe book I reckon. It’s not helpful, kiddo. Still, it can’t be too hard, I reckon. Get on home and fetch us a cup and a tablespoon, he told me. Oh, and a mixing bowl and wooden spoon, he added.
This time I was excited and dashed along the street to get the things so we could mix our ice cream up. As I ran into the house the phone began to ring. It was Mom. She’s going to be late home, she said to me, and would Vince and me get something to eat. I said I wanted taco and she told me that was OK and she’d pay me back when she got home. Great, I thought to myself, I just love Taco Bell and Vince does too so there won’t be any arguing about it. I picked up the things we needed and put them in a bag, took them back to Vince. We’re going to have Taco Bell tonight, I said to him and he said, yeah, here take this and go fetch it now ‘cos I’m hungry. He handed me a twenty and said he’d start on the mixing. Well, I thought I might have liked to do that but going to Taco Bell was good too, so I went off to Pulliam Street again and got our order in. When I got back we went into the room at the front of Fess’s old house and we tried the fan which worked great. We sat on the floor and ate our tacos. I’d got some soda as well so we were doing really good there in that empty house.
After we finished I went and looked at what Vince had been doing since I went for the food. The ingredients were all mixed up well and sitting there in this big bowl. What we didn’t know was how to go on from there. Vince was all for putting it into the Tupperware and hoping for the best. I remembered the change from Taco Bell just then and gave it back to him. I said how the ice cream might not freeze properly in the middle if we just did that and then it would be a waste ‘cos no one would buy ice cream like that. I dipped my finger into the bowl and tasted the mix. It was good, maybe a bit sweet, but I liked sweet things. I asked Vince, have you tasted this and he said he had. He asked me what would I suggest and I had to think hard ‘cos I hadn’t a clue how to make the ice cream freeze right. So as he was starting to put the mix into the Tupperware I came up with an idea that we might phone someone and ask, and I asked him if he knew who might know. Then he said I was a genius, and I think he wasn’t being sarcastic, ‘cos he said we should call Grandma.
We left the Parker place and went back home together to make the call. Vince made the call and asked Grandma if she knew what to do. He told me afterwards that she had said making ice cream was a great idea and that we just had to make sure it didn’t get too frozen too quick and we would need to stir it from time to time while it was freezing to make sure the middle was ok. Vince said thanks to her and we finished the call. Then Vince saw that the answer machine had a message. Probably from one of Mom’s friends, he said, and that was the most likely thing, knowing how much time she was on the phone. We left the message as it was, waiting for her to get it when she got home.
The ice cream mix sat like creamy snow in the bowl and we carefully poured it into the plastic boxes like Grandma had told Vince. It was near five o’clock now and Mom’s usual home time. Grandma had said to stir the mix after a couple of hours in the freezer, and then again a couple of hours later after that. I hoped she was right and I was looking forward to Vince and Tony being the new Ben and Jerry. We put those tubs of ice cream into the freezer, handling them like they were eggs and making sure we spilled none of the mix. How are we going to get to stir them I asked Vince and he said he’d go to the movies even though Sarabeth wasn’t going, so he could visit the house before he set off and again when he got back before coming home. It made me a bit sad that I couldn’t help, but it wasn’t as if Vince was muscling in. The whole thing was his idea in the first place anyhow, so I said, ok good plan. We just sat a while after that and talked about nothing much.
Near six o’clock we went back home. There was no sign of anyone so we just sat and watched TV. It was going to be Smallville at seven or Terminator right now and Vince suggested we toss a coin. Terminator won. He always did! So we sat and drank some juice and watched Arnie chase Sarah Connor and scare the crap out of her yet again. How many times had we seen it, but we still loved it.
It had just got to the sex scene between Sarah and Kyle when I noticed the time. I always get distracted when that stuff gets started in a movie or on TV. It was near seven. Mom wasn’t in and there was no sign of Dad. I wandered over to the window and looked out, and then went onto the porch. Vince was still watching the movie. I looked up and down the street. There were people out on their porches keeping cool and some were watering the grass in a brave attempt to make it more green than brown. No sign of Mom or Dad. I went back in and reminded Vince about the ice cream. He said, shit yeah. I’ll see you later, kiddo, he said to me and hightailed it out. I sat and watched some more of the movie, but I was bored on my own and restless. I got up and paced around. I wished I’d gone to see the ice cream with Vince. I could have ‘cos Mom and Dad were both out. Then I remembered Mom’s friend on the answer machine and decided to see what she wanted.
