Standing in the Rainbow

THE NINETIES

Popsicle Toes

WHEN MACKY WALKED in the door Norma was waiting for him in the living room and said, “Macky, sit down.” The look on her face told him she was about to tell him something terrible or wonderful, he never knew which. But he sat down.

“What is it?”

“I’ve been on the phone with Linda,” she said.

“Yes, and?”

“And. She said she wants to have a baby, she says her biological clock is ticking.”

“Uh-huh, has she met someone?”

Norma got up and started to rearrange the pillows on the sofa, just like she always did when she was nervous. “No, she hasn’t met anyone but she has been calling different agencies.”

Macky was alarmed. “Agencies? What the hell is she doing that for? There are plenty of men where she works.”

Norma cleared her throat. “That’s just it, she doesn’t want a man; well, at least not in person. She wants the baby but not the husband . . . that’s what she said.”

“What?”

“Now, before you get mad at me, I did not say I thought it was a good idea but she has decided to go to a”—Norma weighed her words very carefully—“a place that specializes in that sort of thing. She’s looking into one of those . . . you know . . . bank things.”

“Banks?”

Norma was becoming impatient. “Oh, Macky, don’t make me have to spell it out for you. She wants to get pregnant but she does not want to get married again. She’s going to one of those places that deal in . . . frozen . . .” Norma struggled but no matter how hard she tried she could not bring herself to say the actual word. She glanced out the front window to see if anyone was in hearing distance, then spelled it out: “S-P-E-R-M.”

“What?”

“Macky, have you never heard of artificial insemination? That’s what she wants to get and she just wanted to let us know.”

“Good God.”

“You always said she could tell us anything—well, now she has. I just don’t know what to say or what to think. She’s your daughter. If you hadn’t acted like you wanted a grandchild so much that other time, this might not have happened.”

“Norma, she was pregnant—what was I supposed to say?”

“You acted like a grandchild was the only thing you’d ever wanted in your entire life, then when she had the miscarriage it made her feel even worse.” Norma suddenly burst into tears and wailed, “I hope you’re satisfied. You’re about to have one with a Popsicle for a father!”

But after months of trying and many disappointments, Linda’s attempt to become pregnant was not successful and she finally gave up. Macky and Norma assumed that was to be the end of it but when Macky came in from a fishing trip Norma met him at the back door and announced, “Well, I hope you like chop suey.”

“What?”

“Your daughter called while you were gone. She is now on her way to China to pick up a foreigner baby.”

“What?”

“She said she applied for a little girl a year ago. She said she didn’t tell us before because she thought she would never hear from them but three days ago they called her and told her to come over and pick it up.”

He stood there holding his string of fish with his mouth open. It was the last thing in the world he expected to hear.

“Congratulations, Macky, you are now the grandfather of a Communist who will probably grow up and murder us all in our beds.” With that she left him standing in the kitchen and went back to bed in tears.

As upset and worried as they both were, the moment they saw the beautiful little button-eyed girl Linda had named Apple, they fell in love. Two years later Norma was out at the mall proudly wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of the little Chinese girl on it. Printed underneath was SOMEBODY SPECIAL CALLS ME GRANDMA.

Cecil Figgs, a.k.a. Ramon Novarro

WHEN THE BODY of the large, heavyset woman in the red wig had been picked up off the street and brought to the Cecil Figgs funeral parlor for embalming, they discovered that the lady on the table was no lady. Imagine their incredible surprise when they were told that the man in the bright green dress was none other than Mr. Cecil Figgs!

What a scandal. Thank heaven, Cecil’s mother had not lived to see it. Jake Spurling immediately flew to New Orleans. But even he, with all his powers of deduction and all the resources of the F.B.I. behind him, could not figure out how Figgs had wound up living in New Orleans for the past twenty-something years as a Miss Anita “Boom Boom” De Thomas.

As hard as he tried, Jake could come up with nothing. The only human being who had really known what had happened to Hamm and the rest of the men was now dead, and even he had not known it all. Jake might have solved some of it but he had missed out on a very important clue years ago.

A piece of wood had washed up with the word AYE written on it. The river rescue authorities checked their logs, and a boat registered to a Mr. J. C. Patterson named Aye Aye, Skipper had been lost eighteen years ago. They assumed it was from the Patterson boat. But they were wrong. That piece of wood was from the only thing left intact of The Betty Raye.

