Eureka (20 page)

“Your father did something very irresponsible, I’m sorry to say,” said Florence to her son. “He borrowed on everything we had, to invest in a scheme pushed by a man from Newton who came around the elevator. It failed, and we lost our money— every penny from the crop.”

Otis asked what the scheme was.

Florence said she didn’t know for sure.

Otis couldn’t believe it. Here was her husband—his father— taking all of their money and investing it in a scheme, and she didn’t even know what the scheme was.

Otis persisted, and finally, she said, “It had something to do with drilling for oil in northern Oklahoma—around Pawhuska, I think. Some Indian tribes were involved, too.”

“Why would Dad do that?” he asked.

“He tried his best to keep it from you, Otis, but your father really hated being a farmer, and he hated managing the elevator even more,” said Florence. “He had been on and around farming all his life, but he really wanted to do something else.”

“What
, exactly?”

“He had no idea. But he figured with some more money, he would be able to come up with an idea. Once he mentioned moving to a city—Wichita, in particular—and working at Boeing, Cessna, Beech, or one of the other airplane factories.”

Otis the seventeen-year-old could not imagine what life in a city would be like. He was even nervous about living in Lawrence, where KU was, and Lawrence was a fourth the size of Wichita.

But now, in a bed at Ashland Clinic, Otis was remembering the conversation for what it said about his father, not about possible life in the city. He knew about inherited traits and tendencies because they were a part of assessing risk in the insurance industry.

Insanity can be genetic, he knew. But can a son inherit from his father a desire to run away? Can panic be passed on? How about a chromosome for turning back into a child at an advanced age?

Is there such a thing as a Cushman motor-scooter gene?

Otis figured he might ask Mad Severy or Idiot Tonganoxie or somebody else at the clinic when he was able—and willing—to ask anybody anything ever again.

He also had a rare thought about his mother. Why did he never wonder about getting any genes or something else important from her? Why was she so small, so insignificant, in his memories and worries and dreams, even now? All he could remember was her either going along with Dad or explaining Dad. She never seemed to think or do anything on her own.

He could ask these Ashland shrinks about his mom. Maybe there was some syndrome that would explain why she’d left such a faint impression on him and his life. Was it a syndrome about her—or him?

And what about singing? He remembered singing something just before he fell into the Chanute. Yes! He thought it was “Home on the Range.” Or was it “Sunflower”? Yeah. For Sharon. Could he ever do that again?

These were terrible things to think. But thoughts about never singing or talking or walking or doing much of any living again were beginning to go away for Otis. There had been enough progress—even before the glorious erection—for him to believe he was going to be all right.

I’m going to be Buck again!

So maybe that deputy sheriff named Canton hadn’t made a terrible mistake, blowing in Otis’s mouth.
Thanks for not letting me die, Deputy Canton. Otis thanks you. Buck thanks you. But there’s a problem. Buck’s back here in Eureka as Otis. Unless he can think of some way out of here, you may have died a hero for nothing, Deputy Canton
.

Maybe the way out was suicide. In his present condition, Otis might be able to pull the trigger of a pistol like Pete Wetmore had, if he had one. He might also be able to move his hands and arms enough to take an overdose of pills, assuming he could get any pills strong enough to kill him. But he couldn’t cut his wrists or tie a noose from sheets and hang himself from the ceiling. Not yet. He couldn’t jump from a window or throw himself in front of an Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe train.

Bad thought about the train. Dad didn’t throw himself in front of that Santa Fe freight. It was an accident. Just like falling through the Chanute River Bridge was an accident.

Otis’s dad had an accident on the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe.

It wasn’t your fault, Johnny Mercer!

Maybe Otis could get somebody else to do the killing for him. Maybe Sharon would stab him in the heart or wrap a cellophane bag around his head. Or beat him to death with a Beschloss book.

But until he started talking, he couldn’t ask her. Not only about killing him but also about committing another, most important act.

He so longed for her to touch him in other places—other, more intimate, sensitive places. Only the left toe. She only fooled with his left toe.
Who was that idiot Clinton adviser who paid a Washington prostitute to suck on his toes?

