Eureka (27 page)

The barricade of orange barrels and boards.

This time Otis did as he was told. He turned left.

Within a few minutes, it was all a few miles and thoughts behind him. What now? What new and different adventures awaited him on this second runaway? He’d already had a most satisfying one, getting his money back.

Up ahead he saw the lights of the interstate. Off to the northwest, just south of the entrance ramp, were even more lights— a small strip mall.

Otis was struck with how different these worlds of the interstate and Highway 56 were, despite running parallel to each other, only a few miles apart. They could have easily passed as highways in two very different countries.

He looked at his wristwatch. It was nine-forty-five. Nine-forty-five?
Nine-forty-five! He had driven from Russ Tonganoxie’s house to here in under an hour, even with the Marionville stop-off and the delay at Charlie’s fudge factory.

It had been a journey of over two days the first time.

He turned off at the shopping center. He figured he might as well pick up a pair of cheap sneakers, if nothing else. Continuing to go around in slippers was not a smart thing to do.

There was a sign for a SunflowerMart, a chain of convenience-plus stores that were all over Kansas. He parked right next to the one-story building. No other cars were around; few of the other stores in the center appeared to be open. Maybe the drugstore and the Safeway over to the left were open. And the video store. Video stores always seemed to be open.

The SunflowerMart had a bin of cheap canvas shoes, and Otis found a pair of blue and white ones that were his size—nine. He also picked up a toothbrush and a safety razor.

Back in the Jeep a few seconds later, he stuck the key in the ignition.

“Mistah … hel—wo.”

It was a thin, weak female voice behind his right ear.

He lurched forward, then turned around. Stunned, afraid.

There in the backseat, under two feet away, sat a young woman. There was enough light from the SunflowerMart for him to see her fairly well. She was shaking and crying. She was tiny, bony, messy—hurt. Her face was bruised, and there was blood on her left cheek and all over her lower lip, which was twice as big as it ought to be.

She held something with her hands tight against her chest. It was wrapped in a light blue blanket.

“What are you doing in here?” Otis asked. He tried to ask it gently, but it came out harshly, loudly. He was still recovering from the fear that her voice had shot through him.

From the blanket came the piercing cry of a baby. The woman had a baby in her arms.

“I can hard-wy talk,” she said. “Please take me away—fas. Fas, fas. Pease.”

“What happened to you?”

“My ex-husbund. Drunk. Come to take baby. Hit me, hit me, and then pass out. I run here. Our house over behind Safeway.”

Otis couldn’t tell if she was leaving out words as a matter of intellect or dialect or her injured mouth. Whatever, it came out as a form of pidgin English. Her skin was dark. She might be Hispanic or Iranian.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Two-two … twennie-two.”

It was hard to hear the answer over the screaming of the baby.
But why am I asking her questions like that at a time like this?

Onward, Buck!

He started the Jeep and burned rubber out of the parking lot and back onto the access road north toward the interstate.

Annabel, when she was a baby, could always be put to sleep by the rhythm of a car ride.

Oh, Annabel, Someday I will be back to be your father. Your
functioning
father, I promise
—/
hope.

Riding in a car didn’t work on this baby. This one, this little twenty-two-year-old beaten-up woman’s baby, kept crying. It seemed to be getting louder the more he gunned the Jeep.

“He upset,” said the woman as Otis drove onto the interstate. “He like me sing before he sleep. Can’t do now. Mouth hurt too much.”

“Do you want to go back to the shopping center and get something from the drugstore? Or go to a doctor or a hospital?”

“No! He’ll be after me.”

Otis couldn’t see her very well in the rearview mirror. But he
didn’t have to see or hear to know what the answer to his question would be.

“What if/ tried to sing something?” he asked. As if to audition, he softly sang in a radio jingles tune:

“That good. Yeah, yeh. Pease. He used to hearing my voice, but maybe anybody’s work. His daddy never sing.”

Otis Rolodexed mentally through the Johnny Mercer songs he knew. It didn’t take long to get to the one he thought might do the trick. It was a later song than those he sang in high school, but he had paid attention when it became popular in the 1960s. He knew the words that Mercer had written for Henry Mancini’s music and for Audrey Hepburn. He had never sung them out loud before.

Now he sang them softly, Mercerly, for the first time to the crying baby boy in the backseat:

The baby was still crying, but it seemed to Otis that the ferocity had diminished. The kid was listening. Listen to this, little boy blue:

The baby was only whimpering now. Otis wished the kid could understand the words. Maybe he could.

