The One Place on Earth

Late Sunday morning I woke up in the Eglin Hotel trying to remember something.

It was Uncle Ernie’s telegram—my world had turned 180 degrees.

I got up and took a long shower, then shaved and dressed in clean clothes.

I took a taxi to Safeway and bought plenty of good groceries and a six-pack of Danish beer with a name I couldn’t pronounce. I pushed my cart confidently down the crowded aisles of Montana families dressed up for church. The taxi driver had said business was slow and waited for me out front.

I made a big breakfast, smoked ham and poached eggs and raisin toast with marmalade, and some kind of special Jamaican coffee, so my room was full of warm good smells. As I ate I watched the sun play on the river across the green park.

Joyce had cooked me breakfast my first day in town, the day before Tug and I went to work at Ray’s sawmill—

Tug had taken me to meet his sister, Ray’s wife, and gone off with Denise, Ray’s sister.

In the kitchen I’d taken out the Sleeping Child and shown it to Joyce’s baby, Charlie, trying to get him to eat, and Joyce said she’d been to Sleeping Child Lake before she was married, that it was green and deep and the Indians had believed it was a door to another world.

There was supposed to be a monster, like at Loch Ness.

In the living room drunken Ray lay snoring on the couch under the moose head and his new Mossberg deer rifle.

Pretty Joyce showed me the red heart-shaped birthmark on her wrist, then suddenly sat on my lap and kissed me, before she broke into tears and apologized when I gripped her arms and said it wasn’t a good idea.

It was too bad I couldn’t cook breakfast for Joyce—

I decided next Saturday I’d have lunch at The Briars, a swanky restaurant by a park on the edge of town. Tug had told me about it. I’d walk out and take a taxi back. Or maybe I’d go in the taxi and walk back. I didn’t want to be sweaty for dinner.

Or take the taxi both ways. I might be tired after the expensive meal and a couple of drinks. Hell, I’d treat the taxi guy to lunch.

Drinking a third cup of coffee, I looked up at the poster of Chief Joseph in the noon light, then down on the white antler carving on the coffee table. Maybe Joseph and the Sleeping Child had brought me good luck.

I cleaned up the dishes, then thought about walking over to the college to look things over for tomorrow. But I realized I was tired from the week at Ray’s mill and about two I went downstairs to the matinee.

The conch shell ticket booth was empty, the girl with the book about Hamlet wasn’t there, and I walked in the open glass doors.

I stared up at the tiered chandelier with 5,000 unlit yellow and blue and pink crystals. It was ten yards across and must have weighed half a ton. I had an odd thought, looking at the concentric rings of hanging glass, that there was a crystal for each trout in the Clark Fork.

I wanted to go up into the balcony but a velvet rope blocked the curved carpeted stairway. Mr. Gable’s assistant wore a short-sleeved white shirt and sold me my ticket from behind the long marble snack bar. He was busy with the elaborate popcorn machine etched with sheaves and tasseled ears of corn and didn’t recognize me as an Elgin tenant.

Under two winged bas-relief Egyptian goddesses who held up the Sun I stepped through the padded double doors and stopped.

I’d stumbled into the weather of another world.

The ceiling was wide as an evening sky, with bulging purple storm clouds caught in mid-flight between a silver crescent moon and a rain of comets with tails 30 yards long. The Bears and Orion and Cassiopeia, the shadowed figure of each animal and hero looming behind its pattern of twinkling stars, tilted like kites above the horizons.

Blue stallions raced along the high walls. The flowing manes concealed the breasts of nymphs with streaming hair and slender outstretched arms. Their hands jutted from the mural, lifting tin torches with pink flames to light the storm’s approaching darkness.

The rising blast came from a bell-cheeked God of Wind whose extended blowing lips hid the projection box. I stepped down the back row and took a seat in the middle, looking up at his straining brow and gilt curls.

The Elgin Fox I lived above was the largest theater I’d ever seen, counting Portland and Seattle. The five aisles descended three-quarters of a football field, past endless shadowed rows of seats.

Birdie had told me that together the ground floor and the balcony sat 2,200 but I hadn’t visualized how many that was. Maybe 30 people sat scattered across the ornate interior as cavernous as a big-city cathedral.

