This idea of selling ice cream during the summer seems ridiculous, pointless. I’d much rather be close to water. The waves. Where I can hear them tumble in and then roll out, and see the tiny bubbles left behind on the sand pop one by one. Or feel the undercurrents warm this time of year. Swimming. Watching the girls in bikinis with sand stuck to the backs of their thighs walk up and down the boardwalk. At this time of the morning, the surfers are out riding the waves.
Instead, I’m inside an ice cream truck with my father, selling, cruising the streets. The pumps suck oil out of the ground rapidly with the creaking sounds of iron biting iron in a fenced lot at the end of the street. They look like giant rocking horses. Father turns at the corner, then, suddenly, he points to another ice cream truck.
“There’s the competition,” he says. “If the economy doesn’t improve soon, these streets’ll be full of them.”
He’s smoking, and the smoke floats back my way and chokes me. I can’t stand it. Some of the guys on the swim team smoke. I don’t understand how they can smoke and do their best when it’s time for competition. I wouldn’t smoke. To do so would be like cheating myself out of winning.
All morning he’s been instructing me on how to sell ice cream.
“Tonio,” he says now, “come empty your pockets.”
I walk to the front of the truck, stick my hands deep into my pockets and grab a handful of coins—what we’ve made in change all morning. The coins fall, overlap and multiply against the sides of the grease-smudged, change box. I turn my pockets inside-out until the last coin falls. He picks out the pieces of lint and paper from the coins.
When he begins to explain the truck’s quirks, “the little problems,” as he calls the water leaks, burning oil, and dirty carburetor, I return to the back of the truck and sit down on top of the wood counter next to the window.
“Be always on the lookout for babies,” father says. “The ones in pampers. They pop out of nowhere. Check your mirrors all the time.”
A CAUTION CHILDREN cardboard sign hangs from the rearview mirror. Running over children is a deep fear that seems to haunt him.
All I need, I keep reminding myself, is to pass the CPR course, get certified, and look for a job as a beach lifeguard.
“Stop!” a kid screams, slamming the screen door of his house open. He runs to the grassy part next to the sidewalk. Father stops the truck. The kid’s hand comes up over the edge of the window with a dollar bill forked between his little fingers.
“What do you want?” I say.
“A Froze Toe,” he says, jumping up and down, dirt rings visible on his neck. He wets the corners of his mouth with his cherry, Kool-aid-stained tongue. I reach inside the freezer and bring out a bar. On its wrapper is the picture of an orange foot with a blue bubble gum ball on the big toe.
“See what else he wants,” father says. “Make sure they always leave the dollar.”
The kid takes his ice cream, and he smiles.
“What else?” I ask him.
He shrugs his shoulders, shakes his head, and bites the wrapper off. The piece of paper falls on the grass. I give him his change; he walks back to his house.
“Should always make sure they leave all the money they bring,” father says. “They get it to spend it. That’s the only way you’ll make a profit. Don’t steal their money, but exchange it for merchandise.” His ears stick out from underneath his L.A. Dodgers cap. The short hair on the back of his head stands out.
I grin up at the rearview mirror, but he isn’t looking.
“Want to split a Pepsi, Tonio?” he says.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Get me some water then.”
The cold mist inside the freezer crawls up my hand. After he drinks and returns the bottle, I place it back with the ice cream.
“Close the freezer,” he says, “before all the cold gets out and they melt.”
If the cold were out I’d be at the natatorium doing laps.
* * *
On another street, a group of kids jumps and skips around a short man. The smallest of the kids hangs from the man’s thigh. The man signals my father to stop, then walks up to the window. The kids scream excitedly.
“Want this one, daddy,” one of the girls says.
“This one!” a boy says.
The smallest kid jumps, pointing his finger at the display my father has made with all the toys and candies.
“No, Jose,” the man says, taking the kid by the wrist. “No candy.”
The kid turns to look up at his father, not fully understanding, and then looks at me. His little lips tremble.
“Give me six Popsicles,” the man says.
“Popsicles or nothing. I don’t have money to buy you what you want.”
“A Blue Ghost. I want a Blue Ghost.”
“No, I said.”
The smallest kid cries.
“Be quiet, Jose, or I’m going to tell the man to go away.”
I put the six Popsicles on the counter.
“How much?” the man asks. The skin around his eyes is a darker brown than that of his nose and cheeks.
“A dollar-fifty,” I say.
He digs inside his pockets and produces two wrinkled green balls which he throws on the counter. The two dollar bills roll. I unfold the bills, smooth them, and give them to father, who returns the man his change through the front window.
The man gives each kid a Popsicle, then walks away with his hands in his pockets. Jose, still crying, grabs his as he follows his father back to their house.
“He doesn’t want to spend his beer money,” father says, driving away from the curb.
After that, we have no more customers for hours. Ever since he brought the truck home two years ago, father has changed. Ice creams have become his world. According to father, appearance and cleanliness isn’t important as long as the truck passes the Health Department inspection in order to obtain the sales license. The inside of the truck is a mess: paint flakes off, rust hides between crevices, the freezer lids hold layer upon layer of dirt and melted ice cream. Here I’ll have to spend the rest of my summer, I think, among the strewn Doritos, Munchos, and the rest of the merchandise.
The outside of the truck had been painted by father’s friend, Gaspar, before mother died. I remember how Gaspar drank beer after beer while he painted the crown over the K in KING OF ICE CREAM and assured mother, who never missed one of my swim meets and who always encouraged me to become the best swimmer I could be, that I was going to make it all right in the end.
