The Empress File

sponges. He had the doors andthe big side window open as far as they would go, but never a breeze came in.
    Elvis was the night manager at the E-Z Way, a fat young man given to tent-size sweatpants and novelty T-shirts. Tonight’s had a tiger-striped cartoon cat, with the caption “I Love a Little Pussy.” He’d dripped ketchup on the shirt while eating a hot dog, and five red splotches crossed the Pussy like bloody fingerprints. Elvis mopped his face with a rag he kept in the soda cooler. Reruns of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
flickered on the portable TV bolted into one corner of the ceiling, but it was so hot that he’d lost the story line. Beige moths the size of penny-candy wrappers battered themselves against Mary’s face.
    The E-Z Way, the only all-night store in town, squatted beside the A&M Railroad tracks. Both whites from the east side and blacks from the west—anyone looking for milk or beer or cigarettes—patronized the place. “We get ’em all, sooner or later,” Elvis liked to say.
    A T 11:04 D ARRELL C LARK was Elvis’s only customer. He stood in the back of the store, peering through the glass of an upright cooler. A dozen varieties of ice cream and sherbet were racked inside: vanilla, Dutch chocolate, strawberry, butter brickle, raspberry surprise, chocolate rocky road. Each name and each color photo evoked a memoryof taste. Butter brickle and jamocha were out. Vanilla was good, but too… vanilla.
    Darrell was dressed in Wal-Mart shorts and a brown short-sleeved polo shirt. The shirt was too small and fit his growing body like a second skin. His hair was close-cropped over his high forehead.
    Darrell licked his lower lip every few seconds as he considered the beckoning flavors. After some thought he opened the cooler door, paused to let the cold air wash over him, shivered, selected a two-quart carton of the chocolate rocky road, and carried it to the counter. Elvis counted Darrell’s handful of crumpled dollar bills, quarters, and dimes, rang up the sale, and slipped the ice cream into a brown paper bag.
    “Now you haul ass, boy,” Elvis told him. “That rocky road’ll melt faster’n snot on a hot doorknob.”
    Darrell headed out the door on the run. The brown paper bag dangled from one hand, and his rubber flip-flops slapped on the blacktop as his long fourteen-year-old legs ate up the ground. He crossed the parking lot under the moth-shrouded pole lights and ran down the dirt-and-cinders path that paralleled the A&M tracks.
    Two things were going through his head.
    The first was the thought of the rocky road, cool and buttery in a blue plastic bowl. A good choice.
    Behind that was an algorithm he had been toying with: a way to generate real-time fractal terrain at reasonable speeds on his Macintosh II personal computer.…
    C LARISSE B ARNWRIGHT , whom everybody, including herself, called Old Lady Barnwright, hobbled along Bluebell, a rubber-tipped cane held in one hand, her purse clutched in the other. She lived one block over from the tracks, on the white side of town. She’d spent her entire life in the neighborhood, born in a house not a hundred yards from the house where she expected to die. For thirty-nine years she’d beaten Latin and English into the thick heads of Longstreet’s children. White children for the first twenty-seven years, a mix of black and white for the last twelve. Then she gave it up and sank gratefully into retirement.
    Her husband’s death preceded her retirement by a year. Some people thought that was why she quit. She couldn’t face life and work without Albert, they said wisely.
    They were wrong.
    The fact was, Clarisse wasn’t unhappy to see him go. Had, late on hot summer nights in the forties and fifties, lying in the same bed with him, sweaty and suffocating, listening to his burbling snorts and occasional farts, considered helping him along the Path to Glory. Might have done it, if she could have thought of a surefire way of notgetting caught. The state had the electric chair, and no particular prejudice against using it on women.
    Clarisse sighed as she thought about it. If Albert had lived, he’d have just sat around the house and complained. Complained about paint flaking off the siding, complained about the furnace, complained about the cracking sidewalks, complained about the cotton crop. Never complained about anything interesting.
    Never complained about their sex life, for example. She might have been interested if one night