“Okay. Sounds like a tangled mess, but I’m on board. I suppose we should discuss salary, stuff like that.”
Karen nodded. “Nellie’s willing to pay you a thousand dollars a month, and I’m willing to match that. Will that do? Good. Plus room and board. Question. How much dope to you smoke? Be honest.”
“I don’t keep track, but it probably averages once a day.”
“Well, here’s another condition you’ll have to agree to. I can’t have a stoned manager, a stoned innkeeper, or a stoned entertainer. You get stoned on the job, and you’re out of here the next morning. You’ll have afternoons off from one to four. You may get stoned during that time slot, but come four o’clock, you’re straight. Agreed?”
She offered her hand. Casey reached out and shook it. “Agreed.”
Karen stood up and said, “Come on. I’ll show you to your room.”
“My room?”
She nodded. “That’s part of the deal. Room and board. Besides, you need a place to stay tonight. It’s too late to drive all the way back to L.A.”
Casey rose to his feet. “Okay, but I didn’t bring a change of clothes.”
She grinned. “You’ll find that clothes aren’t always all that necessary here. And I have a toothbrush you can use. Don’t worry, it’s brand new. Okay? Follow me. You’ll be in room ten, on the second floor.” She led the way up the stairs. “It’s not the largest room in the hotel, but it’s the only one with a desk, which you’ll need. You’ll also find a terrycloth robe in the closet and a couple of towels in the chest of drawers. So, after you settle in, you can cross the driveway to the bathhouse and have a long, hot soak. I’ll have Diana light a couple of lanterns. Here we are, room ten. I made the bed with fresh clean sheets this morning. Your toothbrush is on the dresser.“
“You had this all planned out in advance?” Casey asked.
“It was my sister’s idea,” Karen answered, “but she said I could be the one to offer you the job. Or not, if I didn’t like you. But I do like you. Nellie was right for a change. You’ll be perfect for this job.”
———
Diana donned her robe in the staff dormitory and carried a towel across the driveway to the bathhouse. The evening was warm and still, and the darkening sky was slowly loading up with stars. As Karen had asked her to do, she lit the two carriage lanterns mounted on the walls of the bath house. Then she removed her robe and hung it on a peg, kicked off her sandals, and lowered herself into the hot, silky, sulfur-fragrant water of bath number one.
She waited. Karen hadn’t told her to wait, but Diana had a hopeful hunch that a wait would pay off.
It did. Here he came, exactly what she was waiting for. She lowered herself farther down in the dark water, trying to hide from view for another minute or two while she watched the handsome piano tuner strip, hang his robe on the peg next to hers, pulled off his tennis shoes, and turn to face her way, standing relaxed, full-frontal-naked in the lamplight.
“Hello,” Diana said, trying to sound like Lauren Bacall, settling for Betty Boop.
Casey jumped like startled thief. “Yikes!”
“Come on in. The water’s wonderful.”
Casey slipped down into the bath and sat a few feet away from Diana, facing her. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said. “I…um…”
Diana scooted on her butt through the distance between them, until their left legs rested against each other. His face was perspiring, and his shy smile twitched. “Yes? You um what?”
“I appear to be tongue-tied,” Casey admitted.
“We don’t have to talk,” Diana said. “How about a foot massage?”
“Are you offering or requesting?”
“Both.”
She felt his hand lift her left foot, and she shifted again so that they faced each other directly across the steaming bath. She took his right foot in her hands, and they went to work, pulling toes, squeezing heels, rubbing soles, and kneading ankles, calves, and even knees.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh what?”
“Oh, that feels delicious. This is a lovely way—”
“To spend an evening,” Diana softly sang.
“Can’t think of anything I’d rather do,” Casey sang back, just as softly.
“You’re not tongue-tied anymore?”
“I’m never tongue-tied when I’m singing.”
