Trying to jump off the pumper, D. William Aitchbone has knocked the VP on his Texas ass. So a bullet that surely would have gone through the VP’s Texas head, instead has buried itself in Aitchbone’s Ohio elbow. One bullet has sailed all the way to the gazebo, ricocheted off the copper roof, and harmlessly burrowed itself into the big bubbling crock of sloppy joe mix in the Knights of Columbus food tent. One bullet has harmlessly struck the square’s only remaining box elder tree. One bullet has killed one of the giraffes in Paula Varney’s window. One bullet has shattered one of the ceramic deer on Princess Pogawedka’s float. One bullet has found its way into Katherine Hardihood.
Darren Frost had big plans for this Squaw Days. Hidden in his cupcake costume were three pipe bombs. He made them in his converted coal bin with instructions he found on the Internet. Tonight he planned to place them at equal intervals around the library and right when Princess Pogawedka was rising above the stumps, they were going to explode and accomplish for America what the big-talking Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee had not accomplished.
But now there have been gunshots. There is panic everywhere. And blood is running out of Katherine Hardihood’s chest. So Darren Frost’s big plans will have to wait. Someone has beaten him to the punch.
27
“Don’t be surprised if she dies,” the Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee says to Howie Dornick. “God is good and angry at Tuttwyler.”
It is the Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee’s first visit to the hospital. It is Howie Dornick’s tenth. One visit a day since Ernest Not Irish attacked the Squaw Days parade. Visits that last from six-thirty in the morning to nine-thirty at night.
“The nurses say she’s doing as good as can be expected,” Howie answers. They are not in Katherine Hardihood’s room with the tangling tubes and the quiet smells and the eyes that don’t open and the beep beep beeps. They are in the visitor’s lounge just down the hall, watching the blue and yellow tropical fish in the huge wall tank. The lounge walls are painted Serendipity Green®.
As the Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee searches his Bible for an appropriate verse, a great pot of vulva-pink calla lilies enters the lounge, in the arms of Wyssock County Library Director Venus Willendorf. She leans over her flowers, and her ostrich-egg breasts, and kisses Howie on the cheek. She tries to kiss Ray Biscobee’s cheek, too, but he shrivels and flees, mentioning other patients he needs to see. “He is such a dung beetle, isn’t he?” Venus Willendorf hisses before she laughs.
Venus stays just ten minutes. She is followed by Delores Poltruski who stays a half hour. Karen Brown Aitchbone stays an hour—she and Howie are brother and sister, after all—and Woody Sadlebyrne stays a half hour, assuring Howie he can miss as much work as he wants.
Yes, people come to see how Katherine Hardihood is faring, but mostly it is just Howie and the television set, Howie and the old magazines, Howie and the Mr. Coffee with its half-inch of stale brew, Howie and the stack of Styrofoam cups.
Then at seven a flamingo-pink beret wobbles into the visitor’s room like an errant Frisbee. The man beneath the beret is Dr. Pirooz Aram. “Howie Dornick! How are you?”
The old Persian dances to the Mr. Coffee and turns it off. “I hope you have not been drinking this slop.”
“Most of it.”
“And you are still alive?”
Howie Dornick begins to cry.
Dr. Aram takes him in his arms, and unlike American-born men, who can only give another man a few quick stiff pats on the back, he squeezes him and holds him close, until their hearts are thu-bumping in unison. “You have not eaten yet, have you?”
The answer is no. And so Dr. Pirooz Aram takes him down the elevator to the cafeteria. “Madam,” he says to the woman behind the stainless steel counter with a hair net on her head and plastic bags on her hands, “don’t you have any fish or fresh vegetables? No rice? Only these poor mashed potatoes? And what is this meat supposed to be?”
They both get the tuna and noodles. Take their trays to the table by the plastic flower garden. The flowers are dusty.
When the tuna and noodles are finished, the old Persian dances to the dessert shelf and returns with a single walnut brownie. He cut it precisely down the middle with a plastic knife. “It is not because I’m a cheap sonofabitch that I’ve bought only one brownie. Small amounts of things are more enjoyable than large amounts of things. This is something Americans haven’t learned yet.”
