American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  Mr. Gaither exhaled rather noisily. He ran his hand over his mouth with some exasperation and a little bit of pity, as if I were too stupid to see that talking his proposition over with Hank was something that only an imbecilic woman would do.

  “And if he doesn’t like it, where does that put things? You’re out of a job and you could be out of a marriage. Do you want that, Miss Hellmann?”

  “Mrs. Hellmann, Mr. Gaither. And I will consider your proposal. I will. But I really have to speak with Hank about it. It is only right. We took vows. I don’t want to break my vows to him without his permission.”

  Mr. Gaither shook his head. He wore a grimace that said that he was more than a little put out with me. I think the look also said that he didn’t believe I was going to speak to Hank. I was bluffing, testing him. And if this were true, if he called my bluff—well, where was the risk in having ever asked such an audacious thing of me? Whom otherwise would I tell? What person of consequence would believe that he had actually used this awful economic depression to compromise me in such a way? I had no avenue for appeal or redress. So testing him like this could only be a stupid move.

  “Ask him if you wish, Miss Hellmann, but if you do, don’t bother to come to work tomorrow. It should not be my desire each time we embrace to be on silent alert for the approaching footsteps of a cuckold with a gun.”

  “Hank doesn’t have a gun. He does have a very sharp fishing knife, though. The kind you gut the big fish with.”

  Mr. Gaither lost a little of the color in his face.

  Hank laughed when I told him this. And I told it all to him in between forkfuls of Mrs. Peterson’s Dutch chocolate cake (did I mention that Monday was my birthday?) and stolen sips of Hank’s milk. I always tell my husband everything. Just as he tells everything to me. We are very open and honest with one another. Which has made the difficulties of the last several months all the harder to bear. Night after night we have lain in bed and discussed the bleak uncertainty of our joint future. Night after night Hank has held me close to him as we have yearned in a single voice for things to get better, for the Depression to end, for Eddie Cantor to sing again to us in our very own living room, and not through the open kitchen window.

  “But did you really mean it, Hank? That you would have actually agreed to what that lecherous old man was asking?”

  “Well, yes. On practical grounds, of course. Look at the alternative. Me selling apples on a street corner and you taking in laundry.” He added, “And you’re not even very good at laundry.”

  I felt like slapping him again. Hank had surprised me. No, it was something stronger than surprise. It was utter stupefaction. Total awe and wonder. To think that he would give me up in such a way, regardless of the guaranteed return. I felt a little sick.

  After a long moment, I said, “Well, your answer shouldn’t matter so much at this point. Because I’m fired.”

  “Maybe I should call him. Maybe we could work something out.”

  The second slap came even harder than the first. I had a little of Mrs. Peterson’s cake on my fingertips and they left parallel streaks of chocolate frosting upon his cheek. I was like Norma Shearer in that other movie—the one she made early in her career—in which she got to do the slapping. It had the most appropriate title you could think of—that is, for a movie in which there is no shortage of face-slapping going on: He Who Gets Slapped. She slapped Lon Chaney, who played a clown.

  That was my husband to a T. My Hank. The slappable clown.

  But the clown had one final antic to put across before he left the stage. “There’s something I haven’t told you, honey,” he said, keeping his face straight and solemn, though I could feel that there was mischief just below the surface. “Your boss Mr. Gaither called before you got home. I think he started to get nervous about you spilling the beans to me. He said he called to tell you that he’d decided to give you the raise you asked for. No mention of his having thought about firing you, by the way. Seeing that I had lost my job and we needed the dough, the raise was something he was glad to do. Besides, you were a good secretary. Of course, he conveniently left out the real reason.”

  “And what was the real reason?” I asked, tenderly wiping the chocolate smudges from my husband’s reddened cheek with my moistened index finger.

  “That he didn’t want me to come down to his office and gut him like a fish.”

  I leaned back in my chair in a state of joyous awe and wonder. My husband has the most darling smile. He’s the best husband. To think that he’d even kill for me!

  1932

  FASCISTIC IN D.C.

