Standing in the Rainbow (55 page)

After her second term Betty Raye retired from politics altogether and spent most of her time doing just what she had wanted to do all her life. She stayed home and gardened. The only other thing she did besides an occasional visit with her boys was to serve on the board of the twelve Hamm Sparks schools for the deaf and the blind she had founded in her late husband’s name. After Peter Wheeler’s wife died he and Vita married and were traveling the world on cruise ships. Jimmy Head moved into Betty Raye’s guest house out in the back and was very happy.

In 1984 Hamm Sparks Jr. ran for governor and won. People say they heard Earl Finley turning over in his grave.

As far as the Hamm Sparks case, after tracking the boat back to Mr. Anthony Leo, Jake Spurling hit another brick wall. He could not find the boat. He and his men scoured the records of all missing boats found and every piece of a boat found from St. Louis to the Mississippi border and on out to the Gulf of Mexico but nothing showed up. And Jake was still not sure if the missing hearse or the missing boat had anything to do with the men’s disappearance. All he knew was that Hamm had been in Jackson, Mississippi, one night and had vanished the next morning.

Every hunting and fishing camp in the area had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb and with a pack of bloodhounds. Nothing. Every fiber, bone, tooth, or hank of hair that had been recovered in the past seventeen years had been examined but nothing matched any of the men. So far this case was turning out to be the most baffling one he had ever run up against. If Jake Spurling had not been a pragmatic man and a forensic scientist who believed only in what he could see under a microscope, he might have started to wonder if they had really just disappeared into thin air like people said.

Monroe

B
OBBY HAD FLOWN
to New York for a round of business meetings. Fowler Poultry was in the process of merging with another, bigger company. On the third night, when he came back to his hotel he picked up at the desk the message Lois had left for him.

YOUR FRIEND MONROE NEWBERRY PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL IS WEDNESDAY AT
2
. CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS.

He went up to his room, sat down, and called her. Thank God for Lois. She had arranged everything with their travel agent and booked him on a flight from New York directly to Kansas City, where a rental car was reserved; he could drive to Elmwood Springs. After Bobby’s mother had died, Doc had gone to Seattle to live with Anna Lee, and Bobby had not been back to Elmwood Springs since the day of his mother’s funeral or seen Monroe for years. He had been so busy. But he and Monroe always called each other on their birthdays and at Christmas just to check in. They always planned to get together and do something but they had not. Both had always figured they had plenty of time. Now it was too late.

In Kansas City, his rental car was waiting and as he drove out onto the new superhighway he began to think about so many things he and Monroe had done together. Climbing the water tower, swimming at the Blue Devil, the train trip to the Boy Scout Jamboree, all the hundreds of times Monroe had spent the night at his house. The promise they’d made to one another that night, looking up at the stars with his grandmother, to call each other in the year 2000. Each had been best man at the other’s wedding.

But time and distance had taken its toll. Bobby had moved up in the world. He had new friends. He and Lois had bought a home in Shaker Heights in Cleveland, where the corporate offices were now located, and had joined the country club. Monroe had stayed at home to manage his wife’s father’s tire store.

Bobby arrived at the church around 1:40 and said the appropriate words to Monroe’s wife, Peggy, and a few other classmates. Then he walked over to the casket. He reached out and patted the body lying there, a body that was supposed to be Monroe but was only some cold, hard thing just taken out of a freezer. It startled him. Why was he so cold, had they put him in an icebox? What was lying there in a brown polyester suit and tie looked like a bad mannequin someone had made of Monroe as a joke. What was death anyway, some cruel magic trick pulled by the universe? One moment people are here and then somebody waves a cloth over them and in an instant they are gone.

What was once Monroe had disappeared. Where had he gone? Bobby wondered, just as he had as a child, what happened to the rabbit that the magician pulled out of the hat and made disappear—was Monroe hidden in a secret compartment somewhere waiting to come back?

He knew he should be feeling something more but he just felt numb, almost detached. And as he sat in the pew listening to the minister drone on and on, he realized that he had started to hum a little tune that for some unknown reason kept playing over and over in his head. A tune he had not sung in years.
Enjoy yourself, i
t
’s later than you think./Enjoy yourself while you’re still in the pink.
He knew he should be paying attention to the service but he could not concentrate. When it was over, the women, as usual, handled everything well; they even seemed to know when to cry. And how to cry, what casserole to make, and where to bring it. All the men did was show up and line up as pallbearers and even then they had to be told what to do. As he carried the body he was still unable to comprehend that it was really Monroe in the box he was lifting. It couldn’t be. He was only forty-nine years old. He was supposed to have had so many years left. Monroe had been walking down the aisle at the Wal-Mart garden and patio center, looking for a good crabgrass killer, and the next thing he was on the floor, dead of a massive heart attack. They say he never knew what hit him.

But Bobby wondered if Monroe had felt it coming, if he had had even a few seconds of wondering what this was. Was he dying? Was it all over? Had he been shocked to realize that this was it, the way it was going to be? Did he have a second to think about the last thing he said to his wife or his children? Did he think about what he had not done? Was he mad, was he scared? Had his life passed before his eyes, as they say it does? Or did it just go black? Is it like sleeping? Do you dream? Was Monroe somewhere watching him right now, pleased he had come after all these years—or did anything Bobby did today really matter?

If Monroe had known how short his life was to be, would he have done things differently? Would he have wasted so many days just fooling around his workshop or looking at baseball games? What would he have done, had he really known how fast life goes, like one train whizzing past another—a roaring noise, a vibration, and then gone as fast as it came.