Then he says this: “I know that you are filled with questions, Howie. What was that crazy Indian thinking? What was God thinking? Is your sweet Katherine going to live or is she going to die? I don’t have a single answer for you. But I do want you to listen to me—not pretend to listen, but really listen! If Katherine lives you will be very happy and very grateful. But if she dies, Howie, you must also feel happy and grateful. And why is that? Because once upon a time you and this wonderful woman achieved the most wonderful thing two people can achieve—you achieved vasal! I know you do not know this word, Howie. It is a word given immortality by the great Sufi poets, Hafez and Rumi and others. It means to consummate your love, both sexually and spiritually, to succeed in unity. The only thing more beautiful than achieving vasal with a lover is achieving vasal with God. Melting back into God when you die. Fruition. That is what vasal means.
“And so, Howie, if Katherine dies it will be okay for you to be sad for a while. Okay for you to hate God and that crazy Indian for a while. It will be okay for you to miss Katherine forever. But while you are missing her, you must remember that you were awakened and transformed by this woman. Remember that Katherine has melted back into God, where both she and God are awaiting your fruition. Your melting. So you see! You are a lucky bastard no matter which way it goes. I’m not boool-shitting you, Howie. Did you hear anything I said?”
Howie Dornick nods.
“Good. Now eat your half of the brownie before I do.”
28
Green.
Yellow.
Red.
The cars on South Mill stop. The cars on Tocqueville go.
Howie Dornick, the leash in his left hand attached to Matisse, crosses the street and heads into the cemetery. Katherine Hardihood is right behind him, pulling Rhubarb along on his clothesline. “Jiminy Cricket cat,” she huffs, “how hard is it to put one paw in front of the other?” Above the black treetops they can see the Ferris wheel’s blurry lights. It is the big Ferris wheel. D. William Aitchbone finally has found someone with the grit to demand the big Ferris wheel.
As they meander through the gravestones they begin to hear the DOOM-doom-doom-doom of Indian drums. The Re-Enactment is beginning.
It has been some year.
A month after Katherine was released from the hospital, she and Howie drove to the state penitentiary at Lucasville, to tell Ernest Not Irish the truth about Pogawedka and Kapusta. He was just finishing the first week of his eight-year sentence. “Now you tell me,” he said.
Then Katherine sent out notices for a press conference. Only two reporters showed up, Sam Guss of the Gazette and Weezie Wetzel, Wyssock County correspondent for the Wooster paper. Despite all the empty chairs in the library community room, Katherine went right ahead and told the truth: The woman and baby clubbed to death by the Tuttwyler brothers were not Indians, but white; the baby was fathered by Seth Aitchbone, who shot himself in the head when he could mourn no longer; all the proof anyone would need was waiting under Seth’s gravestone in the village cemetery; Pogawedka means nonsense in Polish; Kapusta means cabbage; it is a good thing to celebrate the past, but only if the past really happened. Finally, she apologized to the village for participating in such a fraud and resigned from the Squaw Days Committee.
Sam Guss and Weezie Wetzel reported everything Katherine Hardihood said. And it changed nothing.
“Who cares what really happened,” D. William Aitchbone told the two reporters at a press conference of his own. “What’s important is that we honor our ancestors, and have a good time.”
And so a year has passed. And it is time for Squaw Days again. It’s a perfect August night. The worst heat of summer has passed and the nights already feel like autumn. Matisse and Rhubarb are enjoying the walk. Enjoying each other’s company. Both are happily pissing every stationary object they can find, tree trunks and bushes and park benches. They would be pissing the gravestones if Howie and Katherine would let them.
Howie Dornick has grown very fond of Matisse. Wishes he could keep him forever. But any day now Hugh Harbinger will come to claim him. Hugh is in Peru, with Zee Levant, high in the Andes, in the little village of Iqicucho, studying the brown faces of the descendants of the great Incan emperor Pachacuti. Hugh’s letters continue to be void of any depression. He says when he gets back he will make every human on earth want the fabulous brown skin of the truckstop waitress María Vilca Quechua Ayavilli. He says he is thinking of a line of skin dyes. Meanwhile Matisse is staying at Howie Dornick’s Serendipity Green® house on South Mill, the last house on South Mill still painted that god-awful color.
