Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

Skippy by Derek Nikitas

When he is not at work on his own stories, Derek Nikitas teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Brockport. His work has appeared twice in the Ontario Review, and when we last heard from him he had had a story accepted by Chelsea. Mr. Nikitas’s first fiction for EQMM is also his debut crime story, though in 2001 he won the Elizabeth K. Daniels Mystery Writing Contest.

It’s cold enough to burn. It’ll scream against metal. Never, ever let the children touch. Careful! Watch them! Kids will try snatching those milky ice pebbles from the cooler where the ice cream is stacked frozen, the cooler secured in the pickup bed just behind the tailgate that’s all stickered with Blue Bunny varieties. Some kids will ride the fender; they’ll grab Creamsicles and that perilous dry ice will rain down on the summer pavement and their tender flesh.

Your average commission will be a hundred a day, under the table. Headquarters is three miles west of Hammersport on a back road lined with empty cabbage fields. It’s also the home of your employer, Gregor Havel — a singlewide trailer propped by cinder blocks on a treeless acre. Each morning at nine sharp you’ll arrive to find three Mazda trucks in the gravel drive with their whitewashed wooden truck caps needing a fresh coat of paint. The words Prince Ice Cream will be fading away. Gregor will emerge from his tin-roofed porch, squinting at the daylight, scrawny in his hide rough and gray as an elephant’s. He’ll slouch in a haze of cigarette smoke. Out here the crickets will screech incessantly.

On your first day, ask if this is “Skippy central.”

Gregor will answer in a gruff Dracula accent — Romania or Hungary or something, you’ll guess. “What is this name ‘Skippy’?” he’ll say, coughing.

One morning deep into July when the sun burns dew from the grass and cicadas drone, you’ll arrive at Gregor’s to find flimsy cardboard boxes dumped across the gravel, wrappers torn and skittering in the breeze, bright popsicle puddles seeping into the lawn. One cooler overturned and splashed with the gray sludge of a hundred thawed desserts. Gregor will stand above it, unshaven, pistol in hand as if primed to blast a dying fudge-pop from its misery.

“Go home!” he will demand. He will turn toward the fields to speak. “They come at night to steal and vandalize — three times already this summer. I remain awake as long as possible, but still I miss.”

Ask him who did this.

“I will catch them. But go home now — there is nothing to sell today. I will murder them many times in the face.” He’ll rattle the pistol as if it’s bucking in his grip. “Bang, bang, bang! Yes?”

Don’t let the children come to harm. Bellow, “Stop!” from your window before they rush into the street. Shift to park, leap from the cab with your change dispenser jangling like a tambourine from your belt. Around to the tailgate, position yourself street-side with every sense attuned to traffic and children — even as orders are placed, even as prices tally in your mind — Banana Fudge Bomb Pop $1, Mississippi Mud $1...0, Strawberry eclair $1, Sponge Bob $1.75. Never let the children jaunt blindly away from a purchase, oblivious to passing cars. Grab them if you must, but only as a last resort.

Be warned; at first your sleep will be plagued by the mental echoes of the bell you clang. Two weeks of training with Gregor, stopping hourly at gas stations for coffee and All Sport, more Marlboros. He’ll flick his cigarettes into an ash pile on the floorboard beside the gearshift. A farm bell will be attached just above a hole drilled into the cab roof, through which a leather shoelace dangles, tied overhead to the bell yoke. Pull the strap, and the clapper knolls the bell.

“Not like that,” Gregor will say; he’ll pluck the strap from your fingers. “You sound like a funeral dirge. Make happy sounds like so—” His own fingers will flick, and the bell will tinkle sweet and cool. “Don’t ring without thinking. Rhythm, then silence — like suspense. Wait, ring here where the houses make echo, you see?”

Stand with Gregor behind the truck with the exhaust pipe puttering heat at your shins. In six days of work you’ll have tanned six shades darker. Your legs will pulse with awakened muscles while Gregor scrutinizes your latest sale, his wiry eyebrows drooping. “You take their money like a beggar — snatch, snatch. No subtlety. The money is not the objective, it is the afterthought. Make them believe this. Take the money as if you are refusing the money, like so. Understand? They are sheep — the people — all of them sheep. You tell them what to buy. Not with words; with your body. Use your shoulder to hide pictures of the cheap ice cream. Cheap Creamsicles. Forget Creamsicles. Your fingers swipe across the stickers and lead their eyes toward expensive items, see?”

