The Price of Angie’s Ice Cream
excerpted from Short Stack: A Collection
Copyright
2011 by Scott Morgan
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Scott Morgan
Copyright 2011 by Scott Morgan
Smashwords Edition
The Price of Angie’s Ice Cream
by Scott Morgan
Jim
Destry wasn’t gay. And yet there he was. On tape. Staring at
another guy’s crotch.
He also wasn’t Inspector Clouseau.
But there he was. On tape. Face-planting as he ducked behind the
counter, getting pelted by falling bottles of St. Germaine.
As
usual, trouble started with a woman ̶ his girlfriend, Angie, who,
as usual, asked him for something while he was at his most
vulnerable.
Her
legs were his kryptonite. Warm. Smooth like glass. Two perfectly
shaped doses of Spanish fly. Angie wanted lavender ice cream. Jim had
never heard of lavender ice cream. She told him it was a flower. Then
slid her leg up the side of his.
Jim was a guy. What did you
expect him to say? And Angie bounced out of bed, fresh and filled
with anticipation for a flavor of ice cream Jim would have to drive
20 miles to get. Her legs and all the wonderful things they led to
would have to wait.
Jim drove 10 mph faster than the speed
limit, no matter what the speed limit was. Any faster and he would
have felt whipped. Which he knew he was, but still. Besides, he
didn’t want another ticket. So 10 extra miles an hour meant getting
home sooner, even though he knew Angie would change her mind ̶ not
to mention her clothes ̶ before he got back.
Jim pulled
into the PlanetErth supermarket lot and got out of the car. He tried
to look casual walking across the lot, but he just came off looking
like somebody coping with hemorrhoids. The store itself smelled
strange. A jumble of produce and whole grain breads and
humane-certified beef that ran $18 a pound. He brushed past a dozen
women, each one 40-ish and wearing yoga pants and hemp-knit
pullovers. The guys all wore Dockers and polo shirts. Jim, in his
jeans and a tee shirt over a white long john long-sleeve, was out of
uniform.
Jim
got to the ice cream freezers and felt his jaw go slack. Ice cream.
Ice milk. Goat milk ice cream. Coconut ice cream. Soy ice cream. Rice
milk ice cream. Hemp milk ice cream. Almond milk ice cream. Ice cream
with green tea. Antioxidants. Low sugar. Cane sugar. Brown sugar.
Beet sugar. Ice cream with gooseberry. Boysenberry. Loganberry.
Belgian chocolate. Dutch chocolate. Swiss chocolate. Fig. Licorice.
Chili pepper.
Finally, the flowers. Rose petal ice cream.
Lilac ice cream. Cornflower ice cream. Primrose. Peony. Marigold.
Daffodil. Dandelion . . .
Damn it . . .
Jim
would have to ask somebody about lavender ice cream. He’d managed
to go this whole time without saying those three words.
The
guy in the green-and-blue smock said he’d never heard of it. He’d
check, though, which meant he’d ask the other apathetic smock
jockey in the dairy section who’d say no, they didn’t carry it,
even though he knew they did. Then the first guy would came back
shaking his head and tell Jim no, they didn’t carry it, and tell
him they had lots of other flavors. And that’s what happened.
Except that Jim had found it in the meantime. One pint, tucked away
behind three pints of lilac. Seven dollars and twenty-nine
cents.
!
Jim shook his head in disbelief. And started
thinking. And you know what the worst part was? They weren’t going
to have sex! Jim would get home and Angie would stuff her face and
say she felt bloated and go play World of Warcraft. Well, so what? He
wanted to watch the Orioles game anyway. And if he was going to watch
the O’s he needed beer. So Jim paid for the ice cream and drove to
Grant’s to get a six-pack of Michelob.
Jim walked in behind
a guy in a plaid flannel shirt. (Did anyone ever make a flannel shirt
in anything besides plaid?) The guy held the door open for him and
Jim muttered a manly thank-you under his breath. He threw an up-nod
to the guy behind the counter.
Jim took a nice big noseful of
the scent. The scent of every liquor store on the face of the earth.
Stale. Oaty. Something in the neighborhood of sweet. Immediately he
felt his shoulders relax. No middle-aged yoga uniforms or beige
Dockers here. Guys here wore jeans and sweatshirts. Work boots and
mustaches. It was a lot better on his psyche than the PlanetErth had
been.
Jim grabbed a six-pack. Six-ninety-nine. Thirty cents
cheaper than the pint of ice cream that mocked him from the car.
At
the counter, Plaid Flannel was checking out with his case of Bud
Light. The guy behind Plaid Flannel, a young guy with a bad teenage
mustache wearing a black hoodie, lurked in that way underage guys do
when they drop into liquor stores for a pack of smokes and start
calculating the odds of their getting carded if they sack-up and grab
a bottle of something. The guy behind the counter looked like every
liquor store clerk Jim had ever seen. Rough-hewn and streetwise.
Shaggy and worn. Hoodie wasn’t going to get away with
anything.
Jim, lured by a display case of chips, drifted off
to the left. Why he noticed, he wasn’t sure, but his eyes were
drawn to the crotch of Hoodie’s pants. Hoodie had his hands stuffed
down there, in that way that young guys often do, but something about
the bulge wasn’t right. It was too big. Too bulky. Either he was
incredible endowed or he was . . .
