Call it a consolation prize for being excluded by the big boys who get together to curse and talk about penises. We had taken the little ones away from the campsite, into town – if you call a general store and a chiropractor clinic with a 35 mile per hour speed-limit a town – just to strap them into car seats for ten minutes. As it is, sleeping on the ground when I already have a real mattress at home, plus a flushing toilet, makes voluntary camping a foolish pursuit of weekend leisure. – Why do we do this to ourselves: this constant vigilance and regular headcounts – to intervene before the children wander into the forest forever or vanish down a ravine or into a roiling body of water. As a mom, I’d like to think I would fight a mountain lion with my bare hands to save my child’s life. (I hope that I would.) Our conversations have been half-told, cut-off mid-sentence, punchlines ruined. 

“Hey! Giant sticks stay out of the campfire, go swing them around where people aren’t sitting.” 

“If you’re done playing soccer, fine, but give them back the ball.” 

“Oh sweetie, you’ve wet your pants, come on, let’s have a hug, we'll find some new shorts.”

I hack through the plastic wrapper with my car key. Purple instantly spills down my hand with a tickling cold. I pass the tube of frozen juice to my son’s grabby hand. His cheeks are red, flushed with either hustle or sunburn, time will tell. Sweat pastes his bangs to his forehead. He leans on the bench outside the general store, half-sitting and half standing, as the purple ice telescopes from the wrapper into his mouth. The other kids wave their ice pops in my face, their turn next in line for the car key treatment before the sunshine melts them down, melts us all down.

All three kids sit on the bench in a row, slurping their colors of ice. The sun bakes the dusty lot with golden light, but the awning over the general store protects us from the impossible heat. The woman on the other side of the window wears her hair tied in a nest atop her head. She sweats through the edges of her tank top. She punches buttons on the cash register and when the cash drawer slides open, it dings. Men with beards stand in line, clad in leather and holding cases of cold beer, their motorcycles – giant masses of machinery and wheels – parked in the gravel next to the ice cooler. They ignore the pair of $25 marionberry pies next to the cash register, sweating beneath a skin of cellophane. That’s the thing that I want most of all – a slice of black jam oozing over pastry, a glob of motherfucking ice cream melting on top, the white cream mingling with the juices and clots of berries, making swirls of purple and white. Instead, I crunch on goddamn cashews. 

It’s my first week into an elimination diet with hopes to get my mysterious hives under control. I’m not tough and motorcycles scare me. For my nurse clinical rotation on the hospital’s trauma floor, the beds were populated with dudes such as these, scraped up and dizzy after falling off their motorcycles and bonking their heads.

The kids, my wife, and the other mom all slurp their melting juices in a row on the bench. On another bench sit five men. I try not to look at them much. They’ve emptied from a truck the size of a tank, a type of vehicle I’ve never seen before, like something built for war – armored with plates of metal, a bull skull with long horns mounted to the grill. Tattoos crawl up their arms and onto their faces. They wear denim vests over faded T-shirts. On each of their laps sit cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Several wear bandanas. Their faces are sunburnt and their hair is either sweaty or unwashed.

“Look at that ice pop,” a muscular sweaty gentleman says to my son, “that looks good, man.” My son giggles and hunches his shoulders. I hope that the exchange, harmless, is now over.

Road signs in these parts are punctuated with bullet holes. Billboards planted along roadsides display pictures of bloody tissues, attempting – apparently – to gross people out of their abortions. Last year when we did this group camp with my wife's family, during the thirty minutes spent kicking around the park with natural bridges, my sister in-law returned to find someone had vandalized her car, adding the word “Sucks Dick” to the Obama bumper sticker. Though ten years have passed since I last tangled with groups of men surrounding me to air their grievances over my boy clothes and boy haircut and billfold in my back pocket, assemblies of men still spook me. Even when I’ve tried, I just cannot pass as heterosexual. 

“Ice pops, those were the days, man,” the guy on the end says, gesturing with his chin toward my son. “Cooling off with an ice pop.”

I smile and nod, reluctant to make eye contact. My wife would probably say I’m overreacting – they’re fine, it’s fine, she'd say.

“Man, those were the days,” the man says to nobody.

My sister and I used to buy ice pops at the city pool. When I was ten, the babysitter left me in charge of a seven-year-old and sent us off with towels, flip-flops, and two dollars to a body of water. Every hour on the fifty, the lifeguards blew their whistles until everybody evacuated the pool. Kids then crowded the concession stand, pool water raining into puddles at our feet, our skin slick in the sunlight. The radio played Tears for Fears or Phil Collins. My sister and I surmised this routine emptying of the pool was intended for the lifeguards to retrieve the dead bodies of kids who had drowned in the last hour. 

For ten minutes, adults swam, gliding on their backs through the blue waters, their noses painted with white paste. With the dollar our mom gave us, my sister and I would buy our ice pops for twenty-five cents each and sit against the chain-linked fence, staring at the injustice of an empty pool. Adults get to do everything and kids have to stand around and watch. I practiced no restraint from slurping all the syrup from my ice pop in the first minutes, rendering a narrow tube of plain boring ice. For this reason, I prefer ice cream sandwiches. – They’re harder to ruin. 

One day my sister and I talked my dad into buying us a box of ice pops from Pamida, sold at room temperature, the customer responsible for freezing them. On the gravel roads home, in the backseat of the Buick, I gutted them open with my pocketknife and we drank them all. When we stopped, we both barfed bright red juice all over the driveway. 

My son’s ice pop extends too far and a chunk splats onto the wooden porch. As my wife and I debate whether he should still eat it, my son sobs. “I wasn’t done with it,” he says, tears sliding down his red face. I pick up the purple ice tube and find a single hair embedded in the ice crystals. “Gross.” I fling it to the garbage can. 

After the commotion of hard luck lessons about felled desserts, the bell jingles and the reminiscing man returns from inside the store, orange ice pop in hand, yanking the plastic open with his teeth. Two more men from the bench disappear inside and later return with their own ice pop. Before long, every person on both benches slurps in silent rapture, the sunlight roasting our cars and motorcycles and armored vehicles decorated with a skull. 

It’s time to return to goddamn camping, to go cook meat over flames and begin the ordeal of bedtime. 

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” the reminiscing dude calls out as my son slides off the bench and his feet touch the ground. I don’t think he’s talking about the ice pop. 

We load the kids back into the car, buckle them into their five-point harnesses, slide the backdoors shut. Outside the car window, a man in chaps and silver ring hanging from his nasal septum leans his back against the ice cooler next to his motorcycle, a leg slung over his other knee, his elbow resting on his case of Pabst, slurping on a green tube of ice. Another steps over his legs and jumps off the wooden walkway into a cloud of dirt, his own ice pop in hand. 

My wife starts the engine. Our car tires crunch over the gravel. We pull away from the general store on the highway, back toward our campsite where the older boys swear and talk about penises. We leave behind the battalion of tough guys with their flavored ice, the summer heat, and their boyhoods kicked up like the dust.