Eureka

by Jim Lehrer

  All he had were his Jeeps. He kept them in the garage of his 1950s one-story brick rambler in the middle of an acre of flatland in southwest Eureka. There was the new Wrangler, which he drove to and from the clinic and around town. It was a special Sahara edition—the exterior color was officially called desert sand; the interior was camel. There was also an olive-drab original, made in 1942 in Toledo, Ohio, by Willys-Overland; it had spent World War II at Fort Benning in Georgia. The other two were a flashy red Jeepster convertible, from the late forties, and a little red-white-and-blue right-hand-drive postal Jeep from the 1960s.

  Yes, he thought after Otis left, / have my wheels, too. But not much more than that right now except for some interesting patients. First there was the number two man at the large insurance company who hates his life, and here, now, comes his boss, who seems to hate his even more.

  HE ISSUE WAS whether KCF&C should launch a special insurance for computer-dependent businesses and industries. Otis had assigned a task force under Pete Wetmore to study the risks and feasibility of entering this new line. There was to be a full report by this afternoon.

  So at 2:35, within thirty minutes after he returned from Ashland Clinic, Otis began the meeting with Pete in the executive conference room on the top floor high above downtown and all of Eureka. The fourteen-story KCF&C Building had long dominated the Eureka skyline. The building’s ornate beige brick structure was the landmark toward which all eyes, traffic, and commerce moved.

  Eureka was the fourth largest city in Kansas—behind Wichita, Kansas City, and Topeka. Its seventy-three thousand people in the middle of the state were a mix of professors and students at Central Kansas State College; farm boys and girls who worked at various so-called light-industry plants that did everything from make fertilizer to assemble small jitney-style buses for airport use; and well-educated white-collar folks who ran and manned KCF&C, the banks, and several sizable accounting and law firms. Ninety percent of the population was white, and 80 percent of the adults had at least a high school education. The public schools were considered among the best in the state, as were the police, the welfare system, the libraries, the health care facilities, and most everything else. Eureka, in other words, lived up to its name on most counts. And it was always easy to find, sitting in the middle of the flat prairie without even a small hill for twenty-five miles in any direction.

  Mush. His and Sally’s word for Pete. That was all Otis, sitting here atop Eureka, could think of as Pete talked. Mush. The man is mush, his mind is mush. What in the hell is this company going to do when I retire? How in the hell can this piece of mush take over the company?

  Otis looked out the window to the western reaches of Eureka and beyond. Sometimes, recently, on days when he was feeling warm and well about his BB gun and toy fire truck and Cushman Pacemaker, Otis swore he could see the Grand Canyon or maybe Los Angeles, way, way out there somewhere.

  Right now he swore those were the Rockies, west of Denver, that he saw on the clear blue horizon. And hey, isn’t that Pagosa Springs, home of the Red Ryder museum, out there?

  Pete mushed on and on: “The basis for the premise is that computers sometimes malperform or, in computer language, crash. Computer crashes can cause severe business harm and loss to a particular firm or company. A brokerage firm unable to process its stock transactions could lose millions of dollars. An airline reservation and scheduling system presents similar downside potential. So could other computer-dependent companies, of which there are an increasing number. The question is whether the rewards for us entering the field to provide computer crash insurance would outweigh the risk, and at this point, confirming data is not available. Our company has never in its history been reluctant to see new horizons, to chart new courses, to enter new and challenging fields.”

  Mush, mush, mush.

  KCF&C was almost as much a part of Kansas as the sunflower—the flower and the song—and “Home on the Range,” the official state song. The company had been founded as a cooperative in the late 1880s by several new-immigrant German farm families, most of them Mennonites. They needed protection from fire, pestilence, and the extremes of central Kansas weather for their Turkey Red wheat crops as well as their homes, implements, livestock, and other personal possessions. In the 1920s KCF&C became a mutual insurance company, with agents and farm customers all over Kansas, and then, after World War II, it reinvented itself again as a standard stockholder-owned corporation. When Otis joined the company in 1968, it had spread its reach to most of the Midwest, including both Kansas City and Chicago, where it sold auto as well as homeowners’ and other kinds of insurance. Working sometimes around the clock and traveling anywhere and everywhere there was a client or a deal, Otis had expanded it further into a major national company. Was it now time to expand into computer crash insurance?