Otis figured he might pay a prostitute to blow into his mouth but never to suck on his toes.

Why did he use the word “idiot” so much? Everybody was an idiot. Where had he picked up that word? Pete Wetmore might still be alive if Otis hadn’t called him an idiot and treated him like shit.

Otis vowed to work on not calling people idiots anymore. He’d spread it around. Moron, fool, jerk, dope. How about shit-head? Not a good Kansas word, by any means. But he’d heard it in Kansas from a GI Bill student at KU who had been a marine. He called everybody, even his best friends, shitheads. Yeah. From this day forward, Otis would call everybody a shithead. He wouldn’t call anybody anything right now—not out loud, at least. But he would
think-use
the word about people he didn’t particularly like. People such as Tonganoxie. How did that shithead ever make it through medical school or shrink school or wherever he went? Mad Severy seemed okay. He was neither a shithead nor an idiot.

Neither was the lovely Sharon. There was a problem with her, though. Otis was not absolutely sure the young nurse in the white dress was Sharon from the Farnsworth Creek. He hadn’t gotten a really good look at her. And there on the creek bank, she was in jeans, not a white nurse’s uniform.

Otis had worn a uniform once.

HIS WAS A
dark blue uniform of the U.S. Navy.

In 1955 there was a draft-induced imperative for every male college student to do some military service. Otis chose the Naval ROTC at the University of Kansas, but he broke an ankle in a pickup basketball game at the beginning of his senior year. That resulted in his being declared physically unfit for service. He
didn’t mind because he hadn’t really been that keen on being a navy or marine officer, or any other kind of military person.

But if it hadn’t been for that ankle injury, he would not have been in the student infirmary the evening Sally came in to play the part of Cherie from
Bus Stop
.

Instead of going into the service, he went directly from KU, with his bachelor’s in business administration, to work. He had five solid job offers, all but one from Kansas companies or firms—two banks, a finance company, and an insurance company—that wanted him to work for them in Kansas. The outsider proposal came from United America Seating in West Orange, New Jersey, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of car, truck, and bus seats. Their corporate recruiter came to Lawrence in search of young men who, he said, “saw opportunity in sitting down.”

Otis saw no such opportunity, and he had absolutely no interest in moving to New Jersey. He went for an interview with the seating man because the dean of students insisted that every senior go through at least one interview with a foreign or distant company for the experience. Otis chose the New Jersey seating company over a mortgage company based in Minneapolis and an outfit that had been hired to establish a banking system in Nigeria.

“Let me first tell you that from your office window, you will be able to see the Manhattan skyline,” said the seating recruiter, whose name was Charles Michel. “Don’t think New Jersey— think Broadway, the Great White Way, Central Park, the Empire State Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, ‘New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town.’”

Otis tried, but all he could think of were muggings, bums, honking horns, dirty rivers, polluted air, crapping dogs, the Yankees, and rude people. He hadn’t been to New York or New
Jersey, and his thoughts, impressions, and imaginings were based solely on what he had read and heard.

“Seating is a forever industry—it’s of the past, present, and future,” said Michel, a well-dressed man of forty or so with a slight waistline problem that made Otis think he had spent too much time sitting down on United America seating. “No matter what happens, in times of war or peace, depression or prosperity, people have always had and always will have the need for something to sit on as they move from place to place. It’s like schools and teachers.”

Otis said he didn’t follow the analogy. Michel explained, “There will always be sexual intercourse between men and women, which means there will always be children, which means there will always be schools, which will always require teachers.”

Otis found himself listening to the man. He actually began to think about moving to a place called New Jersey and selling seating and looking out at the tall buildings of New York City. He began to seriously wonder if that might be the most exciting thing for a newly educated farm boy from Kansas. His widowed mother had taken her insurance money and moved to Wichita, where she had made a new and comfortable life as a salesclerk in the women’s clothing department at Buck’s, then the largest and best department store in Kansas. Otis had gotten himself through college with scholarships and part-time jobs at Lawrence cafeterias and doughnut shops, so she had no lingering obligations to him. She had a sister and many friends in Wichita, so she didn’t need her son close by.