  They brought the troops over from Fort Myer in trucks, and the ones from Fort Washington, why, they came up the Potomac in a steamer. I suppose that was an improvement over what had happened on July 14. That was the day, you see, that Vice President Curtis got tired of watching all of us unemployed veterans marching back and forth outside his office window on Capitol Hill, and called out the Marines. Curtis’s successor John Nance Garner once called the job of vice president “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Well, Vice President Curtis, he must’ve felt a little different, because that Kansas Big Chief used the leverage of his office on the fourteenth to summon a whole contingent of Marines all the way from the Navy Yard just to help improve his view of the Capitol Grounds.

  They came in streetcars. For true. In full gear, bayonets fixed. And a lot of good they did. Police Chief Glassford was fit to be tied. He called the vice president a “hysterical meddler.” And some of the veterans knew some of the Marines besides and it ended up being like Old Home Week at the U.S. Capitol.

  July 28 was different. Nobody was smiling. Tar-paper shacks in all the little rag-and-tin-can villages throughout D.C. were going up in flames. The tanks were rolling and the tear gas grenades were flying. People who didn’t have nothing to do with anything were coughing and tearing up in the eyes and cussing the president and cussing his chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, who was leading the charge. And I was hightailing it back to Anacostia Flats, where the largest of all the encampments had been set up. (The biggest Hooverville in the country, it was said.) Trying to get myself back by my own cardboard and packing-crate cottage (the one with the egg-carton roof) to snatch up what few belongings I had in the world before the troops put a match to them, the way they was doing over by Camp Glassford.

  We gave our camp the name of Camp Marks—named for the commander of the city’s Eleventh Police Precinct, Sidney J. Marks, who was with us from the beginning. See, it was Marks and Glassford who saw us all coming and did right by us—giving us a place to bivouac and finding food for us when the federal government would have turned us all away at gunpoint on Day One. Some of those sons of bitches who said we was all Communists, why, they used the camp name to prove their case. They spelled it Camp Marx. For true.

  I came from New Orleans with my colored pal Odell. We been friends since we was kids together in the bayou, me and him. And I only mention he was colored to make a couple of points here: that we both served in Uncle Sam’s army. I was in the Battle of Belleau Wood, where I took shrapnel into my hindquarters, and Odell, not being among them coloreds who got to serve with the French Africans, got hisself put on kitchen and ditch-digging duty until the signing of the Armistice.

  But there was no Jim Crow here in Camp Marks. You find this hard to believe? Believe it: black men and white men—all veteran soldiers of the United States of America, eating and sleeping (making dodo, me and Odell calls it) and rising together at reveille and parading side by side and visiting the Sallies together at the Salvation Army hut (what a collection of little cuties they were, in their doughnut girl bonnets!)—puts a fellow in mind of being at liberty in France back in the day, except there was no Red Cross here in Anacostia. The Red Cross wanted nothing to do with the Bonus Expeditionary Force.

  But white and black, it made no never mind, and that’s probably one of the reasons that the government thought we was all Communists. These caps w
ould come into the camps and you could tell they was spies and snitches because of the way they’d give a closer eye to the Negroes and the Jews. But it wasn’t nothing like the Soviet brotherhood of man that put us all so warm and friendly with each other; it was just plain old-fashioned American brotherhood. You see, we had a lot in common. We’d all served under the American flag and now our country had turned its back on us—every one of us. And it was time to demand our due, all in one loud voice.

  Me and my soap box. I would’ve voted for Roosevelt if I’d been able when the election come up later that year—wanted more than anything to see this country taken out of the hands of the damned plutocrat Republicans and Mellon-aires who got us into this fix. But I was back to riding the rails by then. Me and Odell. Wondering if we was ever going to see that bonus for service in the Great War that was promised to us in 1924 and then deferred for twenty-one more years out of pure political meanness.

