Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [81]
“Oh, Momma, what are you going to do?”
“We’ve got the highway police looking for him right now. If we don’t find Chester your uncle is liable to never come out of that bathroom.” Then she wailed, “Poor little Chester, who would steal a poor little dummy? I got to go, your daddy’s waiting. . . . Pray for us, baby,” she said and hung up.
Later, Minnie and Ferris went over and formed an emergency prayer circle at the restaurant while an eight-point missing-person bulletin was being released across the state. Missing: One ventriloquist’s dummy known professionally as Chester the Scripture-quoting dummy. Blond wig, blue eyes, and freckles. Last seen in a car parked in the parking lot of Wentzel’s Sea Food on Highway 21 wearing a cowboy suit and small cowboy hat.
Ferris was convinced that Chester’s disappearance was the work of the devil, while some of the hard core of the congregation wondered if he had been taken up in the Rapture. Bervin, Vernon, and Beatrice did not know what to make of it but Minnie just kept praying and holding on to her faith that he would come back. Floyd stayed in the men’s room at Wentzel’s Sea Food Restaurant for seventy-two hours until finally Chester was returned safe and sound.
As it turned out, it had all been a harmless prank. Another gospel group passing by saw the Oatman car and, knowing how much Floyd loved that dummy, one of them had snuck in the back and grabbed it. Chester had ridden all the way to Marianna, Florida, where they bought him a child’s ticket on the Greyhound bus and sent him back.
That night in Loxley, Alabama, Chester returned to the stage and sang “Riding the Range for Jesus” and “When It’s Roundup Time Up Yonder.”
“Thank the Lord he’s back with us,” said a much-relieved Minnie to Dorothy on the phone. “I just knowed He wasn’t gonna desert us in our time of need. . . . I tell you, Dorothy, when I saw little Chester come off that bus, oh, it touched my heart so. It was just like the Bible says . . . once’t he was lost but now he’s been found. . . .”
Later that night Dorothy confided to Mother Smith, “She may be loud and she may mangle the English language to a fare-thee-well, but I’ll tell you the truth—if I ever really needed someone to pray for me, or someone I loved, Minnie Oatman would be the first person I would call.”
February, the Month of Love
AS IT TURNED OUT, the Three Little Pigs cafeteria not only brought more good food to town, it brought romance as well. The new owners from St. Louis had a daughter who was now in the sixth grade with Bobby. Her Italian father and her Greek mother had produced a dark-eyed, olive-skinned beauty named Claudia Albetta, who soon had all the boys acting silly. In a town that was made up of mostly Swedish and Norwegian and Irish stock she was an exotic creature, as glamorous as Yvonne De Carlo and Dorothy Lamour rolled into one. By February, Bobby was a goner as well. They should have guessed something was up by his recent change in behavior. For one thing, he was using a lot of Wildroot Cream Oil on his hair, and he had put a brand-new shiny dime in his penny loafers.
When Dorothy came home from the grocery store she was surprised to see Bobby still sitting in the kitchen, the table littered with a pack of penny valentines he had bought at the dime store.
“Haven’t you picked one out yet?”
“No,” he said, pushing them around. “These are all too silly. It has to be just right.”
“And, may I ask who this valentine is going to—or is it private?”
“Claudia Albetta,” he told her but added quickly, “It’s not my idea to send some stupid card. Miss Henderson made us all pick a name out of a hat—she wants to make sure everybody in class gets a valentine.”
“Weren’t you lucky to get the name of a girl you like.”
“I didn’t,” Bobby admitted. “I swapped Monroe my Boy Scout knife and an Indian bracelet for it. He kind of likes her, too.”
“Oh,