Gregor will point toward an elderly woman across the street brushing pine needles from her driveway with a broom — even as dozens more needles dive onto the blacktop behind her. “Do you see her? All the time they do these things with no meaning,” Gregor will explain. “They thrash around in little plastic pools. They eat swine carcasses outside with buzzing flies. They drag children around on leashes — I have seen it. They sneak through the cornfields at night to pillage my coolers, like animals.”

Keep the larger bills buried in a sack beneath the driver’s seat. Drive with both hands on the wheel and never let your mind drift, even late at night when you’re exhausted from twelve hours’ work and your high beams light the black knotty trees encroaching on the road, even when silhouettes seem to lurch from the woods toward your open window and you want nothing but to drift off to sleep.

Watch for deer eyes gleaming. Realize this is the hardest you’ve ever worked. Some mornings you’ll pray for a rainstorm cancellation, but hours later under starlight and after a full shift you’ll smell like soil and breathe like wind; you’ll have traversed a stretch of Earth and conquered its native peoples.

Gregor will wait on his porch, slumped at a picnic table forking spinach from a can into his mouth, his cigarette butts piled in an aluminum ashtray. Overhead a bug zapper will glow purple and sizzle with tiny deaths. Seated at the table, separate bills by denomination and stuff your coins into paper rolls. Collect pennies in soup bowls. Gregor will estimate your earnings on sight. On poor days his anger will mount like an instant heatwave.

“You have lost your customers, see? This money is crap. They run away and never return. What can I do now that you have failed?” A mosquito will pierce his upper lip, but you will say nothing as it gorges. “I take two weeks training for you but still you understand nothing!”

Nights when the money piles higher, he’ll grin from one corner of his mouth and help count the profits. He’ll talk and reveal that thirty years ago he became a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, a student revolutionary of the Prague Spring just before Russian tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square and battered the human face of socialism. “Our First Secretary Dubcek, they kidnapped him to Moscow and broke him, understand? They tied their ropes to him and made him their Communist puppet. The people of Czechoslovakia — they bow to Hitler, they bow to Stalin, they bow to everything because they have no spine to hold them up. So I take my spine and leave.”

Gregor will keep the pistol on the bench beside him. When he hears rustling outside the porch windows he’ll grab his weapon and burst through the screen door. The screen will snap behind him like a mousetrap.

Some days the streets will teem with kids scrambling and scrounging through pockets and sneakers for sweaty wads of money, a loose quarter. They’ll grow frantic as your Prince Ice Cream truck putters into view. Kids will pogo on the roadside, flapping money like parade pennants.

Preserve the illusion that Prince Ice Cream is sweet nostalgia, a summer amusement staffed by honors students with hearts like Saint Nick. But understand that it doesn’t last. Soon your truck will crawl along abandoned streets; the clatter of your bell will ricochet off silent houses. Someone out of sight will yell, “Skippy is a ripoff.” A Sno-Kone will blast against your windshield, a Sno-Kone you sold on that street the day before. It will melt on the glass like a disintegrating rainbow.

Become desperate. Search everywhere within the hundred square miles of your jurisdiction, especially near sundown when sales peak and you’re prowling the woods west of Hammersport, just south of the lake. One virgin cul-de-sac can sometimes yield more cash than several village streets. Learn to ignore NO TRESPASSING and NO SOLICITING. Follow roads that become private drives. Encounter a farmer who’ll jump from his tractor and buy an entire box of Mississippi Mud Pies.

When it’s worst, remember there will always be certain apartment complexes and trailer parks — the places you’ll haunt even after nightfall and into late September, places where people squint at your headlights from their lawn chairs unfolded in the parking lot. Children in their pajamas and with dinner still smeared on their cheeks; children pouring sticky dimes into your hands even before their selections are made. “What can I get for this much?” they’ll ask. Watch them devour whole popsicles in the red glow of the taillights. Some kids without money will beg while their parents gawk from concrete steps. These children will cling to your arms and implore you.

Shirtless, bald-shaven teenage boys will wander around your truck, whispering to each other, lingering beside the driver’s door where inside the money is hidden, where the key in the ignition keeps the truck running. Your shoulders will tense, your pupils widen, but you’ll know you couldn’t prevent them if they tried.

One evening in the woods just south of Lake Ontario your headlights will flash over a sign half obscured by overgrown roadside brush — a wooden marker for Dorset Motor Park. Brake, and notice for the first time that the dirt access road leading to the abandoned Whitman Cold-Storage Plant is bordered by a huddle of mobile homes.

In Dorset Motor Park you’ll lurch the truck through an unseen pothole, and the bell will sound its tocsin even before you pull the strap, a noise intruding through private windows and thin trailer walls. Those who are already outside will gather in the street, children first, stepping into the high beams with their faces stark as bleached bone. Beyond them, at the road’s end, the factory will rise with its crumbling brick and lettering faded to charcoal dust.

