Serendipity Green

by Rob Levandoski

  Two of those still-living humans are Donald Grinspoon and D. William Aitchbone. They stand by the flower-covered grave for a long while, saying nothing. Then they meander through the rows of headstones toward the Civil War memorial. The granite soldier leaning on his rifle atop the memorial watches them approach.

  “I appreciate what you said about Penny at the service,” Donald Grinspoon says. “She thought you were the best, too.”

  “Thank you, Donald.”

  “She was so proud when you passed the bar.”

  “I still have the card she sent me. She put ten dollar inside, like it was my birthday or something.”

  “That’s Penny for you.”

  “I bought a couple of neckties with it.”

  Donald Grinspoon smiles nostalgically. “At my store?”

  “Of course at your store.”

  The mentor gently brushes the snow off the shoulders of the protégé’s Burberry. “I’m sorry about Karen leaving with the kids. Really sorry.” The sudden growl of the backhoe’s engine fills Donald Grinspoon’s eyes with tears. “The whole thing makes me feel like crap, Bill. I told you to go ahead and diddle Vicki, after all.”

  “That’s just it, Donald. I didn’t diddle her. I went to Washington thinking I might. But I couldn’t go through with it. You’d think Karen would know I couldn’t, wouldn’t you?” He tells him how be stuck his finger down his throat and threw up the huevos rancheros.

  They are at the base of the Civil War monument now. They brush the show off the granite bench and sit. They watch the backhoe fill Penny’s grave. “Karen’s a good woman. She’ll forgive you,” Donald Grinspoon says.

  D. William Aitchbone is tempted to ask if he knew that Penny knew about the Weideman Boots thing. But he lets sleeping dogs lie. “It’s going to be a real tightrope, Donald. At the same time I’m convincing Karen that I didn’t sleep with Vicki, I’ve got to keep Vicki believing that someday I will.”

  “That is a real tightrope,” the mentor agrees.

  “And I’ve got to stay balanced on that goddamn tightrope until the VP comes to Squaw Days. After that Vicki Bonobo can go diddle herself.”

  The other still living human at the cemetery is, of course, the operator of the backhoe, one Howie Dornick. Hoping to outlast the other two, he takes his time covering the grave. It is not an easy task. Graves are small holes. The claw at the end of the backhoe’s scorpion tail holds a lot of dirt. But with the help of the cold and the snow, he does outlast the others, and now that he is alone and the last scoop of dirt deposited, he digs Katherine Hardihood’s cellular phone from the bib pocket of his overalls and calls her. “Coast is clear,” he says.

  By the time Katherine and the Bittinger boy arrive at the cemetery, Howie Dornick has already positioned the backhoe’s claw over the grave of one Seth Aitchbone, great-great-great-great-great uncle of one D. William Aitchbone.

  They have wisely decided to exhume ol’ Seth during the light of day. The growl of the backhoe after dark might raise suspicion. It might bring the law. It might bring the entire conspiracy crashing down on their heads with the force of the Tuttwyler brothers’ clubs. So they will open ol’ Seth’s grave in the light of this gray, snow-flying day.

  Howie Dornick has dug scores of graves. He knows just when to stop the big claw before it rips the lid off ol’ Seth’s new box. He eases the backhoe out of the way then slides into the hole with a shovel. It has only been a few months since this new eternal resting place was dug and the dirt and clay easily scoops off. Katherine Hardihood watches for cars or people walking their dogs. “The coast is clear,” she says.

  The lid goes up. The Bittinger boy eases into the hole. He goes straight for ol’ Seth’s skull. “Yessss!” he says, as if the famous Donald Johanson had just called him with a job offer. “Entry hole right through the roof of the mouth. Point-blank. Consistent with a self-inflicted wound.” He pulls a camera from his parka and shoots all 36 exposures. He pulls out a tiny ruler and takes a number of measurements. He examines the rest of the skeleton, finding nothing suspicious.

  Katherine Hardihood now goes to her car and returns with the box containing Seth Aitchbone’s family. The Bittinger Boy shakes their bones right on top of ol’ Seth’s bones, mingling mother, father and child for all eternity, or at least until the next exhumation. That job completed, Howie Dornick works quickly with the backhoe.

