Eureka (14 page)

“That helmet makes you look a lot younger,” said the exceptional young man.

“I know,” said Otis. “Thanks again for saving my life, T.”

“Anytime, Buck. Where exactly are you going?”

“Just west on old 56,” Otis said. “That’s all I know.”

“The Chanute River Bridge is closed the other side of Dearing. There’s a detour a couple of miles west of town. You’ll have to leave 56 there for a while—fifteen miles or so.”

Otis said, “What are you studying in college—what do you want to be?” One last question; the one Otis seemed to ask everyone these days.

“I have no idea, to tell you the truth. I’m just going to college and then go on away somewhere.”

“You won’t live here?”

“No, sir. My mom says there are some people who are meant to go and some who are meant to stay. She says I’m one of the goers, and I think she’s right.”

Otis wanted to ask T to come with him to beat up an old football player named Charlie Blue and take his money back, but he resisted the urge. Charlie could have handled both of them with one hand.

Instead, he shook the young man’s hand and scootered away, back toward old U.S. 56.

Out of new habit, he remembered another of his states’ jingles.

HERE WAS THAT
old round barn? At first he almost missed it, about a hundred yards off the highway on the right. He pulled off to see what he could see. There wasn’t much left. Part of the dome was gone, and so were many of the shingles on the roof that swept up to it. There were also huge gaps in the wooden planking and even in the concrete base. The farmer who owned the barn had decided to let it go away, to disappear, to fall into nothing.

You idiot! Otis wanted to yell at the farmhouse nearby. He was no rabid preservationist, but his five years on the historical society board, which he had done mostly for civic duty, had left him with an appreciation for the simple good sense of preserving the special things of our history. Round barns were special.

So were the state’s ghost towns, such as the Frenchman’s silk town. Within a few minutes, there was the twelve-inch-square metal sign,
SITE OF SILKTOWN.
That poor Frenchman. He’d bought three thousand acres for his new town, promising to develop “a system of industrial and social life far in advance of either now prevailing in the world.” The silk farming did flourish for a while, and so did a large cheese and butter business and a vast orchard of mulberry trees. The community boasted
several mansions, including the Frenchman’s, which had sixty rooms and was, for many years, the largest private dwelling in the state of Kansas. But after twenty years, then in his eighties, the Frenchman gave it all away to the Odd Fellows Lodge for an orphanage and returned to France. All that remained was this small historical marker and the ruins of a deserted school.

Otis could see the white stone remnants of the old school-house in the trees behind a fence on another farmer’s private property. Otis slowed down but did not stop or even think about yelling at this farmer, a man named Troy Mulberry, who had tried—without success—to preserve what was left of the Frenchman’s dream.

Soon Otis was moving again at full putt-putt speed, thinking about that Frenchman. What kind of special, courageous people were he and all of the others who came to this rough country of Kansas to begin new lives? Otis thought,
It’s not the same thing, but what I’m doing right now on this Cushman is…
kind
of the same thing. Isn’t it?

In a few minutes, Otis could see the modest skyline of Dearing—silhouettes of a few new bank and old office buildings and several grain elevators. Dearing was a wheat town of eleven thousand or so people, known mostly for the Mennonite college that housed and supported some of the best Turkey Red wheat researchers and historians in America.

There were a few more cars and trucks on the road as he got closer to the city limits. With no warning, Otis was overcome with exhaustion. He thought for a second he might pass out or even disintegrate and die.

The scrapes and bruises from his spill had been temporarily masked by the exhilaration of being with T and Iola Caldwell. But now Otis’s knee was burning, his bruised skin was aching, and he thought that at least two or three bones of various sizes
and locations had been cracked. Most of his internal organs had been shaken up and out of place.

He saw from the horizon that it was late afternoon and from his watch that it was almost five o’clock.

He had to stop, to rest his weary and injured body and his equally spent and fatigued soul.

Then he saw the familiar blue, yellow, red, and white sign of a Best Western hotel.
Thank you, oh Lord of the hospitality industry
, he thought,
for concluding that the city of Dearing is large enough to support and important enough to rate a real motel.

Within another ten minutes, he was in room 145, a first-floor nonsmoking room with a king-size bed. It took the last of his energy, but as a security precaution, he rolled the scooter inside the room and set it against the wall next to a radiator. Central Kansas was no hotbed of crime—the thievery of Church Key Charlie Blue being a rare exception—but there was also no need to tempt anyone with the easy theft of a priceless 1952 Cushman Pacemaker.

Without taking off anything except his shoes, he fell onto the bed. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been more spent, more used up. He closed his eyes to sleep, but what came instead were thoughts of where he was, what he was doing, and what he had already done. The escape, the rain, the fudge and thievery of Church Key Charlie Blue, Johnny Gillette, Mary Beth’s cafe, the spill, T and his mother, Iola.

All of it had happened in just a day and a half, and he was still only about twenty miles from Eureka.

He thought about Russ Tonganoxie, the long-haired, chino-wearing idiot psychiatrist.
What, pray tell, would he be saying to me now?
Otis thought.

Halstead, you really are crazy.