In front, gold masks of laughing Comedy and weeping Tragedy were stitched to the green satin curtains and I thought of Tug’s movie idea, “The Hungry Mirror.”

The apron of the stage had a trap door to let an organ come up. Birdie said Mr. Gable played recitals before the movies on Christmas, while the kids received candy canes from Santa Claus and college girls dressed as elves.

I wondered if living above the theater had some vague effect, influenced my thoughts or moods, the depth of my breathing while I slept. Maybe the oxygen changed in the brain, special dreams took shape, depending what movie played late to frightened cries or waves of laughter.

The silent empty theater was like a god’s vacant mind, the still air perfumed by popcorn and dust, the blank screen veiled. Now I was awake and the Elgin Fox lay unconscious.

In each of the lit opera boxes sat a man and woman in evening clothes.

The couples looked stiff and formal although the men smoked and the ladies gestured to one another. The lucky guests didn’t move, their gloved hands and opera glasses remained casually lifted, the cigars glowed red but the mustached men didn’t bring them to their mouths.

I thought it must be strange to work each day in the deserted theater with the well-dressed dolls looking down at you with open eyes.

I leaned back in a chair that maybe Birdie and Ralph had re-covered, wondering how far along they had got with fixing the seats, then remembered that Birdie said they were half done. How many years would it take to reupholster the whole theater? There were nearly half as many seats as crystals in the chandelier. Would they start over once they had finished?

Would they live that long?

But Tuesday Birdie said she and Ralph had done 10 seats.

Ten chairs times 100 days was already a thousand.

At that rate, they could redo the whole theater every year, if they didn’t have to stop to shovel snow in winter.

It was like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, like Sisyphus and the rock. The prospect of the two elderly people working forever seemed terrible.

I was wondering if periodically Gable dusted the mannequins’ faces, laundered or changed their costumes for the holidays or special occasions, if Birdie and Ralph had to do it, when I heard a woman call “Bill!”

I started to slide low in my seat, thinking it might be Joyce, before I realized I wanted to see her and sat up to look around. I wanted to sit alone with her in the dark.

Seated down to the right, holding a tub of popcorn, Birdie waved, then Ralph too after she spoke in his ear. He’d been hit by lightning on a sheep ranch by Dillon and lost some of his hearing. The boy with him, the owner’s son, had been killed and his brown hair turned white as snow. I waved back.

The pink torches along the walls came down one at a time, from back to front, then the moon and comets dimmed together. The shaded lamps in the opera boxes went out as the dusty beam shot from the god’s parted lips.

“True Confessions” was a detective story about the brutal murder of a girl with a rose tattoo.

She was from the Midwest and wanted to be a movie star but ended as an actress in sex films. Her dismembered body was found scattered in a vacant lot and the newspapers called her “the Virgin Tramp,” a beautiful and lost Madonna for the corrupt and godless City of the Angels.

Red-haired Robert Duvall played the cynical L.A. cop who had loved a prostitute when he was on the take, but lacked the heart to acknowledge his love. Now she ran the brothel where a priest had just died of a heart attack and Duvall went to the church to deliver the news.

Robert De Niro, Duvall’s black-haired brother and their crazy mother’s favorite, was an up-and-coming monsignor, the cardinal’s organizer and hatchet man, and the golfing buddy of rich contributors.

Fat and pasty Charles Durning was the brothel owner, a Catholic businessman dying of lung cancer who needed a building contract with the church. De Niro, with Durning and two wealthy parishioners, had picked up a pretty hitchhiker on the way back from the racetrack at Santa Anita, and later Durning and his rich friends slept with her.

She was the dead girl with the rose tattoo.

Now Duvall discovered the World War II barracks, the blue movie studio. He walked through the deserted set past the poster bed, saw the bloody bathtub, followed the red tracks to an office.

In a desk drawer he found photos of the girl with the tattoo and a note from Durning, recommending her to the porno director, who had slashed her to pieces, then died in a car crash.

The phone rang and Duvall heard that the madam he loved had committed suicide, after botching an abortion. Her last call was to Durning, asking for help.

Duvall went into a self-righteous fury and for revenge charged Durning with the girl’s murder, caused a scandal in the newspaper, and ruined De Niro’s chance to be bishop.