“Let’s tie our tongues together,” Diana offered, and she wondered where all this courage was coming from. “I mean…I mean—”
“Come here, you irreplaceable you,” he crooned, and she floated across the water and into his embrace. They wrapped each other in their arms, held and hugged, skin to skin, chest to tingling chest, and then their mouths met and opened, and their tongues got acquainted and played together for as long as Diana could keep from squirming for joy. When their lips parted into two big smiles, she felt his hand find her breast.
“Do you feel my heart?” she asked him.
Casey took a deep breath, as if he were on the verge of an announcement, but his voice was squeaky and small. “Diana, I think we’d better stop now before things get out of hand.” Saying that, he released her breast. Cleared his throat.
Diana took a deep breath. Her voice was suddenly husky. “So you’re going up to your room now? Room ten?”
Casey stood up. “I think I’d better.” What a…magnificent…man he was, standing there, about to leave. Just standing there.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll let you go. But first, answer me one question.”
Casey said, “Shoot.”
Diana said, “Would you like some company?”
———
The next morning, Casey awoke late and alone in well-rumpled sheets. He felt more relaxed than he had in a great while, and more alive. And stickier. After stripping his bed, using the bathroom, washing his face, and brushing his teeth, he slipped into his Bermudas, his aloha shirt, and his tennis shoes, picked up his towel, and left the room. He trotted down the stairs and across the drivewayto the bathhouse, where he soaked long enough to clean his skin and settle his spinning mind.
When he returned to the hotel, he walked to the back and looked into the kitchen, where he found Diana studying a recipe in The Moosewood Cookbook. She looked up and smiled, then walked across the kitchen and into his arms for a kiss.
“You slept through breakfast,” she said. “What can I fix you? Eggs? French toast? Granola and fruit, or—”
“Nothing, thanks. I have to hit the road. I overslept.” He cleared his throat and added, “Last night was glorious!”
“Breakfast would have been pretty nice, too. Aren’t you hungry? Can’t I fix you a cup of coffee?”
“No, really. I have to go.”
Diana turned away and said, “So this is it? That’s all, folks?”
“I’ll be back October first,” Casey told her. “I’m moving in.”
She turned back, her eyes wide, her lips in a happy whistle, where Casey kissed her twice more before leaving the kitchen.
Casey walked to the front of the hotel, stopping in the lounge to pick up his tool box, then on to the lobby and out into the warm September morning. He went around to the driveway on the side of the hotel, where he had left his yellow VW bug. He stashed his tools in the trunk, and opened the door on the driver’s side.
“Casey, wait up a minute!”
It was Karen Hope, calling from the vegetable garden. She dropped her trowel and hurried over to him.
“Sorry,” he told her. “I meant to say goodbye, and thanks so much. I had a splendid time. I really did.”
Karen nodded. “I know you did.”
“I look forward to working with you.”
“Listen, you,” Karen said. “There’s one more condition I’m putting on this job.”
“Oh?”
“Listen carefully, lover man. Diana told me this morning how the two of you made whoopee last night. She said it was ‘heavenly,’ I think was the way she put it.”<
br />
Casey scratched his beard-stubbled chin. “So it was. Is there a problem with that?”
“Not necessarily,” Karen said. “Not necessarily, but potentially. Listen. Diana Pearson is the kindest, most giving person I know. Diana is compulsively generous and loving. God, that girl loves everybody.”
“I believe you. But what’s the problem?”
“Diana is also terribly, terribly fragile.”
“She—”
“Shut up and listen. I love that girl as if she were my own daughter. I’ve seen her hurt, and I don’t want to see her hurt again. Casey, my friend, hear this. Just be careful. If you hurt Diana, you’ll be out of a job, and if you break her heart, I will crack your nuts.”
5. One October Day
Wake up. The warm mud spoke to him. It tingled. He could feel motion. The earth was thirsty, excited. Fall was coming.
Nqong rose from his pool of goo and stood on a rock. The spot was gently lit by the morning sun, which came in sideways through the trees. The forest air was cool and dry, heavy with the leftover scent of a long, dry summer. He felt the mud harden on his skin and suck at his pores. He faced the sun and curled his toes into the thick bed of gray dust that covered the rock.
