Free Eureka by Jim Lehrer

Tonganoxie.
But it’s never happened quite like this to me before, and I don’t want to talk about it.
But Bob Gidney was forcing him to. “I put him on Prozac, but my guess is that he didn’t take much of it. I was still getting to the bottom of his neuroses.”
    “How depressed was he?”
    “Enough to blow his brains out, obviously, for chrissake! I just didn’t know it!”
    Bob did not respond to the outburst, either with words or with a look.
    Tonganoxie gunned the Wrangler as fast as he dared. It was only two miles or so to the clinic, but he wanted this trip to end as quickly as possible.
    There was Locust Street and the gate to Ashland. Only a few more seconds now.
    “Do you need to talk to someone, Russ?” Bob said as they approached the staff parking lot.
    “You mean as a patient overcome with feelings of guilt or as a staff member who screwed up?” Russ asked.
    “Only as a patient. As in ‘Doctor, heal thyself.’”
    Tonganoxie braked to a halt on the gravel of the parking lot. “I believe I can think through this on my own, but thanks, Bob,” he said as he began thinking.
    “What about Otis?” Bob asked as they walked toward the clinic’s main building.
    “What about him?”
    “Is
he
liable to do something rash? Clinically abnormal?”
    “No way.”

ILL YOU GO with me?” Otis asked.
    “You mean on another ride?” Sharon asked.
    “A longer one this time.”
    “How long?”
    “Oh, maybe to Hutchinson, Dodge City, Garden City, and beyond—the Rockies, the Red Ryder museum in Pagosa Springs, Colorado—or until we get tired.”
    “Are you out of your mind?”
    It was Sunday, just after eleven in the morning. Otis had told Sally he had a splitting headache and was unable to go to church this morning. She had said that was too bad because a little church might be particularly helpful in getting him over the terrible week of Pete’s suicide and the aftermath. He had agreed with that probability but said he was afraid he would be unable to keep his head up and he might even possibly throw up on the people in the pew in front of him.
    “Sounds like spinal meningitis,” she had said.
    “No, just a simple stress headache,” he had replied.
    So Sally Halstead had gone to the garage, gotten in her BMW, and driven to the First Methodist Church by herself for one of the few Sundays ever, except when Otis was sick or out of town.
    A few minutes later, Otis had gone to the same garage, put on his Kansas City Chiefs helmet, hung his Daisy air rifle by the lanyard to his Cushman Pacemaker motor scooter, and driven off toward Farnsworth Creek.
    And there Sharon was in the same place, on the same quilt, but instead of reading a book, she was wearing earphones connected to a small yellow portable tape player beside her.
    Otis stopped his scooter in the same place he had a week ago. He saw the case for the tapes. They were the companions to Beschloss’s book.
    Sharon, as beautiful as before, saw him shortly after he pulled up. She took off her headphones and stood up.
    He immediately made the suggestion that they go off together that drew her response.
    “Yes, I probably am out of my mind,” he said now.
    “I don’t know you—I don’t even know what you really look like. Are you ever going to take off that silly safety helmet?”
    “It’s an official Kansas City Chiefs football helmet,” Otis said, unsnapping the chin strap.
    She reached out toward him. Otis froze, and before he realized what she was doing, she had hold of the helmet.
    “No,” he said, but he made no effort to resist. This had to happen.
    “Yes,” she said and jerked the helmet off his head.
    The look on her face was about what he’d expected. It was that of a person who had seen something truly unexpected, stunning, horrible, despicable.
    Within moments Otis had his helmet back on his bald head, and he and his scooter were putt-putting alone back up the gravel path. At the blacktop, instead of turning left to go back to