written By
Jack Preston sat patiently at the intersection of St. John Avenue and Hardesty, behind an old Chevy pickup turning left. There was room, if he wanted, to pull around and keep going. But this was his turn, too, even though he hadn’t signaled. Left at Hardesty, past the post office, then straight for half a block. He knew the way.
When the pickup turned, Jack took his foot off the brake and his hands off the wheel, as if letting the car decide, and coasted through the intersection, past the entrance to the Hill Top Tavern on his right and past the two-stall, self-service car wash at the bottom of the hill.
His dad would have liked that old pickup, Jack thought, and could have told him all about it – a classic, probably from the early 60s, painted a seafoam green with a white roof on the cabin and chrome trim. An old workhorse now turned show horse, neatly appointed and lovingly waxed and polished, retired from the hard labors of its youth.
Jack pressed lightly on the gas and reached over to check the package on the passenger seat, a small cardboard box of clothes for his father – sweatpants, sweatshirt, underwear, t-shirts, socks. The usual.
At the end of St. John Avenue – The Bigger Jigger was still there – he turned left to go up Belmont, which marked the eastern edge of the neighborhood. Small, single-story homes ran along both sides of the street, many with hardboard or asphalt siding. A few of the tiny front yards barely left room for a person to stand, overflowing with hopeful aspiration – lilac bushes, flowering azaleas, small crabapple trees and, here and there, a concrete fountain or porcelain bird bath. Most, though, languished under thick, unmown crabgrass, with aggressive knotweed or bindweed climbing and overtopping chain link fences that jailed yapping dogs who just didn’t seem to understand – it was a sunny Sunday morning, a fine day for doing nothing, and there was no need for all their fuss and frenzy.
Near the top of Belmont, Jack scanned the houses on his left. Which one was it? That Friday night with Tracy Sutton. In the basement, her parents had converted the space into a rec room: a sofa, a television, a dart board, a foosball table and something like a wet bar. Her parents out. Her grandmother asleep upstairs in the living room. Jack was a senior. Tracy a sophomore. They’d been dating, but at school that day she’d made such a show of not being able to go out with him that night – a public declaration that everyone at their lunch table and nearby could hear. He took her at her word and thought no more about it. But then she called. Around seven o’clock that night. She invited him over. He was older but she was in charge. Which one was it? Was it the house with the ridiculous, plastic, white picket fence? No. He would have remembered that one. The one next to it? Maybe.
At the top of the hill, Belmont curved to the right and up and around Indian Mound, a protected Native American site a thousand or more years old – not a burial site but something created for purposes unknown, an earthwork promontory overlooking the east bottoms and the Missouri River. Two young boys played atop the wide mound, kicking a soccer ball back and forth, scrambling to keep it from catching the slope and rolling away.
Behind Indian Mound, Belmont ended and Gladstone Boulevard began, and as it moved west the road became wider and more luxurious, with homes along the left-hand side and, on the right, dense shrubbery and trees that obscured the view off the cliffs.
As Jack headed west, the boulevard sloped gently up and then climbed more aggressively. The houses became larger, set deep in their lots – Tudors, Cape Cods, Bungalows, American Foursquares, each nestled comfortably within soft, manicured landscaping and sheltered by towering oaks. Near the top of the hill, before the boulevard curved again, Jack slowed in front of a white Colonial with black shutters and a row of four dormers projecting out of the roof. He’d always admired this house, its large, columned entrance and the carport on one side.
He kept going. The homes grew larger still and more exotic. A brightly-colored Victorian. A Queen Anne with a round tower. And others in a Mediterranean style, built of thick, imposing limestone – built, it seemed, to last forever. In the wide side-yard of the last house, a woman with short dark hair, wearing beige capri pants and a sleeveless purple top, stood atop a stool refilling a bird feeder at her gazebo, which was ringed by a mass of pink roses and, further out, low rows of daylilies and English lavender. Telescoping poles with birdhouses at the top stood here and there throughout her garden and around her yard.
