by Jim Lehrer
The waitress arrived as they finished their meal and gave them the choice of peach, cherry, or blueberry cobbler served warm under a slice of melting Colby cheese and a gob of homemade vanilla ice cream. Russ chose cherry, Bob peach.
“Planting the Cushman idea doesn’t work for me as a cause for your being in such a guilt fuck—funk, sorry,” Russ said after the desserts were delivered. “The scooter was a vehicle, in more ways than one, but that’s all it was. If he hadn’t had that, he would have used or done something else. You know that. Sorry, Bob, but I’m not buying. There’s got to be more going on.”
“I’m having an affair with Sally Halstead.”
Bob said it suddenly and quietly, with his face down in his cobbler. Russ wasn’t sure he had heard what he thought he had heard.
“Did you say what I hope I did not hear you say?”
“Yes. That is what I feel guilty about. He was—is—one of my best friends. A real friend, under my definition. She—Sally— was—is—one of my wife’s best friends. And there it was. Sally came to me at the clinic to talk about Otis’s back-to-childhood problems, and in the course of those conversations, we found ourselves … well, in compromising positions. I hate it. I hate myself. I cannot stand it. I was about to stop it and maybe even tell Otis when he ran away on that goddamn motor scooter.”
“Don’t tell him now, okay?”
“Goddamn, Russ! What kind of fool do you think I am? There is no way I would do something like that. It could kill him.”
Russ Tonganoxie was smiling and shaking his head. He put his napkin to his mouth. “I doubt that.”
“Are you sick?” Bob asked.
“Not yet. I’m just trying to keep from breaking up.”
“This is not funny, you idiot. What’s wrong with you? Get a grip. Maybe everything Woody Allen and the great lay world think about us is right. Maybe we’re all crazier than our patients are.”
“I was just thinking about the scene. You go into Otis’s room at the clinic. You confess to having an affair with his wife. And what happens? He breaks into a Johnny Mercer song.”
Bob Gidney turned his head away in disgust. Then he started laughing himself. “Did Mercer write a song about adultery?”
“I’m sure he did, I’m sure he did. We’ll check it on the Internet.”
“Oh, come on. Not Our Huckleberry Friend.”
Russ stopped laughing. “Hey, what was Mercer’s famous blues song?”
“‘Blues in the Night’?”
“Yeah. According to Otis’s daily nurses’ chart, he sang part of it the other night. How does it go?”
“Something like ‘My momma done told me …’”
“Right. ‘When I was in knee pants …’”
“‘My momma done told me …’”
“‘Son.’”
“‘A woman’ll sweet-talk …’”
“‘And give ya the big eye …’”
“‘But when the sweet talkin’s done …’”
In unison, they sang:
“‘A woman’s a two-faced
Worrisome thing who’ll leave ya t’sing
The blu-uues in the night.’”
They applauded themselves and looked around to see if anyone in the restaurant was paying attention. Nobody was. Long martini lunches were definitely not the rule in Eureka, Kansas. The other customers were gone, and the staff was busy cleaning up and setting the tables for dinner.
“Maybe we could do a CD for the Crazy Rhythms label,” Russ said. “Bob and Russ, the Singing Shrinks.”
Bob Gidney did not raise his usual objection to the term “shrink.” He was too busy sobbing violently into his hands, which were cupped together in front of his lowered, shaking, reddened face.
Russ let him cry. As a matter of professional belief and personal practice, Russ supported a good cry as a legitimate form of therapy. Kept-in, spontaneous emotion of any kind can breed mental unrest and disaster, was his theory, one shared by many others in his field.
He was about to say something comforting to Bob to that effect—something such as “Let the tears flow, Bob”—when the cellphone in his right pants pocket sounded.
Russ listened for only a couple of seconds before standing up and saying into the phone, “We’re on our way.”
To Bob Gidney, he said, “Otis has run away. He just put on his clothes and walked out.”
RUSS DID NOT feel the aftereffects of his martini lunch until that evening, when he turned down the street to his home. Nervous energy and the stimulation of dealing with Otis’s disappearance had not only masked any drunkenness earlier, they had held back a hangover later.
