Fight the Rooster

by Nick Cole

  The Astro Lodge.

  This was, regardless of his goal to destroy the production, his new destination. His only destination. All his questions, and at every moment he could see a new one, would be solved there. He knew, as sure as he knew how to compose a shot, that the Astro Lodge was where he would find peace. He clutched the brochure and departed the sun-warmed office for the steps of Manny’s bus.

  At the front of the speeding bus, just behind Manny, the Great Director slept deeply. His eyes fluttered as he dreamt of a life other than the one he lived. A life of answers. A life of adventure, of fishing, and yes, of bears. A life of escape.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  A Place of Statements

  The bus trundled up the last curves of the mountain in low gear. The narrow road wound its way through deep pines crossing high ridgelines beneath a burning blue madness above. In the high altitude silence the crew approached the Great Director one by one as the buses groaned their way up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  What would they find once they got there?

  What should they look for, or prepare, to better capture light and sound?

  When would craft services be set up?

  The Great Director had no answers for them. He was beyond all that now. He was looking for his very own beginning. His entry into this waking dream called life, when the great camera of time had begun to capture him. He was on a quest.

  One by one they came, and one by one they were sent away. Questions and bewilderment trailed in their wake like so much flotsam.

  The buses eased down into a little hollow. Manny, coming up through the gears, brought his bus onto a narrow side road. Through the pines they could see a monumental, needle-like projection jutting defiantly into the sky beyond. Moments later, the buses cleared a bend in the narrow side road and parked alongside the earth-grounded fins of a giant rocket ship pointed toward the outer limits of the universe.

  It was a fantastic rocket ship. A rocket ship straight from the covers of a million golden age science fiction novels. Pulp, they used to call it. Novels with names like Forbidden Planet, Alien Worlds, and Strange Destiny. The rocket sat atop a large circular half-dome, pockmarked with craters, simulating the surface of an alien chalk-white world. Below the equator of the half-dome, polished bright steel and wide glass windows, mirrored and arched, gaped out onto the surrounding and silent alpine forest.

  A low, flat overhang shot jauntily up and to one side. The angle screamed an architect’s vision of the future circa the age of Telstar. In large, scripted, aquamarine neon letters, the words Astro Lodge flung themselves forward and off to the stars. Color TV and air-conditioning followed below. The letters of “Color TV” varied in color, and the word “air-conditioning” seemed to be covered in arctic sheets of rime ice; cartoon chunks of snow dripped from the i’s, the d, and the g. Behind the central lobby, a semicircular building encompassed the structure of rocket and half-dome. Three tiers contained long rows of orange-painted doors behind which the rooms of the Astro Lodge motor hotel waited.

  The Great Director was the first one off the bus. He stared in wonder at the motel of his birth—a familiar place waiting to be explored. He walked slowly forward to the darkened entrance under the overhang. A dais of short, aquamarine carpeted steps brought him to a double door with curving crescent moon handles.

  Beyond and inside it was cool and dark. The floor was the same aquamarine as the carpet at the entrance. The low domed ceiling twinkled twilight blue, speckled with shiny crystals that seemed to catch the recessed soft light, blinking at random intervals. At the center of the lobby, a circular sculpted blue leather couch rotated clockwise, spinning sedately. The Great Director could see that if he chose, he could approach the couch, throw himself trustingly onto it, and watch the lobby of the hotel turn gently about him.

  He was tempted.

  “Weird, huh?” said Kip, who had managed to sidle up beside him.

  “It’s beautiful,” mumbled the Great Director.

  Kip eyed the opulent space couch like it was a handful of cinnamon rolls and headed straight for it.

  On one side of the room, a high pearl counter stretched the length of the wall. Behind it, a recessed alcove of warm light bore the words Astro Lodge in gold script. The Great Director approached the counter. A silver tray of white mints lay to one side. He ate one. The wintergreen mint coated his mouth in a delicate layer of frost. Each fresh inhalation sent flurries of sleet and snow into his lungs and nose. He had never had a mint like this before. The air all around him tasted fresh and clear. It rushed down to rejuvenate his chest cavity, and at the same time, it rushed upward to clear away the cobwebs of fear and doubt that had become his constant companions.

