Standing in the Rainbow (31 page)

“Norma, you are not going to break her heart. She’s an insurance salesman.”

“She’s probably married to some alcoholic and . . . shhh.” There was a knock at the front door. “Oh my God, she’s here . . . be quiet!” She pulled the phone into the pantry and hid.

“Norma, just go to the door and tell her thank you very much but we don’t need any insurance. If you don’t go now, she’ll just come back. You don’t want to get her hopes up . . . that’s even worse. You have to learn to say no. You don’t have to be rude. Go on now, get it over with.”

The woman at the door continued to knock. She was not going away.

“Oh, Macky, I could just kill you.”

Norma put the phone down, stood there for a moment, screwed her courage to the wall, took a deep breath, and headed for the door.

About forty-five minutes later the bell over the hardware store door rang and a lady of about forty, wearing a green suit and carrying a brown attaché case walked in. She approached Macky with a pleasant smile. “Mr. Warren?”

Macky said, “Yes, ma’am, what can I do for you?”

“Mr. Warren, I’m June Garza from Aetna Insurance and your wife said that you might be interested in hearing about our new three-and-one policy . . . and I wondered if now might be a convenient time?” The phone rang. “I can come back after lunch if you like. . . .”

Macky was caught. “Uh, well . . . excuse me, Mrs. Garza . . . let me get that.” He picked up the phone. Norma was on the other end.

“Macky, is she there yet?”

Macky smiled back at Mrs. Garza. “That’s right.”

“Now, before you get mad at me, I just wanted you to know her husband is a diabetic and lost his left leg and is probably going to lose the other one somewhere down the line.”

“Yes, well, thank you very much.”

Norma continued. “And her mother-in-law has had three strokes and is on very expensive high-blood-pressure medicine. And one of the reasons she has to work today is because they didn’t have insurance.”

“All righty, anything else?” He pretended to be writing down a list of things.

“I know you’re mad at me . . . but—”

Macky tried to sound pleasant. “That’s correct.”

“Don’t take it out on her. Just come on home and take a gun and kill me, shoot me in the head, put me out of my misery.”

“Thank you, I’ll be sure and do that. Good-bye, Mrs. Mud.”

Macky wound up buying two home-owner policies, one for them and one for Aunt Elner.

Small-Town Living, February 1953

I
f a stranger walked down the street past the barbershop in Elmwood Springs on Saturday afternoon and glanced in, he would see a group of middle-aged, gray-haired men sitting around chewing the fat. But if you were one of the men inside you would see six friends you had grown up with, not old men. Doc didn’t see the wrinkles on Glenn Warren’s face or notice that his neck had turned red and sagged with age or the wide girth straining his suspenders to the breaking point. He saw a skinny boy of seven with lively eyes. They were fixed in one another’s eyes as the boys they used to be. When Doc looked at sixty-eight-year-old Merle he saw the blond boy of ten he used to go swimming with. And to all of them, the balding man in the short sleeves with the little potbelly was still the boy who scored the winning touchdown that won the county championship. There wasn’t a secret among them. They knew one another’s families as well as they knew one another. Their wives, now plump gray matrons in comfortable shoes, they still saw as the pretty dimpled girls of eight or twelve that they had once had crushes on. Since they’d all grown up together, they’d never had to wonder who they were; it was clearly reflected in one another’s eyes. They never questioned friendship; it was just there, like it had been when they were children. They had all been at one another’s weddings. They’d shared in all the sadness and happiness of one another’s lives. It would never occur to them to be lonely. They would never know what it was like to be without friends. They would never have to wander from town to town, looking for a place to be; they had always had a place to come home to, a place where they belonged and where they were welcome. None of these men would ever be rich but they would never be cold or go hungry or be without a friend. They knew if one died the others would quietly step in and their children would be raised and their wives would be cared for; it was unspoken. They had a bond. Small-town people usually take these things for granted. As a certain young man named Bobby Smith was to find out for himself that year.

On January 3 Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as the president of the United States and Tot Whooten was not happy about it. She said, “Just my luck. The first time I take the trouble to vote and my man loses.” On January 21, Neighbor Dorothy and Mother Smith traveled all the way up to Kansas City to welcome Harry and Bess Truman back home to Missouri. They stood in the crowd at the station along with ten thousand other people and waited for the train. It was an hour late but they were there as Harry and Bess arrived and the American Legion Band played the “Missouri Waltz.” It was hard to realize that Harry would no longer be in the White House but, as they say, time marches on. Yet, even though other things in the world may have changed,
The Neighbor Dorothy Show
remained the same. She still had her same loyal audience, who would no more think of missing her show than not having their first cup of coffee in the morning.

February 19 was a cold, wet, windy day in Elmwood Springs. Dorothy had just finished her last Golden Flake Flour commercial and was rather circumspect and subdued. As the show was ending she said, “You know, so many of you have written in over the years and asked me what is the best thing to do for a blue mood . . . and asked if I have ever been in a blue mood, and yes, you can be sure I have. I can only tell what helps me and that is baking. I can’t tell you how many cakes I have baked over the years, how many cups of flour I have sifted, how many cake pans I have greased, all because there is something about baking a cake that gets me out of a mood, and so I’ll just pass that on for what it’s worth. Speaking of that, you all know I’ve been a little blue lately, missing my children, but I feel so much better today and I’d like to share a letter with you we got from Bobby yesterday . . .