When The Betty Raye had docked in New Orleans, Cecil had the name of a contact in Louisiana who would sell him formaldehyde by the ten gallons at a cut rate, so he figured that as long as he was there, he would have the man load The Betty Raye with eighty gallons, and Cecil would bring it back to Missouri.

Cecil did not know that the reason the man was selling the formaldehyde at such a good price was because it had been stolen from one of Cecil’s own warehouses. While Hamm and the other men were off having their meeting, Cecil was in the French Quarter, and the boat was loaded not only with the formaldehyde but with fifty cases of cheap, tax-free bootleg rum from Cuba, which Rodney Tillman had arranged to take back to Missouri as well.

Later that night after the meeting, The Betty Raye, loaded to the gills with cheap booze and cut-rate formaldehyde, took off, headed back to the boathouse. They were playing cards en route and Seymour Gravel was chewing on his smelly cigar. “I’m out,” he said and threw his cards down, complaining about his bad hand, and began looking for a match. It was a hot night and the rest of them were in the middle of a pretty intense poker game. Hamm said to Seymour, “If you’re gonna smoke that thing, go sit in the back.”

Seymour waddled back and sat down on a box and continued to search his pockets for a match. “Hey, Wendell—throw me your lighter for a minute.”

Wendell, preoccupied with trying to decide whether or not to raise Hamm, reached in his shirt pocket and tossed his heavy silver Zippo with the marine insignia on it back to him. Seymour reached out but missed, and it sailed on past him. As it was turning over in midair, the top of the lighter flew open, and when it hit the side of one of the boxes, it landed right smack on its small wheel. As people often say when such a freak thing happens, “If you tried you would not be able to do it again in a million years.” The spark from the lighter ignited the dry straw the liquor was packed in and started to spread like wildfire.

What none of the men knew was that a few months ago, the real owner of the boat, Mr. Anthony Leo, had acquired some stolen dynamite he was planning to use in the future to settle a business dispute. And he had it stashed in a secret compartment in the bottom of The Betty Raye for safekeeping.

The gallons of flammable formaldehyde, boxes of ninety-proof alcohol, and a cargo full of dynamite below proved to be not only illegal but a lethal combination. Two men who were out on the river in a rowboat fishing that night came in and said they had just seen a huge comet come hurtling down from the sky. They said it had shot across the horizon and had landed about a mile upriver. But they were wrong. What they had seen that night had not been a comet coming down. It had been Hamm Sparks, boat, and cronies going up!

The bad news: This spectacular event had certainly ended a remarkable political career. The good news: Hamm Sparks had always wanted to go as high in the world as he could—and he had. And as usual, the rest of the men had just been along for the ride.

But as it turned out, there was one man who had not been along that night.

Cecil Figgs had failed to show up at the time they were scheduled to leave and they had left without him, which was fine with him. He was having too much fun. He had left the car keys with Rodney, and Cecil figured he could always fly home.

He woke up in New Orleans two days later in a seedy hotel in the French Quarter with a bad hangover. His young companion was gone but had left a note.

Dear Ramon,

Thanks for the good time. Call me the next time you are in town.

Love,

Todd

Cecil always used the name Ramon Novarro when he was out of town. When Cecil suddenly realized it was Tuesday and that he had missed taking his mother to the eye doctor the day before, he felt sick with guilt. He would have to call her right away, but not before he had a cup of coffee. Cecil dressed and walked next door to eat breakfast and figure out what he would say to his mother, who was sure to be upset. Shortly before his first sip of coffee he picked up the Times-Picayune newspaper someone had left on the counter. When he saw the front page he almost fainted.

HAMM SPARKS, FOUR COMPANIONS PRESUMED DEAD

The article underneath the pictures of all five men, including him, said the police believed the missing men had most likely been murdered and as far as they could tell, it looked like the work of professionals. At the moment they were questioning several men in St. Louis with Chicago mob connections.

What little hair Cecil had stood up on the back of his head. He had no idea what had happened. After he got over the initial shock of the whole thing, his first instinct was to run and call his mother. But then he realized that if someone had been out to kill them and found out he was still alive, they might try it again. Desperately, he tried to figure out what to do next. While he sat before his cold coffee in a dilemma, pondering his future and perhaps his impending murder, it struck him like a bolt of lightning. Wait a minute, he thought. In the middle of this seeming tragedy there was another part of it he had just realized. He was, for all intents and purposes, dead, or at least everyone thought he was. For the first time in his life he was free. Free to be who and what he really was. He would no longer have to lead a double life, always looking over his shoulder, afraid of getting caught; always terrified he might upset his mother or disgrace the family. He’d have to die to do it. It would be a big price to pay but he figured it would be worth it.