  He looked up to see a small, white-haired man in a pastel gray summer-weight suit behind the luminescent check-in counter. The man smiled through perfectly white teeth. His blue eyes seemed lighter than the clear, high-altitude sky hanging just above the treetops outside.

  “Checking in, sir?” asked the white-haired gnome.

  The Great Director turned his head, as if to consult with some unseen sidekick. Finding no one, he continued to survey the room. Beyond the spinning Kip, he saw a darkened archway on the far side of the quiet lobby with a sign above it that read Moon Room. He took in the vintage cigarette machine, backlit in purple and blue, complete with a change slot and a row of golden starburst handles one might actually pull, causing packs of cigarettes to release from their holders and slide down a chute into a metallic tray at the bottom. The Great Director briefly wondered if cigarette machines were even legal in California anymore. He felt as though he had stepped through some kind of wormhole in the universe that allowed him to return to a time that almost seemed to have never been.

  “Are you the… um… innkeeper?” he said, at a momentary loss for the words “manager” or “proprietor.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m Eldon. I own the Astro Lodge.” He continued to smile as he reached forward with a tiny hand and plucked a mint from the dish. In one fluid motion, without breaking his smile, he popped the mint into his mouth. Because the gnome’s features were so diminutive, the Great Director could track the mint’s position inside his mouth. It was now on the right side, oval and large inside his tiny cheek. Every so often it would suddenly dart over to the other cheek. It seemed a long-practiced maneuver.

  “Good mints,” critiqued the Great Director.

  “The best,” affirmed Eldon.

  For a long moment, only the sound of mint-sucking could be heard.

  Then, “Fresh breath is important,” began Eldon, and paused. The look in his eyes was suddenly off and over the hills. As though he were seeing everything as it once was right before him now. He began to speak, his eyes distant but his voice present.

  “Standing here, waiting for the late night crowd to come screamin’ in from Reno, crooners and showgirls, Frank and Sammy, wise guys and rich guys trailin’ in behind ’em. None of ’em’d show up until two or sometimes three in the morning. Here’s me, standing bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Fresh breath. Checkin’ ’em in and gettin’ the bellboy to take their things over to a room. Keepin’ the bartender from leaving by getting him more ice. I had to stay awake until they got here. Once they were here it wasn’t a problem. Then I could listen to ’em sing and laugh, and after a few hours it was off to bed with ’em. All I had to do then was make it to eight o’clock in the morning. Then I could go home and get some sleep. Even go to the lake maybe. Then I’d clean up and come back and do it all over again.” He paused. “Best mints ever for that time of the night. Fresh breath is very important in the hotel business.” The little man smiled beatifically, proud to have lived through a time that had ceased to exist years ago.

  “I think I’ll need all of your rooms,” began the Great Director. “And I’ll also need to rent the entire hotel for the rest of the week. I’ll let my prod
ucer over there square up with you, if that’s okay?”

  The Great Director waited. Would the little gnome hop to his demands with disguised joy? Or sputter with confused exuberance as he rifled through the desk below, stalling for time in which to plan how to accommodate the small army that had unexpectedly shown up that afternoon?

  Nothing but calm servitude crossed the face of Eldon of the Astro Lodge.

  “Yes sir, we can definitely accommodate your needs. I’ll get the keys for the rooms all set up, though I will have to hold one in reserve just in case the Haldenhuts stay the night. They always come out for dinner and then the lounge. Sometimes, if Mr. Haldenhut has had a few too many, they don’t drive the road back to the lake. So I’ll need to keep a room available for the night, just in case. I hope that will be acceptable.”

  “Sure,” said the Great Director.