Listen, kid. Listen to this:

There was silence in the backseat. The only sounds now were the purring of the Jeep’s motor and the whining of its tires on the smooth roadway of the interstate.

“He sleep,” said the young woman in a whisper. “I lay him on seat.” She had moved her head up to Otis’s right ear. “You sing great, mis-tah. My baby love it, I could tell. You should make CD.”

“Thank you,” Otis said.

“Where we go?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Otis replied.

“Okay for me,” said the woman. “You seem like good and nice man. Bad man no sing like you. I so tired.”

She sat back down against the seat, and soon, in the occasional flashes of car lights through the rearview mirror, Otis saw that she, like her little boy blue, was sound asleep.

After a while he pulled in to a Holiday Inn Express and used his MasterCard to buy two nights for the girl and her baby. He escorted them to their room, handed the little mother a fistful of cash—all but a few hundred of his four-plus thousand dollars.

“You really are good and nice man, mistah,” said the girl.

Otis hoped she had it right.

Soon he was back out on the interstate, heading west.

He thought about finding a store where he could buy another BB gun. And hey, there had to be a sporting goods store up the road that sold football helmets. One of the antiques stores in Lehigh City, fifty miles or so ahead, might even have a cast-iron fire engine. What about another Cushman?

Or maybe not.

Otis wondered if Archimedes felt as good as this when he shouted “Eureka!”

Or on the night before
his
sixtieth birthday.

Read on for an excerpt from Jim Lehrer’s

Tension City

CHAPTER 1

Good Evenings

“G
ood evening. The television and radio stations of the United States and their affiliated stations are proud to provide facilities for a discussion of issues in the current political campaign by the two major candidates for the presidency. The candidates need no introduction. The Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and the Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy.”

That was how the moderator, Howard K. Smith of CBS, opened the first televised presidential debate from the studios of WBBM-TV, Chicago, on September 26, 1960.

“Good evening from the Ford Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. I’m Jim Lehrer of
The NewsHour
on PBS, and I welcome you to the first of the 2008 presidential debates between the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, and the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.”

That was how I began the first McCain-Obama debate on September 26, 2008—nearly fifty years later.

There have been thirty-five nationally televised presidential and vice presidential debates, counting that first in 1960 and the last four in 2008.

All the moderators have been broadcast journalists except one—
Chicago Sun-Times
editor James Hoge in 1976. There have been several repeaters: Howard K. Smith of CBS and ABC, Edwin Newman of NBC, Barbara Walters of ABC, Bernard Shaw of CNN, Bob Schieffer of CBS, my PBS colleague Gwen Ifill, and I account for twenty-one of the thirty-five moderating assignments.

Our “Good evenings” have remained roughly the same—except for the top billing going to the geography.

“Good evening from the Wait Chapel at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.”

“Good evening from the Bushnell Theater in Hartford, Connecticut.”

“Good evening from the University of Miami Convocation Center in Coral Gables, Florida.”

The first of my greetings was for a 1988 debate between Vice President George H. W. Bush and Governor Michael Dukakis in Winston-Salem.

That was when I got my introduction to the terrors and triumphs of moderating presidential debates, an experience I have sometimes compared to walking down the blade of a knife.

At Winston-Salem, it actually started before the debate itself.

I was closeted behind a closely guarded conference room door with my three debate colleagues—Peter Jennings of ABC, Annie Groer of the
Orlando Sentinel
, and John Mashek of
The Atlanta Constitution
—to discuss our questions for Bush and Dukakis. This was before the coming of the single-moderator format; the standard arrangement was a moderator plus panelists.

Jennings, anchor of ABC’s
World News Tonight
, had an act of provocation on his mind.

He urged the four of us to forget the rules that had been agreed upon between the candidates and the Commission on Presidential Debates. We should publicly—in front of the whole world—invite Bush and Dukakis to take on each other directly with no time limits on questions, answers, or anything else.

I said we couldn’t do that. We had given our word to follow the rules of the debate. Not to do so, I insisted in my most righteous tone, would be dishonorable, among other things.

Annie Groer and John Mashek agreed. Jennings quickly went along, with grace and professionalism.

Also in Winston-Salem, my wife, Kate, helped with some much needed pre-debate personal perspective that remains with me to this day.