Serendipity Green (20 page)

There is a fabulous gasp.

Howie Dornick has been watching Matisse for two weeks when a contract arrives in the mail from Hugh Harbinger. There's no small print in this contact to worry about, or see a lawyer about. In the clearest English it simply guarantees one Howard Allen Dornick of 185 South Mill St., Tuttwyler, Ohio, fifty percent of all royalties derived from the licensing of the color therein known as Serendipity Green®. Embarrassed that he has consented to such a foolhardy agreement, he signs the contract as soon as he finds a ballpoint. He stuffs it into the self-addressed stamped envelope his new partner has provided him. With Matisse trotting alongside on his leash, he walks the envelope to the out-of-town drop-off box outside the Post Office.

The next morning he drives the village truck to the old Aitchbone family farm on Three Fish Creek Road, to fulfill an even more foolhardy agreement—to dig up and re-plant Bill Aitchbone's ancestors at seventy-five bucks a pop. “Why in
thee hell
am I doing this?” he yells at himself as he drives. “Why in
thee hell
?”

He reaches the Aitchbone farm much too soon. The house and barn have been flattened by bulldozers. A huge plywood sign has been planted: SETTLER'S KNOB. EXQUISITE EXECUTIVE HOMES. He drives past the earthmovers waiting to scrape the precious topsoil off the land, drives all the way to the hill overlooking the creek, where the village's faded yellow backhoe and a stack of inexpensive coffins are waiting. He crawls over the wrought iron fence and climbs aboard the backhoe. The tractor, with its great digging claw poised like the tail of a giant scorpion, starts up on the first try. Diesel fumes spoil the crisp October air.

As skillfully as Artie Brown drove that Seabee bulldozer into the Japanese-infested Matanikau River, Howie Dornick sends the backhoe's claw into the six feet of good earth atop the bones of Henry and Blanche Aitchbone. Little by little he peels away the dirt until he finds traces of rotted wood. Now comes the hard part, the shovel work. It's noon before he has Henry and Blanche in their new caskets. With chains and skill he lifts them into the truck. Next he lifts their old weather-worn headstone into the truck. He drives to the Tuttwyler Village Cemetery where, with only a pair of squirrels as witnesses, he lowers Henry and Blanche into their new eternal resting place. When they are covered with dirt and their headstone resting firmly atop them, he goes back to the farm for another Aitchbone or two.

In three days Howie Dornick digs up seven of D. William Aitchbone's ancestors. He is accustomed to the sight of dirty old bones by now, accustomed to handling skulls with gold-plugged teeth. He is accustomed to his recurring dream of opening a rotting box and finding the decaying bodies of Artie Brown and Patsy Dornick copulating like there is no tomorrow.

On the fourth day the backhoe eats into the dirt over one Seth Aitchbone. Only four feet down the claw strikes bone. “Well, that's not right,” Howie Dornick says. He jumps off the backhoe to remove the yellowy femur dangling from the claw. What he finds in the hole sends him driving like a madman into Tuttwyler, to the Tuttwyler Branch of the Wyssock County Library, to the desk of branch librarian Katherine Hardihood who is completing a report to the board on how many children were caught looking at pornography on the Internet the previous month. It will be a short report, there having been only one offender, Darren Frost Jr., son of Squaw Days cupcake and Christian crusader Darren Frost Sr.

Howie does not let his woman complete the report, short as it is. He drives her back to the Aitchbone farm and the bones only four feet down. Katherine Hardihood crawls into the hole and like an ambidextrous Hamlet lifts two dirt- and worm-filled skulls high into the bluer-than-blue October sky. “Jiminy Cricket,” she says.

By Halloween Hugh Harbinger has signed two dozen licensing agreements. By Thanksgiving week investment bankers and stock brokers are showing up at work in Serendipity Green® suits, checking their Serendipity Green® hats and big-ass Serendipity Green® overcoats at the city's toniest restaurants. Posh Christmas parties on both coasts are wall-to-wall with men and women in Serendipity Green®. Hugh, wearing a Serendipity Green® Santa suit appears on the cover of
GQ
. That same week
Newsweek
puts him buck naked in a Serendipity Green® wheelbarrow full of fifty dollar bills.
Time
doesn't put him on the cover—that honor goes to Yobisch Podka who is about to perform his commissioned symphony at the ceremony celebrating the completed restoration of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling frescoes—but there is a three-page feature inside documenting the color world's jealousy over the Second Coming of Hugh Harbinger: FABULOUSLY GREEN WITH ENVY the headline reads. A photograph of a perplexed Howie Dornick shoveling snow outside his Serendipity Green® two-story frame accompanies the story. Just a week before Christmas, the nation's Gap stores are piled high with Serendipity Green® socks, Serendipity Green® jockey shorts, Serendipity Green® polo shirts, even stacks of Serendipity Green® chinos. On December 23, Hugh flies back to Cleveland to claim Matisse and hand Howie Dornick a prototype Serendipity Green® food blender stuffed with very real royalty checks. “This is just the beginning,” he tells his partner as they sip a couple of brown beers.