  “Good then. I’ll get the keys handed out and we can arrange the paperwork to reflect a week’s contract for the use of the facilities. Tell everyone to get cleaned up and make dinner reservations in the restaurant. After that, the lounge,” he said, indicating the darkened arch with the words Moon Room above it. “Tony Giantone is singing tonight. It’s a real treat. He sounds just like Mr. Sinatra used to in there.”

  Eldon paused, his eyes staring vacantly into the darkened entrance of the Moon Room. The Great Director remained still. Then he waved his hand back and forth in front of Eldon, waiting.

  Eldon snapped back to reality. “Oh, sorry, I was just… just somewhere else for a moment there,” he finished sadly.

  “It’s not a problem. I’m sorry,” apologized the Great Director, feeling guilty for interrupting the quiet moment of faraway remembrance that had crossed the man’s bright little eyes.

  Then he thought, That was easy. It was like they were expecting us.

  For the next hour the Great Director sat and spun. From the gently rotating space couch, he watched the crew come in. Get their keys. Comment on the surreal surroundings in hushed tones. Then amble back out the door to retrieve their belongings from the unloading buses.

  The Great Director decreed the costume truck be opened and the wardrobe people ordered to fit the entire crew in appropriate attire for an evening supper club dinner.

  Then the Great Director was left to himself.

  What had it had been like all those years ago when he had been born on a winter night in the deep of a storm? The design philosophy and space age theme, modern fifty years ago in an age of galactic hope as man optimistically reached for the stars, now seemed archaic and even melancholy. The Great Director tried to imagine that long-ago night. His mother driving herself to the hospital as the roads became impassable. Thick, swirling drifts of falling snow piling higher and higher. Icy sheets lying cunningly across the high ends of the road. The 1966 mint green Mustang must have slipped and slid its way along the mountain highway until its very pregnant driver could no longer bear the quickening labor pains. Shining like a hopeful beacon in the midst of that terrible winter night was the Astro Lodge. The place he’d been born.

  The place where the camera of time had first captured him.

  “You asleep?” It was Eldon, sitting next to him on the spinning couch. He’d perched himself on it without attracting the notice of the eyes-shut Great Director.

  “No. Just thinking about the past,” said the Great Director with an ease he had not felt in years. Lying here with his back and body ensconced in supple blue leather. Basking in a swirling Telstar vision of a future that might have been. He felt none of the usual stresses of self-loathing, anxiety, tension, fear, paranoia, and mistrust.

  “Ah… the past,” murmured Eldon, as if it were a city in Europe he’d once visited and had never left in his heart. Falling in love with its narrow streets. A particular café. The long afternoon he’d once spent drinking Chianti at its wrought iron tables. “I have spent my life thinking about that.”

  The Great Director waited for some prosaic pronouncement, Solomon-like, to come from the well-groomed gnome’s thin lips. Maybe Eldon would be his Garbage Dump Saint. The dispenser of wisdom he’d been casting for all his life.

  Silence. Only the delicate hum of the motor from the leather couch. Working tirelessly. Steadily going where it had come from, always returning.

  Eldon and the Great Director now accepted—strange that they did not consciously “realize,” but to be more specific, “accepted”—that they were in a place, and a relationship, seldom found by two newly acquainted strangers.

  The place of statements.

  Words not needing explanations. Words being spoken merely because they had that need to be released. Confessions, really.

  “I was born here,” began the Great Director.

  Eldon looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded to himself.

  Silence but for the whirring gentle hum of the motor inside the couch.

  “I remember,” said Eldon. “It was a long time ago. I was younger then.”

  Silence.

  “Tell me about it,” said the Great Director.

  More silence. Eldon crossed one gray-panted leg over the other. He leaned back, head up, blue eyes looking out the large front windows. He adjusted one black sock, pulling it tightly up around his calf.

