“If we could speak it, there wouldn’t be nobody here who could understand it,” the little girl said. “So why do we want to speak it?”
“That’s pretty good,” the driver said. He rose from his seat and opened a locker behind him. “Hang on, you guys. Here it comes.”
He was wearing gloves. As fast as he could, he trundled out Popsicles, fudge bars, cups of marbled ice cream, ice cream sandwiches, Eskimo Pies, and frozen sundaes, while more children came running from all over the park. He peeled the paper off the last fudge bar and ate it with them. “How do you like that, kids?”
“Yea!” they shouted.
The little girl stuck her head in the door and looked into the rear of the truck. “What’s that sound?” she said.
“Which sound?”
“It goes thump, thump, thump.”
“That’s my refrigerator unit. It’s broken.”
“It sound like you got a gorilla locked in there,” the little boy said.
“Maybe that’s what it is,” the driver said.
“No, it ain’t,” the girl said.
“I got to go,” the driver said. “Make sure you clean up your trash. Don’t be litterbugs.”
“You coming here tomorrow, Smiley?” she asked.
“I got a lot of places to visit. Be good kids.” He raised his hand in farewell.
“Hey, everybody t’ank Smiley,” the little girl said.
“T’ank you, Smiley!” they yelled.
He shifted into gear and drove away, water streaming off his back bumper, the back end swaying and vibrating.
He stopped at the end of the street and got into the rear of the truck. He opened a large door that gushed with cold. He looked at something on the floor, his jaw tightening. “I told you to be quiet.”
He held on to the doorjamb for balance and stomped a mouth-taped figure with his red tennis shoe, then stood on the figure’s face for good measure. “You make me very mad. You have been a bad boy. Don’t make me come back here again. I do not like bad boys.”
* * *
ON SUNDAY MORNING I got the call.
“We’ve got a beaut, Pops,” Helen said. “We haven’t been able to get inside the ice cream truck yet, but this looks like one for the books.”
AT SUNRISE, A man wearing a Jolly Jack vendor’s uniform pulled up to the pumps in the same truck that had been stolen at the same filling station two days previous. He turned off the engine and went inside without buying any gas. He used the restroom, bought a bag of Ding Dongs, and munched them while he read the newspaper in the convenience store. Then he paid for the newspaper and went outside and did something in the back of the truck.
A minute later, the clerk saw him activate the gas pump with what turned out to be a stolen credit card. The clerk had never seen him before and knew nothing of the truck’s history. The driver was on the other side of the truck, so the clerk assumed he was gassing up. Someone entered the store and said smoke was rising from the back of the truck. The digital counters were racing on the gas pump. The hose and nozzle had been draped over the driver’s window and were sloshing gasoline across the seats and the floor. A flame flickered inside the glass in the rear doors. The driver had disappeared.
The explosion seemed to lift the truck off its wheels, then the fire roared with such intensity that it wilted the roof into carbon paper. One of the customers said he heard the muffled cries of a person inside the flames.
It took me only ten minutes to reach the site. The firemen had finished hosing down the truck, and one of them was prizing open the back doors with a crowbar. Helen was standing by her cruiser, talking into her mic. I waited for her to finish.
“What’s that smell?” I said.
“I hate to think,” she replied. “A car was reported stolen up the road. That’s probably how our man made his getaway.”
“What’s on the surveillance cameras?”
“The top of a head wearing a cap. It looks like he had gloves on.”