Oh my God . .
.
Plaid Flannel took his change and stepped away from the
counter. Hoodie hung back. Jim, watching in slow-motion, realized
what was happening. Hoodie was letting Plaid Flannel get out the door
and then he was going to pull a gun out of his pants and wave it in
the clerk’s face. Hoodie had been keeping his head down to avoid
the camera posted opposite where Jim was standing now. He probably
didn't know Jim was even there.
Idiot. He’d obscured his own
vision with that stupid-ass hood and tied up his hands in his baggy
jeans. Jim could have jumped him if he had been closer. And if a rack
of chips hadn't been in his way. He was just far enough away for that
gun to come out and, if it was real, go off.
Jim looked
around. On the side of the counter, straight ahead, were small
bottles with long necks, just two or three steps away. They would
work. And Hoodie would never see them coming.
Jim sized up the
bottles, just as Hoodie stepped forward and took his hands out of his
pants. Gun. Snub nose. Probably fake, but not worth the chance. Jim
pictured the next ten seconds in his head. He would step behind a
piece of the counter, grab a couple bottles of whatever was there and
throw a little chin music Hoodie’s way. If he missed, it would
still distract the kid. The clerk would have a chance to duck and Jim
would have time to rearm. Clerk probably had a gun back there anyway.
All he needed was a chance to get to
it.
So
Jim took his first step. Sadly, however, he had chosen bottles
instead of cans when he picked up his beer. And in that way that the
universe loves to screw well-intentioned people just for laughs, a
bottle, slick with condensation, slipped out and smashed on
the
floor. Jim's second step landed square in the middle of a puddle of
Michelob and shattered glass. Jim skidded forward, flailing for
balance, and ultimately landed face-first beside the counter.
Jim
banged the side of his head on the counter and fell forward into the
back wall. In the reflection of the wine case next to him, the
overhead camera recorded Jim diving face-first, crawling on his hands
and knees, and wrapping his hands around his head. It was a response
to the pain of having taken a header into the counter and to keep the
falling bottles from knocking him out cold. But since the camera
couldn’t see the bottles falling, it just looked like some guy
diving for cover and pleading not to be shot by a teenager.
Five
or six merciless seconds later, Jim regained some composure. Head
reeling, he sat up to assess the situation and didn’t see Hoodie
anymore. All he could see was the clerk trying to vault (but managing
to do little more than crawl) over the counter, barking something he
didn’t quite understand. Jim stood up and stepped out from behind
the display. Plaid Flannel was kneeling on Hoodie’s back, gripping
the kid in a sleeper hold. The clerk jumped down and emptied Hoodie's
pockets. Then he used the kid's own cell phone to call the police on
him.
The camera, Jim would later learn, recorded Hoodie and
the clerk turning to see what the hell had just crashed into a wall
of liquor bottles. Long enough for Plaid Flannel to step back into
the frame and kick Hoodie’s legs out from under him and grapple him
into submission. As it turned out, Plaid Flannel had seen the gun in
the kid's pants as he turned around to get the door on his way out.
And, as it also turned out, the gun was plastic. It had smashed into
ragged pieces under the weight of the take-down. The camera had
recorded that too. Just as it recorded Jim Destry, soaking and
stunned, peering
out from behind the
display.
***
The police, trying their best not to smile, listened to Jim while they ushered Hoodie into a patrol car and went over the details of the security tape with the clerk. They listened to Jim and then stepped away, patting Plaid Flannel on his shoulder and shaking his hand.
Cops
always tell you not to fight back. That the money in your wallet or a
cash register isn’t worth getting a bullet in the chest. But cops
are guys. Even the women. And guys love knowing that some punk got
owned by somebody who refused to take crap.
Jim didn’t think
the cops actually believed him. They had zipped through the security
tape a dozen times. Rewound it and played it again. He saw it in
their eyes the first time through. The slight raising of the
eyebrows. The barely contained smirk as Jim dove into third. He had
told them what he had intended to do. The police had politely
nodded.
By the time they sent Jim on his way, Angie’s
lavender ice cream was lavender heavy cream. Having been tipped
slightly on the passenger seat, the liquid had oozed out of the
container and through the paper bag. The whole car smelled of sugar
and flowers, an effect intensified by the smell of elderberry. Jim,
after all, had been bombed by little bottles of St. Germaine.
It
could have been worse. He was more concerned with whether Angie was
concerned about him. He purposely had left his cell phone on the
kitchen table so as not to get any “and could you also pick up . .
.” messages while he was at PlanetErth. He had been unable to call
her for three hours, and for all he knew, she had been pacing the
house with worry.
As
it turned out, Angie was asleep on the couch. Her legs were gone,
buried beneath the cotton blanket and fleece sweatpants. And the
Orioles were losing big in the sixth. To the Royals.
Jim put
the ice cream, drippy bag and all, into the freezer and walked
straight upstairs into a shower. He never wanted to smell flowers
again. And then he realized ̶ he had left Grant’s without his
beer. He toweled off and went to bed.
And Angie never did eat
that damn tub of ice cream.