Serendipity Green

by Rob Levandoski

  The store is filling up with customers and Katherine Hardihood can see that his attention is waning out of financial necessity. “How soon?”

  The Bittinger boy pushes the box of bones aside, making room for the three twenty-pound bags of de-icing pellets being lugged up the electrical supply aisle by a red-faced man with a Pop-tart wedged between his chapped lips.

  “Hard to say,” the Bittinger boy says. “If mom’s up to watching the store next weekend I’m driving down to OU to get drunk. Still got my key to the lab. So maybe week after next.”

  The red-face man with the three bags of de-icing pellets looks closely at Howie Dornick and grins through his Pop-tart. TV right? Guy with the ugly green house.”

  “That’s him,” Katherine Hardihood says.

  “I sold him the paint,” the Bittinger boy says.

  Pellet bags finally resting on the counter, the red-faced man is free to take a bite out of his portable breakfast. “That was the weirdest damn story since Morley Safer interviewed that hundred-year-old Mormon with the sixteen wives. And who was that artsy-fartsy guy with the little dog?”

  Howie and Katherine start their drive back to Tuttwyler. Highway department trucks are at work, pushing and scraping and spraying rock salt. The sky is purple-brown. Northern Ohioans know what that means: Several more inches of the white stuff are coming.

  “We shouldn’t have done this,” Howie Dornick says.

  “The weather won’t be any better tomorrow,” Katherine says. She is trying to defrost the door window with the palm of her librarian’s hand.

  “I meant this whole thing with the bones.”

  “We’ve got to know the truth, Howard.”

  “Take it from the illegitimate son of Artie Brown, Katherine, the truth is not always such a good thing.”

  “The truth is always a good thing,” Katherine Hardihood says. She smiles victoriously. She has melted a small circle in the glass and can now see the endless acres of broken corn stalks that comprise Wayne County in winter. “If those are the bones of Princess Pogawedka and little Kapusta, or whatever their real names were, that would be a good thing, wouldn’t it? We could honor them like the real people they were. Stop this Squaw Days circus. Have I ever told you what Pogawedka and Kapusta mean in Polish?”

  “Many times. Nonsense and cabbage.”

  Katherine playfully grinds her frozen palm into her man’s worried cheek. He howls like a branded calf. She laughs as only a woman in love can laugh. “And I’ve also told you many times that my plan will work. Haven’t I, Howard dear?”

  “That you have.” He rubs his fingers on his door window until they are icy cold, then he playfully grabs Katherine Hardihood by her librarian’s nose. She squeals. They laugh and they laugh.

  Howie Dornick knows that his woman’s plan is a good one: if the Bittinger boy finds that the bones are indeed those of an Indian woman and child, then in the middle of the night like some black-and-white movie ghoul he will re-bury them. Then his woman will tell Bill Aitchbone, in front of the other Squaw Days Committee members, of course, that Howie Dornick has just told her something that might be very important. When Howie was moving the old Aitchbone cemetery last fall, she’ll say, he found the skeletons of a woman and child right on top of one Seth Aitchbone, and that given their smashed skulls and their proximity to Three Fish Creek, they just might be the bones of Princess Pogawedka and Kapusta. And if they are their bones, she’ll say, the resulting media hoopla will make Squaw Days one of the top festivals in the state of Ohio, bigger than Buzzard Day in Hinckley, bigger than the Pumpkin Festival in Circleville, bigger than the Sauerkraut Festival in Waynesville that brought down Sheriff Norman F. Cole. And despite Bill Aitchbone’s protests, the committee will vote to have the bones exhumed and examined. And, of course, the bones will be found to be Indian bones, of the proper age, with the proper smashed skulls. Podewedka and Kapusta for certain!

  The delicious part of his woman’s plan, of course, is the obvious question of why Princess Pogawedka and Kapusta were buried on top of Seth Aitchbone. An investigation of old county records will show that Seth is none other that Bill’s Aitchbone’s great-great-great-great-great uncle, the sixth and never-married son of Jobiah and Almira Aitchbone. And this can mean only one thing: Seth and Pogawedka had copulated and that poor little Kapusta is Bill Aitchbone’s illegitimate great-great-great-great-great cousin; and given that someone had thought enough of Seth to place Pogawedka and Kapusta in his grave, they no doubt had copulated a lot and considered themselves a family. Such a revelation will embarrass the hell out of Bill Aitchbone. Maybe humble him. Maybe help Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne win re-election. Such a revelation, after all, will put two famous skeletons in Bill Aitchbone’s closet—the skeleton of his wife’s illegitimate brother, one Howard Allen Dornick, and the skeleton of the half-breed son of Pogawedka—and while a politician can overcome one skeleton in his closet, rarely can a politician overcome two, even a politician with Bill Aitchbone’s genetic steel.