In the end, the man Hamm and the boys had taken the meeting with in New Orleans said nothing. He could not afford to have his name involved in any scandal. Mr. Anthony Leo of St. Louis did wonder what had happened to the boat and his missing dynamite but he was certainly in no position to say anything and for years continued to wonder but kept his mouth shut. The man who’d sold Rodney the illegal Cuban rum said nothing and the man who’d sold Cecil the stolen formaldehyde certainly said nothing. And Cecil said nothing.

In fact, there was no Cecil. From that day forward, nobody but himself knew that Miss Anita “Boom Boom” De Thomas, gorgeous headliner at the famous My Oh My Club in New Orleans, Louisiana, was the sole survivor of the late Mr. Cecil Figgs of Missouri. Cecil had been given an opportunity that few people in this world ever get. He had been shown an open door that led to a new life and he had walked through it to the other side and there was no turning back. Mother Figgs and the entire Figgs clan were left a small fortune and the warm memory of a good son and he was going to have a good time the rest of his life. He had only one major and painful regret in leaving Cecil behind. It had just about killed him not to be able to plan the governor’s funeral. It would have been the triumph of his career. Oh, well.

Time to Say Good-bye

MACKY COULD READ the handwriting on the wall. Long before he said anything to Norma, he knew he just could not compete as a small hardware store. Three different malls had sprung up, and now with the brand-new Home Improvement Center in one and Wal-Mart and Ace Hardware in the other, he had lost business. Most of his old customers had tried to stay with him but with so many new people moving in and the prices being so low, he was losing them one by one, and as he told his friend Merle, “Hell, I can’t blame them, I’d shop out there myself.” Selling out and retiring had been in the back of his mind but he had not had any serious thoughts about it until lately. But events tumbling upon one another had brought him to the moment when he actually sat down and talked with her about the prospects of selling their house.

Pretty soon Macky and Norma started sending off for brochures of retirement communities. From the pictures of the good-looking silver-haired men and women standing around having cocktails, playing golf, tennis, and swimming, it looked like fun. “Your home away from home, only better,” they said.

As it turned out, the decision was made in less than forty-eight hours and it had nothing to do with anything that was planned. Verbena and Merle called in a fit. They had a nephew who was living in a gated community in Vero Beach and he had just found out that a house was coming up on the market in a few days and he’d called to see if they were interested. He said that it was one of the best retirement complexes down there and if somebody moved fast, before the Realtors found out about it, they could buy it from the owner, a friend of his, and not have to pay the commission.

After Macky got off the phone he told Norma all about it. “But the bad news,” he said, “is we have to make up our minds right away. Merle said there are people waiting in line to buy it if we don’t.”

Norma panicked. “Oh my God . . . do we have time to call Linda?”

“Yes, honey, go on.”

After ten minutes Norma handed the phone to Macky.

“Daddy, what do you think?”

“It’s up to your mother, whatever she thinks.”

Norma threw up her hands. “You always do this.”

“Well, Daddy, it sounds like a good deal to me. If you get there and don’t like it, you can always turn around and sell it but it sounds like you have a chance to get a nice place at a good price. I think you would always be sorry if you didn’t take advantage of it. Do you know anybody other than Verbena’s nephew who lives in Vero Beach? Anybody you could ask?”

“No.”

“Let me call around and I’ll try and find out something.” Twenty minutes later she called back. “Daddy, listen to this: Vero Beach, Florida, Indian River country home, home of famous Dodgertown, USA.”

“What’s that?”

“Daddy, it’s where the L.A. Dodgers have their spring training. You and Mother can go and watch the Dodgers play.”

The next afternoon Norma called Linda. “Well, honey, we did it. Your daddy and I have just bought a pig in a poke. He’s told the man yes. I just hope to God we don’t get down there and find out we’re in the middle of a swamp.”

“Great! Aren’t you excited?”

“I don’t know what to think, it all happened so fast. I just hope your daddy made the right decision.”

