American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  * * *

  APPLICATION FOR PEACE BOND

  STATE OF TEXAS CAUSE NO 3422

  COUNTY OF DALLAS

  I, GUS WINDROW, ZENA WINDROW, AND ROBERTINE WINDROW, DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR THAT WE HAVE GOOD REASON TO BELIEVE AND DO BELIEVE THAT A MAN WHOSE NAME WE DO NOT KNOW BUT WHO IS REFERRED TO LOCALLY AS SASSYSQUATCH IS ABOUT TO COMMIT AN OFFENSE AGAINST MY PERSON, TO-WIT:

  We are in fear for both our safety and our very lives. It all started when we were evicted from our house and had to go live in a drainage pipe. The pipe looked unoccupied, so we felt that squatters’ rights would apply. Unfortunately, the hairy gentleman who does not speak except through grunts, or strange appropriations of the lyrics of songs made popular by Judy Garland, has made it clear that we must pay him (money which we do not have) or he will remove us by force.

  “Forget your luggage, c’mon, get outta here! Before I chase all you deadbeats away!” That’s from “Get Happy,” if you don’t know it, and that’s exactly what we aren’t these days. To have reached such a low point in our life trajectory! How we long for the old days when Robertine was on her Valium and I was on the wagon and we all could sit in perfect peace and contentment and drink our cupcoffee. How we miss that quiet cupcoffee and the close-knit family togetherness that accompanied it.

  If we can get the court’s protection for one week more, I’ll have my disability check in hand and we can move someplace else. Where troubles melt like lemon drops and happy little bluebirds…you get the picture, I’m sure.

  1980

  RENOVATIVE IN TEXAS

  I’d hardly gotten a chance to take a peek at my Batman comic book before he was back from the kitchen and the fuse box and climbing the ladder and telling me in his deep, crusty voice to pay close attention. I think he said this out of force of habit, because I was always paying attention. That’s why I was there. That’s why I was spending all of my summer vacation that year learning how to put a house back together so a person—in this case, two persons, my step-grandparents—could move in, could be comfortable, and in the case of this rusty old burned-out chandelier, could have a little light to eat their dinner by.

  “Hold the ladder. Are you holding the ladder, son?”

  “I’m holding the ladder.”

  “First you gotta—hand me that screwdriver, son.”

  I handed up the screwdriver.

  “You gotta unscrew the canopy and pull it down the stem. You see what I’m doing?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Once you get—okay, take this screw. No, no. Remind me where I’m putting it. I’m putting the canopy screws in my shirt pocket.”

  “In your shirt pocket—got it.”

  “Once you get the canopy down the stem then you gotta unscrew the wire caps from the connections. You wanna get a hamburger at Miss LuAnne’s for lunch?”

  “Okay.”

  “You want a grilled cheese?”

  “Okay.”

  “And a Coca-Cola? Where’s my tester? You see what I’m doing, Wayne? I’m touching one of the probes to the black wire connection and the other one to the grounded box. Are you watching?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You want a Grape Nehi?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re a choosy one. Now I’m testing the white wire connection. Black wire, metal box. Everything gets checked. No glow on the tester. No juice. That’s good. Hand me my water thermos. Throat’s dry.”

  I handed Granddad his water thermos and he took a swig. Granddad’s throat was always dry. Just a year earlier he’d had the cancerous part of his esophagus removed. Granddad always had his water thermos with him.

  “All right. Now I’m untwisting the wire connections. Can you see?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okey dokey. Hold the light fixture while I take off the whatchacallit—the strap. You got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I talked to your grandmother this morning—looks like she’s gonna come see us next week. Asked her to bring you a sleeping bag so she could have your cot. You okay roughing it with a sleeping bag, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, I’m putting the mounting strap in my lower right pocket. Screws are in there, too. Now let’s get to work replacing those sockets.”

  We got to work replacing the sockets. Granddad wasn’t a licensed electrician, but I always got the sense that he knew exactly what he was doing. My stepfather shared my confidence, although my mother was a little leery.

  “Your father’s recovering from major surgery, Elvin,” I remember her saying to my stepfather. “He probably needs three or four more months’ rest. Maybe this isn’t the best time for him to be undertaking a major renovation project.”

  But Mama was outvoted. Dad wanted me to spend the summer with my step-grandfather, and Granddad certainly appreciated the help. We were a team. And we got along pretty well. And even though I was only thirteen, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to go into construction—to be a building contractor. It was important for me to know how houses got put together, from the roofing and the dry wall all the way down to the sockets and the wiring, the mounting straps and threaded nipples.

  Today we were rewiring the dining room chandelier. Tomorrow we’d be laying a frame for a new concrete driveway.

  Granddad had bought this old house and the acreage around it for a song. Houses used to be pretty cheap in out-of-the-way hamlets like Windom, Texas. (I suspect they probably still are.) But even so, it was a point of great contention between my step-grandparents over whether they should make the purchase. And whether, ultimately, they’d both end up living there.