Why not take a risk and go to New Jersey and the Great White Way? But his father might have said, Congratulations, Otis, on running off and leaving your mother in Kansas.

Congratulations, Otis, for taking a really big risk.

Another angle on risk was at play. Kansas Central Fire and
Casualty of Eureka had offered him a life’s work dealing with the calculations of risk that underlay the insurance industry. Otis also liked the KCF&C recruiter who came to campus. He was younger than the seating man by about ten years and was a native of Pennsylvania.

“I had to leave home to find the Land of Oz and opportunity,” he said to Otis. “You’re already here. Come with me to be a man of KCF and C.”

He said it in the same tone the fundamentalist preachers in Sedgwicktown used at the end of the Sunday-morning service when they invited people to come down and give their lives to Jesus and join the church.

Otis had never forgotten what Pratt of KCF&C had done for his mother, and that played a major role in his decision to accept the invitation. The company that had paid off Lucas Allen Halstead’s death benefit when it didn’t have to was a company of compassion and quality.

There was something else at work, Otis realized now in his hospital bed as he flipped through it all. What was it T Caldwell’s mother had told him? There are those who are meant to leave and those who are meant to stay. Otis was meant to stay.

Last September he had celebrated having stayed in Kansas with the same company for thirty-eight years. He had stayed, all right.

Then came the cast-iron fire engine and all the rest, and here he was, a prisoner of sorts at the Ashland Clinic.

But what about Sally? What had happened to her desire to be an actress? He couldn’t remember their having a really serious conversation about it. Nothing more than a few minutes here and there. They fell in love, he proposed, and they talked from then on about his job offers and waiting awhile to marry but not about her acting.

Why didn’t they talk more about her acting?

What if they had gone to New Jersey thirty-eight years ago? Would he still be working at United America Seating? Would he be the CEO? What kind of life would Sally have had? Would she have crossed over the river to Manhattan to be an actress? What about Annabel? She was working on getting a master’s in social work at KU. What would she have been doing or studying—and where—if she had been born and raised in New Jersey instead of Kansas? Would she speak with a New Jersey accent instead of in that flat Kansas way? Would they have talked to each other? Would he and she have been a real father and daughter?

Would he have wanted to run away from New Jersey? To the West? Wouldn’t it have been hell getting away from the New York—New Jersey area on a 1952 Cushman Pacemaker? He could imagine the traffic, the trucks, the smog, the turnpikes, the road rage, the idiots—the shitheads. Would he have bought a New York Giants or Mets helmet instead of a Chiefs helmet? What about the Daisy air rifle? They were anti-gun nuts up there in the East, so he probably couldn’t even have bought one without being arrested. Buck definitely would not have worked as a new name. There probably wasn’t one Buck in the states of New York and New Jersey put together.

What kind of person would I be now if I had gone away to New Jersey instead of staying in Kansas?

Would Pete Wetmore still be alive? Would Pete have killed himself, somewhere else working for somebody else?

What about Deputy Canton? Would Canton have had a heart attack anyhow? He was a smoker and overweight and, according to all health and insurance industry paradigms, his chances of dying from a myocardial infarction were in the highest percentile.

Otis saw something up on the hospital room ceiling that was shining, sparkling. It appeared to be a decoration of some kind. A red and green and silver star? Was it a Christmas thing?

It couldn’t be. This was still May. Only a few days before his birthday.

Christmas.

Last year, at the small annual Christmas luncheon Otis gave for the KCF&C’s top eight executives in a private dining room at the Hotel Eureka—there was also a huge company party for everybody—somebody suggested they go around the table and each recount his or her most memorable Christmas.

The stories were mostly happy ones. The time somebody’s father came back from World War II and they had Christmas for him two months late—the best Christmas in the family’s history. The Christmas it snowed twenty-two inches and everyone was snowed in for almost a week of eating, singing, and rejoicing. The time somebody forgot to turn on the oven to cook the turkey and everybody had hamburgers from a Kings-X diner instead. And so on. Otis’s story was about not getting the Daisy air rifle he wanted so badly for Christmas. But he told it with a light touch, so it didn’t violate the joy-to-the-world spirit of the lunch.