Eureka (2 page)

Instead of making a tic-tac-toe board, Otis grabbed one of the printed targets, a ten-inch-square piece of heavy off-white paper with five black half-inch-wide rings going out from a solid bull’s-eye. It was a standard shooters’ target, with each ring carrying a certain number of points—fifty for hitting the bull’s-eye, ten for the outermost ring.

Otis fastened one of the paper targets on a tree with a thumbtack, moved back to a position ten yards away, cocked the BB gun with its pump lever, sighted the bull’s-eye, and squeezed off a BB.

It missed the target—and the tree.

The next shot struck the paper, at least, but not within any of the rings. He kept shooting until it was almost dark, and by the time he finished, he was hitting a bull’s-eye at least every tenth or eleventh shot.

It confirmed what he had suspected from his childhood in Sedgwicktown—he was a natural-born BB gun marksman, a natural-born Red Ryder.

He was back out there in the morning before breakfast and shot off another twenty BBs.

He did the same thing the next morning and the next and the next, reporting his scores to Sally. “Four bull’s-eyes, three fifties, five twenty-fives, and only six that were tens or out of the money. Does it make you proud?”

It was on his tenth straight morning of shooting that Sally said, “I talked to Mary Gidney about your problem. She says there’s a man out at Ashland Clinic who specializes in treating what you’re doing. She said she’d ask Bob.”

The Ashland Clinic—the world-famous Ashland Clinic, as it was called around Eureka—was one of the most prominent small mental health institutions in the country. Its prominence in Eureka made the open discussion of mental health problems, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis as routine around town as steaks in Kansas City, Fords in Detroit, and movies in Hollywood. Mary Gidney’s husband, Bob, was the clinic’s top authority on paranoid schizophrenia.

“You mean there’s a guy at Ashland who treats only grown men who buy toy fire engines and Daisy Red Ryder air rifles?” said Otis, who may have been one of a handful of Eurekans over the age of fourteen who hadn’t had at least one session with some kind of Ashland professional.

“Mary said there’s probaby even a name for what you have, but she couldn’t place what it was. Some kind of syndrome or ‘ism’ or ‘philia.’”

“BB-ism? Fire-truck-ism? Air-rifle-philia?”

“I’m serious, Otis. It has to do with men turning back into children,” Sally said, waving him away as if he were a problem
child. “There was a play, and a movie, in the seventies about some New Mexico weirdos, and one of them thought he was Red Ryder. It was called
When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?
I believe.”

“And they’ve got someone at the world-famous Ashland Clinic who treats
Kansas
weirdos with Red-Ryder-itis?”

Again, Sally waved him off.

Otis ignored her Ashland suggestion and kept up his daily shooting. What he quit doing was reporting his daily scores to Sally.

Within two more weeks, he was up to hitting bull’s-eyes at least ten out of every twenty shots. It made him wonder if there were competition shoots for the BB gun. Think of the trophies, the glory, the fame—the T-shirts, the pennants, the embroidered patches, the autographed photos.

He laughed out loud at the prospect of telling Sally he was going to be gone for a weekend competing in the official Daisy Red Ryder Air Rifle Championship in someplace like Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

OTIS GIRARD HALSTEAD
of Sedgwicktown and Sally Jewell Winfield of Independence had met thirty-nine years earlier while students at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. She had come to KU to get a degree in drama and left with one in English. He had come with no plans other than to graduate and left with a degree in business administration.

Sally’s drama interest came with her from Independence, which was the hometown of William Inge, the playwright who won awards and fame for his straightforward plays—
Come Back, Little Sheba, Bus Stop, Picnic, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
, among others—about the ordinary people of small-town America. Sally’s parents ran Winfield’s, a small dry-goods store
on Main Street that Sally’s grandfather had started in the late 1800s. The Inge influence permeated the whole town, particularly the schools, which sent more than one kid out into the world wanting to be a playwright or novelist, director, actor, or actress.

Sally Winfield’s Inge thing had been acting. Her dream had been to portray the lead females in all of William Inge’s plays on any and every stage in America and the world.