  Pete mushed on: “Yes, there are possible rewards for being one of the first to enter the computer crash field, but the risks of being first at anything are always enormous. As, of course, are the rewards. The man who made the first car was richer than the man who made the last one. But the record is silent on whether there was a first man who tried to make the first car and failed before the one who actually did.”

  Otis kept his eyes toward the Rockies, toward the Red Ryder museum in Pagosa Springs. Did this idiot just say “The man who made the first car was richer than the man who made the last one?” What was the rest of the mush he just said about there being a first before the first? What in the hell does it have to do with insuring against computers crashing? Where am I? What am I doing? Who is this man speaking? Why is he mush?

  How and where are you, Sharon?

  Pete kept talking. “We have drawn some actuarial paradigms and underwriting and probability markups and patterns and projections and predictions and contingencies and mutual benefits and premium and business plans and spreadsheets and test runs and play-outs and CD-ROMS and PBCs and AFCPs and huddles and puddles and cookouts and drive-bys and drive-ins and floppies and hard drives and end runs and home runs and piss pots and condoms and Cheerios and popcorn and playbooks and game films and Beethovens and Bachs and calculus and algebra and trigonometry and 747s and Count Basies …”

  Otis glanced across the table at Pete, who was also staring off to the West, toward the Rockies, Pagosa Springs, the Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles.

  “… and trumpets and pancakes and maple syrup and claims and innovations and income potentials and downsides and upsides and tanning salons and Exercycles and jogging.”

  Pete stopped talking, and Otis turned back to face the West.

  Neither man said a word. The silence grew.

  Otis had never been present when another human being really lost it, came unglued, went over the top. He had the feeling he was having his first such experience.

  Pete said, “I hate the insurance business, Otis.”

  Otis, still looking west, said, “Why, Pete?”

  “We’re bloodsuckers, Otis. We make it on the backs of the lame and hurt and dead and deprived.”

  “Bullshit, Pete. We help the lame, hurt, dead, and deprived. We help them get through their crises. We give them a sense of security and comfort, and we give them money.”

  “Whatever. It’s also boring as hell. I haven’t had a fun day here at the office since the first day two years, nine months, and two days ago, when you took me around and introduced me to everybody. That was the high point of my career at KCF and C. What kind of fucking commentary on my life is that?”

  Silence again for a while.

  Pete said, “I’m not going to get your job when the time comes, am I?”

  Otis had to make a decision. Tell the truth now or later? When do I put this man out of his misery? Now? Yes.

  “Most likely, you’re not, that’s right,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have hired me in the first place. Why did you?”

  “These things are hard to explain when they don’t work out—”

  “It was m
y fault. I never should have taken this fucking job. I knew this wasn’t for me. I knew it, I knew it.”

  Otis elected not to comment on that. He let it sit there and then said, “When you were a kid, what did you want to grow up to be?”

  “A trumpet player in Count Basie’s band.”

  “I didn’t even know you played the trumpet, Pete.”

  “I won the Colorado state championship for the trumpet, and I played in dance bands around Boulder and Fort Collins. I played once at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver with the Glenn Miller Orchestra—there still was one for years after he died in that plane crash, you know. The Brown Palace was and is the best hotel in Colorado. The band leader—I forget his name—said I had one of the best sets of natural-born trumpet lips he had ever seen.”

  Pete fell silent. After several seconds, Otis, still not looking at Pete, asked, “Why didn’t you pursue the trumpet?”