After they packed up and sold everything, it was time, as Merle had said, to shake the dust off and see some new scenery. When Merle and Verbena had moved to Florida they had flown, but Macky decided to buy a Minnie Winnie and see the country on the way down. He bought a captain’s hat and hung a sign on the back that said THE CHUCKLEHEADS and the next day he put Norma, Aunt Elner, and Sonny Number Four in the back and took off. Macky was excited. He had remembered all the little charming, out-of-the-way cafés his family had stopped at the last time he went to Florida, in 1939. But as he soon found out, things had changed. For days all they saw were Burger Kings, Taco Bells, McDonald’s, Jack in the Boxes, and Cracker Barrels. Norma said, “Macky, there are no more little places and Aunt Elner and I don’t want to get ptomaine poisoning just so you can take a trip down Memory Lane.” The one place he did find, Norma refused to go in. “Let’s just go to the Cracker Barrel, where we know it’s clean and the food is good.” The road was not as he remembered either. It was nothing but a blur of huge trucks. There were almost no cars anymore. It seemed like the entire country was nothing but trucks following other trucks. Every town looked exactly like the last. Every gas station had the same mini-mart inside. It was hard to tell one state from another.

In Vero Beach, the man had said to look for a shopping center with a big Publix drugstore, but every shopping center they passed had a big Publix drugstore and Macky finally had to stop and ask directions. A man poked his head in and said, “Sure, go about five miles up past the Winn-Dixie and take a sharp left, right into Leisureville.”

They found the sign with the arrow that said WELCOME TO LEISUREVILLE CENTRAL, FLORIDA’S FINEST GATED COMMUNITY but as they drove in they saw row after row of little mint-green, oleander-pink, or lavender stucco houses that, Aunt Elner noted, were the same color as those candy mints that Miss Alma used to keep in a glass bowl by the cashier.

As they drove in they did not see any vital, silver-haired, good-looking couples, as were shown on the brochure, standing around the pool, cocktail in hand, laughing and chatting with others of the same age with the look of “I’ve got the world by the tail.” All they saw was a bunch of people who looked old to them but looked young to Aunt Elner.

They soon discovered that what had been advertised as Citrus View Patio Homes meant there was an orange grove across the street and a slab of concrete in the postage-stamp backyard. When they walked into their new home Norma was silent. The cottage-cheese ceilings were lower than expected and there were stains all over the mustard-gold shag rug, which did nothing to enhance the olive-green stove and refrigerator. The fact that the house had been closed up for three months and smelled like mildew did not help ease the initial shock. The walls were a dingy color described as champagne beige, popular in the fifties, as were the cheap aluminum sliding doors and windows throughout the house. Macky was already wondering how hard it would be to sell it when Norma surprised him, as she still could, by saying, “Oh, Macky, it’s not so bad. I can whip this place into shape in no time.” Sonny had no qualms about the shag rug and happily scratched away at it after depositing a welcome-to-your-new-home gift. They stayed in a motel until Macky could get the rug pulled up and have the walls repainted. Norma went to Sears and bought a new white refrigerator and stove and had Goodwill come and pick up the old green ones. Macky laid a new sheet of white linoleum on the floor in the kitchen and in the bathrooms. A week later, when the van carrying their furniture arrived from Missouri and everything was put in its place and the stucco house looked at least a little familiar, Macky sat down on his old chair from home and flipped up the leg rest and thought to himself, “Now what?”

The next week a new magazine came and he stared at it and asked Norma, “What the hell is AARP? It sounds like a dog throwing up.”

Norma said, “It’s a magazine from the American Association of Retired Persons. Everybody gets it after they hit fifty. It tells all about your senior citizen discounts.”

Macky mumbled and went out to take a walk. What was going on? He was not ready to be a senior citizen—there seemed to be a national conspiracy to label anybody over the age of fifty-five a “senior” and move them on out of the mainstream. That’s not how he remembered it when he was young; an old man was not old until at least seventy-five or eighty and even Old Man Henderson had still been doing his yard at ninety-three, for God’s sake. Macky was still young; he had years left before he was old. Rest up for what, he wondered, to get ready to die? Take a short rest before you take the long one? Norma was sailing into the bay of senior citizenship with the wind to her back and with a smile on her face. But not him.

Macky wandered around the complex. Not only was he in a different state, he was in a different world and he was lost. Lost in Leisureville.

Seems Like Old Times

AFTER A FEW MONTHS Norma had made a lot of new friends and Aunt Elner was as happy as a lark with all the bingo games they had down there. Sonny the cat was delighted to be living in a place with so much sand to dig in, but Norma was worried about Macky. As she said to Linda on the phone that very morning, “Your daddy is not adjusting to retirement.”

