Fannie Flagg - Standing in the Rainbow

When Hamm got him on the phone, Rodney listened a few minutes without comment, then said, "How much do you need, Hambo? If I haven't got it, I'll get it."

Hamm said, "I think I can do it with five hundred."

"I'll get you six."

Hamm said, "I'll pay you back."

"I know you will."

"I'll never forget this, buddy," said Hamm.

"Don't worry about it. You just go out and win the damn thing."

Once again they moved and again Betty Raye's home life was turned upside down. As soon as he announced, the house was filled with men coming and going, day and night. When she went to bed there were men in her living room. She slept, got up, got dressed, got the baby changed, and by breakfast there were already four or five men sitting at the kitchen table, filling up the place with cigar smoke. She hardly ever saw Hamm alone. If he was not traveling, he was always with his pack of cronies. The house was in a constant mess and she spent most of her time cleaning up after them. There was only one bathroom, so all day long men were traipsing through her bedroom. And if she went into the bathroom she could never be sure that some man would not walk in on her. She tried her best but when she woke up with a strange man she had never seen before walking through her bedroom, that was the last straw. Hamm never understood why she was so upset.

It did not bother him at all to have people around him twenty-four hours a day. In fact, he thrived on it. It seemed to energize him. This constant and relentless lack of privacy, however, was making a nervous wreck out of Betty Raye. She could not even find a place to sit down and cry by herself Six long months later, it was all over: between the radio ads, the posters, and Hamm stumping all over the farm areas, he'd won. He was now state commissioner of agriculture.

Betty Raye was so glad when it was final. At last she could have her husband all to herself and they could get back to a normal life again.

The phone rang in the office of the Tillman and Reid used-car lot and Rodney Tillman picked it up. "Hello?"

A man's voice said, "Hey, sport, what are you doing?"

It was his friend Hamm Sparks. Rodney said, "Right now I'm sitting here trying to figure out if I should kill my ex-brother-in-law or not."

Hamm laughed. "What's he done now?"

"We got the best looking little forty-nine Chevy in here and he went out and started fooling around with the odometer after I told him not to and the damned idiot just put an extra two hundred miles on the thing."

"Why don't you just run it back the other way like you always do?"

"I would if I could, Hambo," he said, glaring at his ex-brother-in-law, who'd just passed by, "but the damned thing's stuck. What are you doing?"

"I'm gonna be working in your area today. Why don't you come take a ride with me this afternoon, keep me company."

Rodney looked through the glass window at the lot, full of dusty cars and empty of customers. "Might as well."

As they rode out to the farms Hamm was checking on that day, Rodney pulled his pint out of his back pocket and took a swig.

"I tell you, son, some days I wish I had just stayed and married that little Japanese gal; this alimony is about to kill me. You sure lucked out with Betty Raye. Now, that's a sweet woman."

"Yes, she is," said Hamtn.

While he stopped at the farms on his list, Rodney sat in the car scrunched up in the front seat and watched Hamm trudging out in the fields, walking around in barnyards and pigsties, talking to each farmer, patting them on the back, saying whatever agriculture people say to each other, and swigged from his pint. After about the fifth farm Rodney asked, "How many more places do you have to go to today?"

"Just six more."

"Well, can we stop somewhere? I need to eat something."

"Oh sure, there's a place right up the road."

Right up the road turned out to be twenty-three miles. As they came out of the small roadside filling station and country store with sausage biscuits, cheese crackers, and Cokes, Hamm headed back to the car.

"Can we eat outside?" Rodney said. "I hate to say it, buddy, but you're beginning to smell like a barnyard. God knows what you've been stepping in, and those hog-snout marks on your pants ain't all that appetizing, either."

Hamm looked down at his pants and laughed. "Yeah, I see what you mean. Sorry, it's just part of the job."

They walked over to a wooden bench set up beside a creek behind the store and sat down. Rodney handed Hamm his Coke. "Drink some of this for me, will you." Hamm took a swig and handed it back and Rodney filled it back up to the top with whiskey, took a drink, and said, "Now, that's a Coke. So, Hambo, is this what you do every day? Stomp around in barnyards?"

"Just about."

Rodney examined the sausage biscuit in his hand with skepticism but bit into it anyway. "Why you ever wanted this job in the first place is a mystery to me. I know you aren't making any money."

Hamm agreed, "No, it's sure not the money. But somebody has to give these folks a hand, trying to scratch out a living with nothing but these little pie crust roads between them and the market. Most of them are just hanging on by a thread as it is." Hamm bit into a cheese cracker with peanut butter in the middle and said, "When it rains, they can't get out and the government won't fix the roads. They throw money at the big cities and build fancy buildings and all those overpasses and underpasses and in the meantime the small farmer is getting ignored. I'll tell you… it makes me mad to see good, hardworking, tax-paying people being kicked around like that. I watched my daddy get kicked around like that, so I know how it feels… But I can't do much. Just give them a little encouragement."

"Well, that's life, Hambo. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, bless their pea-pickin' little hearts. The only difference between you and me and the rich is they've got money and we don't."

Hamm said, "Naw, Rodney, I don't think it's just the money they are different from us. I was around a few of those rich people once and found that out myself."

"When was this?"

"After the war, when I was in school, I met a few of those rich college boys while I was waiting tables. I used to joke around with them every once in a while. I wasn't friends with them or nothing like that, but this one kid from Minneapolis must have thought I was unique or something and invited me to go home with him one weekend."

"Wait a minute. You? Unique?"

Hamm smiled. "Yeah, well, they thought I had a funny accent and I laid it on a bit, you know, played the hayseed for them. So anyhow, I go home with him and we pull up to this big, huge three-story deal where he lives. I never saw anything like that in my life, the whole damn backyard is a lake."

"What lake was it?"

"It was their lake. I'm telling you, these people were rich, and the kid tells me it's their summerhouse. I said, Where do you live in the winter, Buckingham damn Palace? Anyhow, I never felt so out of place in my life. That family of his was nothing but a bunch of cold fish. I don't even think they liked each other and they treated me like I was something that just dropped out of a tree. And I'll tell you something: after that weekend, I'd take any one of those farmers over them any day of the week. I don't want a thing they have. They can keep all their big houses, the servants, the cars, I don't need them." Then his voice trailed off. He looked down at the little stream with a faraway look in his eyes and said quietly, "But they did have this boat. One day his old man took us all out on the lake in it and oh, man alive, that was the prettiest thing you ever saw… all white, with shiny wood inside." He shook his head. "To tell you the truth, sport, I'd cut off my right arm for a boat like that."