Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“I was scared.”

“That doesn’t cut it, missy.”

“You can’t talk to me like that.”

“You’re a terrible, rotten babysitter. You talk on the phone to your boyfriend for hours and hours and your spaghetti tastes awful and I don’t think you deserve to get rescued.”

Marina fumed in silence for a few seconds while she rubbed her knee. Then she started moaning. “Can’t you see I’m in pain?”

“I could be dead , Marina. That china cabinet must have weighed a ton.”

“Suit yourself. I can only imagine what kind of punishment awaits you for leaving me down here.”

I was about to say some other things that Marina did and didn’t do that got my goat, when my little brother Dirk picked up a clod of dirt and threw it at Marina. It hit her in the shoulder and she cried out, more in surprise than in pain.

“Don’t throw dirt down on the babysitter, Dirk,” I reprimanded him.

Now Debbie picked up a handful of soil and dropped it down into Marina’s lap. She screamed again.

“Enough of that, Debbie,” I said in a mature, responsible voice — the kind of voice I would naturally have used if my parents had done the right thing and entrusted to me the care of my two younger siblings, instead of bringing in this awful teenage girl.

“I think my brother and sister want to bury you alive, Marina. What do you think of that? Because they happen to agree with me that you’re perfectly awful.”

“Please get me out of here.” Marina wasn’t whining anymore. Now she sounded genuinely distressed. Maybe she was thinking just what I was thinking at that moment: that there might be a bad aftershock that would close up the fissure and bury her alive. “You’ve had your fun,” she pleaded. “Now please help me!”

I turned to Debbie and Dirk. “What do you think we should do? Do you think we should get Marina some help, even though she only thinks of herself and her boyfriend and John and Paul and George and Ringo?”

Dirk shook his head. Then he picked up a handful of dirt and threw it down on Marina’s head so quickly that some of the hard perma-frosty soil got in her eyes. She cried out and I felt really bad for her. I felt bad again when Debbie picked up a pinecone and threw that . It missed Marina’s arm by a few inches but it might as well have hit her for how much she shrieked.

“You need to stop doing that,” I said to my brother and sister. I looked around to see if anybody was coming to check on us. I figured that somebody would show up soon, but for the time being we were still on our own. It looked like I really would have to go and get help. “You two promise me that you’ll be good and if the ground starts shaking again, you’ll go over there and hold onto that tree?”

Dirk and Debbie nodded. Then Dirk kicked some more dirt into the hole. I remembered that Marina had said that Dirk couldn’t watch Fireball XL5 until he’d cleaned up his room, and then the time came for the show to start and his room still wasn’t straightened up, so there had been a shouting match and Marina was just about to go and turn off the set when the earthquake started and she felt a sudden need to run like a dastardly Communist right out of the house.

I went to the Chigniks’ house next door, but nobody was home and I figured that they were either lying crushed beneath their own china cabinet or were off at Good Friday services. I was about to go to the Pottersons’ house across the street, but at just that moment a young woman came up to me. She was wearing a stewardess’s uniform and looking frightened. She said her name was Miss Dunston, and that she worked for Flying Tiger Airlines. She said she was on her way to the hospital to see if they needed any help, since she had some nursing experience, and I explained that our babysitter had slipped into a crack in the ground and could use her help if the stewardess really wanted to make herself useful.

“I don’t know if I’m strong enough to pull her out, but I’ll come and survey the situation,” said Miss Dunston in that polite way that stewardesses have, though her voice cracked a little from the unremitting fear in her heart. Miss Dunston and I walked briskly back to our front yard, and Miss Dunston got a good look at Marina, who was now partially buried under dirt and rubble. There hadn’t been another tremor — not yet — so this was clearly the doing of Dirk and Debbie. Marina was screaming hysterically, and luckily Miss Dunston hadn’t put two and two together thanks to my younger brother and younger sister wearing their most angelic faces.

“I need to get someone with a rope or pulley or something,” said Miss Dunston with some urgency as she ran off.

I gave Dirk and Debbie a disapproving look and they both shrugged as Muffles the cat, having just pooped in the grass next to our very own front yard crevasse, kicked some dirt and a little something extra into that big hole in the ground.

Ten minutes later Miss Dunston returned with a couple of our neighbors, and the worst babysitter in the history of the universe was rescued.

I didn’t learn the extent of the devastation or the death toll from the quake and the tsunami that followed until later that night. Ahead lay weeks of anguish and hardship as the citizens of Anchorage and Valdez and Kenai and Turnagain by the Sea all mourned their losses while struggling to restore their lives to some semblance of normalcy. (To this day, I can’t stand the smell of Clorox, which we used to disinfect the boiled snow that was for several days our only source of drinking water). It would be a long time before Dirk and Debbie and I would return to our old selves again, but we did relish this one brief moment of fine revenge, while denying every word of Marina’s allegations.

I guess looking back, Marina wasn’t that horrible of a babysitter, and I suppose I feel a little guilty now, in my later years, over what Dirk and Debbie and I did to her. It wasn’t her fault that she got scared and ran out of our house. I didn’t know this at the time, but everything frightened Marina. And it got much worse as she got older. Before giving birth to her first baby in 1971, she was so traumatized by the idea of it that she ran out of the delivery room and even out of the hospital. Her family found her at a McDonald’s eating a Big Mac and trying to ignore her contractions.

Although she didn’t fall into any more holes, she did once almost step into an open manhole in Seattle. She missed it by a few inches. And then she turned to her husband and said, “My life isn’t that ironic.”

And that’s my unironical Alaska earthquake story. Take it or leave it.

“Two ad men walk into a bar…”

“Oyster Bar.”

“Right. Okay. Two ad men walk into the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station.”

“Grand Central Terminal . Grand Central Station is a post office.”

“What are you, the language police? Two ad men walk into—”

“Two Y & R men.”

“Important point. Y & R.”

“Begging your pardon, what are ‘Y & R’ men?”

“The gentleman to my right wants to know the meaning of Y & R men.”

“Account execs from Young and Rubicam: the crème de la crème of New York City ad agencies.”

“I see. Thank you for the clarification.”

“As I was saying — two ad men walk into the Oyster Bar. And then they walk right out. Why do they walk right out?”

“Because the lights went out. But that’s no punchline. It’s just a fact.”

The two Young and Rubicam ad men, both in their mid-thirties, one named McCluskey and the other Selman, sighed, nearly simultaneously. Next to them, a man in his late sixties or early seventies, with a London Fog coat folded neatly in his lap and an umbrella at his side, sighed as well. His sigh came out as a melodious hum. The two ad men to his left, both well-versed in ethnic stereotyping, failed, nonetheless, to register the cliché: a man with a British accent carrying a London Fog coat and an umbrella. All that was missing was the bowler.