Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Camp Marks. Where Odell and me had hardly any time at all to stuff what little clothes we had into our beat-up grips, and tuck away our official discharge papers and our meager souvenirs from our occupation of a land that belonged to us by right of American citizenship.

We retreated alongside the thousands of other impoverished veterans of the War to End All Wars, and their wives and their children. And the stories began to circulate about the boy who wasn’t allowed back into his soon-to-be-ignited hovel to get his pet rabbit, of the Negro bayoneted in the foot for evacuating too slowly, of the babies hospitalized from the gas, of the woman who wasn’t permitted to pick up all of the things that had spilled from her gunnysack and a moment later everything she owned was trod under a cavalry horse’s heavy hoof.

It seemed like Belgium all over again. Except that unlike the Flemish facing the invading Germans, we’d hardly offered up any resistance at all. And when it was over, where was our Herbert Hoover, the man who had headed the Belgian relief effort? Why, hunkered down in the White House, that’s where! No longer the brave humanitarian. Just a frightened, cowering little man, sorely inconvenienced by the audacity of our presence. They say we’d made him a prisoner in that place, and that in the end, we’d kept him from getting hisself re-elected.

President Hoover must have stood at his window and watched Washington burn, just as Odell and I watched the flames from the hills above Anacostia, surrounded by the huddling mothers putting wet cloths to the tear-gas-stung eyes of their whimpering babies.

This was the America I had fought for?

Yet I knew in my optimistic heart that better days were coming. Because there was one thing that struck the heart of every visitor to Camp Marks that summer. It was the presence of all them American flags. Every state’s bivouac had its own Stars and Stripes, you see. Men marched with them held aloft, waved them, saluted them on every occasion. And in the smoking aftermath of the attack upon the camp, there was one flag upon a pole that stood alone, untouched, rippling through the smoke of that night’s terrible fires. All was smoldering, jagged rubble around it. Yet the flag was still there.

For true.

“When did you know?”

“’Seems like I’ve wanted to be an iceman as far back as I can remember. I think about the times when I was a kid and Ma and Polly and me were living at the Broussard place just a few blocks east of here. There’d be these hot summer days when the landlady would forget to take the ice card out of the window from the time before. And the iceman, he’d see the card and climb those two flights of stairs with that dribbling, fifty-pound block of ice on his back, and Mrs. Broussard would realize her error and make her hundred-and-one apologies, but he’d be damned if he was gonna play Sisyphus’s cousin and haul that ice all the way back down to his wagon, so you know what he did?”

“Chucked it out the window?”

“Raised the sash and pushed it right out.”

“That sounds like a reason not to want to become an iceman.”

“There’s an upside to the story. That big block of ice — it would hit the concrete in the courtyard below and shatter. And the kids in the neighborhood, they’d hear the noise and all come running over to grab up those frozen chunks to cool themselves off with. I wanted to be the guy who made all the kids happy. What time is it?”

Ralph Morris looked at his wristwatch. “Ten till.”

Garth Kordel clucked his tongue in wonderment. “Did you have any idea so many people would show up?”

Ralph shook his head. “Let’s get out of the car. I feel like a federal agent on stakeout.”

The two men, both in their mid-thirties, stepped out of Ralph’s Ford Deuce coupe. Ralph leaned back, planted a foot on the running board, and lit up. Garth took in the gathering crowd. It was mostly men, a few women, even a kid or two in tow. A man and little boy walked by.

”Isn’t it a little past his bedtime?” Garth called after them.

The man stopped and turned. His look was open and friendly. “Brother, I’ve been waiting thirteen years for the chance to wet my whistle legally. This is a historic moment and I want my boy to remember it.”

The man and the boy moved on.

There was an electrical current running through the crowd. A brass band was assembling near the front entrance to the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Word was that they’d begin playing right at the stroke of midnight.

The new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, planned to keep his campaign promise to repeal Prohibition. In the meantime he’d gotten Congress to amend the Volstead Act, thus allowing 3.2 percent beer in localities that were happy to have it. St. Louis, home of both Anheuser-Busch and the Falstaff Brewing Company, would most certainly have it. Ralph and Garth were among the hundreds who had gathered to be the first to taste Busch’s “near beer.” Nobody was getting drunk that night, but it was a welcome taste of what was to come. In just four days, Michigan would take the first step toward getting rid of the bane of Prohibition forever. Its state convention would ratify the 21st Amendment (proposed by Congress only six weeks earlier) by a walloping three-to-one margin.

America wanted desperately to be wet again.

Ralph and Garth had claimed their spot a couple of blocks from the brewery about an hour earlier. They had invited their wives to join them, but both women preferred to stay home. Ralph’s wife Vivian didn’t like crowds; she had a delicate and retiring nature. Garth’s wife Caddy didn’t like Ralph . She found him arrogant and overbearing.

The two men had become friends at a young age. Garth was poor. Ralph’s family was in the ice business. When he reached his majority Ralph inherited Morris Ice. Ralph brought Garth on as a deliveryman, then later promoted him to the job of icehouse foreman. The friendship remained intact, but Caddy had always seen the cracks in the ice. It’s hard for one friend to be Gebieter (in the parlance of Garth’s German heritage) over another. Sometimes Ralph had to make decisions that didn’t benefit his employee Garth. Garth tried to be understanding. Caddy didn’t try quite so hard.

Over the previous hour, the men, both football fans, had discussed the sordid details of the recent death of Dr. Fonsa Lambert, who had won fame for formalizing the rules of the game. He had been shot by his seventeen-year-old son Samuel, after the boy had walked in on Lambert trying to choke his wife (Samuel’s mother) to death.

The song had said that “happy days” were here again, but there was too much evidence to the contrary. At a time of national economic troubles, the U.S. Navy had come under fire for putting thousands of precious tax dollars into the construction of helium-filled airships. Despite improved building methods, the aircraft were difficult to fly and often perilous to land. Earlier that day there had been a somber press conference held for the national news services. The only three survivors of the crash of the USS Akron , a steel-framed “flying aircraft carrier,” were brought out to give their account of the tragedy. The dirigible had gone down in rough winds off the coast of New Jersey two days earlier. Investigators would later conclude that the crash couldn’t have been helped, although having life jackets on board for use by its seventy-six passengers and crew — most of whom perished by drowning — might have somewhat mitigated the tragic outcome.

The whole country was talking about the accident, along with the pending legalization of three-two beer, and FDR’s recently declared bank holiday. The Akron disaster was front and center, though. It represented, for Ralph, just another star-crossed attempt by the government of the United States to try to turn the impossible into the possible at great cost. “You take Prohibition, Garth. This idea that you can lead a man to abstinence through constitutional fiat — it was asinine from the very start, and look at all the havoc it’s wrought. And you can’t put balloons up in the air and pretend like they’re gonna do anything but bounce around like balloons. Every one of these dirigibles has been trouble. The Akron ’s had one deadly mishap after another. Why, they killed two men just trying to land the Goddamned thing last year.”