Just Desserts

By James Callan

My dad was more than a little drunk when he ordered two of everything from off the menu at the local Dairy Queen. “One for me and one for you,” he said and smiled, mussing up my hair like I was eight, his breath so heavy with Seagram it could cut through a bank vault.
A voice rich with puberty undulated from the intercom, explaining that the wait would be twenty minutes, that the bill would be more than 1000 bucks. My dad nodded and gave an enthusiastic thumbs up, as if a gesture alone would translate through the audio device. As he eased forward to the window, the Corolla hit the curb no less than six times. From the passenger seat, I buried my head in my hands, but I’ve got to admit: a Turtle Pecan Cluster Blizzard sounded pretty damned good. So I sat back and let my dad do his thing as he rolled up to the service window.
The kid working the drive-thru was one of those early bloomers, well over six feet, but with the face of a twelve-year-old. He had enough acne to make me wince, even with my dad between the two of us. The inflamed dots and little, off-white bubbles on his pale face looked like cherry toppings scattered on vanilla soft serve. His image did nothing for my appetite.
“That’ll be one thousand dollars and-” he was cut short by my dad, who was leaning out the window, sloppy and scary, pointing a weapon at the terrified kid and telling him to fork over a box of Dilly Bars. The overcast sky gleamed in the man- sized boy’s oily skin, his cheeks like two shiny, red apples. The fear in his eyes was animal. Made me think of a distressed cow. And when he grimaced I was blinded by the sheen of metallic hardware that strained to straighten his overcrowded teeth. Then it all melted, like a Dilly Bar left out in the sun. I watched the kid realize the gun in his face was a half-wrapped Snickers Bar, and the boy’s fear seeped out of him like the innards of a waffle cone punctured at the base.
He laughed, sounding more like a man than seemed natural coming from that fifth-grader face. “You sure did startle me, Mister,” he said while looking down the length of a king-sized candy bar into the glazed, angry eyes of a man he assumed was joking.
“No joke, kid,” Dad warned. “This ain’t no fun-size. Don’t think for a second I can’t do some damage just because it’s nougat and nuts, not a Glock.” He took a bite of the candy bar, which was a bit like eating his own words, if you ask me. “Now get me a Blizzard, pronto, or I’ll play piñata on each one of those outrageous pimples you’ve got colonizing your face.” The man-boy scurried off to pump the soft serve as my dad swayed, heckling the poor bastard through the service window. “Jeez Louise, kid. Has anyone ever told you that you look just like Mars?”
From across the parking lot, a bunch of cop cars came peeling through the narrow avenues of parked automobiles. Their sirens drowned out my dad’s heavy breathing, the groan of the soft serve machine, the Bob Marley song from inside the Dairy Queen which told us everything was okay, the words that echoed “Don’t worry, be happy.” I watched the blue and red lights of the law and thought of blue-raspberry and very-cherry slushy machines. I watched the police cars skid to a stop, the cops spilling out of their vehicles and shielding themselves with the open patrol-car doors, guns pointed at the exit-entrance to a Super Target with a red bullseye that seemed to watch us all like an angry god. It held me frozen, like a Dairy Queen Blizzard.
“Your Blizzard, Mister,” the human pimple sang out in warring highs and lows, offering my dad his daytime dessert. Dad reached out for his treat, but the kid tipped the carton upside down, proudly demonstrating the anti-gravity superpowers of the Dairy Queen brand soft serve. “Cute gimmick, kid.” Dad wasn’t impressed. “Now give me my fucking ice cream.” Then, just as my dad took hold of the massive payload of sugar, calories, and fat, the Super Target doors burst outward. A trio of misfits came running out, guns in hand and dollar bills flying free from stuffed pillow cases. The thieves wore disposable masks –medical, not the Halloween kind– so even from across the parking lot I could read the fear in their wide eyes when the cops greeted them with more than king-sized Snickers Bars pointed in their direction.
With the cup of ice cream in his hand and a bottle of Seagram in his blood system, Dad was oblivious to the chaos across the parking lot. But then a gun fired, which set off more guns, more firing, and a stray bullet found its way to the Dairy Queen, ricocheting off the bricks above the service window right into the tub of soft serve between my dad’s trembling fingers.
At the curb, melting faster than a drunk man turning sober after almost having his hand blown off, a Very Cherry Chip Blizzard made modern art beside the tire of a parked Corolla. Out of its anti-gravity XL cup it looked far from appetizing –pink mucus and brain matter, the sort of thing a flying bullet does to a man’s head.
As we drove away, empty-handed, yet each of us with two undamaged hands, my dad no longer swayed on the road, but drove straight and true. The Corolla was as if an arrow, a controlled shot dead-center in a bullseye that sees the world in a brand new light.

James Callan lives on the Kāpiti Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand. His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, BULL, House of Arcanum, Maudlin House, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere.