Eureka (7 page)

Pete mushed on: “Yes, there are possible rewards for being one of the first to enter the computer crash field, but the risks of being first at anything are always enormous. As, of course, are the rewards. The man who made the first car was richer than the man who made the last one. But the record is silent on whether there was a first man who tried to make the first car and failed before the one who actually did.”

Otis kept his eyes toward the Rockies, toward the Red Ryder museum in Pagosa Springs. Did this idiot just say “The man who made the first car was richer than the man who made the last one?” What was the rest of the mush he just said about there
being a first before the first? What in the hell does it have to do with insuring against computers crashing?
Where am I? What am I doing? Who is this man speaking? Why is he mush?

How and where are you, Sharon?

Pete kept talking. “We have drawn some actuarial paradigms and underwriting and probability markups and patterns and projections and predictions and contingencies and mutual benefits and premium and business plans and spreadsheets and test runs and play-outs and CD-ROMS and PBCs and AFCPs and huddles and puddles and cookouts and drive-bys and drive-ins and floppies and hard drives and end runs and home runs and piss pots and condoms and Cheerios and popcorn and playbooks and game films and Beethovens and Bachs and calculus and algebra and trigonometry and 747s and Count Basies …”

Otis glanced across the table at Pete, who was also staring off to the West, toward the Rockies, Pagosa Springs, the Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles.

“… and trumpets and pancakes and maple syrup and claims and innovations and income potentials and downsides and upsides and tanning salons and Exercycles and jogging.”

Pete stopped talking, and Otis turned back to face the West.

Neither man said a word. The silence grew.

Otis had never been present when another human being really lost it, came unglued, went over the top. He had the feeling he was having his first such experience.

Pete said, “I hate the insurance business, Otis.”

Otis, still looking west, said, “Why, Pete?”

“We’re bloodsuckers, Otis. We make it on the backs of the lame and hurt and dead and deprived.”

“Bullshit, Pete. We help the lame, hurt, dead, and deprived. We help them get through their crises. We give them a sense of security and comfort, and we give them money.”

“Whatever. It’s also boring as hell. I haven’t had a fun day here at the office since the first day two years, nine months, and two days ago, when you took me around and introduced me to everybody. That was the high point of my career at KCF and C. What kind of fucking commentary on my life is that?”

Silence again for a while.

Pete said, “I’m not going to get your job when the time comes, am I?”

Otis had to make a decision. Tell the truth now or later?
When do I put this man out of his misery? Now? Yes
.

“Most likely, you’re not, that’s right,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have hired me in the first place. Why did you?”

“These things are hard to explain when they don’t work out—”

“It was my fault. I never should have taken this fucking job. I knew this wasn’t for me. I knew it, I knew it.”

Otis elected not to comment on that. He let it sit there and then said, “When you were a kid, what did you want to grow up to be?”

“A trumpet player in Count Basie’s band.”

“I didn’t even know you played the trumpet, Pete.”

“I won the Colorado state championship for the trumpet, and I played in dance bands around Boulder and Fort Collins. I played once at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver with the Glenn Miller Orchestra—there still was one for years after he died in that plane crash, you know. The Brown Palace was and is the best hotel in Colorado. The band leader—I forget his name—said I had one of the best sets of natural-born trumpet lips he had ever seen.”

Pete fell silent. After several seconds, Otis, still not looking at Pete, asked, “Why didn’t you pursue the trumpet?”

“My dad was a car dealer, and he wanted me to be the lawyer he never was, and then I married June while still in college and
she was pregnant by the time the honeymoon was over and we had Josephine and then the twins and then Bobby, and the life of a trumpet player was not for all of that. What did you want to be when you grew up, Otis? President and CEO of a fucking insurance company in Eureka, Kansas?”

“I’ve never heard you use ‘fucking’ before, Pete.”

“I’ve never used it in front of you before, that’s why.”

Otis noticed that the mushiness had disappeared. Pete’s voice was now hearty, robust, direct. Alive. Here in the middle of talking about insuring crashing computers, the man had come alive and gone nuts at the same time.

