Tropical Depression by Laurence Shames

Author:Laurence Shames
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: shames, laurenceshames, keywest
Publisher: Laurence Shames

23

The Spanish guy who'd made the sno-cones fifteen years before was making sno-cones still. He still had the hairy mole on his left cheek, the stubby two-wheeled cart painted lumpy red and lettered with blotched and leaning letters. The only difference was that he no longer dragged the cart behind him rickshaw-style. By now he'd attached the shafts to a motorized tricycle, a cartoonish thing with a pull-start motor the size of a sewing machine.

The sno-cone man had been diminutive a decade and a half ago, and age had made him even smaller. He worked in baggy blue jeans, a boy's size, not a man's; they were held up by an ancient belt that went around him almost twice, and the legs were rolled into makeshift cuffs above a pair of elfin shoes. His neck had shrunk to a sinewy stalk, his face was pulling inward like a piece of air-dried fruit.

Strangely, though, his arms had gotten longer.

When he worked his plane across the scarred surface of the hundred-pound block of ice, the motion seemed to go on and on, his shoulders stretching as though on springs, his elbows extending like they were made of rubber. Six long sweeps was all it took to shave ice enough to overfill a paper cone.

"So, Meess Lady," he said to Franny now, "you like'a maybe guanabana, coco, papaya?"

Franny was wearing linen shorts, standing astride her rented bike. It had been a long time since she had a sno-cone, it would probably be a long time before she had another one. She put a thoughtful finger to her chin. "Do you still have guava?"

"Fo' course I got guava," said the sno-cone man. "What kinda sno-co' man, he no have guava?"

He stood on tiptoe, grabbed from a shelf a bottle of red syrup. "You like a leetle or a lot, nice lady?"

From fifteen years before, Franny remembered the sweet and gooey last slurp of a sno-cone, when the stinging ice was gone and nothing remained but a shot of viscous syrup that instantly turned warm. "Pretty much," she said.

The tiny fellow poured it on; with a courtly nod he handed over the paper cone. Then he turned to Murray. Murray ordered mango. The sno-cones now cost half a buck.

They took them into the shade of a mahogany tree, put their bikes aside and sat down on a patch of grass. Across the street was a middle school; a few tardy kids were straggling back from lunch. Stylish in their baggy pants and high-top sneakers, they reaffirmed the Lilliputian measure established by the sno-cone man and his tricycle. The smallness made the world seem new and safe and innocent, seemed to speak of young love and discovery and second chances. Murray slid closer to Franny on the grass.

A huge dark Lincoln, grossly out of scale with everything except the overarching trees, turned onto Leon Street.

It advanced with the slow malign momentum of a ship adrift in fog, then parked in back of the sno- cone cart. The driver left the engine running, it sent forth a bad smell and an arrogant whine.

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