The music changed, it was years later, a few months before JFK’s assassination, and the brothers met at De Niro’s poor desert parish, where kindly and honest Burgess Meredith had been the exiled priest before De Niro’s fall from power.

De Niro was white-faced and gentle, dying of heart disease. Duvall apologized, but De Niro thanked him for saving his soul. The brothers agreed to be buried side by side in the bare sand cemetery—

The credits ran down the screen and the theater’s pink torches came up one by one. The moon and comets reappeared and the opera boxes lit up again.

I thought of Tug’s unwritten screenplay about the vain actor and actress and their doubles, the make-up artists who want to commit murder and become the stars. The story was similar to “True Confessions,” about ambition and greed and a failure to love, about good and bad twins and which was which.

“The Hungry Mirror” might have been just as good, maybe better, but no one except Joyce and me and maybe Denise or someone in a bar would ever know about it.

“I used to think it was good luck, before I met Ray and got pregnant,” Joyce had said, showing me the red heart on her wrist.

I saw Birdie and Ralph holding hands, trudging up the steep aisle, and I waited for them. They’d watched the movie where they worked during the week.

For a moment the rising walkway seemed like the road of their lives that they were climbing toward the finish. I felt bad one of them would die before the other.

I asked Birdie if she liked the movie. She said yes, but that it was pretty violent. Ralph didn’t like it much, he didn’t like the bad language. Birdie said they were looking forward to the science fiction movie that was coming next month. They’d heard about it from Glen, the man behind the snack bar. Mr. Gable was going to show the preview next week.

As she spoke I remembered their cramped rooms that smelled of menthol balm, the single beds in the curtained alcoves within calling distance, the framed photos of Birdie’s grandchildren on the old maple dresser.

Birdie had baked some peanut butter cookies last week and asked me to come in as she put them in a plastic bag. I’d noticed an old casting rod with an open reel leaning in the corner by the refrigerator. She said it was Ralph’s, that he and his wife had fished all over Montana.

I asked if they’d ever fished at Sleeping Child Lake, that I’d heard the fishing was good there, and she said they probably had. In good weather they’d gone out nearly every weekend, they owned a little one-wheeled trailer that unfolded into a tent. Ralph had sold it when his wife died. Birdie had never been to the lake. Her daughter and ex-son-in-law rented a boat once and looked for the monster but they didn’t find it.

Birdie thought there might be a monster.

I walked out of the theater with Ralph and Birdie as she pointed at the chandelier and said it lowered on a cable so you could clean it. They were going to the cafeteria for Sunday chicken dinner and invited me along. I said I’d had a big breakfast and I’d see them tomorrow. I saw them move carefully down the sidewalk hand in hand.

I went upstairs and took a Danish beer from the stocked refrigerator.

I lay back on the bed above the baroque theater, half-listening to the radio as I watched the late sun illuminate the room’s floating dust, thinking about the two brothers, the black-haired priest and the red-haired cop, standing among the desert graves. Their name was Spellacy and again I saw Joyce’s small red heart.

Then the lit motes reminded me of the different planets and their orbits and revolutions in the chart at the back of the dictionary.

In the yellow afternoon light the antler Sleeping Child glowed beside my wallet and brass key on the coffee table. I stared at the gold Book of Changes and the 1936 encyclopedia with gilt letters across its back and suddenly got up, sitting at the love seat as I opened the thick book—

Chelan, Lake (55 miles long by two to three miles wide, in Chelan, Co. Wash.) was fed by short streams from the Cascade Mountains and its short outlet entered the Columbia River at the town of Chelan (pop. 1,403). The Chelan Mountains were an eastern branch of the Cascades and bordered the southwestern shore of the deep lake, which had several small resorts.

It was a river-lake, like an eel, at 1,400 feet deeper than any lake in America, except for Crater Lake in Oregon, and for a moment I saw the blue water twist like the Cinnamon River through its gorge, Otis Stivers at the wheel of his submerged drifting car.

Just below, Chelcicky, Petr (1390-1460) was a Czech reformer whose disciples became the Czech Brethren or Moravians, and his chief work was The Net of the True Faith, which anticipated the teachings of Tolstoy by 400 years.

I didn’t look up Sleeping Child Lake.

For dinner I cooked a steak and had it on toast with cottage cheese and half a peach. I cleaned up the kitchen and undressed. In the Murphy bed I listened to the radio—the news didn’t mention Cheryl Reed’s condition in Walla Walla.