I got to the phone as I heard the front door shut, so I put it down and went to say hello to Mom or Dad. I realized I had gotten worried with them being so late. It was Vince just coming in. He told me he was worried about Mom and Dad as well and thought he’d better stay with me ‘cos they’d be mad if he left me on my own. The ice cream was swell, he added. Little crystals were forming and he’d stirred it and it was getting nice and cold and thick. I told him I was going to listen to the phone message for Mom in case it was something she should have answered earlier and we could tell whoever it was she was late tonight and sorry, could she ring when she gets in. Vince said fire ahead and went back to The Terminator.
I lifted the phone again and rang the number for the messages. The electric lady told me I had two messages to listen to and I pressed to hear the first. It was Mom. She’d called when we were having our Taco Bells to say that she and Dad were going to be really late and for Vince not to go out with Sarabeth, but stay in with me. She said she’d ring again later. She didn’t say where she was or why she was late. That was unusual, but I didn’t notice then, only later. I called through to Vince what the message was, and he said we must be mind readers because we’d got it right without being asked. I said there was another message and he said, what is it. I don’t know yet, I told him, I’m just going to listen to it. I deleted Mom’s message and pressed to listen to the other one. It was Mom again. She’d called just before six, right before we got back in. She wanted to know why we weren’t in, but we couldn’t answer because we weren’t there. Then I went cold and my hair prickled on my neck. She was saying that Dad was in the hospital.
I told Vince and we both went straightway to the hospital which isn’t far along Pulliam Street on the east side of town, right by Quicksand Golf Course where Vince and me sometimes played. In the hospital lobby Vince asked the receptionist where Dad was likely to be. Well that receptionist, she looked on her computer and she couldn’t find Dad’s name anywhere so she asked Vince if he was sure it was this medical centre that Dad had gone to. Mom hadn’t said anything about that. The receptionist said she would make a couple of calls for us and in less than 10 minutes she’d found Dad at the San Angelo Community Medical Center. That’s right over the west side. Two buses ‘cept they don’t run after six thirty. Vince said he could probably manage a cab fare so we went to the car parking area of the hospital and talked to one of the drivers. Vince persuaded him to let us both go for the price of one which was mighty generous ‘cos otherwise we couldn’t have both gotten out there.
San Angelo Community Medical Center is a much bigger hospital but it was just as easy to enquire about Dad. The receptionist here asked who we were and was about to ask all sorts of questions to find out if we were goofing or for real. I lost it then, though. I was so worried not knowing what had happened to Dad that I just began sobbing. I reckon that was proof enough for the receptionist that we were who we said and she told us which way to go and even got some janitor type guy to show us. Mom was waiting in the corridor near the room Dad was in. The receptionist had phoned ahead and a nurse told her we were there. She was surprised. She’d said we were to stay home when she phoned and that she’d call about nine to tell us what was happening and not to worry. I guess I’d panicked about Dad being in hospital and put the phone down before all that stuff came out.
Dad was going to be in hospital a few days, Mom told us, ‘cos he’d had an accident at work and smashed a couple of bones in his leg real bad so they needed to operate. She said the operation had worked OK but they had to keep him in a while to make sure the bones set right and that the pins he’d had put in his leg were going to be fine. I didn’t really understand about pins like this and got an image of diaper pins in my head that made me start off giggling. Vince and Mom laughed too when I told them what it was I was laughing about. Maybe we all needed that laughter to quiet down our worries. I asked, can we go see him but Mom said he’d been drugged up to the eyeballs and would be asleep best part of tomorrow morning too by the look of him. She said we’d all go down in the afternoon tomorrow to visit ‘cos she was taking some vacation time from work so as to help him get settled in back home next week, and she might as well start with the day off tomorrow.
On the way out to the car she asked where had we been that the phone never got answered. I looked at Vince and he kind of looked at me too and we knew our secret was going to have to be shared so we told Mom about the newest ice cream factory in town. She thought it was amazing that we’d done all that stuff today, but she wasn’t happy about us using the Parker house in case it got in the way of the realtors selling it. I may be able to help with that, she said and then she changed the subject. We stopped and showed her what we’d done before going home and we stirred the settling crystals like Grandma had told us.
