American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  For a tense moment, Elsie and the man traded cold, freighted looks. Elsie prayed that the man would simply let go of the little girl’s hand and run away.

  Yet he did not.

  There erupted now an expression of angry defiance upon his hard face. Without taking his eyes off Elsie, he yanked the little girl toward him, wrenching her tiny wrist, her eyes wild with terror. She dropped her bag of candy, some of the pieces scattering upon the tiled floor of the center court. Elsie couldn’t hear the little girl’s cry but she could see the fear in her face.

  Now the man was running. He was running as the crying girl tripped and stumbled behind him, still a prisoner to the fate he had chosen for her. Elsie began to run, too.

  A salesman was standing outside of Florsheim Shoes on the concourse, smoking a cigarette. This man was watching the other man tearing through the mall’s center court, nearly dragging a little girl behind him. He was watching Elsie chasing after the two of them. His gaze caught hers.

  “Help me,” she mouthed.

  The man ran inside and directed one of the other salesmen to call security. Then he raced out of the store.

  The abductor was near one of the doors to the parking lot now. The rain was coming down in wimpling sheets, rattling its glass pane. The abductor pushed the door open. The wind seized the door and slammed it shut again. The man fought against the wind with one hand and against the struggles of the little girl with his other hand. Elsie reached the man. She threw herself upon him, maniacal, hating him for what he sought to do, hating him as well for what he had put her through. The man fended her blows. He dropped the hand of the little girl, who started to run away, but was caught by the Florsheim shoe salesman.

  The abductor pushed Elsie away from him. She stumbled backward. He shoved the door open with both hands and went out. Elsie watched as he disappeared into the billowing blankets of rain. A flash of lightning gave Elsie her final glimpse of the man—less a man now than something umbral and hulking and monstrous scuttling between the cars. She turned back to the shoe salesman. “Go after him. Stop him.”

  The salesman shook his head. “Catch in my knee,” he said, rubbing his right kneecap. The girl was next to him. The shoe salesman wasn’t holding her hand but she stood close to him. The girl seemed to know that both he and the older woman coming toward her were there to help her. Still, she wept hysterical tears. The girl allowed Elsie to reach down and embrace her, lovingly, protectively.

  “Security’s on its way,” said the salesman, glancing over his shoulder.

  “They won’t find him,” said Elsie above the sound of the little girl’s sobs.

  Sammy Davis Jr. was singing about separating the sorrow and collecting up all the cream. The shoe salesman, a young man with long black sideburns and a modified Afro, led Elsie and the little girl, from whom was coaxed the name Lucinda, back to his store. Across the center court, the robustious kids had retrieved the bag of candy from the floor. They passed it back and forth, chewing the soft caramels inside.

  Minutes later, the distraught mother of little Lucinda arrived, accompanied by two security guards. She had been looking all over for her little girl. She tearfully thanked Elsie for having found her.

  Elsie spent the next day alone in her new apartment. She wanted to be bored. She would have been glad on this day to be very, very bored. But there was too much to remember, too much to play over and over in her head. And there was one thought in particular that held her hostage: he was still out there.

  1973

  VENGEFUL IN MARYLAND

  The two women sat in the front seat and the two boys in the back seat. The woman behind the wheel, Darva, smoked a cigarette until her friend Camelia asked her to put it out. The smoke, she said, was injurious to her son’s formative lungs. She added, almost as an afterthought, that it was, no doubt, damaging the lungs of Darva’s boy as well.

  It was below freezing outside—too cold to leave a window down.

  “There. I’m putting it out, Cammy,” said Darva. “Stop waving your arms. What’s that supposed to do?”

  Camelia stopped waving her arms. She turned around and looked at her eleven-year-old son, Garrett. He was talking to Darva’s eleven-year-old, Kyle. He was telling Kyle about his action figure—the one standing on his knee, poised for action. Its name was Torpedo Fist. According to Garrett, Torpedo Fist used to be a Navy pilot, but he lost his right arm fighting a shark off the coast of Ceylon. Some local Ceylonese fishermen came to his rescue, and then he got a new arm that was telescopic and cybernetic. The arm sprang into action each time Garrett pushed a button on Torpedo Fist’s muscular back.

