by Jim Lehrer
Then came an eruption of wet. Damn! Damn, damn. This is for little boys! But it came rushing and gushing all over his underwear and into his trousers and down his fifty-nine-year-old legs.
He was horrified. But the horror lasted for only a second or two. Then he laughed—and laughed and laughed. He had had a wet dream! He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one. Then he remembered when it was. Not as a little boy. It was one night after he had danced with Betsy McPherson at an office Christmas party. Betsy was an assistant vice president for finance who was neither particularly beautiful nor particularly sexy. There was just something about her, about the way she walked and sat and talked, that turned Otis on. He could not have explained it, and fortunately, he never had to, because he never made anything even remotely resembling a suggestive comment, much less a real pass, physical or otherwise. All that ever happened was that he went home that night after the party and, late at night in bed next to Sally, he had a wet dream.
Wet dreams were not from the lives of responsible men, not courageous men on quests for new lives. They were like Cushmans and Daisy Red Ryder air rifles and football helmets and cast-iron toy fire trucks.
He got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and cleaned himself up with a towel.
And he lay back down.
He didn’t feel so exhausted. He didn’t feel as if he were going to disintegrate. He didn’t even feel he was crazy anymore. Isn’t it interesting what a wet dream about a young maiden named Sharon can do for an old man? Otis thought. He figured Tonganoxie and the other shrinks at Ashland would have a field day—or professional wet dreams of their own, so to speak—with material like this.
There was a fairly good-sized television set—a twenty-one-inch or more screen—on a chest against the wall right in front of him. It was accompanied by a TV Guide and a remote control on the bedside table. He switched on the set and began surfing.
The news was on. The news wasn’t what it used to be. Otis had not been able to figure out what had happened to the minds of the people who ran national television news. When there were Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner and Eric Sevareid and John Chancellor, the reporting had seemed calm, straight, newsy, relevant, necessary to watch. Now it wasn’t any of those things. He had read in The Wall Street Journal recently that the cable news networks hadn’t been the same since the O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky stories, and they, plus the Internet, had scared the commercial networks into trying to make their newscasts more like entertainment, more like what the cable people were doing with the news. It wasn’t working, because the audiences already had plenty of other ways to be entertained. Such as the circus.
Otis seldom watched any news programs, not even the local ones, except when there was a major national or international news crisis or an area weather emergency. The local newscasts in Eureka were mostly about people screaming at one another or crying and dying violently. The rest were a few breathlessly delivered sports scores, elaborate weather forecasts, and inane chat and giggles among all of the on-air people involved.
He now surfed right through every newscast and news channel, looking for a movie or a British mystery or an A&E history documentary or something that might distract him for a while.
Nothing. He clicked it off.
It was quiet again in room 145. There was no highway noise from old U.S. 56, no noise at all. Now he had to think about himself again.
Okay, Otis, what now? Okay, Buck, what now?
Sleep, I will sleep now, I will close my eyes and dream not of Sharon nor of KCF&C, I will imagine a life somewhere farther west that—
What in the hell is this? I can’t imagine a life different from the one I’ve lived, because it’s the only one I know anything about. This is ridiculous!
He decided to think of something he had done or experienced or seen or felt in each of his fifty-nine years. One year at a time.
Nothing during year one, of course. Or year two. What about year three? Didn’t I first smell cow shit in the barn when I was three? Also, Mom read me a book about a soldier who saved a cat from drowning at the front in France…
He reached for the phone and called his home number in Eureka.
Sally answered on the first ring. There was something in her voice that told him she had been answering the phone on the first ring since the moment she found out that her husband had run away.
“What is this about, Otis?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“I thought I had lost you forever, Otis. Have I?”
“I think so, but I don’t know.”
“Is it about sex?”
Sally spoke quietly. Surprisingly so. There was no anger in her tone. He had expected some shouts, some noise, some commotion, some shit.
“Sex?”
“Sex.”