Next day Mom told us she had spoken to Fess’s mom after we’d gone to bed. She’d asked about the freezer seeing it was rightly theirs, but she’d answered that it was going to be thrown away and if we’d got it working we could have it. Mom said we’d need to get it across to our garage and we reckoned that would be OK the two of us together could handle it. Mom came with us and that was good ‘cos that old freezer was heavier than we’d thought. Good job too we went that morning for it. Realtors came round from Bates-White and that place was sold in the afternoon. That was while we were visiting Dad. He was still real sleepy on account of the drugs they’d given for the pain. We didn’t see his leg which was a pity because I wanted to see them pins, but it was all wrapped up anyhow and under a steel frame to stop the bedding from tangling with the wounds. We told Dad all about yesterday but he was so tired I don’t think he took in most of it. Still it was good to see him and that he was going to be alright after some weeks at home getting physiotherapy, which is exercises to get the use back after you’ve hurt your leg or arm bad.
It was Saturday and the heat wave was still with us. As well as visiting Dad we had looked after the ice cream and helped Mom move stuff around the house so Dad could manage to move about some after he got home. Late afternoon we checked the ice cream again and started talking about marketing it. I reckoned we could maybe sell it along our street to the neighbors. Vince said it’d have to be a good price and we worked around that trying to match how many helpings we could get out of the stuff we’d made and dividing that into the costs so far, as well as thinking about how much Ben and Jerry’s and other brands were. We reckoned that the whole lot could maybe double our money if we could persuade people to buy it. Vince said that for the first time out we might take some teaspoons and like offer a taster to people who showed some interest. It’d mean we made less money but we’d get a clientele, he said, so I said yes and we began to talk about getting it along the street without spoiling.
Vince and me both have skateboards and so I said we could somehow strap the tubs we had to the skateboards and pull them along on string. Vince said it was a cool idea which made me laugh ‘cos it was ice cream we were talking about. Then we hit on the name ICE SKATE for the product with it being ice cream on a skate board. I suppose an alternative would have to be ‘cream board’ but that’s stupid. We went together to the Town And Country Store to get plastic teaspoons and some small pots to serve it in, then we made a sign to advertise it which I would wear round my neck and then we were ready. Tomorrow we could sell the ice cream.
The weather reports on the TV were all saying that the hot weather would last. I reckon if it hadn’t we’d have to eat the ice cream ourselves. Just before noon we went out. Just like every day this week there were folks sitting on their porches, but as it was a Sunday there were parents as well as kids. We got just the right timing because some of them decided to buy some to eat after their dinner. We sold a tub and a half and started showing a profit even with the cost of the plastic spoons included. In the afternoon Mom went to see Dad again and told us we should make some more ice cream if the weather was going to hold so we did. Vince told her he was going round to Sarabeth’s later and she said OK but what about Tony and I said I’d watch a movie on the TV.
The store was open even though it was Sunday and we got enough supplies for ice cream that would make twice as much more as we had already and I’d said to Vince we should get some melon or strawberries and mash them to make a flavor instead of vanilla. He said that would be good. We found chocolate sauce in the Town And Country and bought some as well as strawberries. That afternoon we made our first flavored ice cream and it tasted real good in the mix. Vince left me to put it in the tubs and the freezer so he could go see Sarabeth.
I was watching the movie on TV when there was a knocking on the door. It was Jake from school. He asked is your Mom or Dad in and I told him about Dad being in hospital but he just interrupted. He said there was going to be a big fight and that Vince was after Emilio Perez who was a year or more older than him. I picked up the key and went out with Jake, locking the door after me. He wasn’t sure where the fight was or if it had begun but he reckoned it would be either at the Perez place or down by the golf course. He said that Vince was yelling about Perez taking his girl. Lots of the boys with girlfriends went down to the Quicksand Golf Course when they were hanging out to try to get somewhere private, I suppose. I told Jake that was probably where Vince was going if Emilio was with Sarabeth. There was a small crowd there already. The news of the fight had spread pretty quick because no one liked Emilio Perez. They cheered him when he was playing ball or boxing for the school, but that was school being supported. Away from the games Perez threw his weight around and behaved like we all owed him bigtime for something. Most of the crowd was screaming Vince’s name but it wasn’t helping, he was being pulped. Sarabeth was in the ring around the fighters and she was smirking, enjoying seeing Vince get beat. I couldn’t get near yet. Perez’s great fist had Vince’s shirt all bunched up against his throat and he was slapping Vince about. I couldn’t hear his words but he was saying something right into Vince’s face and I could see spit coming from his mouth as he spat out his hate for my brother. I could sense myself getting angrier and angrier.
