Eureka

by Jim Lehrer

  His plan to leave on Sunday was all due to Sharon and the possibilities and his stupid thoughts and fantasies about her. He convinced himself that there was an outside chance—a one-in-a-million chance, for sure, but a chance nevertheless—that she might, on impulse, go with him. Why not delay things twenty-four hours and see for sure?

  Otherwise, he would go through life wondering: What if I had gone back to the creek and she was there and she had come with me on the scooter? I’ll never know if I don’t try.

  He thought of it even in the what-if context of Pete and his trumpet.

  He somehow knew that he would have to take off his Chiefs football helmet. She would see him as he really was, a bald old man with a mustache. It was absolutely stupid to think that a beautiful young woman would, just like that, pick up and leave with any man she had spent only twenty minutes with, much less an ugly old one.

  But she had returned to Farnsworth Creek. And she was listening to the LBJ tapes, as he had suggested. Then she saw the real him, and that was that.

  At least he came and did it. It was no surprise that she said no thanks to going west with him. She wasn’t crazy. But now, as his Cushman Pacemaker putt-putted along Meridian Avenue toward old U.S. Highway 56, he was at least free forever from having to think of one particular what-if in his fifty-nine years of life.

  Soon to be sixty.

  And he remembered another of his states ditties.

  If I loved Tillie of Trenton,

  and she lost or tore her shirt,

  I’d buy her a New Jersey.

  OTIS DIDN’T NEED to be told by Russ Tonganoxie or anyone else to stay off the interstates if he ran away from home on his Cushman.

  Once he was out of the Eureka city limits and immediate suburbs, it was perfect, exactly as he’d imagined it would be here on old U.S. 56. There was only a handful of vehicles on the road, most of them old cars and pickups moving ever so slowly. The road itself was so underutilized and ignored that there were tufts of grass growing up between the cracks in places. The few people who passed or saw him as he putt-putted by smiled and waved. They apparently didn’t seem to think it was particularly odd to see, on this old road, a man in a Kansas City Chiefs helmet poking along on an ancient Cushman motor scooter with a BB gun strapped to its side.

  The highway, paralleling some of what had been the original Santa Fe Trail, was once part of a major network of east-west highways that cars, trucks, and buses used to traverse the United States. After the coming of the interstate across central Kansas, 56 no longer bore an official number or designation of any kind, and only the counties and towns it passed through provided maintenance and acknowledgment of its existence. Rand McNally and other makers of Kansas maps had years ago downgraded it from a solid red line to a tiny blue line.

  All at once Otis was struck by being alone out on this road. Completely alone. There was nobody riding in a car with him, sitting across a desk or office or room from him, sleeping in the same bed with him, walking down a street or through a shopping mall or hotel lobby with him. Alone. / Otis Hahtead, am alone, he thought. There’s not even a voice from a radio or a television or a telephone. It’s just me and this motor scooter and this old highway and wherever and whoever and whatever lie ahead. Have I ever been this alone?

  Then it started raining.

  First just a few large drops came down, but the sky turned darker, and he could see that heavier rain was up ahead of him, right where he was going. Bad weather was not something Otis had considered very seriously. The scooter had a plastic windscreen, but it was neither large nor strong enough to keep the wet off his face or clothes. The Windbreaker he had packed wouldn’t be any help at all. There was not even any point in getting it out.

  The rain whipped right through the opening in the helmet into his eyes and nose and mouth. Soon water was splashing up on him from the roadway, too. He wondered how the little motor on the forty-year-old Cushman putt-putting along under him might do when it was wet.

  He began to look for a place to pull over. But the road provided few of the standard places to find refuge in a downpour. There were no brightly lit Mobil or Texaco minimarts, no McDonald’s or Wendy’s or other fast-food restaurants, no sparkling new Comfort Inns or Days Inns along this roadside. The only eating places were those where slowness and grease still reigned, and there were no motels of any kind or quality, only decaying skeletons of those made up of a tiny office and a string of even smaller wooden cabins.

  The other problem was that it was Sunday. Out on the interstate, everything was open all the time, but back down here on old U.S. 56, Sunday was still viewed as a day off.

  Otis felt the scooter falter. And he heard the motor miss. The poor little old thing was drowning out. He shoved the handlebar throttle forward. He heard and felt sputtering from down below.