  “My dad was a car dealer, and he wanted me to be the lawyer he never was, and then I married June while still in college and she was pregnant by the time the honeymoon was over and we had Josephine and then the twins and then Bobby, and the life of a trumpet player was not for all of that. What did you want to be when you grew up, Otis? President and CEO of a fucking insurance company in Eureka, Kansas?”

  “I’ve never heard you use ‘fucking’ before, Pete.”

  “I’ve never used it in front of you before, that’s why.”

  Otis noticed that the mushiness had disappeared. Pete’s voice was now hearty, robust, direct. Alive. Here in the middle of talking about insuring crashing computers, the man had come alive and gone nuts at the same time.

  Otis said, “To answer your question, I wanted to be Johnny Mercer.”

  “I never got into baseball. Was he a shortstop for the Cardinals?” Pete said.

  “Johnny Mercer wasn’t a ballplayer, goddammit, he was a singer and songwriter. How could you know music and not know about him?”

  Otis waited for a follow-up question such as “What songs did he write or sing?” Something. He kept talking about Johnny Mercer whether Pete cared or not.

  “Johnny wrote more than a thousand songs—pop songs, famous pop songs. Mostly just the lyrics. Everything from ‘Autumn Leaves,’ ‘Laura,’ and ‘Fools Rush in’ to ‘Jeepers Creepers,’ ‘I’m an Old Cowhand,’ and ‘Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,’ ‘Moon River,’ even—with Mancini.”

  “That was my favorite song for a while,” Pete said.

  Otis assumed he meant “Moon River,” which was a lot of people’s favorite song. It made many men think of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  But Pete had another song in mind. In a quiet, unmelodic monotone, he talked-sang:

  “I’m an old cowhand,

  From the Rio Grande,

  But my legs aren’t really bowed,

  And my cheeks ain’t tan,

  ’Cause I ride the place in a Ford V-8,

  I know ever road in the Lone Star State,

  Yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay,

  Yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay …”

  Otis picked up the few word errors and omissions in the way Pete recited the lyrics. But there was no point in correcting Pete. He was pretty close.

  Pete said, “I sang that as a kid with my brother and two uncles when we wanted to act like cowboys. I may have known then that Johnny Mercer had written it, but I had forgotten him. Now that you mention it, didn’t he also write the Santa Fe railroad song?”

  Otis nodded. Yes, yes, Johnny Mercer wrote “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” Otis had sung it in high school with a perfect replica of a Mercer twang—southern, a bit nasal—that had brought him to wanting to actually be Johnny Mercer.

  Pete didn’t ask Otis any further questions, such as: What happened? Why didn’t you become Johnny Mercer? It was a story Otis had told no one, not even Sally. But he might have at this moment told Pete if he had asked.

  Instead, Pete said, “So here we sit. A failed trumpet player and a failed Johnny Mercer, talking about whether we should insure people’s fucking computers.”

  “Crashing fucking computers, Pete.”

  “I wish I had something like a Cushman obsession to fall back on—to occupy me—like you do.”

  “There’s nothing you wanted as a kid that you couldn’t have?”

  “Nothing. I got everything I wanted. Everything.”

  Otis felt and heard movement and turned toward Pete, who was standing.

  “I’m out of here, Otis. I’m gone—forever. I’m not even going back to my office. I’m going to the elevator and out of this building and never coming back. Please have my personal effects and any money owed me from profit-sharing and all the rest sent to June at the house. Thanks for everything.”

  “Wait a minute, my friend,” Otis said, on his feet and moving around the table.

  “We’re not friends,” Pete said. “You always treated me like shit, like I was a goddamned idiot.”

  “Until right now, that’s about what I thought you were. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

  “Goodbye, Otis.”

  “Let me help you. You ought to talk to somebody.”

  “One of those fucking shrinks at Ashland everybody in Eureka talks to all the time? I’ve done that, thanks. They’re crazier than the rest of us.”

