Paper Moon Motel

The Southwest district office of the Hollister & Tasker Company occupied the second floor over a shoe store on Northwest Twenty-Third Street in Oklahoma City, and at eight o'clock on Monday morning, the second of June, 1958, it already smelled of cigar smoke, floor wax and ambition.

Lyman Strickland, district manager, came round his desk with his hand out before Elias was through the door. He was a big, pink, shining man of about fifty, in a seersucker suit and two-tone shoes, with a Rotary pin in his lapel and a laugh that arrived a half-second before anything was funny.

"The new road man!" he said. "Sit down, sit down. You want coffee? Imogene, coffee for the new road man." He pumped Elias's hand. "Two years door to door in the Chicago suburbs, Mr. Tasker tells me, and you never once got thrown off a porch. That right?"

"Once," said Elias. "In Skokie. There was a dog."

Strickland laughed as if it were the funniest thing he had heard all year, and sat down behind a desk the size of a rowboat. On the wall behind him hung a framed map of the Southwest district, with the counties outlined in red, and a long blue ribbon pinned across it from Oklahoma City to the Arizona border with California, following the line of U.S. Route 66.

"The Sixty-Six Line," said Strickland, waving at it. "The best road territory in the company. Eleven hundred miles of highway, and every mile of it full of families who want their children to grow up smarter than the Russians." He leaned forward. "You read the papers. Last October the Reds put a basketball in the sky that goes beep. In January we put up one of our own, and thank God for it. And every mother in America looked at her children and thought: are they ready? Are they going to know what they need to know?" He spread his hands. "That's us. That's the Lodestar. Twenty volumes, every one of them a door into the space age."

The kit was on a side table, laid out like a surgeon's tray. A sample case of scuffed brown leather, holding the prospectus: a single fat volume in the red buckram Heritage binding, with specimen pages from every letter of the alphabet and a color plate of the planets. Three pads of order forms. A pad of fifty forms on pale green card headed LODESTAR ANNUAL RENEWAL & SERVICE AGREEMENT. A stack of lead cards in a rubber band, coupons clipped from magazines and mailed in by families who wanted to take the Lodestar Space Age Family Quiz. And a second, thinner stack, each card stamped with a red R.

"R-cards," said Strickland. "Renewals. Old customers of the man who had the Line before you. They bought the set, now they need the Annual and the research service, or their encyclopedia goes out of date while the Russians are getting ahead." He tapped the green pad. "The renewal is one signature. Takes two minutes. Fifteen dollars to you, every single one, on top of your commission on new sets. Renewals first, my friend. That's the bread and butter."

Last of all he handed Elias a folded card, printed on both sides in small type. The route card. It listed one motor court for every night of the next two weeks, from Clinton, Oklahoma, to Kingman, Arizona, each with the company's commercial rate and the words mail held. Elias read it down to the bottom, out of habit. The last line read: Kingman, Ariz. — Paper Moon Motel, Andy Devine Ave. (Mrs. F. Ostrander, prop.)

"Stay where the card says," said Strickland. "The courts know us, the mail finds you, and the office can always reach you. A road man who wanders off the card is a road man I can't help." The laugh came, a half-second early. "And I like to help."