American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Why would she leave it there?”

  “Maybe it didn’t go down when she flushed. Try not to think about it.”

  “I love that house, Bill, but it had a turd in it.”

  “I know, angel.” Bill put his arm around his new wife consolingly. After a moment, he drew back. “As embarrassing as it was for us, it must have been doubly hard for Maggie.”

  “I can only imagine,” sighed Heather.

  “Do you want this last piece of sausage?”

  “No,” said Heather. “I could not possibly eat it.”

  Later that night, Bill awoke to the sound of Heather’s soft sniffles.

  “Are you okay?” he asked with whispered tenderness.

  “No, Bill. I’m not okay.”

  Bill rolled over and enfolded his wife’s convulsing body. The tears flowed freely now, great moans of sadness emanating from deep within her throat.

  “Oh God, how I loved that house!” she keened, her voice crepitating with pain.

  “I know you did, angel. Go ahead and let it out. Let it all out.”

  1997

  COMBUSTIBLE IN OHIO

  Randi Bryce didn’t like the interrogation room. The overhead light was harsh and the dark concrete walls made her feel as if she were sitting in a prison cell. It was a sobering reminder of her potential fate.

  None of it made sense. It was as if she had entered her own Twilight Zone episode or one of those stories by Kafka in which one is doomed by circumstances both menacing and illogical. Randi Bryce had stood at the kitchen window and watched her husband burst into flames. She had rushed out with an afghan snatched from the daybed in the adjoining sunroom. Josh was rolling upon the ground, howling in a primal voice she had never heard before. She threw the afghan upon him to put out the fire that still consumed him. Her hands were singed.

  She looked down at those hands now, bandaged and lying still upon her lap—hands tremulous beneath the gauze.

  Randi was being accused, indirectly, of setting her husband on fire. The police officers who brought her in after the ambulance had taken Josh away wanted to know how such a thing could happen. She hadn’t been formally arrested, but she could tell that they were getting close to making it all official. She could tell that they suspected she had used a match and the five-gallon can of gasoline they found sitting accusingly upon the awning-covered patio behind the house. Yet there was no smell of gasoline on her husband, or in the yard. There was no dribbled trail upon the patio’s pebbled surface. Moreover, the lawnmower parked next to the can made the container’s presence appear even less incriminating.

  Maybe this is why they have yet to slap the handcuffs on me, Randi thought.

  Josh’s burns had been severe, but thankfully, given swift actions on the part of both husband and wife, they weren’t life-threatening, barring complications. Randi wanted to see Josh, but being a person of interest in what was now being considered a possible attempted homicide, she could not.

  There were injuries to go around. Things had been said by husband and wife the night before during an argument that was unfortunately witnessed by Josh’s mother Agnes after Randi and Josh’s ten-year-old daughter Brie had been sent up to bed. Randi and Josh had had it out in front of Agnes, and the next morning, a couple of hours after the “incident,” Agnes related the vitriolic exchange to the two investigating officers, Lieutenants Selvera and Leggio—willingly, even eagerly, and in great detail.

  Now it was Randi’s turn to give her side, to try to convince the two detectives that in spite of the obvious motive, she could not possibly have done this terrible thing. Her mother-in-law’s allegation was outrageous. She could hardly speak to it. But she calmed herself. A glass of juice had been set before her. She took a drink from the straw.

  Randi was well aware that she didn’t have to say anything if she didn’t want to. But she wanted to talk. Randi knew that once she was charged, she could have an attorney at her side advising her as to what she should say and what she shouldn’t so that she wouldn’t dig herself a deeper hole than the one she was already in, but she didn’t care. There was a small chance that by simply telling the truth about what happened, here at this early stage, she might be thoroughly exonerated in the minds of the suspicious officers. In the meantime, the cause of her husband’s combustion was still being investigated. Circumstantially, she was the culpable agent. But there was still this: a total absence of any evidence showing how the fire had been ignited.