A single street that had seemed deserted will now rustle with shadows moving just beyond the light. Someone will lean into your open window, a man whose wet coils of hair stream across half his face. Notice fresh blood on his swollen lower lip. Smell the doughy odor of beer.

“We been waiting all summer for you, man,” he’ll say. “Frigging kids been pestering me.” He’ll reach across your body and flick one clean peal from the strap. Catch the onion scent of his armpit. He’ll unlatch your door and step backward to where others are crowding, all of them scowling like prison inmates. The only lights in the park will be those glowing from the trailer windows, dimmed by towels and sheets used for drapery.

A dozen silent children will huddle at the tailgate. Stand behind them. Swat the gnats hovering around your head and glance back to the paved road that you’ve left. Overhead, stripped tree branches will vein the skyline.

The man with the busted lip will press through the children, wielding a beer can in a Buffalo Sabers cozy. “All right — it’s on me, twerps — but you all get Bomb Pops.” Nodding to you, he’ll flip open the cooler lid. “They just help theirselves here or what?”

Push through the children, quietly excusing yourself. Some kids will mutter about the baseball mitt with the embedded gumball, but the man will hold firm — “It’s Bomb Pops or nothing. Skippy’ll set you up.” Wince at the contempt fizzling in that name — Skippy. Stand on the fender. Dole out Bomb Pops to children clutching, some of them shivering.

“What’s the damage, Skip?” he’ll ask, slurping his beer. He’ll lift one leg and scratch at a welt on his bare foot and groan. He’ll be wearing only a pair of cutoff jeans with white threads like peeling skin.

Tell him fifteen dollars.

“Fifteen? You’re kidding me, man.”

Crouch to retrieve the sticky Popsicle wrappers the children have littered. Sense that almost everyone around you is shifting, pacing, pulsing with a communal anxiety as if they’ve all just been aroused from a year-long sleep.

“You take checks, Skippy?”

Say no. Someone behind you will chuckle.

The man with the bloody lip will thrust his hands into his pockets and turn them inside out, revealing nothing. He’ll bow slightly, as if some magic has been performed. Children will have knelt their bare knees on the dirt road behind your truck, slurping at their popsicles as melting streams drip across their knuckles like candle wax.

Tell him that you can’t leave without the money.

“Looks like you’ll need to, Skip. Hey — next time you come around I’ll have it for you, Scout’s honor.”

You will have already decided that no rubber-banded wad of fives and tens is worth offering yourself to those who want nothing less than to beg and steal and tear you open. Think of Czechs bowing their babushkas to the Russian tanks. Notice that every one of several dozen windows at the cold-storage plant has been shattered, and within them is the blackest form of darkness. Feel a raindrop on your brainstem. Mumble a curse.

“What? What’d you just call me?” the man will ask. His beer will splash your T-shirt and his hands grapple your face, thumbs gouging for your eyes. His fingers will stab into your mouth with the taste of oil and dirt. You’ll be pummeled by his wet flesh and your knees will betray you; they’ll drop into the pebbly mud. He’ll groan something wordless as you curl inward, wrapping all of your mind into the blind and silent cocoon you have made.

But you won’t succeed at wishing yourself away from there, no matter how you clench your eyes. Nothing will subdue a sudden impact whiplashing your skull backwards against your own rubber tire. Hear pain screech inside your ears and feel it sear through your cheek and lash within your sinuses. Believe the world itself has slammed to a halt. Then realize that the man with the busted lip has kicked you barefoot in the jaw.

Open your eyes and dark images will fade into white. Watch your blurred assailant crumple onto a cinderblock pile, clutching his own foot, bawling that it is broken. The children will leer at you both. They will shove Bomb Pops like shotgun barrels between their own pursed lips.

For God’s sake keep conscious. Escape through a bleary smog of pain and tinnitus by pattering your hands along the truck until you reach the driver’s door. Hunch into the cab. Grind the gearshift into reverse and lay all your strength on the horn. Watch the children scatter in the rearview. Bleed. Bleed on your own fingers and your neck and your clothes. Bleed starburst droplets onto your lap and the vinyl seat cushion. Ball a yellow napkin from the trash of your Wendy’s value meal and press it into the gash opening the flesh of your cheek; feel it soak as you lunge the truck backwards through divots. Listen to the bell clang and the cooler door slamming like a mute mouth in rage.

Into your headlights a woman will rush, lofting a fan of dollar bills, her head shaved except for a few cornsilk strands. She’ll stumble toward your truck with her loose cellulite all tremors. She’ll clomp sandals through mud and soil, the hem of the T-shirt dangling below her knees. Even as her mouth wrenches, you won’t stop.

