Buckeye's Ballet

By William Kamowski

If Russia and American collaborated on building a dam across the Bering Strait to reverse global warming, what could possibly go wrong? Enjoy the mishaps in the farcical novel Buckeye's Ballet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543919943

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2017 by William Kamowski

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-54391-993-6 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-54391-994-3 (ebook)

Printed and Distributed by BookBaby, Pennsauken, NJ

Contents

PART ONE: The First Year

One: James Buchanan Slept Here

Two: An On-Time Departure

Three: Bachelor Presidents

Four: The Other First Lady

Five: The Good Old Boys Play Win-Win

Six: It’s That Simple

PART TWO: The Third Year

Seven: Ski Bunny Lodge

Eight: Bilgie and the Trashman

Nine: Fire and Ice and Stupid White People

Ten: The Lawyer, the Litigators, and the Saboteurs

Eleven: The Tabák

Twelve: The Shrink, the Spy, the Dumpster, and the Dead Guy

PART THREE: The Fourth Year

Thirteen: The Pastor, the Pulpit, and the Pit

Fourteen: H

Fifteen: The Abominable Snow Bunny

Sixteen: Beauty and the Bet

Seventeen: Dorothy Dot Com

Eighteen: A Couple of Deep-Down-Unders

Nineteen: Gringo from Great Slave Lake

Twenty: Tea

Twenty-One: Can We Make a Musical out of This?

Twenty-Two: Earth Science 201

PART FOUR: The Fourth Year: The Final Weeks

Twenty-Three: Off to See the Wizard

Twenty-Four: The Polar Bear and the Plan

Twenty-Five: Fissures and Fine Cuisine

Twenty-Six: The Preacher in the Promised Land

Twenty-Seven: Junior Junket

Twenty-Eight: The Forces of Nature

Twenty-Nine: The Tourist Eats a Hot Dog at the Ninth Wonder of the World

Thirty: Phone Calls to Old Friends

To Magdalen

PART ONE

The First Year

One

James Buchanan Slept Here

Buckeye wiggled the wet sand of the San Tontos beach between his toes, vaguely annoyed at the chill of the Pacific and more pettily annoyed with his own irritable mood. He rarely walked the shore as he did now. Ordinarily he would have run headlong into the surf to inhale the shock of it all at once, but not at this hour, not without the sun to reassure him through his shivering. Never mind swimming, he should have been sleeping, but that too was impossible, with Hazel in bed cracking a walnut shell every minute and he imagining the fragments everywhere on the sheets, itching even to the inaccessible acres of his back.

Walnuts. Surprise. Healthy stuff for a change. But damn her for ruffling my dreams. How can she sleep herself with all the gurgling of her stomach? Damn her to . . . to . . . freeze her forever in a sea of blue Jell-O, her favorite summer sweet.

An upturned mussel shell cracked beneath his soft raw heel, snapped like a walnut shell, as if his wife had found him on his private stroll. His foot bled a little, the mild sting washed away by the abrupt cold thrill of a wave rolling up his ankles. He damned her a third time to complete the ritual, and for keeping him awake when she knew he had a top-shelf morning meeting. If he was not crisp and witty for the climate conference at 9:00 a.m. sharp, he might kill his chance for a choice box at the Bolshoi on his October trip to Moscow. The Taming of the Shrew—new, something finally new.

More than their inept economics, he detested the cheerful punctuality of the Russians—always so chipper from minute one at meetings. How could they act so disciplined yet be so poor? Probably all a bluff to erase the Russian reputation for centuries of inefficiency. But give them their due: a smile was just a smile to these former Soviets, as he still liked to think of them, which was better than he could say for the French who nuanced every little twitch of a lip or an eyelid into a meaning. The Russians at least took his smile for genuine, as if the sarcastic glitter of his teeth was not translatable.

But damn them all along with Hazel. They knew his weakness for the ballet, whatever else they did not understand, and if he was not the essence of entertainment tomorrow—no, today already—they might instead offer him—who knows—a tour of an experimental genome farm like what they had dished out to Senator Betsy Bakoff from Montana the last time he sent a congressional nuisance as a strategic snub. Or worse: seats for the opera. In October, it would be Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Boris Good Enough, he muttered to himself, getting sung to death by his own chorus.

What really interested the Ruskies—all that interested those he cared to talk to—was science, the toy of people who couldn’t translate very well: rockets and satellites to monitor crops and trucks, newly discovered moons, dwarf stars, life on Mars in the prehistoric age (did Mars have a historic age to be pre to?). Harnessing nuclear waste, deconstructing fossilized sperm to reconstruct DNA to revive species that had flunked Life Skills, breeding earthworms to combat world hunger, refining horse manure to . . . what did they say it could be used for? What did it matter? Horseshit for horseshit’s sake. Where was the techie who could balance the surround sound, finesse the morph knobs on the audio system for Hazel, and keep her appetite out of bed?

