Serendipity Green (10 page)

“None of us speak Indian,” Phyllis Bastinado pointed out. “We'll have to find a book on Indian languages. Find out what tribes were living around here in those years.”

“Eries and Wyandots and Senecas and maybe Shawnees,” Katherine Hardihood said. “Although by the time Wyssock County was settled by whites, most of the Indians had been pushed farther west already.”

“That's all interesting, Katherine,” Donald Grinspoon said, “but we don't have time for a big investigation into Indian languages here. I'm going public at the next council meeting with our Squaw Days plans. I've got to have a name. It's the first damn thing Sam Guss at the
Gazette
will want to know. Can't exactly tell him we're still making one up, can I?”

“No you can't,” D. William Aitchbone said.

“I don't see what's so bad about Laughing Feather,” Dick Mueller said.

Delores Poltruski could see that Katherine Hardihood was about to yell Jiminy Cricket or worse. “I've got a
great
name for the squaw—Pogawedka!”

“I like it!” Donald Grinspoon said immediately. He imitated a B-movie Indian chief. “Pog-uh-wed-kuh! Pog-uh-wed-kuh!”

Everyone but Katherine Hardihood started imitating B-movie Indians: “Pog-uh-wed-kuh! Pog-uh-wed-kuh! Pog-uh-wed-kuh!”

“Princess Pogawedka,” Donald Grinspoon shouted.

“Prin-cess Pog-uh-wed-kuh! Prin-cess Pog-uh-wed-kuh!”

“What about her baby's name?” Phyllis Bastinado then wondered.

“I guess Little Laughing Feather is out of the question,” Dick Mueller said.

“Was Princess Pogawedka's papoose a boy or a girl?” Donald Grinspoon asked.

“A boy,” D. William Aitchbone decided.

“Then how about Kapusta?” Delores Poltruski offered.

“Kuh-poosh-tuh! Kuh-poosh-tuh!”

When Katherine Hardihood arrived at the library the next morning, she went straight for the language books and pulled down a Polish to English dictionary: Pogawedka meant nonsense. Kapusta meant cabbage. “Jiminy Cricket,” she said. “Princess Nonsense and her Little Cabbage!”

Katherine Hardihood would wonder for the next thirteen years whether she had a playful ally on the committee. Or whether Delores Poltruski was just another fool.

8

April is a cold, muddy mess. May is not much better. Robins, forced to build nests and mate under these miserable conditions, are edgy and aggressive, ganging up on the sparrows and mourning doves. Goldfinches are refusing to turn gold, preferring to wear their melancholy winter brown. Squirrels are groggy from too much sleep. Canada geese are suffering from diarrhea. Tulips are dwarfed, their petals lackluster. People aren't washing their cars, or picking up the pop cans and cigarette wrappers littering their lawns, or cleaning the muck out of their gutters. The owners of garden centers, their greenhouses stuffed with unsold petunias and marigolds and impatiens, are pulling out their hair. Kmart and Wal-mart have more bags of topsoil and peat moss and cedar wood chips than they know what to do with. Denny's hasn't sold a single glass of iced tea. Frank and Carla Cooke, owners of the Dairy Doodle, are up to their elbows in frozen custard. Farmers can't plow. Men sit in their garages on their idle riding mowers watching the wet grass get higher and higher, while their wives rearrange cupboard after cupboard. The girl's softball team at West Wyssock High hasn't played half its games because of the rain, and in a one case, because of the snow.

Some blame the terrible spring on global warming. Some blame it on the coming of a new Ice Age. The Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee on Sunday, rain stomping up and down on the roof of his half-empty church, blames it on the filth available at the library. “God is warning us,” he says.

Still, the people of Tuttwyler, Ohio, have to get on with their lives, Howie Dornick among them.

One Friday evening he takes a long shower with a new bar of Ivory Soap. He puts on his suit pants and a light blue shirt, and then, after watching the clock tick away to 8:30, gathers up the bag of fancy muffins he bought that afternoon at the Daydream Beanery and walks up South Mill, across the square, then down East Wooseman to North Grant. After stopping at the In & Out for a box of Tic-tacs, he forces his legs up Oak Street to Katherine Hardihood's two-bedroom ranch. He stands on the front step for a long minute and watches Delores Poltruski pull into Dick Mueller's driveway. Finally he rings the bell. And he knocks, just in case the bell isn't working.

