Publisher
The Eyes
It began in the last days of August, when the leaves of the elm in the front yard had curled into crisp brown tubes and fallen away to litter the lawn. I sat at the curb that afternoon, waiting for Mister Softee to round the bend at the top of Willow Avenue, listening carefully for that mournful knell, each measured ding both a promise of ice cream and a pinprick of remorse. Taking a cast-off leaf into each hand, I made double fists. When I opened my fingers, brown crumbs fell and scattered on the road at my feet. Had I been waiting for the arrival of that strange changeling year, I might have understood the sifting debris to be symbolic of the end of something. Instead I waited for the eyes.
That morning I’d left under a blue sky, walked through the woods and crossed the railroad tracks away from town, where the third rail hummed, lying in wait, like a snake, for an errant ankle. Then along the road by the factory, back behind the grocery, and up and down the streets, I searched for discarded glass bottles in every open garbage can, Dumpster, forgotten corner. I’d found three soda bottles and a half-gallon milk bottle. At the grocery store, I turned them in for the refund and walked away with a quarter.
All summer long, Mister Softee had this contest going. With each purchase of twenty-five cents or more, he gave you a card: On the front was a small portrait of the waffle-faced cream being pictured on the side of the truck. On the back was a piece of a puzzle that when joined with seven other cards made the same exact image of the beckoning soft one, but eight times bigger. I had the blue lapels and red bow tie, the sugar-cone-flesh lips parted in a pure white smile, the exposed towering brain of vanilla, cream-kissed at the top into a pointed swirl, but I didn’t have the eyes.
A complete puzzle won you the Special Softee, like Coney Island in a plastic dish—four twirled Softee-loads of cream, chocolate sauce, butterscotch, marshmallow goo, nuts, party-colored sprinkles, raisins, M&M’s, shredded coconut, bananas, all topped with a cherry. You couldn’t purchase the Special Softee—you had to win it, or so said Mel, who through the years had come to be known simply as Softee.
Occasionally Mel would try to be pleasant, but I think the paper canoe of a hat he wore every day soured him. He also wore a blue bow tie, a white shirt, and white pants. His face was long and crooked, and at times, when the orders came too fast and the kids didn’t have the right change, the bottom half of his face would slowly melt—a sundae abandoned at the curb. His long ears sprouted tufts of hair as if his skull contained a hedge of it, and the lenses of his glasses had internal flaws like diamonds. In a voice that came straight from his freezer, he called my sister, Mary, and all the other girls sweetheart.
Earlier in the season, one late afternoon, my brother, Jim, said to me, You want to see where Softee lives?
We took our bikes. He led me way up Hammond Lane, past the shoe store and the junior high school, up beyond Our Lady of Lourdes. After a half hour of riding, he stopped in front of a small house. As I pulled up, he pointed to the place and said, Look at that dump.
Softee’s truck was parked on a barren plot at the side of the place. I remember ivy and a one-story house, no bigger than a good-size garage. Shingles showed their zebra stripes through fading white. The porch had obviously sustained a meteor shower. There were no lights on inside, and I thought this strange because twilight was mixing in behind the trees.
Is he sitting in there in the dark?
I asked my brother.
Jim shrugged as he got back on his bike. He rode in big circles around me twice and then shot off down the street, screaming over his shoulder as loud as he could, Softee sucks!
The ride home was through true night, and he knew that without him I would get lost, so he pedaled as hard as he could.
We had forsaken the jingle bells of Bungalow Bar and Good Humor all summer in an attempt to win Softee’s contest. By the end of July, though, each of the kids on the block had at least two near-complete puzzles, but no one had the eyes. I had heard from Tim Sullivan, who lived in the development on the other side of the school field, that the kids over there got fed up one day and rushed the truck, jumped up and swung from the bar that held the rearview mirror, invaded the driver’s compartment, all the while yelling, Give us the eyes! The fuckin’ eyes!
When Softee went up front to chase them, Tim’s brother Bill leaped up on the sill of the window through which Softee served his customers, leaned into the inner sanctum, unlatched the freezer, and started tossing Italian ices out to the kids standing at the curb.
