The Hotel Eden: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  Anyway, I spoke to Mr. Royaltuber and I saw the hook there on the car door. It was a regular artificial arm, straps and all, one of them torn, and it scared me too. I mean, when that thing came off, it had to hurt. I took the report, but it wasn’t all in line, and to tell the truth neither was the front of the Royaltuber girl’s shirt. She was misbuttoned the way you are after putting away your playthings in a hurry.

  The Cramble boy kept at me to get back up there right away before the pervert got somebody else, saying things like Wasn’t I the sheriff? Wasn’t I supposed to do something? Well, I could see he wanted to do something, something that had been interrupted up at Passion Point, so I just told them all it was going to be all right, which it was, and I headed back to the Landing, where I was able to run off about ten kids and confiscate a case and a half of Castle Moat, which is not my favorite, but it’ll do.

  MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

  I NEVER MARRIED. Years ago, after my accident, I changed my plans about a career in tennis and went up to college near Brippert and got into their vocational-ed program in hotel management.

  I was pretty numbed out after Cassie’s family moved who knows where. This is a long time ago now. Her girlfriend Maggie Rayne hung around with me for a while, and then I think she saw the limits of a man with one hand and moved on. Her father was a professor at the medical school, and I was clearly outclassed. So, anyway, I never married. I didn’t realize the torch was still lit—or really how alive I could feel—until I saw Cassie again a year ago, when she was carried up here kicking and screaming, spitting and cursing, her eyes red and her hair wild, the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in, let’s see, seventeen years.

  MRS. MARGARET RAYNE NARKENPIE

  I HAD NOT planned on a mountaintop in Bushville. I had not actually thought I would—after seven years of graduate study and three years at the Highborn Academy—find myself banished to the left-hand districts of Forsaken Acres, dressing for dinner at the macaroni-and-cheese outlet, opting for the creamed tuna on special nights. I had lived in a wasteland as a girl, and I thought I was through with it. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that marrying the highest-ranking doctor in my father’s finest class, a tall, good-looking psychiatrist of sterling promise who could have written his ticket anywhere in the civilized world, I was expecting to live in a place where there was more than one Quicky Freeze and a Video Hut. I had dared to think London, New York, even Albuquerque. I had not imagined Griggs. My husband—who has his Institute and his staff and his many duties and all his important vision for psychiatric health care—can’t even see Griggs. So, the way I live here and whom I associate with in this outpost of desolation is, it would seem to me, my business.

  Mr. Royaltuber handles all the television and monitor maintenance and repair for the Spinard Institute. He has also helped us with the satellite dish and the cable connections we use at home. He’s a nice man, and I have lunch with him from time to time. We’ve become, under the circumstances and in this barren place, friends. I met his wife only once, when I was at his home. It was less than pleasant.

  MR. WILD JOHNNY HATERAS, RADIO PERSONALITY, KGRG

  IF ANYBODY PRETENDS to be hurt or surprised by our little prank, they’re bad actors. Everybody in this burg knows what we do on Halloween with the “important news bulletin” and the hook. We’ve been doing it since I started spinning platters here twelve years ago. Nick goes out and slips a dozen of the phony hooks on car doors, and then I interrupt the program with my announcement about the maniac. I think of it as our little annual contribution to birth control, all those kids jumping up when I cut into “Unchained Melody” with my homicide-and-hook news brief. When we started, we used those plastic hooks from the costume shop in Orpenhook, but, sad to say, gang, it’s impossible to scare anybody anymore with a plastic hook. Don’t tell me the world’s a better place. So now we get them in Bark City, little steel hooks that at least look authentic for a few minutes. But this will probably be the last year we send Nick out with anything at all, because of the trouble up by the nuthouse, and because he’s afraid of getting shot. Can you believe that? You go out on Halloween to have a little fun anymore and you run a good chance of getting plugged? Hey, Griggs, wake up, all is not well. If you can’t harass the teenagers without running the risk of getting killed, this town is in trouble.

