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 Mara 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 Mara'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 Mara. "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 Mara 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. Mara 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."

"The fellow before me," said Mara. "Did he leave any notes? On the customers?"

Something went over Strickland's face and was gone, like the shadow of a bird across a window.

"Virgil?" he said. "Virgil retired in March. Fine old fellow. Eleven, twelve years on the Line. Old school." He picked up a pencil and put it down again. "Between you and me, he'd got a little slow. A little set in his ways. Wouldn't carry the renewals, said they were more trouble than they were worth. Well, the company disagreed, and Virgil decided it was time to go home to Kansas and sit on his porch." He smiled widely. "You've got his prospectus there, as a matter of fact. It's the best one we had. Don't mind the pencil marks."

Mara opened the sample case again and turned the fat red volume over. On the inside of the back cover, in faded pencil, there were columns of figures, mileage and oil changes, and notes in a large, looping hand, and here and there two initials.

"Old school," said Strickland again, and looked at his watch.

By ten o'clock Mara was driving west out of Oklahoma City in a 1951 Studebaker Champion with no air conditioning and a canvas water bag hung on the grille, through El Reno and Hydro and Weatherford, over red earth and wheat stubble and the long, low swells of the prairie, with the windows down and the sample case on the seat and the hot wind smelling of dust and cut hay.

Route 66 ran straight and two lanes wide between telephone poles. Trucks came the other way with a slam of air. Every few miles a little run of red-and-white signs went by on posts at the roadside, each with a line of a rhyme about shaving cream. Grain elevators stood up out of the fields like cathedrals. The radio in the dashboard got a station out of Oklahoma City, then a station out of Weatherford, and between them a lot of static, and on the dial two little printed triangles at 640 and 1240, the CONELRAD marks, where in an air raid every station in America would go quiet and those two would tell you what to do. Near Hydro a farm stand sold watermelons off the back of a pickup truck, and an old man in overalls waved at the Studebaker as it passed, as if he had been waiting all day for someone to wave at.

Mara reached Clinton a little before six, with the sun low and red behind the town and her auburn hair stiff with road dust, and found the Redbud Courts on the west end of town where the route card said it would be: a row of eleven little white cottages joined by carports, with a neon sign shaped like a flowering branch, and a lawn somebody had watered that morning.

The night clerk was an old man with a green eyeshade and a pencil behind his ear, who said his name was Elmo Tubb and that he had been clerking at the Redbud since it opened in 1939. He turned the register round on the counter and handed Mara a pen.

"Name, home town, make of car," said Elmo. "I do the license myself. Folks get it wrong. You'd be surprised how many folks don't know their own license."

The register was a big canvas-bound ledger, ruled in columns: Date. Name. Street & City. State. Make of Car. License No. Unit. Rate. Mara bent over it to sign, and saw the entry just above the empty line.

Sun. June 1. V. Ostrander. Wichita. Kans. '53 Chev. Kans. 4417. Unit 7.

The handwriting was large and looping, an old-fashioned hand, the capital K in Kans. swinging out in a big loop like a lasso. The license number was in a different hand, small and square: Elmo's.

"Funny thing," said Elmo, watching Mara read it. "That fellow last night. Quiet old fellow, gray hat. Paid cash, gone before light. Asked me was the book salesman from Oklahoma City due in tonight or tomorrow." He took the pen back and blotted Mara's line. "I said I didn't know any book salesman. And here you are."

"Did he say what he wanted?"

"Didn't say." Elmo handed over a key on a wooden tag. Unit 8. "Just wanted to know when you'd be along."