Softee lost his glasses in the fray, but the hat held on. He screamed, You little bitches!
at them as they played him back and forth from the driver’s area to the serving compartment. In the end, Mel got two big handfuls of cards and tossed them out onto the street. Like flies on dog shit,
said Tim. By the time they’d realized there wasn’t a pair of eyes in the bunch, Softee had turned the bell off and was coasting silently around the corner.
I had a theory, though, that day at summer’s end when I sat at the curb, waiting. It was my hope that Softee had been holding out on us until the close of the season, and then, in the final days before school started and he quit his route till spring, some kid was going to have bestowed upon him a pair of eyes. I had faith like I never had at church that something special was going to happen that day to me. It did, but it had nothing to do with ice cream. I sat there at the curb, waiting, until the sun started to go down and my mother called me in for dinner. Softee never came again, but as it turned out, we all got the eyes.
Will There Be Clowns?
My mother was a better painter than she was a cook. I loved her portrait of my father in a suit—the dark red background and the distant expression he wore—but I wasn’t much for her spaghetti with tomato soup.
She stood at the kitchen stove over a big pot of it, glass of cream sherry in one hand, a burning cigarette with a three-quarter-inch ash in the other. When she turned and saw me, she said, Go wash your hands.
I headed down the hall toward the bathroom and, out of the corner of my eye, caught sight of that ash falling into the pot. Before I opened the bathroom door, I heard her mutter, Could you possibly…?
followed hard by the mud-sucking sounds of her stirring the orange glug.
When I came out of the bathroom, I got the job of mixing the powdered milk and serving each of us kids a glass. At the end of the meal, there would be three full glasses of it sitting on the table. Unfortunately, we still remembered real milk. The mix-up kind tasted like sauerkraut and looked like chalk water with froth on the top. It was there merely for show. As long as no one mentioned that it tasted horrible, my mother never forced us to drink it.
The dining-room walls were lined with grained paneling, the knots of which always showed me screaming faces. Jim sat across the table from me, and Mary sat by my side. My mother sat at the end of the table beneath the open window. Instead of a plate, she had the ashtray and her wine in front of her.
It’s rib-stickin’ good,
said Jim, adding a knifeful of margarine to his plate. Once the orange stuff started to cool, it needed constant lubrication.
Shut up and eat,
said my mother.
Mary said nothing. I could tell by the way she quietly nodded that she was being Mickey.
Softee never came today,
I said.
My brother looked up at me and shook his head in disappointment. He’ll be out there at the curb in a snowdrift,
he said to my mother.
She laughed without a sound and swatted the air in his direction. You’ve got to have faith,
she said. Life’s one long son of a bitch.
She took a drag on her cigarette and a sip of wine, and Jim and I knew what was coming next.
When things get better,
she said, I think we’ll all take a nice vacation.
How about Bermuda?
said Jim.
In her wine fog, my mother hesitated an instant, not sure if he was being sarcastic, but he knew how to keep a straight face. That’s what I was thinking,
she said. We knew that, because once a week, when she hit just the right level of intoxication, that’s what she was always thinking. It had gotten to the point that when Jim wanted me to do him a favor and I asked how he was going to pay me back, he’d say, Don’t worry, I’ll take you to Bermuda.
She told us about the water, crystal blue, so clear you could look down a hundred yards and see schools of manta rays flapping their wings. She told us about the pure white beaches with palm trees swaying in the soft breeze filled with the scent of wildflowers. We’d sleep in hammocks on the beach. We’d eat pineapples we cut open with a machete. Swim in lagoons. Washed up on the shore, amid the chambered nautilus, the sand dollars, the shark teeth, would be pieces of eight from galleons wrecked long ago.
That night, as usual, she told it all, and she told it in minute detail, so that even Jim sat there listening with his eyes half closed and his mouth half open.
Will there be clowns?
asked Mary in her Mickey voice.
Sure,
said my mother.
How many?
asked Mary.
Eight,
said my mother.
Mary nodded in approval and returned to being Mickey.
