Serendipity Green (6 page)

Howie Dornick slaps some air into his flat pillows. If cutting the box elder limb was a plus, Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne's suggestion that he paint his house was an unsettling minus. Those raw, gray clapboards are all he has. They are his dignity. His legitimacy. No way in hell is he going to smother them with paint.

But there is the pressure of it. The teasing. The cajoling. The begging. The threats. So much pressure. As he folds one of his flat pillows and pounds some softness into it, Howie Dornick listens to his thumping heart commiserate with Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne. The mayor has pressures, too. He is a young Democrat trying to fill the shoes of an old Republican. He has D. William Aitchbone gnawing at his ass. So he will do what he can to help the new mayor. He'll take down Christmas decorations and cut dead limbs, do whatever is reasonably asked of him. But reasonably does not include painting his house.

Finally Howie Dornick falls asleep, comforted by his flat pillows and his Civil Service protection.

5

D. William Aitchbone carries his cappuccino to a table by the window. There is no wind tonight, not like the other night. The flakes, small and icy, are in freefall, bouncing off the roofs of cars and people's heads. On the speakers, a Pan flute plays ghostly Irish songs. Behind the counter the girl with blackcherry lips is counting the change in the tip jar.

D. William Aitchbone settles in for another important strategy session with himself. He knows that back at his impressive Queen Anne on South Mill, his wife and kids are just beginning to tease and complain and threaten their way through another blissful supper.

When his strategy session is finished, Aitchbone crosses the village square, noticing that the Christmas decorations are gone from the gazebo and the dead limb is gone from the box elder. “Sneaky bastard,” he whispers to himself, meaning not Howie Dornick, but Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne. He crosses the street and shuffles down the slippery walk to the village hall. He makes sure he slides into his chair just as the meeting is scheduled to begin.

Everyone is there. Woody Sadlebyrne is there. Councilman Phil Tripp is there. Councilman Len Wilkinson is there. Councilman Tom Van Syckle is there. Councilwoman Victoria Bonobo is there. Everyone that D. William Aitchbone wants in the audience is there, too: Sam Guss from the
Wyssock County Gazette;
Katherine Hardihood.

Aitchbone bangs his council president's gavel and gets right to business. “The village budget is about go through the roof,” he says.

While Sam Guss scribbles the great quote in his reporter's notebook, Victoria Bonobo loudly challenges D. William Aitchbone's dire prediction. “Through the roof, Mr. President? We're projected to have a six-thousand-dollar surplus this year. And with all the new commercial growth on West Wooseman—well!”

Victoria Bonobo has challenged D. William Aitchbone's dire prediction because D. William Aitchbone has asked her to. She owes him so much. He handled her divorce. He handled all the paperwork on her new business venture, the Tiny Toes Day Care Center. He handled the fund-raising for her election to the village council. Yes, she owes him a lot. And this morning he called her at Tiny Toes, before the mothers began showing up with their kids, to not only discuss his secret plan for the village budget, but also to ask her to meet him tomorrow for a secret lunch, at the Wagon Wheel Restaurant, way over in Wooster.

Now, as they discussed, Aitchbone responds to her challenge, his larynx vibrating with masculine confidence. “Six thousand bucks is not a surplus, madam councilwoman. Six thousand bucks is a train wreck waiting to happen. I've tracked this thing into the out years. The tax revenues from the new businesses won't begin to cover our additional outlays for police and fire, road and sidewalk repairs, and the like.” Just in case Sam Guss of the
Gazette
missed it the first time, he repeats, “It's a train wreck waiting to happen.”

D. William Aitchbone now passes out copies of a frightening flow chart he's drawn which shows the budget literally breaking through the village hall's historically accurate slate roof.

“What's the answer?” asks Councilman Phil Tripp, genuinely concerned, not part of the conspiracy.

“Privatization,” D. William Aitchbone answers.

Sam Guss writes down the big impressive word and underlines it twice.

“Privatization, Mr. President?” Victoria Bonobo asks, another pre-arranged response.

D. William Aitchbone lifts his firm chin and runs all ten of his fingers through the head of thick hair Victoria Bonobo's husband hadn't been blessed with. “That's correct, madam councilwoman. Bid out some of the village's services to private vendors.”

