Ding Dong Ditch

A short story
by Alan Davis

“I don’t need anyone to protect me,” Lucy said into the telephone. A deck of tarot cards was spread across her bed. A glass of something brown was balanced between her thighs. She had on white socks, a pair of cutoffs, and a T-shirt, which proclaimed that human rights have no boundaries. The card at the center of the tarot deck represented a Fool, one poised at the edge of a cliff, absorbed in his own thoughts. A dog at his feet barked out a warning, but it went unheeded. The Fool had all of his belongings in a little bag, and his clothes were ragged. He carried a red rose in one hand, and high above him the sun was hot and white.

In the kitchen a few minutes later, the phone now wedged between her chin and one shoulder, she filled a plastic Tupperware bowl with blocks of tofu marinated with basil and a chili plum sauce. “That’s how you see it,” she said. “That’s only your opinion.” She covered the bowl with plastic and put it in the refrigerator. “In my opinion, I’m a free woman.”

At just that instant the doorbell rang.

It was past midnight. Who could it be?

Outside, her stoop was empty. The night glistened from rain, and the streetlight on the corner stung her eyes with its big halo of light. The telephone was still in her hand. She could hear a metallic voice somewhere inside it call out her name. LucyLucyLucy. A small dog barked fiercely someplace nearby. She stared into her own house as though she was the one who had rung the bell. She laid the telephone on the stoop. Then, on a whim, she rang the doorbell, twice, three times, and slipped behind a shrub. After a minute, when nobody came out, she crept to a window on the east side of the house.

“Nobody home,” she said.

Inside, through curtains only halfway drawn, she could see the unmade bed, the half-empty glass of booze, the deck of cards spread out across the bed. Solitaire, she thought. Somebody’s playing solitaire tonight. Probably an insomniac. An insomniac playing the Fool. She crept to another window, closer to the bed, and stared at the Fool, nestled between the Magician and the High Priestess. The Magician had a wand and was pointing at the earth with his other hand. He wore a slender crown around his brow. An infinity sign floated above his head. The High Priestess sat in a temple between two columns, one light and one dark, with a sacred scroll on her lap. A veil waved in the wind above her. A crescent moon lay under her left foot.

Lucy crept on all fours—like Orpheus in the underworld, she thought—from window to window. She climbed a chain-link fence to the back and peered into the bathroom, where a bar of French milled soap glistened green in a silver dish by the tub. An old, tattered sock monkey, her good luck amulet, hung by one furry arm from the underside of the dish.

Ding dong ditch, she remembered. Ding dong ditch. That was it, a game played as a kid, one of those things that had something to do with puberty and its mysteries. Ring the bell, run like hell. She had been the ringleader, wore a green kerchief to hide part of her face, buzzed or knocked with vicious glee on a dozen doors a night even after the adults on her block made a kind of vigilante group to catch the little bastards. They would never catch her. Never in hell. Ding dong ditch. That was it. What a hoot, like Mark Twain in San Francisco throwing rocks on tin roofs to disturb people’s sleep and make a racket.

She had recovered from a long illness that summer and had never been happier.

That’s what I’ve lost, she thought. Ding dong ditch.

It was time again to disturb people’s sleep, to make a racket.

She circled the house, peered into each window in turn, and then came back to her stoop, where the phone waited. As if on cue, it rang like a cry from some other world. Him again, she thought. Before she picked it up, she noticed that there was a crescent moon in the night sky and that an emerald green star blinked high above her like a doorbell just waiting to be punched.

I have to run, she thought. It was time and past time to go, to bang on the world and make it glow like struck prongs on a tuning fork. Give it all up and run. The phone could be her wand. She waved it above her head. She could hear that metallic voice shout out her name. LucyLucyLucy.

“Not me Not me Not me,” she shouted back at the sky. The small dog still barked out its warning. She decided to listen. Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. If I have to play the Fool, she thought, better do it with open eyes. She flung open her front door, reached inside to grab a small red bag that fit on her shoulders like a backpack. She scrambled through the house and filled it. The sock monkey, the French milled soap.

Outside again, she rang her doorbell twice, yelled “Ding Dong Ditch Ding Dong Ditch.” She shouted it to the neighborhood.

A group of kids in big floppy pants with cargo pockets and baseball caps turned back on their heads snuck like commandos onto a concrete porch, rang a bell, and skedaddled like slapstick cartoons. My soul mates, she thought; they’ve woken me out of my slumber. When she ran past the house, the door had opened and a heavyset, grizzled man with an untucked plaid shirt and a can of beer glared at her. “I saw you!” he shouted. “I called the cops. We’ll get you. We’ll get you, goddammit. You won’t be free for long.”

Not for long, she thought, not for long, but long enough to play the Fool.

It would be the end of her ordinary life. This is my new life, she thought. Not for long. She hummed the words under her breath. “You’ve got to catch me first,” she shouted over one shoulder. She smiled with the pleasure of the moist night and ran hard in her white socks. Sweat glistened on her forehead. It felt good. She was healthy, had been for years.

Her only belongings bounced in the red bag on her back. It felt good, running towards a new, naked world under a crescent moon and green star. She found herself singing the song “Happy Woman Blues.” The grizzled man on his stoop still shouted, but she was no longer Lucy. She had become a singer of little songs, Fool, Magician, High Priestess. She would prove all night and every night, as she ran for her life from town to town, that she could read the world like a pack of tarot cards. She imagined herself as an urban legend, ringing doorbells, getting her food and love on the run while men and women trapped in their lives would hear their doorbells ring late at night and imagine a new, naked world, would put on their trainers, pack a small bag and start moving. If someone fast on his feet surprised her, by luck or sleight of hand, she would give a big bug-eyed stare, turn quickly in her socks, wave her telephone into the sky, and shout whatever she wanted as she ran, her conscience clear, learning to be happy, so happy that she thought the muscles in her face might break.