When we got back from Bermuda, it was time to do the dishes. From the leftovers in the pot, my mother heaped a plate with spaghetti for my father to eat when he got home from work. She wrapped it in waxed paper and put it in the center of the stove where the pilot light would keep it warm. Whatever was left over went to George the dog. My mother washed the dishes, smoking and drinking the entire time. Jim dried, I put the plates and silverware away, and Mary counted everything a few dozen times.
Five years earlier the garage of our house had been converted into an apartment. My grandparents, Nan and Pop, lived in there. A door separated our house from their rooms. We knocked, and Nan called for us to come in.
Pop took out his mandolin and played us a few songs: Apple Blossom Time,
Show Me the Way to Go Home,
Goodnight, Irene.
All the while he played, Nan chopped cabbage on a flat wooden board with a one-handed guillotine. My mother rocked in the rocking chair and drank and sang. The trilling of the double-stringed instrument accompanied by my mother’s voice was beautiful to me.
Over at the little table in the kitchenette area, Mary sat with the Laredo machine, making cigarettes. My parents didn’t buy their smokes by the pack. Instead they had this machine that you loaded with a piece of paper and a wad of loose tobacco from a can. Once it was all set up, there was a little lever you pulled forward and back, and presto. It wasn’t an easy operation. You had to use just the right amount to get the cigarettes firm enough so the tobacco didn’t fall out the end.
When my parents had first gotten the Laredo, Mary watched them work it. She was immediately expert at measuring out the brown shag, sprinkling it over the crisp white paper, pulling the lever. Soon she took over as chief roller. She was a cigarette factory once she got going; Pop called her R. J. Reynolds. He didn’t smoke them, though. He smoked Lucky Strikes, and he drank Old Grand-Dad, which seemed fitting.
Jim and I, we watched the television with the sound turned down. Dick Van Dyke mugged and rubber-legged and did pratfalls in black and white, perfectly synchronized to the strains of Shanty Town
and I’ll Be Seeing You.
Even if Pop and my mother weren’t playing music, we wouldn’t have been able to have the sound up, since Pop hated Dick Van Dyke more than any other man alive.
The Shadow Year
My room was dark, and though it had been warm all day, a cool end-of-summer breeze now filtered in through the screen of the open window. Moonlight also came in, making a patch on the bare, painted floor. From outside I could hear the chug of the Farleys’ little pool filter next door and, beneath that, the sound of George’s claws, tapping across the kitchen linoleum downstairs.
Jim was asleep in his room across the hall. Below us Mary was also asleep, no doubt whispering the times tables into her pillow. I could picture my mother, in the room next to Mary’s, lying in bed, the reading light on, her mouth open, her eyes closed, and the thick red volume of Sherlock Holmes stories with the silhouette cameo of the detective on the spine open and resting on her chest. All I could picture of Nan and Pop was a darkened room and the tiny glowing bottle of Lourdes water in the shape of the Virgin that sat on the dresser.
I was thinking about the book I had been reading before turning out the light—another in the series of adventures of Perno Shell. This one was about a deluge, like Noah’s flood, and how the old wooden apartment building Shell lived in had broken away from its foundation and he and all the other tenants were sailing the giant ocean of the world, having adventures.
There was a mystery about the Shell books, because they were all published under different authors’ names, sometimes by different publishing companies, but you only had to read a few pages to tell that they were all written by the same person. The problem was finding them in the stacks, because the books were shelved alphabetically, according to the authors’ last names. I would never have discovered them if it wasn’t for Mary.
Occasionally I would read to her, snatches from whatever book I was working through. We’d sit in the corner of the backyard by the fence, in a bower made by forsythia bushes. One day, amid the yellow flowers, I read to her from the Shell book I had just taken out: The Stars Above by Mary Holden. There were illustrations in it, one per chapter. When I was done reading, I handed the book to her so she could look at the pictures. While paging through it, she held it up to her face, sniffed it, and said, Pipe smoke.
Back then my father smoked a pipe once in a while, so we knew the aroma. I took the book from her and smelled it up close, and she was right, but it wasn’t the kind of tobacco my father smoked. It had a darker, older smell, like a cross between a horse and a mildewed wool blanket.