And now this new overture for collaborative science, this oceanic experiment, when both sides had already proved that they couldn’t stop pissing each other off in the sand-locked countries of Middle Earth—this collaboration to finesse the global temperature. What did that mean? Not much explanation, though the Moscow techies had apparently killed an hour referring to it at Tuesday’s briefing in the Valley. Why cool the world when the Conservative News Watch says nobody’s proven it’s really warmer? Global warming. Would somebody bother to read a goddamned history book? he fumed. It’s been warmer, it’s been colder. An occasional superstorm is just that—occasional.

More hot air inside than out. Yes, for once let’s not be the ever-amenable statesman at these meetings. For once . . .

He kicked a stone with his middle toes, thinking it to be a shell.

. . . once and for all, I’ll bring sandals to wear on this lumpy beach.

Now, he might just wheedle them into offering a box at the ballet—it had to be Tuesday because Wednesday would be Mussorgsky’s chorus—before he raised whatever objections his temper could not suppress. This time—not like February’s workshop on collaborative science in the Lime Office where the real work got done, not talked—this time, no greasy bacon and fried eggs for breakfast, no spoiling his best points with stifled belching and heartburn, with all the close-groomed engineers from Moscow looking on, probably charged with vodka, and of course no scent of it on their breath, while he struggled full-stomached against the grease of an American patriot’s morning meal.

He knew those engineers had been knocking back vodkas just as surely as he knew that they could not translate his grin. Glowing like peasants, mustaches stiff with pastry glazes, still they went on sketching rough drafts of space labs on his desk blotter, given to him by the attorney general’s daughter for Christmas, and breaking his mechanical pencil leads under the pressure of their stubby chafed fingers. But dammit, for all their clumsiness, they were precise when they ran out of blotter and stretched their sketches across his parchment calendar, which his favorite lady had sent him for no special reason. That had irked him: they had projected their decompression chambers right across Easter Week, and he couldn’t see his spring minivacation anymore. How would he ever explain to Snookey what had disfigured the calendar, especially the part about humanly modified atmospheric cycles, which made no sense at all? Well, what was the chance she’d ever see it again anyhow, or him, he winced, for another two years at least, maybe six?

Yes, yes, he reminded himself grudgingly, it was his own idea to call that February meeting a workshop against Metz’s warning not to. Workshops were too unstructured, Metz had said. Well, he got that right. But designating last week’s meeting in the Valley as preliminary was a miscue, too, in the opposite direction: nothing got done or said once you said preliminary, at least not in the hour he felt obliged to stay. It was supposed to be a meet-them-and-greet-them affair to usher off Babushchev’s engineers and techies to chat science fiction with the boys and girls in the Valley Labs, and maybe that happened after he left. But all he heard was a tally of old achievements between the Russians and Americans (well, that part was short enough, thank God!) and a long, aimless overture toward fresh promise for Russian-American diplomacy shaping technological alliances and advances to recharge the global economies.

Isn’t there just one global economy? he puzzled. For that matter, and for all we talk about it, is there really any such thing as an economy anyhow? Wind, just wind. Real diplomacy is a successful effort to smile at the person wasting my time.

No, for once, he would insist, graciously if possible, that they sit on the sofas and chairs; he would have the side tables furnished with ink pens which he knew the Ruskies hated using even for signing treaties. He would litter his desk, hopelessly, with documents, files, a newly printed photo of the first lady perhaps, for they had taken notes on the back of the last one he had left lying about upside down without a frame. Hard to believe he hadn’t noticed that till they had left. Not that it mattered now, since he had later sheared off a strip of the bottom, her pearl necklace and the most modest hint of cleavage, as a bookmark for the Vatican mole who had the insolence to request a souvenir. But at least he was the only president in recent history whose desks actually looked like work got done on them.

His foot still bled from the mussel shell. To give the wound a minute’s chance to seal, he sat down on the hard, smooth, water-packed sand, his back one with the flat-faced rock behind him. He pushed the heels of his hands into the beach, forming the first prints of a new day just above the dilated brim of the receding tide. With the moon out, he thought, he might shore up a sandcastle like Snookey did on their last morning together in New Hampshire, but he had never had much of a talent for that sort of thing, no very delicate hand nor any feel for design or shapes waiting to be molded. His daydream would always picture the castle already built . . .

