CHAPTER V
Dilly’s oldest friend, newest friend, and their respective pursuits
Sander Wilmington Kohrnough enjoyed telling those who inquired about his nickname, Swick, that it was his own invention. Much of what he said, was.
According to his oft-repeated tale, his vicious older brother, unprovoked, at thirty-eight months of age, smacked the top of the little guy’s knotty-haired still soft fontanel with Mama’s yardstick. The ominous blow forced a bit of skull down through his forehead. Blocked by his congenital bump, his new bump settled above the first. Defenseless twenty-one month toddler Sander cried, “Mama he swick me!”
Brother’s name was thereafter eliminated from Swick’s list of social obligations.
Home was his one-bedroom apartment on the sixteenth floor of an old residential tower, on the west end of Surf Avenue. He wouldn’t live anywhere else. Only a short walk to everything: his office, Dilly’s office within Treatment Complex, Boardwalk Courthouse, the beach and his preferred open-air dining establishments, where he lingered over the saltiest, greasiest delectables. Hot dogs with sweet pickled relish, hot yellow mustard, (hold the sauerkraut) accompanied by extra thick fries or a steaming potato knish; then a frozen Speedboat cone, vanilla swirls dipped in warm chocolate goop that solidified instantly and cracked, so sweet, so satisfying, on that first bite.
Nutrition was politicized hooey. Disdaining any alimentary regimen, he followed laws of subjective probability: eat enough and you’re bound to catch a vitamin here, a mineral there. He swayed skeptics, when they listened, by presenting anecdotal evidence: his papa, a dietician at Treatment and fanatic dieter all his life, disappeared when Swick was almost ten, whereas Mama enjoyed perfect health from that very day until she died at seventy-one, her only source of protein for sixty-six years, clam chowder.
Swick was heavy for his height, yet that height carried excess weight and cloaked his eating habits under the cheap, loose suits he wore to court. He dressed like his face: jacket linings hung exposed in the back; his face sagged, too. Besides hint of jowl, were deep bulges of skin, like wattles under his clear, hazel-green eyes. “Saddlebags,” his brother had called him, with his nose a pack animal -- camel for its geminate humps. Swick looked worn out. In a man still young enough to believe himself attractive to women, it was very sad to see.
“Surgery,” was Dilly’s opinion, which she offered repeatedly, “take advantage of my Treatment connections,” she reproached him about his lack of initiative, “no exercise, no control over your appearance, do something!”
No. But he listened because she was Dilly, because two fiancées had returned the same ring to him, twice. Plastic surgery was risky and expensive. Anyway, Mama had always taught, “Fate is whatever we can bear, no more.” Swick overlooked his wattles and focused on the patrician aquiline nose he had from her.
As the phone rang that early afternoon, he continued his work and listened. No message. He would have stopped for Dilly, despite his pressing schedule, despite the delicate five-foot-long papier-mâché horseshoe he carried above his head, from bedroom to foyer, where he’d cleared enough floor space to set it down.
Like most everyone, Swick lived for art.
He kneeled on the floor, admiring his creation: his own art journals, cursorily read, then shredded by hand into random strips, dipped in Swick’s original whole grain flour-water recipe, shaped into rosettes or acanthus leaves and connected by arabesque vines, all tendentiously unpainted, smelling like a roll. The concoction dried opaque in places, translucent or transparent in others; words of art appeared and vanished within his grand ornamental design.
Swick and sculpture were ready for their six o’clock appointment. With much love and all his hope, he carried her into the elevator and down to his van. Late lunch, the office, then horseshoe time. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered, covered her with Mama’s cross-stitched heirloom tablecloth, and patted good-bye until five-thirty.
“You’re late, Mr. Kohrnough.” Without knowing specifics, and knowing not to ask, Kurt suspected another shoddy art project. It was that time of month. “Mrs. Brakpond has been waiting for,” Kurt checked his watch, its red second hand ticked, his head bobbed twice, “fifty-eight and three-quarter minutes since I escorted her into the library for her three o’clock appointment.” Kurt stood up, chewing. “Her file is on your desk. Where were you?”
The smell of bubble gum made Kohrnough sick after raw clams and custard; he smiled nonetheless, thinking of papier-mâché. “Skip your bill of particulars.”
“I do what I can. Sir, someone left a message.”
