🎧 267: The trip to Chacallit ...

THE TRIP TO CHACALLIT was an adventure. Any motor trip of that time that went much beyond the streets of a fair-sized town was something of an adventure, one that was likely to include among its highlights plenty of dust and mud, flat tires, running out of gas, leaving the road to avoid surprise obstacles, discovering roads not indicated on any map, and failing to find roads clearly indicated on every map. Herb and Ben’s trip included all of these, but it also included long stretches of pleasant rural scenery and some dazzling early-autumn days. They spent nights in farmhouses, in barns, and in fields, and when they reached Chacallit at last, muddy and tired, Ben was prepared to spring for the cost of a room in a hotel.
     They took a room at the Chacallit House, Chacallit’s only hotel, more a rooming house, really, which stood right on River Road, not far from the building in which Lorna worked. The dining room of the Chacallit House was one of those spots that Henrietta Drechsler, director of the Society for the Preservation of Small-Town Values, had in mind when she wrote:

     There is, in every small town, one place, most often a coffee shop, sometimes a bar, where the movers and shakers gather, where the town officials, businessmen, and shopkeepers eat breakfast or lunch and exchange bits of gossip, rumor, speculation, innuendo, ideas, and hunches. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the town is actually run from this spot — let’s call it the luncheonette — but it is certainly true that many a policy has its origin there, that many careers begin and end there, and that the luncheonette is the forum within which new arrivals, people and ideas alike, are subjected to a terrifying, inquisitorial scrutiny, usually in absentia.

     Ben knew, from the ripple of attention that he and Herb occasioned when they passed the entrance to the dining room on their way to the desk, that the Chacallit House dining room was such a place. After he and Herb had registered, settled in their room, bathed and changed, he said to Herb, “Now I don’t know who exactly we should see about buying coarse goods, so I want to let him find us.”
     “How are you going to do that?” asked Herb.
     “Well,” said Ben, “I’m going to start by spending a considerable amount of time drinking coffee and eating sandwiches in the dining room downstairs. That’s the place to get to know people in this town.”
     “How do you know that?” asked Herb.
     “Oh,” said Ben, “I can tell by the look of those fellows who were sitting there when we came in. Those are the fellows whose pants have shiny seats. They do most of their day’s work right there in that dining room, keeping track of what’s what and making sure that what’s what is what they want to be what. Do you follow me?”
     “Well — ” said Herb.
     “You can bet,” said Ben, without offering any further explanation, “that they spent a half hour or so engaged in speculation about us after we came in, and you can bet that by now they know from the register where we’re from, and you can also bet that the dining room will be quite full this noon in the expectation that we’ll take our lunch there.”
     “And will we?” asked Herb.
     “I will,” said Ben. “I think it might be best if I handled this part of the business myself. You’re — well — you’re a little young, Herb.” He grabbed Herb by the scruff of the neck and shook him as he used to when Herb was a boy. “I’m a little better acquainted with the ways of the world than you are, for one thing, and for another a lot of men in business don’t think of a young fellow as being — well — ready.”
     “Ready for what?” asked Herb.
     “Well, ready to do business,” said Ben.
     Herb shrugged and said, “All right. What do you want me to do?”
     “I want you to set out to sell books,” said Ben. “It will keep you busy, keep you out of the way, and show that we’ve got a good cover for selling coarse goods. You’ll probably make some money for the trip home, too.”
     While Ben spent time in the Chacallit House dining room, drinking coffee, eating stew and sausages and potato salad, and chewing the fat, Herb sold Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf from door to door. It took Ben a day to establish himself as a pleasant fellow traveling with his nephew to teach the boy the book business, to help him find his feet. In the afternoon of the second day, a Chacallitan, Axel Schweib, shot his cuffs during a conversation with Ben, as if gesticulating to emphasize a point, displayed in so doing a really remarkable pair of erotic links, and then went on to deliver a pitch for Ben’s taking erotic links and studs on as a sure-to-be-profitable sideline. Ben expressed interest, with reservations. A meeting was arranged with Luther Huber for the next day.
     In the meantime, Herb had found Chacallit fertile ground for book sales. So successful had he been that he kept selling nonstop, knowing that everything he made would buy more coarse goods. On the second evening, he worked right through dinner, stopping at houses along the road that wound upward from the town. Rain began to fall. He thought of quitting for the day, but he was doing so well that he said to himself, “I’ll make one more stop, at that house just ahead, the one with its windows glowing.”
     It was the narrow house on Ackerman hill, where Lorna sat in the parlor with her parents.

In Topical Guide 267, Mark Dorset considers Small-Town America from this episode.

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