called the furnace Harry, as in, Give ’em hell.
The cigarettes were making his heart slam away at his rib cage, and experience told him the only way to address this was to smoke another.
The ice cream man, once he had been located under the heavy cover of a sugar maple twenty feet from the pre-fall, crashing Niagara, wore a white paper hat in the conventional military shape, the same model Rocco wore when he was on the job; also, a white and blue polka-dotted shirt and a black bow tie. A lipless, unholy grin was frozen to his face. He sat atop the steel cage of a milk crate behind his refrigerated cart, his back against the trunk of the tree. The light all around was splendorous, but the shade afforded beneath this tree was so complete that no patches of sunlight whatsoever fell on the grass.
Such a complicated device just to catch light with. So many thousands of leaves. There was a leaf for every angle of sun coming down. The tree was a cistern for light.
The ice cream man had nothing he was reading, no oddments to fiddle with. Each of his hands rested on the knob of one of the freezer hatches as though he were manning the gate to a passage underground. He stood up with some effort in the strange shadow of the leaves. He was aged significantly. He began speaking before Rocco had completed his approach.
“I have strawberry. I have chocolate. I have pistachio. I have a sugar cone. I have a regular cone. I have no vanilla. One napkin, please.” He cleared his throat. A grasshopper landed on Rocco’s shoulder and the ice cream man leaned smoothly toward him and flicked it off. “I have no sandwiches, drumsticks, or novelties of any kind. I have paper cups and wood spoons. One scoop, twelve cents. Two scoops, nineteen cents. Three scoops, a quarter. I have no nuts. I have no cherries. Sixty feet in that direction one finds a public water fountain. Thirty feet to the left of that is a public latrine. I don’t know what time it is.”
There was a pause while the two men took in each other’s faces. Rocco thought he saw a shiver of recognition pass across the man’s features, and then the man stifle it. There was unquestionably the too-longness of the pause and of the looking at each other before the man set himself to opening the freezer hatches and exposing his wares. The paper hat was cockeyed—a cheerful angle, the way Rocco himself wore his—and liver spots were visible on the exposed portion of the scalp, beneath what remained of the glossy, pallid hair.
“I know you,” Rocco said.
“No, you don’t.”
“We know each other. If you give me a second—”
“Whoops! There it goes! Now then, to summarize, your choices are three in number—”
“I hope you’ll forgive me. For two days, I’ve been beside myself.”
“—flavor, vessel, number of scoops.”
“I’ve been under a cloud. I’m having trouble thinking with a high degree of clearness. Whenever I think it’s lifting, or thinning out—the cloud, I’m saying—suddenly everything gets darker than before.”
“You think you’re unique. You think the newlyweds don’t give me this. I am their uncle that died. I am Grandma’s former milk-man. They leave the confines of Mother’s home to get married, and they come here and get a motel for the night, and the next morning, snap—”
“No no no.”
“—suddenly I am the long-lost. I am Mark Twain. One night with their husband and they have second thoughts. They want a return to normalcy, Grandma, the butter churn.”
“No, but—”
“Pull yourself together, for Chrissake.”
“I’m in some very delicate business these days. Let me not hang details around your neck. It’s enough to know that at the very heart of this business is something that I have to have all my powers about me.”
“I’m plain of face. I could be anybody.”
A tabby cat with a live swallow in its jaws sprung from a rock below them onto the sill of the cliff, squeezed itself under the rail,
The cigarettes were making his heart slam away at his rib cage, and experience told him the only way to address this was to smoke another.
The ice cream man, once he had been located under the heavy cover of a sugar maple twenty feet from the pre-fall, crashing Niagara, wore a white paper hat in the conventional military shape, the same model Rocco wore when he was on the job; also, a white and blue polka-dotted shirt and a black bow tie. A lipless, unholy grin was frozen to his face. He sat atop the steel cage of a milk crate behind his refrigerated cart, his back against the trunk of the tree. The light all around was splendorous, but the shade afforded beneath this tree was so complete that no patches of sunlight whatsoever fell on the grass.
Such a complicated device just to catch light with. So many thousands of leaves. There was a leaf for every angle of sun coming down. The tree was a cistern for light.
The ice cream man had nothing he was reading, no oddments to fiddle with. Each of his hands rested on the knob of one of the freezer hatches as though he were manning the gate to a passage underground. He stood up with some effort in the strange shadow of the leaves. He was aged significantly. He began speaking before Rocco had completed his approach.
“I have strawberry. I have chocolate. I have pistachio. I have a sugar cone. I have a regular cone. I have no vanilla. One napkin, please.” He cleared his throat. A grasshopper landed on Rocco’s shoulder and the ice cream man leaned smoothly toward him and flicked it off. “I have no sandwiches, drumsticks, or novelties of any kind. I have paper cups and wood spoons. One scoop, twelve cents. Two scoops, nineteen cents. Three scoops, a quarter. I have no nuts. I have no cherries. Sixty feet in that direction one finds a public water fountain. Thirty feet to the left of that is a public latrine. I don’t know what time it is.”
There was a pause while the two men took in each other’s faces. Rocco thought he saw a shiver of recognition pass across the man’s features, and then the man stifle it. There was unquestionably the too-longness of the pause and of the looking at each other before the man set himself to opening the freezer hatches and exposing his wares. The paper hat was cockeyed—a cheerful angle, the way Rocco himself wore his—and liver spots were visible on the exposed portion of the scalp, beneath what remained of the glossy, pallid hair.
“I know you,” Rocco said.
“No, you don’t.”
“We know each other. If you give me a second—”
“Whoops! There it goes! Now then, to summarize, your choices are three in number—”
“I hope you’ll forgive me. For two days, I’ve been beside myself.”
“—flavor, vessel, number of scoops.”
“I’ve been under a cloud. I’m having trouble thinking with a high degree of clearness. Whenever I think it’s lifting, or thinning out—the cloud, I’m saying—suddenly everything gets darker than before.”
“You think you’re unique. You think the newlyweds don’t give me this. I am their uncle that died. I am Grandma’s former milk-man. They leave the confines of Mother’s home to get married, and they come here and get a motel for the night, and the next morning, snap—”
“No no no.”
“—suddenly I am the long-lost. I am Mark Twain. One night with their husband and they have second thoughts. They want a return to normalcy, Grandma, the butter churn.”
“No, but—”
“Pull yourself together, for Chrissake.”
“I’m in some very delicate business these days. Let me not hang details around your neck. It’s enough to know that at the very heart of this business is something that I have to have all my powers about me.”
“I’m plain of face. I could be anybody.”
A tabby cat with a live swallow in its jaws sprung from a rock below them onto the sill of the cliff, squeezed itself under the rail,
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