Eureka (24 page)

USS TONGANOXIE, AS
always at patient assessment staff meetings about Otis, cracked jokes.

“Why don’t we make some tapes and CDs of Otis’s singing and market them to music lovers the world over? ‘Otis Sings Mercer.’ We could even create our own label. ‘Ashland Rocks.’ Or ‘Schizo Songs’? ‘Crazy Rhythms’? We could make some money, pave the parking lot, expand the cafeteria.”

Nobody laughed. Nobody had any optimistic assessments or new treatment ideas for Otis, either.

On the way out of the conference room a few minutes later, Russ Tonganoxie surprised Bob Gidney by suggesting they have lunch together. They quickly agreed on the Turkey Red Cafe, a onetime wheat farm outside town that had been converted into the Eureka area’s best and most popular restaurant.

Russ and Bob had yet to develop anything other than a working relationship. That was why the invitation surprised Bob.

They rode in Russ’s shiny, sporty sand-colored Jeep Wrangler. The Jeep’s canvas top was in place, but it was open on both sides because it was a warm day, and Russ had removed the side doors and windows.

“We’ll start with a vodka martini, on the rocks with two olives,” said Russ.

“No way, no thanks,” said Bob.

But immediately after they were seated at a private corner table at the restaurant, Russ ordered a martini for each of them from a young waitress. She was dressed in a long cotton dress with a white pinafore that matched the decor.

There was real hay up in the loft of the onetime barn, a restored 1938 Ford tractor and plow displayed like pieces of sculpture over by the bar, old scythes, rakes, and other hand implements along with farm scene photos and oil paintings on the walls.

A casual observer would have had trouble guessing Russ and Bob had enough in common to share even a meal. Both were dressed in their usual manner. Russ Tonganoxie was in faded blue jeans, white sneakers, and a wrinkled long-sleeved blue-and-white-striped polo shirt. Bob Gidney was wearing tasseled black loafers, a sharply pressed dark blue hopsack suit, a blue oxford button-down, and a wine silk tie. Russ’s hair was mostly uncombed, while every strand of Bob’s seemed freshly fixed.

After a few minutes, the martinis were delivered. Russ grabbed his and raised it. Bob just looked at his and said, “I haven’t had a real martini in years. They make me drunk and sometimes giddy, sometimes teary.”

“Pick it up,” Russ said. “At least let’s have a clink.”

“I have several appointments this afternoon,” said Bob. But he did raise his glass and knock it against Russ’s.

“So do I. But right now I want to talk about you. I have watched you sliding down some kind of slippery slope since Otis’s accident. I understand your friendship, but I sense there’s something more, something deeper, going on. Am I right?”

Bob took a sip of his martini. He said, “Sure. I hadn’t realized it was so obvious.”

“You’ve lost your spark, your verve, your involvement, your engagement. You seem distracted, mostly somewhere else.”

“I wish I were mostly somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere else.”

Both Russ and Bob ordered the Country Sampler lunch special—a large plate that included a crisp-fried chicken breast, a small slice of sugared baked ham, a three-inch piece of buttered corn on the cob, separate spoonfuls of slightly cooked green beans and black-eyed peas, a splat of onion-flavored mashed potatoes, a thick slice of ripe tomato, and three radishes. Everything had been raised there on the farm. On the side came gigantic glasses of iced tea, a basket of warm wheat biscuits and corn-bread sticks, and freshly whipped butter served in a fruit-preserves jar.

Russ noticed that Bob took a second and then a third sip of his martini.

“Have you talked to anybody about what’s going on with you?” Russ asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Bob took his fourth sip. Russ covertly signaled to the waitress for two more martinis.

“It’s not ripe for talking,” said Bob. “I feel guilty about some things concerning Otis, that’s all. It’ll pass. If it gets to a point where I need to talk to you or somebody else, I’ll let you know. And relax. I am not about to kill myself… Sorry, Russ.”

