Serendipity Green (27 page)

D. William Aitchbone sips his coffee slowly, calculating how this scandal might affect his own fortunes. His political fortunes. His marital fortunes. Clearly he does not want to ride in the Squaw Days parade with a VP about to be impeached and imprisoned. Had he succumbed to Victoria Bonobo in that Washington hotel room, he would have been forced to do just that! So at first glance his faithfulness to Karen looks like a godsend. No sex with Vicki, no VP at Squaw Days. Same deal as last year. But he knows only too well that Victoria Bonobo is as ruthless as he is, and what at first glance looks like a godsend may at second, third or fourth glance prove to be a god-awful mess. So he sips his coffee even more slowly.

He thinks about that scene in the mayor's office. It's clear why Woody Sadlebyrne was laughing at the VP's misfortune. He's a Democrat. And an asshole. But why was Victoria Bonobo laughing? Pretty soon it's as clear as the nose on his face: She knows he puked those huevos rancheros on purpose. She knows he has no intention of copulating with her, that despite his obvious lust for her, he is a loyal and loving husband. And because of that fatal flaw, she will make him pay, see to it that the VP comes to Squaw Days no matter what. And he, the ever-loyal Republican, will have to ride with him in the parade no matter what, politically humiliated, tainted with scandal, no more likely to win the next election for mayor than Katherine Hardihood is likely to win the next Miss Universe pageant.

And so with no other choice—no other choice at all—D. William Aitchbone drives to Woodchuck Ridge, to Victoria Bonobo's wide concrete driveway. He runs to the porch and rings the bell and when she opens the door he takes her by her wonderful shoulders and squeezes her wonderful breasts against his pounding heart. “Vicki,” he says, his thin lips all over her smooth neck, “I've got to have you! Right now, Vicki!”

As she giggles in his ear, he looks into the kitchen and sees Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne drinking a tall glass of milk, wearing nothing but a skimpy pair of Serendipity Green® jockey shorts.

22

It is April again. Howie Dornick has never liked April. It is the month the storm sewers back up and send him underground to claw out clumps of leaves and mud and the rotting carcasses of rats and cats, the month potholes appear, like sores on a leper, sending him into the wet village streets with shovelsful of asphalt patch. It is the month when the traffic lights short out, sending him up ladders, a zillion volts of electricity just that far from his runny nose.

And so here he is, with rain in his face, rain about to turn into BBs of ice any second now, balancing atop a ladder, minivans and sport utility vehicles circling him like hyenas, rewiring the traffic light at Tocqueville and South Mill. “Hey!” someone in a fine black Lincoln yells up at him. “Where's that green house?”

Howie Dornick points his electrical pliers down South Mill. It is the fifth time he's pointed his pliers that morning. It is also the fifth time he's wondered just why in
thee hell
is he standing atop this ladder—still working like an old unappreciated dog for the village—when he has enough money in the bank now to buy half the damn village? There are plenty of deep and dark psychological reasons he supposes. Self-hatred maybe. Or low-esteem? Or atonement for the sins of his war-hero father? Fear maybe, or some convoluted sense of duty. Perhaps the pleasure of being a pain in the ass. Who knows why he stays in this worthless job? Maybe it's just that you can't teach an old unappreciated dog new tricks. Maybe that's all there is to it.

A final dangerous twist and snip and the traffic light is fixed. He puts the ladder in the village pickup. “Where's that syrupy green house?” an old woman in a red Oldsmobile asks him. Her hair is dyed nearly the same shade of red as her car, as is the hair of the five or six other women wedged inside. He points down South Mill.

“Do you suppose the man who owns the syrupy house is at home?” the woman with Oldsmobile red hair then asks him. “We baked him some cookies.”

“I think he's on a Caribbean cruise,” He answers sympathetically. “But I suppose you can leave the cookies on the porch.” The women drive off and he hurries to the control box on the corner and resets the traffic light.

Red.

Yellow.

Green.

Order is restored. The cars on South Mill dutifully stop. The cars on Tocqueville dutifully go.

