"Mr. Warren, we just got the report from the lab and it's absolutely benign, so we're gonna close her on up. She should be out of recovery in a few hours." He spoke over his shoulder to another doctor that had just passed him in the hall. "Hey, Duke, can you get me two more tickets for the game tomorrow?"
Macky didn't hear Duke's response. He stood up and took a walk outside the hospital. Everything inside had been cold and sterile and now he was back out in the warm sunshine and he felt as if he could breathe again. He found himself smiling at the people he passed and at that moment he made a deal with himself. Anything that woman wants from now on, she gets.
Afterward, he had to remind himself of that deal he made that day outside the hospital. When he asked her the next year where she wanted to go for a vacation, she said, "Well, there is one place that I have been dying to go to, but I don't know if you will want to."
"Norma, I told you we will go anywhere you want."
"I've always wanted to go to Las Vegas and see Wayne Newton in concert."
He would have gone to the moon had she wanted.
Six months after they returned from Las Vegas, Norma finally found the civic cause she had been searching for. Somehow it seemed that after Neighbor Dorothy died, nobody ever came to town anymore. When she had her radio show, people came from miles around by the busloads, but now, with the new interstate, downtown was dying on the vine. At the next chamber of commerce meeting a brand-new committee to come up with solutions to revitalize downtown Elmwood Springs was formed and Norma was voted to head it. After walking downtown, clipboard in hand on a fact-finding tour, Norma reported her conclusion at the next meeting.
"We are too dull what we need is a theme."
"A theme? What kind of a theme?" asked Leona.
"A theme, something to make us different, make us stand out, set us apart from other towns so people will want to come here. We just don't have any character; every building is just willy-nilly. We need to make an impression. When you drive in, what do you see? You see a sign that says Welcome to Elmwood Springs but we need more than that. We need to have one that offers an idea, a claim, something unique. Home of the World's Largest Sweet Potato or something. We need to give people something unusual, an attraction that will make them want to get off the interstate and stop."
They all fired at once:
"Can't we think of something like that to get us in the Guinness Book of World Records?"
"Like the world's largest cake. Or pie or pancake, even."
"What about a waffle, the world's biggest waffle?"
"But once you make it, it won't last you have to offer them something to see that's still here."
"We need something that's indigenous."
"How about home of the largest squash ever grown? Don't you remember when Doc Smith grew that squash and sent it to the state fair?"
"How do you know it was the world's largest squash? It was the state's, but we don't know for sure if it was the world's."
"All right, we can say the state's largest squash who going to know anyway? Or care?"
"I think they took a picture of it. We could find out, we could display that."
"Well, I tell you what. I certainly wouldn't turn off the interstate to look at a squash, much less a picture of a squash," said Tot.
"What do we have a lot of?"
"Corn?"
"No, Iowa has corn. Idaho has the potato."
"Rhubarb? Does anyone else have rhubarb?" asked Verbena, biting into a doughnut. "We could get a whole bunch and plant it real quick."
"Why does it have to be a vegetable why can't it be a meat or a pastry or a beverage?"
Norma said, "I still think a theme would be better and permanent, like having Main Street look different somehow. Maybe have it look like a street in a different country, you know, like that Danish town in California."
"What about this: we could have a town theme. All we would have to do is change everything into Swiss chalets and put bells on the cows and things. Call ourselves "Little Switzerland' or something."
"What cows? We don't have any cows in town."
"All right, you come up with something."
"What about Hawaiian, I love that, everybody could wear muumuus and Dixie teaches the hula maybe she could teach the whole town and we could give everybody a lei when they drove into town. Something like that."
The next morning Norma drove around town trying to envision a theme that would, as the committee eventually had suggested, "more easily lend itself to fit the existing topography." There was not a body of water to speak of, unless you included the lake or the springs, so the Hawaiian idea was out. Nor was there a mountain within three hundred miles. Elmwood Springs was as flat as the world's largest pancake and inland.
Inland. She had a brainstorm. Why not capitalize on just that, Elmwood Springs right smack in the middle of the country. After all, they were not too far north, not too far south, east or west. And if you dropped New Mexico and Nevada, which you could because they were mostly desert, then Elmwood Springs was truly sitting right smack-dab in the middle of the country. Everybody said that if you climbed high enough you could see into Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and all the way down to Iowa.
And so it was voted on. George Crawford painted the sign and on May 22 the committee held the sign unveiling and applauded. There it was for all the world that passed by on the interstate:
NEXT EXIT ELM WOOD SPRINGS, MISSOURI, VOTED THE MOST MIDDLE TOWN IN AMERICA
Not a single car turned off the road because of it, but the town felt better.
One afternoon Mrs. Pike of Spartanburg, South Carolina, received a surprise visit from her old friend Minnie Oatman, who was passing through on her way to join the group for a sacred-music festival in Dadeville. Minnie was in the living room, holding forth about the state of her health and the state of the gospel music world. "You know, I was laid up for four months a while back."
"Yes, I heard you were," said Mrs. Pike with concern.
"But as soon as I got over my heart attack I get on a plane and go on up to Detroit to join the family and, honey, I did not get back a minute too soon. While I was laid up the boys and that fool Emmett went out and got themselves a manager. I look up and here they come, wearing them tight little pants and skinny little neckties and long sideburns and pencil-thin black mustaches with their hair all combed way up in slick pompadours on the top of their heads and the worst of it was they thought they looked good. I said, "You boys is just one step away from show business and if your daddy could see you he'd roll over in his grave." Oh, I was fit to be tied and I can't blame Beatrice, she can't see what they had on. Anyhow, I ran that manager off. But you know, I worry to death about how gospel has just gone commercial. I think it all started when the Oak Ridge Boys let their hair grow long and went country. And now lots of these boys have turned country trying to make a fast buck. I'm scared Vernon is gonna run off to Nashville for good and start pop ping those pep pills with the rest of them. Bervin got his self a new wife and is threatening to run off and be an Amway salesman and if he does there won't be anybody left to sing tenor." She took a swig of her iced tea. "I had hoped to bring Betty Raye's two boys into the family group someday but that's not gonna work out. Neither one of them can carry a tune." She heaved a sigh and looked away, baffled. "I just don't understand it. Both of them tone-deaf, with me and Ferris for grandparents."
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.
Bobby 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 NEW BERRY 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.