Otis said, “To answer your question, I wanted to be Johnny Mercer.”

“I never got into baseball. Was he a shortstop for the Cardinals?” Pete said.

“Johnny Mercer wasn’t a ballplayer, goddammit, he was a singer and songwriter. How could you know music and not know about him?”

Otis waited for a follow-up question such as “What songs did he write or sing?” Something. He kept talking about Johnny Mercer whether Pete cared or not.

“Johnny wrote more than a thousand songs—pop songs, famous pop songs. Mostly just the lyrics. Everything from ‘Autumn Leaves,’ ‘Laura,’ and ‘Fools Rush in’ to ‘Jeepers Creepers,’ ‘I’m an Old Cowhand,’ and ‘Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,’ ‘Moon River,’ even—with Mancini.”

“That was my favorite song for a while,” Pete said.

Otis assumed he meant “Moon River,” which was a lot of people’s favorite song. It made many men think of Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.

But Pete had another song in mind. In a quiet, unmelodic monotone, he talked-sang:

Otis picked up the few word errors and omissions in the way Pete recited the lyrics. But there was no point in correcting Pete. He was pretty close.

Pete said, “I sang that as a kid with my brother and two uncles when we wanted to act like cowboys. I may have known then that Johnny Mercer had written it, but I had forgotten him. Now that you mention it, didn’t he also write the Santa Fe railroad song?”

Otis nodded. Yes, yes, Johnny Mercer wrote “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” Otis had sung it in high school with a perfect replica of a Mercer twang—southern, a bit nasal—that had brought him to wanting to actually
be
Johnny Mercer.

Pete didn’t ask Otis any further questions, such as: What happened? Why didn’t you become Johnny Mercer? It was a story Otis had told no one, not even Sally. But he might have at this moment told Pete if he had asked.

Instead, Pete said, “So here we sit. A failed trumpet player and a failed Johnny Mercer, talking about whether we should insure people’s fucking computers.”

“Crashing
fucking computers, Pete.”

“I wish I had something like a Cushman obsession to fall back on—to occupy me—like you do.”

“There’s nothing you wanted as a kid that you couldn’t have?”

“Nothing. I got everything I wanted. Everything.”

Otis felt and heard movement and turned toward Pete, who was standing.

“I’m out of here, Otis. I’m gone—forever. I’m not even going back to my office. I’m going to the elevator and out of this building and never coming back. Please have my personal effects and any money owed me from profit-sharing and all the rest sent to June at the house. Thanks for everything.”

“Wait a minute, my friend,” Otis said, on his feet and moving around the table.

“We’re not friends,” Pete said. “You always treated me like shit, like I was a goddamned idiot.”

“Until right now, that’s about what I thought you were. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

“Goodbye, Otis.”

“Let me help you. You ought to talk to somebody.”

“One of those fucking shrinks at Ashland everybody in Eureka talks to all the time? I’ve done that, thanks. They’re crazier than the rest of us.”

Otis said, “What about a trumpet? Go buy yourself a trumpet, Pete. Right now. Go right now and buy a trumpet.”

Pete smiled, said, “Whatever you say, Mr. Johnny Mercer,” and left the room.

ONCE THE DOOR
was shut, Otis said softly to the West:

He did not sing the words in a Johnny Mercer voice. He only spoke them in an Otis Halstead voice.

And then he sat motionless, silently looking west, for nearly thirty minutes.

He thought about Pete and whether he should go find him and talk to him some more. And he thought about the Cushman and Johnny Mercer and that young nurse named Sharon and about profanity.

He thought about being fifty-nine-year-old—soon-to-be-sixty-year-old—Otis Halstead. At least he was no Silver Star. He had always told everybody the truth about his washing out of naval ROTC and a military commitment by a stupid accident in college. He probably could have gotten away with telling people he had been a navy officer who commanded patrol boats in Vietnam or something. Nobody would have checked. But that kind of stuff was not for him, Otis the responsible son, husband, father, businessman. And friend?