Like I said, Perez was about three years older than me. And Vince is the sports type in the family; I’m a bookworm, but I wasn’t about to see him beat over a girl, especially by the school bully, especially a girl like Sarabeth. I looked around for a weapon I could use. We were just off the 17th fairway and there were some bushes nearby so I went and looked for a branch or something and found one about half the thickness of my wrist, but it was strong. I picked it up and went back to the fight, pushing through the circle. As I got back Perez landed a low punch that made the kids watching cuss him out loud and call for Vince to lay into him, but Vince was falling to the ground. Perez was calling Vince an eyetie loser and that made me even madder. One of the things I love most about my Dad being my Dad is the Italian American accent he has like in gangster movies, and this Perez was now insulting the whole family. He was sitting atop Vince and pounding his chest and face but he soon stopped ‘cos I whacked him real hard across his back. Whack! I hit him again opening a wound on his head and WHACK! Even harder this time, I came with a back hand hitting his chest and left arm about the same time. I couldn’t hear anything but the branch hitting this heap of shit in front of me and I couldn’t see anything but the look of fear as he realized he was hurting for a change. I didn’t stop hitting him. The guy yelped like a scalded cat and fell off of Vince, and then I noticed near everyone was yelling and calling my name. I backed off. I realized I’d hit the school bully and he was going to want to paste me like he’d been pasting Vince, but Vince, he took control now and rolled over onto Perez hitting him just one time in the middle of the face. Emilio Perez screamed again as his nose sort of collapsed to one side. There was blood all over from the gash I’d given him and out of his broken nose. Vince got up and yelled something about never even thinking about taking on the Mazzi family again or else. All these people were round us patting our backs and stuff like that. We were like heroes. Sarabeth was nowhere to be seen. Someone yelled, Vince, you’d better get something cold against your eye, and I said to Vince I thought we had the issue of cold already covered meaning the ice cream. He grinned, put his arm round my shoulders and that’s how we walked the rest of the way home.
When we got home the remainder of the posse that was with us each got some of our ice cream for nothing. Vince said that it was called a loss leader and they’d all want to come back for more while the heat wave lasted.
It did last …
…and they did keep coming back.
Fire Dancing
All around the bonfire there were sparklers waving in the air. Children, parents and even some singletons joined in the fun of writing ephemeral messages with the primitive light pens. And then, in the pool of light which the oblivious crowd surrounded a lone woman started to dance as if entranced.She looked neither to left nor right. She danced for herself. Her arms rose and fell in front of her and to her sides. She swayed to an inner music perhaps.She danced in time with the dancing flames but only I saw her.She was the fire dancing.
Sunday, 28 January 2007
Apple
It looked for all the beautiful, primeval world, like a pear, but rounder. Eve reached up to pluck the fruit. It was red where exposed to the sun and green on its shadier side.
'I wonder if I, too, have a shadier side.' Eve had not realised she had spoken aloud until she heard the voice ...
'Perhaps you would like to eat from the each side, to see if the flavours are different? You might learn something' A snake slithered into view.
Eve took a bite from each half of the fruit. She decided she liked the dark side …
'I wonder if I, too, have a shadier side.' Eve had not realised she had spoken aloud until she heard the voice ...
'Perhaps you would like to eat from the each side, to see if the flavours are different? You might learn something' A snake slithered into view.
Eve took a bite from each half of the fruit. She decided she liked the dark side …
Saturday, 20 January 2007
Writer's Block
Writer’s Block
He sits in front of the screen, staring. Just staring. A look on his face indicates puzzlement and his lips begin to move, though without sound. He stares ahead of him and finds his voice.
‘I know him. I know that man. I’m sure it’s him – his glasses seem heavier. Thicker lenses? It’s the glasses I remember. You look old with those glasses.’
He looks away, down at the table, sees the keyboard. He looks closely: Q W E R T Y U I O P … Yes, he knows this. He looks up at the screen, at the man in the screen.
‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? You make books. I’ve read your books. A writer.’
