—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.
“We’ll figure it out,” David said.
“Mint chocolate chip,” said the man.
“Is he delusional?” David heard Deke whisper at his back. David shushed him, unable to pull his eyes from the ice cream man.
“Butter pecan,” the man said. “Strawberry cheesecake.”
“Come on,” David said, waving the man down from the truck. “Why don’t you come on down. I’ll give you a hand.”
“Blueberry Surprise,” said the man, a ball of phlegm clotting up the final syllable. Then he leaned forward so that the lower half of his face—the part not obscured by the shadow of the hat’s brim—glowed white and garish in the moonlight.
Something dark was trickling from the man’s left nostril. It appeared to lengthen, albeit almost imperceptibly, as David watched. For a moment, it almost looked like the man’s face was splitting down the middle, a crack forming at the center of his skull.
He’s had a stroke. It was the first thought to come into David’s mind. This put him somewhat at ease, since strokes, while awful, were comprehensible. It stripped some of the mystery, the lunacy, from this whole thing and made him feel somewhat more at ease.
“That’s it,” David said, aware that he was talking to the man like he would to a child. “Come on down.”
The man didn’t so much climb down from the cab as slide down in a disjointed and ungainly fashion. When his white shoes hit the pavement, David thought the man’s legs would buckle and give out, so he rushed to the man’s side and quickly gripped him about the shoulders for support. That was when David caught a whiff of him—the stench of fresh feces clinging to him like a shroud. It was enough to nearly make him gag, and he quickly recoiled from the man.
It was then that he heard a police siren coming up the street. Relief washed over him. He found his feet and took several steps away from the man. As if sensing David’s apprehension, the man turned and faced him with his whole body—a disconcertingly robotic adjustment of shoulders, torso, head—and that was when David noticed the dark splotches running down the front of the man’s white uniform toward the hem of the pin-striped apron. More blood.