Serendipity Green (5 page)

At 9:30 he meets the mayor at the gazebo.

“See you took the decorations down,” Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne says.

“That plastic pine garland was a good idea, mayor,” says Howie Dornick. “It'll last a good twenty years. I'm not so sure about the ribbons, though.”

“Well, I'm glad you got it down.”

“Stored away until next November.”

“Well, that's good.”

Now Howie Dornick learns that the mayor does not want to see him about the gazebo decorations.

“Howie, that dead limb on the box elder has got to come down right away.”

“We ought to cut the whole damn tree down.”

“Wish we could. But it's the last box elder on the square.”

“So what?”

“It's not so much the box elder. It's Katherine Hardihood.”

Howie Dornick understands the mayor's dilemma. While Katherine Hardihood is a fine woman—she once brought him a piece of rhubarb pie when he was digging the leaves out of her storm sewer—she also is something of a fanatic. He imagines coming to the square some morning with a chain saw and finding Katherine Hardihood padlocked to the trunk of the box elder, a half-dozen sticks of dynamite strapped to her chest. “I'll put the limb on my spring list,” he promises.

“Better put it on this morning's list, Howie.”

“OK. But the ground's slicker than shit. You'll have to hold the ladder.”

An hour later Howie Dornick, carbon dioxide rolling out his bright red nostrils, inches his way up the box elder with the village's heavy chain saw. Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne is below him, holding steady the village's ice-cold aluminum ladder, as well as his political future. “For God's sake be careful, Howie.”

“Just hold her still,” Howie Dornick answers. He could just as easily be talking about Katherine Hardihood as the ice-cold aluminum ladder.

Howie Dornick reaches the tree's wide crotch and eases off the ladder. Lying flat against one the tree's still-living limbs, he yanks the cord on the chain saw. The roar fills the square. He leans and sinks the saw's flying blade into the numb, corky wood of the limb in question. Woody shrapnel bounces off Howie Dornick's plastic safety glasses and rains onto the mayor's unprotected face. “Stand back!” Howie Dornick shouts over the roar. The mayor retreats. The limb moans and drops.

Howie Dornick now goes to work on the limb, trimming it into fireplace logs. The mayor helps him load the logs into a wheelbarrow. “There's another matter we need to talk about, Howie,” the mayor says as they head toward the village hall.

And so Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne broaches the subject of his unpainted house.

“Katherine Hardihood got a bug up her flat behind about that, too, does she?”

“Everybody on the Squaw Days Committee, actually.”

They reach the street just as the Don't Walk sign begins flashing. Howie Dornick sets the wheelbarrow down. He is embarrassed now. And angry. And full of self pity. “I know it's bad,” he says, meaning both the condition of his house and his own personal sloth, “but paint ain't exactly in my budget.”

Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne drops his head. “I know the village doesn't pay you much.”

“Benefits aren't any good either. I'm still paying off my mother's medical bills and she's been dead for six years.”

The sign flashes
WALK
. Howie Dornick lifts the wheelbarrow and starts across the street. The mayor pursues him. “Maybe we can get some paint donated.”

“I don't want no charity.”

Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne knows he must be careful. And he knows that Howie Dornick knows it, too. “We all appreciate your service to the village.”

Howie Dornick gives the wheelbarrow an extra push. It's fat rubber wheel bounces over the curb. They head for the rear of the village hall. “What you appreciate, mayor, is my father's service. You know well as me that the only reason I've got this crumb-bum job is because the great Artie Brown saved those Seabees and lost his foot. The same reason my mother got that crumb-bum job fixing lunches at the elementary school.”

“Now, Howie.”

“True, ain't it?”

“True,” the mayor admits.

Howie Dornick appreciates his honesty. “I voted for you, you know.”

“Really? I figured all the village employees voted Republican out of self-preservation.”

“I'm protected by Civil Service.”

They both laugh a little. Their difficult conversation is over. Howie Dornick heads across the parking lot with the wheelbarrow. “Say, mayor,” he calls out. “You don't mind if I take this wood home for my fireplace, do you?”

“Not at all, Howie.”