  MRS. CASSIE ROYALTUBER

  IT’S FUNNY WHAT people think. You try to put a pair of kitchen scissors in the doctor’s wife one afternoon and they think (a) you’re crazy, or (b) you’re desperately in love with your sweet husband, or (c) you caught her in bed with your husband, with whom she’s been sleeping for two years, and therefore you’re just slow to catch on, since everybody, absolutely everybody else in this village, which is not exactly full of geniuses, has known about the affair since the first week, or (d) that you’re all three: crazy, in love, and slow to catch on.

  Well, it is simply exhilarating to be liberated from (a) the slings and (b) the arrows of public opinion and to take it for what it is, which is (a) irrelevant and (b) as absolutely wrong as it can be.

  Who in their right mind—which is where I find myself—would consider that the television repairman’s wife might have another reason? Who would grant the past its due, the vast sweeping privilege of history and justice? Who would guess that (a) I knew Mrs. Narkenpie before she and her doctor moved to Griggs, in fact before she was Mrs. Narkenpie, when she was simply Margaret Rayne, and that (b) she was the prime reason I had been forcibly removed from my one true love so many years ago, and that (c) I had chosen those scissors not for the convenience of their being right there in the drawer but because they were appropriate—I wanted to cut her the way she cut my Howard.

  And the things I screamed I screamed on purpose. How are you going to get into the loony bin unless they think you’re loony?

  ROD BUDDAROCK

  WHAT HE DOES is take the beer. This seems to be his only deal as a cop, to drive around on weekends and take beer from kids. And he keeps the beer. Some kids just go ahead and buy his brand, which is the Rocary Red Ale—fifteen dollars a case at any Ale and Mail. Isn’t there any crime to stop? How do you get a job like that—free car and free beer? Hey, I’ll sign up. As is, I’m glad I’m a senior and out of here next spring. He comes into our Halloween party last Saturday, the same night that there’s a maniac with a hook roaming all over Griggs, attacking kids, slashing at everything in sight, and he busts us, scaring everybody shitless and causing Ardeen Roster to break her nose running away in the bushes, and he writes me a ticket for it. Then, while some monster with one arm has practically taken over the whole town, he takes our beer, and there’s still about three and a half cases of Red Pelican—which you have to drive to Orpenhook to even find—so I’m forced to live the rest of my life picturing this civic wart pounding down our Pelicans every afternoon on his deck while he dreams up his next law enforcement strategy. Life is hard on the young, man, count on it.

  MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

  I’M GOING TO NEED to get my hook back. There’s a lot of work up here that requires two hands. We’ve got leaves to rake, tons, and a lot of other seasonal preventive maintenance—storm windows, snowplow prep work—and I can’t load and deliver firewood effectively without my prosthesis. I’d appreciate its return as soon as possible.

  MR. RICK ROYALTUBER

  CASSIE WAS NEVER even cranky all these years. I mean, of all people, she’s the last I’d expect to crack up. It was tough to send her off. It hurt me to put her up on the hill, but there it was, we couldn’t deny she’d lost control of her senses when she tried to harm Mrs. Narkenpie. How do you think I feel knowing she’s up there, locked up in a nuthouse night and day, wearing a straitjacket or what-have-you. But the doctor said it was for the best, and I believe him. These things, so many of them, are beyond ordinary folks.

  SHERIFF CURTIS MANSARACK

  INCIDENTAL TO MY call on the Royaltubers Halloween night, I had the Cramble boy pop open his trunk, and
I found the following:

  nylon rope, 100 yards

  hammer

  hatchet

  power screwdriver

  small grappling hook

  duct tape, two rolls

  canvas, 12x12

  flashlights, two

  pepper spray, two canisters

  bolt cutters

  Doritos, large bag, taco-flavored

  JILL ROYALTUBER

  I NEVER SAW his face. I never saw anything really. All I heard was some vibrations, I guess—maybe footsteps in the leaves, and then a kind of metallic clicking like scritch, scritch, and I was begging Jack to pull out, to just pull out of there. We hadn’t been doing anything. Jack had hurt his hand in the game against Bark City, and I had been massaging that. We were trying to relax.

