Do the Weird Crime, Serve the Weird Time

THE ICE PALACE

The widow MacPhearson never did anything. She was just like me, she never went out at night, never talked on the hone. Nothing.

She wasn’t doing anything the night of the Fourth, the night she was shot. I wanted to know. I wanted to know exactly what kind of nothing she was doing that night. She and I are the same age, excepting now of course she is dead, actually if she were alive she would have been six months older than me, which doesn’t matter much now, but kept us in separate grades in school.

I was retired, but she kept working. I had worked the Sears catalog show room. Doublesign, Texas had had the last Sears catalog showroom in the country. It should have been closed years ago, but a clerical error kept it going. I am fascinated by errors. Maybe the people that shot her, had meant to shoot me. Maybe they just had the wrong address. A simple computer error. I hate computers. I had to stop working just as computers came in.

Velma MacPhearson also had no truck with computers. She ran the Ice Palace, which was a place to buy soft ice cream and shakes near the state park. There weren’t many places like that left. I mean not affiliated with some big chainlike Dairy Queen. When she was working there years ago, everyone called the Ice Queen, because she had no truck with men either. She wasn’t rude to us, just a little cold, just like ice cream. But as she got old no one would have wanted her anyway, so we stopped calling her the Ice Queen. I have heard her called the Ice Bitch, but I was brought up never to call a lady things like that (even if they were true).

I wish she hadn’t been so cold to men. She would have made a good neighbor. Both of us were in bad health. Hers was worse though. She was past the time in life when you should have to stand and make a living. I think she had enough money to retire, just no one to give her permission to do so.

The sheriff said the FBI came into town after her killing. She was killed by a serial killer. I don’t know what he killed or why. Maybe it was just women that worked in the ice cream industry. Maybe just people that were Ice Bitches. I want to know.

I was at the VFW hall. I had lied about my age to get into the end of WWII. That was how my legs wound up the way they are. Which is another reason I wanted a nice neighbor. My kids pulled a mean trick on me. They both died, so that I am alone a good deal.

I know she used to watch TV, because I could hear it. I could have heard the shot, except I was at the VFW hall. We were watching the fireworks show. Last Fourth of July of the century, of the millennium. I had to listen to idiots explaining Y2K to other idiots, but it was people. I have always needed people.

People will tell you who you are.

One of my big fears is that I won’t have any people around me when it is time to pull the plug. I could fall and they could put me into one of those damn life support machines, and I could live forever.

Someone came to pull Velma’s plug.

They just walked in off the street.

I can’t believe that. I can’t believe that someone could just kill you without even knowing you. There must be a mistake. Maybe it was somebody that she shorted for change. She did that. I’ve seen her cheat a tourist out of a dime or a nickel, a quarter if she was feeling bold. They lost their quarter and they came to get her. I could live with that. It puts a price tag on human life.

She was in her bedroom on the second floor. Ever since that night I have slept in my second floor bedroom. She and her runaway husband had bought their house, but I inherited mine. In the “historic” center of downtown Doublesign. That’s because it has the old library and the post office and places for people to sell junktiques to tourists. Otherwise it would be just plain old. It isn’t very likely that you’ll meet anyone that lives in the house they were born in, but I do. I will die here.

I have been sleeping in the second floor, because all I can do is think about her death.

She was shot twice. Once by a .22 at close range and once by a kid’s dart gun. That’s how they know it was this serial killer. I wonder if they shot her with the dart gun first, or second.

Imagine if it was first. You know someone has broken into your house. They had come in through a window facing the backyard. She must have heard them come up the stairs. She probably screamed, and then whup she is hit with a dart. She must have been so relieved. It was all a joke, a prank, and then blammo a real bullet into her head making a third eye.

I saw her when they took her away. I wanted it all from my upstairs window. Then the sheriff came to talk me about it. I had been down at the VFW Hall listening to a recorded version of Elvis signing “Dixie.” So mainly he told me about it, rather than me answering his questions. He called her “the Ice Bitch.”

I don’t know what is wrong with ice. Many of my friends have moved out of Texas because they can’t take the heat. They are living with their kids in some cool town. Those that live here, spend all their time inside, with their air conditioners turned up so far that if they were to die, their body wouldn’t be in any danger of rotting. It seems a safer way to die.