But now it hit him in a rush. His mouth, his stomach, his brain seemed overstuffed with vomit and garbage and trash.
He pulled the Wrangler into his driveway and drove straight for the large garage in back.
In virtually one continuous motion, he braked to a stop and leaned out of the Jeep far to the left.
God bless you, my sweet little Jeep, No doors or windows to deal with, Perfect for barfing, absolutely perfect.
Everything he had eaten and drunk—for days or weeks or months, it seemed—came rushing into and through his mouth. When it finally ran out, he continued to heave for several more minutes until there wasn’t even a drop of sour spit left.
“You okay?” somebody asked. It was a male voice. A vaguely familiar male voice. Whoever it belonged to was standing in a shadow. There were lights back here, but also some dark spots where the light didn’t shine.
Great, thought Russ. A perfect ending to this lousy goddamned day. Now I’m going to be robbed. Here in the Sunflower State, here at my new home on the range where the buffalo roam, the deer and the antelope play, and the skies are not cloudy all day, here in the Land of Oz, where Judy Garland and Bert Lahr and Jack Haley walked the Yellow Brick Road in no fear.
“What do you want?” he said into the darkness. “Whatever it is, take it and get out of here. I’m sick as hell, and I need to go to bed.”
“I want one of your Jeeps.”
“You sound familiar. I know you, don’t I? Come out into the light, for chrissake. If you’re going to hijack a Jeep, have the criminal balls to do it out in the open.”
The man stepped into the light about ten yards away. It was Otis Halstead. “Eureka,” Otis said quietly.
“Eureka, my ass!” said Russ in as loud and angry a shout as his condition would permit. “You singing vegetable asshole! I was right about you playing possum!” Russ slid out of the seat, being careful not to step in the puddle of his vomit on the driveway. “Where are you headed?”
“West. Same as before.”
“Got a big sixtieth-birthday blow out planned?”
Otis only smiled.
Russ Tonganoxie did not see himself as a strong or tough guy, but clearly, even in his barfy condition, he could handle Otis. They were about the same stature and muscle size—medium to small, average to weak—but Otis had been mostly in bed for the last several days. That meant he was even weaker than usual. Unless Otis had a weapon of some kind, no problem. A weapon was not likely, unless he had picked up another Red Ryder BB gun somewhere.
“I’m not giving you the keys to this Jeep or any of the others—they’re antiques,” Russ said. “You’re going to have to take them from me by force, and I plan to resist with every ounce of energy I have.”
He didn’t feel sick or tired anymore. He was professionally aroused, curious, ready. This could be fun.
He walked right at Otis, who was dressed in a long-sleeved red-and-white-checked button-down, khaki slacks, and slippers.
“I paid nineteen thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven dollars for this Wrangler,” Russ said as he approached Otis. “It’s top-of-the-line. Soft top and removable side-door curtains for good weather, like now. Hard top for cold weather. Four-wheel drive. Five-speed manual transmission. Four-point-oh-liter, six-cylinder engine. P-225/75-R-15 Goodyear tires—”
“I�
��ll get you twenty thousand even plus another two thousand—a kind of service charge for wear and tear—as soon as I can. My word is good.”
Russ stopped two yards from Otis, who had made no sign of moving. He was standing his ground.
“Your word sucks, Otis,” said Russ. “You jerk us around and play games with us, acting as if you’re mostly out of it, capable of only singing like Johnny Mercer.” Changing to a mocking, sneering, half-singing voice, he shimmied, shook his shoulders á la Elvis and said, “‘Do yuh hear that engine down the line? I figure that it’s engine number forty-nine.’ What crap that was. Suckers. You played us for suckers. And you and your word suck.”
Russ turned toward the door of his large garage. He pointed a small electronic device at the door, and it came up, turning on lights and thus illuminating his three other Jeeps inside.
