A police van arrives, police reciting delectable apricot fudge in its full ingredients--"Howdy, Sergeant Major."
"Howdy, vendor. You're blockin' traffic."
"Blockin' my ass, I'm blockin'."
The dust rises cool and fluid dynamic around the wheels of onrushing cars.
"Would you help me kindly, Sergeant Major?"
"The ice cream vendor needs not ask."
"My boys are searching the median environment for some sort of way, they've got string and a certain panache but no real highly developed means of reducing traffic flow in the passing direction in favor of stoppage for sweets, and I was wondering if you mightn't favor the ice cream vendor industry with a means and a way of furthering selfsame stoppage, I'm not suggesting mildly, nor suggesting no wild affront, you know..."
The officer looks past the barrelling cars at the ice cream men on the median with their ounces of string and the placards, etc. He takes a look at his men, natty in black with coy tilts to their caps, extravagant men, refusals of various sorts already glowing around their edges, and blows with full police lungs on his whistle. "Take out your guns, snarly metal, take out! And, I say, aim! Fire! Read your rulebooks! Aim! We're in reallife jeopardy, sons, men, we're having no wee appraisal from bums in pancake galoshes, no sir, we're out on the fast-hanging streets, and it's us who're doing the hanging. Take aim! Take fire at will! The vendor's your man."
The ice cream vendor ducks and crawls to his truck amid a volley of .22 bullets. A wheel hisses. Many cars stop. The ice cream vendor, finally, dead, attracts a crowd which rushes at little-publicized flavors, handed out by the vendor's men, now by the truck, congratulating where congratulations are due, and slowly the sun sinks behind the hills to a rousing hurrah! ahoy! hoohooey!
Later, at the morgue, the ice cream vendor's mother removes a silk scarf from her son's reddened pocket and places it as is in her chest. Later policemen ask each other for stories, similar stories of trust/misdeed, and the men each recount three likely stories that happened at sundown one day on a thrilling stretch of the dusty highway from Amarillo to Houston, widened West, and the mother has clams baked in dough and the babies, they are redfaced and antagonistic.