HOMECOMING KING

HOMECOMING KING

By Andrew Paul Grell

The Farrier shop was still there. Hiram saw the tools through the open gate, each tool in its own place. Antique tack adorned the walls. Obviously, the farrier was new, a woman at that. Good on her. Keep the horses calmer. She looked a bit like Carter, the old farrier. She waved and smiled when she noticed the potential stranger staring into her shop. Hiram waved back and wondered if he had gone to P.S. 7 with her. She didn’t seem to know the short-ish man in road-worn clothes.

Hiram kept walking along the main drag. He finally found another familiar shop, the Two Bits Tonsorial Emporium. The famous sign, “OUT OF WORK? SHAVE AND HAIRCUT, TWO BITS,” was still in the window, although behind that window there was a unisex doing-stuff-with-hair parlor.

“Hey, Mister!” Hiram looked down at the source of the voice, a tween girl who looked and dressed amazingly like Marcy from the Peanuts comic strip.

“What can I do ya fer,” Hiram asked, easily slipping back into the patois he grew up with.

“What is that thing around your neck? Is it some kind of phone? An iPhone? My parents would only let me get an LG.”

“It’s a Fox and Hound Whistler. In the old days, before everything was fiber, if something happened to a company’s phone system, you had to use one of these to test what cable gets plugged into which jack. You short a pair of wires in one place, then you go back to where the bunch of wires came from and you run the whistler over the switch, like a hound chasing a fox.  When the fox whistles, you know which end connects to the end at the other location. Then you keep doing it until it’s all untangled.”

“Why do you keep it if it’s obsolete?”

“Good question. It’s obsolete here, but not where I’m coming back from. What’s your sign, young lady?”

“I’m a Taurus, Mister.”

“Propitious and fortuitous. I set out of late from the Taurus Mountains, do you know where that is?”

“Yes!  Yes, I do know! It’s in Turkey! We just covered Turkey in Social Studies, from when it was Greek to now. What were you doing there?”

“I started out these seven and twenty years passed as a scholar of the classical world, right here in Cornell. Then my country called me to war in what miserable wretchedness that classic beauty has sadly become. And now I am on my way home.”

Hiram took off his blue rucksack, fished out two gold bullion coins and presented them to the Junior High girl. “Smart girl. You’ll have to wait a few years, but when sold, they’d purchase an iPhone and a decent used car.”

She gave him a wide-eyed “Thanks, Mister!” and they continued on their paths, his an excruciatingly slow, by necessity, journey home. Another few blocks along the main drag, he saw his favorite sign. Atop a busy garage, the sign read “Tire King of Tyre, New York. Shocks, Mufflers, Tires, Body Work, Doughnuts, and Coffee.” Young Hiram had known  that only he, himself, Hiram, could be King of Tyre and heir apparent of Ithaca.

At the far edge of town was the sole tourist attraction in Tyre, New York, Gorg-ette Park,  host of a bastard child of the real Ithaca gorges, which flowed and spun a water wheel powering a calliope, tunes rotating based on the flow of the little gorge. Fortunately, the sweetly cacophonous instrument issued the final strains of “Volare” and powered down for a bit. Hiram snagged a bench in one of the park’s petal-shaped alcoves. He removed his hat, placing it upside down on the mosaic-tiled footpath girdling the park and stood up on the bench. Scanning the afternoon lunching and relaxing visitors, Hiram saw only one person he might possibly recognize. Jacob Landrace owned a boutique hog farm, mainly for competition at fares. Hiram had a summer job at Hog Heaven after his Junior year of High School. He saw the toll the last ten years had taken on the old farmer. At least he had the pleasure of a nice park to relax and people-watch in. The returnee from the Orient thought Jake had given him the fleetest of winks.

There was no preamble, no introduction, no explanation. Hiram just started reciting Xanadu. When he got to Alph, the sacred river, he pointed to the gorg-ette and got a laugh out of the crowd. Someone put a fiver in the orator’s hat and called out “Hesperus, Hesperus.” Hiram dove right in, moving along a catenary arc from the daughter’s white bosom to her salt-ice frozen, lifeless breast.   Reciting The Raven, people did squawky bird calls for the “nevermores.” Naturally, upon the opening line of Jabberwocky, half the park was reciting along. After a selection from Horatius at the Bridge, the entire park was screaming “For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his Gods!”

“That was quite impressive, young man, a cold open, reading the audience. What’d your hat do,” the potential Jacob Landrace asked, giving Hiram another tiny wink

“Forty-seven dollars and sixty-eight cents.”

“That’s a handy skill, being able to count that while you’re performing. Listen, I see you’re a traveling man. My wife is a fan of poetry. How would you like to have dinner with us in the farmhouse?”  Jacob handed his former employee a business card declaring “Hog Heaven Farm, Out on Highway 61, Tyre, New York, Can’t miss it.” and winked ever so slightly one last time, perhaps the displacement of a single eyelash. “Six Thirty work for you? We go to bed early on the farm. Whaddaya go by?”

“You can call me Dizzy. I’ll have to have my administrative assistant check my schedule but it should be fine.”