Father lives this way, I know, out of loneliness. He misses mother as much as I do.
I count the passing of time by how many ice creams I sell. It isn’t anything like swimming laps. Doing laps involves the idea of setting and breaking new limits.
“How much do you think we have?” my father asks. The visor of his cap tilts upward.
“I don’t know.” I hate the metallic smell money leaves on my fingers.
“No.”
“A couple of months on your own and you’ll be able to guess approximately how much you make.”
A couple of months, I think, and I’ll be back in high school. Captain of the varsity swim team. A customer waits down the street.
“Make the kill fast,” father says.
A barefooted woman holding a child to her breast comes to the window. She has dirty fingernails, short and uneven, as if she bites them all the time. Make the kill fast, I think.
Ice creams on the counter, I tell her, “Two dollars.”
She removes the money out of her brassiere and hands it to me, then she walks away. She has yellow blisters on the back of each heel.
After that, he begins to tell me the story of the wild dog. When he was a kid, a wild bitch came down from the hills and started killing my grandfather’s chickens. “Seeing the scattered feathers,” father says, “made your grandfather so angry I thought his face would burst because it’d turned so red.”
“Anyway,” he continues, “the wild dog kept on killing chickens.”
Not only my grandfather’s, but other farmers’ as well. The other farmers were scared because they thought the wild dog was a witch. One morning, my grandfather got my father out of bed early and took him up to the hills behind the house with ajar of poison. A farmer had found the bitch’s litter. My grandfather left my father in charge of anointing the poison all over the puppies fur so that when the mother came back, if he hadn’t shot it by then, she’d die the minute she licked her young. My father didn’t want to do it, but my grandfather left him in command while he went after the wild dog to shoot it. The dog disappeared and the puppies licked each other to death.
When he finishes telling me the story, father looks at the rearview mirror and grins, then he drives on. He turns up the volume in the music box and now Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head blares out of the speakers. The old people’ll complain, he says, because the loud music hurts their eardrums, but the louder the music, the more people’ll hear it, and more ice creams’ll get sold.
Farther ahead, another kid stops us. The kid has his tongue out. His eyes seem to be too small for his big face. Though he seems old, he still drools. He claps his small hands quickly.
“Does he have money?” father asks.
“Can’t see.”
The kid walks over to the truck and hangs from the edge of the window.
“Get him away from the truck,” father says, then to the kid, “Hey, move away!”
“Come on,” I tell the kid, “you might fall and hurt yourself.”
“Wan icleam,” the kid says.
“We’ll be back in a little while,” father tells him.
“Wan icleam!” He doesn’t let go. “Wan icleam!”
“Move back!” father shouts. “Tonio, get him away from the truck.”
I try to unstick the kid’s pudgy fingers from the metal edge of the window, but he won’t let go. His saliva falls on my hands.
“Wan icleam!”
I reach over to one of the shelves to get a penny candy for him so that I can bait him into letting go, but father catches me.
“Don’t you dare,” he says.
He opens the door and comes around the back to the kid, pulling him away from the truck to the sidewalk where he sets the kid down, and returns.
“Can’t give your merchandise away,” he says. “You can’t make a profit that way, Tonio.”
The kid runs after us shouting, waving his arms. I grab a handful of candies and throw them out the window to the sidewalk, where they fall on the grass and scatter.
* * *
The sun sets slowly, and, descending, it spreads Popsicle orange on the sky. Darkness creeps on the other side of the city.
If I don’t get a job as a lifeguard, I think, then I’m going to travel southeast and visit the islands.
“How are the ice creams doing?” father asks. “Are they softening?”
I check by squeezing a bar and say, “I think we should call it a day.”
“Tonio,” he says. He turns off the music, makes a left turn to the main street, and heads home. “Why didn’t you help me with that kid? You could have moved him. What will happen when you’re here by yourself?”
“Couldn’t do it.”
“Here,” he says, giving me the change box. “Take it inside when we get home.”
“I’ll get it when we get there.”
He puts the blue box back down on top of the stand he built over the motor. Cars speed by. The air smells heavy with exhaust and chemical fumes. In the distance, columns of smoke rise from factory smokestacks.
He turns into the driveway, drives the truck all the way to the front of the garage, and parks underneath the long branches of the avocado tree.
“Take the box inside,” he says, turning off the motor. He steps down from the truck and connects the freezer to the extension cord coming out of the kitchen window.
I want to tell him that I won’t come out tomorrow.
“Come on, Tonio. Bring the box in.”
“You do it,” I say.
“What’s the matter, son?”
“I’d rather you do it.”
“Like you’d rather throw all my merchandise out of the window,” he says, growing red in the face. “I saw you.”
He walks toward me, and I sense another argument coming. Father stops in front of me and gives me a wry smile. “Dreamers like you,” he says, “learn the hard way.”
He turns around, picks up the change box, and says, “I’m putting the truck up for sale. From now on you’re on your own, you hear. I’m not forcing you to do something you don’t want to.”
I don’t like the expressionless look on his face when usually, whenever he got angry at me, his face would get red and sweaty.
He unlocks the kitchen door and enters the house.
I jump out of the truck, lock the door, and walk around our clapboard house to the patio. Any moment now, I think, father’ll start slamming doors inside and throwing things around. He’ll curse. I lean against the wall and feel the glass of the window behind me when it starts to tremble.