At the far west edge of the neighborhood, he found the Concourse, three square blocks of grassy lawn, fountains and tennis courts – but just before the Concourse he hit the round-about and was back onto St. John Avenue, heading east, and surveying once again its familiar scattering of barbershops and hair salons, smoke shops and liquor stores, pawn shops and consignment stores and, here and there, a bakery or a bar.
Jack had completed another loop of his old neighborhood. In fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. As he approached Hardesty, he slowed and slowed and slowed and tried to catch the light red, so he could sit there and work up his resolve to turn left.
But he caught the light green, and he gentled his way through the intersection.
One more time around, he thought. One more time.
* * *
He was surprised the two boys atop Indian Mound were gone already, done with their play, but then he saw them and a few other kids and their moms, in line at an ice cream truck parked behind the mound. Jack slowed to watch – the bright colors of the van, all pink and blue and yellow with images of fudge bars and drumsticks and bomb pops, and the kids squealing, hitting such high registers, one after the other and then all together, as they nudged and jostled each other and shared this moment of speechless joy. His gaze lingered on the scene in his rearview mirror until the slope of the road tucked it away.
Maybe I could do that, he thought. Maybe I could drive an ice cream truck.
Jack looked over to the box of clothes in the passenger seat, riding shotgun. If his father had been riding shotgun – his father of old, that is, his father from years earlier – it would have been a good time to talk.
“What do you think?” Jack would have asked. “Me driving an ice cream truck. I like driving. I like kids. I like ice cream.”
“What you really like,” his father would say, “is being unsupervised.”
There was no easing into anything with his father.
“My contract’s up with Solaris,” Jack would say. “Well, not up, but they bought me out. The project was done, and they had nothing else to apply me to. Well, that’s probably not true. But companies don’t think that way. They don’t think, hey, we’ve still got this great developer for eight more weeks, what else needs to be done. It’s like they don’t have the imagination needed to move someone from one project to another. So they bought me out.”
And just like that it would be out there. He was out of work. At loose ends. Again. In spite of his degrees. In spite of his credentials. In spite of everything.
His father would sit and think and say nothing for a while, letting Jack’s words linger until they floated out the car window with the flow of warm summer air.
“Well,” he would say eventually, “there’ll be something new along soon. Right?”
And then the two would sit in silence. Or comment upon the weather. Or wonder if there might be a baseball game on television that afternoon, as long as it wasn’t the Yankees. Yes, fuck the Yankees, the two would always agree.
“You kids,” his father would say.
“Kids?”
“You kids. I don’t know how you do it. You’re like migrant farm workers. Picking watermelons in Florida and moving along, picking cabbage in Georgia and moving along. Following the farm belt and the harvest season, sleeping under strange roofs or under the sky, showing up when you’re needed and disappearing when you’re not.”
“It’s not that bad,” Jack would say.
“It’s the same thing,” his father would say. “Exploitation.”
Jack took his foot off the gas and tapped the brake. A couple of teenage girls were playing tennis in the middle of the boulevard, on a court they’d marked onto the street. Maybe spray paint. Maybe chalk. Tennis without a net but contested with serious intent. One girl, a tall brunette with reach, held the advantage because she was playing downhill. A shorter blonde, whose thick, waist-long hair swung in tempo with her movements, darted here and there and kept pace in spite of playing against the uphill slope of the road. The two retreated to the curb as Jack slowly drove by. He waved, but they ignored him.
As he climbed again toward the Concourse, he noted the various oak trees still standing all these years. Bur oak, English oak, red oak, spotted oak, white oak. He knew the types of trees from a class field trip in sixth grade; with the teacher’s help, the kids identified all the trees along the upper stretch of the boulevard and collected leaves to classify and study. A few giant cottonwoods stood behind some of the larger houses, and a number of Kentucky coffeetrees were sprinkled among the properties. Off the boulevard and into the narrower residential streets, the trees were mostly maple and juniper, smaller specimens, but everywhere. Everywhere trees, everywhere shade and everywhere shelter.