After the graveside service, they went back to the house. Peggy had set up a little table with a candle on it, where she had put out some photographs. Bobby walked over and saw the one of Monroe sitting on a pony, the same pony he’d been on, and school pictures, Monroe’s wedding picture, frames with his family’s pictures of him holding a string of fish, Monroe getting heavier as the years went by but still that same, sweet, good-natured Monroe, who had gone along with every crazy thing Bobby had thought up. After a while, all the guys eventually went out on the back porch and stood around talking, trying to remember all the funny things over the years. That time when Monroe had shot his little toe off when he tripped over his hunting dog, the time he had been caught trying to steal Old Man Henderson’s wheelbarrow, all the nutty times of their childhoods. One of the guys passed a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey around and they each took a drink. Most of them, including Bobby, had lost a parent but that was to be expected. This was different. This was the first friend of their own age who had died. This was too close for comfort.

Death did not scare Bobby; he had seen too much of it in Korea. What scared Bobby was the moment or even the few seconds when you might know you were dying and that everything was over. He had almost drowned once and had thought for a fleeting second that maybe it was his last moment on earth. But at the time he had been so young and after he had the devil scared out of him, he’d promptly forgotten it and continued to take stupid chances. The young can forget easily. As you get older, it becomes harder and harder to forget your own mortality. There are so many reminders. Little individual end of the worlds start to happen all around you. When your grandparents go, your parents are ahead of you, but when they go, you look around and realize you are next in line. Then one day you are actually talking about cemetery plots and insurance.

It was about five when the get-together was over. Before he left to go back to the airport, Bobby decided to take a walk around town. He had not been home since his mother’s funeral all those years ago. As he walked down streets where he had once known every face he passed, there were now strangers who had no idea who he was. They thought this was their town. Streets and houses that he had once known as well as the back of his hand had all changed. He walked along his old paper route but there were strangers in the old Whatley house, strangers sitting on the porch where the Nordstroms used to live. He cut down a few alleys, which years ago had seemed twenty feet wide, and was surprised to see that they were just narrow little footpaths, lined with garbage cans. He had not remembered so much garbage. He walked by his old house. He and Anna Lee had sold it a few years ago and he was glad to see it looked just about the same, only so much smaller than he remembered. Everything was much smaller. Downtown was just a block long. It had seemed so much bigger, like an entire city, as he remembered it. He stopped in front of the window of the Morgan Brothers department store and wondered how they had managed to get a winter wonderland in that little window. The barber pole was gone. Almost every business on the street was closed for good, except for the hardware store and his dad’s old drugstore. The glass doors to the old Elmwood Theater were chained shut, and a poster of the last movie shown there, in ’68, was dusty inside the glass frame. He stood outside on the sidewalk and stared up at it. God, he thought, the hours he had spent inside, the theater filled with screaming children and squeaking seats being flipped up and down. The green tin light sconces up the sides of the walls, a place so dark you would be blind for a few minutes as your eyes adjusted, until you could make out those little white lights on the floor by each row of seats and you would head down the aisle, your feet carpeted by some wonderfully soft, multicolored maroon and pink and green stuff leading you deeper into the theater, closer and closer to the big screen, where life was exciting and full of a million possibilities and dreams. He walked over and peered inside the lobby but could not see much. He did not know if it was because of the Jim Beam but as he stood there he could almost hear the large glass machine popping corn. He could taste the salty, buttery taste of that popcorn in the greasy red-and-white-striped bags. And even though the diner had closed years ago, he could still remember the tangy taste of mustard and chili on the hot dogs, washed down with bottles of ice-cold Orange Crush. And as he went by the drugstore he could taste all the root-beer floats, lemon and strawberry sodas, the banana splits, and the steaming hot-fudge sundaes he had eaten over the years.

So many sounds and smells. He thought, I must be drunk. He walked back to his car and got in and sat there alone. It was fall and the leaves were just beginning to turn and a thousand new memories flooded his mind.

That time. That place. That feeling. What he would not give to get it, to find it again for a day or even an hour, but he knew it was as impossible as trying to catch smoke in your hand. How could anyone know, when he or she was living it, that they would someday look back with longing, that these would be the good old days? No one tells us, “This is the happiest you will ever be in your life.” Why had he wasted so much of it dreaming about going to other places? For the first time, Bobby realized the thing he missed most in the world was gone forever and he sat there and cried like a baby. He wanted his childhood back. He wanted to go home, walk down the hall, and climb into his old bed, and wake up with his future laid out before him on a red carpet. He wanted to go back to when a day seemed to last an eternity and the field behind the house was a vast expanse that led to magic places and the swimming pool was as long and as wide as a lake. When your best friend was your blood brother and all the girls thought you were cute. He wondered whatever had become of the Bubble Gum King of 1949? That boy who was going to fly planes, jump freighters to the Orient, be a cowboy, and do so many wonderful things.

Nothing too terrible. He had just grown up.

Poor Tot

A
BAD CHILDHOOD
followed by a happy adulthood is one thing, and a good childhood followed by an unhappy adulthood is another. But for Tot Whooten, a miserable childhood had followed her like a black dog right into an equally miserable adulthood. She had been so busy she had not noticed until one day when she looked around and it seemed clear to her that life was not a constant struggle for other people. They seemed to actually enjoy it and look forward to the dawning of a new day.

It had suddenly become obvious to her that if you wake up every morning and it takes you almost an hour to talk yourself into just getting out of bed, something is wrong. Every morning for the past twenty-plus years she had been her own mental cheerleader, doing back flips and chanting, “Be happy you are alive, life is great, rah rah rah . . . sis boom bah! You will be dead soon enough, don’t waste your life away, get up, get up, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, it’s a new day,” and so on. But this morning the cheerleader inside just sat down with her pom-poms and flopped back on the bed beside her, saying, “I’m exhausted . . . I give up, I can’t do it anymore.” She was like that Old Man River, tired of living, but feared of dying, and this morning she had realized that she could no longer jes’ keep rolling along.