The Night Parade(9)

Across the street, porch lights came on. Another light blinked on in Deke Carmody’s front windows farther up the block. A second later, Deke was beneath the awning of his front porch, cinching a bulky white robe around his thick frame.

“What is it?” It was Tom Walker from next door, coming up beside David. “What’s going on?”

David shook his head. “I have no idea.” Then he proceeded to walk around to the driver’s side of the truck.

Tom Walker grabbed him by the bicep. David paused and looked at his neighbor, noting the dark, sunken, sleep-weary eyes, the stubble on Tom Walker’s chin. In the cold light of the street lamps, Tom looked like the newly risen dead.

“What?” David said.

“Nothing,” Tom said, as if changing his mind, and released David’s arm. Then he shook his head and uttered a nervous laugh. “I’m right behind you.”

Yet despite Tom’s proclamation, David walked around the front of the truck by himself. Only when he passed in front of the truck’s headlights, their startling white glow casting heat along the exposed flesh of David’s arms, did he realize that he was suddenly vulnerable—that if the figure behind the wheel decided to floor the accelerator at that moment, he’d be a goner. Thinking this, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that there was a light on in one of the front windows of his own house. Kathy’s silhouette stood behind the glass.

He crossed to the driver’s side without incident. The truck’s door was higher than a regular vehicle’s, so David had to take a few steps back to see in the window. But even then, the window was rolled up, and there was nothing but glare from the streetlights at the opposite end of the court splashed across it.

“Hello?” he called to the driver. He waved his hands over his head, like someone signaling an aircraft.

Tom Walker came around the side of the truck. He looked spooked, his knobby knees poking from below a pair of lacrosse shorts, his big feet stuffed into what looked like his wife’s fuzzy pink slippers.

“He’s in there,” Tom said. “He’s watching us.”

“He’s not moving,” David said.

Deke Carmody materialized out of the darkness, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight. He was staring at the truck as if the thing were an alien spacecraft just descended from the sky. “It’s friggin’ one in the morning,” Deke said, as if this needed to be stated. “Somebody order some Rocky Road or what?”

And let’s not forget that it’s the dead of winter, David thought, but did not add. Instead, he reached out— “Hey, now,” Tom uttered.

—and popped the handle on the door. The door eased open, exposing the darkened cab and the oddly bent figure behind the steering wheel.

David took a step back. He couldn’t make out the man’s face, but from what he could tell, he was dressed in his starched white uniform and pin-striped apron. The Freez-E-Friend hat was perched on his head, a thing that always reminded David of an old milkman’s hat. It was when the hat seemed to reposition itself in the darkness of the truck’s interior that David realized the ice cream man had turned and was looking straight at him.

“Are you all right?” David called to the man over the din of “Yankee Doodle.”

The man inside the truck said nothing. A starched white knee came into the light, ghost-white, and David could see the man wore shiny white shoes, too.

He’s in full uniform. Which means he must be a lunatic. As if driving an ice cream truck around at night in the middle of winter wasn’t enough proof of this.

The man’s hand came up and brushed against the steering wheel column. David heard the jangling of keys. A moment later, both the truck’s engine and the music died. The silence that replaced it was almost deafening.

“You okay, pal?” David said, taking a step closer to the open door.

“I don’t . . .” the man began, then stopped. David heard him clear his throat—a raw, guttural sound, wet with phlegm toward the end. “I don’t think I’m . . . doing this right,” said the man.

“Doing what right?”

The man said nothing.

“What’s your name?” David asked him.

“Uh,” said the man. “It’s Gary. My name’s Gary.”

“What are you doing out here, Gary?” He tried to put some jocularity in his voice, a bit of humor that might serve as the right amount of magic to dispel this whole uncomfortable scene. Yet his voice cracked, and David thought it had the opposite effect.

“Making the rounds,” said the man. “Isn’t that right?” He added that last part with undeniable uncertainty, as if he was hoping David might be able to instruct him whether or not this was, in fact, what he was doing.

“Do you know where you are?” David asked.

The man said something that sounded like, “Pistachio.”

David licked his upper lip. “Why don’t you come on down, come out here with us? If you’re lost, we can help you.”

“I’ve got all this work to do,” said the man. David still could not see his face. “If I don’t do it, who’s going to . . . going to do all this work?”

“I don’t understand,” David said. “What work?”

“All this . . . all this work,” the man said, and motioned with one hand toward the back of the truck, presumably to indicate all the ice cream and frozen pops back there.