Ice-Cream Headache Read Online Free PDF Page B

them, any of them.
    Once his father had given him a half dollar right in front his mother. It was the time she hit him with the kitchen fork when she was frying chicken. He was standing by the stove bothering her with questions and making a nuisance of himself, and it was a hot day long, long years ago, and she just got mad and hit him with the fork. The fork cut his forehead and broke his glasses and the blood ran down into his eyes. It did not hurt much but the blood in his eyes scared him because he couldn’t see and thought maybe he was going to die. His mother threw the fork down on the floor and started crying and that scared him worse because then he was sure he was going to die and he did not want to die yet, when he was still just such a little boy. She phoned the doctor and his father, and she kept wringing her hands and crying “O what have I done! My poor little boy! My darling son!” and he had felt very sorry for her and put his arms around her and told her it was all right and it didn’t hurt much and for her not to worry, he did not really mind dying when he was still such a little boy, but it only made her cry worse. He knew she did not really mean to do it because she cried so much and she sacrificed everything for him and Jeannette and loved them better than anything in the world. So when the doctor and his father came, he and his mother told them he fell down and cut his forehead on the edge of the table. His father gave him a half dollar right in front of his mother and squatted down and put his arm around him. If he had been cut over both eyes he bet his father would have given him a whole dollar.
    Other kids’ fathers didn’t give them whole dollars when they got cut over both eyes, and his father really looked tough when he got mad. He bet there wasn’t anybody would tackle his father when he got mad, even if he was a drunkard and ran around with hotassed bitches and had those great big arms and belly and strong as a bull and would kill any woman. Sitting in the swing he wondered what the hotassed bitch looked like. He hoped he would get to see them doing it.
    Suddenly in his mind he saw his father sitting at the kitchen table, all alone, holding the diworce, drinking a bottle of beer, playing with a pile of quarters and half dollars that he did not have anybody to give them to, that was the way it would be when they were gone. He blinked tears from his eyes, he felt very sorry for his father. A diworce, he thought, we’re going to get a diworce.
    When his father drove in the driveway he got down on his hands and knees behind the brick railing and watched through the four-cornered hole like a diamond while his father opened the back door of the big square Studebaker and took two huge paper sacks of groceries in his big arms and carried them to the back door. Looking through the trees into the clearing, Hawkeye leveled his cap-n-ball-long-rifle and let the big Indian have it, right in the chest, and the two big paper sacks of dynamite tumbled unhurt to the ground; Hawkeye had fired between them carefully because the dynamite was needed to blow the Indian village up the river. He aimed over his finger and fired; and his father walked on to the house.
    Then he waited, just as his mother had told him, grinning at how he was outsmarting his father. After the second trip he ran lightly out into the yard, carrying his rifle at trail and loading her as he ran, the Indians called him The Man Whose Gun Was Always Loaded, opened the back door of the car and hit the dirt. It was dusty on the floor and the dust got in his nose and choked him up but he did not mind because he had made it across the clearing unseen and had slipped into the enemy general’s limousine.
    He heard them talking loud in the kitchen and guessed they were having another big argument. His father came out and slammed the door and got in the car and he lay, laughing to himself, very excited.
    His father drove down toward town and every