Norma had been reading the volunteer-positions-for-seniors column to Macky, as she did every other day, and as usual he’d resisted her suggestions.

“Norma, I’ve told you, I am not going to stand around like some old senile fart and welcome people to Wal-Mart, for God’s sake.”

“I didn’t say Wal-Mart. There are plenty of places that retired people go to work for . . . McDonald’s . . . Burger King. Look, it says here you can even volunteer at the high school cafeteria or the library. They want seniors to set a good example to the young people. What’s wrong with that? At home you used to do all kinds of things for the community.”

“That was different.”

“How can it be different?”

“It was my community; this isn’t my community.”

“It is now. Young people are just the same everywhere—don’t you want to be a role model . . . be a good influence?”

He left the house and took a walk around the complex. It was only the end of November but some people had already put up their Christmas wreaths, brought with them from other parts of the country. The huge decorations, which might have looked fine on some door of a house in New Hampshire or Maine, looked bizarre in the glaring Florida sun, like an entire community had gone mad and decorated for Christmas in the middle of the summer. One pale orange house had put a fake snowman on the small front porch but had neglected to remove the pink plastic flamingo on the lawn. Macky knew by the calendar and by the ads that had already started on television that it was about to be Christmas but other than that, one day was no different from the next. All the earmarks of the season that he had gone by for the last sixty-two years were gone.

At home he knew when it was fall. He smelled it. He raked it up in the yard. He and Norma had a routine. At the end of September she collected all their summer clothes and put them away in the bottom drawers and moved the sweaters up to the top. All the winter coats were brought from the back bedroom closet and put in the coat closet. Summer shoes were replaced with winter shoes. He could count on a month or so of everything smelling slightly like mothballs. Then when May came around, back they went. But this year the clothes did not change. Everything was still seersucker and short-sleeved. They only had a few sweaters but that was mostly for air-conditioning, not weather. Macky had read somewhere that a person’s ability to adjust was a sign of intelligence. So far he was failing the test. Not that he had not tried. In fact, at first he had been much more enthusiastic than Norma. But after the initial excitement, after he had done all the work on the new house, learned the neighborhood, and seen all the sights, it had slowly begun to dawn on him. Life as he had known it was all over. Life in a town where your family had lived for over a hundred years and everybody knew not only you but all your family was over. Here he was just another stranger. Just another transient. Nobody special. At home he had an identity. He was Macky Warren. Son of Olla and Glenn Warren. His father had owned and run the hardware store for fifty years, and then he had owned it and run it. For most of his life, whenever he had been anywhere where people did not know him and they had asked, as men do, What line are you in? he had been able to answer, I have a little hardware store back home. Now nobody ever asked what line he was in or what did he do. If they did ask, he had to answer by telling them what he used to do. What he used to be. Now what was he? Who was he? Just another displaced stranger trying to pretend that a get-together at the complex clubhouse was just like home only better.

Aunt Elner was making so many new friends her own age that she was loving Florida but Norma had problems with Macky. She came in after one of her flower-arranging classes and said, “Macky, I talked to my friend Ethel and she said that Arve went through the same thing and his doctor identified it as a male identity problem. And that what you need to do is to connect with your inner male.”

“Oh good God, Norma, what did you tell her?”

“Nothing bad, I just said that you were depressed, having a hard time adjusting to being retired. It’s not anything to be ashamed of, evidently a lot of men go through it. Anyhow, she talked it over with Arve and he went for help and she says it really helped him.”

“Norma, Arve is an idiot. Do you really think that wearing gold chains and sticking a curly black wig on your head at seventy-five is adjusting? He’s a joke.”

“All right, so he may be a little silly but he’s happy and isn’t that the point, to be happy? Anyhow I’m not going to argue about Arve; the point is she gave me this brochure for you to look at.” Macky took it and read where once a week, groups of men organized by Jon Avnet, Ph.D., gather to “reconnect with the warrior within, to drum, talk, weep, and tell their stories in a safe place.”

He looked up at Norma and said nothing.

The Ant

MACKY WANDERED over to Ocean Park, sat on a concrete bench, and stared out at the blue water. The world he had known was gone. Not only was he living in an alien place, but while he had been busy all these years making a living, someone had changed all the rules. For all he knew, he might as well have gone to sleep and awakened on the moon.

