Mark Dunn - American Decameron

He could no longer light the backyard grill and attend the flame after it flared up one day and singed his cook’s apron.

And he could no longer drive. This was the hardest prohibition to accept. He had started driving when he was thirteen; he had driven the pickup truck on his father’s ranch north of Waxahachie. He had taught all three of his own sons to drive.

On some days Lester understood fully why his wife felt it necessary to take these things away from him. He wasn’t as sharp as he used to be, he had to admit, and much more forgetful as of late. On other days, however, Lester Henderson raged against his wife for relegating him to a kind of second adolescence — one with restrictions and curfews, and marked by a humiliating lack of trust.

Audrey had driven her husband to the YMCA that morning. He had told her that his friend Charlie would be there. The two men usually worked out on the Nautilus machines and sparred with the boxing gloves and then went for a trot around Town Lake, which was actually a dammed section of the Colorado River overlooked by the skyscrapers of downtown Austin on the north side. But this particular Saturday Charlie would not be there. Lester knew this, but he lied so that his wife would let him come to the YMCA that morning while she shopped. There was very little that she and their grown children allowed him to do for himself these days. At the gym, he could be his own man. He could be the young man that he once was, working his muscles and expanding his lungs. Lester felt invigorated, revitalized there. He didn’t feel like the doddering, forgetful person he had become. Not the Alzheimer’s victim that everyone else knew him to be.

The numbers had left his head. They had been there only minutes before; he had turned the dial in the correct access sequence — clockwise to the first number and then counter-clockwise past the first number to the second and then clockwise again to the third number. It had always been so simple for him that he could almost do it without thinking.

But now he was forced to think about it quite a bit. The first number was thirty-six…he was sure of this much. But the second and third numbers remained elusive.

The locker room was nearly empty. It was late morning. The early risers had finished their crack-of-dawn workouts and gone home. The young men who came in the afternoon after sleeping off their carousing from the night before had yet to arrive. There was a man at the end of the row of lockers, but he seemed in a hurry to dress and leave, and Lester was reluctant to bother him. There were classes going on upstairs — aerobics and abdominal intensives. He could go up there and find someone, let them know that he was having trouble with his lock, but the towel was small and left a good part of him fully exposed. His was an old man’s body, drooping and flaccid and covered with wrinkles in spite of his best efforts to tighten up à la the eternally youthful Jack LaLanne. This wouldn’t work at all.

The only thing that potentially could work was to sit and think and perhaps the numbers would eventually come back to him. Or he could sit and wait for one of the young YMCA employees to come by — one of the young men who gathered up the used towels and wiped down the exercise machines.

Lester sat. He wondered if he would have to stop coming to the gym. It was important to lock up his clothes. Clothes often got stolen from unlocked lockers. He liked to shower at the gym. The shower at home was over the bathtub. Sometimes he would forget to put down the non-slip bathtub mat and his wife would make a comment. She would say that she was going to start doing it for him, because she didn’t want him to fall and break his hip.

Audrey had started to do too many things for him already. Things like chauffeuring him around. Smaller things like going to the grocery store alone when the two had always gone together. It was something they’d done since they were young newlyweds, pinching pennies and eating buttered spaghetti, and rice and beans. He was an undergraduate at the time, studying accounting at the University of Texas on a small scholastic scholarship.

Lester laughed mordantly to himself. As a CPA, he had spent his life around numbers. He had arranged them for specific purposes, subjected them to countless mathematical operations, used them as a form of language to tell hundreds of different stories. Numbers comprised the nuts and bolts of his life. His facility with them had provided a good home for his wife and three sons, had put each of his boys through college.

Now the numbers betrayed him. They left him sitting naked and wet upon a wooden bench facing a locker that would not allow him access because he couldn’t crack the elusive code. His world had become inscrutable — filled with things that had stopped making sense to him. He felt helpless. And he hated feeling helpless, hated feeling dependent.

Men would soon come into this locker room in large numbers — young men, vibrant men, men with their lives spread out in front of them — they would come and see him in this compromised state and they would pity him and there would be nothing he could do to win back their respect.

The man at the end of the row had been turned away from Lester but was now clearly looking in his direction. The man’s name was Cleve. Cleve was in his early thirties — just slightly younger, he appeared to Lester, than Lester’s youngest son Jack.

Cleve closed his locker door and slung his gym bag over his shoulder. He started out of the locker room but then stopped and turned back to focus on Lester again.

“You having some trouble there?” Cleve asked, casually but not mocking.

“A little, yes. I can’t seem to get my locker opened.”

Cleve nodded. “You got it open before you went into the shower, right?”

Lester nodded. “But it’s giving me trouble now.”

“Oh.” Cleve walked over and set his gym bag down on the bench. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. His hair was wet and combed and he smelled like Dial soap. The smell reminded Lester of his sons, who had often come down to dinner from showering after their late afternoon football and basketball practices smelling strongly of deodorant soap and youthful colognes.

Lester had no trouble remembering the way that things smelled or tasted or felt. Memories of these visceral things had yet to break faith with him.

“What’s the number? I’ll try it for you.”

Lester didn’t answer. Nor did he look up to meet Cleve’s eyes.

Now Cleve understood.

“Let me go find Manuel,” he said. “He’s around here somewhere. I’m sure he’s got a bolt cutter.”

“Much obliged,” said Lester. The words were those of his rancher father. He didn’t know why he said them. They took Lester back to a time long, long ago — a time that he’d been visiting through his memories more and more often.

Cleve returned five minutes later with Manuel, a man in his late twenties who worked for the YMCA. Manuel was sorry to admit that he didn’t have a bolt cutter because someone had stolen it. The day before yesterday. He had it on his list to buy a new one, but regardless, he couldn’t get to petty-cash until the director came in on Monday. Lester thought that there must be a safe in the office that held the money box — a safe that was just as impenetrable for Manuel as Lester’s locker was for him.

“You tried the combination in several different ways?” asked Manuel.

Lester nodded. Cleve took Manuel aside and spoke to him quietly. Manuel nodded in response. His look became sympathetic.

Lester could easily guess what was being said. Such things were always spoken in whispers and with backs turned. People were always talking about him and giving him that same look. It angered him, and yet, was it not true? He couldn’t get into his locker because his brain had ceased to retain the numbers that access required. It was a very simple fact — a medical, a scientific fact. Like the clean science of numbers. Numbers don’t judge. They just are .