Read Online The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford - Free Book Online

to hang out if I wanted to.
    I didn’t want to seem scared or ungrateful, so I stayed for a while sitting on the curb, watching them play handball, while Johnny Mars explained that if you jerked off into a syringe and then gave yourself a shot with it and then fucked your wife, your kid would come out a genius. When I finally rode away, Lennin told me to say hello to my father, and when I was well across the field, he yelled after me, “Have a fucking nice summer.”
    Lennin’s interest in protecting me made it possible for me and my brother to pass through the school field after dark, whereas anyone else would have had their asses beaten. One night we ran into Lennin and his gang down by the woods, where Minerva Street led to the school grounds; he had a silver handgun in his belt. He told us he was waiting for a guy from Brightwaters to show up and they were going to have a duel. “For my honor,” he said, and then drained his beer, smashed the bottle against the concrete opening of the sewer pipe, and belched. When a car pulled up on Minerva and blinked its lights on and off twice, he told us we better get going home. We were almost around the block to our house, when in the distance, we heard a gunshot.
    Occasionally, Lennin would surface and either save me from some dire situation, like the time I almost got mixed up in a bad dope deal at a party, and he came out of the dark, smacked me in the side of the head, and told me to go home, or I’d hear about him through gossip. He and his gang were forever in trouble with the cops—knife fights, joy rides in hot-wired cars, breaking and entering. I know each of them did some time in juvenile lockup in Central Islip before I graduated. Finally, I finished high school, moved away from home to go to college, and lost track of him.
    Now I was in The Tropics, just coming out of a daydream of paradise and the past, and there he was, standing at my table, holding a bottle of VO, a bucket of ice and a tumbler, looking like someone had taken him down to the gas station and put the air hose in his mouth.
    â€œYou don’t remember me, do you?” he asked.
    â€œI thought it was you,” I said, and smiled. “Bobby Lennin.” I stuck my hand out to shake.
    He laid the bottle and bucket on the table and then reached out and shook my hand. His grip didn’t have any trace of the old power.
    He sat down across from me and filled my glass before pouring one for himself.
    â€œWhat are you doin’ here?” he asked.
    â€œI came in to see the mural,” I said.
    He smiled and nodded wistfully, as if he completely understood. “You visiting your old man?” he asked.
    â€œYeah, just for an overnight.”
    â€œI saw him in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago,” said Bobby. “I said hi but he just nodded and smiled. I don’t think he remembers me.”
    â€œYou never know,” I said. “He does the same thing with me half the time now.”
    He laughed and then asked about my brother and sisters. I told him my mother had passed away, and he said his mother had also died quite a while back. He lit a cigarette and then reached over to another table to get an ashtray. “What are you up to?” he asked.
    I told him I was teaching college and also that I was a writer. Then I asked if he still saw Cho-cho and the other guys. He blew out a stream of smoke and shook his head. “Nah,” he said, looking kind of sad, and we sat there quietly for a time. I didn’t know what to say.
    â€œYou’re a writer?” he asked. “What do you write?”
    â€œStories and novels—you know, fiction,” I said.
    His eyes lit up a little and he poured another drink for each of us. “I got a story for you,” he told me. “You asked about Cho-cho and the gang? I got a wild fuckin’ story for you.”
    â€œLet’s hear it,” I said.
    â€œThis all happened a