Four and Twenty Beds

A few minutes later Grant strode into the living room, where I was reading a magazine Mrs. Clark found in one of the cabins.

"A joke, eh?" he said grimly. He was giving me that withering look again, and this time I had a peculiar feeling that I deserved it. "Well, if it was a joke, your peppy little girlfriend was the one who played it. Both of the wool blankets are gone from the beds in 16!"

The influx into Banning of people with asthma, bronchitis, sinus trouble, arthritis, and common colds continued into the spring. Cultivated sweet peas were appearing in the wake of the almond and peach blossoms, wild flowers were spreading themselves extravagantly over the whole desert, and the fields behind our motel were splashed with color. Some careless giant had trailed dirty fingers across the snowy mountain tops. A pair of plucky birds were busily building a nest in the rear of garage 16, almost directly above my washing machine. The days were so breathtakingly lovely that it was hard to believe that less than ninety miles away there were fog and cloudiness, and people with persistent coughs and sniffles.

Nature's springtime orgy made us feel as though we should do a little to keep up with her. So, the first time Oliv Snyder came around, we made a deal with him.

Oliv Snyder was a gardener, obviously, and–so he said–an ex journalism teacher.

The latter epithet I doubted. I never heard him saying "you was" or "I seen," and David never caught him splitting an infinitive, but somehow I couldn't visualize him lecturing to an absorbed audience on the intricacies of slinging the English language around.

He was a short, moody little creature with white hair which curled at the ends. He wore a cap with a frayed, mothbeaten brim, and his elbows and knees, and various other portions of his anatomy and underwear, were visible through the holes in his clothing. His theme song, patterned after that of Snow White's seven dwarves, must have been "Hiccup while you work," for on the several occasions that he worked around the grounds of the motel he devoted fully as much energy to his gusty staccato hiccups as to his gardening.

Although he himself didn't seem to be much of a bargain, his proposition was.

"Five rosebushes–hic!–the very finest Talisman, to be planted on out to the highway and divide your property from the motel next door. And then all in front of the motel to the highway planted in calendulas. All for–hic!–ten dollars. You just clean the–hic! weeds out and get the land ready and I'll–hic! do the rest."

Two days later Grant had cleared out all the puncture vine, Russian thistles, and the other defiant weeds that never let up their efforts to regain the tiny percentage of territory they had lost to civilization. The wild flowers that bloomed with such mad splendor on the fields behind us stayed bashfully back where they couldn't be seen from the highway, and added nothing to the front view of our place.

Oliv Snyder appeared at the appointed time, his car loaded with boxes of plants, rose bushes, and a box of rich mountain-dug dirt which had its particular merit, he assured us, in the fact that it was "hundreds of thousands of years old."

Personally, I doubted that it was any older than any other dirt.

I raked away a few loose weeds while Mr. Snyder began digging holes in the rocky, hard ground. He paced out the distance between the holes so that the rose bushes would be properly spaced; then he placed the bushes in the holes, and poured the ancient dirt around their roots. While he worked he talked, letting drop occasionally a four or five syllable word that sounded affected and unnatural.

"Even though I am a very well educated man, and have had several books published, I have–hic!–a few little idiosyncrasies," he confessed, darting his bright, wrinkle-surrounded eyes at me.

"You're kidding!" I protested. "Surely you're too normal, too well balanced for anything like that."

"No," he said seriously. "Of course I am–hic!–exceptionally well balanced, but about even me there are–oddities, shall we say?"

"Yes, let's," I agreed.

Flailing his arms, the little man threw himself upon one of the newly planted rose bushes, trampling it with his feet. Or so it appeared. I was about to yank him back indignantly when I realized that his tattered shoes were adroit in avoiding the bush.

"I'm just stamping the–hic!–stamping the dirt down," he explained. "The roses like it better that way. Hic! They like things just so. They have their own little idiosyncrasies, you know."

"Even the well-educated, well-balanced ones?" Then, afraid that sounded too flippant, I said, "But what are your idiosyncrasies?"

Oliv seized a hoe from his car, leaned upon it, and said, "Look at me. I'm–hic!–the man with the hoe, stolid and stunned, brother to the–hic!–the ox."