When he’d grown up, everybody had more or less agreed to a certain way of living. A certain standard. You didn’t lie, you didn’t cheat or steal, you honored your parents, your word was your bond. You didn’t try to weasel your way out of things. You married the girl. You paid your bills. You took care of your children. You didn’t cuss around girls. You didn’t hit women. You played by the rules and it was expected that you would be a good sport if you lost. You kept your house, yard, and yourself clean.

Norma said you have to just swing with it and try not to let it bother you so much. He wished he could but somehow it seemed this new world was easier for the women to accept and adjust to. What bothered him and other men his age and older was that the things they had been willing to die for were no longer appreciated. Everything he had believed in was now the butt of jokes made by a bunch of smarty-assed late-night-TV so-called comedians making a salary you could support a small country with. All he heard was people saying how bad we were, how corrupt we had been, and how terrible white men were. He had not felt like a bad person. But just the fact that he was a white man of a certain age, a lot of people he did not know hated him. He had never knowingly been mean or unfair to another human being in his life. Now it seems he was the oppressor, responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. War, slavery, racism, sexism—he was the enemy and all he had tried to do was live a good and decent life. History was being rewritten by the minute. All of his childhood heroes were now being viewed as villains, their lives judged in hindsight by the current fad of political correctness. Hell, now they were even taking Huckleberry Finn out of libraries, for God’s sake. It was all too confusing.

You never saw people anymore, everything was self-service, everybody behind glass windows. And you could not get a real person on the phone. Everywhere you called, a recorded message connected you to another recorded message and then hung up on you. And everybody was mad and screaming about something. He did not know which was worse, the radical right or the radical left. It seemed nobody was in the middle anymore. We used to be on the right track and then we took a wrong turn but he did not know where. Was it the dope or television? Was it having too much that did it? He had tried to read what the experts thought but they did not know any more than he did. All he knew for sure was that after the ’40s and ’50s, when he had been raised, the world had flipped over like a giant pancake and everything was backward. When he was a kid everyone had wanted to be Tarzan; now they all want to be the natives. People were sticking rings in their noses—even pretty little girls were running around with green hair, their bodies pierced everywhere.

And nobody answered a direct question anymore with a simple yes or no. Everything was answered with some kind of rhetoric. And he knew far more than he wanted to know about perfect strangers. Things people used to be ashamed to talk about now sold books and got them on television. Murderers were being asked for their autographs and turned into celebrities. Football, basketball, and baseball players could beat up their wives, take drugs, go to jail, and still stay on the team and make millions. It didn’t matter what kind of a person you were anymore. He remembered when a professional athlete was someone to look up to; now the sports page read more like a police blotter.

And never in a million years would he have dreamed that one day baseball players would be wearing earrings. Or that some girl would be singing on television in her brassiere. Life was all so different, with this one having two mommies and another one two daddies.

He did not know what to think anymore. The way it looked to him, the world was not getting better; it was getting worse. He sat there for about an hour and gazed out at the water, wondering where and when it was all going to end.

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and stared down at the sandy ground, as if looking for an answer. After a few minutes he noticed a tiny ant that walked underneath him, struggling to carry what looked like a large piece of potato chip. It was much too big for him to eat, but he was headed somewhere with it anyhow. He watched the ant as it kept going and banged into another concrete bench, went around it, crawling over rocks and other obstacles, determined to get back home with his treasure. It was much too big for him to carry but he did not seem to know it.

Macky sat there and watched the ant struggle along until it was out of sight and he smiled for the first time in weeks. “Who knows?” he thought. “If he keeps on going, the little son of a bitch might just make it.”

Hey, Good Buddy

THE NEXT DAY Norma marched in the door and said, “I have made a decision. Since you won’t go to any of the groups, I have taken the bull by the horns. Come out to the car and help me bring it in.”

When they got to the car there it was, in a box that looked like the hide of a black-and-white cow. Norma had bought him a computer.

“Norma, I don’t know how to use that thing.”

“Neither do I but we are going to learn. I’ve signed us up for lessons over at Comp World. It can’t be hard; they say now that even first graders can do it. Besides, Linda said if we got one we could E-mail each other.”

“Norma, I’ll help you set it up but I’m not going to any classes over at Comp World. You go if you like.”

Five months later, after much cussing, he let Norma show him how to get on the Internet.