No, not friend. No friend to Pete, for sure. Pete was right about that. /
really did
—
do
—
treat the poor bastard like shit. But goddammit, how could I have known the guy was moving ever so slowly but surely toward a breakdown? Mush is mush, shit is shit, I’m no world-famous Ashland Clinic shrink
.

Otis decided against going after Pete right now. Or calling somebody at Ashland or even down the hall in Pete’s office. Pete will walk it off, think it off. He’ll be fine. With his background and education, how can he be anything but fine? Maybe he really will go and buy a trumpet.

Otis finally returned to his own office on the penthouse floor. It was a large place filled mostly with designer-selected paintings of still lifes and heavy dark brown furniture that fit the heaviness of his CEO position. Otis had never taken the time to
really personalize this space where he spent so many of his days and nights.

He looked through some monthly sales reports. The Omaha/ Lincoln district was down again—more than 10 percent over February. Don Caney, the district manager, wasn’t making it. Time maybe coming soon to move him back to the home office in the underwriting department, where he started and belonged. There are salesmen and there is everybody else. Caney was an everybody else. Chicago/Peoria was up. Good, good. So was Wichita/Oklahoma City. He checked the insurance categories companywide. A little burst of activity in boat insurance. There had better be. There was always an increase in boat insurance sales in the spring as people got ready for summer.

Then he glanced at some new data from one of the insurance industry’s research institutes. Mandatory air bags for all seats in all cars and vehicles were coming, and the prospect was to save three thousand lives and $21.4 million a year for the insurance industry. Hip, hip, hooray.

There was another
Our Future
report to peruse. The crashingcomputer task force had come from such a report. This one had to do with KCF&C entering the banking business if and when the U.S. Congress and others permitted insurance companies to do so. Some believed there was a great future out there for the insurance company that turned itself into a full-service one-stop financial center. Maybe so, maybe someday.

Otis’s secretary, a sharp and unassuming woman of forty-five from western Kansas named Melissa, inquired on the intercom about Pete Wetmore. She said Mr. Wetmore’s secretary had not seen him since he left to attend the conference room meeting with Otis two hours ago. Pete had said to tell her that an emergency had come up and that he’d decided to leave for the day. Nothing to worry about.

Otis picked up his phone and called Bob Gidney at the Ashland Clinic. Otis figured Bob thought Otis was calling to set up another appointment with Russ Tonganoxie. No, said Otis, he had a question.

“Is there some kind of mental disorder that causes people to suddenly start saying ‘fucking’ all the time?”

“Not just that word but all kinds of foul things—whatever comes into the mind comes out the mouth,” Bob said. “It’s called Tourette’s syndrome, named for a French physician in the late 1880s.”

“Is it very serious?”

“Not necessarily—usually only very embarrassing. Have you come down with it?”

“No. But I think a colleague of mine may have.”

“Who?”

“That’s none of your ‘fucking’ business.”

Otis hung up and had a brief second thought or two about whether he should have said something specific to Bob about Pete. Not just about “fucking” but about his trumpet frustration, his troubled thoughts, his walking away from his office and job—his losing it right there in front of Otis.

But Pete said he had already talked to the people at Ashland. Forget it.

Otis saw from his watch that it was almost five o’clock. He picked up a file folder from an executive placement firm in Chicago—headhunters, they were called—that he had contacted secretly to begin looking for a new number two. He had concluded for sure a few months ago that Pete Wetmore definitely was not going to make it. The board had pushed Otis to have a natural and agreed-to succession in place before he was contemplating retirement. So, assuming he stuck with it until he was sixty-five, he still had some time to get things lined up.
The file had the photos and bios and dossiers on two men— both white baby boomers in their mid-forties, both now working for giant insurance companies in second- or third-level positions. One was a New Yorker with an MBA from Wharton, the other a Californian who had started in the business as a company lawyer. Both were married with young children, both took good photographs.