In Idaho, Otis Stivers had nearly hit Tug’s pickup, the kid trying to outrun the police after shooting his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend at an A&W along the Cinnamon River, before he missed a turn and was trapped in the sunken car.

I watched the headlights cross the ceiling and graze the face of Chief Joseph, until I fell asleep and had a nightmare about Joyce—

Monday I woke up when I heard the radio going, and for a second I was afraid I’d be late for the mill.

After a shower and shave I put on a pair of slacks and my green sport shirt. I got my money out of Edgar Allan Poe, between two pages of “The Gold Bug,” and hurried downstairs.

I was waiting at the curb when Tug pulled up in his pickup.

He’d got his shot-out window fixed and he stared at me as he leaned across the seat to roll it down.

“What’s up, bro? Who died?”

“Nobody.”

In the dream Ray had broken in with the new Mossberg rifle as Joyce and I lay naked on the Murphy bed.

Red-haired Sherry, his secretary, stood at Ray’s shoulder with a shiny pistol and her blouse undone.

“I’m quitting the mill.”

“How come?” Tug looked surprised.

“Going to school.”

“Where?”

“At the college. Uncle Ernie bailed me out.”

“I told you to stick with Uncle Ernie,” Tug said, grinning. “He’s the man!”

“Can you tell Ray I had to pick up on this right away? And could you get my check?”

“No problem—”

“If you see Wes, tell him I’ll stop by some night at Custer’s.”

“Okay, Bill.” Tug reached and gripped my hand. “Congratulations. You’re my war buddy. We took fire together.”

Don’t screw with Idaho!

In my pocket I felt the Sleeping Child—the Indian boy had given it to me, after I slipped him 10 dollars outside the crossroads store, so his aunt could get a drink.

Tug had talked back to the grocery clerk when she complained about Indians, and later her people had fired on us at Turtle Lake.

“Thanks, Tug.”

“You were due, partner, just like me. Can you believe I’ve even slacked off on the smoke?”

“We’ll have to get together.”

“Just us,” Tug said. “Some night when Denise and Joyce are going out.”

“See you, buddy.”

“Bill?”

I stepped back to the truck. Tug leaned toward the window.

“For your information—Ray’s doing Sherry.”

“Is he?” I said.

“I just thought I’d let you know. You can file it away. Keep the faith.”

He smiled and raised a fist.

Tug drove off and I turned the corner, walked down the block to the Stockmen’s, and ordered pancakes and scrambled eggs and bacon with biscuits and country gravy.

In the crowded morning lunchroom the local businessmen were talking loudly, over an even louder radio that was dialed to a local call-in show.

Two hikers, a boy and girl from the college, were missing in Glacier Park and a large search party on horseback was combing the woods.

I hadn’t heard any report and didn’t know anyone was lost.

The host of “Kootenay Cavalcade” was fielding opinions from callers, about charging lost campers a fee for their rescue, the repeal of endangered species laws, lifting restrictions on hunting licenses and game limits and certain large-caliber rifles and shotguns.

One woman from Lolo argued that all backpackers should have to carry revolvers for self-defense.

A man at the counter thought they should kill all of the bears, black and brown too.

His neighbor on the next stool argued that was going too far, that the black bear was smaller and less aggressive. As a kid he’d had a cub for a pet.

I finished my breakfast and coffee and walked back toward the Elgin and crossed the street to the black granite Cattleman’s Bank.

I talked to a woman at the reception desk and she pointed me toward a big desk in the back.

“Bill Ryder? Great to meet you.”

The friendly banker in boots and a brown Western suit put out his hand.

“I’ve stayed a couple times at your uncle’s big hotel in Seattle. They sure do it right.”

“It’s a nice place,” I said. I’d never stayed at the Fremont, just had lunch in the coffee shop one time.

“Great seafood.”

Everything went smoothly. I showed my driver’s license, confirmed my balance of 2,500 dollars from my Uncle Ernie, and signed a few forms.

“Welcome to Montana, Bill.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad to be here.”

“You’re on your way to Washington, though.”

“That’s right. Lake Chelan.”

He grinned.

“You want to trade places?”

“Maybe later. I’ll see how it goes.”

