by Jim Lehrer
Otis figured he was the same as the quarterback on TV whom Charlie had yelled at to throw it out of bounds.
TIS HADN’T BEEN back on the road ten minutes when he needed to have a cup of coffee. And maybe something unsweet to eat. The great fudge of that thieving Church Key football has-been had left Otis with a slight twinge of nausea in his throat. Yes, his grandmother had been right about eating too much fudge.
He started looking for somewhere to stop.
There was a boarded-up place that once was what appeared to have been a fairly elegant steak house. There were the long-closed coffee shops of two deserted motels and the remains of what must have once been a busy truck stop and cafe.
Kansas was well known for its deserted places, its thousands— six thousand, at least, according to the Kansas State Historical Society—of dead towns born of people’s dreams that didn’t come true. Otis knew, from his tenure as vice president of the society, that most of them had been created in the late 1800s by enterprising immigrants from the East or Europe. Some came to get rich by erecting factories—cement factories were a particular favorite—or mining for coal, lead, zinc, and other Kansas natural resources. Others came to be free and happy by transforming pieces of open Kansas land into individual visions of paradise. There were socialist communes, hot-springs resorts, camps for buffalo-hunting safaris, pro-slavery/anti-slavery fortresses for whites and blacks-only havens for escaped/freed slaves, a Presbyterian town, a Jewish agricultural colony, a community of fancy young Englishmen who substituted coyotes for foxes in their to-the-hounds hunts, a vegetarian settlement laid out in accordance with an octagonal plan. Several of these ghostly spots were on or near old Highway 56, including one not too much farther west, where a wealthy Frenchman had come in 1870 with the families of forty expert silkworm farmers to establish the new silk capital of the world.
Otis, his desire for coffee growing, was about to consider a detour over to the interstate when, finally, up ahead he saw a small vertical flashing sign, MARY BETH’S, it said in foot-high letters, with EATS crossing near the top like a T.
He pulled off the road and saw immediately that Mary Beth’s was to cafes what Church Key Charlie Blue’s was to factories and Johnny Gillette’s was to vehicle repair shops. It was a very small, very old art deco stucco building that was suffering mightily from age and neglect and deterioration. Years ago it may very well have been a snazzy little diner-type place.
Now he saw huge cracks and holes in the stucco, which had begun, no doubt, as pure white but was now a musty, rusty, sandy color. Inside, there was a counter with a few stools and six or seven booths covered with split and chipped red vinyl. The black-and-white tile floor was also split and chipped.
But the place was open for business. At this moment that was all that concerned Otis.
There were two men sitting at the counter and two other men sitting across from each other at one of the booths. No one was talking, and there was no music playing. The only sound was from the crackling of grease somewhere in back behind the counter. Something was being fried. Otis couldn’t tell from the smell what it was. Bacon, maybe. Or sausage. Hash browns? An egg over easy?
Something on the counter immediately caught his eye. There was one of Church Key Charlie Blue’s bags of fudge. A hand-lettered sign leaning against it said: HOMEMADE FRESH TODAY— 50 CENTS APIECE. Otis resisted the urge to grab them and toss them out and away as far as he could.
“Mary Beth!” one of the men at the counter yelled. “You’ve got a customer in need out here!”
Otis smiled down at the man, who was in his sixties, very tanned in the face and around the neck, and dressed like a farmer. “Thank you, sir,” Otis said quietly, respectfully.
“Service isn’t what they do here,” said the man. He said it in a friendly manner.
And there in front of Otis stood somebody who had to be Mary Beth. She was much older than her restaurant, seventy, at least, tiny, and very gray—both her hair and her shriveled, tired skin.
“I’m so sorry, but I’m out of everything but toast, bacon, eggs, and coffee this morning,” she said with a weariness that was stunning, scary. She seemed about to drop—dead, maybe— right there before everybody. “Fudge—I’ve got some fudge there, too, as you can see. Not the right thing to eat for breakfast, though, is it? You look familiar. Didn’t I see you at that crazy football player’s this morning?”
Otis only smiled. He was not anxious to confirm that he’d had anything to do with the thieving idiot called Church Key. But there was nothing he could do about it now. He told Mary Beth he’d love two pieces each of toast and bacon.
“Help yourself to a cup of coffee from the pot over there, and have a seat anywhere,” she said.
Otis chose a booth two down from the one that was occupied.
One of the two men in it yelled amiably at Otis, “We were just talking about Joe Montana. Was he as good as Len Dawson? I saw your Chiefs helmet there. What do you think?”
Montana and Dawson had played quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs at different times. Otis had seen them play in person at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City and on television.
“I’d say they were about the same,” Otis said. “Both were great.”
“Yeah,” said the man. “That helmet looks like the real McCoy. Charlie Blue got his real one from the Cowboys. Did you see it?”
“I did. This one’s real, too. I bought it at a sporting goods store.”
“Why?” said the other man. He and his companion were wearing blue work clothes. Otis recognized the logos over their left breasts as being that of the CKP&L—Central Kansas Power and Light.
“I bought it for my son, and he loans it to me when I ride the scooter,” Otis lied.
The two men had clearly watched him arrive on the Cushman, which Otis could see from his place in the booth. They had probably been talking about the old unshaved guy who just drove up on an old motor scooter wearing a Chiefs helmet.
“Is that a twenty-two hanging off the scooter?” one of the men asked.
“It’s an air rifle,” Otis replied and, anticipating a follow-up, added, “I use it to shoot rats and cats and gnats.”
The two men from CKP&L looked at each other and said no more.
Otis went back to feeling really good about himself.
He checked his watch again. It was 10:35 A.M. He tried to imagine what was happening now at his old offices in Eureka. Who, if anyone, was crying over the disappearance of the CEO; who, if anyone, was reading the boring goddamn reports he would be reading, and running the boring goddamn meetings instead of him? He worried for a few hard minutes—it was the first time it had crossed his mind—about the stockholders of Kansas Central Fire and Casualty. The stock had been selling on the AMEX at thirty-four a share on Friday when the market closed. Once the word was out on his disappearance this morning, it might take a hit of three or four points. The running away of a company’s CEO can do that to a stock. But if the institutional types—pensions and mutual funds—didn’t panic, everything would settle down in a few days. Jack Thayer would figure out a way to signal stability to stockbrokers and stockholders and policyholders and employees and the world. KCF&C would be fine without Otis Halstead. He had never thought so before, but sitting here now in this booth at Mary Beth’s on old U.S. 56 west of Eureka, he was sure of it.
Speaking of Mary Beth, he noticed that she was talking to somebody. She was speaking loudly, and so was the other person—a man.
Otis turned toward the noise.
“I gave you a twenty, Mary Beth, goddammit,” said the farmer who had summoned her on Otis’s behalf a few minutes before. He was standing at the end of the counter with the cash register between him and Mary Beth.
“Don’t you goddamn me, Duane Williamson,” she said. “You know what it does to my arthritis.”
“There’s no connection between cussing and arthritis,” said the man. “You’re trying to steal my money again, and playing sick isn’
t going to change it one whit.”
Otis may have imagined it, but it seemed as if Mary Beth’s face went from concrete-block gray to blazing red in a split second. “You gave me a ten! Now, you take your change and your cheating self out of here and out of my sight before I call the sheriff and have you arrested for disturbing the peace and making a slander against me.”
“I ain’t going nowhere without ten more bucks, and that’s it.”
“Then you’re going to jail or your grave.”
The customer stepped around the corner and moved his right hand toward the cash register drawer. Mary Beth slammed it shut on some of his fingers, and he screamed.
“You old thief!” he yelled at her. “One day you and this place are going to burn like you’re in hell itself!”
Otis stood up and started moving toward them. He remembered reading a story in The Kansas City Star a few years ago about an incident over ten dollars in change at a Dairy Queen in some East Texas town. It was between some cowboy kid and a waitress, and before it was over, there was a live TV standoff, gunplay, and at least one person dead—maybe both the waitress and the customer.
Otis wasn’t going to let that happen here. Maybe he hadn’t reacted the way he should have to save Pete Wetmore’s life. Whatever, he sure as hell was not going to make that mistake again.
He approached them with a ten-dollar bill in his hand. “Here,” he said to the man. “Take this, and that’ll end it.”
“What business is it of yours?” said the man.
“Just trying to keep the peace, that’s all. And that’s worth ten bucks any day, anytime.”
“I don’t want your money,” the guy said and stalked out the front door.
Mary Beth disappeared through a swinging door that Otis assumed was to the kitchen.
Otis turned to go back to his booth. The other three customers in the place—the two from CKP&L and the second man at the counter—were still sitting, and they were smiling at him.
“Why didn’t you all try to help out?” he asked the three in a kind of joint accusation. “Somebody could have gotten hurt— killed, even.”
“No way,” said the man at the counter. “They’re both Williamsons—second cousins or something. They fight over something every morning.”
Before too long, Otis was back on old U.S. 56, having left a twenty-dollar bill under the corner of his empty plate.
His throat was completely fudge-nausea-free after he’d eaten two pieces of fairly brown wheat toast and two pieces of crisp bacon and drunk two cups of coffee. The sweetness was gone, but the Church Key Charlie Blue fury was still stuck way back up in there.
SOON HE WAS on the western outskirts of Marionville, Kansas, famous for being the birthplace of more Congressional Medal of Honor winners per capita than any city or town in America (seven out of a population of twenty-five hundred) and as the birthplace of Larry Winston Weir, the inventor of rippled potato chips. Both distinctions were commemorated with small sections in the city-county historical society’s museum on the square. Otis knew that because he had gone there on the historical society’s VIP bus tour of central Kansas’s historical sites.
This trip to Marionville was as a VIP runaway on a motor scooter.
He remembered that earlier tour mostly for the stops at a few of the twenty-four round barns that had been built in the early 1900s and remained in various stages of use and restoration throughout Kansas. There was one just west of Marionville, if he recalled correctly, that was particularly stunning. It was a concrete and wood structure that was sixty feet in diameter and seventy-five feet tall in its domed center. From a distance, it looked like a strange, out-of-place castle in the middle of the prairie.
Marionville was also known for its brick streets, most of them having been laid years ago, during the peak of the town’s prosperity from a nearby air force base. The bricks were famous Coffeyville bricks, manufactured in the southeast Kansas town of Coffeyville. But prosperity had disappeared from Marionville, and with it had gone the town’s ability to properly maintain the remaining bricks and replace those that were broken or missing. The end result was a street system that was mostly an obstacle course that rattled bones and teeth, dislodged hubcaps, and blew out tires.
Otis, realizing the peril, throttled his scooter down to a slow creep as he entered the town and kept his eyes hard on the roadway, looking for dangerous holes and bumps. The road made a series of sharp turns before it straightened out to go through downtown and by the square. He made it fine until he came almost to the end of the brick on the west side of town, where old U.S. 56 switched from brick back to cracked and neglected concrete.
He relaxed and took his eyes off the road in front of him and began observing the sights and scenery again. On his right was the once-proud WELCOME, HIGH FLIERS gate to the once-proud Galva Air Force Base, one of several facilities in Kansas built during World War II to train B-29 bomber crews. It had remained active as a training base during the Korean War and for a while as some kind of intelligence facility during Vietnam. Now it was deserted, its runways grown over with grass, its fences covered with vines, its stories and the people who lived them—
Suddenly, Otis was flying through the air.
He landed on his head, the Chiefs helmet whamming hard against the highway. He was conscious but hurting. He heard the screeching of brakes and turned over and looked up to see the blur of a blue pickup truck coming right at him. He rolled to his left, and the truck jerked to the right, its left front tire brushing slightly against the helmet and Otis.