  “Well,” he sighed. “Old Man Rockwell. Yup. That’s how it begins. Old Man Rockwell was already building this place when my car broke down a few miles east of here.” Eldon cleared his throat, warming to his voice and settling in for what had to be said. “It was, oh I don’t know, early summer. Sixty-four I think. I was headed to San Francisco. I’d gotten out of the Navy a few years earlier and knocked around back east for a while. I was a singer, just like Mr. Sinatra. At least, I thought so back then.” He chuckled softly to himself. “Now, I know no one sings like Mr. Sinatra did. But back when I was young, I was dumb enough to believe differently.

  “Anyway, my car broke down and I walked up the road. It was about two o’clock in the morning. After a few miles I found this place, except it was just a frame back then. It had a few months to go before the big opening, but most of it still wasn’t built. I found a stack of flat wooden boards and crawled on top of it to sleep until morning. I remember, though, that I really didn’t sleep. See, I was a city kid. I was afraid. Truth be told, this was really the first night I’d ever slept in the woods, much less all alone. But it was really wonderful. Lying there, looking up at the stars and the sky all night long. Seeing how it wasn’t actually black. It’s really blue. Deep blue. Up this high you can really see the whole universe spread out at night. Space isn’t really black, it’s blue and it’s deep. There’s depths to it. Growing up in the city my whole life, then being on a sub in the Navy, I never saw a night like that.

  “I must’ve fallen asleep, because Mr. Rockwell woke me up in the morning just after dawn. ‘You hungry, kid?’ he asked me. I said, ‘Yes sir.’ And I was. Mr. Rockwell gave me some wrapped sandwiches. I explained what had happened to my car, and he said there was a mechanic who could fix it. I didn’t have much money, so he offered me a job right there, saying he’d pay me until it was fixed. Soon as I worked off the night’s room and board.”

  Eldon again chuckled softly.

  “Get it? We always laughed about that ’cause I’d slept on a board. A stack of ’em in fact. But that’s how he was, incredibly kind but you’d pay for everything. I guess that’s how we stayed in business so long. He always paid for the best, but he got his money’s worth. I helped him finish up the hotel. Stock it. Get it ready. By the time we opened I was the night manager.”

  Eldon re-crossed one leg over the other. Again straightening his pant leg and sock. Satisfied. He continued.

  “It was dry and cool that first night,” he said plainly. “Our only guests were a newlywed couple. Came in from Reno and decided not to go all the way to San Francisco.” Eldon sighed. “That was a long time ago
.”

  Silence. One of the crew came into the lobby, looked around for a moment, and found the cigarette machine as if he’d known it would be there. The crewmember produced change from his pocket as if he’d known this machine would only take change and not dollar bills. He fed the machine patiently, rhythmically, as it demanded the consumption of silver, then he reviewed the selections. Scrutinizing for the exact type of pack to purchase, then pulling the starburst gold knob. A rumble and a thunk and the pack appeared. The smoker retrieved the prize and was away, already tapping the pack with the palm of his hand.

  Eldon continued.

  “The night your mom came in I’d been on for just about an hour. She came waddling through the door and sat down right here. A second later she got up, said it made her dizzy. She told me she needed a doctor and that she was having a baby. I didn’t know what to do. I was scared, so I called Mr. Rockwell. Well, he came running over through the snow from his private apartment, carrying his medical bag. Surprise, surprise, he was a doctor. Never knew it before that night. Funny, huh? He’d been a doctor in a big city somewhere back east I think. After the war and before he moved here. Said he made a lot of money and moved out here to build this hotel and get away from some stuff. Good thing he did, or else where would you have been born?” Eldon laughed, patting the Great Director on the knee.

  “Why did he build this hotel?” asked the Great Director.

  Eldon paused to consider this. His blue eyes searched the deep forest just beyond the space-age windows.

  “I asked him that for years. Until you came along that night, he never told me. But after he delivered you and gave your mom the employee night room, we had some scotch in the lounge. He had a lot; I had one. I was still on duty. In an ordinary situation he never would’ve allowed it. But that night was special. So we drank good scotch and we toasted you. We didn’t know it then, and I don’t think Old Man Rockwell knew it out loud. You know, like he was thinking about it in his head. But… he was waiting for you.”