“That’s right, Bill. Take it easy. Play it as it lays.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Don’t go hiking without a guide—”

“I won’t.”

I gave my cash from Mussel Bay, all but 175 dollars, to a tall, attractive teller who put it in my large new account and complimented me on my green shirt.

My uncle’s tall hotels that notched the Seattle skyline were backing me up like face cards made of brick, as leisurely I prepared to take my place as manager of the distinguished Blue Heron Motor Lodge on beautiful Lake Chelan, 55 miles long and the second deepest lake in the West . . . .

Suddenly I was respectable, with a distinguished family and money to my name and a new place to go where people with titles and college degrees, nice clothes and polished manners, were eagerly awaiting me.

Confident, like a happy sleepwalker, I left the bank and passed the Elgin and then climbed the curved bridge over the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, pausing in the middle to look down for trout holding still in the current.

I saw one, brown-green with black speckles above its darker shadow on the gravel, then one more and another a few yards away, like bathers basking in the warm morning sun, before I descended to the south bank and through the bright September day walked the 10 blocks to Northwestern College.

The ivied tower had open arches and I could see the dark bells below the white clock face with its black metal hands and numbers.

Old brick buildings with slate roofs were scattered around the edges of the quad of maples and conifers between newer, flat-topped buildings with banks of windows.

A star-shaped fountain and a bronze grizzly bear holding up a fish with silver-dollar-sized scales stood where six sidewalks met. The girls in sweaters and jeans sitting on the lawn with boys in college sweatshirts seemed very young, pure and unapproachable.

School had been in session two or three weeks. I saw a sign and headed up a walk toward the glass doors of the admissions office.

Like the man at the bank, right away the woman at the desk knew who I was.

She smiled and handed me a manila packet.

I only had to sign one paper, and she gave me a carbon that said I was enrolled and my transcripts would be requested from Corvallis.

“You’ve only got two classes,” she said. “What’re you going to do with all your time?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Study, I guess.”

“Don’t work too hard now.”

I peeked in the envelope.

“Do I have a class today?”

She put out her hand.

“Let me see that a second. We’re all in a tizzy, with the students lost at Glacier.”

I handed it back and she lifted glasses hanging on a neck chain.

“Yes, you do, Bill. With Dr. Adkins. You’ll like him!”

She glanced down at her wristwatch.

“It just started—Antelope Hall 281, across the quad.” She pointed with her finger.

I thanked her and went out, walked up one spoke of the wagon wheel past the hungry grizzly in the fountain, then crossed the grass toward a four-story building.

It was an empty honeycomb. All the classes had begun on the hour. I started down a hall, checking the numbers on the closed doors, following the corridor and the arrows like street signs painted on the walls, but the numbers grew smaller.

I retraced my path to the front stairwell and climbed a flight and walked down another hall past four deserted rooms with open doors. Out the windows you could see the looming Kootenay Range, the granite snow-streaked peaks above the tree line. In town you were too close and low and couldn’t see the high mountains that stood just beyond the hills.

I stopped at Room 281, listening with my head close to the door. I heard the teacher’s voice say “Hilton” and stepped in.

Dr. Adkins looked the model of a professor.

He had salt-and-pepper hair, wore a checked sport coat, and gestured with a pointer at a single word chalked boldly on the board:

Reputation

About 30 students sat at desks, including five or six men and women my age or older.

“Reputation,” the professor said. “Let’s consider what the term means generally, and, more importantly, what it implies and how it’s earned.”

As he turned to face the class he saw me.

“I have a strong feeling you’re Bill Ryder.”

Two cowboys and a girl with red hair and then the rest of the students in unison swiveled their heads and looked at me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“That’s all right.” He pointed with the stick. “Take a seat.”

I sat down at the first open desk.

“Class, Bill’s uncle is a successful entrepreneur in Washington. He owns several four-star hotels, including the Fremont in Seattle. Bill will be with us for a semester, before he assumes management of the Blue Heron Motor Inn, a fine, well-respected resort motel on Lake Chelan.”

The younger students looked solemn and admiring, the older ones a bit envious. The girl with long red hair smiled warmly.

“In fact,” the professor went on, “I would like to pause now and attend to some related business.”

He set the pointer on the lectern, then looked up.