  Hugh Harbinger meets Buzzy at the Peacock and with mugs of the day’s house blend in hand, they sit in the front window and watch the West Villagers dig their cars out of the tofu-hard snow that fell all night. “I hear Koko’s back from Morocco,” says Buzzy. “And she’s brought some beautiful brown camel boy with her. Humpty humpty.”

  “I thought she was never stepping foot in New York again.”

  “You said the same thing.”

  “And I meant it.”

  New York irony never gets any better than this and they giggle at their own brilliance. “So,” says Hugh Harbinger, “any dish on what Koko’s got up her sleeve?”

  Buzzy’s voice melts like mozzarella. “Wwwwhite!”

  “White?”

  “Fabulous, isn’t it? The world’s biggest slut suddenly in love with white. I hear she’s designed seventy-seven shades, everyone of them named after some virtuous woman in the Bible, the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. I hear she and her camel boy got off the Concorde simply dripping in white. Robes and hats and scarves. All sorts of baubles. Even their shoes. White white white. The couture houses are already beating a path, I hear.”

  Hugh Harbinger throws his mug of house blend through the window. Although the shower of glass is loud and spectacular, no one inside nor outside the Peacock is startled. Artists and writers have been throwing mugs through the window of the Peacock for decades. “Good gravy, Hugh, chill!” says Buzzy, making sure no glass has sprinkled into his coffee, “You’ve had a fabulous ride with Serendipity Green®. Now it’s time for Koko and her camel boy to ride fabulously for a season or two. Humpty humpty hump. No biggie, is it?”

  Hugh Harbinger yanks his Serendipity Green® watch cap over his ears and disappears up Greenwich Avenue.

  One waitress goes for a broom and dust pan. Another goes for the big piece of plywood in the storeroom.

  21

  Ernest Not Irish fastens his ponytail with a turquoise clip. He puts on the denim shirt and khaki Dockers he purchased that afternoon from the JC Penny Company. Over his head he slips his favorite bolo tie, the one with the silver wolf’s head. He puts on his only sports coat. He removes the FREE CHIEF WAHOO button from one lapel, the I’M A REAL CLEVELAND INDIAN from the other. He sprints through the March rain to his Pontiac and drives south. He is on his way to be reasonable with his white brothers in Tuttwyler, Ohio, as the wise Dr. Pirooz Aram has suggested.

  Ernest knows it will not be easy being reasonable. For five hundred years his ancestors have tried to be reasonable. The Arawaks tried to be reasonable with Christopher Columbus, not knowing he was under orders from the king and queen of Spain to steal their gold, riddle their bodies with European diseases, fill the wombs of their women with European sperm, and collect their souls for the European god. The Wampanoags tried to be reasonable with the Pilgrims, not knowing they were spies for a huge island of tree-chopping lunatics called the English. His own Cherokee ancestors tried to be reasonable, too. They reasonably signed a treaty with George Washington, ceding most of their lands in exchange for eternal peace. They reasonably accepted the advice of Thomas Jefferson and built good roads and sturdy cabins, cleared their forests in order to grow corn and apples and graze sheep and cattle. They reasonably built gristmills and sawmills and blacksmith shops, schools and a library with one thousand books. They reasonably created a written language, started a newspaper, adopted a constitution with an elected chief and a legislature with a house and a senate. Yes, they reasonably accepted the life their white brothers said they should. But the Cherokee land was good land, and there was so much of it, and there were
rumors of gold. And so despite their reasonableness, the Cherokee were rounded up, and like a herd of cows, driven through the blinding snow to a land in the west the Choctaws called Oklahoma—“Land of red people”—where those who survived this trail of tears were promptly starved and swindled anew. Yes, so many Indian brothers had tried to be reasonable with so many white brothers, only to discover again and again that these brothers of theirs were all a bunch of gold-gouging, tree-chopping, sperm-shooting lunatics with empty souls. And now he, Ernest Not Irish, like so many before him—like Wahunsonacook of the Powhatans, like Samoset of the Pemaquid, like Tecumseh of the Shawnee, like Little Crow of the Santee, like Crazy Horse of the Oglala, like Cochise of the Apache, Manuelito of the Navaho, Tooyalaket of the Nez Percé, Wovoka of the Paiutes, Big Foot of the Hunkpapas—is on his way to Tuttwyler, Ohio, to be reasonable with a white brother named D. William Aitchbone.