And then wrecked by the likes of the men landing that oversized dinghy only a hundred feet to his left.

So why beach a dinghy here? Their ship distressed? No, they wouldn’t have cargo.

It looked, through the moon-grey darkness, like oil drums.

Let’s rest, one of them panted. Next time I’m wearing gloves. And you’re buying them. All the major money in this junket and the oars are splintered. No gloves, no life jackets. Shit, next time hire yourself some galley slaves . . . The rest was lost to the splashy rumble of a breaking wave.

Matches flared and, downwind, a perfect statue to grace the portal of anyone’s sandcastle, Buckeye spied them askance as he imagined any mythical sculpture might do. He might not have recalled the odor had he not found Snookey stoned in the hunting lodge three years ago. His sworn duty staring him in the face, and not a Secret Service agent handy at the moment of need. Always there otherwise, orchestrating superfluous security.

Covered in a shadow aside a stretch of moonlight, he amused himself with all the silly things he might do: give them the shoo, tell them he ran the whole show around here and they could just clear their asses out, threaten their tax returns with endless audits, demand a night with each of their girlfriends in exchange for pardon—no, make it an hour apiece. Or maybe the straightforward approach: his back to the lone rock protruding from the sand, hauling off with one of their oars, thwacking blows to their crew cuts (he was sure they had crew cuts), breaking skulls, jaws, noses; a shot to the crotch, a second to the back of the neck, one at a time, while the others, like inept lookers-on in a painfully contrived action flick, just stood around waiting for the director to tell them when to join the fray. With the last of them going down, the first one he’d leveled now regathered himself on the damp sand where he lay well-pummeled, curled into a focused aim, and fired his nine millimeter.

Just as the newspaper headlines began to roll through his mind’s eye, his own name heading the body count, the first drum toppled from the boat in a sopping thud. The two men, unable to catch the container when their partners tipped it to them over the gunwale, jumped back to save their feet from its weight. Only one escaped. The second hopped and wobbled, spurting profanity about broken toes and clumsy sailors.

Under cover of the others’ unsympathetic laughter, Buckeye slipped off, a bit disgusted with himself for not having joined the boxing club at Dartmouth. What good had the forensics team ever done him, he shrugged, except to land a few jobs in lawmaking along the way?

Well, no matter. He could see how silly it might have gone had he tried to stop them: Gentlemen, it is my sworn duty, as CEO of every acre east of this beach, to inform you that the smuggling of marijuana across the border from Mexico—you have brought it from Mexico, haven’t you . . . ? No? Well . . . Who in the hell cared? Everyone under forty in California smoked the damned stuff. One more time: Gentlemen, it is my sworn duty to warn you not to re-smuggle your cargo out of this state into any place worthwhile.

And then, with no boxing experience from Dartmouth to fall back upon, he’d have a real fight on his hands because Californians were so ego-touchy with all their grapes and population to brag about. If it were up to him instead of the seismologists and Senator Anthracks from Texas, he’d not spend a dime to save the pack of them from the fault, which now threatened imminently according to all the so-called earth scientists who were getting no media attention in the States. Only the British news announcers with the ill-conceived neckties were spelling out the real danger. So then, let the earth and the ocean have their way just for the pure and satisfying meanness of it all, because thirty million Californians divided into seven billion Earthlings went two hundred and thirty-three times, and that was not even one percent of the global population (which was the sorry fact—too few killed to trim the grand total), and so, for all he cared, anything that went to the right side of the decimal could fall off to the west side of the fault.

Or so he had told his first lady when she had told him that they were buying a house above the Pacific. But Witch Hazel always had an answer: California was just edging slowly northward (she had read somewhere in junk science) and wouldn’t reach Portland until her gold molar crowns had turned to compost.

It was no accident that civilization had discovered the Pacific last of all the oceans. And now he had to be part of its stupidity: a house on a bluff on the California coast, a fool’s haven, not likely to last until the great fault had its way, probably fated for a mudslide in a month or two, the way the freak rains had been coming, more on than off, in recent days. May and June were dry months, the realtors had said.

So there she would be on one of their California afternoons, slicked with all her Swedish suntan oil made in San Diego, basted up like a Cornish hen, plucked into goose bumps despite all the sun her skin absorbed—though she wore those old-fashioned, modest one-piece suits—probably oblivious to the softening foundation beneath her there on the sun deck overlooking the ocean, oil simmering on the crests of her thighs, the mud about to slip away . . .