  MRS. CASSIE ROYALTUBER

  I LOVED HOWARD from Moment Number One, when we met seventeen years ago, on the night of the construction of our high school’s homecoming float, which was a big ram. We were the Cragview Rams. He and I were part of the tissue brigade, two dozen kids handing Kleenex each to each in a line that ended at the chicken-wire sculpture, which slowly filled with the red, white, and blue paper. He was standing next to me and our hands touched once a second as the tissue flowed through us, my left hand, his right hand, which he would lose that spring, touch, touch, touch. He was the first tender boy I ever knew, and I was happy when he invited me to the homecoming dance. There is no need to explain every delicate step of that fall, Moment Number Two and Moment Number Three, except to say that when we gave our hearts, we gave our hearts completely, and everything else followed. It was the year I died and went to heaven for a while.

  Moment Number Four I discovered that I was pregnant, and even that seemed magical, until my father found out thanks to my jealous classmate, wicked Maggie Rayne, who also told him that Howard and I always met after school in the Knopdish junkyard. And it was there, Moment Number Five, that my father found us in the rear seat of an old VW van, which had been like a haven for us, and he yanked me out onto the ground and slammed that rusty door forever, or so I thought, on my one good thing—Howard Lugdrum.

  Howard, I heard, lost his arm in the “accident,” and my father moved us far away, here to Griggs. The Moments now go unnumbered. Before the summer was over, young, handsome Ricky Royaltuber was coming round, and I didn’t care, I did my part. I wasn’t even there, and I guess I’ve been away a long time.

  I didn’t care when Maggie Rayne moved to town with her fancy doctor, and I didn’t care that she went after and got Ricky. It freed me in a way. I can hardly remember who came and went in our house—Jill’s friends, neighbors, boys.

  But when I heard that the stars had relented and uncrossed and again lined up my way, that Howard had come to Griggs, working at this very loony bin in which I now live, I woke up, and in a major way. Afternoons, he comes in with a cup of tea, and we sit and he lets me hold it while we talk. These days are sweet days again, full of sweet moments. Even now I can see him through these bars, cleaning the windows of the van with the big circles of his left hand.

  JACK CRAMBLE

  I DON’T CARE who knows it now: I was going to spring her. Last year, when I was a nobody from nowhere, she was the only person in town who would listen. I was the new kid in town then, not captain of the football team, and she was always there for me. I told her everything. It was easier and better than talking to my own folks, and she was different, a woman, more woman than anybody I’ll ever meet again. I loved her and I loved the way she talked, putting my problems in perspective a, b, c, or 1, 2, 3. To keep seeing her I started dating that dipweed Jill, who has been nothing but a pain in the neck with all her “sharing,” “caring,” and “daring.” Such a girl. Such a needy little girl. Just thinking about her makes my skin crawl. Let’s go up to the Point, she’d say, so she could crawl all over me. I’ll tell you flat, she knows nothing about being a real woman like her mother. We went up there on Halloween after the game so I could scope out the fence and the approach to Cassie’s room. The plan was for midnight. Of course, Jill jumped me when we parked, and lucky for me the watchman came along or I’d have had to go all the way. As it was, her pants were already to her ankles, and he got a hell of a view of her bare ass in the window.

  But it hasn’t deterred me. Cassie and I are meant to be together, that’s clear, regardless of the age difference. I’m going back up there in a night or two and busting her out. Football season’s over, and it’s time to be me. My heart knows what to do, and it says, Scale the wall, break her out!

  MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

  SHE WAS HERE almost a year before she told me. Though I knew instantly we’d pick up where we left off, my heart steady through the years to the one woman I loved, Cassie waited to be sure it was still me, I guess, that a man with one arm could be trusted. So last week we were at tea in her room after her counseling session, and she looked at me funny and told me something amazing: I have a daughter! A daughter! Having Cassie back in my life after so long seemed almost too much for me to bear, and now … a child. Well, not a child but a young woman. And, Cassie told me, I could see her if I went by the north pine grove sometime after nine that night, Halloween. I’d see a blue-and-white Ford and my daughter would be in it! It was all I could do to get the afternoon hours out of the way; it was a waiting like no waiting I have ever known. My daughter! As it happened, I don’t know if I saw her or not, just somebody’s butt in the moonlight.

