Eureka

by Jim Lehrer

  “She’s put on the cap to see you, even though I told her you were bald and didn’t care about hair,” T said. “Mom says she’s curious to see any strange man I brought home—particularly one who’s riding around on an old motor scooter and one whose life I saved.”

  Otis had never been comfortable around really sick people. He had trouble looking at them without feeling embarrassed, ashamed that they were sick and he wasn’t. He never knew what to say, and he often said too much or the wrong things. He had wanted to tell T that he didn’t want to see his mother, but that would have been impossible.

  “What kind of scooter is it?” asked Iola Caldwell after her son had introduced her and Otis. Her voice was cracked, high-pitched, but firm.

  “It’s a Cushman,” Otis replied.

  “That’s what I figured.”

  Iola Caldwell was sitting up in bed, propped up by several pillows. Her head was mostly covered by a red baseball cap with CENTRAL in script across the front. Some thin strands of dark brown hair were showing on the sides. Her skin was yellow, like slick paper, but her blue eyes sparkled out at Otis. He could not tell how old she was but thought probably in her fifties. He could not tell what she had looked like before she got sick, but he figured probably very attractive. She made only a tiny lump under the bedcovers, but there was no way to know what her original size had been. Could she have been as large a woman as her son was a man?

  There was something about her manner, her style, that did not make Otis want to turn away, to leave the room. He didn’t mind looking at her, listening to her.

  “T’s father won me with a Cushman. He was the only boy in high school here in Marionville who had one. He offered to take me on a ride, and he took me forever—almost forever. I loved sitting there behind him with my arms around his waist. I was the envy of every girl. I mean, every girl.”

  Otis said, “Would you like to take a quick ride on mine?”

  The blue eyes brightened like new stars. To her son, she said, “Take me out there, T.”

  “Mom, are you sure?” said T.

  “I’m really sure.”

  Otis almost cried as he watched the son reach under his mother’s frail, shrunken body and lift her up into his arms. Both were careful that her pink chenille robe covered her completely. Her feet were bare. Otis saw a pair of pink slippers on the floor by the side of the bed. In a completely natural move, he reached down, picked up the slippers, and stuck them one at a time on her feet.

  “Onward, Buck,” T said.

  “Onward, Buck,” his mother said.

  Outside on the street, Otis sat down on the scooter first, with both feet on the ground. Then he felt the warmth of a small shaking body behind him and two thin arms around his stomach.

  “Slowly, now, Buck,” T said.

  Otis smiled and pushed off the scooter with his right foot. It coasted a few feet, and he inched the throttle up a whisk. He was struck by her smell. It was a mixture of medicine and powder and soap, like that of a well-run hospital. He felt her head hard against his back and her hands hard against his stomach. But she didn’t seem to be afraid. She had done this before; she had been on the back of a Cushman before. She was comfortable here.

  A skinny old woman in a blue housecoat came out of the house next door. She waved her bony right hand at Iola and yelled in a surprisingly loud voice, “Look at you, look at you, look at you.”

  “Look at me is right, Grace,” Iola Caldwell called back, but her words probably didn’t carry all the way to Grace.

  Otis drove the scooter as slowly as it would go without tipping over. He went down the road—a narrow, well-maintained blacktop—for about fifty yards and then made a swing around and came back.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her as he made the swinging turn.

  “Like being in heaven,” she said.

  Those were the only words they exchanged in the five minutes they shared on the 1952 Pacemaker.

  As T lifted her off, she said to Otis, “What’s that gun about?”

  “It’s a BB gun, Mom, not a real one,” T said.

  “I hate guns,” she said. “I’ve never let T have even one of those.”

  Her son carried her back inside the house after she exchanged several hearty waves with Grace, who, smiling happily, had not left her front sidewalk. She had been a loyal audience.

  Otis followed at a distance but, instead of going back into Iola’s bedroom, stayed in the entrance hall. In a few minutes, T came back out.

  “She enjoyed that,” he said to Otis. “Thank you for doing it. Can I get you some coffee or iced tea or something?”

  Otis truly did not know what to do. He very much wanted to stay here awhile in this house, with this young man and his dying mother. But it didn’t make sense.

  “She told me to tell you to shave,” T said. “She said a grown man like you shouldn’t go around looking the way you do. I told her I’d tell you, and I did.”

  But she doesn’t understand, thought Otis. / am running away from home. Grown men who run away from home do not shave. They also do not brush their teeth.

  Otis knew T expected some explanation, some real story about how and why he was out there on old Highway 56 on an antique motor scooter. No stories. Otis changed the subject. “What’s your situation, T?” he asked.

  T hesitated for a second but then answered, “I’m a junior at Central State, but I took this semester off to be here at home with Mom. Her liver disease, just so you know, isn’t caused by drinking or anything like that. Nobody knows where it comes from. It just comes. She ought to have a transplant, but her heart’s not up to it, which goes back to some problem she had when she was a kid. I don’t get it. She’s only forty-six years old. But what it means is that she doesn’t have much longer, so I figured it was more important to be here with her than to be at school. I can finish that later … you know, afterward.”

  Yes, Otis knew what “afterward” meant. His mother had died at the age of seventy-one, twelve years ago, from complications caused by a badly done gallbladder operation. He said to T, “It must be so difficult taking care of her. I admire you for doing it.”

  “There’s a hospice nurse who comes in the house every day when I’m not here. The worst part, frankly, is taking Mom to the bathroom. I have to stay in there with her so she doesn’t slip or fall. She hates it that I’m in there as much as I do.”

  Otis had nothing to say. He couldn’t imagine ever being in the bathroom with his own mother while she … well, went to the bathroom. There had never been much of a personal nature between him and his mother, who was a shy woman overshadowed, even in Otis’s memory, by her husband almost to irrelevance.

  Otis started walking back toward the front door. He was going to leave T and Iola Caldwell and their white frame house in Marionville, Kansas.

  He asked after a few seconds, “Where’s your dad? The man who gave her her first Cushman ride?”

  “He and Mom divorced several years ago. He lives in California, but he sends us money for her, and for me to go to school. He’s a criminal lawyer, and one of the reasons Mom’s so hot against guns is because he helps criminals with guns stay out of jail. That’s what she says, at least.”

  Otis wanted to know more. He wanted to know why Iola Caldwell and her husband divorced. He wanted to know everything about this family, these people, their life.

  They were out on the sidewalk now. He thought he’d try one more question. “What kind of relationship do you have with your father?”

  “I hate the son of a bitch. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a father.”

  Buck will be your father! Otis wanted to yell. But he remained silent.

  T said, “He ran off with his partner’s secretary. She was pretty and young and sexy. I think it gave Mom her sickness.”

  “That doesn’t cause liver disease, T.”

  T waved that statement off into the air. This son, this exceptional young man, knew damned well his father’s screwing ar
ound had caused his mother’s sickness. It was clear nobody would or could ever convince him otherwise.

  Otis re-covered his bald scalp with the Chiefs helmet and mounted his scooter.

  “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.

  If I loved Carol of Raleigh,

  And she hit a baseball out of sight,

  I’d call it a long Carol-liner.

  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 …