“I’ve applied for a job at Southern Industries,” Jack would say. “You’ve heard of them.”
“Big company,” his father would say.
“Yeah.”
“A real job? Getting up in the morning, driving to work, sitting at a desk – that kind of job?”
“Yeah.”
As he hit the roundabout and headed east on St. John, Jack felt the morning getting away from him. The sun had climbed higher in the sky and no longer glared through the windshield.
The touchscreen on the dashboard told him it was almost noon.
“So tell me about this real job,” his father would say. “Real. It doesn’t sound like you.”
* * *
Jack drifted through the intersection at St. John and Hardesty for the sixth time that morning, and he wondered when the Hill Top Tavern might open. Noon? Would it open at noon on a Sunday? And, if it did, would it be bad form to be the first in the door? A minute past noon and alone?
It would be cool in there. With a beer in hand, he’d find a comfortable spot to kill some time. Or maybe The Bigger Jigger at the corner of Belmont would be better. It had old-time jukebox selectors in the booths and in the back of the bar a couple of well-worn pool tables and a rack of madly warped pool cues. That would be peachy, better than driving around and around all day, right?
But Jack didn’t stop. He’d never been much of a drinker.
The party behind Indian Mound had broken up. The ice cream truck was gone. The girls playing tennis on the boulevard were gone, too. Just as well, Jack thought. It might look pervy to keep driving by.
Jack leaned forward and into the driver’s side door, his back damp with sweat, and he considered how he might explain applying for a developer job to his father, who, as far as he knew, never so much as turned on a computer. Jack had been such a late child for his parents – an afterthought, a happy accident. At his birth, his father and mother were both easily old enough to be his grandparents.
“Well, first of all,” Jack would say, “it was all bullshit.”
His father of old would chuckle.
And then Jack would start and stop and stammer and stutter, trying to explain the first level of bullshit to his father – what it was like having an AI interview. Not just one AI interview. Five successive AI interviews over the span of two weeks.
“Talking to a computer?” his father of old would ask.
“Yeah,” he would say.
The first one caught Jack by surprise. Online interviews were common, but Jack expected to connect with a person, and what he got instead was a welcome from an AI system avatar, a young white male, who barely looked sixteen, sporting glasses and a green polo.
“Like a cartoon,” his father would say.
The AI system invited him to choose an interviewer avatar and gave him a number of options. Jack thought quickly and strategically; he considered that even this innocuous choice might be a part of the screening process. He purposefully picked avatars the least like himself and consciously avoided the avatar of the white kid in the green polo.
“People think this doesn’t matter,” Jack would explain, “but it might be the most important part of the interview – a hidden screening factor – testing whether or not you can be comfortable with a diverse set of people.”
He’d go on to describe what he considered the next-level bullshit, the live coding exercises each avatar presented to him and how disorienting he found it to have his work corrected in real time. The corrections weren’t wrong, Jack would explain, they were merely inefficient – probably tied to the needs of outdated legacy code or dictated by the weight of accumulated shortcuts. He adapted to their methods more and more with each interview; he coped by pretending he was playing a game, outwitting an opponent, solving a puzzle, navigating a maze toward some glorious quest object.
“They’re testing you,” his father would say.
“Well, yeah.”
“But not the way you think. They’re not testing your skills. They’re testing your willingness to adapt, your willingness to fit in, your willingness to become one of them.”
“One of them,” Jack would repeat.
“You know,” his father would say, “an adult with a job.”
His father always was a riot.
