All Too Surreal Page 18

  Marie giggled. Katie looked at her mommy, then her sister, and laughed too, so as not to be left out of the fun, whatever it was.

  Ronald took another bite of pancake, chewed, and tried not to taste it. “I don’t think it’s all that funny.” Despite what he’d told Marie so she wouldn’t worry, last night’s nocturnal visit by the Neat Treats had disturbed him. “It’s weird, is what it is.” And it was something else, a word he didn’t want to speak around Marie because he didn’t want to scare her. It was dangerous.

  Ronald and Bridgett had been married for fourteen years, more than long enough to develop a certain amount of spousal telepathy. She frowned. “I think you were right a minute ago, when you said this isn’t a good topic to discuss at breakfast.”

  “We don’t have to discuss it, but I think we should at least be … cautious for a while. When it comes to—” he glanced at Marie — “making purchases of frozen confectioneries, that’s all.”

  “Frozen what?” Marie said. She turned to her mother. “Does he mean ice cream?”

  Ronald sighed. Six years old, and already he couldn’t put anything over on her. What was it going to be like when she was sixteen?

  “Not now, honey.” Bridgett turned to Ronald and gave him the That’s Quite Enough look. He opened his mouth to say one last thing, thought better of it, and nodded. She smiled, satisfied, and they all ate in silence for the next several minutes.

  Ronald decided he’d try to bring up the matter of the ice cream truck again with Bridgett before he left for work, sometime when the kids were otherwise occupied. And if such an opportunity didn’t present itself, he’d call her on his lunch hour. He wanted to make sure that she didn’t let Marie buy anything from the ice cream truck, not for a while, anyway.

  He heard his mother’s voice whisper in his mind. You can’t be too careful, Ronnie. The world’s a dangerous place. You don’t watch your step, you can trip on your very own porch, hit your head on the concrete, and die right then and there. You gotta keep a sharp eye out. Hell, you gotta keep two, all the time. You listening to me, Ronnie?

  He’d listened; listened good. Not like he had much a choice — he’d heard it (or some variation) from his mother all of his life. And while as an adult he knew that his mother had overstated her case (was “too damn paranoid,” is how Bridgett put it), in general, he’d found her advice to be sound enough. The trick was to have a balanced perspective; the world was a potentially dangerous place. A bit of healthy paranoia was a good thing. He was doing okay, and so were his wife and kids, and that was because he maintained his perspective and kept a sharp eye out, kept two, all the time.

  But indulge in too much paranoia and you ended up like his mother. Shut away in a nursing home, terrified of letting anyone on the staff touch you, convinced they’re stealing from you, short-changing you on food, going through your trash when you’re asleep, plotting to kill you with deadly drugs they only say are medicine. She’d died two years ago, and as much as he loved her, Ronald couldn’t say he was sorry.

  Who knew why the driver of the ice cream truck had chosen to do a Paul Revere last night? Maybe it had been a joke, as he’d told Marie. Or maybe whoever it was really had been drunk, as Bridgett suggested, or on drugs. But there were other, more sinister possibilities. Maybe the driver was crazy, perhaps even a pedophile who fancied himself some sort of suburban pied piper who used a truck and speaker in place of a flute. Not very likely, perhaps — after all, why would a child molester seek his prey at night, when all the kids were inside and asleep? — but that didn’t make it, or something equally as nasty, impossible. Maybe he should report the night driver to the police, just in case. Loud as that music had been, someone else had probably already called to complain, but at least he could add his voice to the chorus.

  He’d call the police first thing once he got to the bank. That decided, he felt better. Now all he had to do was finish choking down the rest of his pancake.

  Ronald followed the ice cream truck up one street and down another. It was a slow procession; the Neat Treats driver kept to speeds of fifteen, twenty miles an hour max. If there was a pattern to his nocturnal rounds, Ronald couldn’t detect it. The driver seemed to be selecting streets at random, sometimes circling back to cover the same ones again. Ronald checked his dashboard clock. He’d been tailing the ice cream truck for almost half an hour now, and aside from that one horrible stop, it hadn’t so much as slowed down, just continued its stately snail’s pace through the neighborhoods.