He lay on his back on the rock, staring up between the trees into the early morning blue. A hawk circled high in the sky, crying, crying. Nqong closed his eyes and waited. When he felt the mud completely dry, he slowly moved his body. He stretched in all the thirty-six ways, seven times. The mud cracked away from him and crumbled under his body.
Before he had finished his stretches, the spot of sunlight had moved from the rock, and there was a chill in the air. Fall was coming fast. Nqong stood, brushed the last crusts of dry mud from his body, wrapped his yellow garment about him, and walked through the forest to the water house. Fall. Time to prepare the jars.
He lit the lamps and shed his canvas wrap. It was warm in the water house. He took a deep breath through his nose, feeling the sulfur fumes massage his nares, his sinuses, his throat, his lungs. He walked to the back of the water house and into the cave, feeling the pipes. Fine. He returned to the waterworks. He checked the glass tubes for their level and their color. He counted the jars on the shelves. He cupped his hands over the vats and washed his face with each of the waters. He licked his lips. He opened the taps one by one and drank a sip from each. He checked the temperature of the main spring. The rate of flow. The taste. He grinned. Here comes fall, he thought.
Nqong loved fall.
He adjusted the valves until he had them just right. Then he put on his garment, blew out the lamps, and left the water house. It was time to go to town.
———
“Does the water feel warm to you this morning?” Diana asked Casey. “Warmer than usual?”
They were alone in the bathhouse, sitting side by side in the first bath, looking out toward the east, where the sun had just risen above the tall pine trees.
“I don’t understand it,” Casey said. “The sun’s rising later, the day’s chillier than usual, and yet the water’s warmer. Doesn’t make sense.”
“It has to make some kind of sense,” Diana said.
“But you’d think….”
“Don’t think.” Diana shifted in the water and lay back to float, belly up. Her body drifted, her long blonde hair like a cloud around her head and shoulders. As she floated over Casey’s legs, he stopped her gently and supported her, one hand below a thigh, one below the small of her back. Looking down at her smiling face, her breasts, her belly, the faint line of hair that traced from her navel to her thick thatch, he felt himself grow warm, felt his penis, which was already pointing in the right direction, reach up to tickle Diana’s butt.
She opened one eye. “Don’t get fresh,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Unless of course you mean it.”
He smiled down at her and gave her body a gentle shove, and she floated away, feet first, her hair giving his body one more wispy thrill as it passed by. He told his penis to behave, and after a while it did.
Mornings were a relatively new experience for Casey. He had always known about mornings. The world is waiting for the sunrise, the bright golden haze on the meadow, and all that. But it had been a long time since he had witnessed an actual morning until he moved to Hope Springs. But now that he had been there for a couple of weeks and was settling into a routine that had a lot to do with daylight, he found the mornings beautiful.
He and Diana would meet in the bathhouse for the first bath of the day, soaking quietly for half an hour in the rich water the same temperature as their own blood.
Sweet, sweet Diana. Why couldn’t Casey just relax and fall in love with her? But he couldn’t. For a romantic lounge singer who believed all the lyrics to the love songs he sang, he was a failure at meaningful love, and his brief flings usually ended up hurting someone. Casey did not want to hurt Diana. He dared not. Karen had made that emphatically clear. And so he and Diana, whom he liked so terribly much, had managed to cool down to the status of good friends, which left them both feeling not quite thrilled.
Nevertheless, this was a good life, and the day was off to a good start. The morning was quiet and cool. Diana held his hand. The water was perfect. From his perch on the top of the hotel, Clyde the peacock crowed to greet the morning sun. That was usually the loudest event of the day, and Casey was used to it.
Then something with a busted muffler roared into their morning and rattled to a halt on the gravel driveway that separated the bathhouse from the hotel. Casey and Diana, rising quickly from their bath, heard a truck door slam. As they were reaching for their robes, they heard a double blast of gunshot, which bounced against the canyon wall and echoed, echoed, echoed.
“Jesus Christ!” Casey gasped. “What was that?”
“Renner, probably,” Diana said.
“Probably?”
