Eureka (10 page)

“Want a beer?” said the man, emptying the one he had in his hand.

Otis was not a beer drinker. He preferred white wine and vodka in the summer, red wine and Scotch in the winter, but he wasn’t about to decline the offer. “Sure, thanks,” he said.

The man motioned for Otis to follow him over to the refrigerator. It was a badly scarred white Kelvinator with rounded corners. Otis estimated its age to be about the same as the man’s— forty-plus, at least. Inside there was mostly beer, cans and botties
of Great America beer. There were also some bottles of ketchup and mustard and a few other containers and uncovered plates of leftover salads and frozen dinners and sandwiches and pieces of meat and potatoes that Otis tried not to look at very closely.

The man grabbed two dark brown bottles. He handed one of them to Otis and then turned back to a cardboard box on the floor next to the refrigerator and came up with a small silver bottle opener—a church key, as they were sometimes called. “Have one of these, too, on me,” he said, handing the church key to Otis. “They used to be my stock-in-trade. Pull-tops killed it all. My name’s Charlie. You may have known me as Charlie Blue—Church Key Charlie Blue.”

Otis thought about that for a few beats. He remembered the sign out front. Something about Church Key Charlie Blue’s Factory. But nothing else came to mind.

“Tight end, Eagles, Rams, Cowboys—two-time second-team all-pro, three-time pro bowl,” said Charlie, clearly annoyed that Otis didn’t remember him.

“Oh, sure, you bet,” Otis lied. “You were great.”

“What’s your name, scooter man?”

“Otis.”

“Don’t lie to me, Otis. You just did about knowing who I was. I really hate people who lie to me. And everybody I ever knew did. What the fuck were you doing out there in the rain on a pussy motor scooter, Otis?”

Charlie began moving back toward the television. Otis fell in behind him and, without thinking much about it, said, “Running away. I was running away.”

“From cops or women or bills? Got to be one or the other, scooter man Otis.”

Charlie turned down the sound on the television and sat in
the chair, which was faded red, quilted, overstuffed. He pointed at the couch, which more or less matched. Otis sat down. He was still wet, though no longer dripping. But the room was warm, and he was also no longer shivering.

Otis wanted to answer Charlie’s question but couldn’t think of what to say. What, exactly, was he running away from?

Charlie said, “What are ya, Otis? Oat-tus. Sounds like a goddamn geometry teacher’s name. Never figured out the point of it or algebra.”

Otis had a crazy urge to say, Hey, Charlie, do you know who Archimedes was? He was the Sicilian-born Greek mathematician who first screamed “eureka,” as in the name of Eureka, Kansas. He also helped invent geometry, Charlie. What do you think of that?

Instead, he said, “I’m in—
was
, I guess—insurance.”

“I have been screwed, rued, and tattooed by more insurance companies than there are fizz bumps in this bottle of beer. They never want to pay up.”

Charlie reached over and turned the TV back up. The half-time show was on. Four grinning, hyper men were sitting at a desk, showing highlights of games and talking endlessly and mindlessly about it all.

Charlie let them talk for a minute or two and lowered the sound and said to Otis, “They humped me out of every one of those kind of jobs. I should be doing that halftime stuff, Monday-night football, color talk, sideline shit. I could have done it better than these assholes. Look at ’em grinning and laughing at each other. They think they know football. They don’t know shit. I know football. They’re pulling down a mil or more a year, and I’m pulling down sweat off this beer bottle. They gave me some tryouts to do commercials. Let me show you.”

Abruptly, Charlie was out of his chair and down in a three-point football lineman’s stance, facing Otis. “They took audition shots of me down like this, all in football gear, all made up by a big-tit blonde to look muddy and tired and bleeding, and then a voice on the commercial said, ‘Hip one, hip two, hip three, hut!’ Then I came right at the camera like I was going to hit somebody.”

Charlie came right at Otis as if he were going to hit somebody—somebody named Otis.

Otis had a split second to imagine his body crushed, his soul crying out in pain. But Charlie stopped under a yard away and said off to his left, “I’d stop and straighten up and look right at the TV camera, take off my helmet, hold out my hand like this, and come back with a beer in it. And I’d say, ‘When you work hard for a living, you need to have a way to relax after a hard day on the job. I’m Church Key Charlie Blue, and I’m sure the best way to relax is with an ice-cold Great America beer.’”

Otis wasn’t sure what to do, so he applauded this old football player’s commercial audition routine.

Said Charlie, “Thanks. Yeah, as you just saw, I was good. Damned good. But not good enough for the creeps running everything. They also told me—you know, like, ‘by the way’— that my reputation for drinking beer might not work with the family-TV crowd. That gave me the name Church Key. They gave it to me in college. They said nobody could put down more beer than Church Key Charlie Blue. That was the goddamn truth then, and it still is. Great life, great country, ain’t it? Great America. You got that church key I gave ya?”

Otis pulled it out of his pocket. “You bet,” he said.

“Read what’s engraved on it.”

Otis leaned to his right and held the church key under the light of the floor lamp, which seemed, along with most everything else in the room, on the verge of collapsing.

There was the familiar bald-eagle logo of Great America beer, and under it, in small script,
COMPLIMENTS OF CHURCH KEY CHARLIE BLUE.