Katherine Hardihood isn't at all surprised by his appearance at her door. She's invited him to stop by. The dress pants and blue shirt and bag of muffins do surprise her, though. Pleasantly surprise her. Also makes her more nervous than she wants to be.

“Smells like Pine Sol,” Howie Dornick says, sniffing the living room air.

“My cat has a hard time controlling himself.”

“Pisses things, does he?”

Katherine Hardihood takes the muffins to the kitchen and puts them on a pink depression glass platter. She pours two cups of freshly dripped coffee—freshly ground from the hazelnut-flavored beans she bought that morning from the Daydream Beanery—and putting everything on a reproduction tin Coca-Cola tray, returns to the living room.

Howie has positioned himself on the end of her sofa. “It's going to be just like last year, isn't it?” he says, putting down the
Newsweek
he wasn't reading. “It's going straight from winter to summer. No spring at all.”

“Looks that way, doesn't it?”

Howie Dornick and Katherine Hardihood have been seeing each other quite a bit lately. D. William Aitchbone has seen to that.

“These muffins are wonderful,” Katherine says, peeling back the sticky paper cup and taking a guppy bite out of her muffin's crunchy golden skin.

They talk about the Daydream Beanery for a while, he shaking his head at what a prissy place it is, she telling him that it's where she bought the coffee they're drinking, which, he agrees is pretty tasty. They talk about the trouble EDIT is causing for the library, including D. William Aitchbone's ongoing threat to nominate Ray Biscobee for the board. They talk about his ongoing proposal to privatize village services—it looks like he has the votes to push it through at the June meeting—and they talk about the cause of all this trouble in their lives, Howie's unpainted clapboards.

“Do you really think I should paint?” he asks.

“It's up to you,” she answers.

“I don't know,” he says.

They finish all the muffins and half the coffee, and then, as if D. William Aitchbone secretly has implanted computer chips in their buttocks and brains, these two unappetizing people copulate right there on the couch, with the light on, and the drapes wide open, with Rhubarb watching from the top of the sofa, the scent of Pine Sol, Ivory Soap, and hazelnut wafting.

Howie Dornick walks home at one in the morning, wishing his mind was full of fresh memories of wonderful sex. But it hadn't been wonderful sex. It had been horrible sex. It was obvious from Katherine Hardihood's shaking knees that she had never had sex before. And his excessive sweating and inopportune passing of hazelnut-scented gas hadn't helped matters. Nor had his penis. It hadn't been in contact with a vagina since his year in Japan in the early sixties, and just like Japan, it had remained rubbery and ambivalent throughout.

Still, the kissing beforehand had gone fine, as had the hugging afterwards. After they each spent some time in the bathroom cleaning up, they had another cup of coffee, and shared a bowl of Cheez-its, letting Rhubarb lick their orange fingertips while they watched public television's umpteenth re-broadcast of Yobisch Podka's 1991 performance with the Santa Fe Symphony.

When he reaches the porch of his unpainted two-story frame on South Mill, Howie Dornick presses his face against the raw gray clapboards and cries. In the morning he drives all the way to Wooster. Passing the Wagon Wheel Restaurant, he spots a car in the parking lot that looks just like the American-made Japanese luxury job D. William Aitchbone drives—same pewter paintjob and everything. He drives on to Bittinger's Hardware and walks straight for the young man standing behind the cash register, who has shorn bootcamp hair, an earring, and a tee-shirt that reads BONE HEAD.

“How can I help you?” the young man asks in the friendly, efficient voice the hardware-selling Bittingers have been using for ninety years.

Howie frowns at the tee-shirt. “I need some house paint.”

“You've come to the right place.”

“I'm painting my house. On the cheap.”

“Gotcha.”

The Bittinger boy leads Howie Dornick down the wallpaper aisle to a pyramid of paint cans by the nail-nut-bolt-and-screw display. “Not our best, but the best for the price,” he says, using a line he's heard his father and grandfather use a thousand times. He taps on the can lids as if they're a stack of bongo drums.

Howie stares at the pyramid of cans, in his head trying to multiply the sale price by the number of gallons he figures he needs. He doesn't like the total he comes up with. “Anything cheaper?” he asks.

