Serendipity Green

by Rob Levandoski

  Carlucci-Plank: “And saved a lot of Seabees. The Army awarded him a Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  Dornick: “That’s his wooden foot on the mantle.”

  Carlucci-Plank: “And when he returned home a hero, he got your mother pregnant. She was still in high school. He never married her.”

  Dornick: “No. But he willed her his penis.”

  Carlucci-Plank: “And so you grew up—how can I put this, Mr. Dornick—as a local embarrassment. Like some crazy old aunt locked away in the attic.”

  Dornick: “They gave me a job with the village when the snack cake line moved to Tennessee.”

  Carlucci-Plank: “Shoveling snow and digging graves.”

  Dornick: Somebody’s got to do it.”

  Carlucci-Plank: “I heard that as recent as last summer the village council tried to fire you.”

  Dornick: “Some thought it would be a good idea to privatize village services. To plug future shortfalls in the budget.”

  Carlucci-Plank: “Then you painted your house this—how else can I put it—this atrocious green. And this famous color designer from New York, Hugh Harbinger, who’s being treated for clinical depression, happens by one day and …”

  Dornick: “He came to Squaw Days with his parents.”

  Carlucci-Plank: “… and he falls in love with that atrocious color, what he now calls Serendipity Green®. He turns it into the color rage of the decade.”

  Dornick: “That’s about it.”

  Carlucci-Plank: “In a few short months Serendipity Green® has made you a wealthy man.”

  Dornick: “I don’t know about wealthy.”

  Carlucci-Plank: “And yet you keep your degrading job with the village. Shoveling snow. Digging graves.”

  Dornick: “So far. But there’s still talk of privatization.”

  PART III

  “So tractable, so peaceable are these people, that I swear to your majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.”

  Christopher Columbus,

  Letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella

  17

  Green.

  Yellow.

  Red.

  The cars on South Mill stop. The cars on Tocqueville go.

  It is February and the snow is horizontal again. D. William Aitchbone is returning from New Waterbury, once more missing dinner with Karen and the kids, on his way to the year’s first meeting of the Squaw Days Committee.

  D. William Aitchbone desperately needs a strategy session with himself. Yet he won’t be going to the Daydream Beanery. Nosireebob. Not since they started serving their coffees in Serendipity Green® mugs he won’t. Not since the counter girl changed her lipstick from blackcherry to Serendipity Green®. So when the light goes from red to yellow to green, he does not drive straight through the intersection, nor drive past his impressive soapy white Queen Anne. He does not drive past Howie Dornick’s repulsive green clapboards where, despite the purple-black February sky and the gooseshitting snow, tourists and television crews are most certainly causing traffic problems. Instead he turns left on Tocqueville and winds his way through Tuttwyler’s side streets to the throbbing commercial strip on West Wooseman. At Burger King he sits in a cold booth next to the condiment counter. As high schoolers with larynxes surely transplanted from rutting moose fumble for ketchup packs and straws, he sits in his Burberry overcoat sipping a large black coffee, honing his plans for what will be the best Squaw Days ever. As he plans and shivers and sips, he notices that three of the four girls sitting under the twirling bacon-cheeseburger mobile are wearing Serendipity Green® socks.

  At 7:20 he drives to the square and parks in front of Just Giraffes. In the window two dozen Serendipity Green® giraffes are circling a JUST ARRIVED! sign. He crosses the square. The gazebo is still trimmed with Christmas garlands. “Conniving bastard,” he growls through his thin blue lips, the conniving bastard being, of course, one Howie Dornick, scheduled to be featured that coming Sunday on Sixty Minutes.

  At 7:30 he barges into the library community room. He sits at the head of the table, thinking he is seducing his flock with his perfected lawyer’s smile. In reality he is scaring the bejesus out of them with the giddy grimace of a maniac. “Everybody here then?” he asks.

  Everybody is.

  Delores Poltruski is there. Dick Mueller is there. Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne is there. Donald Grinspoon, Katherine Hardihood, and Paula Varney are there. So is the Serendipity Green® giraffe Paula brought along to show the others. Kevin Hassock, the buffoon who let the Happy Landing Ride Company bring their small Ferris wheel is not there. Two weeks after his divorce was final, he accepted a transfer to Duluth, Minnesota. But his replacement, Paul Kreplach, is.