  Granddad didn’t say much about all that. In those pre-slumber, lights-out conversations from our cots in the still-unfinished bedroom, we talked about the Texas Rangers (both the baseball team and the law enforcement agency—Granddad’s brother was a Texas Ranger of the gun-toting variety)—and we talked about trucks. Oh, how he loved his 1970 C/10 Chevy pickup. Medium gold and white—a real Texas workhorse. We talked about how he’d grown up in Fannin County and about how much he was looking forward to moving back after “way too many years in Big D.”

  “When the Ewings and all those Hollywood people moved in, I knew it was high time your grandmother and I got the hell out.”

  I hadn’t known my stepdad’s father very well. I was told to call him Granddad, and I did. Not having any other grandfather, I had no problem with that. But it wasn’t until the two of us started our summer-long construction project that I really began to feel the way a kid is supposed to feel about his family elders. And while I guess you could say it was still in many ways the best summer I would ever spend, it was not without a few wrinkles.

  The doctors had carved out the cancer, but Granddad still wasn’t a healthy man by any definition. Sometimes a good part of his day would be spent trying to get his mind off the discomfort in his throat. I didn’t ask about his prognosis. I just assumed he wouldn’t have had the surgery if the doctors didn’t plan for him to be around a while longer. And on top of that, I figured he wouldn’t have been going to all the trouble of renovating a house and bugging my grandma to come live with him in it if he thought his number was nearly up.

  The other wrinkle was that he slept with a loaded gun under his cot. (“A house out in the country like this—you never know who might come prowling around of a night.”) This was something I never got used to. In fact, on our first night together Granddad told me I was supposed to wake him up when I had to go to the bathroom, or else he might hear me rustling around, shoot first and ask questions later.

  I’d generally hold my pee for the whole night.

  I came well stocked with comic books and car magazines, and we had the transistor radio, and I can tell you to this day all the songs that got the most airplay that summer. George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” Charley Pride’s “You Win Again,” and Mickey Gilley’s cover of “Stand By Me” co
me right to mind. And Granddad had this honky-tonk station he liked that played the really old twangy stuff that made me think of grizzled men in dirty boots and goat-roper hats wailing through their tobacco chaws.

  Sweet Jesus, I never forgot for a minute that I lived in Texas!

  But there was something about my adoptive grandfather that I wouldn’t come to realize until long after he’d died. And despite his best hopes, the good Lord only gave him another year and a half. That came out to about thirteen months my grandmother had to live in this house Granddad and I put together, far from all of her friends and civilization as she knew it. And it was this: The old man wanted to spend what time he had left in close communion with that place where he grew up. He showed me once where the little ranch house had stood, only about six or seven miles away. He was born there, he said, in a spot now reclaimed by weed and mesquite. This is where his roots were, where he remembered being happy as a boy.

  And it’s where Grandma got him buried.

  Like I said, I didn’t know this until after he’d died, the part about why it was he wanted to renovate this old house. I probably could have figured it out. If I’d pointed my brain in the right direction. But I was too busy getting my education.

  Granddad let me fold the wire connections into the wiring compartment and screw the cover back on. While he held the chandelier, I tightened the mounting strap to the ceiling box and gently folded the wires into place. I slid the canopy up the stem, making sure that it pushed flat against the ceiling. Then I tightened the screws to secure it. We put in the new bulbs and reattached the shades, and he let me flip the switch at the fuse box. I left to him the honor of turning on the light at the wall switch. Even though it was early afternoon and there was sunshine coming in from both of the windows, the room became flooded with light. It was a warm light with a sweet yellow cast, and we did as we always did when we finished another stage in our summer-long project: we shook hands. Smooth palm to callused palm. He was my grandfather—not by blood, but certainly by heart. And I was the grandson he had never had.

  After admiring our handiwork for another minute or so, we climbed into the cab of his Chevy pickup and headed to LuAnne’s for a grilled cheese and a Grape Nehi.

  I can still taste it.

  1981

  SELF-ANOINTED ABOVE, LET’S SAY, OKLAHOMA

  It was the first time I’d ever flown First Class.

  And the only time.

  There are First Class people, and there are Coach people. Coach people are the great unwashed multitudes of us—young, old, poor, rich (because sometimes First Class gets filled up, and Reginald Kensington, Esq. and his wife Boopsy are denied, by circumstances, their caviar and champagne, and must eat peasant peanuts and drink populist pop with all the rest of us). First Class people aren’t just people with money, they’re also people with attitude. They’re flying on the magic carpet of luxury because God has so ordained it.

  I remember once being stopped right at the end of the jetway by a flight attendant who had suspended the boarding process until after all of her First Class passengers had gotten their pre-flight apéritifs. I wrote the airline to complain about this assault on democracy. I told them I was never going to fly them again. But of course I did.

  And I flew in Coach. Always Coach, except for that one flight on April 15, 1981.

