Ricochet Joe

3 ICE CREAM AND PAINFUL LOSS

The city council and the many business owners of Little City, recognizing that the world was growing darker and more dysfunctional every year, had worked together to provide anxious tourists with a destination that reminded them of a much earlier era. Therefore, on the main street, under the jacaranda trees and the palm trees, along the cobblestone sidewalk, among the quaint shops and the genteel galleries and the wondrous little cafés, there was even a malt shop with a 1950s decor and waitresses wearing white uniforms and pink hats and pink shoes. To even the most critical eye, every detail of the establishment appeared historically correct—except that there were no ashtrays on the tables.

Both Joe and Portia would have chased their adventure with a more fortifying beverage if they had been of drinking age, but as they were both eighteen, they settled for a back booth in the malt shop, ordering a chocolate-ice-cream soda for him and a cherry-ice-cream soda for her.

“So nothing like that ever happened to you before?” she asked.

“Did I look like I knew what I was doing?”

“I wish I could say yes.”

The experience seemed almost like something that he had dreamed, and he was surprised that it hadn’t left him more badly shaken. In fact, a curious sense of well-being had settled over him the moment that the purse snatcher had run off, as if he’d been given antianxiety medication.

“I must have looked crazed.”

“Man, you were like some pinball ricocheting from flipper to buzzer to bell.”

Joe liked the way that Portia stirred her drink to make the ice cream melt faster, how she scooped the creamy foam off the top of the soda, how she ate it with the slightest smacking of her lips.

He said, “Why on earth did you follow me through all of that?”

“Who wants to spend Saturday stabbing litter?”

“Volunteers for a Better Future,” he said.

“I didn’t volunteer. I was dragooned.”

“Dragooned by whom?”

“Who the hell says whom anymore?”

“I might be a writer someday.”

“Oh, I hope not. You seem so nice.”

Joe watched her drawing the pink cherry-flavored slush through her straw. Her lips puckered precisely, and her cheeks dimpled with the suction, and her throat pulsed with each swallow. Joe was not mechanically inclined. Working on car engines and that kind of thing held no appeal for him. But he was riveted by the mechanical process of Portia consuming the cherry-ice-cream soda.

“What’s wrong with writers?” he asked.

“A lot of them hate the world and want to change it, build Utopia.”

“I don’t.”

“Good. Because utopias always turn out to be one version of hell or another.”

“I just want to tell good stories. Or write advertising copy.”

“I am dazzled by your commitment to literature. So what was it that happened to you out there? Are we talking psychic phenomena? Are you some kind of mutant?”

“I’m not one of the X-Men.”

“You’re no Wolverine, for sure. But you’re something.”

“No, not me.” Again his equanimity surprised him. “It was just a two-headed-calf thing.”

“Are you going to drink your ice-cream soda, or just have erotic fantasies while you watch me drink mine?”

“I could be happy either way,” he said, but he turned his attention to his soda.

Portia propped one elbow on the table, rested her chin in the palm of her hand, watched him for a moment, and said, “You do that pretty well yourself.”

He said, “Who dragooned you into volunteering?”

“Chief Montclair.”

“The police chief?”

“Well, he’s not an Indian chief. He was upset with me.”

“That’s not good.”

“Oh, he’s been upset with me at least since my first day in elementary school.”

“You got in trouble with the cops when you were just six? How?”

“I stripped off my clothes and ran naked through the school.”

Joe took a break from his ice-cream soda to consider what she had said. In his mind’s eye, she was eighteen in first grade. “Why would you do that?”

“I didn’t want to be there.”

“An extreme strategy.”

“It worked a few times. Then it didn’t. So I bit the bullet for twelve years of tedium—otherwise known as school.”

“I liked school,” he said.

“I’m not stupid, okay? I got top grades. They just make it all so boring. I have a low tolerance for boring.”

“So why did Chief Montclair make you volunteer?”

“Too many speeding tickets. Either I had to volunteer, or he’d take away my driver’s license.”

“He can’t do that. Can he do that?”

She shrugged. “He’s not just the police chief. He’s also my father, and I still live at home.”

“You’re Portia Montclair.”

“Wow, you put it together just like that.”

She returned to her cherry-ice-cream soda, and for a minute or so, they both enjoyed her enjoyment of it.

She said, “You’ll have to meet my dad. He’s a hard-nosed cop, but you’ll like him.”

“Your mom must be very pretty. I mean, well, ’cause you are.”

“I have some pictures of her. She looked way better than me.”

The wrong kind of chill passed through Joe, and he felt that he had been stupid and thoughtless. “I’m sorry. I lost my mother, too. She died of cancer when I was two.”

“Mine’s still out there somewhere, living the good life. She found a rich guy who didn’t want kids as much as she didn’t, and they went off and didn’t have any together.” Portia’s flippancy seemed calculated to deny her pain. “When I was six, she assured me I’d be better off without her, and she went down the front walk with two suitcases and got in a white Mercedes and was driven away by a man I never saw. She sure was right, ’cause when she left, and it was just Dad and me, everything was way better.”

Joe considered his words before letting loose of them. “My grandma Dulcie says we know we’re finally getting a little wisdom when we’re able to see that even loss can be beautiful if it makes us love more the things we haven’t lost.”

After a silence, she said, “What did you mean earlier when you said ‘a two-headed-calf thing’?”

“Whatever happened to me, ricocheting around like that, it won’t happen again. Strange things happen all the time, but they don’t repeat. Like, there was a rain of frogs in this town in Pennsylvania in 1948, but not since. In 1922, in Chico, California, a lot of stones fell from the sky slowly, as if gravity had little effect on them. But never again. Two-headed calves are born, but rarely.”

“I think it’ll happen again,” she said.

“Nope. It’s just a strange little story to tell the great-grandkids when I’m eighty.”

“Great-grandkids? Are you married?”

“No, of course not. I’m only in my first year of college.”

“College, huh? I’m not going to rack up humongous debt just to be twenty-two without a job instead of eighteen without a job.”

“So what’re you doing instead?”

She winked. “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”

The prospect of getting to know each other better pleased Joe, and he smiled even more winsomely than usual.

She said, “Okay, Ricochet Joe, take your mental hands off my imagined body until I give you permission to dream.”

“That’s not what I was thinking about.”

“Yeah, right. Don’t try to tell me you were working on the plot of your great American novel.”