Howie Dornick spends the rest of morning looking for the leak in the village hall roof that's turning the newly carpeted fire chief's office into a federally protected wetland, or so the fire chief has complained. He spends the afternoon replacing the shingles and copper flashing around the hall's decorative cupola. The cupola was added to the village hall the same year the gazebo was built, two extremely high-maintenance and totally unnecessary gewgaws erected at great expense to make all those new people moving into the new housing developments feel like they're living in a real honest-to-gosh country town, with a handy shopping mall, handy interstate exit, and handy summer festival. Before going home for the day, he Shopvacs the water out of the fire chief's carpet. No threat of heron or ducks building nests there now.

Thankfully there is only one car of daytrippers parked in front of his two-story frame. Eyes straight ahead he walks past them, pretending he doesn't hear their pleas for autographs. He picks up the tin of cookies left on the porch and goes inside. He doesn't turn on any lights. In these months since he and his house became famous, Howie Dornick has learned that a light in the window is an open invitation to strangers. So he sits in the dark and sups on Thermos coffee and—what a surprise—green cookies.

The cookies are not exactly Serendipity Green®, but Howie Dornick knows it is only a matter of time before Serendipity Green® food coloring will be on the market and he'll up to his ears in Serendipity Green® bakery. Hugh Harbinger has already sent him a case of Serendipity Green® Easter egg dye.

At eight Katherine Hardihood call him. “Can you come over?”

“I was just there last night.”

“Can't we can see each other two nights in a row?”

“We never have before.”

“Then you're coming over?”

“Of course.”

“Just don't expect anything,” she says. “I'm in no mood.”

“Me neither,” he assures her.

Howie Dornick chooses the most masculine of the five Serendipity Green® umbrellas Hugh sent him and walks briskly through the BB-gun ice shower to Oak Street. “I brought you some cookies,” he says to his woman when she opens the door and pulls him inside. The living room smells of Pine Sol. Rhubarb is perched on top of the couch wearing one of the two dozen Serendipity Green® flea collars Hugh Harbinger sent a while ago.

Katherine Hardihood fills a pair of Serendipity Green® mugs with boiling water and shakes an envelope of instant cocoa into each. She opens a bag of miniature marshmallows with her librarian's teeth.

Howie knows from the mound of marshmallows she floats in her cocoa that his woman is out of kilter about something. She has been out of kilter a lot lately. They head for the sofa. “Good day at the library?” he asks.

It's the question she has been waiting for. She thanks him with a kiss right between the eyes. “Darren Frost came in this afternoon.”

“Surfing the Net for porn?” Howie Dornick knows nothing of computers or the Internet, but like everyone in the world today, he knows how to say “Surfing the Net.”

“Of course,” says Katherine Hardihood, marshmallow clogging the corners of her mouth. “But under the new rules I can't let him look at it, let alone print it out and wave the pictures around like he's just found definitive proof that the Constitution of the United States was a communist plot.”

“So you had to ask him to stop. Beautiful.”

“But he wouldn't stop, Howard. He started shouting about his First Amendment rights. Threatening to call the ACLU.”

“Darren Frost believes in the First Amendment?”

“He was being sarcastic, Howard.”

“Oh.”

“I had to call the police.”

“All right!”

“By the time they got there that goofball had thrown two computers through the window and ripped the covers off fifty-seven children's books.”

“
Lake Toads and Land Toads?
”

“It was out. It's always out.” Katherine Hardihood eats a green cookie. Now there are green crumbs stuck to the marshmallow on her lips. “It's all Bill Aitchbone's fault, of course.”

Howie wets his thumb and tidies his woman's mouth. “Now, Katherine. He's not to blame for everything.”

“The hell he isn't. He put Ray Biscobee on the library board knowing very well Venus Willendorf would wrap him right around her big nipples.”

Howie Dornick fears his woman is slipping more out of kilter by the minute. “I think you mean around her little finger.”

“I said big nipples and I meant big nipples.”

“Sorry.”

“Bill Aitchbone knew from the get-go Ray Biscobee would crumble,” she explains, “and he knew that would only make Darren Frost, or one of EDIT's other crazies, all the crazier. ‘Satan got the reverend, but he won't get me.' That sort of thing.”