  But that isn’t the end of his woman’s plan: producing the smashed skull of Bill Aitchbone’s distant kin, she figures, will transform the Tuttwyler brothers’ misdeed from a happy myth to a horrendous murder. And who today in Tuttwyler is related to these murderous brothers of yesteryear? Donald Grinspoon’s thrice-afflicted wife, that’s who! And so a bloody wedge will be driven between the former mayor and his political protégé, a wedge that will spit the local Republicans for decades and end all talk of privatizing village services. And best of all, Squaw Days itself will be transformed, from a carnival of lies into a somber memorial to truth. It is such a good plan.

  18

  Ernest Not Irish leaves his apartment on Detroit Avenue and drives his old white Pontiac with the blue fenders across the Cuyahoga River to Jacob’s Field, the spectacular new stadium where the professional baseball team called the Cleveland Indians play. Other members of Cleveland’s Real Indians are already keeping a vigil there, waiting for the big equipment truck with Chief Wahoo on the side to begins its annual February trek to Florida for the start of spring training.

  Ernest Not Irish arrives at the ballpark just as television crews from channels 3 and 8 are pulling up. Channels 5 and 19 are already there. The reporters who will interview him are wearing earmuffs over their wind-resistant hair. The cameramen are wearing orange Cleveland Browns caps. Steam is pouring from coffee cups and nostrils.

  It has been twenty-four years since Ernest Not Irish moved to Cleveland from Tennessee. His father, dead now, came north to work at the Ford Motor Company, but ended up working 1800 feet under Lake Erie, in Cleveland’s famous salt mines. Ernest Not Irish’s name was not Not Irish then. It was McPugh, a name perfectly respectable among the Scotch-Irish living in the shadows of the Great Smoky Mountains, but a name funny as hell on Cleveland’s west side. Even the black kids thought McPugh was funny as hell.

  And so young Ernest was not happy in Cleveland. Not happy at all. In the mornings when he looked south from his bedroom window, he saw filthy smoke rising from filthy steel mills. He saw highways clogged with suburbanites. He saw the identical gray roofs of ten thousand identical houses. In Tennessee when he looked south from his bedroom window, he saw the peaks of the Smokies rising like gargantuan black bears through the low wet clouds that gave the mountains their name, and the Little Pigeon River, meandering like a silver snake through ten zillion trees. So he missed the black-bear mountains and the silver-snake river and the ten zillion trees. And he missed Cora Mae Bean, his seven-eighths Cherokee grandmother; missed her chocolate eyes, and missed her face, which was the color of the sausage-grease gravy she made every Saturday for breakfast. He missed the biscuits she made to soak up that wonderful gravy, biscuits as hard as life on the outside, as soft as her heart on the inside. He missed her smile and her breath, both as sweat as the okra she battered and fried every Sunday. He missed her always busy fingers, always busy kneading dough for biscuits, embroidering flowers on pillowcases, busy on the w
arped keys of her old piano, scratching the top of his always itchy head, as she told him of his Cherokee ancestors, their dream for a nation of their own, their trail of tears as soldiers marched them off to death and Oklahoma. She’d scratch his head and tell him of the stubbornness of those, who despite the greed and trickery of the whites, clung to the holy mountains like the low wet clouds that gave them their name, tell him how proud she was of her one-eighth Negro blood, of the runaway slave Solomon Hangbee, who fought for the north in the War Between the States, and before being butchered at Fort Pillow along with scores of other Negro soldiers who had already surrendered, had successfully mated with her great-grandmother.

  No, Ernest did not like Cleveland, Ohio. And he did not like being a McPugh.

  And so the year his father was knocked off a bar stool by a stray bullet, the same year he dropped out of school and went to work unloading produce trucks at the old Central Market where Jacob’s Field now stands, he threw away his white blood, with the same distaste you’d pour a carton of soured milk down the kitchen sink, embracing fully his Cherokee blood. Ernest Not Irish he became. An annual pain in the ass to the professional baseball team called the Cleveland Indians.