“As I’ve told you, David Hamphill is the owner and manager of the Lakeview Inn, Montana’s finest and most successful resort lodge.

“For the past six years, Mr. Hamphill has been kind enough to sponsor an intern program that allows our future graduates to each spend a weekend at the Lakeview, observing its operation firsthand and gaining valuable experience of the inner workings of a top-tier hotel.

“At our next class I’ll be passing around a sheet for sign-ups, but as Bill here has a position waiting for him at the end of the semester, I’d like to invite him to be this year’s first visitor to the Lakeview. If there aren’t any objections—”

No one said anything. What could they say?

“Can you make it this Saturday and Sunday, Bill?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Thank you.”

I felt people watching me.

It didn’t seem fair that I’d just waltzed in and stepped to the head of the line, but Uncle Ernie had connections and the strings were in place. I had a feeling they pulled both ways.

“Good. Today I have a meeting immediately after class, but I look forward to speaking to you next time at greater length. Perhaps sometime soon your uncle can visit and share some of his expertise?”

I nodded.

“Excellent,” he said. “I’ll call Mr. Hamphill.”

Adkins smiled, picking up his pointer as he turned to the blackboard.

“All right, back to work—”

“Reputation” was a blanket term that included everything about a hotel.

Its physical appearance. The service. And the tone set by management, the communication, overt and subtle, that passed between host and guests.

An immediate ambiance should be felt as soon as the visitor’s car approached the parking lot and grounds, or even before that, when he saw the billboard on the highway. Or heard the hotel’s name ring in the air for the first time.

It was this atmosphere, this concrete yet abstract, almost impalpable essence that went into establishing a hotel’s identity.

A simple two-part phrase summed up the message: “We offer what you need and desire— You need and desire what we offer.”

“Now that we’ve laid out a generic working definition, let me ask you a more delicate question that’s only partly rhetorical.”

Adkins glanced out the window at the mountains, in deep thought, then scanned his audience.

“What makes you fall in love—in true, deep, abiding love—with another person?”

He paused.

“Now think for a moment. Then let me offer my hypothesis—”

As Adkins held the pointer horizontal, a hand at either end, I thought of Joyce.

“The person we love is a certain inner person, outwardly embodied in a unique manner and look, whom we care fondly for and who cares fondly for us.

“In happy moments we admire the loved one with gratitude, we feel fortunate, even blessed, and want time to never change or end, not one second to escape. In sad moments, we recall our former happiness and wish we could return if only for an hour to that place where the world seemed made only for us.

“Now of course a lover isn’t a hotel. But a hotel does project a personality, and presents both the attractions and the pitfalls of a personal relationship.

“I’ve implied that the interior identity of the person we love is reflected in a smile or a walk, the timbre of the voice, the gesture of a hand—the way the fingers grasp a coffee cup or a lock of hair—or by some endearing flaw, like a freckle or a wavy fingernail—

“All the little things we recognize and cherish like life itself—

“Now let me pose a few specific, apparently mundane questions and you can decide whether you agree with my thesis. I’m deadly serious now and I ask for your undivided attention—”

Were you secretly gratified when the unlit “No Vacancy” sign included “Sorry”?

Did the typeface on the hotel’s business card or the pleasing design and sturdy quality of its matchbook signal that the rooms would be comfortable and well lit?

Would the raised pile of the towel invite your dry cheek?

Could the immaculate tub allow you to slip and fall?

And momentarily, when you saw the fresh paper seal, did you imagine that the commode had just been purchased and installed especially for you and no one else?

Was it understood that the hotel’s stamped monogram on the hem of the ironed sheets promised discretion and privacy?

That you could lie alone at night without overheard reminders of your solitary state, your secret vulnerabilities?

All in all, “reputation” had to do with trust in a hotel’s detailed sense of concern and good taste, a restrained but welcoming generosity, and respect for visitors and their need to rest secure.

“In bad movies we often hear the disillusioned and usually well-worn heroine complain, in some sordid hotel room, that she has made her bed and now she has to lie in it.”

Adkins waved the pointer quickly, like a sword.

“Now freeze that frame.

“Remove the regretful hedonist and her paramour, replace the rumpled bed and dusty blinds and scattered undergarments.

