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.