He frowns and looks down at the keyboard again. His left hand moves tentatively and he presses his thumb against the space bar. Again he presses the space bar and lifts his right hand to press on enter. His hands go back to his lap.
‘So you just press these buttons? You just spell out your stories letter by letter, word at a time.’ He giggles for no apparent reason and says ‘Sentenced to death!’
A sudden look of fear transforms his features. He lifts his hands to shield himself from the man on the screen whose own lips are moving, quivering.
‘What did you do that for?’ He asks. ‘Why did you say that? It’s not the end yet – I’ve not started the story yet. I’ve not started the story!’
He’s shouting now, angry with the man on the screen.
‘You always make me stop too soon when I’ve not finished!’
His hands are resting on the keyboard as he accuses the bespectacled man in front of him. He types – ‘Once upon a time’, and giggles.
‘No, that won’t do.’
He smiles and the man on the screen smiles back. He looks at the keyboard and begins to type out words at speed. Occasionally he looks up and the man on the screen returns his smile.
After some fifteen or twenty minutes his pace slows. A thousand or so words typed, and his fingers come to rest. He leans forward over the keyboard and scowls. The scowl changes to a look of despair and grief.
‘It’s gone.’ He slowly looks up and talks to the man on the screen. ‘It’s not there. It’s supposed to be there. Can you remember what it was? What did I write?’
His left hand moves to the space bar and he presses it but it’s an action he’s not conscious of. He stares at the man again.
‘Aren’t you a writer? I know you – I’ve seen you. You’re a writer.’ A gentle smile of recognition and then he says, ‘Tell me what you’ve written.’
His fingers tap at the keys, a subconscious action as he quizzes the writer, a reflex action from somewhere in his past. One hundred words a minute as he taught himself all those years ago. He laughs aloud; his laugh is hard edged and will not stop.
‘What’s the matter, Alan?’ The nurse walks into his room briskly. ‘Do you want me to turn your computer on? Are you going to write us a story?’
He sits in front of the screen, staring. Just staring. A look on his face indicates puzzlement and his lips begin to move, though without sound. He stares ahead of him and finds his voice.
‘I know him. I know that man. I’m sure it’s him – his glasses seem heavier. Thicker lenses? It’s the glasses I remember. You look old with those glasses.’
He looks away, down at the table, sees the keyboard. He looks closely: Q W E R T Y U I O P … Yes, he knows this. He looks up at the screen, at the man in the screen.
‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? You make books. I’ve read your books. A writer.’
He frowns and looks down at the keyboard again. His left hand moves tentatively and he presses his thumb against the space bar. Again he presses the space bar and lifts his right hand to press on enter. His hands go back to his lap.
‘So you just press these buttons? You just spell out your stories letter by letter, word at a time.’ He giggles for no apparent reason and says ‘Sentenced to death!’
A sudden look of fear transforms his features. He lifts his hands to shield himself from the man on the screen whose own lips are moving, quivering.
‘What did you do that for?’ He asks. ‘Why did you say that? It’s not the end yet – I’ve not started the story yet. I’ve not started the story!’
He’s shouting now, angry with the man on the screen.
‘You always make me stop too soon when I’ve not finished!’
His hands are resting on the keyboard as he accuses the bespectacled man in front of him. He types – ‘Once upon a time’, and giggles.
‘No, that won’t do.’
He smiles and the man on the screen smiles back. He looks at the keyboard and begins to type out words at speed. Occasionally he looks up and the man on the screen returns his smile.
After some fifteen or twenty minutes his pace slows. A thousand or so words typed, and his fingers come to rest. He leans forward over the keyboard and scowls. The scowl changes to a look of despair and grief.
‘It’s gone.’ He slowly looks up and talks to the man on the screen. ‘It’s not there. It’s supposed to be there. Can you remember what it was? What did I write?’
His left hand moves to the space bar and he presses it but it’s an action he’s not conscious of. He stares at the man again.
‘Aren’t you a writer? I know you – I’ve seen you. You’re a writer.’ A gentle smile of recognition and then he says, ‘Tell me what you’ve written.’
His fingers tap at the keys, a subconscious action as he quizzes the writer, a reflex action from somewhere in his past. One hundred words a minute as he taught himself all those years ago. He laughs aloud; his laugh is hard edged and will not stop.
‘What’s the matter, Alan?’ The nurse walks into his room briskly. ‘Do you want me to turn your computer on? Are you going to write us a story?’
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