  Ronald’s window was still down, and cool summer air caressed his face, but it failed to soothe him. He was sweating as if he were standing under a desert sun at high noon, and he gripped the steering wheel so hard he thought the bones in his fingers might snap. He didn’t know what to do. He had a cell phone in the glove box. Should he call the police? They might be skeptical of his story about the severed head, but surely there would be some physical evidence — bloodstains and the like — inside the ice cream truck. Or should he pull ahead of the truck, block its path, force it to stop so he could confront the driver about his daughter? He remembered how the woman’s head, dangling at the end of her hair, had winked at him (seemed to, seemed to!) and was afraid. He imagined the driver stepping out of the truck, grinning maniacally, blood-stained machete held high. Heads up, pal! It’s your turn!

  The next time they came to an intersection, whichever way the truck went, Ronald could go the other way, head home and try to forget about ice cream trucks that came out in the middle of the night, that played music which no one seemed to hear, and which delivered body parts instead of dessert. He was tempted, but he knew he couldn’t give up, not after what the Neat Treats man had done to his daughter. He decided to continue following the truck for a little longer, see if he couldn’t learn something more that might strengthen his story for the police. That way —

  The ice cream truck’s brake lights bled onto the street, and the vehicle slowed. The driver pulled up to the curb in front of a ranch home with a yard full of cutesy lawn ornaments and a decorative flag jutting out from the overhang that covered the porch. Ronald drew as close as he thought was safe, then pulled over to the curb himself and put the Tercel in park.

  Several moments passed, and then the porch light snapped on. The front door opened, and a woman wearing a long nightgown stepped out. She was drenched in blood, her face, hands, hair, nightgown — she looked as if she’d been swimming in it. Her face was slack, eyes wide and staring like a sleepwalker or a George Romero zombie. She walked across the grass, making her way through the maze of objets d’art that grew from the lawn like some bizarre variety of mushroom. As she crossed the yard, Ronald noticed for the first time that the decorations weren’t the usual sort of kitsch that littered suburban lawns. Instead of gnomes, lawn jockeys or concrete geese, this yard sported stunted, twisted things … clawed, fanged, with baleful yellow eyes that seemed to be staring right at him. He thought he saw a taloned hand twitch here, a tooth-filled mouth gnash there, but he told himself that it was only his imagination, and he even managed to believe it.

  The blood-soaked woman stepped up to the ice cream truck, and this time Ronald was grateful that he couldn’t see the driver as he handed the “neat treat” over to the woman. It was a large hacksaw that gleamed silver in the moonlight. The woman set the blade against her forearm, sawed back and forth a few times, displaying no expression as the teeth sliced through her flesh and blood pattered to the grass. Finally, she pulled the blade away, nodded to the driver as the Fat Man had done before her, then turned and headed back toward her house, hacksaw held up as if she were a soldier marching with a gun. And now she was grinning.

  The ice cream truck pulled away as the woman returned to her home — and whatever unfortunate family members were inside. Ronald waited until she’d shut the door and turned off the porch light, and then he pulled into the street and continued following the Neat Treats truck, trembling so hard he could barely keep control of the steering whee
l, whispering to himself over and over again.

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…”

  When Ronald walked into the house, he found Bridgett in the living room, walking Katie, who was fussing.

  “I called the police about the ice cream truck. Guess what they said?”

  “Ronald …”

  He tossed his car keys onto the phone stand next to the door. “They told me it was a bit late to be playing April Fool’s. Dumbasses.”

  “Ronald, please, there’s something —”

  “I mean, I admit it sounds crazy, an ice cream truck driving around in the middle of the night, but you’d think they’d at least check into it. But they said they hadn’t received any other complaints. Can you believe that? As loud as that truck was?” He shook his head. “I guess people are getting too damn lazy to even pick up a phone and —”

  “Ronald!”

  He broke off, startled by her shout. As if it were an instant replay, the last few moments finally managed to penetrate his consciousness. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Marie. She —” Katie chose that moment to let out a howl, and Bridgett shushed her, spoke words of soothing nonsense.