  By the time Earnest Not Irish reaches I-491 the rain has turned to sleet and the pavement is deadly with an invisible coating of ice. All around him cars and trucks are spinning into the median strip. But his old Pontiac—named after an Ottawa chief who once tried to be reasonable—stays on the road and soon he is cruising up West Wooseman, two cars behind a dump truck spitting out salt—salt mined from the same tunnels under Lake Erie, where his father worked before taking a stay bullet in the head.

  West Wooseman takes him to the village square. He finds the village hall and parks. Someone has thoughtfully spread blue de-icing pellets on the sidewalk. Inside he sits three chairs away from an unappetizing woman with the features of a librarian. There are only a handful of others in the audience: a small pale man with a reporter’s notebook in his lap; a sad old man holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  As he waits for the council to arrive, Ernest Not Irish reads again his most recent letter from someone in Tuttwyler:

  Dear Mr. Not Irish,

  Don’t waste your time writing letters to Mayor Sadlebyrne about Squaw Days. The real chief cook and bottle washer in Tuttwyler is D. William Aitchbone. You’ll find him lording over the village council on the first and third Thursdays of the month. Meetings start promptly at 7:30.

  Like all of the previous letters he’s received from Tuttwyler, it is not signed.

  Finally the village council files in and sits at the long table in front. The man in the middle seat, holding a gavel and spraying the audience with a smile, stands and leads everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance. Earnest assumes this man is the chief cook and bottle washer identified in the letter. So he raises his hand and speaks loudly. “May I address the council?”

  “Not yet you can’t,” says D. William Aitchbone.

  The president of the CRI sits quietly for two hours and twelve minutes while the council debates and votes on a series of important legislative matters: whether members of the volunteer fire department should have to pay for their own subscriptions to Ohio Firefighter; (which passes 3 to 2); a variance allowing Clark Besserman of 651 Tocqueville to put a ten-foot fence between his house and the new Cap’n Scrubby 24-hour car wash, even though the village code says privacy fences can be no more than six feet high (which passes 3 to 2); an ordinance preventing people from having more than one garage sale a month (which passes 4 to 1); whether to give Quotidian Bolt & Screw Company a twenty-year abatement on property taxes if it vacates its crumbling 90-year-old factory in Cleveland and builds a new state-of-the-art plant in Progress Center, the 600-acre industrial park being carved out of Gordon Teaselbaum’s cornfields and cow pastures (which passes unanimously.)

  “And now,” asks D. William Aitchbone, “does anyone in the audience wish to address council?”

  Ernest Not Irish stands and lets everyone get comfortable with his dark skin and ponytail and the silver wolf on his bolo tie. Now he speaks: “I am Ernest Not Irish, president of Cleveland’s Real Indians, and—”

  “We enjoyed your letters,” interrupts D. William Aitchbone.

  Ernest Not Irish counters the council president’s mad smile with a reasonable one. “I hope they did not sound too confrontational.” He talks for twelve minutes about historical accuracy and human dignity. He reminds all of his white brothers and sisters in the room that Princess Pogawedka and Little Kapusta were real people, as were the men who murdered him. “But this story about Pogawedka rising out of the stumps and forgiving those who stole her people’s land and stole her baby’s life is a bunch of baloney.”

  “I thought you people believed in spirits and stuff like that?” asks D. William Aitchbone.

  You people! The words make Ernest Not Irish tremble. He wants to scream. He wants to throw his folding chair. He wants to tell this D. William Aitchbone exactly what he told Dr. Pirooz Aram, that if Pogawedka really had risen from the stumps, it would have been with a bow and a quiver of arrows and a granite ax. But he is determined to be reasonable. “Yes, we believe in spirits. And we believe in forgiveness.”

  “Then what’s the problem, chief?” asks D. William Aitchbone.

  Chief! This word make the other members of the village council tremble.

  “I am not a chief,” Ernest Not Irish says.

