Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“I want you to come to the bedroom. I want to show you the colors I was thinking of for the new house.”

Dana rose heavily from his chair. He closed the window. “You’re already picking out colors? They haven’t even laid the foundation yet.”

“You know I like to plan ahead. Come sit with me.” Ramona took her husband’s hand and led him to the bedroom. She often mothered him. He never complained. On nights like these, nothing mattered. Ramona could do or say whatever she liked, and she often did, to coax from Dana something that resembled a smile.

Tonight Ramona went over the colors for the paint and shared with her husband some ideas she had for wallpaper. She did this in a variety of funny voices. She succeeded in making Dana laugh in spite of himself. And then she put everything away and tucked him into bed, reminding him that he needed his rest. Dana was supposed to get up early the next morning to drive up to the five pristine acres he and his wife had just purchased a few months before — acres that, thanks to post-war inflation, had cost them twice what they had intended to spend. Tomorrow was the day that the drilling company was supposed to come. They were going to dig the Darbys a well.

Dana and Ramona knew that after years in the city, it was time for them to move out, to situate themselves in the peaceful Connecticut countryside. Where the nights were long and quiet. Deathly quiet.

Oh how Dana was looking forward to that .

Dana didn’t reach the property until midmorning. The drilling operation had been in full swing for at least two hours. There were friendly waves from the father and son and the other two men who were involved in the laborious business of extracting water from the hard rock that lay beneath Dana’s property. The men couldn’t be interrupted at the moment; the early part of the operation was the most critical and labor intensive. A great hole had first to be dug. Once the digging was completed, the men had to jack the drill up, secure it and level it. Dana watched as the son began to set up an onsite blacksmith shop, complete with anvil and bellow, sledge, coke pile, and water quench. The young man found a nice shady spot under a couple of tall elms. Dana thought this might be a good time to introduce himself. From a distance, the four men were a blur of hats and heaving shoulders and active hands. He’d hoped it wouldn’t take weeks to find water, but odds were they’d be on a first-name basis by the time the well was completed, and Dana was nothing if not a friendly employer.

The son had stopped his work in the makeshift forge to watch as his father and the other two men guided the five-hundred-pound drill bit into place. Both he and Dana stood silently, observing the twisted steel cable being threaded through the pulley of the rig’s tower, and then being looped under a pulley in the walking beam, and finally pulled back to a drum from which it could be released foot by foot into the deepening hole. A few minutes later the young man turned to Dana, pushed back the brim of his hat, and wiped his right hand on his overalls. He walked over and, smiling amiably, reached out to shake Dana’s hand.

Dana shook it, even as all of the color left his face. He looked into the cheerful countenance of the driller’s son, into his dark brown eyes, the skin slightly creased below. He took in the hard jawline, the recessed cheeks, a shock of dirty blond hair escaping from beneath the hat. The man, whose name Dana knew to be Larry Anders Jr. was a perfect replica of a young man whom Dana had known seven years earlier. Like Dana, the man had worked with the 27th Materials Squadron at Nichols Field — a pursuit and operations base — on Luzon in the Philippines. He was a flight mechanic, Dana a crew chief. Within weeks the two men were moved to the Bataan Air Base and then in April, 1942, were surrendered along with 75,000 other Americans and Filipinos to the invading Japanese forces. The young man was his friend. Was his best friend.

“Are you all right?” asked Larry.

“Yeah — I’m — you look like somebody.”

“I get that sometimes. That actor, right? Who does the Pete Smith ‘Specialities’? He was also in that crazy — that Reefer Madness . He was the dope fiend who kept yelling — now what was it he kept yelling?”

Dana interrupted: “No, I mean in the war. A guy I knew in the war.”

“Where’d you serve?”

Dana was getting lightheaded. He backed himself into a folding chair and sat down. “I was in Bataan,” he said softly.

“That’s a long way from where Uncle Sam put me . I was over in France for most of the — you want I should get you something to drink?”

Dana shook his head. “Just let me sit here for a second.”

Larry squatted in front of Dana. “I look that much like him?”

Dana nodded. He swallowed. He didn’t feel well. Brett Freuer. Incarnate. Resurrected. The resemblance was more than uncanny. Even the voice was similar; it had a slight drawl. Brett grew up in Arizona. Dana wondered if Larry and his dad were also from the Southwest.

Dana felt like an idiot. He felt like a little old lady with the vapors. For Christ’s sake, he’d survived the Bataan Death March and then spent over three years in dehumanizing captivity. Brett didn’t even survive the march. A lot of men didn’t. There was no rhyme or reason to which men would crap out, would succumb to the lack of food and water, to tropical disease, to the murderous whims of their Japanese captors. Or was there something in his mettle, in his desire to survive that gave Dana the advantage? And if so, where was that fortitude today?

Dana spent the rest of the afternoon listening to the loud drone of the rig’s motor, watching the walking beam rise and fall as the cable went from taut to slack each time the bit hit the bottom of the deepening hole. He rescued himself from the Bataan Peninsula ten, twenty, fifty times that afternoon and put himself in the here and now of rural southwestern Connecticut, upon his five pristine acres, in the presence of the men who were drilling for the water that would allow him and his wife to escape the heat and congestion of the city and live a cooler, quieter, less chaotic life. And yet Dana’s gaze repeatedly returned to his dead friend’s twenty-something-year-old doppelganger.

Dana left before any of the men in the drilling outfit did. But he didn’t go home, didn’t drive right back down the turnpike to the City. He found a neighborhood tavern in nearby New Canaan, a place where he could get a beer before all the thirsty working stiffs from the area filed in, hot and tired from their long day of manual employment. Dana sat in the friendly watering hole nursing his pint, popping peanuts into his mouth, listening to a couple of regulars discussing the at-bat pyrotechnics of Musial and Williams and Kiner and Mize.

He didn’t even notice when the Anders, both father and son, entered the place and slid into a booth. Was totally oblivious to their presence until Larry Jr. excused himself from his father and claimed the stool next to him.

“Play it faster! Play it faster!”

Dana turned.

Larry was grinning. “That’s what the character says in that crazy marijuana flick, Reefer Madness . He’s yelling it to some girl playing the piano. I guess when you’re hyped up on reefer, you want your music hyped up too.” Larry signaled the bartender for his usual and then said to Dana, “That friend of yours you mentioned earlier — he’s dead?”

Dana nodded.

“Christ. Sorry. He was your best buddy, right?”

“He saved my life.”

“You mind telling me how?”

“I — um.”

“Sure. Sure. Okay.”

The two men sat quietly. Then Dana said, “How much are you and your dad going to cost me when all of this is said and done?”