  So once again, as the big equipment truck begins to warm up for the drive south, the local television reporters ask him the same questions they’ve been asking him for eleven years now.

  Asks the reporter from Channel 3: “Every year you demand that the Indians drop Chief Wahoo as their mascot, and every year they ignore you. Why keep it up?”

  Answers Ernest Not Irish: “We demand it every year because it is wrong every year. Why they ignore us every year you’ll have to ask them.”

  Asks the reporter from Channel 5: “Chief Wahoo is really pretty cute. What’s so offensive about him?”

  Answers Ernest Not Irish: “Bunny rabbits are pretty cute. Indian peoples are not bunny rabbits. We are human beings. Human beings deserve respect.”

  Asks the reporter from Channel 8: “The Indian’s management says Chief Wahoo is one of the most recognizable team logos in the world, that they couldn’t change it if they wanted to.”

  Answers Ernest Not Irish: “The swastika was also a very recognizable team logo.”

  Asks the reporter from Channel 19: “How many years do you intend to keep this protest up?”

  Asks Ernest Not Irish: “How many years do you intend on being a black person?”

  While Ernest Not Irish gives these answers, his fellow members of the CRI bounce their homemade signs up and down and stomp their feet to keep the cold from leaking into their shoes. The driver of the equipment truck waves until all of the cameramen focus on him, then he pulls away in a great billow of blue diesel fumes.

  Ernest Not Irish drives back across the Cuyahoga for a few hours sleep. He has already worked his full shift at the Brottenschmidt’s Bakery—“We never stop loafing at Brottenschmidt’s”—and he has a non-stop drive to Florida in front of him, where he will protest the arrival of the equipment truck, and answer the same moronic questions from the television reporters from Miami and Orlando, Jacksonville and St. Pete.

  “So, tell me, Ernest Not Irish,” asks Dr. Pirooz Aram, putting his empty demitasse on the silver tray on his desk. “Did your protest go well this year? You look like you got a little sun.”

  “I am an Indian. The sun is always in my face.”

  Dr. Aram likes that. He laughs like only an old Persian can. “I must tell you, Ernest, when I saw you on the television, you did not seem to be as angry as other years. I hope you are not losing faith.”

  Ernest Not Irish confesses that while Chief Wahoo still bunches his shorts, his anger these days belongs to another cause. “It’s that damn Squaw Days!”

  Dr. Pirooz Aram knows about Squaw Days. For years he has listened to Katherine Hardihood bitch about it. Yet he is a man who loves to be entertained as much as he loves entertaining. “Squaw Days? I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”

  Ernest tells him all about it. He tells him about the parade, about the cupcake who gets almost as much applause as Princess Pogawedka, about the Tuttwyler brothers and their big papier mâché clubs throwing candy to children. He tells him about the tobacco spitting and pie eating, the construction-paper feathers the women who sell big cookies wear and the wooden Indian holding the pizza. He tells him about the Re-Enactment. “And they have this white woman dressed in white buckskins rise out of a pouf of phony-baloney smoke to forgive them for bashing in her baby’s skull. And to wish them well as they piss pesticides into the creeks and rivers and vomit concrete over every sacred inch of soil. No real Indian ghost would do that.”

  Dr. Aram plays with his beard, twisting the coarse white hairs into little ringlets. “No?

  “The real ghost of Pogawedka would rise out of the fire with a quiver of arrows and put a slice of flint into every white brain she saw. ‘That arrow is for bashing my head open,’ she would say. ‘That arrow is for bashing my baby’s head. That arrow is for pissing pesticides. That one for vomiting concrete. That one for making the wooden Indian hold a pizza.’ And when her arrows were gone she would wade through that crowd of white fools with a granite ax, forgiving them one by one. Boom! ‘You are forgiven.’ Boom! ‘You are forgiven.’”

  Dr. Pirooz Aram continued to make ringlets. “So this Squaw Days bothers you? So what?”

  Ernest Not Irish’s Cherokee blood runs wild across his weak European cheeks. “So what?”

  “Yes, Ernest! So What? So this summer you are going to make some new signs and while everyone is having a good time eating cookies and cotton candy, you are going to stomp back and forth on the sidewalk.”