  Otis said, “What about a trumpet? Go buy yourself a trumpet, Pete. Right now. Go right now and buy a trumpet.”

  Pete smiled, said, “Whatever you say, Mr. Johnny Mercer,” and left the room.

  ONCE THE DOOR was shut, Otis said softly to the West:

  “Do you hear that whistle down the line?

  I figure that it’s engine number forty-nine.

  She’s the only one that’ll sound that way,

  On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe …”

  He did not sing the words in a Johnny Mercer voice. He only spoke them in an Otis Halstead voice.

  And then he sat motionless, silently looking west, for nearly thirty minutes.

  He thought about Pete and whether he should go find him and talk to him some more. And he thought about the Cushman and Johnny Mercer and that young nurse named Sharon and about profanity.

  He thought about being fifty-nine-year-old—soon-to-be-sixty-year-old—Otis Halstead. At least he was no Silver Star. He had always told everybody the truth about his washing out of naval ROTC and a military commitment by a stupid accident in college. He probably could have gotten away with telling people he had been a navy officer who commanded patrol boats in Vietnam or something. Nobody would have checked. But that kind of stuff was not for him, Otis the responsible son, husband, father, businessman. And friend?

  No, not friend. No friend to Pete, for sure. Pete was right about that. / really did—do—treat the poor bastard like shit. But goddammit, how could I have known the guy was moving ever so slowly but surely toward a breakdown? Mush is mush, shit is shit, I’m no world-famous Ashland Clinic shrink.

  Otis decided against going after Pete right now. Or calling somebody at Ashland or even down the hall in Pete’s office. Pete will walk it off, think it off. He’ll be fine. With his background and education, how can he be anything but fine? Maybe he really will go and buy a trumpet.

  Otis finally returned to his own office on the penthouse floor. It was a large place filled mostly with designer-selected paintings of still lifes and heavy dark brown furniture that fit the heaviness of his CEO position. Otis had never taken the time to really personalize this space where he spent so many of his days and nights.

  He looked through some monthly sales reports. The Omaha/ Lincoln district was down again—more than 10 percent over February. Don Caney, the district manager, wasn’t making it. Time maybe coming soon to move him back to the home office in the underwriting department, where he started and belonged. There are salesmen and there is everybody else. Caney was an everybody else. Chicago/Peoria was up. Good, good. So was Wichita/Oklahoma City. He checked the insurance categories comp
anywide. A little burst of activity in boat insurance. There had better be. There was always an increase in boat insurance sales in the spring as people got ready for summer.

  Then he glanced at some new data from one of the insurance industry’s research institutes. Mandatory air bags for all seats in all cars and vehicles were coming, and the prospect was to save three thousand lives and $21.4 million a year for the insurance industry. Hip, hip, hooray.

  There was another Our Future report to peruse. The crashingcomputer task force had come from such a report. This one had to do with KCF&C entering the banking business if and when the U.S. Congress and others permitted insurance companies to do so. Some believed there was a great future out there for the insurance company that turned itself into a full-service one-stop financial center. Maybe so, maybe someday.

  Otis’s secretary, a sharp and unassuming woman of forty-five from western Kansas named Melissa, inquired on the intercom about Pete Wetmore. She said Mr. Wetmore’s secretary had not seen him since he left to attend the conference room meeting with Otis two hours ago. Pete had said to tell her that an emergency had come up and that he’d decided to leave for the day. Nothing to worry about.

  Otis picked up his phone and called Bob Gidney at the Ashland Clinic. Otis figured Bob thought Otis was calling to set up another appointment with Russ Tonganoxie. No, said Otis, he had a question.

  “Is there some kind of mental disorder that causes people to suddenly start saying ‘fucking’ all the time?”

  “Not just that word but all kinds of foul things—whatever comes into the mind comes out the mouth,” Bob said. “It’s called Tourette’s syndrome, named for a French physician in the late 1880s.”

  “Is it very serious?”