I must have looked rather vague, for he explained, "That's from one of the poems I use–hic!–to teach my journalism classes."

He began chopping at the ground. "One of my peculiarities," he said, "is that I can't resist buying the bottles of things the–hic!–apothecaries sell. Those rows and rows of neatly labeled bottles on the shelves in drug stores–hic–they do something to me. I don't know what it is exactly, but practically all the money I earn doing gardening–hic–and odd jobs goes into the apothecaries' pockets. You ought to see my domicile–it's just like being in a–hic!–a drug store. Every shelf and drawer is loaded with bottles of pills and tablets and–hic!–capsules."

"Well, that's–interesting," I remarked, not being able to think of a more satisfactory adjective. "Sort of a hobby."

"But that isn't the sum total of my idiosyncrasies," he said, his face, under its thatch of white hair topped by his frayed cap, turning a mottled pink. He stopped, thrusting a small plant into the trench he had dug.

"No, I–hic!–regret to say, that isn't all," he went on. "It's–well, it's women. I can't resist them either."

I clicked my tongue sympathetically. "Lots of men are like that," I comforted him.

That night, though, I awoke and sat upright in bed. Oliv Snyder couldn't resist bottles of pills, so every drawer and shelf in his house was loaded with them. He couldn't resist women, so …

I was so overcome with curiosity about his home life that it took me an hour to get back to sleep.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

GRANT GREW VERY tired of the conscientious customers who made a point of delivering the keys to one of us personally before leaving. It was annoying enough for us to have to interrupt breakfast or a bout with the razor or the dishpan to answer the bell and accept a key; but it was infuriating to be called out of bed unnecessarily in the wee small hours. Most of our customers, of course, sensibly left their keys inside the cabin, or sticking in the keyhole of their cabin door; but for the maddening few who insisted on seeing the keys safely home, Grant bought a silver mailbox and nailed it just outside the office door. He was in such a hurry to get the thing finished, now that he had actually started, that he didn't even take time to put exact, measured lettering on it. He simply dipped one of David's slender paint brushes into a bottle of black ink and wrote in shaky letters on the face of the mailbox "Please return keys here."

With a big safety pin Grant secured the front of the mailbox, so that people wouldn't pull it down and let the keys fall out.

Practically all of our customers put their keys dutifully into the little slot in the top of the mailbox when they were ready to check out, but there were always a few who were bewildered by the whole setup. This type would study the mailbox for a long time, read and reread the words on the front of it, ponder the safety pin, and peer into the slot to see whether there actually were any keys there–and sometimes, even after all these preliminaries, would ring the bell and hand one of us the key.

One morning I was dusting the Venetian blinds in the office when a plump woman in cerise slacks, with a hat that looked like a ring mold of feathers, minced toward the office door. A key was dangling from her hand, and I moved away from the window to watch her unobserved. She didn't look very intelligent, and I wondered how long it would take her to figure out how to dispose of the key.

She studied the mailbox, the words painted on it, and the safety pin, for several minutes. Then she moved her arm upward determinedly–and just as she did, Donna, in the living room, let out a piercing shriek.

By the time I had dashed into the living room, located Donna, whose head was stuck between the davenport and the wall, extricated her head and secured for her the ball she had been chasing, the cerise-slacked, feather-hatted woman was gone.

I was curious, though, to see whether she had put the key into the slot, so I stepped outside to look in the box. I was reaching for the safety pin so that I could let down the flap when I noticed something hanging from the pin. It was the woman's key!

There are people who can get into all kinds of difficulties over such an apparently harmless and simple an object as a key. Nearly every day some brilliant soul, after opening the door of his cabin and deposting one suitcase (and his key) inside, locks himself out when he starts back to get the rest of his belongings from his car. I have so thoroughly learned the expression that accompanies this predicament that when anyone wearing it comes into the office I hand him a master key before he speaks, and say "This key will open it."

Then there are the people who look at their key tags upside down. The key to cabin 2, upside down, can be mistaken for that of cabin 7, and vice versa; and, of course, 6 and 9 are always easy to confuse. Every once in a while a customer who has been assigned to cabin 7 comes to the office in a huff because he can't get into cabin 2.