“Scrub it all down with powerful disinfectant, repaint and re-carpet, carefully select from a range of fixtures, with discretion choose new colors, surfaces and weaves, summon your reserves of aesthetic judgment and intuition—transform it all into a palace suite—”

He raised his arms for emphasis.

The students looked at each other and smiled.

“But I implore you, I appeal to your keen intelligence and imagination, your shared sense of humanity and your honed business eye—

“Please, promise you’ll save one precious item from that tawdry scene, rescue and distill one vital essence—”

His arms dropped slowly.

“What am I talking about?”

No one answered.

“Remember the tired actress’ hard-earned lesson? ‘I’ve made my bed and now I have to lie in it.’

“Now make a single substitution, just a word.

“Replace ‘have’ with ‘want,’ so the credo reads, ‘I’ve made my bed and now I want to lie in it.’

“That’s your lodestone, your pole star and gleaming sun, the legend that should be etched on a golden plaque in your brain. If you remember nothing else I say, remember this:

“Each bed you offer your guest should be as delectable as your own, the one place on Earth you’d most desire to rest for the night and rise from in the morning—”

He smiled, then continued smoothly.

“—whatever your romantic persuasion. Which leads us to a swift survey of anthropology, of custom and practice that with minor—relatively minor—local differences is surprisingly consistent throughout time and across the globe—”

As Adkins spoke in his assured, knowledgeable voice, engaging and entertaining his listeners—I wondered if he’d seen “True Confessions” or peeked in at my dream of Joyce and the Murphy bed and Ray and Sherry with the guns—I thought about the Elgin.

It hardly fit his profile of a hotel’s ideal identity.

The Elgin wasn’t really a hotel, but a business building that was its own segregated city, with baroque theater and credit dentist’s office and beauty college, cheap apartments and New York penthouses, starvation staff, and an elevator with a chandelier and jewelry case.

It was Mr. Gable’s private Hearst’s Castle where like a heavy Vincent Price he wore tuxedos at night and stood under the larger, famous chandelier, played organ at Christmas, collected art, and lived seven stories above the town that wild Indians like Wes sometimes still roamed.

What the professor was talking about was a blend of sociology, psychology and philosophy that together verged on a universal religion. He seemed to be describing more than appearances, he kept using the word “essence,” insisting that all things grew from the right way of thinking about the “idea” of a hotel.

“This notion is as ancient as civilization itself and can be found in all the great cultures: The ‘guest’ as the ‘host’s other self’ is the common underlying thread that connects a sheik’s grand impromptu feast for weary desert pilgrims on their way to Mecca to an Eskimo’s offer of his wife’s favors to starved polar explorers in snowshoes and ragged sealskin parkas—

“Read the world’s history and greatest literature,” he concluded. “It’s plain as day.”

He set the pointer done carefully like a conductor’s baton.

“Shall we leave our analysis of reputation on that note and in that place for now, between the howling ice cap and the camel’s burning sands?”

It was an impressive lecture, like an extrapolation of the Golden Rule—if you thought you were a king, you treated everyone else as royalty.

Now Adkins grinned suddenly, lifting his brows and wryly dragging a finger along the bridge of his nose.

“There’s a perhaps apocryphal story well known within the profession—perhaps nothing more than a variety of urban legend—concerning Conrad Hilton, founder of the international Hilton Hotel chain. I mentioned him earlier, along with our own Mr. Hamphill, as an introduction to our word ‘reputation.’ Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes,” said several students, like kids eager for another story.

“Well, supposedly Mr. Hilton would periodically appear at the front desks of his grand hotels incognito, often in a beard or wearing a pork-pie hat, once even on crutches, so the story goes, always dressed as an average, unassuming traveler, to better judge the quality of his inns and the service of their staff.

“Whether or not there was any truth to the story, apparently the rumor spread and became a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that Hilton employees were never quite certain that the person they were waiting on wasn’t Conrad Hilton himself.

“Now I’m tempted to say that the tradition continues to this very day—that would make a pleasant ending to my presentation—but we’re here to learn the art of providing dignified and comfortable accommodations for our guests, not to exchange ghost stories.

“I’m sad to report that Mr. Hilton died over 20 years ago, a full decade before his last reported appearance—”

The class waited and then broke into laughter as Adkins smiled broadly.

But I was remembering the story of St. Christopher, the ex-patron saint of travelers, who unknowingly carried Jesus across a swollen stream.