“There’s no woman with me, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t know exactly what I mean, but that’s a good beginning, something I’m delighted to know. I would hate it if you ran off with another woman.”
That struck Otis as rather funny. It was better to run off with a BB gun, a motor scooter, a football helmet, and a toy fire engine than with a woman.
Then he thought about what T Caldwell had said about his father, and it wasn’t funny anymore. What if Sally came down with a deadly liver disease because of what he had done?
“Bob Gidney told me that the specialist you saw at Ashland—isn’t his name Russ Tonganoxie?—believes a lot of men your age, in your situation, want to run away to new lives, but few of them actually do it,” Sally said.
“I helped a guy make fudge this morning, Sal. Can you believe that?”
“No, as a matter of fact. It’s so unlike you, Otis. What kind of fudge?”
“Chocolate—even better than Grandmother Halstead’s.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Not now.”
“Where are you?”
“Not very far away.”
“You really are alone?”
“For the first time in my life.”
“Are you ever coming back from running away for the first time in your life?”
“I don’t know.”
They ended their conversation.
Otis felt like an even bigger fool. Here he was, the daredevil scooter man who had run away from home, and what did he do? Like a little fifty-nine-year-old, soon-to-be-sixty-year-old, boy missing his mommy, he called home after being gone only two days.
Within ten minutes, he was fast asleep.
That was because he’d remembered hitting his first baseball when he was four, and because he’d finally come up with something to do about Church Key Charlie Blue.
OTIS WAS UP and gone before daylight.
He cruised by Johnny Gillette’s, and as he approached Church Key Charlie Blue’s, he slowed down. With only a few yards to go, he switched off the scooter’s engine and coasted into the rim of the driveway.
With a stealth and precision that made him proud, he braked the scooter to a stop, disembarked, and lifted his Daisy Red Ryder air rifle from its hanging place.
Here we go, Buck.
He crouched down sniperlike behind the scooter, laying the gun across the seat as if it were the top of a trench or foxhole.
Tic-tac-toe, Church Key Charlie Blue!
Otis had remembered correctly that the front of Charlie’s house had a window with nine small panes—a perfect tic-tac-toe board. Otis estimated the distance at about twenty-five yards, well within the range of this BB gun.
He sighted the window in the upper-left-hand corner and squeezed the trigger.
Pow!
The window cracked and the glass fell. Bull’s-eye.
In rapid succession, he sighted and fired and hit the window in the lower-right-hand corner and the other two corners. Pow! Crash! Pow! Crash!
The center pane was splintered, and so were the four remaining ones on the sides.
Nine shots, all bull’s-eyes.
As the last window crashed, Otis saw, out of the corner of his right sighting eye, the door to the factory side open. Here came Charlie.
In a flash, Otis hopped on the scooter, rehung the BB gun, kicked off the motor, and rode west again. Charlie was beyond running and, Otis knew, he also had no wheels.
“Oat-tus, you fucker!” he heard Charlie yell.
Oat-tus, without looking back, raised his right hand’s middle finger high above his head as he rode out of sight.
There must have been times in Otis Halstead’s fifty-nine years of life when he felt better than he did, but at that moment Buck couldn’t think of any.
OTIS HAD BARELY noticed the police car when it passed him going the other way. The traffic was relatively heavy for old U.S. 56, but he guessed that was because, at almost eight A.M., people were on their way to work and to school.
He knew from his map that the road would be turning less traveled and more comfortable again before too long, before he came to the Chanute River Bridge detour that T had told him about. The only sights of consequence between here and the next real town, Cherryvale, the post-rock capital of the world, were that bridge, several crossroads with county roads, and mostly shells of tiny places between fields of growing wheat.
He was only a few minutes beyond Dearing when he first saw the police car in the small mirror attached to the left handlebar.
Then came the flashing blue lights on top of the police car as it came up behind him.
