Free Eureka by Jim Lehrer Page B

and the president, Nick Merriam, asked no questions. Otis Halstead wanted some cash, Otis Halstead got some cash—two inch-and-a-half stacks of fifties and hundreds, each held snugly and neatly by a large tan rubber band. Both knew, without having to confirm or comment, that nobody would have to be told about Otis’s money, which he walked out with in a small black canvas valise he’d brought from his office.
    Saturday morning, while Sally went out to run some errands, Otis placed that valise in the bottom of the spacious rear storage compartment of the Cushman. On top of the money, he stuck Jockey shorts and skivvy shirts, a pair of khaki pants, two long-sleeved shirts, a Windbreaker, gloves, a pair of heavy walking shoes, and a Dopp kit with a safety razor, toothbrush, and other basic toiletries. On top, he placed his box of BBs, maps of Kansas and the western states, and the toy fire engine.
    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 onold 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