Howie Dornick and Katherine Hardihood leave the cemetery and walk past the Catholic Church, which has been minus one member since Delores Poltruski moved to Indiana with Dick Mueller. The marriage of Dick and Delores came quite unexpectedly during jury selection for Ernest Not Irish’s trial. With Delores’s help, Dick was able to sell his auto parts store, his house, and all of his rental properties in less than a month. The town they’ve moved to did not have an auto parts store. According to Delores’s letter to Katherine, the town has a wonderful festival celebrating the seven-and-a-quarter-inch left thumb of Ruby Courgette. It seems that Ruby, normal in every other way, had this gargantuan left thumb. The biggest thumb on record, not only in Ohio but the entire United States. Two years after she died at age ninety-three, the town starting holding Thumb Day. Howie Dornick thinks Delores is just pulling Katherine’s leg about this festival. Someday they’re going to drive over to that town in Indiana and see if Thumb Day is for real.
There have been so many changes this past year. Paula Varney closed her Just Giraffes shop right after Christmas, marking every stuffed giraffe down sixty percent. But the storefront didn’t stay empty for long. In April, Candyce Zarnik opened EEK, A MOUSE!, a shop selling nothing but mouse bric-a-brac: stuffed mice and ceramic mice and books about mice and mice plates and mice paintings and expensive denim blouses with mice embroidered on the pockets. Howie Dornick actually went in there once and bought a rubber squeak-toy mouse for Rhubarb. Matisse ate it.
They walk down the west side of Tocqueville and start up South Mill. All of the impressive Victorians and Greek Revivals are painted soapy white again. The fervid repainting began shortly after Oprah Whinfrey did a show with the famous color designer Koko. The Serendipity Green® craze is over, Oprah proclaimed. Now everything is white white white. White clothes. White shoes. White fingernails and white lips and white cars and white sheets and white houses. But, as Koko pointed out, and Oprah agreed, this new world of whiteness does not mean a bland and colorless world. Koko has, after all, designed seventy-seven shades of white, each named after a different virtuous woman. Howie Dornick finds the current white craze a hoot. He knows that any day now Hugh Harbinger will be back from Peru and before long the world will be brown brown brown.
They let Matisse and Rhubarb piss the hedge in front of Donald Grinspoon’s impressive gothic. The house is for sale. Just ten weeks ago Donald Grinspoon took a rope with him to the empty snack cake plant. It was his protégé D. William Aitchbone who found him dangling over the rusting cupcake wrapping machine, suicide note safety-pinned to his sweater. Now Donald is in the cemetery with his Penelope, the date of his death freshly chiseled on the stone. Donald loved Penelope more than anything, and except for his necessary tryst with the wife of the Weideman Boot Company president, he was as loyal and as faithful as any man ever was. He was the salt of the earth, that’s what Donald Grinspoon was.
Matisse and Rhubarb also want to piss the ornamental fence in front of D. William Aitchbone’s impressive Queen Anne. The house is as soapy white as it ever was. Say what you will about Bill Aitchbone, he was never one to succumb to fashion. Yes, he had a rough row to hoe there for a while—all that business with Victoria Bonobo, Karen leaving with the kids, smashing into the gazebo—but with the help of Dr. Pirooz Aram, he’s on top of his game again. Karen and the kids are back home where they belong. And he’s about to be elected mayor of Tuttwyler. He’s the only candidate on the ballot. Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne went off to live with Victoria Bonobo in Washington after the Vice President rewarded her with a job at the Department of the Interior.
D. William Aitchbone also could be in Washington if he wanted. After he took that bullet in the elbow for the Vice President he could have gone to work in any cabinet department he wanted. The attempted assassination created such sympathy for the VP that the Justice Department’s report implicating him in Revenge-gate went unnoticed by both the public and the press. But D. William Aitchbone wants to be mayor for a term or two, and then a member of Congress when old Buddy Bowfin steps down. He’ll be a shoe-in. His only potential rival is county commissioner Buddy Bowfin Jr. And did Buddy Bowfin Jr. take a bullet in the elbow for the Vice President of the United States? He did not.