  SHERIFF CURTIS MANSARACK

  FALL IN GRIGGS is a good thing: the leaves change color and there’s football and the smell of the first wood fires. Halloween’s my last big chance to score a beer bust, and I almost never miss. I didn’t miss this year. Every year there’s a hook, sometimes more than one, and it takes a week or two for things to quiet down. I don’t mind the hooks; the waxed windows are worse. I’d trade the waxed windows for two more hooks. Soon it will snow and life gets real easy: there’s no cop better than old Jack Frost.

  PERSON BEHIND LAST TREE IN THE TWILIGHT

  AT NIGHT, AS I drift through these woods, I tap my hook from time to time against my leg and the feel of the hard iron spurs me on past fence and fern, past drooping branches and the cobbed underbrush. What I need is an older-model American car parked alone in the dark, one with a grip handle I can snare. The lift handles are no good, and everything anymore has the aerodynamic lift handles. I want a ’60 Fairlane or a ’58 Chevrolet, a car with bench seats big enough for two young people to get comfortable and tangle up their clothing and their brainwaves so that they forget the dark, the woods, the person with a hook, every Halloween, approaching through the leaves.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  NO ALPHABET COMES along full-grown. A period of development is required for the individual letters to bloom and then another period for them to adjust to their place in the entire set, and sometimes this period can be a few weeks or it can be a lifetime. No quality font maker ever sat down and wrote out A to Z just like that. It doesn’t happen. Getting Ray Bold right required five months, these last five months, an intense creative period for me which has included my ten-week escape from the state facilities at Windchime, Nevada, and my return here one week ago. Though I have always continued sharpening my letters while incarcerated, most of the real development of Ray Bold occurred while I was on the outside, actively eluding the authorities. There’s a kind of energy in the out-of-doors, moving primarily along the sides of things, always hungry, sleeping thinly in hard places, that awakens in me the primal desire toward print.

  And though Ray Bold is my best typeface and the culmination of my work in the field, I should explain it is also my last—for the reasons this note on the type will illuminate. I started this whole thing in the first place because I had been given some time at the Fort Nippers Juvenile Facility in Colorado—two months for reckless endangerment, which is what they call Grand Theft Auto when you first start in at it, and I was rooming with Little Ricky Grudnaut, who had only just c
ommenced his life as an arsonist by burning down all four barns in the nearby town of Ulna in a single night the previous February. Juvenile facilities, as you can imagine, are prime locations for meeting famous criminals early in their careers, and Little Ricky went on, as everyone now knows, to burn down eleven Chicken Gigundo Franchise outlets before he was apprehended on fire himself in Napkin, Oklahoma, and asked to be extinguished.

  But impulsive and poultry-phobic as he may have become later, Little Ricky Grudnaut gave me some valuable advice so many years ago. I’d moped around our cell for a week—it was really a kind of dorm room—staring at this and that, and he looked up from the tattoo he was etching in his forearm with an old car key. It was Satan’s head, he told me, and it was pretty red, but it only looked like some big face with real bad hair—and he said, “Look, Ray, get something to do or you’ll lose it. Make something up.” He threw me then my first instrument, a green golf pencil he’d had hidden in his shoe.

  It was there in Fort Nippers, fresh from the brutality of my own household, that I began the doodling that would evolve into these many alphabets which I’ve used to measure each of my unauthorized sorties from state-sponsored facilities. Little Ricky Grudnaut saw my first R that day and was encouraging. “It ain’t the devil,” he said, “but it’s a start.”

  I HAVE DECIDED to accept the offer of reduced charges for full disclosure of how and where I sustained my escape. In Windchime I had been sharing a cell with Bobby Lee Swinghammer, the boxer and public enemy, who had battered so many officials during his divorce proceedings last year in Carson City. Bobby Lee was not happy to have a lowly car thief in his cell and he had even less patience with my alphabets. I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t simply a car thief, that I was now, in the words of the court, “an habitual criminal” (though my only crime had been to steal cars which I had been doing for years and years), and I tried to show him what I was working on with Ray Bold. Bobby Lee Swinghammer’s comment was that it looked “piss plain,” and it irked him so badly that he then showed me in the next few weeks some of his own lettercraft. These were primarily the initials B and L and S that he had worked on while on the telephone with his attorney. And they are perfect examples of what is wrong with any font that comes to life in prison.