“You mean things like police and fire?” Tom Van Syckle wonders, all on his own.

D. William Aitchbone's smile is reassuring. “Well not right away, Tom. We could start with some of the costly little stuff, like cleaning storm sewers, grave digging, repairing sidewalks and trimming limbs, simple maintenance stuff. Then after we've seen if the savings are real, we can look at things like garbage and snow removal. Police and fire would be way down the road. Way way down the road.” He passes out identical gray folders containing not only the details of his proposal, but Xerox copies of newspaper articles from other Ohio communities where privatization has been a big success. “Maybe this is the way we ought to go, and maybe it isn't,” he humbly tells his fellow council members. “But I think it's something we ought to consider. Again, I'm suggesting we start small.”

Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne sits back and folds his arms, both amused and terrified by Aitchbone's performance; knowing that while the village budget will indeed scrape against the ceiling tiles in two or three years, there is not a chance in hell it will ever break through the slate shingles; knowing that D. William Aitchbone's proposal to privatize is nothing more than his private war against Howie Dornick's unpainted house.

Katherine Hardihood leaves the council meeting bewildered. She, too, understands the wickedness of Aitchbone's privatization plan. Worse still—what is making her wrists and ankles quiver—is her realization that D. William Aitchbone knows she understands it, and that he's counting on her to explain his threat to Howie Dornick.

Walking down the dark sidewalks of Tuttwyler, icy snow bouncing off her noisy polyester coat, house key ready to pluck a rapist's eye, she more than once whispers, “That Machiavellian fart.”

She reaches her house. Delores Poltruski's car is not in Dick Mueller's driveway. Rhubarb has not pissed the curio cabinet. She loves him up anyway. She puts on her nightgown and two pairs of socks and gets in bed. On the news, the Cleveland Indians' equipment truck is arriving at Winter Haven, Florida. The driver, still wearing his Chief Wahoo cap and jacket, waves at the camera. As he does every year, Ernest Not Irish has followed the truck south, and is now standing outside the Indian's spring camp, in summer shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, shaking a big homemade sign that shows Chief Wahoo holding not a baseball bat, but a plate of pancakes. AUNT JEMIMA IN REDFACE the sign reads.

In the morning Hardihood walks to the library. She turns on the lights and turns up the heat. Weekday mornings are not very busy. A few retired people. A few young moms with their preschoolers. A few people who work odd shifts. At eleven she takes ten minutes to eat her lunch, and then, invigorated by the small bites of egg salad and Wonder Bread floating in her stomach, in a subterranean lake of grape juice, she returns to her desk for the lunch-hour rush. By 1 p.m. she has checked out eleven movie videos, five computer games, four CDs of children's music, and three books, one of them a novel.

The library is dead until three. Then school is out. Dozens of kids tumble in. There is the din of magazine pages turning, the din of homework going undone, the din of computer keys as seventh-grade boys tap onto the Internet to research their favorite rock stars and—if the Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee is to be believed—to download dirty pictures and chat with European pedophiles. By five the library is empty again.

Katherine Hardihood has succeeded in keeping the Machiavellian Fart out of her mind all day. Then at five-ten, just as she is about to walk home for supper, leaving Megan Burroughs in charge for an hour or so, the wife of the Machiavellian Fart appears at the desk, her daughter Amy and son Cannon in tow. She is there to pick up her reserved copy of
Lake Toads and Land Frogs
, R.C. Corwin's young adult fantasy about mutlicultural tolerance.

“Aren't you so proud of Bill?” Karen Aitchbone says to Katherine Hardihood.

“Hmmm?”

Karen Aitchbone blushes loving-wife pink. “Stepping into Don Grinspoon's shoes, I mean. This is going to be the best Squaw Days yet, isn't it? Not that Donald didn't always do a great job. But he's had so much on his mind the past few years. I don't know how some people cope, do you?”

“No, I don't,” Katherine Hardihood says. She hands
Lake Toads and Land Frogs
to Amy. “Be sure to return it by the 28th. There are lots of other children waiting.”

“I will,” says Amy Aitchbone.