Howie Dornick and Katherine Hardihood reach the square. Even though the food tents and craft booths are still open, the square is empty. Everyone is at the Re-Enactment. The gazebo looks nice now that it’s been re-painted white. Just the other day the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a big story on the bath Bison-Prickert took on all that leftover Serendipity Green® paint. Myron Bison III told the paper that while the company’s debt is wrecking havoc with its stock values, the relocation of its production facility to Matamoros, Mexico will return it to profitability by the third quarter. Helping, said Myron Bison III, will be its new line of white paints, an amazing seventy-seven shades offered in both latex and rust-resistant enamel.
Howie Dornick makes sure they skirt the gazebo—he did the repainting and he’ll be damned if Matisse and Rhubarb are going to piss it. They head toward the library.
Katherine Hardihood had worked at the library for so many years. Helped make so many just-average kids smarter. So many smart kids smarter yet. Steered so many people toward the truth. Found them the facts they wanted and needed. But the drug test for employees pushed through by D. William Aitchbone was the last straw. She resigned and as soon as she and Howie were back from their honeymoon in the Poconos, she opened a little bookstore on the square, filling the window with every book EDIT didn’t like.
Megan Burroughs is head librarian at the Tuttwyler branch now. And right now Megan’s amplified voice is echoing across the village as she reads to the crowd about John and Amos Tuttwyler who, while hunting for a spot on Three Fish Creek to build their grist mill, happened across the Indian squaw Pogawedka, and perhaps thinking they were in danger of being attacked by other noble savages hiding in the trees, clubbed her and her baby to death. For many years Katherine Hardihood read this crap.
When Megan Burroughs finishes reading, The Marching Wildcat Band of West Wyssock High begins its peppy marshal version of Pachebel’s “Canon in D major.”
They pull Matisse and Rhubarb across the street and into the black lawn surrounding the library.
Howie Dornick could never admit this to his woman, of course, but he finds the noise of the Re-Enactment comforting. It’s another sign that things are finally getting back to normal. The royalty checks have stopped coming and the Serendipity Green® paint on his clapboards is beginning to chip and fade. It has been months since daytrippers left cookies on his porch and reporters from foreign lands banged on his door.
Best of all, people are ignoring him again. Oh sure, sometimes someone waves when he’s mowing the cemetery grass or cleaning out a storm sewer, and sometimes when he’s shopping for food or buying socks at Kmart someone will ask, “How’s it going?” But by and large things are getting back to where they were. He’
s nobody again. He gets up and goes to work and comes home and watches TV. At night he and Katherine walk Matisse and Rhubarb. Sometimes on a Saturday or a Sunday they drive to Hinckley Lake and watch the ducks swim in circles in the shallow bay by the boathouse. Every month or so they drive over to Wooster to see how the Bittinger boy is coming along with his new business ventures. The espresso bar and gift shop aren’t doing so well, but the gourmet grocery is a big success and the Bittinger boy is talking about opening one in Tuttwyler. He’s got his eyes on the empty auto parts store.
So Howie Dornick happily pulls Matisse along on his leash and Katherine Hardihood happily pulls Rhubarb along on his clothesline.
There is a dark shape moving along the back wall of the library. It is a strange dark shape. It is wide and round and flat on top. And it has two legs and two arms. And those arms are carrying something. During the festival teenagers are always lurking in the shadows, necking and smoking cigarettes, but this is a strange shape and Howie and Katherine are more than a little curious.
They advance, quietly, until they reach the azalea bushes by the rock garden. Matisse and Rhubarb want to piss the bushes, so they stop and let them. They can see the dark shape more clearly now. It is a large cupcake. Which, of course, means it is Darren Frost, the village expert on pornography. They watch as Darren Frost carefully places one of the things in his arms against the wall. It is a long and cylindrical thing. It’s a pipe bomb, that’s what it is. Darren Frost intends to blow up the library.
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