She and Otis met while she was playing such a role. He was in the student infirmary at KU, recuperating from a broken ankle; she was there with a group of drama students to provide entertainment for the student patients as part of a class project.

Otis was in pain, unable to walk, and certain his life was in ruin when this beautiful blond creature came into the ward. She and a crew-cut guy from Wichita wearing cowboy boots did a scene from near the end of
Bus Stop
, She played Cherie, who was being asked by a young man named Bo to come away and marry him.

“Cherie … it’s awful hard for a fella, after he’s been turned down once, to git up enough guts to try again.”

“Ya don’t need guts, Bo.”

“I don’t?”

“It’s the last thing in the world ya need.”

“Well … Anyway, I just don’t have none now, so I’ll just have to say what I feel in my heart.”

“Yeah?”

“I still wish you was goin’ back to the ranch with me, more ‘n anything I know.”

“Ya do?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Why, I’d go anywhere in the world with ya now, Bo. Anywhere at all.”

“Ya would? Ya would?”

Otis decided there and then that once he got back on his feet and out of this place, he was going to find that blond student actress and do everything in his power to persuade her to go to
his
ranch or wherever with him.

He found her three years later. Otis had to first find a job before taking on a wife and family. They stayed in touch and saw each other often, but Sally spent the time working in her parents’ store in Independence. Her life with Otis, when it did begin, was one that had no stage appearances in any William Inge play, or any other, for that matter. Sally’s drama professor at KU—a retired stage character actor named Overbrook—had preached the message that acting was a life, not a hobby. So she put it completely aside, to be first a wife, and then a mother— delayed for an additional four years after marriage until Otis could see a solid long-term future at Kansas Central Fire and Casualty—and a good citizen of Eureka, Kansas.

Sally and Otis had had only one real conversation about her stage career that never was. They were driving alone together on the interstate back to Eureka from Kansas City, after seeing Inge’s
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
, which had originally starred Pat Hingle and Teresa Wright, at the Lyric Theatre. Otis and Sally were in their mid-forties, but he had been struck on this particular evening by how young and beautiful Sally still looked. Her bright blond hair, which she wore straight and shoulder-length, shone like an exquisite silk crown, her soft brown eyes were like jewels in that crown, her complexion was like the tan coating on a piece of elegant enameled china …

“You could have been as good—and as famous—an actress as Teresa Wright, if you had chosen that instead of me,” Otis said.

“We’ll never know, will we?” Sally replied.

At first Otis thought he detected a tone of anger and remorse,
longing and disappointment, but then she said, “And that’s probably just as well, Otis. I never found out for sure, so I will always have my what-if dream instead of disappointment.”

A few miles farther down the highway, Otis asked, “If you had known I was going to be bald, would you have given me even a second look, much less given up your acting dream for me?”

Sally reached over with her left hand and caressed the top of his hairless head. But she said not a word.

THE NEXT THING
Otis bought was a football helmet.

It was an official regulation NFL helmet of the Kansas City Chiefs, the favorite team of Otis and nearly everyone else in the Eureka area. Kansas City, only forty miles beyond Lawrence and 125 from Eureka, was the big city in the lives of most people in Eureka, even if the largest of the two separate Kansas Cities was on the Missouri rather than the Kansas side of the line.

Otis saw the helmet in the window of a Sports World superstore at the North Side mall, where he had gone Saturday morning to buy a new book about the naval battles of World War II. The helmet’s plastic shell was glowing red, with the Chiefs’ arrowhead symbol on each side. Without a second’s thought, Otis bought it for $185 and went right home to put it on his bald head.

He looked at himself in the mirror over the sink in the downstairs bathroom and very much loved the boy from Sedgwicktown who stared back at him. It was a sight he’d never seen when he was such a boy, and that was what had prompted his impulse decision to buy the helmet.

Otis and all thirty-six of the other boys in Sedgwicktown High School had played on the football team because they’d had no choice. If they hadn’t, they would have been labeled “fruits,”
and their lives would have been ruined for high school if not forever, at least in Sedgwicktown. Some played varsity in the games against Valley Center, Lehigh, Maize, Mount Hope, Haven, Hesston, and other neighboring Kansas towns. Then there were the scrubs who scrimmaged only in practice as fodder for the varsity. Otis was a scrub, too small for a lineman, too slow for a running back or split end, and too uncoordinated for a quarterback. So he spent every fall afternoon through four years of high school being tackled, blocked, hammered, slammed, kneed, elbowed, and thrown around as a live practice dummy.