  The pretty female officer sitting across the table from her, Lieutenant Selvera, was patient. Her voice had a slow, soothing cadence. “Take your time,” she said. “Tell us everything that happened last night and everything that happened this morning leading up to the incident.”

  The shovel-nosed young male detective leaning against the dingy cinderblock wall nearest the door agreed with a nod.

  “Why do I have to talk about what happened last night? Haven’t you heard it all from Agnes? She was right there when the fireworks went off.”

  “Fireworks?” Lieutenant Leggio raised an eyebrow.

  “I don’t mean that literally.” Randi glanced at the male officer. His face registered nothing. This wasn’t going to be good cop and bad cop, Randi thought. It was going to be good cop and rudely indifferent cop.

  “Josh and I—I don’t think we’ve ever had a good marriage,” Randi began. “It was okay in the beginning, but over time we just found ourselves going through the motions. He never asked me for a divorce and I never sought one from him. I don’t think either of us had the stomach for it, and there was Brie to consider. We both felt like this would tear her apart—she’s a very delicate child.” Randi felt weariness creeping in, even though the interview had hardly begun. “We went to the marriage counselor and tried a few things, but we could never make the marriage what we wanted it to be. So we just kept plodding along.”

  “What do you and your husband do for a living?” asked Lieutenant Leggio.

  “I worked for a small investment company until I got sick and haven’t gone back.”

  “Sick?” asked Lieutenant Selvera.

  “Yes. I got cancer a couple of years ago. Cervical cancer. Josh and I didn’t want to have any more kids, so I opted for a radical hysterectomy and post-op radiation.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Good for now. Time will tell.” Randi stopped her story to take another suck of juice. She couldn’t use her hands, so she bent forward like the little toy drinking bird in the top hat.

  “Go on,” said the female lieutenant, after Randi had swallowed.

  “Josh works for a construction supply company.”

  “What happened last night?” asked Leggio. “What was the fight about?”

  “He flipped out. He does this. Something gets to him and he goes postal. Last night it was news from his mother. She was having dinner with us, as she’s no doubt already told you. Josh’s brother, Stephen, had really started to rake it in with this World Wide Web–based company that he’d gotten in on the ground floor with, and here Josh was, working for the same old walls-and-windows company that hadn’t given him a raise in over two years. It started to be about that, and then it morphed into how lousy his life was overall and how even his marriage was just one big fat joke. And he had only stayed with me because of the cancer, but he was miserable. All this in front of his mother.”

  “What did she do? The mother,” said Selvera.

  “What she always does. She jumped right to his defense. He’s so overworked and this and that, and of course he should get a handle on his temper, but he has every right to want his life to go in a different direction. Textbook mother-in-law malarkey. I felt that I was being ganged up on—as usual—and so I fought back.”

  “How did you fight back?”

  “I said that I should have married this guy I dated in college. And Josh said that he should have married some girl he’d known since high school, and this is when things entered uncharted territory. He confessed
that he’d been seeing her off and on all through our marriage. Until she died. She also had cancer—the same cancer as me. He wondered why the cancer had taken Teri but didn’t take me, as if this were evidence of some cosmic cruelty directed only at him. I was paralyzed. Not only by the fact that my husband wished death upon me, but by his need to mention this longtime affair he’d had with Teri just to hurt me. So I sought a way to hurt him. I told him something that just came to me in that moment: that cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus. That I’d never slept with anyone but Josh. That only he could have given me that virus—the virus that he had apparently gotten from his old girlfriend. Now I knew why I had gotten cancer and who had given it to me. I knew that if I had died, he would have been responsible for my death. Did Agnes mention this? You should have seen her face when I said it.”

  Randi took another sip. “This juice is too sweet. Can I just have some water?”

  Lieutenant Leggio glanced over at the two-way mirror and nodded. A moment passed and then another officer entered the interrogation room carrying an open plastic water bottle with a straw bobbing inside. He set it down in front of Randi and left.

