With that money, I hoped to buy plane tickets so the four of us could fly out to Santa Monica. I wanted to pay for a few nightsat a cheap motel and treat everybody to seafood while we went around town putting up posters for Star.
Morgan didn’t like the idea of me paying for everything, but I told him too bad and maybe he could buy me a beer one day.
Then I received a call from Gus Odell.
“Son,” he said. (He liked to call me son.) “You gotta go about this smart. Put the snowmobile up for araffle. There’s seven thousand people in Hysham and Treasure County combined. At two dollars a ticket, you stand to gain fourteen thousand, which is enough to stay at a nice hotel and to fly in a seat more toward the front of the plane.”
“Uh,” I said, hardly knowing what to say. My mind was not as flexible as it ought to be in order to shift my thinking so drastically. “Only one person can win,” I said.
“That’s thepoint,” Gus said. “It’s a game of chance. Everybody gets a flutter of excitement that they might win, and one lucky soul gets a nice snowmobile.”
“It feels like stealing.”
“Itisn’t.” At the other end of the line, I could hear Gus sputtering. “Get Mabel on the horn. She knows your plight. She’ll spread the word for you and tell folks you’re selling your machine to pay for a honeymoon for Morgan and Jack. Hell, you might even get people buying more than one ticket.”
So that’s what we did. Our base of operations was at the Volunteer Fire Station on Rapelje Avenue; the volunteer firemen sold the raffle tickets and collected the proceeds. The stubs of the raffle tickets were kept in a giant barrel, from which Mabel herself would select the winner.
On the day of the raffle drawing, the last day of November, a crisp sunny day, we hadanotherparty, complete with bratwurst and burgers on the grill, with all the fixes, along with potato salad (no raisins) and macaroni salad, and a mess of dried applepie and blackberry pie and cherry pie, including Mabel’s own peach cobbler and a giant pan of rhubarb crumble.
The high school band played. The mayor gave a speech. Then Mabel reached into the barrel with one hand (with the fire chief holding onto her other hand to make sure she didn’t fall in) and pulled out the winning raffle ticket.
The snowmobile went to a young couple who’d just moved to Hysham with the hope of growing sunflowers and living off the land. They’d bought a piece of land five miles south of the Buckingham Cloulee Bridge, and so would make good use of the snowmobile when the hard snows of winter came.
And I was the happy, though astonished, recipient of seventeen-thousand dollars. Which was enough to pay for the plane tickets (premium economy on Delta), three nights at a hotel, and food. In addition, according to Mabel, she’d gotten everyone to agree that with what was left over, I could buy my lace master, then maybe I’d be willing to donate the rest? Gladly, I told her. With all my heart.
Someone in town, a young woman with a skill-set that included graphic design, offered to make us signs that we could put up all over Santa Monica.
I’d imagined us buying some cheap paper and using a black marker to write the message to Star. Our wrists would have ached, and the signs wouldn’t have looked all that special; certainly, they wouldn’t have been distinctive enough to attract a young man’s notice.
Instead, we got the signs on good paper. They had a border full of stars, and in the middle, the text read, in distinct letters:
STAR
Nimble and Blue
Await You
In Hysham
Come Home
She printed two hundred posters for us and even told us that regular masking tape would work just fine in a climate such as the California coast.
Morgan had luggage, and though we imagined we could all put everything we needed into two suitcases, Mabel insisted we check out the Army surplus store in Billings. We purchased two more suitcases, which meant everyone would get their own and we wouldn’t have to rely on Jack’s ratty duffel bag. And on the day of our flight, Young Tommy and Deputy Hartland drove us in the official cruiser to the small airport on the north side of Billings.
With a quick layover in Salt Lake City, we landed in Los Angeles just after two in the afternoon. We rented a car at an exorbitant rate and, inside of an hour, we were pulling into the underground parking for the Shore Hotel.
The difference between the Shore Hotel and our little hometown in Montana was not that it was a fancy hotel for four very un-fancy men. It was that the difference was almost indescribable. The air was moist and smelled like salt and Coppertone. A cool breeze came off the ocean, even after it crossed the asphalt street to where the hotel was. People walked around showing a lot of skin. We had a double room with a balcony that faced west and, which we were told, would be a great place to watch the sunset from and did we want to pre-order room service?
I wanted to say yes, but Morgan said no and said something about hot dogs on the beach. The receptionist raised his eyebrows, and Morgan added, “Can we make that reservation for tomorrow evening?
“Yes, sir,” the receptionist said. “The sun starts to set around four-thirty or so, so if you order before noon tomorrow, youshould get your meal around four-fifteen. Just call down to reception.”
“Thank you,” Morgan said. “We’ll do that.
We changed into summer clothes, shorts and t-shirts and flip-flops, crowding in the bathroom to apply sunscreen, and trooped down to the lobby, and across the somewhat busy road to the beach. The sand was deep, but some kind soul on the city planning committee had determined that there should be a wheelchair mesh grate placed exactly where we wanted to go: down to the shoreline.
This meant that Morgan could use his cane and walk and not get mired in the sand. Which meant that we were down by the water in the blazing sunshine, inhaling the wholesome ocean air half an hour before sunset.