And it is just the beginning. On New Year's Eve Dick Clark broadcasts from Times Square wearing a big-ass Serendipity Green® overcoat. A Serendipity Green® Goodyear blimp flies over Miami's Joe Robbie Stadium on Superbowl Sunday. On January 3, both Jay Leno and David Letterman tell their first Serendipity Green® jokes. On January 6, the President of the United States wears a Serendipity Green® necktie while welcoming the prime minister of Mozambique to the White House. On January 8, Prince Charles attends a Yobisch Podka concert at The Albert Hall wearing a Serendipity Green® tuxedo. On January 11,
The Today Show
unveils its new Serendipity Green® couch. On January 12, Oprah Winfrey wears a Serendipity Green® pantsuit for her interview with Hugh Harbinger. On January 17, PBS viewers watch the hosts of
This Old House
slather Serendipity Green® paint on a newly restored Queen Anne in Vicksburg, Mississippi. On January 23, Hugh sends Howie Dornick a Serendipity Green® bread maker stuffed with more royalty checks. On January 27, the first copycat color debuts, assuring Hugh Harbinger that his comeback is complete; Serenity Green the manufacturer of plastic raincoats calls it. On February 1,
Sixty Minutes
correspondent Carolyn Carlucci-Plank profiles a village maintenance engineer from Tuttwyler, Ohio, named Howie Dornick.

Carlucci-Plank: “You're father was a war hero.”

Dornick: “He hobbled six miles.”

Carlucci-Plank: “And saved a lot of Seabees. The Army awarded him a Congressional Medal of Honor.”

Dornick: “That's his wooden foot on the mantle.”

Carlucci-Plank: “And when he returned home a hero, he got your mother pregnant. She was still in high school. He never married her.”

Dornick: “No. But he willed her his penis.”

Carlucci-Plank: “And so you grew up—how can I put this, Mr. Dornick—as a local embarrassment. Like some crazy old aunt locked away in the attic.”

Dornick: “They gave me a job with the village when the snack cake line moved to Tennessee.”

Carlucci-Plank: “Shoveling snow and digging graves.”

Dornick: Somebody's got to do it.”

Carlucci-Plank: “I heard that as recent as last summer the village council tried to fire you.”

Dornick: “Some thought it would be a good idea to privatize village services. To plug future shortfalls in the budget.”

Carlucci-Plank: “Then you painted your house this—how else can I put it—this atrocious green. And this famous color designer from New York, Hugh Harbinger, who's being treated for clinical depression, happens by one day and …”

Dornick: “He came to Squaw Days with his parents.”

Carlucci-Plank: “… and he falls in love with that atrocious color, what he now calls Serendipity Green®. He turns it into the color rage of the decade.”

Dornick: “That's about it.”

Carlucci-Plank: “In a few short months Serendipity Green® has made you a wealthy man.”

Dornick: “I don't know about wealthy.”

Carlucci-Plank: “And yet you keep your degrading job with the village. Shoveling snow. Digging graves.”

Dornick: “So far. But there's still talk of privatization.”

PART III

“
So tractable, so peaceable are these people, that I swear to your majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.
”

Christopher Columbus,

Letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella

17

Green.

Yellow.

Red.

The cars on South Mill stop. The cars on Tocqueville go.

It is February and the snow is horizontal again. D. William Aitchbone is returning from New Waterbury, once more missing dinner with Karen and the kids, on his way to the year's first meeting of the Squaw Days Committee.

