Doubloon
A boy, some bubblegum, and mead-swilling Vikings. Also, chocolate coconuts.
The streets are filled with people, and the air is rich and ripe in the yellow August sun. On the corner of Main and Yamhill, a blind man with a tin cup plays an accordion next to a Christmas tree decked out with ornaments and lights. Two dogs make merry love. The crowd parts around them.
The blind man taps his accordion, a concertina with small round keys. His fingernails are too long, so he keeps hitting more than one key at a time. Someone is barbecuing teriyaki. People walk around nibbling sticks of thin meat and sipping from plastic glasses of artificially colored yellow lemonade. Children play at swords with leftover teriyaki sticks.
The day is as usual as any other day. A little gray cloud scuttles overhead, stops, and drenches the street corner with water. The concertina man shuffles off in disgust. The Christmas tree shorts out. The dogs, wrapped up in each other, ignore the rain. A boy named Ronka drops his teriyaki stick and rushes into a store to get out of the rain. He has never been in that store before.
“And what can I do for you, little boy?” says a voice behind the counter. It is thin and dry, with a crackle around the edges.
With his sopping hair in his eyes, Ronka can’t see at first. He thinks the woman behind the counter sounds like a witch. By the time he gets his hair out of his eyes and can see her clothing of many colors and her brightly striped scarf, he’s gotten used to the oddness of the shop, its currylike mustiness and warmth. It’s as if he has come here all his life, as if he’s always known its secrets.
What a marvelous place this store is! Dark and mysterious and full of jars that are riddles in themselves. Squinting to read the labels, Ronka decides against the dragon’s tongue extract.
“You got any bubble gum?” he asks. The woman laughs in reply. Ronka has a strange feeling of losing his balance, and then he is standing in a . . . place . . . he can’t see what kind of place, even whether it’s indoors or outdoors. Ronka hasn’t much time to notice his surroundings, anyway, because his feet are tangled in a large pink pool of gum. He reaches down and pulls off a piece, pops it into his mouth. It’s vintage—his favorite.
Ronka tries to walk. He can do it, but it’s slow. He sets his eyes on a palm tree at the edge of the bubble gum and wades through the pink goo toward the shore. Aching in every muscle, he finally pulls free by grasping the tree (it’s a young one he can fit his arms around) by the trunk and lifting a foot at a time out of the sticky pink gum.
As he walks about, the gum dries and flakes off his shoes and clothing, not like the usual sort of gum. Come to think of it, he was able to chew and swallow the piece he took. More like taffy.
“Hey, that was taffy,” he says aloud to no one in particular, since no one is around, and then the rest of the scene comes into focus. He’s on a deserted tropical beach. The sand is as yellow as the lemonade on Yamhill Street. The taffy subsides into a flawless pink pool, with no footsteps to mark where he’d been. He wonders whether the palm tree is a coconut palm. As if cue, it drops a coconut at his feet.
He pick up the coconut. Hey, it’s really chocolate on the outside, and when he punches through the chocolate shell, it’s filled with coconut filling. He eats some, but the sugar makes him thirsty. Turning around, scanning the horizon, he sees a lemonade stand with a rakish turquoise umbrella. As he walks up to it, he can see that the lemonade is artificially yellow. He orders some anyway.
He’s almost finished a glass when a boat pulls up on the yellow beach near the bubble-gum pool. Aboard it is a rowdy band of Vikings, yo-ho-hoing and swigging from large jugs. They seem tipsy. When the leader steps on shore and starts looking around with puzzlement, it’s evident that they are also lost.
He tells Ronka they are seeking the corner of Main and Yamhill. “Well,” says Ronka, “I came from there not long ago but”— he stops to take a suck of lemonade— “I’m not sure how to get there.”
He looks around. The sun winks derisively off the surf. Next to the pink pool of bubble gum—or taffy—the sea is flat, no rolling rollers. More like a pool itself. One of the Vikings dives in. The others head for the taffy and lemonade.
“Say,” says one, “is that a coconut palm?” Ronka shims up and picks one of the chocolate orbs. Only this one has raspberry inside.
The Vikings, in exchange, offer him some mead. You must know that theirs is no ordinary mead. It’s Vik-o-Mead, the true food of the gods, strong and soporific. A tiny sip puts Ronka to sleep. That’s how Vikings kidnap people. They have quite an assortment of captives belowdecks.
The Viking who dived comes back up and says he found a way out. So all the Vikings leave their shields and spears on the beach and splash into the lagoon, helmets and all, their long hair flowing in the green water and yellow bubbles coming from the folds of their clothing.
Their diving into the lagoon dislodges a host of red butterflies that climbs like a flame into the cloudless blue sky. Wait, there is one cloud, a familiar little cloud. It’s refilled itself and is looking for something else to rain on.
There is a door under the reef. That’s what the Viking scout had found. The Viking captain hauls on it and, with the help of a couple of others holding his waist, is able to wrench it open. It’s dry inside. The Vikings pile in. There are about a dozen of them. One carries the sleeping Ronka. The door slams shut behind them. On the inside, there is no doorknob, so there’s no way to go back out.
The Vikings begin to wail, missing their ship. One of them had left a half-read paperback on his hammock, and now he’ll never know how it came out. It was about a boy on a corner, watching a Christmas tree in the golden August sunlight. Two dogs were having a jolly good time. Then a sudden rain came up and chased everyone away and the boy went into a strange shop. And that was as far as the Viking got before it was time to go raiding and he had to leave his book behind.
[Note from Fran: This is the story that was given to me. There may be more, but you will have to figure it out for yourself.]