A horrified Norma desperately tried to recover and said in as normal a voice as she could muster, “Oh, yes, Emmett.”
“My boss says we can do the whole thing, fender and top, for seven twenty-five.”
“Well, thank you,” she said, and hung up.
Emmett put the phone down at the shop and thought, Lord, what was the world coming to? Mrs. Warren was pretty for her age, but he figured she was at least fifty-something. She must be one of those women that go after younger men.
Norma immediately called Macky, hysterical. “Oh, my God. I am so embarrassed. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was just getting ready to. Why?” When Norma told him what she had said, Macky just laughed. “Well, I’m sure you made his day.”
“I’m just mortified.”
“Oh, honey, don’t worry about it. It probably happens all the time.”
“Not to me. I want you to call him and tell him that I certainly didn’t mean him.”
“What do you care what Emmett thinks?”
“What if he tells his wife and it gets all over that I was coming on to her husband?”
“Oh, Norma…”
“No, no. You don’t understand, Macky. I can’t live in this town with people thinking that. You have got to call him, right now!”
“Why don’t you call him?”
“I can’t. Oh please, Macky. Please!”
As usual Norma was hysterical over nothing. But he would call.
Down at the auto shop, a voice on the intercom said, “Emmett…phone call…on three.”
He wiped his hands and picked up. “Hello.”
“Emmett, this is Macky Warren.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Are you having an affair with my wife?”
“Ah, oh no, sir. Oh God, no!”
“Just kidding.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, listen…you knew she thought it was me calling her when she picked up the phone, right?”
“Uh, yes, sir.”
“Okay. She was just a little embarrassed and I wanted to clear it up. Okay, buddy?”
“No problem…done.”
“Good. Oh, and that estimate’s fine.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Emmett hung up his heart was still pounding. He knew Macky had been a Green Beret, and it scared the hell out of him.
Two minutes later, Norma was on the line. “Did you call?”
“Yes, no big deal. He laughed about it. So you can go on with your life, okay?”
“Okay, but you’ll have to take the car in. I can’t face him.”
“I figured.”
“This is all your fault, you know. You shouldn’t be so sexy,” she said.
“I’ll try not to. Oh, and by the way, Emmett told me I was a lucky man to have such a hot-tamale sexpot of a wife.”
“He did not! Did he really say that?”
“No, but I bet he thought it.”
“Oh, Macky!”
“Gotta go. Bye.”
Norma hung up and shook her head. Macky could be so silly sometimes.
Three days before Thanksgiving, the entire town gathered down at the high school to see the big yellow band bus off to New York. Several band mothers were aboard as chaperones, as well as Tot Whooten, who was along to fix the majorettes’ hair for the parade. She told Cathy Calvert, “The whole country will be watching us, so I’m doing everybody in a flip and extra-strength hair-spraying them to hell and back, so no matter what the weather is, our girls are gonna look good from start to finish.” Luther Griggs went along to help load and unload the bus.
Two days later, the bus full of screaming and excited kids finally arrived at the motel in Newark, New Jersey, where they would be staying. When they walked into the lobby, they were greeted with a big banner across the lobby that the town had ordered: GOOD LUCK TOMORROW. WE ARE SO PROUD.
At around four A.M. early Thanksgiving morning, just a few hours before the Elmwood Springs High School Band was to have their brush with greatness, something happened.
When Luther Griggs went out to the motel parking lot to unlock the bus, it wasn’t there. It had been stolen, along with all their uniforms and instruments still inside.
Later, when the kids were told what had happened, they wandered around the hotel in a state of shock. A lot of the girls cried. They couldn’t believe it. After the whole town had worked so hard to raise money to get them there, and all their parents and grandparents had been looking so forward to seeing them on television. Some had even bought new television sets just for the occasion. They were not going to be in the parade. The police came and took a report, but said there was nothing they could do for the moment.
Later, the kids sat in the lobby with Mr. Koonitz and the chaperones and watched the parade on television. They had come all that way, worked so hard, all for nothing. That afternoon, the school board had to charter another bus to go up and bring them home.
As Merle Wheeler said to Ernest Koonitz when they came back, “It makes you wonder about people, doesn’t it? How can thieves live with themselves? Didn’t they think what stealing that bus would do to those poor kids?” Tot Whooten was mad as hell as she stomped off the bus. She said to Verbena, who had come to pick her up, “Can you believe it? They got my hot irons, rollers, and all my gel and spray.”
Macky and Norma Warren were there to meet the bus. They had gone down to the high school to help get the kids home. When Macky saw the stricken looks on the kids’ faces, it really got to him.
That night, after they went to bed, he said, “I wish to God I could find the bastards who took that bus. I’d kill them with my bare hands.”
Like everybody else in town, Macky was upset about losing the bus, the instruments, and the uniforms, but he knew those things could be replaced. What had made him so mad was how the theft had affected the kids. Having that rotten thing happen had caused them to lose a little bit of the innocence and trust in the world they once had. And that was something they could never get back.
Naturally, in Elmwood Springs, a predominantly Christian community, the following Sunday, most of the sermons had been about forgiveness; the main thrust being “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” But Macky was having none of it. As far as he was concerned, the sorry low-life son of a bitch who took the bus knew exactly what he was doing. Sermon or no, he would have broken his neck if he could have found him.
After they had stashed all the stuff from the school bus in the basement of a deserted building they used to store things, the two thieves drove the bus across town, stripped it, and dumped it in a parking lot.
When they got back to the building, the mother of one of the thieves and her boyfriend were going through the clothes and had already cut all the buttons off the uniform jackets. All the patches that said ELMWOOD SPRINGS MARCHING BAND had been ripped off and thrown away.