  Me and Odell was over on the north banquette of Pennsylvania Avenue when that Little Caesar sends in his Cossacks with the tanks and the guns and the gas masks, and we was watching the men scatter and listening to the frightened screams of the mothers and their boos. (You’d be surprised how many of us former doughboys brought our wives and babies along. Sometimes they just had no other place to go.) And I walk up to this one fuzz-faced soldier boy who’s fixing to put on his gas mask and do his dirty business with the tear gas, and I say, “I used to wear one of dose, too, chief. Of course I was fighting the Huns, not my fellow Yanks.”

  And the boy—’cause I grant you he was nothing more than a boy, no more than the age I was when I went off to fight the Kaiser—he gives me such a sad-ass look, and he says with hardly any volume to his voice at all: “I’m just doing what I’ve been ordered to do.”

  “Uh huh,” I say. “And dat man over dere, the one on the ground—” says I, as me and Odell are looking over at Shorty, who came with us to see if there was any truth to the rumors about sending in the cavalry against us. Shorty’s on the ground from where one of the cavalrymen swung his saber and sent him tumbling. His banged-up face and arms were K&B purple. “Dat man dere was three times decorated.”

  The soldier boy said he had to throw his tear gas grenade now and we’d best be moving on down Pennsylvania Avenue if we knew what was good for us, and then he put on his gas mask, and Odell and me, we shot off running.

  All the way to Camp Marks.

  Here was our crime: We came to Washington, D.C., to ask for help from our government. It wasn’t like what some of them politicians was saying—that we was asking for special treatment just because we’d been soldiers. But we came back from a war that had filled the pockets of our civilian brothers and was an especially good thing for their bosses on account of all the profiteering. And a hell of a lot of us veterans had a hard time finding work. The jobs we had when we went “Over There” weren’t waiting for us “Back Here.” And there wasn’t a lot of hiring going on elsewheres neither. Some of us eventually landed on our feet, but then the Depression hit and we lost our footing all over again. Millions of us. And the country was supposed to do right by us and compensate us for putting ourselves in the trenches in service to the American flag. But they reneged.

  And we got mad.

  Some folks gave a listen to us. Some fed us. And the chief of police looked the other way when we built the saddest junk-pile testaments to this damned Depression you ever saw, right within view of the Capitol building, of the White House, right there in the shadow of the Washington Monument. For true.

  But there were them others who wanted us gone. As of yesterday.

  That afternoon in Washington, D.C., one man lay dead and another dying. The city, it was turned mightily on its head. But General MacArthur was ready for whatever might come. And he was dressed to the military nines. I hear tell he sent one of his aides back to Fort Myer to fetch his polished riding boots. For true. The general was ready to vanquish his foes with all the horses and all the men and all the Goddamned firepower he could muster. Forgetting exactly who those foes actually were.

  I was one. And Odell was another. And there was Shorty with all his medals, crawling on the ground like a thrice-kicked dog. All this came back to me when that son of a bitch MacArthur got his insubordinate ass whipped by Truman in ’51 and I remembered it again when I wrote the son of a bitch to tell him why he’d best not think of running for president the next year. That he wouldn’t get the veteran vote—at least not the World War I veteran vote, because there was a hell of a lot of us doughboys still around in ’52 and we had real good memories about how he turned the American army against its own during the bloody summer of ’32.

  I also reminded him what me and Odell saw in the middle of that wide Pennsylvania esplanade while his troops was pushing us all farther and farther south.

  He was sitting in his limousine and talking to the reporters and photographers.

  “Point down to the troops, General,” the photographers said, trying to pose him.

  And he grinned and obediently pointed.

  “Now give us a salute, General.”

  No grin. Just a face of utmost seriousness for the cameras. And the salute.

  “Now get out and stand beside your horse.”

  Someone fetched the general’s horse. Standing next to his mount, he soaked up every ounce of that limelight for the cameras. It was probably the best day he ever had, in my humble Cajun opinion, until 1944 when he sloshed through the water on his triumphant “return” to Leyte, with his speech all typed out nice and proper and ready to be delivered to the grateful Filipinos.