  “Well, I am a chief,” says the president of the Tuttwyler village council, “and unless you’ve got ten thousand braves in warpaint in the parking lot, I don’t think we have anything to talk about, do we? This is our town and our history. And whether you like it or not, Princess Pogawedka rose up through those stumps and forgave us. And we’re real grateful for that. And we’re going to go on showing our gratitude every goddamn summer, whether it ruffles your headdress or not!” D. William Aitchbone brings down his gavel like a fly swatter. “This meeting is adjourned.”

  As the village council gathers up its papers and flees, Ernest Not Irish feels friendly fingertips on the knuckles of his clenched fist. It is the unappetizing woman who was sitting three chairs away from him. “Don’t let him get under your skin,” she says, gentle eyes dancing. “He’s experiencing a rather uncomfortable slide into oblivion these days.”

  As she walks away, zipping up her noisy coat, the pale man with the reporter’s notebook asks him if Not Irish is one word or two.

  “Two,” he says.

  Ernest Not Irish leaves the village hall and walks across the parking lot where ten thousand braves in warpaint are not waiting for a secret owl-hoot to attack. He drives north, hatred dripping off his steering wheel, a sports call-in show fading in and out on his radio, someone asking the know-it-all host if the rumors about Cleveland Indians’ pitcher José Mesa being traded to Seattle are true. Ernest Not Irish wonders if the know-it-all host knows that Seattle is named after a gullible Suquamish chief who tried to be reasonable?

  D. William Aitchbone waits in the men’s room for twenty-three minutes, until the other members of council have surely gone home. With the big stiff collar of his Burberry pulled up around his face like the blinders milk wagon horses used to wear, he hurries down the hall toward the door. He hears hoarse laughter and peeks over his collar. In the mayor’s office, sitting at the mayor’s desk, is the current mayor, Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne, stroking his throat. Victoria Bonobo is standing behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other dabbing her wet eyes with a Kleenex. In front of them is an open Cleveland Plain Dealer. He ducks back inside his collar and hurries out.

  He drives up West Wooseman to Burger King and buys the last Plain Dealer in the box by the door. Inside he buys a coffee and he sits alone by the cold front window. He finds the story that made Woody Sadelbyrne hoarse and Victoria Bonobo cry. As he reads he slowly crushes the plastic container of non-dairy creamer in his hand. “Doesn’t this just take the cake,” he says.

  What takes the cake, of course, is the story running across the bottom of page five. It is a story about the Vice President of the United States and his alleged complicity in a scheme to register illegal Mexican aliens to vote. The story takes place in the VP’s home state of Texas where a twister—an F-5 with winds topping 285 miles per hour—flatte
ned a little Panhandle town named Tilly. Two weeks after the twister flattened Tilly, an emu farmer in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma—some 180 miles away—spotted his big birds eating envelopes. Fearing they’d choke, he jumped the fence and gathered up more than two hundred envelopes, some half-eaten, some still bundled together with rubber bands. Texas twisters being the ferocious and finicky beasts they are, all of the envelopes were addressed to the same person, a Mrs. Margaret Cumberworth of Tilly, Texas. Most envelopes contained nothing more interesting than old telephone and electric bills. But one intrigued the emu farmer to no end. It had been mailed from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. To the emu farmer’s disappointment, the letter inside was not from the President of the United States, but from the Vice President. Said the letter:

  Congratulations on your retirement, Margaret. Your years of flawless service to Texas and the nation makes us all proud. And thanks again on all you did to make Montezuma’s Revenge the big success it was.

  The emu farmer did what any good citizen does when finding the private correspondence of a famous person. He went immediately to the nearest newspaper, the Jeromesville Messenger, which dutifully printed it on page one. VP’S LETTER BLOWS IN FROM TILLY, the headline read. It was not long before this particular issue of the Messenger made its way to the library in Tulsa, where the librarian in charge of periodicals wondered just what Montezuma’s Revenge was—other than a bad case of diarrhea from drinking water south of the border—and just what this Margaret Cumberworth did to make it a big success. So the librarian sent the story on to her old college roommate in Austin, who was now the personal assistant to the famous muckraking columnist, Moxie Givens.