  “Tell me about this morning,” said Lieutenant Selvera, after Randi had taken a long drink of water.

  “He was still angry. I was downstairs when he got up, getting Brie ready for my next-door neighbor Adelle. She takes Brie, along with her own three kids, to a summer day camp in Shaker Heights that her sister runs. Adelle came and got Brie, and then a few minutes later I could hear him upstairs banging around. Then he comes downstairs and goes into the den and all of the sudden there he is standing in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. He’s giving me this look—like the way he looks at the cat when she goes on the rug. He’s holding the three remote controls that go to each of our three television sets in his hand. He yells at me: ‘How can all three of our TV remotes be broken at the same time? The law of averages says that’s an impossibility.’

  “‘It’s probably the batteries,’ I say. I tell him I’ll go to Radio Shack and buy replacements.

  “He sits down at the kitchen table and starts to take out the batteries, telling me I should take them with me or I’ll get the wrong ones. The sliding part doesn’t come up very easily on one of them and this ticks him off. And then he says he can’t trust me to do it right—this is just plain meanness on his part—and he stuffs them in his pants pocket and says he’ll stop by Radio Shack on the way home from work. I tell him I’m sorry about what I said the night before and he says he still wonders if we’re going to be able to stay together until Brie goes off to college. I notice that he’s cut his neck shaving.

  “‘I was watching that goddamned Bigham mutt taking a shit in our backyard. We should have fenced in that goddamned yard the day we bought this house, but we didn’t, and now all the neighborhood dogs come over at their goddamned leisure to use it for a toilet. I guess my hand slipped. I’m going to shoot me a dog one of these mornings.’

  “I got him calmed down. I got his oatmeal and coffee. He ate. Things seemed to be getting back to normal—or at least what we call normal. There was so much that we needed to address from the night before, but I was just happy that we weren’t at each other’s throats anymore. We didn’t have to love each other, I thought, but there had to be some way we could learn to tolerate each other while we were still stuck together.”

  Randi got quiet for a moment. She was replaying the conversation in her head. She had said all the right things and Josh had stopped being hateful, had looked a little contrite even, as the two sat staring at one another in silence across the table. Suddenly, the silence was shattered by the sound of a dog barking in the backyard.

  “He flew out of his seat and threw open the back door and went after the dog—I don’t know whose dog it was. But he literally chased that dog out of the yard and halfway down the block. He was panting and winded when he got back. I was standing on the patio watching him. I was about to ask whose dog it was this time, when suddenly he burst into flames.”

  “Spontaneous combustion?” asked Lieutenant Leggio, shaking his head skeptically.

  “Yes.”

  “You know, Ms. Bryce, that we don’t believe you.”

  “But that’s what happened. I saw it.”

  What was to be done? Randi had watched this terrible thing happen to her husband, she had been snatched up before she could see him at the hospital, before she could tell him that she would stand by his side just as he had stood by her side through the cancer. It is the thing that spouses do. Even those who no longer love each other. Randi worried about her daughter, who was, no doubt, worried sick about her mother and father while in the temporary custody of her grandmother. It was a horrible situation made even worse by the alarming accusation leveled against Randi—that she had somehow set her husband on fire.

  How had she done it? It baffled the two police detectives. When the Cuyahoga River burst into flames in 1969, some said that it was spontaneous combustion. But it didn’t take long to discern the real reason, the one based upon scientific fact: the river was covered with oil slicks, and oil was combustible. One match, dropped in just the right spot, would have done it. Where was Randi’s match—both figuratively and literally?

  What had happened to Josh Bryce continued to baffle the two detectives as they made their way to the precinct captain’s office. It baffled, as well, the medical examiner who had been brought in to answer questions about how a person could set another person on fire and leave no evidentiary trace behind. It was the medical examiner, a thoughtful, deliberate man nearing retirement, who decided, instead, to shine a different sort of light on the incident by asking a question that had not yet been asked: “Why did Ms. Bryce attempt to put out the fire if her purpose had been to see her husband fully consumed by it?”