“Dear Mother,

“Since you gave out my address over the radio, you would not believe how many cards and letters and other good stuff has come my way. Please thank them all for me and the rest of the guys. A lot of these guys don’t get mail and they are getting a big kick out of reading mine and helping me eat all the cookies, fudge, and cakes that have made it all the way to Korea. Most of the guys in my company are from big cities. I guess it took sending me all the way over here to really appreciate my hometown. So love to Dad and slam the screen door for me will you, so your listeners won’t be too lonesome for me.

“Love, your son,

“Pfc. Bobby Smith

“And I also want to thank you. You all have been so sweet to write and send him things. You know I don’t like to get sentimental but I will say this: We all know he was a handful and I think of all the times I yelled at him to sit still, to stop running, not to slam the door, but today I’d give a million dollars if I could hear him slam that door or see a cake where he had run a finger around the bottom. Oh, if we could only stop time, and speaking of time . . . I can see by the old clock on the wall that it’s time to go. I can’t wait until tomorrow, when we can visit with each other again . . . you mean so much to us . . . each and every one of you. This is Neighbor Dorothy with Mother Smith on the organ . . . saying . . . have a nice day.”

To Dorothy’s great disappointment, the very day Bobby had turned eighteen Monroe had driven him over to Poplar Bluff and he had joined the army and left school. It had come as a surprise to everyone but there was nothing they could do. The night before he left Jimmy had come into Bobby’s room and handed him his watch. “I want you to wear this for me while you’re gone. I’d be going if I could.”

Bobby was touched and put it on. “Thanks, Jimmy, I’ll take good care of it.”

“Well, I won’t get a chance to see you in the morning, so good luck to you over there, buddy.”

“He’s just going to training camp,” said Doc to Dorothy, trying not to make a big deal out of it, but the next day when he looked up and saw the 10:45 bus drive by the drugstore with his son on it, he wondered if he would ever see him again.

As soon as he finished dispensing Mrs. Whatley’s thyroid pills, he stepped out in the back alley for a moment and leaned against the building. The sun was shining and he could hear the high school band practicing over at the football field just as if it were another ordinary fall day.

Winter Wonderland, March 1953

F
ROM THE TIME
Bobby had arrived in Korea he’d felt as if he were trapped inside of the big display he used to see in the window at the Morgan Brothers department store every Christmas. Only in this winter wonderland the things moving around were ugly, brown, grinding tanks, men with machine guns, and medics carrying stretchers full of wounded, dead, or dying soldiers. Bloodstains littered the white snow, as did an arm or blown-off leg, as well as bodies that lay twenty feet away. Trees that had been shot into nothing except shattered sticks were lying on the ground. He vowed that if he ever got out of there alive he never wanted to see snow again.

But with each hour that passed the chances of him getting out of there alive grew less likely. His company was surrounded on all sides.

It had happened overnight. They heard the North Korean tanks to the south and more moving in from the north. As it was, there were only fourteen men left. They had lost all communications a few days ago and were huddled together in a round ditch that they had dug last night. They were supposed to have been relieved a week ago by another company but they had been pushed back so far behind the lines, they couldn’t be sure they would be found. In the frantic scramble they had lost most of their K rations and had no idea where they were or how far away the other Americans were.

Everything was cold and white. They couldn’t see more than a foot in front of them. When it wasn’t snowing, a white misty ground fog came in. It was such a strange, surreal war, as if it were being fought in cotton. The sound of machine-gun fire was all around them, soft and muffled, but still they knew it was deadly. So strange to be so terrified with the whole world gone soft and white or to be covered with sweat in the middle of a snowstorm. They could occasionally hear voices calling out in the distance, to them or to one another, they didn’t know. Most of these men, including Bobby, had grown up in movie theaters watching World War II movies, and the shrill, high-pitched, Oriental language that sounded just like Japanese struck a twelve-year-old’s fear in their hearts. But this was no movie. And their sergeant was not John Wayne. He was a twenty-two-year-old kid from Akron, Ohio, who had just gotten married a year ago. Soon they had run out of everything, food, ammunition, and any options. They could not signal where they were or they would be ambushed. They were trapped. Dead if they moved, dead if they didn’t.

Then, at about one o’clock that afternoon, Bobby suddenly said to the man beside him, “The hell with this. I’m going to go and find them.” He handed the man his gun and crawled over the top of the ditch and disappeared. He knew he could not stand up without getting his head shot off, so he crawled. As he slowly inched forward in the snow he suddenly remembered something Jimmy had told him at the Trolley Car Diner years ago, right before the bubble gum contest: “Don’t look to your right. Don’t look to your left. Concentrate. Remain calm, stay the course.” He kept repeating it over and over in his mind. Thinking about that day, thinking about the bubble he blew, thinking about the applause. . . .
Don’t get rattled. Concentrate. Nice and easy all the way.

While he continued to move forward inch by inch, moving for his life and the life of the other men on the line, thousands of miles away in Elmwood Springs, the high school senior class was busy with such benign matters as who to vote for in “Who’s Who,” what color stone they wanted in the senior ring, and who they were going to ask to the prom. That afternoon his best friend, Monroe, would be sitting in the drugstore drinking cherry Cokes with his girlfriend, Peggy, and asking Doc if he had heard from him.

Twenty-eight hours later he had crawled within six feet of a dead body and twenty feet past a North Korean machine-gun nest, where three soldiers were sleeping. But he never saw any of them. After he made it up the hill, he stood up and ran and fell and ran again until someone heard him yelling at the top of his lungs, “Hi-yo, Silver, away!” The Americans, nervous and quick to shoot at anything that moved, knew at once that this was no Korean and came out and found him. He was half out of his mind and had no idea why he had been yelling, but it saved his life.