  Odell used to ask me, years later, about my hatred of that corncob-pipe-smoking Napoleon, when the two of us were settled back down, him with his Vera and all those “chillren,” and me with my Peggy, who dared to take a chance on a forty-three-year-old confirmed bachelor with a little shrapnel still left in his ass and an itch to go off and fight in this new world war—an itch that was never going to get itself scratched. And I’d remind him that when the historians got out their pens, and the Hoovers (I’m also referring to that Commie-obsessed FBI squirrel) and Deputy Chief of Staff Moseley and Major Patton (Eisenhower, I think, was always embarrassed over the orders he had to follow on that sad day) got all their Communist-uprising bullshit knocked down by the truth of who it was who actually lived in those crowded mud-caked camps during those rainy weeks of June and July, 1932—when all was said and done and everybody knew the whole truth, folks would be reminded that it was Douglas MacArthur who deliberately disobeyed the president’s order not to send his avenging army across the 11th Street Drawbridge and upon the boggy fields of Anacostia that night. It was Douglas MacArthur who ignored a presidential order for the purpose of his own bastard glory. Sound a little familiar, don’t it?

  Camp Marks. Where Odell and me had hardly any time at all to stuff what little clothes we had into our beat-up grips, and tuck away our official discharge papers and our meager souvenirs from our occupation of a land that belonged to us by right of American citizenship.

  We retreated alongside the thousands of other impoverished veterans of the War to End All Wars, and their wives and their children. And the stories began to circulate about the boy who wasn’t allowed back into his soon-to-be-ignited hovel to get his pet rabbit, of the Negro bayoneted in the foot for evacuating too slowly, of the babies hospitalized from the gas, of the woman who wasn’t permitted to pick up all of the things that had spilled from her gunnysack and a moment later everything she owned was trod under a cavalry horse’s heavy hoof.

  It seemed like Belgium all over again. Except that unlike the Flemish facing the invading Germans, we’d hardly offered up any resistance at all. And when it was over, where was our Herbert Hoover, the man who had headed the Belgian relief effort? Why, hunkered down in the White House, that’s where! No longer the brave humanitarian. Just a frightened, cowering little man, sorely inconvenienced by the audacity of our presence. They say we’d made him a prisoner
in that place, and that in the end, we’d kept him from getting hisself re-elected.

  President Hoover must have stood at his window and watched Washington burn, just as Odell and I watched the flames from the hills above Anacostia, surrounded by the huddling mothers putting wet cloths to the tear-gas-stung eyes of their whimpering babies.

  This was the America I had fought for?

  Yet I knew in my optimistic heart that better days were coming. Because there was one thing that struck the heart of every visitor to Camp Marks that summer. It was the presence of all them American flags. Every state’s bivouac had its own Stars and Stripes, you see. Men marched with them held aloft, waved them, saluted them on every occasion. And in the smoking aftermath of the attack upon the camp, there was one flag upon a pole that stood alone, untouched, rippling through the smoke of that night’s terrible fires. All was smoldering, jagged rubble around it. Yet the flag was still there.

  For true.

  1933

  LETTING GO IN MISSOURI

  “When did you know?”

  “’Seems like I’ve wanted to be an iceman as far back as I can remember. I think about the times when I was a kid and Ma and Polly and me were living at the Broussard place just a few blocks east of here. There’d be these hot summer days when the landlady would forget to take the ice card out of the window from the time before. And the iceman, he’d see the card and climb those two flights of stairs with that dribbling, fifty-pound block of ice on his back, and Mrs. Broussard would realize her error and make her hundred-and-one apologies, but he’d be damned if he was gonna play Sisyphus’s cousin and haul that ice all the way back down to his wagon, so you know what he did?”

  “Chucked it out the window?”

  “Raised the sash and pushed it right out.”

  “That sounds like a reason not to want to become an iceman.”

  “There’s an upside to the story. That big block of ice—it would hit the concrete in the courtyard below and shatter. And the kids in the neighborhood, they’d hear the noise and all come running over to grab up those frozen chunks to cool themselves off with. I wanted to be the guy who made all the kids happy. What time is it?”