Eureka (13 page)

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.

“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 around 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.