Halfway down the boulevard, before it started its steep climb, Jack changed course with a soft right onto Cliff Drive, a scenic byway that paralleled the boulevard, with tall limestone bluffs and wooded hillsides shooting up on his left and a drop of two hundred feet or more to his right, off to the bottoms and the Missouri River. The byway wound and curved with the cliffside, sprinkled with pullouts for parking, picnicking sites with firepits cut into the limestone, gentle fountains and waterfalls – and, for those who knew where to look, stepping stones, set into the hillside, which led up to Lookout Point and a bird’s-eye view of the riverfront.
An adult with a job, Jack thought. Is that what I’m about to become? Showering every day, dressing, commuting, parking, badging in, logging on? Showing up for team meetings, sub-team meetings, one-on-one meetings, cross-departmental meetings, cross-functional meetings, planning meetings, project meetings, status updates? Going to team outings, team parties, wearing party hats, eating pizza, eating cake, winning ugly sweater contests, singing “Dancing in the Dark” on Karaoke night? Seeing the same people day after day after day? Learning everyone’s habits, everyone’s thoughts, everyone’s secret language, knowing what they’re going to say before they say it? Joining the grand conspiracy, playing the game, ignoring the bullshit, pretending it’s not there – dripping from the ceiling, oozing down the walls, overflowing from the elevators, blocking the stairwells?
Jack spat out the driver’s side window. The air, stale and stagnant, carried a thick woody scent that turned swampy and foul as he drove past small collection pools of standing water, covered in vegetation and algae. He spat again.
“So are you thinking about jumping?” his father would ask. “Park at one of the pullouts, step up onto the stubby stone wall at the edge, take an easy step off? I’m not sure it would work. There’s a lot of growth on the hillside. You’d probably get tangled up and just hang there among the branches until someone along the bottoms saw you or heard you screaming.”
“Funny.”
“You’d end up on the evening news. Man gets job, jumps off cliff.”
“I don’t have it yet. I’m waiting to hear.”
“Ah,” his father would say. “So today you’re just . . . scouting out the best spot.”
Jack slowed. A group of bikers were approaching in the oncoming lane – a young family, two parents and two kids, a young girl and a younger boy. Jack traded a wave with the kids as they went by. When he was a kid, Jack and his friends would bike Cliff Drive almost every day in the summer. About halfway down the drive, they’d take an exit road known as Goose Neck, which climbed and twisted – and tested their strength and stamina before popping them out at the boulevard, across the street from the last big house. And each time they wondered, could they bike to the top or would they have to dismount and walk their bikes up the last stretch of steep road?
Jack turned his car up Goose Neck, the road climbing and twisting left, then right, then left again. He pulled up to the stop sign at the top.
Across the boulevard, the bird lady was still out. She was talking to someone through her black, wrought-iron fence – the ice cream truck driver, who had pulled to the curb in front of her yard, facing his truck into oncoming traffic. He handed her something through the fence. An ice cream sandwich. Jack noticed that she didn’t pay and watched as they chatted. She unwrapped the ice cream daintily, pulling the paper wrapper down about halfway and holding it between thumb and forefinger; she took a bite and then another, the driver talking the whole time.
I could do that, Jack thought. Hand out free samples. Chat up the customers. Be everybody’s friend. Couldn’t I?
* * *
At the roundabout, Jack watched the traffic carefully and, instead of swinging onto St. John Avenue, he went through the intersection and found a parking spot at the Concourse.
He eased himself out of his car. He’d been driving around the neighborhood, one circuit after another, for hours. A gentle breeze chilled his back through his damp shirt, but he knew the feeling wouldn’t last against the midday heat.
With slow steps, he set off on the walkway around the park, following the same counter-clockwise direction he’d driven all morning. It was all very much as he remembered it, but of course, he recognized no one.
A young woman pushing a stroller walked toward him, repositioning her bag on her shoulder and smiling down at her baby. “Did you see that doggy?” she said. “Did you? Oh, that doggy was so cute, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that doggy cute?” She gave no ground on the narrow walkway, and Jack stepped onto the grass, which crunched loudly under his feet.