Otis pulled off the road, his mind racing with possibilities. Church Key? Could that thieving idiot have called the police about the BB-gunning of his windows? No way. He’d have to explain the four thou. What, then? The scooter was properly licensed, so it couldn’t be that. Maybe he was driving the motor scooter over the posted speed limit? Or operating the scooter recklessly? Or had somebody riding a 1952 Pacemaker Cushman just robbed a bank or committed murder, and a serious case of mistaken identity was unfolding?
“Good morning, there, sir” were the first words spoken by the officer after he tossed away the cigarette he was smoking. He was dressed in a two-toned brown uniform, a matching straw Stetson, and brown shoes, with a pistol on his right hip and a gold badge on his left lapel that identified him as a deputy sheriff of Sabetha County, Kansas. On the right lapel was a small gold metal name tag that said CANTON. Otis figured his age at about sixty. He walked with a slight limp.
Otis returned the greeting and dismounted from his stopped scooter and put down the kickstand. “I hope I haven’t done anything wrong, Sheriff,” he said in as friendly and safe and unthreatening a voice and tone as he could manage.
“Not a thing but turn me green with envy,” said Canton. “That’s a Cushman Pacemaker, isn’t it?”
Tonganoxie’s male wheels thing again. Otis said, “It sure is— a 1952 model.”
“I had an Eagle when I was a kid. It’s what turned me on to motorcycles and then to law enforcement. I rode one for the Wichita PD for over twenty-five years before it spun out on me in an ice storm. Gave me a bum leg and a ticket out of town to a quieter life up here in the boonies. I rode escort when President Carter and Sandy Koufax and John Glenn and a lot of others came to Wichita and did several times when Dole ran for president.”
The man was smiling, and so was Otis now. “Would you like to take my Cushman for a spin?” Otis asked.
“I thought you’d never offer. I would love it, I really would.”
Otis stood aside, and the deputy climbed on the scooter with the grace, style, and strut of a motorcycle-escort cop. As they said in sports—he was back!
The happy Deputy Canton took the scooter out on the road and putt-putted west a few hundred yards, never out of Otis’s sight, then turned around and came back.
“A fine instrument of transportation is what you have here,” said Canton. While lighting a cigarette with a silver Zippo, he gave Otis a long hard look.
“What happened to your Chiefs helmet, friend?” he said. The attitude had changed subtly.
“I did a spinning-out of my own yesterday over at Marionville,” Otis said, trying his best to keep things light, personal, nonchalant.
“Why don’t you take that helmet off and let me have a good look at you?”
Otis took off the helmet.
Deputy Canton took his good look and then pointed back at the scooter. “What’s the air rifle for?”
“Oh, just for playing around.”
“You seem a little old for BB guns, football helmets, and motor scooters—that’s what I’m thinking.”
Otis smiled and took a step toward his scooter.
The deputy held up his right hand in a movement clearly marked: Stop! “Have you got a driver’s license on you, friend?”
“You bet,” Otis said, resisting to the urge to tell this man they were not friends. He retrieved his Kansas license from his billfold and handed it to the deputy.
“‘Otis Girard Halstead,’” the deputy read aloud. “You’re a ways away from Eureka. Where you headed on that scooter of yours, Otis?”
Otis had trouble thinking of a time when he had been asked a more difficult question. He knew that difficulties of an unknown but potentially serious type could lie ahead if he didn’t give an answer that suited this Sabetha County deputy sheriff named Canton.
“Pagosa Springs, Colorado,” he said.
“You got family there?”
“No, sir. I’m going to the Fred Harman Art Museum. He’s the guy who created Red Ryder.”
The deputy seemed to think about that a moment. He appeared amused, then confused, and finally said, “We’ve got a substation back down the road a couple of miles. I’d like for you to come with me, Otis. I’m not arresting you or anything like that. It’s only a request.”
“Why, sir?”
“So we can see about you.”
See about me? “What is there to see?”
“Well, first, if there’s a criminal possibility such as an outstanding warrant and then, maybe, if there’s a mental thing of some kind.”