St. Martin had set out on a journey and given away his clothes to a series of beggars in dire need, so that finally he was naked, except for a cloak. The final beggar approached him at a crossroads, asking for a blanket against the cold. Martin nodded, tearing the cloak in two and handing half to the beggar.

The beggar suddenly revealed himself as Jesus and his face began to change, one face and then another, as Martin understood that all the people he had helped along the way had been Christ.

Adkins checked his watch.

“So, in closing, let me advise you to always be careful innkeepers—

“Whether in New York or Honolulu, London or Bejing, never for a moment let down your guard.

“That rowdy has-been rock star or the rumpled traveling salesman—or even the middle-aged harried housewife in urgent need of an iron—may be none other than Professor Adkins from Kootenay, Montana, your new guest arrived to check on your progress—”

The kids laughed again and started to clap and Adkins made a mock bow.

It was a good lecture and performance.

It was obvious Adkins liked his job and had mastered his subject and technique. I overheard a girl say that Adkins was the best teacher in the department and that he was sexy.

I tried not to think about the whole thing being a business and a carefully crafted science of image-making and deception.

Under the surface of nice sentiments and vivid descriptions, the dramatic cultural parallels, it was another sacred religion of money, with its own dogma and ritual and liturgy.

The bell went off.

Instantly the kids were up and on their way out after Adkins, who’d been moving toward the door in anticipation of the rush. The redheaded girl smiled as she passed and I smiled back.

I got up as the two cowboys stood and slipped on straw Stetsons.

They stood next to me as we waited to go out the door.

“You’re lucky,“ said the one with long sideburns. “You’re going to the Lakeview.”

“All I’ve got to do is get up there.”

“There’s a bus,” the other boy said.

“Why don’t you ride with us?” the first cowboy said.

“You’re going to the Lakeview?”

“We’re going near there. Special deer season opens Saturday. To thin out the herd. We won the lottery, both got tags.”

I thought of Wes, who slept with white women while their husbands were hunting, then of Ray and his new gun and wondered if he’d won a chance to shoot an early deer.

“We’re going as far as Ingot. You can catch a bus or ride from there. It’s only about 20 miles to the lake.”

“What lake?”

“The hotel’s right on it,” the other one said. “Sleeping Child.”

I felt a shiver of surprise.

“Sleeping Child Lake?”

My attention had been on Lake Chelan.

”Yeah,” the first boy said.

He took out a tin of snuff.

“Chew?”

“No thanks.”

I was a little light-headed.

“When you leaving?”

“Six Saturday morning.”

“You sure you’ve got room?”

“Sure. Bud here has a king cab.”

“Okay—I’ll be waiting outside the Elgin Theater.”

“We’ll see you before then,” the second boy said. “Next class.”

“Do you know what the assignment is?”

The boy who chewed dipped his hand into a book bag and brought out a heavy volume.

The cover said The Philosophy of Hotel Management.

“It’s in the bookstore. We have to read the first four chapters by next week, for a quiz.”

“Where’s the bookstore?”

“At the end of the main walk.”

I followed the boys downstairs, outside onto the quad toward the grizzly, then stopped.

“The lake’s supposed to be a door to another world,” Joyce had said, then shown me the red heart.

If Ray went hunting, I could ask Joyce to go, now that I wasn’t working at the mill—

“Each bed you offer your guest should be as delectable as your own, the one place on Earth you’d most desire to rest for the night and rise from in the morning—”

I slipped my hand into my front pocket and closed my fingers around the Sleeping Child.

Without even thinking, I carried it with me all the time now.

The End

***

Nels Hanson

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and graduated from UC Santa Cruz and the U of Montana. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and a citation in its Joseph Henry Jackson competition. His stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Long Story, Short Story, South Dakota Review, Starry Night Review, The Offcourse Journal, Atomjack, Zahir, Word Riot, and other journals. Stories are currently on the Web at The Green Hills Literary Lantern, The 3rd of November Club, The Write Place at the Write Time, and The 13th Warrior Review, and stories are in press at Splash of Red, Prick of the Spindle, Caveat Lector, Danse Macabre, Ruminate Magazine, The Iconoclast, and the Overtime Chapbook Series at Blue Cubicle Press.