  “He’s the only P.A.C.K. team member with superhuman powers,” said Garrett in answer to a question that nobody asked.

  “He’s a fag,” said Kyle, punching numbers into his HP-35 scientific calculator, which his father had just gotten him for his birthday. “And get that fag doll out of my face,” added Kyle.

  “He isn’t a doll,” said Garrett in a small, defeated voice.

  “Yeah, he is. And he’s wearing a faggot cap and a stripey faggot shirt.” Then, when it appeared that Kyle had said everything that he was going to say on the subject, he appended, “And you’re a fag.”

  Camelia turned to look at her friend behind the wheel. “Are you going to say anything to your son, Darva?”

  Darva turned around. “Kyle, don’t call people names—especially your friends.”

  Kyle couldn’t be bothered to look up. He was making the numbers on his upside down calculator spell the word “BOOBIES.” “He isn’t my friend. He’s the son of your friend.”

  “I thought you boys liked each other,” said Camelia.

  Kyle didn’t answer. Garrett kept quiet.

  The car in front of Darva’s Coppertone Buick Electra pulled forward about a car length. Darva engaged the ignition, applied slight pressure to her accelerator, and moved her car forward an equal distance. Then she turned off the ignition.

  “Why don’t you let it idle?” asked Camelia. “You probably use more gas turning it on and off like that.”

  “That isn’t what Doyle says. Kyle, tell Mrs. Holley what your Uncle Doyle, who owns his own auto repair shop—tell Mrs. Holley what Uncle Doyle says about idling for thirty minutes to an hour in a long gas line.”

  “For every minute a car idles,” said Kyle in a voice that was half instructional and half smartass, “it uses the same amount of fuel it takes to go a mile. Idling for too long can damage your engine. It leads to a buildup of fuel residue on your cylinder walls.”

  Camelia sighed exasperatedly. “But, Darva, you must have turned your car on and off ten times since we got in this line. That can’t be good for fuel economy either.”

  Kyle didn’t wait for prompting by his mother. Without lifting his eyes from his calculator he continued: “My uncle says that if you’re stopped for more time than it takes to sit at a traffic light, you should shut off your engine. It uses less gas to turn it back on than it does to let it idle.”

  “Kow! Pow!” said Camelia’s son Garrett, who was employing his action figure’s superhuman fist to vanquish all manner of imagined enemies.

  “Fag,” said Kyle under his breath as he punched in the numbers 7,7,3 and 4 to give the word “hell” upside down. His father had paid almost four hundred dollars for the calculator. It was just one of the many expensive gifts that Kyle’s dad, divorced from Kyle’s mother for the last two years, had bought his son.

  A silence passed, disturbed only by the occasional honk of a horn and somebody shouting something at somebody else. All in all, though, the motorists in today’s gas line—which extended for several blocks down the northbound lane of York Road, in Towson—were fairly well-behaved. There had been no fistfights today, no altercations with the gas station attendants, no frustration-fueled assaults on the pumps with ball-peen hammers. There was just the agonizing, interminable wait. The Chinese water torture stop and start. The silent cursing of OPEC and the oil
companies (who were surely somehow playing this gas shortage to their own advantage). The angry look of the attendant when you asked for a top-off. Which was exactly what Darva wanted. She had three-fifths of a tank of gas already but she wanted it full. For peace of mind, everybody wanted it full.

  Darva wished that Kyle and Garrett’s karate lessons were closer to her house. But at least the dojo was near the mall, and today she and Camelia could finish their Christmas shopping while the boys were chopping and bowing.

  Then, as if out of the blue, Camelia gulped. It was very vocal, like the kind of noisy gulp that sitcom characters make.

  “What is it?” asked Darva. “What’s the matter?”

  Even Kyle looked up.

  “Behind us. In that Mustang.”

  “Who? Who’s in the Mustang?”

