The missing epilogue of Stormy Weather
During the last week of Auguts I got many mails (special thanx to Mary Kwasnik),
saying that in some editions of Stormy Weather the epilogue is
missing. So I decided to type it in and here it is....
E P I L O G U E
The marriage of Bonnie Brooks and Max Lamb was discreetly
annulled by a judge
who happened to be a skiing companion of Max Lamb's father. Max returned to
Rodale & Burns, pouring his energies into a new advertising campaign for Old
Faithful Root Beer. Spurred by Max's simpleminded jingle, the company soon
reported a 24 percent jump in domestic sales. Max was promoted to the sixth
floor and put in charge of an $18 million account for a low-fat malt liquor
called Steed.
By the end of the year, Max and Edie Marsh were engaged. They got an
apartment
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Edie became active in charity
circles. Two years after the hurricane, while attending a Kenny G concert to
benefit victims of a Colombian mud slide, Edie met the same young Kennedy she'd
long ago tried to avidly to debauch. She was mildly amazed when, while greeting
her, he slipped a tongue in her ear. Max said it surely was her imagination.
Brenda Rourke recovered fully from her injuries and returned to the
Highway
Patrol. She requested and received a transfer to northern Florida, where she
and Jim Tile built a small house on the Ochlockonee River. For
Christmas he
gave her an engraved gold replica of her mother's wedding ring, and two
full-grown rottweilers from Stuttgart.
After being rescued in the ocean of Islamorada, Avila was taken to
Miami's
Krome Detention Center and processed as "Juan Gomez Duran", a rafter fleeing
political oppression in Havana. He was held at Krome for nine days, until a
Spanish-language radio station sponsored his release. In return, brave "Senor
Gomez" agreed to share the details of high-seas escape with radio listeners,
who were moved by his heart-wrenching story but puzzled by his wildly
inaccurate references to Cuban geography. Afterwards Avila packed up and moved
to Fort Myers, on the west coast of Florida, where he was immediately hired as
a code-enforcement officer for the local building-and-zoning department. During
his first four weeks on the job, Avila approved 212 new homes - a record for a
single inspector that stands to this day. Nineteen months after the hurricane,
while preparing a sacrifice to Chango on the patio of his luxurious new
waterfront town house, Avila was severely bitten on the thigh by a hydrophobic
rabbit. Too embarrassed to seek medical attention, he died twenty-two days
later in his hot tub. In honor of his short but productive tenure as a code
inspector, the Lee County Home Builders Association established the Juan Gomez
Duran Scholarship Fund.
One day after the state trooper was shot in the parking lot, paramedics again
were summoned to the Paradise Palms Motel in the Florida Keys. This time a
guest named Levon Stichler had suffered a mild myocardial
infarction. On the
ride to the emergency room, the old man deliriously insisted he'd been held
captive at the motel by two bossy prostitutes. Doctors at Mariners Hospital
notified Levon Stichler's daughter in Saint Paul, who was understandably
alarmed to learn of her father's hallucinations. After hanging up the phone,
she informed her children that Grandpa would be coming to stay for a while.
The gnawed remains of Ira Jackson, identified by X-rays, were
cremated and
interred at a private ceremony on Staten Island. Several Teamster bosses sent
flowers, as did the retired comptroller of the Central States Pension Fund.
Three weeks after the hurricane, the African lion that attacked Ira Jackson was
captured while foraging in a Dumpster behind a Pizza Hut in Perrine. The
tranquilized animal was dipped, vaccinated, wormed and nicknamed "Pepperoni".
It is now on display at a wildlife park in West Palm Beach.
The murder of Tony Torres remains unsolved, although police suspect
his wife of
arranging the crime, so that she could hoard the hurricane money from Midwest
Casualty. Detectives seeking to question Neria Torres learned that
she'd moved
to Belize, leased an oceanfront villa and taken up with an expatriate American
fishing guide. A court-ordered inspection of her late husband's bank records
revealed that before leaving the United States, Mrs. Torres moved $201,000
through a single checking account. The house at 15600 Calusa was never repaired
and remained abandoned for twenty-two months, until it was finally condemned
and destroyed.
Five weeks after the hurricane, Fred Dove went home to Omaha and
presented his
wife with two miniature dachshunds orphaned by the storm. He, Dennis
Reedy and
eight other Midwest Casualty adjusters were honored for their heroic work on
the Florida crisis-response team. To publicize its swift and compassionate
processing of hurricane claims, the company featured the men in a national
television commercial that aired during the Bob Hope Christmas Special. Fred
Dove was hopeful that Edie Marsh would contact him after the
commercial was broadcast, but he never heard from her again.
Faced with a class-action lawsuit by 186 customers whose homes had more or less
collapsed in the hurricane, builder Gar Whitmark declared bankruptcy
and
revived his construction companies under different names. He was killed
thirteen months later in a freak accident on a job site, when high winds from
a tropical storm knocked a bucket of hot tar off a roof an through the
windshield of his Infiniti Q45. His troubled widow gave up prescription
medicine and joined the Church of Scientology, to which she donated her late
husband's entire estate.
The body of Clyde Nottage Jr. was flown from Guadalajara to Durham,
North
Carolina, where - at his family's request - an autopsy was performed at the
Duke University Medical Center. Four days later, Mexican authorities arrested
Dr. Alan Caulk, seized his laboratory and deported him to the
Bahamas. Oddly, no sheep were ever found at the Aragon clinic.
Despite contradictory affidavits from two preeminent psychiatrists, attorneys
for Durham Gas Meat & Tobacco persuaded a judge in Raleigh to declare
Clyde
Nottage Jr. mentally unfit. The posthumous certification was based on
disturbing medical evidence supplied by Mexican officials, and sealed forever
by the North Carolina courts. Sixty days after Nottage's death, DGM&T resumed
production of Bronco cigarets. The advertising contract with Rodale & Burns was
not renewed.
Eleven months after the hurricane, a biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife
Service made a gruesome find in a remote upland area of the Crocodile Lakes
Wildlife Refuge in North Key Largo: a deformed human jaw. Locked to the bone
was an adjustable iron bar popularly used to deter auto theft. Dental X-rays
identified the owner of the mandible as Lester Maddox Parsons, a
career felon
and convicted killer wanted for violent assaults on two Florida Highway Patrol
officers. According to the Monroe County Medical Examiner, evidence at the
scene indicated that Parsons likely starved to death. A search of the hammocks
turned up the remaining pieces of his skeleton, except for the skull.
Augustine Herrera sold his late uncle's wildlife farm and moved with
Bonnie
Brooks to Chokoloskee, a fishing village on the edge of Florida's Ten
Thousand
Islands. There he bought a crab boat and built a pineboard house with space for
a large library, including a wall for his collection of skulls, now numbering
twenty.
Bonnie Brooks took up watercolors, cycling and outdoor photography.
Her
remarkable picture of a pair of bald eagles nesting in the boughs of a cypress
made the cover of Audubon magazine.
Most of the wild animals that escaped from Felix Mojack's farm during
the
hurricane were recaptured or, unfortunately, killed by armed home owners. The
exceptions include one female cougar, forty-four rare birds, more than three
hundred exotic lizards, thirty-eight snakes (venomous and nonvenomous) and
twenty-nine adult rhesus monkeys, which have organized into several wily troops
that roam Dade County to this day.
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