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the creek and the rustle of leaves in the cottonwood tree.
    Otis leaned the gun against the side of the scooter and walked toward the water, away from the woman. Without looking at her, he said, “On days like this, it makes you wonder why Dorothy or Judy Garland ever wanted to leave Kansas, doesn’t it?”
    “I’ve never wanted to leave Kansas,” the young woman said. Her voice was as soft and gentle as the breezes. Or that’s the way it sounded to Otis, who turned back to face her. She was smiling.
    “You must be, as the old song said, a real ‘sunflower from the Sunflower State,’” he said.
    “What song is that?” she said. “I know about ‘Home on the Range.’ Is there another one about Kansas?”
    He wanted to say: Yes, yes. “Sunflower” by Mack David. Russ Morgan’s recording of it had made the 1949
Hit Parade
on the radio. And he wanted to sing it for her. He knew the words to all four verses and the refrain. There had been a time long ago when Otis knew the words to hundreds of popular songs.
    But he did not sing “Sunflower” for this young woman. Instead, he said, “Have you come to the part in the book where LBJ talks about Bobby Kennedy?”
    “No, not yet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scooter like that before.”
    “It’s an antique.”
    “Why not just buy a new one?”
    Otis decided there was no answer to that question that he wanted to give the young woman. He turned back toward the creek, which was clear and about fifty yards wide at this particular spot in the Cimarron Regional Park. Otis had been coming here for years to fish and to walk.
    This was the first time he had come on a Cushman and the first time he had come across a beautiful young woman reading a book.
    “Why haven’t you taken off the football helmet?” she asked.
    “My head will come off with it if I do,” Otis replied, turning back to face her.
    She laughed. “What’s your name?” she asked.
    Without a second’s hesitation, Otis said, “Buck.”
    Buck? Buck. There had been a guy from Sedgwicktown who played starting halfback for K-State when Otis was a freshman in high school. His name was Buck—Buck Kingman. He came back to town occasionally and walked the streets surrounded by squads of admiring boys and girls. Otis had always thought it would be terrific to be named Buck. Now he was.
    “What’s your name?” Otis asked the girl.
    “Sharon.”
    “What brings you here?”
    “Well, it’s so lovely and peaceful. I just moved to Eureka from Wichita—I’m a nurse. And you?”
    “I’m not allowed to talk about myself,” he said. “Would you like to take a ride on my scooter? I’m a good driver—and safe in every respect.”
    Without a word, she stood up.
    He hung the air rifle by its lanyard on the handlebars, kick-started the motor, and she climbed up behind him.
    And then he felt the thrill, the glory, the incredible turn-on of her hands lightly on his waist and the warmth of her body against his back as they rode away together down the gravel path.
    What if Annabel is right? And this young thing decides to rape me?
    THEY RODE DOWN the path a hundred yards or so onto a little-used connecting blacktop road and then circled back to the creek bank. They neither passed nor saw nor heard any other vehicles or people.
    For Otis, it was twenty minutes of being in a high, unrelenting state of exquisite sexual arousal unlike anything he had experienced in a long time—so long that he couldn’t even recall the last time he had felt anything quite like it.
    He could feel her young breath on his neck, her young fingers in his belt loops, and on a few delicious occasions when the scooter turned or lurched, he felt some of the most intimate parts of her young body pressed against his back.
    She must be about half his own age, younger even than Annabel. Otis, a Dole-Kassebaum Republican, thought of BillClinton, the Arkansas fool, fouling his presidency and place in history over a girl like this.
    Otis