Eureka Read Free

Central Fire and Casualty—and a good citizen of Eureka, Kansas.
    Sally and Otis had had only one real conversation about her stage career that never was. They were driving alone together on the interstate back to Eureka from Kansas City, after seeing Inge’s
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
, which had originally starred Pat Hingle and Teresa Wright, at the Lyric Theatre. Otis and Sally were in their mid-forties, but he had been struck on this particular evening by how young and beautiful Sally still looked. Her bright blond hair, which she wore straight and shoulder-length, shone like an exquisite silk crown, her soft brown eyes were like jewels in that crown, her complexion was like the tan coating on a piece of elegant enameled china …
    “You could have been as good—and as famous—an actress as Teresa Wright, if you had chosen that instead of me,” Otis said.
    “We’ll never know, will we?” Sally replied.
    At first Otis thought he detected a tone of anger and remorse,longing and disappointment, but then she said, “And that’s probably just as well, Otis. I never found out for sure, so I will always have my what-if dream instead of disappointment.”
    A few miles farther down the highway, Otis asked, “If you had known I was going to be bald, would you have given me even a second look, much less given up your acting dream for me?”
    Sally reached over with her left hand and caressed the top of his hairless head. But she said not a word.
    THE NEXT THING Otis bought was a football helmet.
    It was an official regulation NFL helmet of the Kansas City Chiefs, the favorite team of Otis and nearly everyone else in the Eureka area. Kansas City, only forty miles beyond Lawrence and 125 from Eureka, was the big city in the lives of most people in Eureka, even if the largest of the two separate Kansas Cities was on the Missouri rather than the Kansas side of the line.
    Otis saw the helmet in the window of a Sports World superstore at the North Side mall, where he had gone Saturday morning to buy a new book about the naval battles of World War II. The helmet’s plastic shell was glowing red, with the Chiefs’ arrowhead symbol on each side. Without a second’s thought, Otis bought it for $185 and went right home to put it on his bald head.
    He looked at himself in the mirror over the sink in the downstairs bathroom and very much loved the boy from Sedgwicktown who stared back at him. It was a sight he’d never seen when he was such a boy, and that was what had prompted his impulse decision to buy the helmet.
    Otis and all thirty-six of the other boys in Sedgwicktown High School had played on the football team because they’d had no choice. If they hadn’t, they would have been labeled “fruits,”and their lives would have been ruined for high school if not forever, at least in Sedgwicktown. Some played varsity in the games against Valley Center, Lehigh, Maize, Mount Hope, Haven, Hesston, and other neighboring Kansas towns. Then there were the scrubs who scrimmaged only in practice as fodder for the varsity. Otis was a scrub, too small for a lineman, too slow for a running back or split end, and too uncoordinated for a quarterback. So he spent every fall afternoon through four years of high school being tackled, blocked, hammered, slammed, kneed, elbowed, and thrown around as a live practice dummy.
    The worst part was that he didn’t even sit on the bench during the games. He was in the stands with the girls because the Sedgwicktown Cardinals could afford only twenty-five game helmets. They were shiny white plastic, much like those the college teams then used, with a bright red cardinal on either side.
    “Buy your own helmet, and you can suit up,” said the coach to Otis and the other scrubs who didn’t—and never would— make the game cut.
    His mother said she was just as happy that Otis wasn’t out there on the football field endangering his life, ignoring the obvious fact that the coach never would