  “A change of heart maybe?” asked Lieutenant Leggio as he and his companions settled into chairs around the police captain’s desk, leaving Randi Bryce in temporary limbo in the interrogation room.

  “Perhaps. But let us consider the following,” said Dr. Graybeal, the M.E., scratching the bristles of his once old-fashioned but now suddenly trendy goatee. “Seemingly spontaneous combustion does on occasion happen. It’s a rare, but documented, occurrence.”

  “Seemingly?” asked Captain Samuels.

  “Combustion for which a cause can never be determined.”

  “Uh-uh, Graybeal. Not really buying it.” The captain’s best detectives weren’t buying it either. Leggio all but suggested with his look of amused incredulity that it was time for the good doctor to take his forty-year gold watch and go hit the rocker.

  Graybeal had dealt with disrespectful cops before. “What was the victim wearing?” he pursued.

  “Well, we’re certain it wasn’t anything flame retardant,” answered Leggio, his mordant humor going unappreciated by the others in the room.

  “What was in his pockets?” asked the doctor.

  “You’re not giving up on this, are you, Henry?” asked Lieutenant Selvera. “Nothing unusual. Keys. A wallet. He was getting ready to leave for work.”

  “Anything else?”

  “There were three lithium batteries. The fire pretty much melted them.”

  “Oh.”

  Now the medical examiner smiled. For a brief moment Josh Bryce became not some poor victim of backyard immolation, but a riddle completely soluble. “The batteries weren’t melted by the fire, officers. They were the reason for it. The keys and the batteries jostling together in his pocket. The morning was hot. There must have been some friction. Had he been moving around the yard?”

  Lieutenant Selvera nodded. “He’d chased after a dog.”

  Graybeal nodded. “The friction of the keys rubbing against the batteries short-circuited one or more of them and ignited the fire in his pocket. It happens, and not that infrequently. Have the crime lab run some tests. I’m sure the findings will bear this out.”

  “The woman
was telling the truth?” asked Leggio, after a long, arced whistle of astonishment.

  “Lo and behold, she must have been,” said his partner. “Okay to get her over to the hospital to be with her husband, captain?”

  “Of course. Take one of the patrol cars.”

  Randi Bryce reached the hospital at six. Josh was awake, but just barely. Their eyes held on one another for a long moment as Randi gently touched her husband’s one bandage-free hand with one of her unbandaged fingers. “I told you I’d go to Radio Shack,” she said.

  “I know,” he responded groggily, the intravenous painkillers sucking him back into somnolence. “I know.” And then he was asleep.

  Randi did not leave her husband’s side all night. It is the thing that spouses do.

  1998

  DENTIGEROUSLY FORTUITIOUS IN FLORIDA

  There are three things that probably shouldn’t be said to the victim of a brutal, late-night assault in a dark parking lot.

  The first is “How are you holding up, hon?” This from the victim’s mother.

  The victim—Abby Alpert—didn’t know how to answer. She was still having nightmares, although the panic attacks had subsided and she’d even been able to go to the movies with her girlfriends the previous Friday night (something light, a romantic comedy).

  The second is “Aren’t you glad he didn’t rape you?” This from Abby’s best girlfriend, Tish.

  Abby’s reply: “Yes, I’m very glad he didn’t rape me. But allow me, please, to still feel violated, nonetheless, by the attack.”

  The third is “So when do you think you’ll be able to come back to work?” This from Abby’s sensitivity-challenged employer, Thom Jensen, DDS. Abby had been out for two weeks and Thom the dentist and his office manager Ms. Purdy were getting tired of beating the bushes of Port St. Lucie for part-time hygienists to fill in for all of Abby’s appointments, this being August, and so many of Florida’s dental hygienists having temporarily fled the state for cooler climes “off-peninsula.”