  Ronald felt a cold wave of fear wash through his gut. He walked over to Bridgett, took her elbow, turned her to face him. “Forget about the baby for a minute. What about Marie?”

  “She’s in her bedroom. She’s been there since after three. She …” Bridgett hesitated, and a mixture of guilt and defensiveness passed across her face. “She saw the ice cream man this afternoon.”

  The fear turned to a ball of ice in the pit of his stomach. “Christ! I told you to keep her away from that bastard!” Bridgett opened her mouth, no doubt intending to offer a reason why what she had done — or rather failed to do — had seemed appropriate and logical at the time. But Ronald pushed passed her and hurried to Marie’s room. The door was open a crack, but he knocked before entering.

  “Sweetie? It’s Daddy. How are you doing?”

  Marie lay on her small kid’s bed, Power Puff Girls sheets drawn up to her chin. Stuffed animals surrounded her head like an anthropomorphic halo. She didn’t look at him as he crossed to her bed; her gaze remained fixed on a point upon the ceiling.

  Ronald knelt next to her bed, reached beneath the sheet and felt around until he found his daughter’s hand. “Are you sick?”

  No response, not even an eye blink.

  He felt a mounting horror rise within him, and he struggled to maintain control. The last thing Marie needed was to see how scared he was. “Mommy said you’ve been in bed all afternoon. Is that true?”

  Nothing.

  “She said you … you saw the ice cream man today.” He fought to keep his voice even. “Did you get something from him, from the Neat Treats man?”

  After his call to the police had been unsuccessful, he’d looked through the Yellow Pages, trying to find Neat Treats. Under Ice Cream & Frozen Deserts — Dealers, he found well over a dozen entries from Baskin-Robbins to Udder Delights, but nothing for Neat Treats.

  Marie gave the merest of nods, a single head bob, though she still didn’t take her gaze off the ceiling.

  Awful scenarios ran through his mind: the driver had exposed himself to her, had offered to sell her drugs, had tried to fondle her, and perhaps succeeded. Whatever had happened, it had to be something terrible, else why would Marie be lying here, almost catatonic? “What did he … what did you get?”

  At first he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she said, “He didn’t give me anything; he showed me something.”

  Christ, the sonofabitch had whipped it out in front of her. Sick horror at the thought of his child being violated mingled with a sudden overpowering anger. He wanted to wrap his fingers around the Neat Treats man and squeeze until the bastard’s eyes popped out of his skull.

  He didn’t want to ask his next question, didn’t want to know the answer, but he had to. After all, he was the Daddy, wasn’t he? “What did he show you, honey?”

  A pause, as if she were trying to figure out the best way to phrase her reply. “He showed me the world.”

  Ronald looked at her for a long moment, trying to understand what she’d said. He tried to get her to clarify, but nothing he said elicited any further response. She just lay there, looking up at the ceiling, expressionless.

  Finally, he told her to try and get some rest, and he left the room. He heard his mother’s voice. You really dropped the ball on this one, Ronnie boy. Didn’t I tell you the world was a dangerous place? Now look what’s happened to your daughter. Some freak has messed with her head — maybe messed with more than that! — and she’s so traumatized she can barely talk. And the way she just stares! You should have kept a sharp eye out, Ronnie. Should’ve kept two.

  He wanted to call the police and have them come to the house, but Bridgett refused. “She’s upset enough as it is. She doesn’t need a cop asking her all sorts of embarrassing questions. If you must call, leave an anonymous tip, like they do in the movies.”

  He was furious with his wife. Didn’t she understand that this sick motherfucker needed to be stopped before he hurt any more kids? But when he looked in on Marie again and saw her still staring without expression at the ceiling, he couldn’t bring himself to call the police and put her through the additional trauma of being questioned.

  They continued with their nightly routine as best they could. Bridgett made dinner — spaghetti and salad — and they ate without Marie, who could not be roused from her bed. Bridgett promised that if Marie wasn’t any better come the morning, she’d take her to see the pediatrician. Ronald nodded absently.

