The Ice Cream Truck Driver is My Mortal Enemy

   The ice cream truck driver is my mortal enemy.  A savage, bloodthirsty feud has been carried out between our ancestors for centuries. Hate for him runs cold in my blood vessels and soaks my black heart in a bath of acid.  Like a wild beast, my brain stem is hard-wired with predatory instincts, and the skin along my spine tightens, my senses sharpen long before my brain recognizes the sound of a tinkling, electronic calliope wafting across the neighborhood on the slightest breeze.

   As it has for ages, the lengthening of the days marks the resumption of hostilities as our fragile, unofficial winter truce melts away.  From sunrise to sunset between Memorial and Labor Day, we are partners in a fearsome ballet.  He tauntingly works his way around the edges of my territory, endlessly circling just outside my reach.  He watches and waits intently for some evidence of my weakness or sign of distraction, prepared to race his rattling white truck deep into my block, whereupon he would leap out from behind the popsicle freezer and disembowel me with a little wooden paddle spoon.  He is as murderous as I.

   My friends come to visit.  Always after dark, of course.  They find me stalking back and forth in front of the windows, fists clenching and relaxing, pausing now and then to cock an ear windward or to peer down the street into the darkness or sniff the air for the faint smell of diesel fuel.  They believe that I am just a bit edgy, having grown cranky of hearing "Music Box Dancer" played over a tinny speaker a few thousand times too many.  They are wrong, however.  The tune is the weakness of my enemy; his Achilles' heel.  Like an exotic bird with brilliant plumage, his showiness is necessary to attract his prey, but it also leaves him dangerously exposed to predators.   To me, that song is like a trumpet fanfare, presaging the eventual fulfillment of my destiny.  Play on, you vermin, play on.  Your day shall come soon.

   I have surreptitiously enlisted the neighborhood youths to scout him and report on his activities.  It costs me 75 cents worth of Fudgesicles and Bomb Pops for each scrap of data, but the cost of this intelligence is a pittance if it actually helps me vanquish him.  They tell me that his name is Walter, but I do not care.   I cannot begin to allow myself to think of him as a person.  He is only a target.   When the glorious day comes, and my hand is at his throat, I cannot allow pity or compassion to distract me.  They tell me that sometimes he sometimes parks behind the paper warehouse and smokes marijuana in the back of the truck.  I record this fact in code in my dossier, a worn notepad that I carry in my pocket and constantly review and memorize whenever I have a moment of idleness. 

   I have devoted nearly all my life to preparing for our final conflict.   My uncle began schooling me in simple hand-to-hand combat techniques when I was six, saying that it was for my own protection.  At eight, I was given a knife for my birthday, along with training on fourteen ways to use it.  On my twelfth birthday, my uncle brought me deep into the woods.  At midnight, over a smoldering campfire, he explained for me as much as he could about the eternal conflict between the two warring houses.  He revealed to me that my father had not actually abandoned my mother and I.  He had been slain by my enemy's older sister inside a bank, where she had been recently taken a job as a teller. One evening, after volunteering to stay late to empty the ATM, she trapped him in the little glass vestibule and slit his throat with a bank card sharpened to a razor's edge.  He slumped to the floor, and as his life drained away, she hissed a curse at him for his role in the execution of her grandfather, a shoe repairman, two decades ago.  "And so it shall end for you," he told me over the glowing embers of the campfire.  "No one in our family dies of old age." 

   Eight months later, he was crossing a drawbridge when the operator opened it beneath his car.  My family doesn't drive that route anymore.  We keep our money in our mattresses.  We eat cookies for dessert.

   Living in a state of constant vigilance is exhausting.  Sometimes, late at night, I lie awake and imagine what it would be like to be at peace.  I know him only from my notepad; he knows me only from his slow orbits of my neighborhood.   I have been so focused on spilling his blood that I have never attempted to learn what passions flow in it.  Sometimes, the grudges borne by our families seem like ancient mythology; a fable like Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, the Montagues and Capulets. We hate each other only because we have been told to.  If we deemed the accumulated body count from this eternal feud to be the price we each pay for our ancestors' impulsiveness, we could lower our guard and meet as friends, not enemies. I would approach his truck, with nothing in my hands but a crisp dollar bill, and return with my fingers dripping with hot fudge, not blood.  He could go to the movies again, knowing full well that the ticket taker, in my crisp white tuxedo shirt, would not misdirect him to an abandoned and carefully booby-trapped theater.

   But morning comes, and by mid-day, it is hot and sunny.  Somewhere, two blocks over, that song is playing again, and I want nothing more than to vindicate the honor of my uncle and father, of my aunt and grandfather.  The ice cream truck driver is my mortal enemy, and I must slay him. 

Posted: 7/10/01