Otis moved his legs to stand up. They worked. He stretched his arms. They worked. He removed his helmet. His head didn’t come off inside it. He could see and smell. And there was no blood.
The helmet had a harsh scrape across its top and right side. His $185 Kansas City Chiefs helmet had saved his life.
“Are you all right, sir?” said a young male voice.
Otis turned in its direction and saw a kid in his late teens, tall, blond, crew-cut. He was rolling the Cushman toward Otis.
Otis noticed that they were in the middle of the road, and a few cars had stopped in both directions. There was no huge backup. It would have taken days of stalled traffic to create a huge backup on old U.S. 56.
“I’m fine,” Otis said to the young man.
“You want an ambulance?”
“No, no. No need for that. I’m still all in one piece.”
“Then let’s move off the highway.”
Otis followed the young man and the Cushman to the highway shoulder, where the pickup—Otis recognized it as a Dodge Ram—had come to rest.
The kid waved the cars in both directions to go about their business, and Otis’s brush with death was over. As best as he could tell, the scrapes to his wonderful lifesaving helmet and right knee and leg were all the damage that had been done.
The kid said, “Thank God that scooter of yours and that Chiefs helmet coming toward me grabbed my full attention— so I was looking when you took your fall and could react in time to keep from running right over you.”
Yes, thought Otis. Thank God and you, young man.
Otis inspected his 1952 Pacemaker. It looked no worse for wear than he did. “I must have hit a hole in the road,” he said.
“That’s mostly all there is in this old highway,” said the kid. “Can I take you somewhere?”
Otis really liked this young man. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Tom Caldwell. T is what everybody calls me—because there are a lot of Toms in my family,” said the kid. “It’s a plain T without the period. My parents said if an S without a period was all right for Harry S Truman, then that was fine for their son.” He extended his right hand.
Otis took it and said, “I’m Buck.”
“Nice to meet you, Buck,” said T Caldwell. “Where are you headed, anyhow?”
“West—to Salina and beyond.”
T Caldwell said, “I live just around the corner. I had run
out to get some magazines for my mom. Want to come by for a cup of coffee or something?”
Buck said he would love to.
THE CALDWELL HOUSE was a one-story freshly painted white frame with green shutters, a shingle roof, and a clean trimmed yard and flower garden in front. This kind of house in this kind of neighborhood was right out of Otis’s life in Sedgwicktown. As he scootered up to the house behind T’s truck, he realized that it was all still pretty much the same. Eureka was larger, and the houses—those in NorthPark in particular—were larger and newer, but most everything else was about the same.
About the same. Maybe that was the story of his life? About the same. Everything about him, Otis the Responsible, was always about the same as it had always been. Well, that was not exactly right. Hadn’t his father’s death changed him? What about being bald? Could that idiot Tonganoxie be right about that?
He was no longer Otis the Responsible. Now he was Buck.
“My mom is very sick with a bad liver disease, Buck,” T said as they walked up the front sidewalk. “It’s got a very long name—primary sclerosing cholangitis—and there’s no cure. She doesn’t get her hair fixed much anymore, so she doesn’t like to see a lot of people.”
Otis said he understood. He took off his football helmet and swept his right hand across his barren scalp. It marked the first pleasant thought and happy gesture he’d had about not having any hair. “Tell her I’m not big on fixed hair, either,” he said.
T smiled and said, “Good for you, sir. Sometimes she puts on a Central State baseball cap that I gave her, but she says it makes her head itch like she’s a puppy with fleas. Mostly, she sees only me and other family and old friends, anyhow.”
Otis said he understood. But he really didn’t. The only person really close to him who’d died was his father, and that had happened suddenly, violently, in an accident.
Inside, T went off to the left to see about his mother. He told Otis to make himself comfortable, pointing right, toward what was clearly the living room. The interior, like the exterior, was tidy, precise, immaculate. Otis looked around for photographs and other specific signs of this family’s life, but before he found much of anything, T returned.
