“What’s he doing?”
“Just sitting there, it looks like. I don’t know. I can’t really see.”
When he turned and headed out into the hall, Kathy said, “Where are you going?” There was a level of trepidation in his wife’s voice he found strangely endearing.
“To go check it out.”
“Outside?” She said this with incredulity, as if he’d just suggested he walk blindfolded into traffic.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s weird,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
“It’s fine. Just wait here.”
In the foyer, he shoved his feet into a pair of ratty moccasins, unlocked the front door, and, sans jacket, stepped out into the night.
It was bitterly cold, causing the sweat that still clung to his exposed flesh to freeze. From the front porch, he had a perfect view of the Freez-E-Friend truck, idling right there in the middle of Columbus Court. It was a quaint little cul-de-sac that served eight homes. The lampposts cast pale white light onto the white-paneled truck, giving it an otherworldly appearance. There were Christmas lights on all the houses, but at this hour, they had all been turned off. David hesitated for just a moment before stepping down off the porch, hearing Kathy’s words echoing in his ears: Because it’s weird. I don’t like it. But then he was crossing the lawn and stepping down off the curb into the street, his shadow stretching disproportionately out in front of him in a halo of lamplight.
It was a typical ice cream truck, done up in white panels with decals of everyone’s favorite flavors pasted onto the side. Cartoon clowns capered among the flavors, pulling cartwheels and somersaults. The truck’s engine sounded like an uncooperative lawn mower, but it was barely audible over the sound of “Yankee Doodle” emanating from the roof-mounted speakers.
A figure sat behind the wheel—a dark form whose slouched silhouette suggested some level of distress, though David could not immediately identify why. Yet the sight of this figure caused him to pause once again. Despite the cold, he found he was suddenly perspiring.
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.