At the foot of what might someday become the mud slide, he put on his deck shoes, which had been dangling by their laces from his index finger. Cut off by the smugglers from the easy switchback he had descended an hour ago, he was directly below his porch, about to climb a stretch he had never dared before. He began the climb as delicately as he could but was soon wrist-deep in the sandy muck.

No wonder his muscle men preferred this location to the hunting lodge for his working vacations. This seemed an almost inaccessible fortress to rival old Quebec. He’d be as surprised as Montcalm if someone were to make an attempt on his life from this angle. Still, Wolfe had something of a path to climb up that cliff, but he would not have cared much for this siege, with the bright red English uniforms showing the soil so easily. His black boots would have been filling with the ooze, the slime dribbling past his elbows down his upturned sleeves toward his armpits. This was no attempt for a general, perhaps no attempt for himself except that he had done some lightweight mountain climbing in Vermont in his teens. No, here was a challenge for a pockmarked greaseball assassin in polyester pants and a butterflied shirt from Taiwan, carrying up no more girth than the bulge of his Glock 17 shoved into his waist under a white leather belt and no more dignity than he might claim with a Jersey accent.

His Double-S sentries would not spot him coming up under the porch at the rear of the house, for if they came to this side of the house at all, it was only to drink a little Hennessey, or so he suspected from the empty pint flask he’d found in the potted pansies yesterday. Nearing the top, he gained a little confidence, then in a sharp change of mind slipped into an unsettling worry: the stupid shits, this wasn’t the impervious fortress they took it for after all. Never mind old Quebec—anyone who could put his pride aside could climb this so-called cliff, and here he was proving himself wrong and Hazel right, for she had repeatedly, abrasively insisted that our secret sentries should be more wary of the rear of the house, bluff or no bluff. And just a quarter mile from the bungalow, four off-course drug runners were going unnoticed—well, almost—about their business.

Twenty feet from the top, his deck shoe was sucked from his left foot into the ooze. Sons of bitches, he seethed, as much for the lameness in his anger as for the loss of his shoe. If it weren’t for those four sneaking shits, whom he couldn’t slip past, he could have taken the path, and why in hell hadn’t he? It wasn’t their beach; it was his. And it was hardly his fault that they couldn’t afford to be seen doing what they were doing. Lousy sons of bitches. Where were his wits, his nerve?

Well, there were four of them.

But damn them along with Hazel, and the Russian engineers. Thanks to them all, the whole night was ruined (he only wanted this time to himself as long as Hazel was keeping him awake) and, nuisanced in still another direction, he noticed his glow-in-the-dark watch had stopped at half past midnight. What time was it exactly? Too late, probably, for enough sleep to bluff freshness in the morning.

At the top of his climb, he thought he heard one of the smugglers laugh, but no, the distance and the surf would have consumed the sound. Still, it irked him that they were going unaccountable for the trouble they were causing him. Clumsily one-shoed, he slunk a quarter mile along the edge of the steep slope to a point directly over them where rock and sand dropped more precipitously and he could hear the trace of their voices between swells of the surf. His usual appetite for mischief now skewed his better judgment in a whim to entertain himself. With a tight squint into the gray darkness, he could see them rolling the last barrel to the foot of the cliff where they righted it and let themselves drop onto the sand.

Waiting for a beach buggy of some kind, he guessed, though it was a good mile, either north or south, to a break in the cliffs and an access track off the beach. He scrambled a few feet down to a ledge, keeping low as he imagined any Navy Seal might do, until he notched into a foothold beside an embedded rock. A vague idea formed in his elvish need to gratify himself for their nuisance. He kept low as he loosened the rock, in case his own guardians should cast a glance south of the bungalow, though he was pretty sure he was beyond the range of their infrared View-Masters. It cost him only two fingernails and a grunt to dig the thirty-pound stone out of the sandy soil and swing it sling-like between his squatting legs. If he were just a little lucky, it would land on one of their barrels, scare the shit out of them. He rocked his cannon shot back and forth to gain impetus, projecting his heave with each forward swing until impatience persuaded him to let fly too soon. The stone thudded disappointingly against the bluff only ten feet below him, but at least he had not gone with it as he had done at twelve while heaving stones from a hillside into a shallow swimming hole. That had cost him a week in the hospital, to say nothing of his pride. Here there were no witnesses to the lame attempt.

Just as well. In another instant, when the memory of his small leg in traction vanished, he heard, faintly, a slew of rocks bounding down the cliff bottom. A half dozen thuds told of stones hitting the barrels, while others landed without report. Except for a short scream soon lost in the backdrop of the surf.