When I walked to the library downtown, Mary would walk with me. She rarely said a word during the entire trip, but a few weeks after I had returned The Stars Above, she came up to me while I was searching through the four big stacks that lay in the twilight zone between the adult and children’s sections. She tugged at my shirt, and when I turned around, she handed me a book: The Enormous Igloo by Duncan Main.
Pipe smoke,
she said.
Opening the volume to the first page, I read, ‘Perno Shell was afraid of heights and could not for the world remember why he had agreed to a journey in the Zeppelin that now hovered above his head.’
Another Perno Shell novel by someone completely different. I lifted the book, smelled the pages, and nodded.
Tonight I wanted Perno Shell to stay in my imagination until I dozed off, but my thoughts of him soon grew as thin as paper, and then the theme of my wakeful nights alone in the dark, namely death, came clawing through. Teddy Dunden, a boy who’d lived up the block, two years younger than me and two years older than Mary, had been struck by a car on Montauk Highway one night in late spring. The driver was drunk and swerved onto the sidewalk. According to his brother, Teddy was thrown thirty feet in the air. I always tried to picture that: twice again the height of the basketball hoop. We had to go to his wake. The priest said he was at peace, but he didn’t look it. As he lay in the coffin, his skin was yellow, his face was bloated, and his mouth was turned down in a bitter frown.
All summer long he came back to me from where he lay under the ground. I imagined him suddenly waking up, clawing at the lid as in a story Jim had once told me. I dreaded meeting his ghost on the street at night when I walked George around the block alone. I’d stop under a streetlight and listen hard, fear would build in my chest until I shivered, and then I’d bolt for home. In the lonely backyard at sundown, in the darkened woods behind the school field, in the corner of my night room, Teddy Dunden was waiting, jealous and angry.
George came up the stairs, nudged open my bedroom door, and stood beside my bed. He looked at me with his bearded face and then jumped aboard. He was a small, schnauzer-type mutt, but fearless, and having him there made me less scared. Slowly I began to doze. I had a memory of riding waves at Fire Island, and it blurred at the edges, slipping into a dream. Next thing I knew, I was falling from a great height and woke to hear my father coming in from work. The front door quietly closed. I could hear him moving around in the kitchen. George got up and left.
I contemplated going down to say hello. The last I’d seen him was the previous weekend. The bills forced him to work three jobs: a part-time machining job in the early morning, then his regular job as a gear cutter, and then nights part-time as a janitor in a department store. He left the house before the sun came up every morning and didn’t return until very near midnight. Through the week I would smell a hint of machine oil here and there, on the cushions of the couch, on a towel in the bathroom, as if he were a ghost leaving vague traces of his presence.
Eventually the sounds of the refrigerator opening and closing and the water running stopped, and I realized he must be sitting in the dining room, eating his pile of spaghetti, reading the newspaper by the light that shone in from the kitchen. I heard the big pages turn, the fork against the plate, a match being struck, and that’s when it happened. There came from outside the house the shrill scream of a woman, so loud it tore the night open wide enough for the Shadow Year to slip out. I shivered, closed my eyes tight, and burrowed deep beneath the covers.
A Prowler
When I came downstairs the next morning, the door to Nan and Pop’s was open. I stuck my head in and saw Mary sitting at the table in the kitchenette where the night before she had made cigarettes. She was eating a bowl of Cheerios. Pop sat in his usual seat next to her, the horse paper spread out in front of him. He was jotting down numbers with a pencil in the margins, murmuring a steady stream of bloodlines, jockeys’ names, weights, speeds, track conditions, ciphering what he called the McGinn System,
named after himself. Mary nodded with each new factor added to the equation.
My mother came out of the bathroom down the hall in our house, and I turned around. She was dressed for work in her turquoise outfit with the big star-shaped pin that was like a stained-glass window. I went to her, and she put her arm around me, enveloped me in a cloud of perfume that smelled as thick as powder, and kissed my head. We went into the kitchen, and she made me a bowl of cereal with the mix-up milk, which wasn’t as bad that way, because we were allowed to put sugar on it. I sat down in the dining room, and she joined me, carrying a cup of coffee. The sunlight poured in the window behind her. She lit a cigarette and dragged the ashtray close to her.
