Then after the Governor sat down, the Mayor gave a stirring recounting of the history of Wynning. It seems one hundred years ago a man named Wynning and his family settled here. A town grew up. Every year a Founder’s Day Celebration had been held. This was the 100th such celebration. Thank you.
Wild applause followed the Mayor’s oration. It was like the Gettysburg Address had been spoken for the first time. The reason for the enthusiasm was clearly the Governor. Never before had a Governor attended the yearly celebration. A new page was being written into the history of Wynning. I could hardly wait for next year’s speech.
The Mayor stayed on his feet for the duration of the program. There were two reasons for this. One reason was that the Mayor was the emcee. The other was that now that the Governor had sat down, there weren’t any chairs left.
Wheaty liked the next part a lot. The Wynning Founder’s Day Queen and her court were presented. Evidently the crowning of the Queen at the beauty pageant of some sort had been held the night before. It was hard to believe a town so small could have enough good-looking young girls to populate a beauty pageant. It was harder still to believe when the girls appeared.
There were five of them, five apparent girls in bright summery dresses that seemed to have been ordered from a ten-year-old Ward’s catalog. The girls climbed awkwardly onto the stage (there were not steps up to the bandshell from the ground) and displayed thighs of varying quality.
Three of the girls were, in fact, spectacularly homely. The sun bounced off braces on most of the female teeth on that stage. Two of the girls were sisters, it seemed safe to assume, as they shared the same stark red hair and freckles, although the freckles may have been acne, I never got close enough to check; each sister did, however, have her own individual, distinctive homeliness. The other homely girl who was not a redhead or a sister of the redheaded girls either, except perhaps in spirit, had apparently entered the beauty contest in hopes first prize was a nose job. The other two girls were not homely. One was skinny and plain, but a raving beauty in comparison to the sister act and the girl with the nose. The other girl was a lovely, shapely brunette, with a heart-shaped face, large, luminous brown eyes and a dainty nose; her cheeks were flushed with excitement (for, after all, she was the one who’d been crowned Queen of Wynning Founder’s Day) and her teeth were straight and white and braceless. She had three inescapable physical characteristics, which can best be described by the following approximate figures: 38 D, and six foot two.
I heard somebody breathing hard.
It was Wheat.
His eyes were popping and his mouth was open.
He was in love.
“Kitch,” he said. “I’m in love.”
“One of the redheads, right?” I whispered.
“No! The big one! The tall girl with the long hair and the long legs and the big boobies!”
Chapter 25
Elam said, “Shut up you two.”
After the applause trailed off, the girls began introducing themselves, giving brief personal histories that must not have come as great surprise to the assembled residents of their Toyota trunk of a hometown.
Each girl was a recent high school graduate planning to attend one of the nearby community colleges or the University of Iowa. The two redheads were planning to major in home economics. The girl with the nose was going into pre-med. The skinny, plain girl was an English Lit major and wanted to be a poet. The Queen was a phys ed major.
The Mayor played Bert Parks and asked the Queen, who was dressed virginal white with a rhinestone tiara in her long brown hair, how she felt about her honor.
She said “I am thrilled from head to toe,” which in her case was quite a distance.
Then there was more applause and the Queen and her court climbed back down off the stage, showing thigh again, especially the Queen, who had quite a lot of it to show.
Wheat followed the Queen as she disappeared into the crowd. Followed her with his eyes, that is. Hopp was holding onto Wheat by the elbow, not about to let him get out of sight. Wheat was used to Hopp being somewhat irritable and thought nothing of it. I wondered if there was some way of keeping the truth away from Wheat. Telling him about the bank robbery (which was, technically, still in progress) was apt to set him off. A few minutes ago, before Wheat had showed up, Elam had asked if I thought Wheat capable of panic. I hadn’t had the chance to answer him, but soon Elam should find out first-hand just how foolish that question had been.
Chapter 26
Only the more I thought about it, the more it seemed a bad idea to tell Wheaty about the robbery. And as the program on the bandshell stage drew to a close, I whispered that opinion to Elam. “Listen, he’ll freak. He really will. Take my word for it. Let’s leave well enough alone.”
Elam whispered back, “What do you suggest we tell him, them?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing except we’re not happy he parked his car where he did, making us stuck here in the middle of the trial run.”
Elam nodded.
“And,” I continued, “he’ll understand that naturally we don’t want to attract much attention, since we’re in town getting ready for the real thing.”
Elam nodded some more. “You’re a smart kid,” he said, with his sinister smile. “Ha! Maybe I oughta cut you in on the take.”
I swallowed hard. “I’ll pass on that, thanks.”
“Hey you guys,” Wheat said. “Quiet. This is interesting.”
The Mayor was telling about the forthcoming events of the day. There was to be entertainment, much of it there on the bandshell stage: an amateur-hour type contest; a concert by a female glee club from West Liberty; and a reprise of the talent numbers the girls in the Wynning Founder’s Day Queen contest had performed the night before. The big tent was for a marathon bingo game, “only a 25-cent donation per card, and lots of big prizes.” The Grange Hall, which was on the side street Wheat’s car was parked in, was the scene of an antique show, a needlepoint and ceramics display, and a fine arts competition. Hot meals could be had, for a pittance, at the VFW Hall; and the local tavern had been transformed into a beer garden, for today only, with mugs of beer for a nickel and pitchers for fifty cents. In between the various entertainment presentations on the bandshell stage, there was also to be dancing in the streets. Or more specifically, dancing in the street, you guessed it, the street the stolen Mustang was parked along. There was to be square dancing, and then a country western band would play, after which there’d be a teen dance. It was beginning to look like a long day.
At this point the Mayor concluded his remarks, thanked the Governor for coming and everybody stood and clapped again, and the program was over. People rushed forward to meet the Governor, shake his hand, get his autograph, and we quietly rose from our front-row seats and gathered under a tree at the rear of the park, away from any Wynning citizens.
Elam took immediate command. He had apparently whispered to Hopp the game plan about leaving Wheat in the dark, and merely said, calmly, “Okay. So we’re stuck here for the day, looks like. Unless you can move that car of yours, Wheat, without making a thousand other people move their cars too. No? Okay. Then we got to blend in. Be part of Flounder’s Day, hey hey. Enjoy ourselves.”
“How?” I asked.
Wheaty said, “Let’s all go drink nickel beer.”
Elam said, “No. Getting crocked ain’t exactly a good way of stayin’ on top of things. No, much as I’d like it, the beer garden is out. Besides, we should split up. Bein’ strangers in town on a day like this is bad to begin with. Bein’ a group of strangers stickin’ to each other like fly paper’s worse yet. So we each go a separate way. Now. Who wants to do what?”