  D. William Aitchbone simultaneously gives him a nod and a thumbs up. “We’re delighted to have you on the committee, Paul. I’m sure you’ll have lots of good ideas for us.”

  Paul Kreplach responds with a confident Popeye the Sailor Man wink. He has every right to feel as confident as Popeye. In just the past six months he’s been named Midwestern sales manager for the nation’s largest manufacturer of tamper-proof medicine bottles, gotten married for the second time—to a woman not only younger but infinitely better-looking than his first wife—and purchased a monstrous brick colonial in Woodchuck Ridge.

  Delores Poltruski knows all about Paul Kreplach. She was, after all, the real estate agent who convinced him his salary could handle the 30-year adjustable mortgage. “Paul’s new wife used to dance with the Youngstown Ballet,” she informs the others. “She’s thinking of opening a dance school.”

  “I hear Dottie Dunkle’s bagel shop is going under,” Dick Mueller says. “That’d make a great dance studio. High ceiling. Right on the square.”

  Delores Poltruski pats Dick Mueller’s arm. “Oh, Dick! That’s a great idea! Isn’t it, Paul?”

  “Yes, it is,” Paul Kreplach says. Being new to Tuttwyler, Ohio, he does not know what others know. He does not know that Dick Mueller owns the soon-to-be-empty storefront in question. He does not know that Dick and Delores Poltruski have been copulating twice a week for years. Nor does he know that the maniacally grimacing chairman of the Squaw Days Committee plans to ignore and humiliate him for the next seven months, and probably, if all goes as plans, handle his young, good-looking, ballet-dancing second wife’s divorce.

  “I suppose the first thing we need to do,” begins D. William Aitchbone, “is to make sure everybody is happy with their subcommittee assignments.”

  Everybody is extremely happy with their subcommittee assignments. Their February faces show it. One by one they make their presentations:

  Dick Mueller dutifully reports that the parade units will line up on Mechanics Street, proceed up East Wooseman to the square, go once around, then proceed out South Mill to the cemetery for the memorial services. Both the high school and junior high bands will march again, he says, and the Chirping Chipmunk unicycle troupe from Akron has expressed interest in returning for a third year. Now he folds his hands on the table. His neck turns to steel. His eyes lock on the wall just above D. William Aitchbone’s head. “I think we ought to put Howie Dornick in the parade,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many out-of-towners have come into the auto parts store for directions to his house.”

  Delores Poltruski immediately offers her support. “He’s becoming a national celebrity. Did you know that Sixty Minutes is—”

  “We know,” says D. William Aitchbone. “But just because the liberal media is falling for—”

  Before his protégé can ridicule Dick and Delores into submission, Donald Grinspoon offers his support for the idea. “Howie’s going to end up more famous than his father.”

  Dick Mueller doesn’t especially like that. “You can’t compare a guy who loses his foot on Guadalc
anal to a guy who paints his house.”

  “I’m not comparing their accomplishments,” says Donald Grinspoon, “just their fame.”

  “I’m not sure putting Howie in the parade fits the Squaw Days theme,” D. William Aitchbone says.

  “Fits about as much as Darren Frost and his cupcake suit,” Delores Poltruski points out.

  D. William Aitchbone cannot believe Delores said that, and not Katherine Hardihood. Nevertheless he’s happy to have an ally. “I agree. No Howie Dornick and no cupcake.”

  “Overruled,” Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne says. “Both are a part of our history. As much as Princess Pogawedka.”

  “Absolutely,” says Donald Grinspoon.

  D. William Aitchbone cannot believe he’s lost the debate. It’s the first debate he’s ever lost in his life. “OK folks, but don’t come crying to me when Tuttwyler becomes the laughingstock of Ohio.” He asks Delores Poltruski for her report on the food and craft booths.

  “My people are bombarding me with oodles of good ideas, “she begins. “Just oodles and oodles!” She tells them how the G.A. Hemphill Elementary School PTA plans to sell Serendipity Green® snow cones. She tells them how the Knights of Columbus plans to sell Serendipity Green® macaroni salad. She tells them how Ethel Babcox is already making little Serendipity Green® houses for her crafts booth.

