Serendipity Green (21 page)

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 Guadalcanal 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 weather,” 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.”

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!