Mark Dunn - American Decameron

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 .

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.”