  Darva tilted her rearview mirror to get a better look. The boys turned around as well, so that all eyes fell upon a 1973 ketchup-red Ford Mustang convertible with the top up and a twenty-something blonde in the driver’s seat.

  Darva whipped around to get a better look out the back window. “It’s his car.” She squinted, then nodded. “It’s her. I think. Kyle, is that your stepmother?”

  “It looks like her.”

  Camelia tutted and shook her head. “What’s she doing with Dave’s car? I thought Dave left her.”

  “I did too. Kyle, do you know why your stepmother is driving your father’s Mustang? Have they gotten back together again?”

  Kyle hunched his shoulders into a modified shrug.

  “What do you know that you’re not telling me? Put down the calculator. What has your father done? Has he gone back to her?”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  “You see him every weekend. Does she come over? Do they talk on the phone?”

  “Kow! Pow!” said Garrett, who was using Torpedo Fist’s enlarged hand to pound the folds of his gi.

  “Garrett, shut up!” shouted Camelia. “Move forward, Darva.”

  Darva turned the key in the ignition and rolled the Electra forward to fill in the space that had just opened in front of her.

  “Has he gone back to her, Kyle?” asked Darva, turning off the ignition. “Your father told me they were getting a divorce. He told me they were incompatible. Does he still love her? Do you know the answers to any of these questions?”

  “Mom, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  The Mustang pulled forward.

  “If there’s something that your father has shared with you that you’re deliberately not telling me, I’m going to ground you for a month. And I’m taking away all of your expensive gadgets.”

  “This isn’t a gadget, Mom. It’s a calculating device.”

  “Did he or did he not move back in with her?”

  Kyle looked into his mother’s angry eyes. There was hurt there as well. The hurt was taking the place of the hope. Hope for a reconciliation. Hope that Darva and Kyle’s father would remarry and things would go back to the way they were before Darva’s world fell apart.

  “Everybody turn back around,” said Camelia. “She sees us all looking at her.”

  But Darva wasn’t looking at the woman in the Mustang. Her eyes were focused on her son. “He told me that the marriage wasn’t working. He took me to Lexington Market. We had Faidley’s crab cakes and he told me it was over. He was going to divorce her. This is what he told me. Did your father lie to me?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “That son of a bitch,” Darva muttered. She settled her head on the steering wheel, then a moment later jerked it back up. “I don’t blame her. She’s just looking out for herself. I blame him. He lied to me.” Then louder, the next words directed to her son: “Your son-of-a-bitch father lied to me.”

  “He didn’t really lie, Mom. He wanted to leave her. Honest. But he couldn’t.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “Because she’s going to have a baby.”

  Camelia pointed. A new space had just opened up in front of Darva’s car. Darva needed to pull up. “You need to pull up, Darva.”

  “I’m not going to pull up,” said Darva, her jaw clenched, her teeth locked. “I’m tired of moving forward by inches. I’m tired of topping off. I’m tired of being the only casualty in this family. Give me that goddamned calculator.”

  Kyle shook his head.

  “You need to pull up, Darva,” said Camelia. “People will start honking.”

  Darva twisted around in her seat. She yanked the calculator out of Kyle’s hand. She rolled down her window and tossed it out of the car. Kyle stared at his mother in horror.

  Then Darva turned the key in the ignition. She put the car in gear. A new gear. Reverse. She gunned the accelerator and slammed the Electra into the front of her husband’s ketchup-red Mustang convertible with the second wife—the pregnant second wife—inside. Darva put the car in drive, jumped it forward and then immediately back into reverse so she could ram her husband’s car again.

  The new wife screamed, the sound muffled by the closed windows. She pounded the horn futilely. Camelia’s hands flailed at her friend with equal uselessness. People began to jump out of their parked or idling vehicles to intercede—to stop this madwoman from further destruction.

  Darva was brought to her senses.

  That night, Darva Johnson made the local news. “It just got to be too much for her and she snapped,” said her sympathetic and helpfully misinformative friend Camelia Holley, when the news reporter shoved the microphone in her face. “The waiting and the waiting. She just lost it.”