I bet her body was very cool, when they carried it out.

I can’t get this place very cool. It’s those damn high ceilings. You see they used to build ceilings very, very high to encourage circulation of air. This was a cool house in my grandfather’s time. But I can run my AC all the time and It doesn’t get cool. I think about cool things when I am going to sleep. I think of icy mountain springs, and snow and ice cream. I think about the soft ice cream down at the Ice Palace. Before I got diabetes, I used to dream of just sticking my mouth under the spigot and letting the thick stream of soft ice cream fill me up, make me good and cool.

I always envied her her job at the Ice Palace. I used to work in a catalog showroom. That meant mainly I helped people look things up in a catalog and then order them. That what webpages do now. Sometimes people were happy when they used my service. They were ordering swing sets for the children or luggage for a round-the-world trip. But sometimes they were unhappy. They ordered home repairs, or equipment that let them use the tub safely and so forth. But I was never there when they would get their stuff. I never got to see the real smile—the smile of ownership—of material culture. All I got was vague smiles of hope. This was something that Mrs. MacPhearson had over all of us. Everyone is happy to buy ice cream. Even the little kids she used to be mean to, were still happy to buy ice cream. I don’t think you can look at an ice cream cone and be unhappy.

I have seen many unhappy people.

Constance, my wife, was unhappy. I saw her unhappy face for many years, and everything I did, everything I tried, made her more unhappy. She died young, escaping me the way Velma’s husband did her. Of course he didn’t die. He just bought the Ice Palace and then ran off and left her to pay for it for many years. It wasn’t the Ice Palace to start with it, it was the Golden Bucket and sold chicken. It never did well, but the Ice Palace did OK. It even did OK enough for her to have one or two young girls work there with her in the summer. It didn’t do crap in the winter, but she would be down there. I have driven by when there was snow on the ground and seen the widow’s unhappy face, just staring at the snow. She would be open all day for that one cup of coffee she would sell. But she didn’t have anything else. All she had was the Ice Palace. She lived across the street from the library and didn’t go. She didn’t even allow herself cable TV. Up every morning to wash it up, and then serve the pre-lunch crowd of farmers that came in to drink coffee, and once-in-a-great-while have a single ice cream cone. Then lunch. Local people. The afternoons filled with tourists back from the state park. Small dinner trade, then the local kids out riding around. Everyday she knew what she had to do.

I don’t know what I have to do. I don’t wake up in the morning with a plan. Someday I go to the barber, some days I cut my grass. I take some of the old men, who are worse off than me, to the doctor. I get my car serviced. Time flies by. It seems like every week, I’m getting my car serviced. My life was never as full as the widow MacPhearson’s. Maybe that was why they shot her. Maybe she had used her share of life’s resources. Maybe there’s only so many new faces you get to see, so many people that you talk to. Then some agency in the world intervenes. But probably not with a.22, probably such cosmic allotments are determined by angels.

I don’t know about angels. I have never been sure about God. I’ve thought I should drag my butt down to church, so I would get a chance to meet people, talk with people. I think it has been ten years since anyone stepped into my house. I mean other than a plumber.

I wonder if Velma thought about God, when they shot her.

She knew she was going to be shot that’s the important part. She had been sitting at the swivel chair at her desk in the bedroom. She would have swiveled argon as they came up the stairs. They had clipped off her power. Things were dark. I bet she was getting up the steam to go downstairs and check her fuse box. Her wiring was bad, like every house on this block, they hadn’t figured on people having washing machines and dishwashers and satellite TV. She probably had already turned around, with that very resolved and determined face she had for everything, and was about to get up. She would have seen them head first. She would have known if she knew them.

If the FBI is right, she would have known that she didn’t know them. So she had to know she was going to die. People don’t show up in the dark to give you flowers.

She could have seen the cold barrel of the gun. The light from the street light would have let her see it. I have measured this. My own bedroom is just as far from the streetlight. I have tried to make it just like hers. I turnoff all the lights and then I try out different things with mirrors and stopwatches. I want to know how long she had to think about it. She couldn’t have time to think all the things I’ve thought about it. I’ve had weeks and weeks. I suspect that she had less than a minute, from when she saw them to the bullet entering her forehead.