Woodrow Wilson Sadelbyrne heads back to his office. He's gotten the box elder limb cut—Katherine Hardihood and Delores Poltruski and the Knights of Columbus will be happy about that—but he's gotten absolutely nowhere with Howie Dornick's unpainted house. D. William Aitchbone will not be happy about that. He chuckles at his defeat. The ground isn't the only thing slicker than shit, he thinks.

At four-thirty Howie Dornick walks home to his unpainted two-story frame on South Mill, pushing the village-owned wheelbarrow filled with logs cut from the box elder on the village square. As he struggles up his icy driveway he tries to picture his house with a fresh coat of soap-white paint. But the picture won't stick in his mind any more than a layer of paint would stick to those warped and weathered clapboards. He likes his unpainted house. Likes it fine. It has always been unpainted, at least as long as he and his mother lived there. A coat of paint on those clapboards would be as unnatural as a wedding ring on his mother's rough cafeteria manager hand.

For his supper Howie Dornick makes three Swiss cheese and bologna sandwiches. He makes the sandwiches on wheat bread. He always eats wheat bread. He flavors the sandwiches with brown mustard. He does not eat his sandwiches at the kitchen table, but takes them into the living room, setting them right on the arm of his La-Z-Boy recliner. He turns on the
Jerry Springer
show. Jerry is interviewing mixed-race girls who don't know that their mixed-race boyfriends are really mixed-race girls like themselves, disguising their sex under baggy sweaters, baggy pants and backwards baseball caps. Howie Dornick cannot keep his eyes from drifting to the mantle, to the photograph of his mother and to Artie Brown's prosthetic foot.

His mother's name was Patsy, Patsy Dornick. The Dornicks were a family of Irish Catholics, originally from the west side of Cleveland. They moved to Tuttwyler during World War II, when Tuttwyler Mills was having trouble finding men with baking experience. Patsy's father had plenty of baking experience and having just lost his only son in North Africa, and his only wife in a streetcar accident, he was eager to escape the ghosts of his west side house. He bought the two-story frame on South Mill and went to work baking snack cakes.

Patsy was the oldest of four daughters, already a sophomore in high school when they moved to Tuttwyler. She had a tiny but well-proportioned frame.

She had her mother's perfect face. She did not miss her mother, since she was always with her, in every mirror she passed, and always in the sadness on her father's face. But she did miss her brother.

Howie Dornick's father was the war hero Artie Brown. The Browns were farmers, able to trace their ancestry to one of Connecticut's earliest families. They were a happy family, hard-working and patriotic, almost all of them living disease-free well into their eighties. The Browns considered their good health and longevity the result of good breeding rather than some sort of divine reward. Only the Brown women, recruited from other well-bred families, showed any interest in religion. The Brown men never set foot in a church unless it was a Saturday night and fried chicken was being served.

Artie Brown enlisted the same day he graduated from high school. Patsy Dornick had not yet arrived from the west side of Cleveland and his heart and his future belonged to Melody Ring. In the summer of 1942, Artie found himself in the U.S. Army's 164th Regiment, on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal. On the day he was to become a hero he was sitting behind a Browning .30-caliber machine gun, on the banks of the Matanikau River, guarding a battalion of Seabees who had just finished building a swing bride and were now taking a much-needed bath in the moonlight. Smoking a Camel and sipping a tin cup of cold bitter joe, Artie Brown watched the naked Seabees in the river below him, scrubbing the sweat from their pimply backs and the bugs from their itchy groins.

Suddenly Japanese soldiers exploded through the jungle along the opposite bank. Grenades and bullets ripped chunks of flesh from the naked and soapy Seabees. Artie Brown and his Browning came to their defense, ripping chunks of flesh from both palm trees and Japanese. The Seabees splashed ashore. The Japanese kept coming. Many of both were killed.

The Seabees reached the bank and kept going, naked and wet into the jungle without stopping to gather up their clothes or their weapons. Artie Brown kept firing. Japanese kept coming. Japanese kept dying.

It was now that Howie Dornick's future father became a hero. To his left he saw Japanese filing onto the bridge. It would have been like shooting starlings off a barbwire fence for him, had not one of the Seabees parked a bulldozer in the line of fire. Without thinking Artie Brown abandoned his Browning, and bent like a barn door hinge, ran to the bulldozer. As he ran, shrapnel from a Japanese grenade sliced his foot off at the ankle.