Russ shook his head but said nothing.

Without comment or apparent notice, Bob soon was several sips into his second martini. So was Russ.

They idly talked awhile about the restaurant and Eureka and Kansas, as well as the clinic and a few new psychiatric studies
that intrigued one or the other. Russ told Bob that something interesting had turned up on Canton, the deputy sheriff who had saved Otis’s life and then died himself. It turned out that he was a Silver Star.

“He claimed he had been a motorcycle cop in Wichita and that he had been hurt in an accident there. Not so. He spent his whole life working on farms out near the Colorado border. Nobody checked out his references when they hired him as a deputy because they liked him, he told good stories about his motorcycle days, and they happened to need somebody in a hurry.”

“I thought the sheriff said he was the best deputy they ever had,” Bob said.

“He still says that. Very common for Silver Stars. In order to keep their fantasy lie going, they have to be better than anybody else.”

Bob left for the men’s room. While he was gone, Russ used his cellphone to call the clinic. He told his secretary to cancel his afternoon appointments and to pass on the message to Dr. Gidney’s secretary to do the same.

When Bob returned, Russ asked, “Do you still get a kick out of psychiatry, Bob?”

“Oh, please, for God’s sake. I’m not interested in being one of your mature-male-in-crisis subjects.”

Russ grinned, looked away, and then pressed on.

“I hit on Otis about being a bloodsucking insurance man. He hit back, calling us brainsuckers. Maybe he’s right. We live off the troubled minds and souls of humankind. It certainly bothers me sometimes, I must confess. I understand also why Otis Halstead wanted to run away. God knows I have certainly had that desire more than once. My work really does bear out that running away is one of the most common of desires among well-educated
professionals. I would assume that you’ve had your runaway moments, too.”

“Shut up, Russ. Okay?”

Their food arrived with two more martinis.

“What did you do that made you feel so guilty about Otis?” Russ asked after a couple of minutes.

Bob, in a vodka-soaked monotone, said, “I’ve always tried to control my own life. I believe in conserving my mental and physical energy for things that matter to me. I talk only when I want to talk and only about what I want to talk about, when I want to talk about it. My guilt feelings about Otis, if they exist, are not on the list at this particular moment at the Turkey Red Cafe—”

“Fine,” Russ interrupted. “But if you feel guilty for not having helped Otis through his running-away crisis, forget it. I may have been the one who planted the idea of running away on the motor scooter.”

“You? When?”

“When he and I talked that first and only time at the clinic. We were talking about the scooter, and I said something flip, something smart-ass—my style—about a motor scooter not being very good for running away from home. I even advised him to stay off the interstates, which he did, and fell into a river for his trouble.”

“Well, I gave him the idea for the Cushman. We were talking about his BB gun and his toy fire engine. He asked me if there was anything I ever wanted that I couldn’t have, and I said a red Cushman. He said him, too. And he went off to Nebraska and bought one. If I hadn’t planted the idea of the Cushman in his troubled head, he might not have run away, and you know the rest.”

“Might, might, might. The three most powerful words in the
rationalizing of human behavior.” Russ closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

The waitress arrived as they finished their meal and gave them the choice of peach, cherry, or blueberry cobbler served warm under a slice of melting Colby cheese and a gob of homemade vanilla ice cream. Russ chose cherry, Bob peach.

“Planting the Cushman idea doesn’t work for me as a cause for your being in such a guilt fuck—funk, sorry,” Russ said after the desserts were delivered. “The scooter was a vehicle, in more ways than one, but that’s all it was. If he hadn’t had that, he would have used or done something else. You know that. Sorry, Bob, but I’m not buying. There’s got to be more going on.”

“I’m having an affair with Sally Halstead.”

Bob said it suddenly and quietly, with his face down in his cobbler. Russ wasn’t sure he had heard what he thought he had heard.

“Did you say what I hope I did not hear you say?”

