Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Adrian didn’t go home. He sat for a long time in the restaurant, reading the paper, drinking coffee, waiting for the end of American Bandstand . Benny would be surprised to see him on his day off. Angela and Kirk would too. They knew that he wasn’t supposed to be in the store on Thursday afternoons. They would be unprepared for what he intended to do there. Today he would sit down and watch Sally Starr with them. The whole two hours. And then he’d walk them home. He wanted to make sure they got home safe, this day and every other day they might happen to show up at the store.

The days were getting shorter. Someone needed to be there for them in the dark.

It was my younger sister Debbie who looked out the window and said that Marina, our babysitter, had just fallen into a hole. I didn’t know what Debbie could possibly mean and didn’t have time to give it much thought. I was trying to hold up the china cabinet, which wanted to come crashing down to the floor, and I was also far too busy yelling at my younger brother Dirk to get away from the television, which seemed about to bounce off its stand.

Dirk had been sitting in front of the TV watching Fireball XL5 when the earthquake started. The booster rockets on Colonel Steve Zodiac’s World Space Patrol spaceship had just ignited when the picture went out and Dirk, being six, was having trouble disconnecting what had just happened on the screen of our family’s Zenith black-and-white television from the first few seconds of the most powerful earthquake to hit North America in recorded history.

“Debbie!” I cried, as loudly as my twelve-year-old vocal cords could manage. “Grab Dirk and get out of the house! Where’s Marina?”

“I told you! She fell into a hole!”

Debbie went for our brother. Walking was difficult. The floor was rolling like something in a funhouse. I was losing my battle with the china cabinet and had started to worry that in my defeat, Mama’s proudest possession — inherited from her grandmother, along with all the fine china inside — would fall right down on top of me and flatten me like a pancake.

I had been helping Marina make spaghetti. Dad, who was an SFC with the Alaska Army National Guard, was supposed to go straight from Fort Richardson to pick Mom up at the J.C. Penney’s store, where she was buying some new shoes for Easter, and then they were going to celebrate their anniversary, first by having dinner at the Red Ram and then going to see The Fall of the Roman Empire .

I told Mom and Dad that it was humiliating not being allowed to babysit my own brother and sister when my friends were already babysitting other families’ kids, but Mom said she didn’t like the idea of the three of us being left by ourselves so late into the night. The Fall of the Roman Empire was supposed to last more than three hours.

So who did she choose? Somebody only four years older than me, who was probably the worst babysitter in all of Anchorage. Mom chose somebody who, when the floor starting rolling and the TV went out, and all the telephone poles up and down Beech Street started whipping from side to side and power lines started snapping and throwing sparks all over the place — somebody who, when the world seemed to be coming to an end (and not in a fun way like with the Roman Empire), got out of the house quicker than you could say “boo” and left her three charges to fend totally for themselves. Nice work, Mom.

And now Debbie said that Marina had fallen into a hole.

I watched as my younger sister grabbed our brother just as the television came crashing down on the floor, right where he’d been sitting, and then, fearing for my own safety, I stepped away from the china cabinet and looked on in horror as it toppled over and smashed to bits all the things my mother held dear. In the kitchen, the pan of spaghetti sauce flew off the stove and splattered the walls and floors with blood-red splotches, while all the cans in the pantry knocked themselves off the shelves and started rolling all around like the way things do on ships in stormy seas.

Alaska’s worst babysitter had left the front door open, and I watched as Muffles, our tabby, went dashing out. Once I’d gotten Debbie and Dirk outside, I pulled them away from the house, which seemed to be shaking itself into something that we probably wouldn’t even be able to live in anymore, and Dad’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon, which he couldn’t drive until the transmission got fixed, started looking like Colonel Steve Zodiac’s space rocket ramping itself up to blast right off. What surprised me the most, though, was what the ground around the house was doing. It was cracking right open just like it did in that movie, The Last Days of Pompeii , even though my teacher, Miss Sabatini, said that earthquakes aren’t supposed to make crevices big enough for people to fall into. I later learned what my eyes had already told me: earthquakes of 9.2 magnitude can rip the ground open like a can opener, and this one was doing just that, as Debbie and Dirk and I hung onto the big tree in the front yard and waited for what seemed like an eternity (four minutes is a very long time for an earthquake to last) until everything got still and quiet again.

Once it stopped and I could hear the sound of my own voice, I said to my sister, “What hole?”

Debbie pointed to the obvious choice: a five or six-foot-wide trench that had suddenly appeared in the front lawn.

“You stay right there.” I’d read about aftershocks that could be almost as strong as the original quake. (What I didn’t know at the time is that the ’64 Alaskan quake would be followed by an almost record number of them). I walked with unsteady legs over to the trench and looked down into it. It was eight or nine feet deep and there, sitting at the bottom, was Marina. She was rubbing her knee and looking up at me.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I think I broke my leg.”

“It’s broken?”

“That’s what I just said. Can you go find somebody to get me out of here? I think I have to go to the hospital.”

I didn’t say anything. As upset as I was from the terrible quake, I was enjoying seeing this World’s Worst Babysitter (who I hated more than anyone in the world — and that includes Soviet Communists, who my dad says are going to overrun this country someday and steal our liberty) sitting at the bottom of a big hole. In fact, I was enjoying it so much that I almost smiled. This was where she deserved to be. Why? Because she had abandoned the three children SHE WAS BEING PAID GOOD MONEY TO TAKE CARE OF just to save her own sorry self.

“Why are you just standing there looking at me?” asked Marina. I hated that name: Marina . It wasn’t a name for a person. It was a name for a boat basin.

“I just wanted to say, Marina, that you wouldn’t be in this predicament if you hadn’t abandoned your post. What if this had been an attack by the Siberian Communists? Debbie and Dirk and I would be taken prisoners by the Red Guard and you would be entirely to blame.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re irresponsible.” I folded my arms. Debbie and Dirk, in spite of my orders, now came over to look down into the hole with me. I wondered if my brother and sister thought that Marina looked as stupid as I thought she did.

“If you don’t get somebody to come and pull me out of here, Darlene, you are going to be in the worst trouble of your life. My parents are probably worried sick about me right now, and they don’t even know that I’m sitting underground with a crippled leg.”

“I’m not going to go and get you help, Marina, unless you tell me why you ran out on the three of us. We lost my mom’s china cabinet because of you, and the TV set almost fell on top of Dirk.”