Time
had passed since the bath water was even tepid; it had been daylight when he
lowered himself into its scalding depth but now Brother Skunk lay submerged in
the near dark, his only movement the running of each thumb across its adjacent
fingertips’ corrugated flesh, knowing anything more would disturb the water and
in such force upon him an awareness of its actual temperature.
Thick
steam that had so infused the air was visible now only as backlit tracks of
condensation upon the window’s glass from beyond which came audible the
electronic lament of an ice cream van, its every incongruous note crisp upon
the winter air.
At
each interruption of the vehicle’s music he drew and held his breath, only to
hear it recommence in predictably less time than it might have taken anyone to
make their purchase. With bitter amusement he imagined it travelling in the
wake of the very truck sent out to salt the roads, this sense of its disparity
effecting his dismissal of its actuality, his eventual conjecture settling not
unpleasantly upon the idea of a phantom with the tune itself a mere echo of
nostalgia, a siren’s call to those as shared with him the same ghosted
sentiment of self.
At the sound of the ice cream vendor.
Mother (calling up to him from the
hallway): SKUNK! ICE CREAMS!
He negotiates the stairs fast as he is
able, swallowing back the Pavlovian saliva already flooding his mouth.
Skunk: ICE CREAMS! ICE CREAMS!
While his mother sweeps the loose change
from off the mantelpiece he is galloping out the house into the bright blue
summer noon and along the pavement toward the stationary van. In front of him
and currently being served are two little girls he has never before seen here.
That they are identical beneath the bright blondness of their hair distracts
from the frustration that he might arrive at the serving window before his
mother has caught him up; looking around he is bewildered to see her standing
still halfway back between him and the house, then startled as the top half of
her body convulses as if subject to a sudden burst of voltage. He might almost
convince himself she is dancing but for her eyes, which appear to him as though
emptied out of all capacity for vision.
He watches the coins spill from out her
hand onto the pavement and roll about her feet.
He was
unsure if he could still hear it, or if he was now listening only to a kind of
momentum established by its consistency of pitch.
Mother: ICE CREAMS! ICE CREAMS!
His mother collects the coins from off
the mantelpiece and with them tight-gripped in her fist tears out the house
even as he is defeating the last two or three of the stairs.
Skunk: ICE CREAMS! ICE CREAMS!
Galloping out after her across the
front grass, he is still a few steps behind when she stops dead, shocked to see
the twin blond girls standing there together at the ice cream van. She grabs at
Skunk as he tumbles into the back of her legs and moves to pass her by;
catching him around one elbow causes him to flail and cry out as he loses
balance.
With their ice cream cones in hand the
girls turn as one to the source of upset, only to see the woman already pulling
and pushing the little boy back toward the house from which they had just
emerged, his sudden wailing all too audible even when the front door closes
them both off from view.
In what he perceives as one single
motion she is both climbing the stairs and casting her fistful of coins across
the living room, their metallic staccato upon the furniture unimaginably harsh
even amongst his sobbing which continues on at such intensity that he must
eventually lower himself to his hands and knees, gasping at breath between the
spasms by which he is wracked, the back of his hand smeared thick with wiped mucus.
In such disappointment and confusion it does not occur to him that his mother
is herself thus engaged in the room above his head.
at
which his memory faltered, unable to locate between them either the reason or
reconciliation he felt certain there must have been, and so again found himself
at the impasse of that old insatiate ache to ask of her answers to all those
unanswered by which he remained beset, until adopting as a final resort the
violent throwing over of himself onto his side in hope that the coldness of the
water in which he was immersed might become his primary concern, and thus
elevate himself up from out the frustration of irresolvable memory.