“Nothing I'd feel right selling you,” the Bittinger boy says, another well-practiced family line jumping off his tongue.

“I've got to do this on the cheap,” Howie Dornick says.

The Bittinger boy knows the Bittinger credo:
Sell up if you can, sell at sale price if you must, but sell something if you call yourself a Bittinger
. And he wants to stay a Bittinger, at least until he graduates from Ohio University. He studies not only his customer's shabby clothes, but also the poverty in his eyes. “If this is too steep, we've got some stuff in the back I could give you at a real good price.”

“I'm interested in a real good price.”

The boy gives his customer the
follow-me
Bittinger wave and starts down the wallpaper aisle. “Once in a while somebody orders a custom color, then doesn't pick it up, for whatever reason.” He turns down the garden tool aisle and gives the seed rack a spin just in case his customer might want to plant something. “Where you from?”

“Tuttwyler.”

“I went to Squaw Days once. Almost entered the tobacco-spitting contest.”

The small talk tempts Howie Dornick to ask the Bittinger boy about the message on his tee-shirt. “What makes you a bonehead?”

“My girlfriend had it made for me. I'm majoring in forensic anthropology, with a minor in archeology. I study bones and stuff.”

“No kidding.”

The Bittinger boy drums on the chest like a National Geographic gorilla. “Eventually I'd love to work with somebody like Donald Johanson. You know, from the Institute of Human Origins? The guy who discovered Lucy?
Australopithecus afarensis
? In Ethiopia? The little three-million-year-old hominid babe? Did you know Johanson used to work at the Natural History Museum in Cleveland? Working with a heavy hitter like Johanson is a long shot. Believe me, a reeeeaaaal long shot. I'll probably end up in a crime lab solving murders. But that's OK. More fun than selling hardware.”

Bonehead, all right, Howie Dornick thinks.

The garden tool aisle empties into the heating and plumbing supply department. Between the air conditioners and the sump pumps stands the door to the back room. The Bittinger boy leads his customer through it. He knees in front of a stack of paint cans and twists them so he can read the labels. “I've got to warn you, some of these colors are reeeeaaaally something.”

Howie Dornick squats next to him. “Let's see what you've got.”

“Well, I've got four gallons of this yellow. The guy who took over the Klean Kar car wash on Route 3 wanted something that would really catch people's eye. Two days after he took it over, somebody shot him while he was emptying the quarter boxes. So we got stuck with this really bright yellow.”

“How bright is it?”

“I can give you a real good price. I can give you a real good price on all this stuff.”

And so Howie Dornick leaves Bittinger's Hardware with not only the four cans of car-wash yellow, but also with three cans of video-store blue (the electrician hired to rewire the old empty store burned it to the ground, the Bittinger boy told him), two cans of beauty-shop blue (the three women partners had a falling-out over what their shop should be called, Hairway to Heaven, Shear Magic, or Cheap Cuts), one can of gold (The Bittinger boy had mixed that one for a Wooster College fraternity house, but the brothers spent the entire fix-it budget on a propane grill, leaving repainting of the big peeling Greek letters above the front porch for another year), and one can of darkroom black (ordered by a freelance photographer who fell off a barn roof trying to take a panoramic shot of Holsteins coming in for milking, for the July cover of
Ohio Cow
magazine). Despite the misfortunes of these various Woosterites, Howie Dornick leaves Wooster a happy man. He's gotten all these cans for the price of one can of sale-price white.

As soon as his customer drives away, the Bittinger boy calls home. “Dad,” he says, “you'll never guess what some guy from Tuttwyler just bought. All that paint in the back.”

“Hope you gave him a good deal. You don't make your money on what people buy from you today, but on what they buy from you tomorrow.”

“Gave him a real good deal.”

“Good. You're not wearing that goddamn tee-shirt, are you?”

Bittingers never lie, not to each other, not to anybody. Still, they are skilled in the art of evasion. “Tee-shirt?”

“A hardware man can't be thought of as a bonehead,” his father says. “People have to believe hardware men know everything. You sell him any brushes?”

“One of the cheap ones with the plastic bristles.”

“Didn't you explain that a good brush is more important than the paint?”

“Twice. He said the cheap one was good enough.”