OLD HAUNT

 …first in a series of stories from a recent road trip

My pal and I powered up the roughly paved road to the Paxton Hotel about mid-afternoon.  It would be my first real visit in about 65 years.  Or would it be a visit at all?

         As we set our Moto Guzzis on their side stands, a furious looking someone steamed in our direction from a nearby cabin.  

         “Just the man I was lookin’ for,” I said before he could utter a word.

         “Huh?”

         “Yeah.  You run this place?” I asked.

         “Security and stuff,” he said.  “Who wants to know?”

         I’d unzipped my bike’s tail pack and slipped out a copy Eden, Indeed: Tales, Truths and Fabrications of a Small Town Boy.  [Available by special order through your neighborhood independent bookseller – or through that online company that starts with an A.]  “Here,” I said.

         Whatever steam he had boiled up began to dissipate.  “What’s this?

         “A book I wrote about growing up in Chico. There’s a story in there [starting on page 48] about the time Dad stopped in here for a beer ‘cause he was tired of hearin’ me and my brother squabble in the back seat of the car.”  

         Security and Stuff crimped an eye and began thumbing through pages.

         “The barkeep served up Dad’s beer and then scared the crap out of me with a story about a ghost woman who sat in a rocking chair all night.”

         The man grinned.  “That rocker’s right there on the porch.” He pointed.  “Go take a look.”  

         I climbed up the stairs and snapped a picture or two.  Frankly, the chair didn’t look exactly like or old enough to be the one in question, but I’d been seven at the time of my other visit and memories can be fuzzy.  

         “Would you like to see what they’ve done to the place?”  I wondered who ‘they’ was and how many ‘theys’ there’d been in the past six decades.

         The entrance was not as I remembered.  No shaft of light illuminated a tired wooden floor or tattered rug when he opened the door.  I didn’t see the upright piano or the moth-eaten American flag.  The filmy curtains were gone and the windows seemed to close, which they didn’t do before.  It seems a lot of work had been done and redone to freshen things up.  The bar was polished and clean – no cigarette butts filled ashtrays – and the kitchen looked commercial and modern.  

         “If you’ve got a minute, I’ll show you the widow’s watch.  You wanna see it?”

         “Sure!”  

         I was expecting to head upstairs, but instead squeezed through a narrow portal and clumped down a darkened set of stairs.  The walls had no interior plaster or sheathing, just rough two-by-fours with light slipping through cracks in the exterior planking.  The air smelled of dust and mildew aged a century or more.  

         As we clambered down, he explained: “Sorry to be so gruff up there.  This is private property and I just ran off five guys and a gal who seemed pretty high on something.  Didn’t understand the term private.  Got into quite an argument.  Made me kinda edgy.  Sheriff can’t respond too quickly in this neck of the canyon.  Distance and all.”

         We pushed through a narrow passage with a grubby, littered floor with poor footing.  Opening a door that he must have located by feel alone he said, “Here’s where they found that rocking chair.”  Then he pointed at a pair of windows that didn’t quite close.  “That’s where she was lookin’ out.”

         I stepped around a weary settee that might have survived a trip around the horn and peered through the dusty, wrinkled glass.  “You can’t see the tracks from here.  Aren’t they up the hill?”

         “Yeah. It doesn’t make sense, does it?  But this is where they say they found what they think was the old gal’s chair.”  I again wondered about ‘they.’  

         He opened a door and now sunlight flooded in.  We stepped outside finding ourselves at the basement of the grand old building.  The Feather River rushed by in the ravine a hundred or so feet below us, its current offering an age-old whisper.  Although we could see Highway 70, the old Western Pacific Line was nowhere in sight.

         He thumbed through the book.  “So you grew up in Chico?”

         “Yep.”

         “So did I.  Chico High.  Class of ’79.”  He offered a bit more bio.  Father was a lawyer.  He, himself, flew fixed wing transport until he retired a few years back and moved home.  Came to do this for lack of anything better.  Enjoyed the place and the job; not so much having to run folks off.

 

The Paxton Hotel is now used for special occasions like weddings and such.  Rooms aren’t available to passers-through, but we were told we could stop by any time.

         As my pal and I puttered down the road back to the highway, I wasn’t sure I’d seen the actual chair – at least it wasn’t the one I remembered – or visited the actual window where the ghost lady would rock at midnight “Waitin’, just waitin’ for her true love to return.”  

         But I was sure I’d visited an old haunt.

 

© 2024

Church of the Open Road Press