“That’s his name. Nick Renner. He’s a big pain in the ass. I’m going to go get Karen.”
They put on their robes and left the bathhouse together. Out on the driveway, a tall, wiry man was leaning into the back of a pickup truck, securing a shotgun onto a rack with two other firearms.
“Hey,” Casey said. Diana passed behind the truck and went on into the hotel.
“Who the fuck are you?” the man told him.
“My name’s Casey. I live here.”
“Renner. I hunt here.” He wore boots, baggy jeans, and an oil-stained red tee shirt. His hair was long, black, and greasy. He was half a foot taller than Casey, and Casey was a tall man.
“I don’t think so,” Casey told Renner. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.”
Renner said, “You don’t think so? This is dove season, haven’t you heard?”
“Haven’t you heard,” Casey answered, “that this is private property?”
“You own it?
“No.”
“Me neither. We’re even. You live here, I hunt here.”
“What were you doing shooting off a gun right next to our home?” Casey wanted to know. He looked up to the roost on top of the hotel. Clyde was nowhere to be seen.
“Letting you know I’m here,” Renner said. “Didn’t want you to think I was trespassing.”
“How about letting me know you’re not here,” Casey said.
“How about kissing my ass.”
“Renner!” From the steps of the hotel, Karen strode down in jeans and a yellow work shirt, her fists clenched. “I’ve told you never to fire off guns around here. People live here. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Renner lit a cigarette and threw his match on the ground. “Tell this fag in a bathrobe I get to hunt here.”
“That’s over, Renner,” Karen told him. “No more hunting. No more senseless slaughter. Find someplace else.”
“I don’t see no ‘Posted’ signs,” Renner said. “I been hunting this property since I was a kid. So I recommend you and your hippie friends wear red if
you’re going to be out in the woods in dove season. Or deer season. And far as I’m concerned, it’s always open season on coyote, wild pigs, and condors. And peacocks.”
Renner flicked his cigarette, still lit, onto the lawn, climbed into his truck, and started the engine, which blared like doomsday. Then he shut it off and climbed out of the cab. “I gotta take a dump,” he said. “Can I use your bathroom, or would you rather I use your bushes?”
“Go ahead,” Karen said. “In the hotel. Then you’re out of here.”
Nick Renner turn his back on Casey and Karen and clomped up the steps to the front door of the hotel. As they watched him go in, Karen took Casey’s hand and squeezed. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll call the sheriff if I need to, but I think he’ll behave.”
———
“I swear to god I’m going to kill that peacock,” Nellie said. “He wakes me up every morning at the crack of dawn. Every morning of the world.”
“That’s his job,” Karen said, glaring at Nellie across the circle. “That peacock is my friend,” she added, “so don’t consider killing him if you value your own life. Which reminds me, your boyfriend’s back. He said he was hunting; I suppose he was hunting for you.”
“What are you talking about? God these meetings are early. Diana, honey, is there any more coffee?”
“Don’t treat Diana like a servant, Nellie,” Karen scolded. “You can make your own coffee for God’s sake.”
“It’s okay,” Diana said, getting up. “It’s made. Anybody else?”
Casey, Nellie, and Nels raised their hands. Diana left the library and walked back to the kitchen. Morning meetings were different now, that was for sure. They used to be held in the carriage house, starting at eight, and the whole community would meditate silently for half an hour before saying a word. Then there would be emotional clearing for as long as it took, then sharing of appreciations, and then business, if there was any business.
Now it was all business. They met in the library now, because Nellie lived in the carriage house, and they met at nine, because that was as early as Nellie would agree to get up. As for meditating, clearing, and sharing, Casey wasn’t into it. He said all that touchy-feely was probably wonderful stuff, and he recommended that it be done on a volunteer basis from eight to nine every morning, but once nine o’clock came business should be business, because there was a lot of work ahead to get the hotel and the bathhouse ready for winter. The community agreed to that, and within one week attendance at the early morning mediation diminished to Karen and two or three others, and even they had skipped the last couple of mornings.
Hot Springs Eternal Page 6