“Good God, Katherine, do you really think—”

“You bet I think.”

“You want to watch some TV?”

It was the wrong thing to say. “Watching some TV is your answer to everything.”

“Sorry.”

Katherine Hardihood puts her empty cocoa mug on the coffee table and curls up next to her man. “Did I tell you that Ray Biscobee wants all the librarians to take a loyalty oath.”

“Loyalty to what?”

“To Community Standards. I'm not taking any oaths, Howard. I'm not.”

“What about Venus Willendorf's big nipples? Won't they come riding to the rescue?”

“Oh, sure. But Bill Aitchbone will see to it there's some kind of compromise. A compromise I'll have to live with until Darren Frost comes in with an Uzi. That's why I wanted you to come over tonight, Howard.”

“I see,” he says, not seeing anything.

“I think Bill Aitchbone is too much for us.”

Now he does see. “We're not going public with the bones, are we?”

“He'll grind us finer than table salt.”

“What about the facts? What about the truth?”

“He's too much for us, Howard.”

Howie Dornick picks up the TV remote. But he knows enough not to use it. He plays with it like a string of worry beads. “I'll get my own Uzi. And guard you day and night.”

Katherine takes the remote from his hands and wraps her librarian's arms around his maintenance engineer's neck and fills her lungs with enough oxygen to last through an hour of lovemaking. “You'd do that for me?”

“I thought you were in no mood.”

“I love you, Howard.”

He pushes her back on the cushions and then falls on her like the trunk of a rotted redwood. The marshmallow on their lips cements them together like Crazy Glue.

“We're going through with it,” Howie Dornick says with masculine certitude as they kiss and kiss and kiss. “Even if I have to point my Uzi at you.”

“You can point your Uzi-woozie at me anytime you want.”

“We're going through with it,” Howie Dornick says again, unbuttoning her librarian's blouse with the speed of a farm wife podding spring peas. “No matter how crazy Bill Aitchbone or Darren Frost or anybody else gets.”

Katherine Hardihood twists and unhooks her bra for him. Rhubarb heads for his Serendipity Green® food bowl in the kitchen.

An hour later Howie and Katherine are stretched out in bed. Rhubarb is curled up between them, enjoying the exotic smells. Rain is banging on the roof like a bus load of Kentucky clog dancers. The April wind is pruning the trees. “So when we gonna do this?” he asks.

“It's going to cause such a stink,” she says.

“We won't be making any friends.”

“We've done pretty well without any so far.”

They giggle at the total truth of that sad reality. When his woman sits up to turn on the radio, Howie Dornick watches the glow from the streetlight walk down her vertebrae. “I love you, Katherine.”

She smiles and rests her cheek on his wiry chest hair. “Do you think we should tell him first?”

“Bill Aitchbone?” He can feel her nodding yes. “Why on earth would we want to do that?”

“Because we're decent people,” she says. “Because if someone was about to go public with some horrible secret about our ancestors we'd appreciate knowing first. Because Bill Aitchbone, bastard that he is, is going through a tough time with his marriage. And he's sitting alone in his big house missing his kids.”

Howie Dornick does love this woman. “When?”

“When the time is right. When he is at his absolute lowest. When we can grind him up like table salt.”

God does he love her.

Dr. Pirooz Aram sucks the last drop of espresso from his demitasse and pushes the blinking button on his phone. “Hugh Harbinger! My receptionist says you have been calling every fifteen minutes like some crazy person. You are not crazy again, are you?”

“I'm afraid I'm getting there.”

“I keep reading about how rich and famous you are again. America is some amazing place, isn't it? You can be rich and famous as many times as you want. You are still in New York?”

“Up to my neck.”

“You are taking your Solhzac?” Dr. Aram asks. He does not hear his patient's answer. He is too busy thinking about how amazing America is. “I have been playing chess again, Hugh. In fact, that is why you have been calling me like a crazy person all afternoon. I've been at the mall playing chess with my friend Igor Zugzwangadze. He is not a very creative player, but like all Georgians he is a very good tactician.”