“Yes. That is what I feel guilty about. He was—is—one of my best friends. A real friend, under my definition. She—Sally— was—is—one of my wife’s best friends. And there it was. Sally came to me at the clinic to talk about Otis’s back-to-childhood problems, and in the course of those conversations, we found ourselves … well, in compromising positions. I hate it. I hate myself. I cannot stand it. I was about to stop it and maybe even tell Otis when he ran away on that goddamn motor scooter.”

“Don’t tell him now, okay?”

“Goddamn, Russ! What kind of fool do you think I am? There is no way I would do something like that. It could kill him.”

Russ Tonganoxie was smiling and shaking his head. He put his napkin to his mouth. “I doubt that.”

“Are you sick?” Bob asked.

“Not yet. I’m just trying to keep from breaking up.”

“This is not funny, you idiot. What’s wrong with you? Get a grip. Maybe everything Woody Allen and the great lay world think about us is right. Maybe we’re all crazier than our patients are.”

“I was just thinking about the scene. You go into Otis’s room at the clinic. You confess to having an affair with his wife. And what happens? He breaks into a Johnny Mercer song.”

Bob Gidney turned his head away in disgust. Then he started laughing himself. “Did Mercer write a song about adultery?”

“I’m sure he did, I’m sure he did. We’ll check it on the Internet.”

“Oh, come on. Not Our Huckleberry Friend.”

Russ stopped laughing. “Hey, what was Mercer’s famous blues song?”

“‘Blues in the Night’?”

“Yeah. According to Otis’s daily nurses’ chart, he sang part of it the other night. How does it go?”

“Something like ‘My momma done told me …’”

“Right. ‘When I was in knee pants …’”

“‘My momma done told me …’”

“‘Son.’”

“‘A woman’ll sweet-talk …’”

“‘And give ya the big eye …’”

“‘But when the sweet talkin’s done …’”

In unison, they sang:

They applauded themselves and looked around to see if anyone in the restaurant was paying attention. Nobody was. Long
martini lunches were definitely not the rule in Eureka, Kansas. The other customers were gone, and the staff was busy cleaning up and setting the tables for dinner.

“Maybe we could do a CD for the Crazy Rhythms label,” Russ said. “Bob and Russ, the Singing Shrinks.”

Bob Gidney did not raise his usual objection to the term “shrink.” He was too busy sobbing violently into his hands, which were cupped together in front of his lowered, shaking, reddened face.

Russ let him cry. As a matter of professional belief and personal practice, Russ supported a good cry as a legitimate form of therapy. Kept-in, spontaneous emotion of any kind can breed mental unrest and disaster, was his theory, one shared by many others in his field.

He was about to say something comforting to Bob to that effect—something such as “Let the tears flow, Bob”—when the cellphone in his right pants pocket sounded.

Russ listened for only a couple of seconds before standing up and saying into the phone, “We’re on our way.”

To Bob Gidney, he said, “Otis has run away. He just put on his clothes and walked out.”

RUSS DID NOT
feel the aftereffects of his martini lunch until that evening, when he turned down the street to his home. Nervous energy and the stimulation of dealing with Otis’s disappearance had not only masked any drunkenness earlier, they had held back a hangover later.

But now it hit him in a rush. His mouth, his stomach, his brain seemed overstuffed with vomit and garbage and trash.

He pulled the Wrangler into his driveway and drove straight for the large garage in back.

In virtually one continuous motion, he braked to a stop and leaned out of the Jeep far to the left.

God bless you, my sweet little Jeep, No doors or windows to deal with, Perfect for barfing, absolutely perfect.

Everything he had eaten and drunk—for days or weeks or months, it seemed—came rushing into and through his mouth. When it finally ran out, he continued to heave for several more minutes until there wasn’t even a drop of sour spit left.

“You okay?” somebody asked. It was a male voice. A vaguely familiar male voice. Whoever it belonged to was standing in a shadow. There were lights back here, but also some dark spots where the light didn’t shine.