One day while she was gone, Macky was pleasantly surprised that after a few tries he was able to get into a chat room.

“Hey, any old guys out there remember the Hardy Boys?” Within two minutes Marvin from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, answered.

“Hey, good buddy, affirmative. I just found three old copies—The Tower Treasure, The Missing Chums, The Clue of the Broken Blade. Have two copies of Missing Chums would be happy to send on.”

The next thing Norma knew she could not get him off the Internet. He was all over the map. He was even able to locate fly-fishing experts on the thing. What they had to discuss about the mayfly was a mystery to her but he chatted for hours with someone in Wyoming. And they seemed to know what the other meant. As for Macky, after he got the hang of it, he announced to Norma, “This is just like ham radio, only better.”

Norma said, as usual, “See? I told you.”

Life started to perk up a little more for Macky. His little granddaughter, Apple, started coming down for visits and he was able to teach her all the fine points of baseball. One beautiful Sunday the two of them went to the Dodgers game over at Dodgertown, USA, and had a wonderful time. The little girl did not know it, but one day years from now she would look back on that day and remember how the sun felt and the smell of the grass . . . all the hot dogs and peanuts her granddaddy bought her, the feel of his hand holding hers as they walked home, and she would smile.

All’s Well That Ends Well

TAKE WHAT HAPPENED to Betty Raye, for instance. Although she had started out poor in life and had been deprived of her rightful place in the world, the universe sometimes has a way of righting things. Her two boys were lucky in business and made a killing in real estate. Her uncle Le Roy Oatman’s guilt over leaving the gospel group and joining a hillbilly band finally paid off in a big way. In 1989, while on a three-day bender in Del Rio, Texas, he wrote a song about how fortune and fame don’t mean a thing because, as the title says, “I Never Said Good-bye to Momma.” Country-and-western star Clint Black recorded it and it became an overnight hit and had grown men sobbing in their beers for years. When Le Roy passed on, he left Betty Raye, the only one in the family who had been nice to him, millions of dollars in royalties that just keep on rolling in.

Then there was money from Hamm’s life-insurance policy, which Vita helped her invest in several stocks. One was a pharmaceutical company that just happened to manufacture birth-control pills. When the sexual revolution hit in the seventies, she made $5 million on that one stock alone. But rich as she was, Betty Raye still lived happily in her red-brick house.

However, Le Roy was not the only Oatman to do well in the music world.

After a long dry period when southern gospel had been pushed into the background by a musical trend known as “contemporary Christian music,” in 1992, the Oatman family was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and, thanks to the Bill and Gloria Gaither Gospel Music television shows, they became more popular than ever. Minnie had diabetes, gout, emphysema, and two knee replacements and was on her fifth heart attack, but apparently nothing can kill her. The woman who just can’t wait to get to heaven is going to have to wait a little longer. Right now she’s doing four shows a week.

As for Beatrice Woods, the old saying that love is blind is just a metaphor but in her case love really was blind, literally, and it was a good thing. Floyd Oatman was not the best-looking of men, but in his heart he was as romantic as the next. His problem was he had little courage and was terrified to talk to women, but Chester was a ladies’ man and had no fear. What poor Floyd was too shy to say to a woman, Chester, the Scripture-quoting dummy, said for him. He leered and whistled and flirted with every pretty woman he saw. But in 1969, with a little help from Beatrice, Floyd was finally able to find his own voice and speak for himself and to ask Beatrice to marry him without going through Chester.

Of course, Beatrice had no idea that he was not the most handsome man in America. He told her that he looked just like Clark Gable but having been blind from birth, she did not know what Clark Gable looked like, either. And later, with Beatrice’s love and encouragement, Floyd, in an incredible leap of faith, threw Chester the dummy over the side of a bridge into the Pea River outside Elba, Alabama. He was free of Chester at last and was finally able to stand alone.

However, unbeknownst to Floyd, Chester was to make one final solo appearance. During the big Pea River flood, Chester the dummy washed up and floated through the town on his back and scared everybody half to death. The three firemen that risked their lives jumping into the river to retrieve the body of the poor little drowned boy were in for a surprise and took quite a bit of ribbing from the other men when they pulled him out. Chester spent the rest of his days hanging on the wall at the firehouse, until it burned down. Being made of wood, poor Chester the dummy finally bit the dust for good.

Beatrice and Floyd had one son. They did not name him Chester.