The thirteen keys, one numbered for each cabin, were somehow the tangible symbol of our work. They were woven into the very fabric of our lives. Early in the morning, before daylight, Grant usually got up to see if anyone had left a key and checked out. If there were an empty cabin, he cleaned it up and rerented it.

It was the keys which absorbed Mrs. Clark's first attention every morning when she came to clean the cabins. A quick perusal of them told her which cabins were ready for her to go into. It was the remaining keys we surveyed each night as a quick way of knowing how many vacancies were left. Frequently a key that a customer had carried away by mistake would turn up in our post office box, having been dropped in "any mailbox" in accordance with instructions stamped on the metal tag attached.

And it was one early afternoon while I was hanging up the keys, after Mrs. Clark had finished cleaning the cabins and Grant had left to take her home, that there occurred one of the most frightening episodes of my motel career.

We kept the keys hanging on hooks on a large board placed under the office desk, where customers could not see them and where it was necessary to stoop only slightly, to slip one of them off its hook.

Just as I finished hanging the last key the office door opened and a pale, rabbit-like little man walked in. I smiled to myself at the whimsical notion that he seemed out of place in skin and cheap, striped shirt and trousers. He should have been clothed in soft white rabbit fur. He was probably, I thought, the type who would prove almost too timid to ask for a cabin.

I was to learn, though, that he wasn't too timid to ask for a great deal more than that.

"Yer husban' home, sis?" he squeaked, sounding like a smart-alecky, frightened child.

"No, he isn't," I confessed, "but he'll be back in about fifteen minutes. If you'd care to wait–"

"That's all I wan'ed t'know," he said, his nose twitching like the nose of an Easter bunny Hellwig had given me when I was ten years old.

"Gimme yer money," he said, standing directly in front of the desk and staring at me with terrified, pink-rimmed eyes.

"My–my money?" I repeated.

And now I was the one who sounded like a frightened child.

There was a hundred and fifty dollars in the house, about sixty of it in the desk drawer–too much money to be bluffed into handing over to a–

And then I saw his gun.

He held it in one trembling white hand.

My mind was suddenly a maelstrom, offering up weird, useless suggestions for tricking or attacking the man, reasons why I should or shouldn't hand over every cent quietly, and churning with totally unrelated thoughts and ideas–with a bit of a review of my past life thrown in for good measure.

I wouldn't give him the money. I'd pretend not to understand and he'd get exasperated and go away, to come again some other day, that was that old nursery rhyme I used to sing or something. The telephone, that was it, the telephone, if I could get to the telephone I could call the police and then stall him till they got here. I'd say excuse me, I have to make a phone call, and then … His eyes. The rims are red, like he'd been crying, or rubbing them, or hadn't had enough sleep. They're funny eyes–scared to death. I'm scared to death too. Maybe I should give him the money. When people are scared and upset they're apt to pull the trigger. Maybe I should do what he wants. After all, it wasn't the brave-looking tortoise who finally won the race, it was the hare, even if he did look pretty rabbity and scared. He had a gun, after all, and who wouldn't win a race if he was carrying a gun? Or wait–wasn't it the tortoise who won? While I was trying to figure this out I saw far below me, as though through a mist of clouds, a pair of hands stuffed with money.

I watched these hands curiously as they thrust the money into one of the trembling white hands across the office desk. The trembling hand grasped it convulsively, thrust it into a pocket, and then fluttered nervously around its owner's twitching nose.

"Gimme the rest of it, sis," the little man piped. His nose was wiggling harder than ever now, the muscles around his mouth and eyes were jerking, and he looked as near to a nervous collapse as I was. The more he twitched, the worse I felt. If that twitching should get as far as his trigger finger . . .

It isn't a pleasant thing to look into a narrow tube of metal, at the back of which lies potential oblivion. I was relieved and numb when the little man put the gun into his pocket. Apparently he was in such a panic to get away that he wasn't going to argue or wait for more money.

I poked my head cautiously out the office door when he had gone, my terror ebbing. I hoped that I could get his license number.

His car, though–toward which he loped and bounded like a jackrabbit–was parked facing east, in front of and across from the Peacock, so far away that I couldn't read his license number. I did a little loping and bounding myself, certain that in his frenzy to get away he wouldn't notice me–until, as he was getting into the car, I was close enough to read his license number.