Friday, last day of vacation,
she said. You better make it a good one. Monday is back to school.
I nodded.
Watch out for strangers,
she said. I got a call from next door this morning. Mrs. Conrad said that there was a prowler at her window last night. She was changing into her nightgown, and she turned and saw a face at the glass.
Did she scream?
I asked.
She said it scared the crap out of her. Jake was downstairs watching TV. He jumped up and ran outside, but whoever it was had vanished.
Jim appeared in the living room. Do you think they saw her naked?
he asked.
A fitting punishment,
she said. And as quickly added, Don’t repeat that.
I heard her scream,
I said.
Whoever it was used that old ladder Pop keeps in the backyard. Put it up against the side of the Conrads’ house and climbed up to the second-floor window. So keep your eyes out for creeps wherever you go today.
That means he was in our backyard,
said Jim.
My mother took a drag of her cigarette and nodded. I suppose.
Before she left for work, she gave us our list of jobs for the day—walk George, clean our rooms, mow the back lawn. Then she kissed Jim and me and went into Nan and Pop’s to kiss Mary. I watched her car pull out of the driveway. Jim came to stand next to me at the front window.
A prowler,
he said, smiling. We better investigate.
A half hour later, Jim and Mary and I, joined by Franky Conrad, sat back amid the forsythias.
Did the prowler see your mother naked?
Jim asked Franky.
Franky had a hairdo like Curly from the Three Stooges, and he rubbed his head with his fat, blunt fingers. I think so,
he said, wincing.
A fitting punishment,
said Jim.
What do you mean?
asked Franky.
Think about your mother’s ass,
said Jim, laughing.
Franky sat quietly for a second and then said, Yeah,
and nodded.
Mary took out a Laredo cigarette and lit it. She always stole one or two when she made them. No one would have guessed. Mary was sneaky in a way, though. Jim would have told on me if I’d smoked one. All he did was say to her, You’ll stay short if you smoke that.
She took a drag and said, Could you possibly…?
in a flat voice.
Jim, big boss that he was, laid it out for us. I’ll be the detective and you all will be my team.
Pointing at me, he said, You have to write everything down. Everything that happens must be recorded. I’ll give you a notebook. Don’t be lazy.
Okay,
I said.
Mary,
he said, you count shit. And none of that Mickey stuff.
I’m counting now,
she said in her Mickey voice, nodding her head.
We cracked up, but she didn’t laugh.
Franky, you’re my right-hand man. You do whatever the hell I tell you.
Franky agreed, and then Jim told us the first thing we needed to do was search for clues.
Did your mother say what the prowler’s face looked like?
I asked.
She said it was no one she ever saw before. Like a ghost.
Could be a vampire,
I said.
It wasn’t a vampire,
Jim said. It was a pervert. If we’re going to do this right, it’s got to be like science. There’s no such things as vampires.
Our first step was to investigate the scene of the crime. Beneath the Conrads’ second-floor bedroom window, on the side of their house next to ours, we found a good footprint. It was big, much larger than any of ours, and it had a design on the bottom of lines and circles.
You see what that is?
asked Jim, squatting down and pointing to the design.
It’s from a sneaker,
I said.
Yeah,
he said.
I think it’s Keds,
said Franky.
What does that tell you?
asked Jim.
What?
asked Franky.
Well, it’s too big to be a kid, but grown-ups usually don’t wear sneakers. It might be a teenager. We better save this for if the cops ever come to investigate.
Did your dad call the cops?
I asked.
No. He said that if he ever caught who it was, he’d shoot the son of a bitch himself.
It took us about a half hour to dig up the footprint, carefully loosening the dirt all around it and scooping way down beneath it with the shovel. We went to Nan’s side door and asked her if she had a box. She gave us a round pink hatbox with a lid that had a picture of a poodle and the Eiffel Tower.
Jim told Franky, Carry it like it’s nitro,
and we took it into our yard and stored it in the toolshed back by the fence. When Franky slid it into place on the wooden