  Cherokee blood fills the whites of Ernest Not Irish’s blue-green European eyes. “I’m going to let them know that they are disgracing my people.”

  The old Persian pulls him from his chair and hugs him like a son and a brother and a father combined. “I will come and carry a sign with you,” he says. “If you think it will do any good.”

  Ernest does not particularly enjoy being hugged like a son and a brother and a father. “You are right, Dr. Aram. It does no good. Americans are undisgracable.”

  “That is because Americans are still pooping in their diapers, historically speaking,” the doctor says, returning to his chair and his ringlets. “You and I, Ernest, are from old nations. Our souls are heavy with thousands of years of culture. Thousands of years of shame and pride. Victory and defeat. Great achievements and great mistakes. Great myths. But Ernest! These Americans we live among! Their souls are still as light as the paper feathers the women who sell big cookies wear. They are still inventing their culture. They are still inventing their history that someday will weigh heavy on their souls and make them disgracable.”

  Tears wash the blood from the whites of Ernest Not Irish’s eyes and he wishes the old Persian was still hugging him. “And make them stop pissing on Indians.”

  “Yes, dammit!” Dr. Pirooz Aram sings out. He starts dancing. “And stop pissing on Iranians! Do you know, Ernest, that when those crazy students took those Americans hostage in Tehran, I could not go out for a loaf of bread without somebody giving me the finger? My neighbor still calls me Imam the Terrible, as though I am a butcherer of innocent children, as though the word Imam will insult me. He doesn’t even know what the word means. He only knows how to kill the dandelions that pop up on his lawn, sweet little gifts from God. Imam means leader! A divinely appointed leader! You tell me, Ernest, what is so terrible about being a divinely appointed leader? Nothing! And then when his garden hose springs a leak, he comes and borrows mine. And on Christmas he sends me a card with a manger scene on the cover, just to get my goat, not knowing that we Moslems consider Jesus one of the greatest Imams of all time. Americans!”

  Ernest Not Irish reaches out and grabs Dr. Pirooz Aram and hugs him like a son and a brother and a father combined.

  “Our problem, Ernest,” says Dr. Pirooz Aram, kissing the top of his head, “Is that we are Westoxified
.”

  “Westoxified?”

  “Seduced by the all-things European. Seduced by their crazy inventions and their crazy ideas. The Persian word is Gharbzadegi. It was coined by the Iranian writer Jalal Alee Ahmad, just a few years before the revolution that landed those fifty-two American diplomats in the hoosegow, which, if you don’t know it, is a Spanish word for jail.”

  “I know Hoosegow,” says Ernest Not Irish. “The Cleveland police have hoosegowed me a dozen times.”

  “I am so Westoxified,” Dr. Pirooz Aram continues, “that to escape the torturers of the American puppet Shah Pahlavi, I came to America to be tortured by six-lane highways and magazines filled with young women showing their cleavages. That’s how Westoxified I am, Ernest.”

  “And me?”

  “You are so Westoxified that you use that crazy European invention called television to practice a crazy European idea called free speech, to protest another crazy European idea called racism.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Suppose? How many times do I have to tell you, Ernest? Know! Are you listening to me?” Dr. Pirooz Aram breaks away and presses his warm forehead against the cool window and watches a crew of black Americans pour asphalt over the last open meadow in Parma. “I know this is your session, Ernest, but I must tell you, I am so ripped between East and West it isn’t funny. My brain belongs to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and Kierkegaard and Sartre, and Henry Ford for christsakes. But my heart, dear Ernest, my heart still belongs to Hafez and Rumi, and Omar Khayam, and Firdawsi—who was a greater poet than Homer by the way—and the spring flowers that caress the slopes above old Tehran. Is it any wonder I dance for my patients?”

  “No wonder at all,” says Ernest.

  “There is so much about America that I hate and yet so much that I love,” Dr. Pirooz Aram says. He snatches the Indian’s hands and dances him around the office. “For better or worse, God has planted us here, Ernest. And while you have a duty to your ancestors to raise as much of a ruckus as you can, never forget that you also are an American! That these undisgracable people are your brothers! So be as reasonable as you can with them. Do you hear me, Ernest? As reasonable as you can! Dammit, Ernest, are you listening?”