  I was flying back to Cincinnati after having just completed an interview with American Airlines at their headquarters in Dallas. I don’t know how things were before or after, but for a period of several years in the late seventies and early eighties, American Airlines jump-seated hundreds, perhaps thousands, of flight attendant applicants from all over the country for the purpose of preliminary group interviews—the only step in the multi-step interview process that I made it through. I thought I’d interviewed well. I contributed to the group “conversation” as well as any of the other girls and the three or four boys who hoped to begin careers in “in-flight customer care.” I felt that I had said all the things I was expected to say—all the things that should have moved me along to the next stage in the interview process. (Word to all future flight attendant hopefuls: The most important responsibility of a flight attendant isn’t making passengers comfortable—it’s keeping them safe.)

  But I wasn’t called back.

  They never tell you why, but I think I know what happened: I have a large mole on my chin. It isn’t the most disgusting mole you’ve ever seen, but it’s quite noticeable, and a former boyfriend, speaking, perhaps, on behalf of all of my former boyfriends, told me the night he broke up with me that, try as he may, he just couldn’t get past it. I don’t think the recruiters at American Airlines got past it either.

  Anyway, there was an empty seat in First Class, and that’s where the airline put me. Maybe I wasn’t destined to be a flight attendant, but at least I could return to Cincinnati in style. And after what happened that afternoon, I’m happy I never had the opportunity to go into this line of work. I’m not sure what I would have done if placed in the same situation as the First Class attendant on that flight.

  I don’t remember her name.

  Let’s call her Susie.

  I sat next to a young man who had something to do with the audio-electronics industry, and he was initially very talkative and friendly, but once he got a glimpse of the other side of my face (where the mole was), he suddenly got very busy marking up something spiral-bound with graphs and flowcharts.

  Across the aisle from me were two women. I recognized the one in the aisle seat instantly. She was Tricia Swearingen, the forty-something-year-old televangelical wife of the televangelist Luke Swearingen. Both she and her husband preached the “Prosperity Gospel” every night and twice on Sunday on probably one of the most popular syndicated religious programs on the air that year. And it was apparent that Ms. Swearingen practiced what she and her husband preached, because here she was sitting pretty and prosperous in First Class, and I had to imagine that it was the contributions of thousands of the couple’s loyal and generous viewers that allowed them to do this and such other things as keep a fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and live in a house that was beyond palatial (sometimes she and her husband would broadcast their show from the mansion’s “great room”). The two were obviously quite proud of their wealth, which God, apparently, wanted them to have for doing His work so well.

  My grandmother was a big follower of the Swearingens. When we had to move her to the nursing home and my dad and I were cleaning out her apartment, we found at least six different Bibles in her bedroom bookcase, each personally embossed on the cover and mailed to her, according to the accompanying letter, “as our way of saying thank you for your gracious love offerings to The Hour of Faith, hosted by Luke and Tricia Swearingen, and featuring ‘The Hour of Faith Singers’ and the blind Harpist for Jesus Marietta Gee.” I always wondered aloud, when I found myself visiting my grandmother during the hour that the show was on, why it was that Brother Swearingen, who had helped countless crippled people rise up from their wheelchairs or throw off their crutches, and who had healed attendees to his televised services of everything from mild eczema to Hashimoto’s encephalopathy—why it was that Brother Swearingen couldn’t place his hands over the eyes of blind-from-birth Marietta Gee and give her blessed sight, since it wouldn’t have affected the beautiful, angelic clarity of her plucking of the harp strings, and would have kept her from stumbling around backstage and sometimes disturbing the broadcast.

  “Because it isn’t God’s will that Miss Gee should see,” my grandmother invariably replied.

  I debated whether or not I should introduce myself to Ms. Swearingen, since we had already exchanged pleasant smiles across the aisle, but I was in a terribly unsociable mood. I had come to the painful realization that my chances of being invited back for the next level of interviews were about nil (I think it was the way that the interviewer kept levelling side glances at my you-know-what), and there was that constant reminder of my failure in the person of the �
�ber-efficient, preternaturally polite flight attendant, Susie, who did not have a you-know-what anywhere upon her peaches-and-cream countenance. I finally concluded that I should not disturb the handsome yet slightly hard-featured telegenic preacher-woman. She was, after all, reading her Bible.

  You believed me, didn’t you? No, it wasn’t a Bible. It was the latest issue of Redbook. And the real reason that, ultimately, I didn’t say anything to her was because there was already someone doing just that: the forty-something woman sitting next to her. Because of the jet-engine drone I couldn’t hear what that woman was saying to Ms. Swearingen, but it seemed to be a fairly one-sided conversation—the other woman talking, Ms. Swearingen nodding and appearing to be only half listening.

  Apparently concluding through Ms. Swearingen’s monosyllabic responses and her unsubtle body language (i.e. arms across her chest) that the popular evangelist really didn’t wish to engage her, the woman got quiet and turned to look out the window at the billowy cloud shelf. Whereupon Ms. Swearingen mouthed a private “Thank God.”

  Maybe I should have just let it pass, but I couldn’t help myself. “Excuse me,” I said across the aisle. “I noticed that you just thanked God. I know who you are. My grandmother—she watches you and your husband all the time.”

  “Oh, is that so?” Ms. Swearingen pushed a fallen strand from her molded blond do back onto its rigid mound.

  “So, if you don’t mind me asking, what were you thanking God for? The safe return home of the orbiter Columbia yesterday?”