A group of kids played at the jet fountains at one end of the park; one at a time, they tried to navigate the array of fountains without getting sprayed. A slender young boy celebrated his triumph too soon as the final jet shot up and hit him in the seat of his pants. His friends howled. “Peelarious,” one of them yelled. “Swamp butt!” yelled another.
The tennis courts were empty, except for a lone girl with a deep tan hitting tennis balls against one of the practice backboards. An open duffel bag with rackets, towels and a water bottle lay off to the side. She hit forehand after forehand after forehand, each with a grunt or a groan and then one with a loud scream as the tennis ball thudded off the rim of her racket and spun skyward.
Jack found a spot on a bench shaded by two maple trees, back near his car and the shallow casting pool, an old man spot, certainly more comfortable in the spring or fall than the middle of June. But it would do. At the pool, a young boy operated a radio-controlled sailboat, which seemed to be stuck going in circles in the middle of the pool. The boy shook his controller and batted it with his hand to no avail. The boy’s dad kicked off his sandals and waded into the pool to retrieve the toy.
As Jack watched the young dad fiddle with the boat’s rudder, a familiar tune played in the distance, as if from a music box – a thin, tinny, instrumental of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
The ice cream truck approached.
The tune changed. What was it now? “It’s a Small World After All?”
The ice cream truck parked at the curb not far from Jack’s car. The music continued as kids and parents gathered; a loose crowd formed and, when the driver opened the truck’s large serving window, the tunes mercifully ended. The boy with the radio-controlled boat and his dad were slow to arrive and stood at the back of the crowd.
From his seat on the bench, Jack watched, an audience of one.
“Hello, hello,” the driver called to everyone. He wore a white short-sleeved button-up with the company logo, The Scoop Troop, on the breast pocket and what looked like a pair of gray work pants held fast by a black leather belt. His thick black hair was slicked back and his wide smile felt genuine and welcoming.
He had a clear routine: take the order, take the money, then retreat to his freezer to gather the ice cream. Always in that order.
One woman with two children stood waiting after asking for two cookie ice cream sandwiches. The driver stood waiting, too. “That will be eight dollars,” he said, smiling, never flinching. The woman, searching this pocket and that purse, claimed she’d left her money at home, in the apartment complex down the street. The driver disappeared, returned with two lemon ices, and handed them to the kids. “Here, it is such a hot day, this will tide you over.”
The woman and the kids moved away with an air of disappointment. What did they expect? What did anyone expect? The kids without money, the kids without enough money, the parents whose pay cards were declined, the kids who couldn’t make up their mind, the parents who asked about nuts, about dairy, about eggs, about soy, about wheat flour? Or the family that let their over-friendly golden retriever run free and dart into the truck’s open door?
Yet the driver handled everything with aplomb, including the treat he threw out his serving window for the dog to run after.
Jack joined the line, the last customer.
“Tough day?” he asked, when his turn came.
“Just the usual,” the ice cream truck driver said. “What can I get for you?”
“Ah . . . what will last?” Jack asked. “If I have to drive ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Between you and me,” the driver said, “at room temperature, some of this stuff might never melt. Even on a hot day, in a car, you’d probably have twenty or thirty minutes before it got soft.”
Jack ordered two “Drumsticks in a Cup” and paid.
Yet Jack lingered at the window.
“Is that it?” the driver asked.
“Well.”
“Something else I can help you with?”
Jack surveyed the inside of the truck. So much paperwork posted – licenses, permits, food handler certifications, food safety certifications, health department inspection score, food allergen information.
“You with the county?” the driver asked. “I’ve seen you driving around. You watching me? You here to check my permits? On a Sunday? That’s bullshit, man, that’s total bullshit. You’ve got to identify yourself. You with the county?”
The driver seemed older now. Worn. Wrinkles at the corners of his worried eyes. His hands dry and chafed and stiffly clawed, the collar on his shirt discolored and frayed.
The driver pulled the serving window closed and got behind the wheel.