Hiram knew from painful experience that pigs were smart and that swineherds had to be even smarter. The winks were either nerve problems or a way of signaling that he knew, and that Hiram didn’t want anyone else to know. He’d find out soon enough. The man of the road pressed on, often twisty, sometimes backwards, but always in the direction of Ithaca.

“Yo, Dog!” Hiram was walking by Tyre High’s basketball courts. Only one person called him Dog.

“Argos! Dog! Whatterya still doing in this hick burg? Weren’t you drafted by the Rockets?”

“Yup. But like Bill Bradley, there’s only so much shock a pair of knees can take. And unlike Bradley, nobody thought I was senatorial. Now I’m running the athletics program for this hick burg. But what about you? Why haven’t you been around for ten years, King Hiram?” Off court, they were an unlikely pair. But Hiram’s Carthaginian descent paired with Argos’s Viking heritage made a killer point guard and power forward combination.

“I’m not here, Argos. At least not yet. Code-17.  Is there somewhere we can get a little cover?”

“Sure. My office in the field house.  What’s up?”

“Let’s wait till we’re out of surveillance reach.”

“Dog, look, you can’t just drop in after 10 years and be all James Bond and shit. You went out on a real mission.  You were the fair-haired boy. So to speak. Applied Cultural Anthropology as a diplomatic tool. You saved the Ismailis. Then you disappeared.”

“With any luck, Arg, you’ll get the full story and I’ll get home.”

“Home? You wanna get home? I’ll drive you, you’ll be there in 45 minutes.”

“Look, Arg, that’s not going to work. Take these.” Hiram handed his teammate five of his gold coins.

“These are bullion coins. That’s $8,000 right there. Hold onto it in case I need you to help. Take you phone number, write the letter of the alphabet that corresponds to the number, 1 is A, 7 is G, get it?  Q is zero. Give me the paper. I’ll contact you if I need help. Stay loose. Hopefully, we’ll have dinner in Ithaca before long.”

“You’re really into that James Bond stuff. Any Bond Girls involved?”

“Penny is the only girl for me.”  Hiram tried parsing the look he got from his old friend, decided to drop it and headed out on Highway 61 for a home-cooked meal; the reason people couldn’t miss it, Hiram recalled, is that it was a hog farm, and even show-hog establishments stank to high heaven.

“It is you, isn’t it, Hiram?”

“Of course. And thanks for your discretion in the park. I can’t have anyone know I’m stateside until I’m safely back in Etna House with Penny and my son, Telly.”

“Most of the kids who worked summers with me went on to great, or at least near-great things. Your buddy Argos made it to the NBA. Jessica clerked in the Supreme Court. And you are the pig farmer who saved the Ismailis from the fate of the Yazidis, then disappeared. Come, take a load off, I’m helping Shirley get the dinner together. We can talk while we eat.”

“Good to see you again, Hiram. How’s your leg doing? That was a brave thing you did saving that pig.  Rachel was my favorite.”

“Fully healed, Shirley, thanks!”

Dinner was ravioli, antipasto—the meats cured on the farm— Caesar salad, cerignola olives, sun-dried tomatoes and Italian bread with red wine and a bottle of Grappa.  The company took a break from the first round of forkfuls and the interrogation began.

“What was the deal with the poetry recital? Coded messages?”

“Not at all, Jake. A guy in threadbare clothes, living out of a rucksack, caging coins as a busker, is not going to be suspected of having $200,000 in gold in the old Jansport’s frame. Not much profit in robbing beggars, you know.”

“So what happened? Where were you?”

“For nine years, I was a prisoner of Calypso in a bunker in a cave in the Taurus Mountains”

“Music held you prisoner, Hi?”

“Her name was Calypso, daughter of a local poohbah educated in England. A double major, Anthropology and Archaeology. She heard of my predicament and offered me a job; when I finished, she would make sure that I could return home. She showed me a U.N passport with my picture in it and all of my details correct. I glanced at the last page as I handed it back. Everything was correct because it was my actual U.N. passport which had gone missing.

“After the Ismaili affair, I was persona non grata almost everywhere in the region. It seems that the locals really want to be in control of who gets partnered with them and who gets ethnically cleansed. She had a pile of texts, stele fragments, cuneiform slabs, scrolls, codices, anything that could move information from the past to the present. She wanted to know if I would come to the same conclusion she had. Everyone has a theory of what went on 5,000 years ago in the area that started the snowball rolling down the hill and got bigger and bigger until it crashed into the descendants of the people who packed and tossed it. I figured I could spend six months or so looking at what she had, then put ‘paid’ to whatever cockamamy theory she had and finally go home to Penny and Telly back in Ithaca. It wasn’t to be. After eight weeks, I knew she had at least a few breadcrumbs of merit. I was hooked. The bunker was big enough and sufficiently stocked to support a regiment for years. My job was going over the texts with her and to make sure the cave’s water sources remained accessible, that our ventilation and comms would be undetectable. That’s how I learned that the Taurus Mountain waters running by our cave had enough gold to be worth panning. After two years, I was convinced of her hypothesis and was ready to co-author with her; my actions and my position at prestigious Cornell University would guarantee a quick peer review and publication.”