She didn’t get up. She was sitting when the bullet struck. Maybe she was really defiant, refusing to get up for some hooligan that had disturbed her house. Maybe she was afraid. I’ve got to know what she thought. That way I’m prepared. I can’t imagine an event like that happening. How can you die and not be prepared? So I try out things.

I got the key to her house.

No one knows this. I did not tell the sheriff. Long ago she gave a key to my wife, so that my wife could carry in the mail and newspaper; when Velma had to go to Ohio that time and take care of her sister. My wife never gave the key back.

I remembered it a few days after the shooting. The FBI had come and gone and the sheriff was done with the place. There would be some months before the county would figure out who the house belonged to. So it just set there full of darkness and mystery.

One night I waited till two in the morning and then I went in. I took a little flashlight and made my way up the stairs. I went to her swivel chair and I sat down in it, swiveling around each time the hose settled, trying to imagine the killer coming up the stairs in the dark. I could see his head; it was almost like he was there, but I didn’t know what I would think. What would my last thoughts be, if I knew they would be my last thoughts. I wondered if she would have thought of her husband that had abandoned her forty years ago.

Just think of it. She was with that guy for six, seven months and that was what had shaped her whole life. It gave her the Ice Palace. It gave her a reputation as a woman that men run away from. It gave her every unhappy day. All the other six months, all the half years since had done so much less, except for the night of the Fourth. Perhaps it set her free.

I have been back in the house more often. At first I was very careful. I would late until early morning. Some mornings I couldn’t do it. I would fall asleep about midnight, and then when I opened my eyes, rosy-fingered dawn had taken the sky. I realized though, that no could see me enter from the back of her house, anyway. Just as no one had seen the killer enter. I would just wait until nightfall.

The house was hot, since there was no power and therefore no AC. I really thought a good deal about ice cream. Someone had emptied out the refrigerator. I guess that is lagniappe for the sheriff. Since the crime investigation is over I can touch things. I touch her desk, I lay in her bed. Sometimes I get down on all fours and touch the bloodstain on the carpet with my forehead. I listen. Thing are very quiet in the house, so you can hear anything. I heard a leaf from one of her big maples hit the roof. In a few months it will be autumn. Soon the house will belong to somebody. Maybe the county can claim it, but it will stop being empty. Stop being our house.

I wish she could tell me what she thought.

I tried to find out things from the sheriff about the investigation, but he either knew nothing, or told me nothing. I found out that he talked about me. There’s a bar in town called the Shamrock, and I went there the night in August when it had been over a hundred that day and I needed something cool. I hadn’t been in years, and the bartender told me that the sheriff said I was obsessed about the case. Implied I was in love with the widow MacPhearson.I laughed. He laughed. I ain’t never going in there again.

I’m not in love with her. I just want to know what she thought. I lived next to her for forty years. I don’t know what she thought.

We were both the same. We never took vacations. We we’re born here. We never left the city except briefly. We looked out at the same street. We knew the same people. We read Reader’s Digest and the TV Guide. We shopped at the Sac-n-Pac and the HEB. Watered our lawns on the same days. Everyday she would say to me, “Good Evening Mr. Clemens.” Most of the year, she would add, “Hot enough for you?” I would say “Good Evening Mrs. MacPhearson, can’t complain and it wouldn’t do any good if I did.” I never asked her what would happen if suddenly some were to kill her. Kill her with a real bullet and then bounce a dart off of her. I never asked what she would be thinking of. Suddenly it was dark, darker than it had been for forty years since her husband ran out on her, dark. She would be assessing whether or not to bother to try and fix the lights, and habit and “common sense” would say, “yes, go fix the lights.” Then she would hear the killer’s footsteps. Come at last, after all those years of waiting. She may have had time to straighten her hair. Time to formulate one last greeting. No, she would have been silent. Silent like I am every night as I sit in her chair. She would have turned to face them. She had forty years to prepare. Up till the last minute, she would have thought that it could have been him, coming back after all those years to thank her for keeping their dream alive after so many miserable lonely mornings. Thank you, honey. And she could have told him—what? Which of the many speeches prepared for over the years.

But it wasn’t him. Just some random person, like any of the faces that she saw in the Ice Palace everyday. Then she had a moment for her last thought on earth.

I pray every night when I sit here, that her last thought was of ice cream, thick and flowing from the spigot, flowing on into eternity.