34X768.

Three-four-ex-seven-six-eight! 34x768. I repeated the numbers to myself, I whispered, sang and chanted them as I ran back toward our motel. I mustn't forget them; 34x768–34x–

"Pardon me, ma'am, could you tell me how far it is to Riverside?"

"Thirty-four ex seven sixty-eight miles!" I panted, brushing past the tall soldier who was blocking my path.

I rushed into the office, hunted frantically for a pen, and wrote the license number down on a registration blank. Then I telephoned the police department.

I was just hanging up the receiver and mopping the perspiration from my forehead when Grant returned. Abruptly all my resourcefulness and courage melted away, and I flung myself howling into his arms.

"A rabbit held me up and took all of our money!" I wailed.

It was about ten minutes before Grant could soothe me to a point where he could get a coherent explanation of what had happened.

The police caught the terrified thief before he was twenty miles out of town. When they stopped at the motel so that I could identify him, and to check on the money which had been stolen, I was busy writing the story of the holdup for the Banning paper.

Grant, of course, didn't know how much money had been in the drawer; and I had been in no condition to count the money as I handed it to the frightened desperado. I didn't know how much had been in the drawer because Grant's airy carelessness about money, once earned, had led me to put cash in and take it out from the drawer with as much nonchalance as his, and as little regard for amount. I was pretty sure, though, that it was in the neighborhood of sixty dollars that the little man had taken; and that was the amount they found on him. They gave us a little advice on keeping better track of the money we took in, which left me with a momentary glow of triumph, and an excuse for being on the delivering instead of the receiving end of one of those maddening, superior, meaningful glances–but I knew that neither the advice nor the glance would have any effect on Grant.

My career as a part-time newspaper reporter was thriving, and without my ever finding it necessary to go out looking for news. Highway accidents, which were an old, old story to us by now, occurred frequently in front of our motel. It was usually easy for me to get the names, addresses and ages of the occupants of the involved cars while the police were asking their routine questions. I simply wrote the facts, dramatizing them a little, and the editor of the paper accepted them eagerly.

The frequent wrecks, and the fact that in two of them the cars had come right off the highway onto our land, made me very glad that the front of our motel was sixty feet from the highway. A hundred and sixty feet would have been safer! And after a truck, struck by a car when it was trying to make a left turn into Moe's restaurant, rammed into the garage of cabin 16–which corresponded to the children's bedroom on the other side–I rearranged the furniture in their room, in such a way that neither David's bed nor Donna's crib was near the side of the wall that was closest to the highway.

Watering the calendulas and the roses that Oliv Snyder had planted in front of the office was, I felt, one of the most hazardous jobs connected with running the motel. The flowers in the tip end of the rock-enclosed triangle were only about six feet from the edge of the highway. And six feet from the edge of a highway where busses hurtle past and trucks roar by and there is no speed limit, and where cars are continually cutting in and out of traffic to go to the cafe or to the bar or to one of the motels, and where wrecks are a common occurrence, is a locality that not even Lloyds of London would care to insure against anything, at any premium.

But it wasn't only highway accidents as prospective items for the Banning paper that clamored for my attention. Things happened all the time, with our motel usually the geographic center. There was the civic news picked up from gossip around the motel and at meetings of the motel owners' association. There were the miscellaneous odds and ends about fires, sicknesses, promotions, and so forth, that drift naturally through a busy, public place like the office of a motel. And there were the trivial "personals" so dear to the heart of a country paper editor. I had developed such a nose for news that I couldn't let any of these pass by without dashing to the typewriter and slamming out a few paragraphs about it. If David so much as mentioned that a certain playmate of his had to hurry home from school because an uncle from Michigan was coming to visit, I had to find out about it, even if it meant tracking down the child's parents through his address at school, and asking them point-blank if they had a visitor–and if so, how about a few details. At first I fought against this compulsion to track down every potential however-minor story. But, for hours after I conquered the urge to follow a certain lead, I would feel a gnawing sense of guilt, a feeling of having left something unfinished. It was a familiar feeling; I have experienced it many times after failing to turn back a page of a magazine to see whether that ad read "You must try Whippersnapper's Mange Medicine" or "You should try Whippersnapper's Mange Medicine." I've experienced it after failing to count the exact number of stairs I climb in a given flight. I always experience it if, after idly making creases in one side of my skirt, I neglect to make an equal number of identical creases in the opposite side of my skirt. Psychologists call it, I believe, a compulsion neurosis.