Jake got some more ravioli and wine and then some ice cream. “But that didn’t happen, did it?”

“No, it didn’t. She exchanged messages with a former professor who wound up leaking some juicy tidbits. From the reaction she got from just those little scraps, it was clear that people were going to shit all over this discovery, religious, atheistic, secular, political; the whole clown car was going to run over us and beat us like pinatas. She apologized, and the paucity of the leaked material ensured that the pitchforks and torches would be quickly put away. I decided to stay another year to see if we could find something eminently unquestionable, or a bit of good news to ease the shock of the new idea. I took it as far as I could go, but she wouldn’t open the bunker of give me my passport back. She started flirting with me, winking, walking around in her unmentionables, and I swear, she must have had someone finding out what Penny looked like, how she wore her hair, I might have happily stayed down there with her, but the idea of winding up in a Hitchcock movie motivated me to emerge from Plato’s Cave, as she called it. Day by day I put more notes in the rucksack and more gold in the frame. On the first day that I inspected the ventilation system and didn’t hear any shooting, I grabbed my stuff and started walking from Asia to Europe. I called in favors from faculty at the Ecole Normale and Cambridge and points in between. I had the distinct honor of a midnight wade across the Rio Grande without a shred of fencing to slow me down. I kept walking, and here I am.”

“That’s some story. Jake, a story like this needs some ice cream; be a love and get it, will you?” When Jake’s footsteps changed pitch from the carpeting to the linoleum, Shirley whispered in Hiram’s ear. “Everyone except Penny thinks you’re dead. I speak to her on the phone at least once a week. A few years ago she said she got confirmation that you were alive and working on a project, the details of which could not be shared.  You know, Telly is scheduled to hog with us next month. The first second generation Hog Heaven Alum. What I’m saying, you know, is that I consider your family my family. Penny tells me about the men that find excuses to intersect with her. Telly’s chemistry teacher. His scoutmaster. The Mayor, for fuck’s sake. He wanted to plan something for her, a memorial in case she declared you dead, or a fundraiser if she wanted to keep looking. She had other plans. One year Telly would do his homework on the porch with your Perazzi next to him. Loaded. Shhh…” Jake came back with dessert.

“So, any clues about this dangerous idea?”

“Sorry Jake, it’s embargoed until everyone on board agrees on how to handle it. Say, Jake, still got your Heathkit? I saw the antenna was still on the roof. After the ice cream, can I use it? Ya know, maybe I can give you folks a taste of what’s going on. You folks are learned in Bible ways, aren’t you?” Two heads nodded semi-enthusiastically.

“Alright, here’s your hint. Abram and Sarai came from the east. Where the chief Gods were Brahma and Sarashvatai. Mordecai and Esther came from Judea to the place where the chief Gods were Marduk and Ishtar. And that’s about all I can say.”

CQ CQ TELLY CQ CQ CEDAR. Hiram thought he heard his son’s Morse cadence transmitting a filthy joke.

CEDAR CEDAR ITHACA AWAITS. CALYPSO SAYS HELLO. ARGOS IS A DOG AND NO FRIEND. POSNER STILL HELD A GRUDGE ABOUT THE ACCIDENT AND HIS SON. HE KEPT SNIFFING AROUND ETNA HOUSE. I ADJUSTED HIS ATTITUDE CEDAR CEDAR YOU ARE CLEARED FOR LANDING TELLY OUT

Hiram sang to Shirley for his supper, a full recitation from memory of Ancient Mariner, and happily passed out on the couch.

The Hero, upon the morrow morn, washed the evening’s dishes and left a thank you note on the table. He felt there was still a task for him to do. He found it after five miles of walking; a little farm-country church, back half stove in, Sunday communicants facing the intact but prohibited front. It was too good to pass up.

“I can have your church fixed up. If you can answer a riddle.” The congregants stared at the stranger and his odd proposal, some trying to place the face of the wanderer.

“There’s a stand of cedars off of fire road 20.  It used to be on my grandfather’s land, now it’s part of the park, but Grandpa made sure it would always be open to hand-cut. It would match your existing wood. Answer my riddle and I’ll cover the cost of getting it milled and using it to repair the structure.”

“What’s the riddle?” was shouted out by several parishioners.

“There is a village where the barber shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself. Who shaves the barber?”

The pastor fumfered over Kurt Godel and set theory but couldn’t tie it up. A young lady blew through the classical logic. “Nobody. The barber is a woman.”

“Very well done.” Hiram handed the minister 20 gold bullion coins. “This is $35,000. That should cover the repairs. Could someone give me a lift into town?”

The welcoming committee was on the Etna House lawn. The Cornell humanities dean introduced Hiram as the new Chairman of Cultural Anthropology and presented him with his chair, a really nice Inada Dreamwave. The editor of Chalcolithic personally accepted the thumb drive with the completed paper Hiram had been carrying around. Telly shook his hand, and then Penelope grabbed her husband.

“We have some catching up to do.”

“Yes, about 10 year’s worth…”