  “I don’t think we should go overboard with this Serendipity Green® thing,” cautions D. William Aitchbone. “I really don’t.”

  “And wait until you see the Serendipity Green® mittens the Methodist Moms are knitting for their booth,” Delores Poltruski adds. “They’re the cutest things.”

  Aitchbone knows he can’t expect much out of Paula Varney, given that she’s been bouncing that Serendipity Green® giraffe on her knee since the meeting began. She doesn’t disappoint. “All of the merchants plan to put out their Serendipity Green® merchandise for the sidewalk sale,” she says. “Randy Foxx at Kmart has already ordered five thousand Serendipity Green® coffee mugs. He’s going to stack them up like Indian teepees. What he doesn’t sell at Squaw Days he’s going to stack up like Christmas trees.”

  “Neat idea,” new member Paul Kreplach says.

  “Well Donald,” D. William Aitchbone says, his grimace now beyond maniacal, “I suppose we’ll be spitting Serendipity Green® tobacco juice this year.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a hoot,” the former mayor says.

  “How about Serendipity Green® fireworks?” the current mayor offers, as if a Serendipity Green® light bulb was hovering over his head.

  “Oh, that would be a hoot, too!” Delores Poltruski says.

  Everyone has reported now but Katherine Hardihood. She has sat quietly. Offering no suggestions. Rendering no support. Making not a single plea for historic accuracy. Flinging not a single cynical remark. D. William Aitchbone folds his arms across his chest, certain now that it’s her turn, a great river of Serendipity Green® ideas will pour from her librarian’s mouth. “What you got cooked up for the Re-Enactment?” he asks.

  “Same old same old,” Katherine says.

  As the meeting winds down, Paul Kreplach is given his marching orders. “If the Happy Landing Ride Company shows up this year with the small Ferris wheel, we’re hanging you from it,” the Squaw Days chairman attempts to joke.

  The committee members file out into the horizontal snow. D. William Aitchbone is almost to his car when Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne catches up to him and clamps his cheap Democratic glove on the epauletted shoulder of his Burberry.

  “Sorry to keep you from your warm bed, Bill,” Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne says, spinning his nemesis around so the snow can pour into his nostrils. “I just wanted you to know that this Serendipity Green® nightmare of yours is just beginning.”

  “It’s your nightmare,” says D. William Aitchbone, jerking his epaulet free.

  Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne smiles at his hollow bravado. “There’s going to be a representative from the Bison-Prickert Paint Company at Thursday’s council meeting. And do you know what he’s going to do, Bill? He’s going to offer to paint our gazebo Serendipity Green®, so they can use it to film a TV commercial to introduce their new Serendipity Green® house paint.”

  D. William Aitchbone blows the snow from his nostrils. “Council would never sit still for that kind of corporate exploitation.”

  For a few seconds Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne’s Democratic brain is as numb as his February toes. Had super-Republican Bill Aitchbone actually said that? Corporate exploitation? The same man who rammed through the tax abatement bill that cut the property taxes of all those discount stores and fast-food restaurants that rushed to West Wooseman after the I-491 extension was built? The same man who had his ancestors’ bones hauled away? “They’ll do more than sit still for it, Bill. They’ll do handstands and backflips and grunt like a liter of hungry piggies. Rumor has it the Bison-Prickert people will be arriving at the meeting in a brand new pumper, just like the one you promised the fire department before you went off on your privatization jag.”

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “Rumor also has it the new pumper will be painted—you guessed it, Bill—Serendipity Green®. Bison-Prickert it seems has just added our favorite color to its line of rustresistant commercial and industrial enamels.”

  And so D. William Aitchbone flees the mayor and drives out South Mill. He slides up his driveway and slides into bed. He does not kiss Karen’s cold ear. Her cold ear was sired by war hero Artie Brown, who, in a spurt of patriotic fervor, sired the ears of Howie Dornick, sire of the godawful color called Serendipity Green®.

  “How’d your meeting go?” Karen Aitchbone asks.