  There was no mention of the identity of the woman in the deeply dented Mustang. The true story of Darva’s descent into temporary madness remained, at least for the present, a well-kept secret.

  1974

  VICINAL IN TENNESSEE

  To borrow from the Bard (with sincere apologies): “Some are born fans of Elvis, some achieve an appreciation of Elvis, and some have Elvis thrust upon them.” I fall into the last camp.

  I grew up in the mid-century suburban Memphis neighborhood of Hickory Hills in a community called Whitehaven. It was called Whitehaven not because of the fact that it was originally a “whites only” residential suburb (and years later became a largely African American community, making the name more than a little ironic), but because a man by the name of Colonel Francis White owned most of the original property out of which Whitehaven was created.

  Graceland was there. Upon that 13.8-acre estate in the year 1939 was built the most recognizable white-columned mansion since Tara. (Given the year of the house’s construction, its original owners, the Moores, could very well have been influenced by the movie adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s classic.) Elvis bought the house in the late fifties. Shortly thereafter, my parents built their own far-smaller domicile in the subdivision that sprang up around the house. All of our neighbors across the street used the stone and brick walls encompassing Elvis’s impressive demesne for their own rear fencing.

  To put it in medieval terms, ours were the serf cottages that looked up at the castle of the King. (Of Rock and Roll.)

  I attended elementary school with Elvis’s stepbrothers. They had reputations for being rowdy boys, and my mother made me decline their invitations to come swim in Elvis’s pool. The closest I ever came to entering the hallowed grounds of Graceland was climbing the wall in a friend’s backyard and peering over. I remember scaling this wall in a different spot shortly after Elvis’s death. I watched the pageant of mourners snaking up the driveway to view the body. It was an assemblage fit for a head of state. Film-history buff that I was, I couldn’t help comparing the turnout to the ridiculously overattended viewing of the body of Rudolph Valentino.

  There were great tears and much fainting.

  No, I never got to swim in Elvis’s pool, though he often rode his motorcycle up and down our street and gave the neighborhood kids—the progeny of the serfs, if you will—a noblesse-neighborly wave.

  And on July 12, 1974, I spent an evenin
g with Elvis. I shared the experience with my twin brother Clay.

  Coincidentally, it was our birthday.

  My sharp recollection of that summer is marked by three enduring memories, all having to do with the movie theatre where Clay and I worked as ushers and general factotums.

  1) I ate popcorn. All summer. I never tired of it, because I made it just the way I liked it. I was forever chastised by the manager of the multiplex, Mr. Humphries, for not oversalting it. Oversalted popcorn sold at movie theatres is good for business; it’s supposed to make the customers thirsty so they’ll want to buy sodas. (Or “cokes,” as we called pop and soda in Memphis, regardless of whether it was actually a Coca-Cola or some entirely different brand of soft drink.) I didn’t care. Like the koala bear and his eucalypt leaves, popcorn was my mainstay throughout the summer of 1974. And I popped it to suit my own tastebuds.

  2) President Nixon’s resignation speech. A political junkie at a young age, I was unhappy to discover that Nixon’s televised speech announcing that he would resign the presidency the next day was scheduled to be delivered while I was working the evening shift. Mr. Humphries took pity on me and allowed me to take my break at 8:00 and watch the address upstairs alongside the projectionist on his portable black-and-white TV. I have forgotten the name of the man with whom I shared this historic moment, but not his political affiliation. He was no fan of the thirty-seventh U.S. president and hurled frequent animadversions at the televised image of that “goddamned son-of-a-bitch” who would soon be departing, and “none too soon, the lousy crook bastard.”

  3) Then there was the night of earlier mention that I spent with Elvis, my brother Clay, and all the other monkey-suited male ushers and teenaged candy-counter girls who agreed to stay on after public operating hours ended so that we could help host Elvis’s wee-hour private movie party. Elvis liked to do this every now and then: arrange with this particular suburban multiplex to rent out the whole shebang for the balance of the night, and bring along a few friends and family members for company.