“All right, I’m moving!” the driver called as he started the engine. “Asshole!”
Back at his car, Jack set the ice cream and two plastic spoons in the box with the clothes for his father, rolled up his car windows and turned on the air-conditioner for the first time that day.
* * *
An old Corolla, burgundy, missing its back bumper and with rust along the rear wheel wells. An overbearing Dodge pickup truck, black, with impatience at the wheel pressing a horn that played Dixie. A low-riding Civic with dark-tinted, menacing windows, counterpointed by cheery orange blossoms on its Florida license plates.
Car after car streamed through the roundabout – not dense traffic, just ill-timed – and Jack waited for his chance to turn back onto St. John and shoot down to Hardesty.
If his father of old had been riding shotgun, he would have been laughing.
Jack would have started laughing, too.
“That poor son-of-a-bitch,” his father would have said. “That will teach him to have his permits in order.”
Finally, a lull and a right turn onto St. John. Jack took his place in the single-lane, eastbound traffic, only with less patience now. The string of drivers out front – nonchalant, indecisive, slow-moving – kept Jack’s foot popping back and forth between the gas and the brake.
“Don’t worry about the ice cream,” his father would have said. “You’ll get there when you get there.”
There – not a great place, admittedly, but in the neighborhood. At least that’s what the social worker had said the year before. She explained that his father did not have a lot of options. No options, really. But being in the neighborhood was a good thing, she kept saying, because there would be others from the area living there, too, people his father might know or recognize. And that would help, she said, with acceptance. Acceptance? She did not know his father at all.
If only this admittedly-not-a-great-place knew how to do laundry without losing all of his father’s clothes. Everything. All the time. Right down to his diabetic slippers and the tennis shoes with the Velcro ties. Where did it all go? Were they running some sort of underground market on sweatpants and sweatshirts? Posting everything on eBay? Selling it by weight to a recycling center?
A car out ahead of him stopped to turn left into the parking lot at the Holy Cross Church. The way was clear and yet it sat there, its turn signal blinking. It nosed into the empty oncoming lane – inching forward, inching forward – before finally overcoming its crisis of faith or faulty transmission and moving out of the way.
“Remember the ice cream we used to make?” his father would ask. “Out on the patio? That hand-cranked churn, all the ice and rock salt?”
“Strawberry,” Jack would say. “We always made strawberry.”
“So good. Fresh. Like nothing you can buy.”
Jack kept the windows rolled up and the air-conditioner on full blast. He reached over to the passenger seat. The ice cream cups still felt firm. Good. Good. He would get there before it melted.
“Remember the ice cream we used to get out on Highway 24,” his father would say. “Remember? At the Hi-Boy?”
“On Saturdays in the summer,” Jack would say. “After fishing. We would always stop. Chocolate ruled the day.”
The last few times Jack had visited, his father mistook him for someone else – a doctor, a therapist, a dining room server, a housekeeper. On good days, his father came to himself with a few gentle reminders – “Dad, it’s me. Jack.” Other days, though, his father struggled, and so Jack, a friendly stranger, would sit with him and chat and watch television. His father, so small, ghostlike, disappearing, sinking into his wheelchair. His skin gray, his hair thinning, his scalp sallow, his shoulders collapsing inside a too-large gray sweatshirt that wasn’t even his, a piece of refuse from the nursing home’s weekly laundry lottery. And his eyelashes gone, fallen out, harbinger to a harsh reality.
Jack sat impatiently at the intersection of St. John Avenue and Hardesty, his turn signal blinking steadily.
“When you get that job,” his father would say, “we’ll celebrate. Go out to that Hi-Boy for a chocolate malt. Or something. This will be a good thing for you.”
That damned job. Jack had no words. He could not explain why he applied. He could not explain why he wanted it, in spite of all the attending bullshit. Why he needed it so desperately hid at a depth that he could not reach.
The light green, he touched the gas and turned.
