Ol’ Jim Teague, probably about seventy-five years old, was the overnight desk clerk. Came on about 9:00 p.m. He’d sit behind the front desk for about an hour, doing nothing, then move to a comfortable chair nearby where he would continue to do nothing until he dozed off.
He offered little in the way of security, but this was back when we didn’t worry a whole helluva lot about security. We didn’t have surveillance cameras, gated communities, home security systems, microwave movement detection systems, car alarms, card scanners to gain entry to work, guns on our nightstands, and politicians and security firms that tried to scare us into voting for them or buying something. Robbery of course was always a possibility, if not the probability news channels would have us believe. I don’t buy free-floating fear. I never bought The Club, that antitheft steering wheel bar I’ve seen on an old orange Pinto with a Blue Book value of an open bag of Cheetos.
One night while Teague slept, Jim Murphy and Noble Needham picked up the cash register, carried it downstairs, then woke up ol’ man Teague and asked him for change for the cigarette machine. (A pack was thirty-five cents, and boy did people bitch about that.)
“Get it yourself,” Teague mumbled.
“The register’s locked,” Jim reminded him.
Teague rose slowly and fumbled for his keys as he shuffled over behind the desk. He found the key but…no register!
“Jesus Christ!” Teague yelled. “Where’s the goddamned register?”
“You’re in deep shit,” Jim said, shaking his head. Then he and Noble burst out laughing.
* * *
Nights at the front desk were usually quiet, but did have their moments.
A young couple was spending their wedding night at the lodge when midway through it the bride came sprinting down the hall and through the lobby screaming “I married a monster! I married a monster!”—apparently not the abusive variety but the kind who makes nutty requests. As the groom checked out the next morning, alone, he was asked the standard question: “How was your stay?”
* * *
Then there was the Night of the Mad Hungry Man Last One Standing No-Holds-Barred Missouri Death Match.
Teague and I were sitting in the lobby when a loud, burly, belligerent drunk crashed through the front door, yelling “Restaurant open?” It sounded less like a question than a demand.
“No,” Teague answered, with what may have been a bemused what-a-stupid-question lilt. “It’s been closed for way over an hour.” I half expected Teague to add: “Stick around, it reopens for breakfast in eight hours.” Teague did have that grumpy old man way about him.
“We’re hungry!” the man hollered.
“Not open,” Teague said curtly.
Hungry Man, as he forever came to be known in lodge lore, grabbed frail, old Teague by the collar, pulled him to within an inch of his face and shouted, “How about now?! Now is it open?!” Then he shoved Teague hard against the wall.
I don’t like bullies, never have, a half century before it became a cause. Also, I have a temper, having always been told it’s because I have red hair. My high school buddies remind me of the time we were walking down the street and were confronted by some toughs, one of whom pulled a knife. I responded by pulling my jacket open, sticking out my rather unimpressive chest, and challenging our would-be assailant: “Go ahead! You haven’t got the guts to use it!” I guessed correctly. (Thank you, Jesus.)
Aunt Janet displayed some of her gift shop wares in the lobby, among them a large, rather heavy two-by-three-foot green plaster statue of Buddha sitting sideways on an elephant.
Unbeknownst to Hungry Man, who was still occupied with Teague and with his back turned to me, I picked up that symbol of peace, love, and harmony, and brought it crashing down on his head. This substantially loosened his grasp of Teague’s collar and sent Hungry Man slumping to the floor, stunned and momentarily unconscious.
Someone, I think it was Pete, yelled, “You killed him!” But Hungry Man stirred, came up in something of a kung fu pose, then hit the floor again before crab-walking sideways on all fours out the front door.
The next morning, Ed asked Pete, “What the hell happened here last night?”
And Pete replied: “A man came in, asked if the dining room was open, and Billy hit him over the head with a statue.” Thanks, Pete.
* * *
Occasionally, another old timer, Bud, an old friend of Teague’s, would stop in late in the evening for a cup of coffee and some reminiscing.
He’d grown up in Linn Creek, a small town nearby that had to be moved uphill or torn down, lock, stock, and barrel when the dam was built and the water came in.
He said everything between 628 feet above sea level and the 660 feet of the lake’s surface had to be demolished by fire or dynamite: houses, barns, schools, trees, churches, bank, gas station, store. All that remained were tree stumps and piles of broken concrete. “Cemeteries, too, yeah,” Bud said. “Some of the cemetery crew quit.