“Who?”
Plaintiff breath forced Kurt to shut his right eye; he grinned at his employer, who cared nothing for the law, less for its practice. So near retirement, better stay with the joker you know. “I wouldn’t know who, sir. Two ladies await you. Mrs. Brakpond brought a friend.”
From his office, Swick phoned Dilly at Treatment, then at home.
“Poor Dil. A hook?”
“Where were you?”
“Huh. I’ll tell you later.”
“At the diner with my papers, 5:00.”
“I can’t. I have a client here, then another appointment. Can you walk?”
“I’ll manage.”
“It’s the perfect excuse. I’ll come over.”
“No. The diner.”
“I wouldn’t dare with your poor foot.”
“The diner,” she said, “7:00. And don’t keep me waiting.”
“Don’t I always wait for you?”
“Since when?”
“How late will you be this time?”
“The diner. 7:00.”
“I have a trial tomorrow morning but we’ll check your papers. 7:30. For you, Dil, I’ll extend myself.”
As Mrs. Brakpond and company waited, Swick looked out his window, down at his parked van, horseshoe inside. How did the famously starving unknowns survive without a law practice to support their dreams? Without a friendly, cooperative judge to support the practice? Overpriced canvas, brushes, money wasted no longer. Inspiration had replaced his wallet. Paper and gluey flour. This time he had a winner.
File in hand, horseshoe and Dilly on his mind, he swaggered past Mr. Kurt and into his library to prepare his client for the judge.
Ernest’s front door never opened; the porch was cluttered with finds gathered for future orders. Around the back was another, smaller porch, which looked out on his garden: no grasses, shrubs or flowers.
The garden began with his memorial to Dinah, who would call “Be right there” when the doorbell rang, and tip her glistening black head, a mynah salute, when Ernest came home, tip her head right three times, low low lowest, and declare,
“fomaldipoos,” whatever that was, and ‘heigh hough,’ her preferred greeting.
She was inventive, self-taught and lovely, orange beak, yellow necklace, enormous brown eyes. After six years he’d found her dead in his backyard, stiff on the flagstones under her plastic fig tree.
He missed her! He wouldn’t bury her. His wife, recalling another bird destined to spend eternity as an idol on a desk, recommended,
“Taxidermy, Ernest.”
Ernest refused. “Who stuffs a parent? Or a spouse?” He proposed what he reasoned Dinah would have requested, cremation, but there was nothing available, nothing appropriate to hold her ashes.
That day, distraught Ernest wandered on the beach where he, with Dinah, had so often strolled, where she would cling to his right shoulder and mutter whatever came to mind, her plangent repetitions like the sea itself; and he walked for a long time. A laughing gull circled above, one propitious black primary landing before Ernest, who imagined it as tail of a life-size monument to his Dinah. He collected feathers. In his basement he found a hollow wooden decoy, merely a coot; he sawed off the head, inserted a cork as neck, reattached the head and glued on feathers. The colors were wrong, the eyes garish studs from his tie tack days, but it was distinctive, intimate, and birdy.
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Eager to fulfill Dinah’s wishes, Ernest phoned his pathologist friend, Dr. Porter Mulch, whose cousin had married into the Still Family Memorial Services. “I never forget favors,” Ernest said. The Stills granted his unusual request, no fee: hers was such a tiny body.
Dinah burned beautifully. Ernest stored her ashes with a short secular prayer, built a driftwood plinth and set her on the back porch where she found comfort in her fig tree, and he in her. Neighbors and beachcombers admired his creativity and his obvious love for Dinah. When Mrs. Josh’s canary passed away she came to plead with Ernest, as she phrased it, for a bird urn for her Sunshine. Ernest gallantly obliged.
Mr. and Mrs. William Boyd approached him the following month. “Bill’s nagging me,” Mrs. Boyd said, and Ernest knew her Bill, “kill you for a joke.” They were drawing their wills. With graves and burial so expensive they’d decided on cremation, but when shopping for urns they were appalled at the price of even a humdrum wooden box. “We’ll pay, we trust you,” Bill said, “could you make us a pair of Love Boyds?”
Yes, plus a bonus: a tiny tin plaque, scratched Eternal Peep, hung from a fine, rusted chain around the pair’s necks.
They were highly satisfied. Ernest’s new business took off.