D. William Aitchbone desperately needs a strategy session with himself. Yet he won't be going to the Daydream Beanery. Nosireebob. Not since they started serving their coffees in Serendipity Green® mugs he won't. Not since the counter girl changed her lipstick from blackcherry to Serendipity Green®. So when the light goes from red to yellow to green, he does not drive straight through the intersection, nor drive past his impressive soapy white Queen Anne. He does not drive past Howie Dornick's repulsive green clapboards where, despite the purple-black February sky and the gooseshitting snow, tourists and television crews are most certainly causing traffic problems. Instead he turns left on Tocqueville and winds his way through Tuttwyler's side streets to the throbbing commercial strip on West Wooseman. At Burger King he sits in a cold booth next to the condiment counter. As high schoolers with larynxes surely transplanted from rutting moose fumble for ketchup packs and straws, he sits in his Burberry overcoat sipping a large black coffee, honing his plans for what will be the best Squaw Days ever. As he plans and shivers and sips, he notices that three of the four girls sitting under the twirling bacon-cheeseburger mobile are wearing Serendipity Green® socks.

At 7:20 he drives to the square and parks in front of Just Giraffes. In the window two dozen Serendipity Green® giraffes are circling a JUST ARRIVED! sign. He crosses the square. The gazebo is still trimmed with Christmas garlands. “Conniving bastard,” he growls through his thin blue lips, the conniving bastard being, of course, one Howie Dornick, scheduled to be featured that coming Sunday on
Sixty Minutes
.

At 7:30 he barges into the library community room. He sits at the head of the table, thinking he is seducing his flock with his perfected lawyer's smile. In reality he is scaring the bejesus out of them with the giddy grimace of a maniac. “Everybody here then?” he asks.

Everybody is.

Delores Poltruski is there. Dick Mueller is there. Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne is there. Donald Grinspoon, Katherine Hardihood, and Paula Varney are there. So is the Serendipity Green® giraffe Paula brought along to show the others. Kevin Hassock, the buffoon who let the Happy Landing Ride Company bring their small Ferris wheel is not there. Two weeks after his divorce was final, he accepted a transfer to Duluth, Minnesota. But his replacement, Paul Kreplach, is.

D. William Aitchbone simultaneously gives him a nod and a thumbs up. “We're delighted to have you on the committee, Paul. I'm sure you'll have lots of good ideas for us.”

Paul Kreplach responds with a confident Popeye the Sailor Man wink. He has every right to feel as confident as Popeye. In just the past six months he's been named Midwestern sales manager for the nation's largest manufacturer of tamper-proof medicine bottles, gotten married for the second time—to a woman not only younger but infinitely better-looking than his first wife—and purchased a monstrous brick colonial in Woodchuck Ridge.

Delores Poltruski knows all about Paul Kreplach. She was, after all, the real estate agent who convinced him his salary could handle the 30-year adjustable mortgage. “Paul's new wife used to dance with the Youngstown Ballet,” she informs the others. “She's thinking of opening a dance school.”

“I hear Dottie Dunkle's bagel shop is going under,” Dick Mueller says. “That'd make a great dance studio. High ceiling. Right on the square.”

Delores Poltruski pats Dick Mueller's arm. “Oh, Dick! That's a great idea! Isn't it, Paul?”

“Yes, it is,” Paul Kreplach says. Being new to Tuttwyler, Ohio, he does not know what others know. He does not know that Dick Mueller owns the soon-to-be-empty storefront in question. He does not know that Dick and Delores Poltruski have been copulating twice a week for years. Nor does he know that the maniacally grimacing chairman of the Squaw Days Committee plans to ignore and humiliate him for the next seven months, and probably, if all goes as plans, handle his young, good-looking, ballet-dancing second wife's divorce.

“I suppose the first thing we need to do,” begins D. William Aitchbone, “is to make sure everybody is happy with their subcommittee assignments.”

Everybody is extremely happy with their subcommittee assignments. Their February faces show it. One by one they make their presentations:

Dick Mueller dutifully reports that the parade units will line up on Mechanics Street, proceed up East Wooseman to the square, go once around, then proceed out South Mill to the cemetery for the memorial services. Both the high school and junior high bands will march again, he says, and the Chirping Chipmunk unicycle troupe from Akron has expressed interest in returning for a third year. Now he folds his hands on the table. His neck turns to steel. His eyes lock on the wall just above D. William Aitchbone's head. “I think we ought to put Howie Dornick in the parade,” he says. “I can't tell you how many out-of-towners have come into the auto parts store for directions to his house.”