  Bridgett scowled. “Did you hear what I said?”

  Ronald glanced at Katie, saw she’d smeared spaghetti sauce all over her face. “Sorry, I was thinking.”

  “About what?”

  He kept staring at Katie; he couldn’t get over how much the sauce looked like blood. “Going for a drive.”

  The Neat Treats truck stopped in front of a Tudor style house not quite big enough to be called a mansion, but a damn site finer than Ronald’s home. This was the well-to-do part of town, what residents called the “dollar side.” Ronald and his family lived on the more modest “fifty cent side.” The truck drew up to the curb and parked; three car lengths behind, Ronald did the same. He watched the Tudor, waited for the appearance of the ice cream man’s next customer. The drapes were shut, but they glowed muted yellows, oranges, reds; it appeared that every light in the house was on. A party? Maybe, but then where were the cars? There were none in the driveway, and there weren’t many more parked in the street.

  Ronald touched his sopping brow, smeared sweat around with his fingers. He felt as if he’d swallowed a cactus that was slowly expanding in his stomach, and his hands trembled so badly, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to control the car well enough to get home.

  And that’s all he really wanted to do now — go home. It had been a mistake to try and track down the ice cream truck, he could see that now. And what had he planned to do once he caught up with Mr. Neat Treats? Confront him, demand to know what he’d done to his daughter? Maybe even beat the man up? It had seemed to make sense back at the house, especially as the evening wore on and Marie showed no sign of improvement. But now, after finding and following the ice cream truck down miles of suburban streets, he wanted to believe that everything he’d seen tonight was just an hallucination brought on by worry over his daughter’s condition. But he knew better. Something deep within his hindbrain, that primitive reptilian part whose only concerns were eat-drink-fuck-survive, told him that as much as he might prefer it to be otherwise, everything he had seen tonight had been real.

  Whoever … whatever the ice cream man was, whatever his fell purpose, there was no room for him in the balanced perspective of the world that Ronald had labored to maintain throughout his adult life. The driver of the Neat Treats truck belonged in his mother’s world — that shadowy, fearful place in her rotting mind wh
ere she’d spent her last days.

  You were right, Mom, he thought. The world is a dangerous place. So dangerous that sometimes looking out the window to see what’s passing in the street is the worst possible thing you can do.

  Screw it. Let the ice cream man finish his dark rounds alone. Ronald’s place was at home, with his wife and children. He put the car in reverse, not giving a damn if Mr. Neat Treats saw the red splash of his rear lights. He looked in the rearview, intending to back down the street and turn around in the first driveway he came to, head home and try the rest of his life to forget the ice cream man and that goddamned endless “Turkey in the Straw.” But Ronald froze when he saw what was looking back at him: a pair of animal eyes set above an elongated canine snout, the whole of it painted blood-red by his brake lights.

  His first thought was to gun it, run the fucker down, whatever it was, but he hesitated, looked forward, saw the Tudor’s front door was open, and a group of people had come out onto the immaculate lawn. No, not people, not exactly. Their bodies were human, but their heads were those of animals — cats, dogs, pigs, rats, deer … They were dressed in S&M chic: leather with studs and spikes, rubber with openings for nipples, crotches, and anuses. One of the creatures, a well-muscled man with the head of a twelve point stag and an enormous semi-erect penis, stood on the sidewalk next to the ice cream truck, making his transaction. The other animal heads decided to not let the party die down while they waited, and started chasing one another across the lawn, grunting and growling in their bestial voices. Within moments, they began coupling, tripling, quadrupling, screwing with animalistic abandon.

  The wolf-head behind Ronald’s car walked around to the driver’s side. Ronald turned to look at her, saw she had eight small breasts in two rows down her chest and abdomen. She reached a clawed hand through the open window and put his car into park. Her scent filled his nostrils, a musky mix of canine and ripe vagina. She pulled her hand back, opened the door and gestured for him to get out. Ronald looked at her. Her tongue lolled out the side of her mouth, and her gaze was fixed on him as if she were trying to decide whether to fuck him, eat him, or both.