Did people still escape from mental hospitals? Otis resisted an automatic desire to say something angry, resistant, smart— something that would only make matters worse.
“You up to following me on the scooter?” asked the deputy. “I’d suggest the other way around—you drive the cruiser and I drive the scooter—but they’d fire me for letting you drive the county’s car.”
In a few moments Otis, on his scooter, was traveling east close behind the deputy’s car.
The initial possibilities that lay ahead were not hard to figure. Deputy Canton would do some kind of name check or something on Otis Girard Halstead and, with some calls, would determine that the scooter man with the Red Ryder rifle, Chiefs helmet, and Cushman was a runaway insurance company CEO/ civic leader. Then what? There was neither a criminal nor a mental possibility.
But, But who needs this? What self-respecting runaway scooter man would voluntarily put up with this kind of indignity?
Otis waited until there was a good clean break in the traffic and then swung the scooter around and headed west again.
In the handlebar mirror, Otis saw the brake lights of the deputy’s car come on and the car pull off. Okay, so now what are you going to do, Mr. Deputy Canton? You have no legitimate reason to come after me, to take me into any kind of custody while you run your checks.
The sheriff’s cruiser disappeared at a fast speed. Clearly, the deputy knew he needed more than the fact that here was a grown man acting like a child. That was not enough. He needed to run his checks, and he had decided to go to the substation as fast as he could to do it. He knew the Cushman moved very slowly, so if something did turn up, there would be no problem catching Otis.
Otis felt smart, quick, keen, clever, daring, cool—young.
TIS BEGAN TO relax after a few minutes. There was no Deputy Canton coming up behind him with flashing lights, and the familiar had returned. The highway o
nce again had more bumps and cracks and rough patches on it than it did cars or trucks or buses.
Buses. There were no buses. Otis had a vague notion that Greyhound was about the only bus company left in Kansas, and they sped by the small towns on the interstates from Kansas City west across the state to Denver, and south to Wichita on into Oklahoma. Buses were something that went with Red Ryder, Cushmans, cast-iron fire engines, and wet dreams. In the ’40s and ’50s, the crimson-and-cream buses of the Santa Fe Railway’s bus company, called Santa Fe Trailways, had been the major form of transportation in and out of Sedgwicktown for Otis, his family, and most everyone else he knew. The bus had stopped at Hutchinson’s Rexall in the center of town on Harper Street, across from city hall, the bank, and most everything else that mattered. Until college, Otis had left on every major excursion of his life aboard one of those roaring machines that spewed black smoke and blared with the sound of air horns and hissing brakes. They were the magic chariots of escape, of tomorrow, of glory, of somewhere else. Now they were mostly no more.
And there came the first sign warning of the detour ahead for the Chanute River Bridge.
BRIDGE CLOSED AHEAD I MILE—FOLLOW DETOUR SIGNS.
The large black letters were emblazoned on a three-foot-square orange metal sign.
The signs grew in size and intensity as he got closer, the last being:
DANGER AHEAD. ALL VEHICLES MUST TURN LEFT.
There was a barricade made of orange barrels and heavy board slats across the road. Otis saw a red Dodge pickup and a blue Oldsmobile in front of him turn left as they’d been told.
But Otis decided not to do as he’d been told. Why not at least take a look at this old bridge? He was in no hurry. Deputy Canton had clearly turned up nothing that required a highspeed chase of a Cushman down old U.S. 56.
No car could make it around the barricade, but on the right—the north side—there was a gap large enough for him and his scooter to squeeze through. Otis dismounted and walked himself and pushed the scooter through the small opening.
Then he got back on the scooter and started riding. He could see the outline of bridge spans about a hundred yards ahead. There were the remnants of houses and stores on both sides of the road, but nothing that was still alive—structures or people. What small signs of life and business that may have remained had obviously departed with the closing of the bridge. The barricades made regular access impossible.