Instead, stop later at a defunct gas station three miles away, at the northern outskirts of Hammersport. Park beside a lone telephone booth where the glass will be scratched with a hundred initials, all of them glittering in a street-lamp shine. Let the truck idle while you slump in the driver’s seat and plan a phone call to police, or an ambulance, or Gregor. Dispense one quarter into your palm. Taste the metallic tinge of shock spreading across your tongue, prickling down through your lungs, the flavor of consciousness giving way again.

Sleep.

Awake some time later when a downpour is growling on the windshield. Find yourself draped across the passenger seat. The napkin will have become a red pulp dried against your wound. Forty minutes will have passed, and rain will have pooled in the eroded concrete around the telephone booth. You should call the police. You should let hospital nurses stitch your wound and administer tetanus shots and speculate that your face had been sliced open by your assailant’s sharp toenails.

But you won’t — you won’t call anyone, will you?

You’ll think of Gregor slurping spinach and awaiting your late return, maybe already back in his truck scouring these backwoods for signs of a wreck. You’ll think he has decided that you’ve been swallowed up by the world, and you’ll be desperate to show him your mangled face, prove to him your resolve.

But don’t go back to Gregor. Go home. Don’t force the truck through a pummeling rain that will drench the Hammersport streets into smeared impressions of themselves. Stoplights dripping crimson, street signs melting. Don’t drive so quickly that the moist road hisses underneath your tires. Stall; stop for gas. Don’t barrel across the farm roads stretching toward Gregor’s trailer.

Because what you’ll find when you return is Gregor prowling outside sopped and shirtless in the purple sheen of his bug zapper, wearing nothing but his khaki shorts, hair slicked over his cranium. He will be aiming his pistol with one hand toward the grass, stiff-armed. He’ll cup a cigarette dry with the other.

If you come this far, then just keep driving. Steer erratically if you must, but drive past. Abandon the truck down the road and race on foot across black and waterlogged fields until you collapse, almost drowned and heaving.

But don’t stop at Gregor’s trailer. Don’t wedge the truck headfirst into its gravel dock. Don’t douse the headlights as Gregor lurches toward you round-shouldered and puffing smoke like a dying campfire. With frantic forearm gestures he will lure you from the truck. “Come see what I have locked away. Hurry,” he’ll say.

The rain will patter your shoulders. You’ll forget the money pouch and the generator plug and everything if you follow Gregor’s trail. He’ll sidestep toward his trailer, never losing sight of you, urging you onward with flicks from his pistol. He will approach one of the three decommissioned coolers rusting in his yard. He’ll crush his cigarette against the cooler lid, where the rain will have gathered dust into rivulets of gray. When he opens the cooler, he’ll wrap his finger around the pistol trigger and stab the weapon inside.

You’ll see a boy just barely teenaged soaked in his jeans and a black T-shirt. A kid wearing fear on his face like the dead wrenching rubber on a Halloween mask. Blood in one nostril bubbling with each harried breath. Don’t allow yourself to see his eyes wet and blinking, his body folded inside the cooler with limbs bent useless.

“I caught the little insect, yes?” Gregor will say.

Don’t arrive at this moment. Don’t. Take another route. Because when the rain drives pain back into your wound and reminds you of your own shameful contortions, you will not be able to withhold. You’ll rush back to your truck and yank unopened boxes from the cooler. You’ll return to the boy and tear one box open like a split pinyata, dousing his body with ice cream sandwiches. You won’t dare glance toward Gregor, but you’ll see his gun always looming over the cooler lip, trained toward the boy’s wincing face.

You will tell the boy to eat. He wants ice cream? Eat the ice cream! Eat it all, you’ll demand, or Gregor will fire bullets and the bullets will black out his mind forever. You’ll scream at him, demand that he move faster as his fingers stumble across the packaging. You’ll hang so deeply into the cooler with your head and your curses that if Gregor fired, his bullets would catch you, too. Even as the boy chews down those cold slabs, you’ll dump a dozen more popsicles over his chest. Chocolate-darkened saliva will pool against his chin. Loose pellets of dry ice will begin to fog against his clothes and bare arms. He’ll flinch at the frozen burns and chew. He will close his eyes.

Right now you are furious, listening to these predictions. Right now you can’t imagine because you are gentle and you understand clearly that afterward there will be no hope of burying the shame of this moment from memory. But just wait and you’ll see. There is no need now for anyone to substantiate the awful thrill that you’ll soon feel slicing up your heart.