  And then it went silent. The motor had stopped running. He turned the handlebars to the right and let the scooter coast as best as it could through puddles onto what appeared to be a large driveway. Somewhere at the end—twenty or so yards away—was a structure of some kind. He saw a light on. Was it a store? A house? Through the rain and the darkened sky, he could not tell for sure.

  He dismounted and pushed the scooter on toward the light. The rain was still coming down, but there was no wind, so it was falling straight down. And it hadn’t picked up in intensity. A couple of blessings.

  The building seemed to be some type of combo—part rundown white frame house on the left, part shop made of gray concrete blocks on the right.

  Then Otis saw in hand-painted red lettering over a large garage door on the front of the shop: CHURCH KEY CHARLIE BLUE’S FACTORY—NO CREDIT CARDS.

  Otis, still pushing the scooter, continued toward the light. He knocked on the only door, which was barely above ground level, and waited.

  Nothing happened. He thought he heard something inside— voices and shouting—a television set or a radio. Somebody was listening to or watching something in there.

  Otis banged on the door again, this time much harder.

  In a few seconds, the door swung open, and there stood one very large, very scary man.

  “Who and what are you?” said the man after a quick, harsh glance at Otis, who was also almost blown away by the smell of beer coming from the man’s mouth. His words were spoken in what, to Otis’s Kansas ear, sounded like pure Oklahoma-Texas hillbilly.

  He was a giant, a real-life giant, who clearly needed a shave, a haircut, and a bath. Otis figured him to be at least six-four and to weigh at least three hundred pounds. His hair was a barnyard blond, and it was long and uncombed and unclean. He was dressed only in a pair of filthy tent-sized work pants that, sometime in their life, may have been khaki-colored. His bare chest was huge and hairy and, like his arms and hands, smeared here and there with dark blotches that resembled grease and dirt. Otis could only guess his age. Forty? Forty-five?

  “My scooter’s motor drowned out,” said Otis. He began to shiver, and he honestly didn’t know if it was out of fear or being wet.

  The man shook his head in disgust and said, “I’m closed—it’s Sunday, for chrissake. The Raiders are on against the Steelers.”

  Otis, the rain still falling on him, stood to one side and shoved his Pacemaker in front of the door.

  “That’s a goddamn old thing—my cousin had one,” said the man. “No wonder it quit on ya.”

  Now what? thought Otis.

  Said the man, “Well, ‘least you got wheels. I got no wheels of no kind—no car, no truck, no bike, no roller skates, no red wagon, no nothing.”

  With his huge right hand, he reached out, grabbed the scooter by the handlebars, and jerked it inside the house as if it were a flyweight running back. To Otis, he said, “Get your butt in here before you drown out, too.”

  Otis, his mind racing with uncertainty and anxiety, got his butt in there and then stood with his motor scooter, both of them dripping water on the man’s floor.

  But the gu
y didn’t seem to notice or mind. He said, “The Raiders are about to score—less than a minute to the half. Find yourself a place to squat.”

  Otis looked around for such a place. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  “And take off that goddamn Chiefs helmet!” the man yelled back at Otis. “I hate the goddamn Chiefs!”

  Otis took off his helmet and cradled it under his right arm. He discovered that the top of his head was about all there was on him that was dry. So there was finally some good news: Official NFL Kansas City Chiefs helmets don’t leak.

  As he walked around, Otis spotted another official NFL helmet. It was the familiar silver and blue of the Dallas Cowboys, and it was sitting on the floor against the far wall with what looked like a few small silver and gold trophies.

  The house, if that was what it really was, was basically one square twenty-by-twenty room. There were a few open doors going off in various directions, presumably to closets or a bathroom, but what Otis saw was an unmade double bed in one corner; a couch and an easy chair in another corner, where the man was sitting in front of his television; a table and chairs, a refrigerator, a hot plate, and a sink in another. The fourth corner was filled with stacks of newspapers and magazines, framed photographs and posters. There were no rugs on the unpainted wood floor.

  The place had a strange, out-of-place, unidentifiable, but nice smell—almost sweet.

  “Throw it out of bounds!” the man yelled at the television. Around his feet were various sports sections of newspapers and at least a dozen empty beer bottles and cans.

  The “less than a minute to the half was in football time. Including time-outs with commercials, it was almost three minutes before the man came back to Otis and his scooter, both still dripping inside the front door.”

  “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-a
ssing. 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.