Artie Brown hadn't driven a bulldozer before, but he'd been driving farm tractors since he was five and by the time he was in the bulldozer's ass-shaped metal seat, he had the levers figured out. His bleeding ankle stump working the clutch, he drove the bulldozer straight onto the bridge. The bridge and the bulldozer and Artie Brown and a lot of Japanese collapsed into the river.

Artie rose from the river bottom like a coconut. He would have been spotted and shot for certain had he not come up under a face-down Seabee oozing blood. Sticking his nose out of the water between the dead Seabee's open legs, Artie Brown floated safely down the Matanikau. After a bend or two, he pushed the Seabee away and swam to shore. He hobbled for six miles until be reached the forward line of the 7th Marine Regiment. By noon of the following day, the Japanese advance was stopped and the surviving Seabees, wearing nothing but dried soap, were rescued from the jungle.

Artie found himself a hero. The morning he was to be evacuated back to Australia, Major General Alexander M. Patch found him among the other wounded and stooped over his stretcher. “You lost a foot, soldier,” Major General Patch was reported to have said, “but you saved a whole gaggle of Seabees. I'm recommending you for a Congressional Medal of Honor Medal.”

“Well, ain't that something,” Artie was reported to have said.

And so one-footed Artie Brown came home to Tuttwyler. There was a parade and a special church service and an article in the local paper, and Melody Ring, so proud and so relieved, let him for the first time unhook her bra. Not too many days after that one-time event, Patsy Dornick began letting him unbuckle the belt on her dungarees, as many times as his heroism required.

Patsy Dornick went off to live with an aunt in Cleveland for a while. By the time she returned with young Howard Allen—last name still blank—Artie Brown, fitted with the best prosthetic foot the people of Tuttwyler could chip in for, was back on the farm plowing and milking and wondering why in the hell he'd married Melody Ring.

And so Howard Allen was christened a Dornick, though everybody in Tuttwyler, including the former Melody Ring, knew he was a Brown.

Howie Dornick washes down his bologna and Swiss cheese sandwiches with the last of the instant coffee in his Thermos. After
Jerry Springer
he watches the local news, and then the national news, and then
Wheel of Fortune
and
Jeopardy
. Then he brings in an armful of logs and builds a fire. The box elder wood is dead but wet, and no matter how far he opens the damper, smoke fills the living room. Still, he stays by the fire until the logs are reduced to ash and then he goes to bed.

He hides his head between his two flat pillows. It has been one of those days when the plusses and minuses balance out, leaving you uneasy and ambivalent and awake for a long time. Despite the work and risk involved, being forced to cut that dead limb out of the box elder had been a plus. It had pleased the mayor. Pleased Delores Poltruski and the Knights of Columbus. Pleased God knows how many others.

But it wasn't the
pleasing
that made cutting that limb a plus. He doesn't care about pleasing people. What he cares about is
pressure
. He is under a lot of pressure. Terrible pressure. Pressure others in Tuttwyler can't begin to imagine. For most people the worst pressure of their lives is over the moment they pop free of their mother's vaginas. But he is still dangling from his mother's vagina, unable to be fully born, the only imperfection of a perfect father.

Being the war hero he was, Artie Brown was never required to take responsibility for the imperfection Patsy Dornick had named Howard Allen, neither legally nor financially. Not even morally. Boys will be boys. War heroes will be war heroes.

But Tuttwyler was required to take responsibility.

It was easy for the village to be responsible for Artie Brown's imperfection while the snack cake line was still operating. There was a job for anyone you needed one. An unmarried mother could have a job there. An illegitimate son could have a job there. They could slide into the production line unnoticed, hidden by the jangle of conveyor belts, the whoosh of wrapping machines and the growl of tow motors; hidden by the wonderful aroma of cakes baking and sweet icings squirting. But when the snack cake plant moved to Tennessee there were not so many jobs for women who seduced war heroes or for the illegitimate sons dangling from their vaginas. So Patsy Dornick and her son Howard Allen became wards of the village. She was given a job at G.A. Elementary School as cafeteria
manager
. He was hired as the village's maintenance
engineer
. Grand-sounding jobs no one in their right mind would want to do. Jobs that paid next to nothing. Jobs that would make Patsy and Howie Dornick forever beholden to the village's brutal benevolence.