Now the Machiavellian Fart that is the husband and father of these perfectly harmless people is stinking up the inside Katherine Hardihood's head. She worries and fumes all the way home. She worries and fumes all the time she is wiping down the curio cabinet with Pine Sol and all the time she is simmering a can of Campbell's Manhattan Style Clam Chowder and spreading margarine on eight saltine crackers. She worries and fumes while she is eating that soup and those eight crackers and sipping a half-glass of skimmed milk, scratching Rhubarb's ears while he sleeps next to the plastic roses on the table.

Knowing as many facts as she does, Katherine Hardihood can commiserate with any number of historic figures who faced similar damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't predicaments. But with the demon responsible for her predicament being D. William Aitchbone, her heart instantly reaches out to the biggest schnook in all Christendom, Judas Iscariot. How Judas must have felt that night, she thinks as she plays with Rhubarb's head: If he betrays Jesus, as Jesus almost certainly wants, he'll be the most reviled man in all Judea, Jesus being the messiah and all; yet if he refuses to betray his lord, he might be mucking up God's grand plan for human salvation. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.

She walks back to the library and checks out videos and computer games and CDs and even a few books. At eight-thirty she turns off the lights and locks the door. She goes home and takes a zip-lock bag of rhubarb stalks from the freezer and puts it in the sink to thaw, just in case she proves as weak-willed as Judas Iscariot.

The next morning she bakes a rhubarb pie.

Victoria Bonobo waits for D. William Aitchbone in the parking lot of the Wagon Wheel. At exactly noon he pulls in. Inside, they take the booth nobody wants by the restrooms. One restroom door says BUCKAROOS. The other says SCHOOL MARMS. Victoria Bonobo orders a light meal for her nervous stomach, tossed salad and hot tea. D. William Aitchbone orders a mushroom burger, fries and coffee.

“Thanks for last night,” Aitchbone says when the waitress heads to the kitchen with their orders.

Victoria can feel her red blood cells spinning. “I think privatization is the way to go, too. It will take some doing to convince the others, but—”

The coffee and hot tea come. He waits for the waitress to pour and leave. “We'll get it done, I think.” Then he smiles. “But that's not what I wanted to see you about.”

Her red blood cells are somersaulting now. “Oh?”

D. William Aitchbone leans over his coffee steam. “When you were going through your divorce, I remember you telling me …”

Victoria leans into her tea steam.

“… that your brother roomed with the Vice President when they were at Ohio State. And that they still keep in touch.”

Victoria feels her red blood cells sink to the bottom of her veins like flakes of rust. “Oh.”

While Katherine Hardihood worries and fumes at the library, the rhubarb pie cools on top of her stove, protected from her tomcat by the heavy lid of a turkey roaster. She does not go back to work after supper. For the first time since becoming branch librarian, she'll let Megan Burroughs lock up. She changes into a comfortable pair of slacks and puts on a huge, poppy-red turtleneck that hides her unappetizing trunk under thick folds and blazing color. She applies a thin coat of gloss to her lips then, thinking better, wipes it off, leaving her librarian's lips a bit pinker nonetheless. She brushes her teeth with baking soda, puts the rhubarb pie in a Rubbermaid pie carrier, and walks through the snowless night to the unpainted two-story frame on South Mill.

Howie Dornick, breath smelling of peanut butter, cracker crumbs on his flannel shirt, opens the front door without turning on the porch light. “Katherine?”

Katherine Hardihood stiffly offers him the rhubarb pie, the way Indians in old movies offer peace pipes. “I remembered how much you liked it,” she says. “I found some this morning in the freezer—not pie but rhubarb—and said ‘Jiminy Cricket, what the heck, I'll bake Howard Dornick a pie.'”

He takes the Rubbermaid container. “Isn't that thoughtful.”

The heat escaping from the open door mixes with the outside cold, forming a noticeable vortex of spinning air that, if this uncomfortable moment lasts any longer, Katherine Hardihood fears, might erupt into a full-blown tornado, ripping the porch right off its foundation stones. “We need to talk, Howard.”

He backs inside. She follows and closes the door. “Why don't you cut us some pie,” she says, peeling off her noisy coat and white knit hat. The power of her poppy-red sweater sends him fleeing to the kitchen. “I've still got a little coffee in my Thermos, if you want some.”

“Why not,” she says.