  “That bastard brother of yours is fucking up everything we’ve worked for. Absolutely fucking it up!”

  Karen Aitchbone has never heard her husband refer to Howie Dornick as her brother before. She has never referred to him as her brother herself. She begins to breathe like a little girl who’s just knocked the wind out of herself riding her tricycle off the end of the porch. “You slept with Vicki Bonobo, didn’t you?”

  “Who?”

  Karen Aitchbone slips out of bed and stalks to her closet. From one of the purses she no longer uses, she pulls a letter. She stalks back to the bed and hands it to her husband. It is a short, cold letter. A February letter:

  Karen,

  Do you know what your husband and Vicki Bonobo did in Washington DC?

  She watches her husband read the letter and crumple it into a snowball and throw it against the kittens-playing-in-a basket-of-yarn wallpaper.

  It is unseasonably warm for more than a week. Then the temperature tumbles and it snows. The first day the flakes are wet and fat. They pile a foot high. The second day the flakes are as fine as donut sugar. Driven by a ferocious Canadian wind, they form great drifts that close half the roads in the county and force cancellation of the Friday night basketball game between the West Wyssock Wildcats and the Orville Red Riders. On Saturday morning Howie Dornick and Katherine Hardihood drive to Wooster anyway.

  Except for a few unflagging fools on snowmobiles, the streets of Wooster are empty. Store windows are frozen white. Drifts are as high as the coin slots on the parking meters.

  The two visitors from Tuttwyler are worried that the Bittinger boy won’t show up. But when they approach the hardware store they find a wedge of parking spaces shoveled out of the drifts. They park and carry their cardboard box inside.

  Howie Dornick points to the young man standing behind the counter drinking a can of Mountain Dew. “That’s the Bone Head there,” he whispers to his woman. Like brides with cold feet, they march slowly up the plumbing supply aisle.

  “We were afraid you wouldn’t be open,” Katherine Hardihood says when they reach the young man with the Mountain Dew. “That was quite a storm last night.”

  The Bittinger boy swallows the mouthful of Mountain Dew he’s been sloshing. “In the hardware business, the only thing better that good weather is bad weathe
r,” he says. He tells them he’s already sold six aluminum snow shovels, seven plastic ones, nine pairs of thermal gloves, half a pallet of ice melting pellets, and two kerosene space heaters. He tells them how the blizzard of ’77 paid off the second mortgage on his parent’s house and how they sold forty-eight electric fans over one blistering July weekend in ’86. He also tells them that in September his father, driving home from the big hardware show in Chicago, fell asleep at the wheel and drove into the path of a tractor-trailer hauling made-in-China Christmas toys, not only killing himself, but killing his son’s dream of working alongside Donald Johanson at the Institute of Human Origins. “I’m the head hardware honcho now,” he says.

  Katherine Hardihood compassionately folds her arms over her noisy caramel-brown coat. “There’s no one else who could run the store?”

  “Except for my brother Bob, I’m an only child,” the Bittinger boy says. “And Bob, well, Bob is a little different.”

  “Retarded or something?” Howie asks.

  “Creative or something,” answers the Bittinger boy, smile gone. “He’s working on his masters in poetry and playing sackbut in a medieval quintet.”

  “Sackbut?” Howie Dornick asks.

  “Something like a trombone,” Katherine answers.

  The Bittinger boy is astonished. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who knew what a sackbut was.”

  “She’s a librarian,” Howie Dornick says.

  And so the small talk winds down and after the Bittinger boy sells a plastic snow shovel and pair of thermal socks to a man wearing a spring jacket and tennis shoes, they get down to the contents in the cardboard box.

  “Well, they’re human bones, that’s for sure,” the Bittinger boy says. “And one’s an adult—a woman by the shape of the pelvic bone here—and the other’s clearly a child.”

  Katherine Hardihood is not impressed. “We could see that ourselves.”

  Her man is neither impressed nor unimpressed. He is simply cold and frightened. “We think that maybe—”

  The Bittinger boy stops him. “No-no, Mr. Dornick. A forensic anthropologist has to go into an investigation without prejudice. What you think is immaterial. What I think is immaterial. I’ll find what I find.”