“People cried, watching their town go.” He said the town of about four hundred was close knit. Families intermarried. Everyone knew everyone else. “If there was a lost cow wandering through town, everyone knew whose cow it was.”
He said many people had their houses pulled up the hill to the new Linn Creek or the new town of Camdenton. He added that as the water was rising, lawyers were still working feverishly on land deals with local folk. “They’d taken over the biggest house in town for their offices and when they moved it uphill the lawyers just stayed in there working.” Bud chuckled.
Teague asked him if he’d tell me the story about his grandmother. And he said he’d be happy to.
“I was fourteen,” he said. “My folks said for me to go over and check to see how Grandma was a-doin’,” he recollected. “As I was a-walkin’ up to her house I seen a man climbin’ out of a truck who I was pretty sure I’d seen before, someplace. He was wearin’ dirty clothes. He was with another fella who was wearin’ a clean white shirt and a necktie and shiny shoes. They walk up the front steps and shiny shoes knocks on the door. Grandma answers it and the man says, ‘Mornin’, ma’am,’ he says, tippin’ his hat, all polite-like, like he was sellin’ Bibles or somethin’. ‘I’m with the ’lectric company.’
“‘Figured,’ she says, talkin’ at him through the screen door.
“‘Well,’ he says, ‘water’s risin’ and we got to get you folks safely out of here so’s you don’t drown.’
“Here he is, actin’ like he’s here to rescue people when he’s part of the cause of the whole thing. The flood.”
“‘Might as else come on in then,’ Grandma says. Man says he can’t stay but a minute because the two of them are right busy. And they were all of that.
“The dirty clothes guy stays on the porch. Inside Grandma is tellin’ the ’lectric man I’m her grandson. He says his name and offers his hand, but I don’t take it, just give him a little nod.
“He opens his case, takes some papers out, hands ’em over to Grandma, and starts spoutin’ a bunch of mumbo jumbo about what she has to do to get the money for her house. But we can’t really follow what he’s tryin’ to say. Had the feelin’ he liked it that way.
“Grandma tells every bit of our family’s eighty years in this house—since before the war between the states. Weddings at the house, and menfolk comin’ home from wars, and the big ol’ oak tree in the front yard that she’d watched grow practically from an acorn.
“She shows ’lectric man a photograph of a man she says was my great-granddaddy, an Osage Indian, with long black hair. He wasn’t none too happy about white folk a-comin’, and he let ’em know it, Grandma says. The Osage was fierce.
“Anyways, after about a half hour of family history, there’s a rappin’ on the door and the dirty clothes guy steps inside. He’s been waitin’ on the porch, spittin’ tobacca juice over the railin’, tappin’ his foot, and swattin’ at flies. He makes no greetin’s and grunts to ’lectric man: ‘Gotta get to it.’
“‘So we got to leave now, I reckon,’ Grandma says.
“‘Water’s risin’,’ ’lectric man says. ‘Got your things ready?’
“‘We have everthin’ boxed up cause we knew you was a-comin’. We heard what you’re here to do. Most of our things are in the wagon.’
“’Lectric man helps with the loadin’, I guess to show he was halfway human.
“Grandma steps out the front door for the last time, wearing her Sunday-go-to-meetin’ dress. She pays no mind to what’s goin’ on around her, not lettin’ anythin’ bother her, the way she’d had to do her whole life, carryin’ on with a stiff upper lip, through floods, droughts, two children dyin’. She won’t give the ’lectric men no satisfaction.
“She wraps a red shawl round her shoulders, raises her chin, and walks slowly down the steps like a queen. She takes my hand to pull herself up onto the wagon seat, her royal coach.
“She looks down at the fella in the dirty clothes, sayin’, ‘Could you do us the kindness of waitin’ ’til we’re over the rise before doin’ what you come to do?’
“‘Yes ma’am,’ he replies, tippin’ his cap.
“‘Let’s get a-goin’,’ she says, and I snap the reins. Tears come to my eyes and I ain’t ashamed to say it.
“‘Be a man now, boy,’ Grandma snaps. ‘Don’t look back.’
“I think the fella in the dirty clothes probably didn’t have to do much, just spread hot coals from the fireplace on the wood floors. Probably all that was needed.”