The worst part was that he didn’t even sit on the bench during the games. He was in the stands with the girls because the Sedgwicktown Cardinals could afford only twenty-five game helmets. They were shiny white plastic, much like those the college teams then used, with a bright red cardinal on either side.

“Buy your own helmet, and you can suit up,” said the coach to Otis and the other scrubs who didn’t—and never would— make the game cut.

His mother said she was just as happy that Otis wasn’t out there on the football field endangering his life, ignoring the obvious fact that the coach never would have sent Otis onto the field. His only endangerment would have been from tripping over a bucket or getting a splinter in his butt from the wooden bench.

His dad said wasting money on a football helmet was out of the question.

“Well, what do you think?” Otis now asked Sally as he walked into the den with his new Kansas City Chiefs helmet on his head.

“I think you must get help, Otis,” she replied. “You really must.”

“You can’t tell I’m bald, can you?” he asked.

“Otis, you’re close to being in real trouble.”

Otis smiled through the face protector and went outside with his Daisy rifle and shot off some BBs at a target. It was not easy, sighting the rifle with the helmet on, but he soon figured out an effective way to do it.

He fired off ten BBs and then, without really thinking about it, let his aim and the gun rise up and to the right, to a floodlight in one of the trees.

He pulled the trigger. Pow! went the gun. Pop! went the light. Crash! went glass onto the patio.

Within a count often, Sally was at the sliding glass door, then outside and inspecting the damage. “You’re sick,” she said quietly but firmly.

Otis couldn’t remember the last time he felt so good.

He spotted a small brown bird on a tree limb off to his left. Again, he aimed and fired a BB. The bird fell from the tree.

“That’s it,” said Sally.

OTIS KNEW THE
“quiet dinner with the Gidneys, just the four of us,” was a setup. Sally said it was to have a belated celebration of Mary Gidney’s birthday, but that was clearly not so. Otis knew for a fact that Mary had quit celebrating or even acknowledging her birthdays ten years ago. But Otis went along with the line because he really didn’t mind talking with Dr. Bob Gidney. Through the years, Otis had known many of the psychiatric types from Ashland Clinic and found them to be about the same ratio of jerks and fools as corporate CEOs or most other lines of work, insurance included. Bob Gidney was a good man, neither a jerk nor a fool. Sally enjoyed being with him as well.

“Hey, that’s some fire engine you have there, Otis,” said Bob as they came back into the den after dinner. The fire engine was on the mantel over the fireplace. “Something left over from childhood?”

“You might say that,” Otis said. He knew what was going on. Sally and Mary, clearly by prearrangement, had lingered in the kitchen. “I just bought it the other day, though.”

“That’s what I heard,” said Bob.

Otis guessed Bob was only a year or two younger, but he always dressed as if he thought he was twenty years younger. Tonight he was in heavy-starched white duck pants, a purple-and-white-checked button-down shirt, and highly polished brown penny loafers with no socks. Otis, who bought most of his clothes from Brooks Brothers and J. Crew catalogs, was wearing khaki chinos, a solid dark blue short-sleeved sport shirt, and white sneakers. Sally often suggested to Otis that he might consider “branching out” and dressing the way Bob Gidney did.

Bob had grown up in the dressy world of Wilmington, Delaware, son of a DuPont executive, and come to Ashland Clinic from Philadelphia, where he taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and maintained a private practice.

Otis went over to the fire engine and moved it back and forth across the mantel. “Want to push it around yourself, Bob?”

Bob declined the invitation to play with the fire engine, and in a few moments the two men walked back to the outside entertainment area.

“I hear you bought a BB gun, too?” Bob asked Otis.

“That’s right,” Otis said, pointing to a cottonwood. “There’s my target on that tree. I hit eight straight bull’s-eyes this morning—fourteen out of twenty in all.”