Well, one of them, apparently left for dead, was at St. Vincent de Boardwalk’s Hospital, as Buckeye liked to call it. By seven o’clock, the mishap was food for banter on the Breakfast Brothers radio show, thanks, no doubt, to some surf nerf who had risen at an inhuman hour to tame the first wave before half the coast had gotten up to pee. The injured man was found alone, the apparent victim of simple misfortune—a routine rock slide, said the Corn Flakes on WINK.

Had they covered all the evidence of the barrels and their footprints when they cleared out? No matter. He had dinged them right in their goods.

Critically injured by falling rock . . . just a quarter mile from the president’s bungalow . . . and the president there on a working vacation . . . the injured man as yet unidentified, the radio rattle concluded and gave over the broadcast to adultery in the world of golf.

So . . . it was not the first time he had flattened a man. Well, accidentally with a snow plow in Bennington and . . . and, on the subject of accidents, he suddenly realized that he should have stopped shaving while he listened to the news. Before he noticed what was happening in the mirror, the blood was inching its way through his tee shirt. Those bastards were still a distracting nuisance, with one of them in the hospital too. This was a real slice in the valley of his chin, worse than the one he had given himself on the honeymoon when he tried to show off to Hazel his skill with an antique straight razor. So much for this tee shirt, and the Russian engineers would have quite a chuckle over the Band-Aid on his chin. They liked that sort of humor.

Shit, where are the Band-Aids? They were right there on the shelf in the wicker chest when I singed my finger on Hazel’s curling iron.

The little things were always missing when he needed them; the big things, of course, never went away. Did Hazel misplace the Band-Aids or did the maid? Did it matter, because they always achieved the same effect—not a dime’s worth of difference between the two of them, except that Holl was probably neater in bed. Sometimes he wondered: her thighs weren’t bad looking for all he had glimpsed of them when he had mishappened upon her vacuuming under the sideboard, and how terrible could her Rhode Island accent be when she moaned in passion?

Christ, he snapped at himself, where’s the mind these days? He shook his head free of the image, while the sting of antiseptic mouthwash—the only sterilizer he could find—ate into the cleft of his chin. It almost looked like a gauze-and-adhesive-tape wound, but he would sooner have cancelled the entire meeting than bandage the chin he had to chat with, because the Roosies always expressed too much interest in his health. And if he had to tell them he had simply cut himself shaving, he wasn’t sure he could tolerate their little mirth until he settled the business of prime seats at the Bolshoi. Gingerly, with a short, narrow strip of adhesive tape, and no gauze beneath it, he pinched the edges of the cut together.

There! Who needs sutures? It doesn’t leak a bit.

Maybe the day would turn out after all, once he finished with the Semi-Siberians and started on lunch. Too bad about breakfast, though. He had wanted a bagel, but his chin wound couldn’t tolerate all the aggressive chewing required for western American bagels.

Can’t Californians learn just one goddamned thing from New York—like how to make a real bagel? Well, maybe just some Fruit Loops today.

The breakfast table was always disappointing at the bungalow—never what he wanted to eat, never when he wanted to eat it, and seldom with whom—and today was more deflating than usual. As he stepped into the dining room, Hazel was dumping the remaining Fruit Loops, accompanied by a puff of the rouge-colored powder from the dregs of the cereal box, into her bowl. Why were his vacation breakfasts with Hazel so different from their meals with civilization? More to the point, why did she have to sit directly across the table, lengthwise, from him? (It was just the two of them and no domestics, not even Holl, once the offerings were on the relentlessly cheerful tablecloths.) Something perhaps she had picked up from an endless BBC series about rich people eating across vast expanses from one another? At the very least, assuming that she had to be annoying to begin with, she might have sat at his elbow, to spill his apricot juice. Of course, she could as easily have blamed the seating arrangement on him, since he always sat at the other end, but . . . Yes, what the hell! He pulled his chair around the corner of the table, still at his remote end four chairs away from her, knocking their seating arrangement for two absurdly off balance. And his gaze, now perpendicular to the line of hers, met a soft, pleasant beige wall and an oil portrait of the fifteenth president of the Unites States—James Buchanan, the bachelor president.

Going for a swim before morning meetings, Bucky?

So that was what she was wearing under her floor-to-ceiling morning robe—a bathing suit. He always wondered. It was a little game he had going with himself at breakfast when they ate alone, trying to guess after she came out of the john what was or wasn’t beneath her Asian silks that could grace an inaugural ball. She was all stirred up, probably had missed him last night, or she wouldn’t be up to some play this early. But once she had started on those walnuts, she couldn’t help herself even to satisfy her other natural appetites. He delighted in not being the