Yes, I am definitely crazy. Just like you, Tonganoxie, Sniffles lead to
a runny nose, which leads to a cold, which leads to pneumonia. Buying an antique toy fire engine leads to a BB gun and a Kansas City Chiefs helmet, which leads to a Cushman, which leads to insanity, which leads to dreams of running away with a stranger half my age named Sharon and then to really running away from home all alone.

He thought about Kansas Central Fire and Casualty, his privileged life as a CEO. His salary of $250,000 a year, plus a year-end bonus based on the company’s performance. KCF&C always did well, so he always did well at bonus time because it was calculated as a percentage of his salary. Last year the bonus was $50,000. In addition to the money, he had a terrific pension and stock options program as well as the normal CEO perks of first-class air travel and membership in two country clubs and Eureka’s top downtown private club.

But KCF&C and all that went with it were in an earlier life, a life that was gone—and gone forever. The few KCF&C thoughts he did have were mostly about what they would do with his small handful of personal things. There were photographs of Sally and Annabel on the back credenza, and on the walls hung his framed college diplomas and signed photographs of him with Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum, the Eureka Man of the Year plaque and the United Way leadership certificate, and other remains of his life as a civic leader and leading citizen of Eureka, Kansas. On his desk were a small gold clock that had been presented to him after his year as president of Rotary, and an engraved sterling silver pen-and-pencil set that he’d gotten from the National Association of Insurance Executives for serving as its president. And there were his small specially printed memo pads that had not only his name and title but also stickum slivers at the top, like a Post-it.

None of these things mattered. There was only one object that did. It was a magnificent thirty-six-by-twenty-four photograph
of several shaggy buffalo roaming the tall grass prairie near Council Grove. There was a light snow falling in the foreground and the hint of a late-season sunset in the background. A gifted Oklahoma photographer had taken the picture, which, even up close, resembled a painting as much as a photograph. To Otis, it was a piece of art. He had never thought of or appreciated photography as an art form until he saw that picture hanging in a gallery in Kansas City. He paid twelve hundred dollars for it, more than he had ever paid for anything like that, and he saw it as a tremendous bargain. Now he hoped somebody at the company had the good sense to give it to Sally or otherwise take care of it in his permanent absence. They could throw out all of the other so-called art on his walls, all the paintings of flowers and apples and similar inanimate objects.

What a nothing life he had led. And that buffalo picture said it all. It was the only thing he had to show for his fifty-nine years that was of any value to him. Except for the fire engine and the BB gun and the football helmet and the Cushman, all of which he had just acquired. What had he done with his fifty-nine, soon-to-be sixty, years? And his millions of seconds, thousands of minutes, hundreds of days and months?

Amen, Anthony Hopkins, I, too, have wasted my life, I, too, look back on my life and see a desert wasteland.

He thought of Sharon. He considered her face and hair and eyes and fully clothed body from the two times he had seen her. Then he considered, ever so slowly and delightfully, what she might look like nude, lying in the sunshine on that quilt alongside Farnsworth Creek, reading Beschloss. He removed her clothes, one small garment at a time, to see for sure. He was not surprised to discover that her young body was fresh and soft and shiny and slick and sweet. He ran both of his hands over her …

Then came an eruption of wet. Damn! Damn, damn. This is for little boys! But it came rushing and gushing all over his underwear and into his trousers and down his fifty-nine-year-old legs.

He was horrified. But the horror lasted for only a second or two. Then he laughed—and laughed and laughed. He had had a wet dream! He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one. Then he remembered when it was. Not as a little boy. It was one night after he had danced with Betsy McPherson at an office Christmas party. Betsy was an assistant vice president for finance who was neither particularly beautiful nor particularly sexy. There was just something about her, about the way she walked and sat and talked, that turned Otis on. He could not have explained it, and fortunately, he never had to, because he never made anything even remotely resembling a suggestive comment, much less a real pass, physical or otherwise. All that ever happened was that he went home that night after the party and, late at night in bed next to Sally, he had a wet dream.

Wet dreams were not from the lives of responsible men, not courageous men on quests for new lives. They were like Cushmans and Daisy Red Ryder air rifles and football helmets and cast-iron toy fire trucks.

He got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and cleaned himself up with a towel.

And he lay back down.

He didn’t feel so exhausted. He didn’t feel as if he were going to disintegrate. He didn’t even feel he was crazy anymore.
Isn’t it interesting what a wet dream about a young maiden named Sharon can do for an old man?
Otis thought. He figured Tonganoxie and the other shrinks at Ashland would have a field day—or professional wet dreams of their own, so to speak—with material like this.

There was a fairly good-sized television set—a twenty-one-inch
or more screen—on a chest against the wall right in front of him. It was accompanied by a
TV Guide
and a remote control on the bedside table. He switched on the set and began surfing.

The news was on. The news wasn’t what it used to be. Otis had not been able to figure out what had happened to the minds of the people who ran national television news. When there were Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner and Eric Sevareid and John Chancellor, the reporting had seemed calm, straight, newsy, relevant, necessary to watch. Now it wasn’t any of those things. He had read in
The Wall Street Journal
recently that the cable news networks hadn’t been the same since the O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky stories, and they, plus the Internet, had scared the commercial networks into trying to make their newscasts more like entertainment, more like what the cable people were doing with the news. It wasn’t working, because the audiences already had plenty of other ways to be entertained. Such as the circus.