Otis followed Russ into the garage. “Tell me about the Jeeps, Russ.” They were lined up in military formation, not unlike the Cushman King’s scooters up in Nebraska. One hundred and thirty-four and counting.
“That first one there on the left is the real real World War Two McCoy,” said Russ. “It’s got the shovel on the side and the extra gas can on the back, as you can see. The windshield folds down. The whole thing weighs only eighteen hundred pounds. Anybody could push it out of a ditch. I bought it from the son of a guy who took it with him when he got out of the army after the war—stole the damned thing, for all I know.
“The next one—the red thing of beauty—is the Jeepster convertible. Slightly longer than the original Jeep. Look at the whitewalls, the chrome on the front. A Jeep, but something very special.
“Then my little red-white-and-blue right-hand-drive postal Jeep. Police also used them for parking-meter duty.”
“How did you get them out here from the East Coast?”
“I drove one out with another hooked behind on a trailer hitch. Then I flew back and got the other two and drove them out the same way. I took different routes each time—both were great trips, one across on 1-70 through Columbus and Indianapolis and Kansas City. The other, longer but prettier, on the old U.S. 50 through the West Virginia mountains, Cincinnati, Vincennes, Indiana.”
“You’re as nuts as I am, you know.”
Russ said nothing and went on toward the far door that led into the house.
Otis said, “Help me, Russ. Playing dumb and out of it, as I’ve been doing, is punishment enough.”
Russ waved him off, walked on, opened the outside and screen doors, and disappeared inside the house.
“If I still had my Red Ryder BB gun, I’d shoot the lights out on all these Jeeps of yours!” Otis shouted after him.
Russ stuck his head out from behind the screen door. “Get your crazy Red Ryder ass in here, and let’s talk about all of this.”
“You’re crazier than I am! Jeeps, motor scooters, what’s the difference?”
“The number of wheels! Jeeps have four, motor scooters have two!”
“Mercer wrote a Jeeps song.” Otis did a little two-step movement with his feet and sang:
“Jeepers, creepers,
Where’d ya get those peepers?
Jeepers, creepers,
Where’d ya get those eyes?”
Soon Otis and Russ were sitting on stools across from each other at the butcher-block top of a high kitchen table. Otis was talking.
“I started getting better almost from the beginning. I hid it from Mad Severy and everybody else. At the very start, I really was unable to see anybody clearly, to move or talk—that’s really true. But I had my hearing and my wits about me. And slowly, my vision came back, and I said my one glorious word— ‘Sharon.’ Then ‘Eureka!’—that was for you.”
“Thanks a lot. Sharon. I want to know about her.”
“There’s nothing to know except an unreal fantasy and a real wet dream.”
Russ offered to get Otis something to eat or drink. Otis passed and simply kept talking while Russ poured himself a glass of Diet Coke over ice; his stomach took a pass on anything else.
“I started singing. All the words to the old Mercer tunes came back to me like I had just learned them. I don’t know how or why; they just did. You were right when you said I had no desire to return to the life I had run away from.”
Russ told Otis how they had turned his problem into an official syndrome, one he wanted to call simply “Otis.” He said he should call Mad Severy or somebody at the clinic right now and tell them Otis the Escaped Singer had been found.
No way, said Otis. “They’ll all come over here and try to keep me from running away again. One of the reasons I played possum games was because I didn’t want to recover right back into my old life. I’ve led a deadened life for fifty-nine years—almost sixty—and deadened everyone else’s around me. My family’s, my colleagues’. Look what I did to Pete Wetmore. You call and I go. I’ll literally run away on my own two feet if you won’t give me a Jeep.”
Russ nodded, making no move toward a phone, and asked when Otis had felt really recovered, when and how he had realized he could talk and get up out of bed, walk, and move around.
Otis said, “When I was alone, I spoke only to myself. I had to be careful when I talked, so I spoke quietly, sometimes even in a whisper. At first it was mostly about sneaking to the bathroom. I had to get in and out of there quickly, when I was pretty sure no nurse or attendant or one of you hotshots was due to visit. I had to learn to leave a little for the bedpan or somebody might wonder why I could go so long without.”