Before Otis could say anything, Charlie said, “Instead of doing their commercials, Great America hired me to go around to bars on Monday nights—you know, during Monday Night Football— and hustle business for them. I had just retired from the Cowboys—retired ‘cause they said I couldn’t run anymore, the humpers—so I only went to places in Texas. East Texas, mostly, where the real rednecks live. I’d give out those church keys and do some autographing and a lot of grab-assing. The agent I had said it was public relations, and if I did it well, I would get another shot at commercials or move on to endorsing shoes and footballs and shit like that. I never moved on to nothing. Once you didn’t need a church key to open a can of beer much anymore, they didn’t need me to go around handing out church keys anymore either.”

Otis considered the possibility of some MBA candidate at KU or Harvard or a similar place doing a case study on how the invention of the flip-top impacted the manufacture and sale and distribution of church keys in America.

“Did you always want to be a pro football player?” he asked Charlie.

Charlie, as if blowing up a balloon, raised his chest. “Since I first saw myself in the mirror.”

“When was that?”

“When I was about two days old.”

“College. Where did you go to college?”

“Little dipshit place in Oklahoma you never heard of.” Charlie turned the sound back up and sat himself back down. Otis took a sip of his beer and remained still and silent as Charlie watched and listened while the Steelers kicked off to the Raiders to start the second half.

After a while, Otis’s eyelids felt heavy. Running away from home in the rain had worn him out, and the beer had had an effect, and so had the lulling sound of voices and cheers. He set his beer bottle down on the floor.

As he did so, he noticed that Charlie also no longer had a beer in his hands; his eyes were closed, and his chin was resting heavily on his chest. Above the sounds of the television he honked out some of the loudest snoring Otis had ever heard. He was sure it could be picked up by travelers all along old U.S. 56, even through the rain.

Ignoring the fact that his clothes were wet and his shoes were muddy and even where he was or what in the hell was going on, Otis stretched out on the couch.

Soon he was also snoring loud enough for travelers to hear all along old U.S. 56.

TIS WOKE UP
to a jolt of strong, sweet odors—none of which he immediately recognized—and into a world of absolute confusion.

Those first few seconds after he opened his eyes were terrifying.

Where am I? What time is it? What is that smell? Why are my clothes so wet? Am I going to be late to work? Where is Sally?

Is Pete Wetmore really dead?

Where is my Cushman?

Where in the hell is there a bathroom?

He sat straight up and looked around him.
The loony football player? Where is he? The giant? Was his name really Church Key Charlie Something?

Where in the hell is he?

What
is
that smell? It’s like the one last night, only ten times stronger.

What in the hell have I done?

Otis swung his feet around to the floor and stood up. There was the Cushman over by the door. Good.

In the cold light of early morning, the home of the monstrous man named after a beer can opener was more dirty, more messy, more everything crummy. Otis remembered a marine captain
assigned to his naval ROTC unit at KU who, during inspections, called most everything he saw a “rat’s nest.” This place gave new and real meaning to that term.

Otis heard the sound of metal scraping from the concrete-block building next door. He began walking tentatively toward a wide-open door.

In the other building, standing over what appeared to be a huge hot stove, was Charlie. Blue? Charlie Blue.
Is his last name Blue?
Otis thought. He was wearing his Dallas Cowboys helmet and a pair of white latex gloves, the kind doctors and other health people use. In his right hand was a long wooden spoon that he was moving around in a huge cauldron-sized metal pot. There was steam flowing from the pot. And there was also that sweet smell.

Otis recognized the odor. It was chocolate. Heavy, grand, magnificent, glorious chocolate. It reminded him of fabulous Sunday afternoons at his grandmother’s house in Medicine Lodge, southwest of Wichita. She had made fudge that, to Otis’s taste, was the best in the world. The only downside was that she would never let Otis have as much as he wanted. “It’ll make you sick, Otis,” she’d say.

What in the hell is this?
thought Otis.

“Good morning,” he said to Charlie.

The monstrous man didn’t even give Otis a glance. He said, “My crapper’s on the disabled list. If you need to take a leak, just go out back to the woods and do it. I never lock the back door. Anything heavier, go over to the Gulf station just up the road to the right. Tell Johnny Gillette you’re a friend of Church Key’s, and he’ll give you his crapper key. He’s always up early.”

“What are you making there?” Otis asked.

“Fudge.”

Fudge, This loony, monstrous old three-time pro bowl football player is making fudge? That filth I saw on the man’s body last night wasn’t grease or oil
—
it was chocolate! This is crazy, this is absolutely crazy. Come see
this,
Tonganoxie!
Otis thought.

Otis remembered
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, the fabulous children’s book that he had read aloud to his daughter, Annabel. And wasn’t there a movie later?

Willy Wonka would not have been caught dead in this chocolate factory. Church Key Charlie Blue’s factory was as big a mess as his house. There was the stove in the center of the room, there was another ancient Kelvinator against a wall, and there were several waist-high tables scattered around. Many were covered with metal baking sheets full of what apparently were layers of poured fudge or top-tied plastic bags of fudge squares. The stove and the sheets and the tables were splattered with what appeared to be burnt chocolate. The floors were littered with empty bottles of vanilla and bags of sugar and brown Hershey’s cocoa cans. The walls were covered with poorly framed photos and posters of football players. Otis assumed all of the players were Church Key in various stages and uniforms of his life, but there was no way to tell for sure, because the faces were obscured by helmets and face masks or distorted by wild grimaces or grins.