Russ wanted to know how he’d gotten away from the clinic and over here in slippers. They had determined that there was only a set of sport clothes in Otis’s closet. No shoes.
“Hitchhiked. First ride was with a guy delivering bottled water. The second with a Sears catalog credit checker. He had a phone book in his car, and I looked up your address. He dropped me four blocks from here.” Otis stepped down from his stool.
Russ looked at his wristwatch and then, for good measure, at a large round clock over his refrigerator. “It’s almost nine o’clock, and it’s dark as hell out there. This is a stupid time to set out.”
Otis began moving slowly toward the door to the garage.
Russ leaped off his stool and cut Otis off, blocking his way. They ended up under a yard apart.
“Don’t screw with me, Russ. This is my life, my Eureka, we’re talking about here.”
“I had an idea about recording you singing some of the Mercer songs. Call it Otis Sings Mercer, something like that. You could finally be what you always wanted to be.”
Otis shook his head. “You’re playing with me, and it won’t work. Get out of the way.”
Russ sprang into a boxer’s crouch. “You’re going to have to punch me out of the way, fella.” He said it in a tone and accent that vaguely resembled that of an Italian mobster.
Otis took a large, forceful step to his left—Russ’s right—and Russ made no move to stop him. “Okay, you win.” Russ reached into his pants pocket and pulled out some keys, pulled one off a ring, and tossed it to Otis. “Take the Wrangler. Can you drive a stick shift?”
A look of wonder and joy came across Otis’s face. “You’re a good man, Russ Tonganoxie. Even if you’re a little wacko. You might want to talk to somebody sometime about your Jeep problem. There must be somebody at Ashland who specializes in treating people who love Jeeps. Yeah, it’s been a while, but I can do stick shift.”
“I’m going with you.”
“What?”
“I’m going to run away, too. I hate this place and everything about it. My brain sucking job sucks. I talk to one guy, Pete Wetmore, and he kills himself. I talk to another—you—and he runs away from home on a motor scooter. Give me a minute to throw some things in a bag. What about money?”
“I have my MasterCard. They left it with my driver’s license on a shelf in the closet. I’ll stop at an ATM somewhere.”
“Me, too, then.”
“What about the ot
her Jeeps?”
“I’ll drive one of them—the old army Jeep. I’ll just leave the other two here for somebody to dispose of. I’ll call Gidney or somebody from the road. They can sell the house, too, and everything in it, and send me a check.”
Russ disappeared down a hallway to his bedroom to throw some clothes and a shaving kit into a suitcase. Within a few minutes, he heard the sound of the Wrangler’s motor outside.
He raced back to the kitchen and to an outside door.
The Wrangler and Otis were gone.
The only sign of them was a handwritten note Otis had left under Russ’s glass of Diet Coke on the kitchen table.
Russ—
I’ll run away my way and you run yours. I think you want to go the other direction anyhow—back toward the East, where you really live. Wherever you go, I’ll eventually find you and get you the money for the Jeep. I’ll take good care of it. Please don’t tell anybody you saw me and what I’m driving. I need some time to get really away this time. Thanks. Eureka.
Otis
—By the way, you called it right at the beginning.
I’m a classic No Need Monster.
Russ Tonganoxie had never been as full of conflicted thoughts and drives and instincts and desires as he was at this moment.
He could jump in the Fort Benning Jeep and go west after Otis—or go back east.
He could call the police and report his Wrangler stolen by Otis Halstead.
He could call Sally Halstead and tell her that Otis was safe but gone west again.
He could do what Otis had asked—call no one, do nothing, give him a day or two to get lost.
He could carefully parse the emotional words he’d spoken a few minutes ago about hating this place and his job.
He could begin wondering whether he really would have run away with Otis Halstead. Or was it an unconscious professional trick aimed at keeping Otis under supervision, under care, under treatment?
He could just go to bed and try to sleep everything off.
And that was what he did.
His main regret was that he hadn’t asked Otis if he really did know the words to six hundred Johnny Mercer songs.