Whatever it is, I've got it.

I always give in finally and go back to count the stairs, check on the exact wording of the ad, or belatedly crease my skirt in the required manner; and I always wind up by tracing the news item to its lair. Sometimes I wish I had never heard of newspapers.

Tyrone Power had once stayed at the Peacock, and I waited eagerly for him, or some equally famous personage, to spend a night with us, so that I would have a really worthwhile story for the paper–one that would make Banning's citizens sit up and gasp–and, incidentally, give the Moonrise Motel a little good publicity. I turned over in my mind the few famous people I had met, wishing I knew them well enough to be able to write a casual note suggesting that they take a vacation in Banning. I had interviewed Margaret Lee Runbeck and Rupert Hughes, before we left Los Angeles, but of course neither of them would remember. And I had met Dick Powell one Sunday afternoon. I was introduced to him by Virginia Gregg, a radio actress I was interviewing who was working with him on that afternoon's broadcast of "The Rogue's Gallery." Dick Powell, I'm sure, will always remember the day–not because of meeting me, but because of the fluff he made. Closing the drama in a narrated summing up of the afternoon's story, he let the radio audience in on the fact that the villain had been convicted of "robbery and murdery."

A green coupe drove into our driveway with a swish of gravel. I sighed. I felt almost too tired to cope with customers. Grant, with his usual lack of system, had started the big job of washing all the soiled bedspreads, doilies and dresser scarves–forgetting that he had an appointment with the dentist in half an hour. Remembering the appointment just in time to keep it, he left me to finish the job he had started.

The spreads, scarves and doilies were hanging on the line now. I opened the office door and walked wearily out toward the green coupe.

The middle-aged driver reached onto the seat beside him for his hat, put it on quickly and removed it with a courtly gesture. His narrow brown eyes were amused.

"Mr. Hawkins!" I exclaimed. My first impulse was one of joy at seeing him again, but then I remembered the blanket he had made me think was stolen, and the apple-pie bed he had made for the new occupants of his cabin the day he left on his honeymoon.

Miss Nesdeburt's plump little body was already halfway out of the car. She hugged me, tears running down over the fine wrinkles around her eyes.

"Ma chere amie!" she exclaimed, dabbing daintily at her eyes with a lace-edged hanky. Her fair skin was flushed with emotion. "It's simply terribly good to see you again, and to be back at the sweet little motel where I first met my Herbert! We just thought we'd drive out this way for old times' sake! After all, it's only a few miles from Burbank, n'est-ce pas?"

When we were all seated in the living room Mr. Hawkins caught my eye almost guiltily and said, "I apologize deeply, madame, for any unpleasantness that may have occurred during my stay at your charming motel. I seem to recall something about–ah–a blanket, wrongly supposed to have been stolen, and–ah–"

"An apple pie bed?" I refreshed his memory.

"I'm sure," he said gallantly, "that you are too sweet and fair-minded a young lady to hold grudges. Let's let bygones be bygones, shall we?"

"I'm willing," I laughed. And he held out a big, strong-looking hand for me to shake.

I shook my head, instead. "I'm willing to let bygones be bygones," I said, "but that doesn't mean I have to trust you. I'm afraid if I shake hands with you I'll either find a spider in my hand, or glue all over my fingers, or maybe you'll try some kind of a jiu-jitsu trick on me. We'll be friends–but at a distance, if you don't mind."

Mr. Hawkins laughed and sat down again. "All right–but you must at least let me thank you for the cockroach you sent me. You'll be happy to hear it's in perfect health, and we've made quite a pet of it. We named it 'Ermintrude.' A neighbor is taking care of it for us today while we're away from home."

Miss Nesdburt was quivering with eagerness to get into the conversation.

"There's so much to tell you, I simply don't know where to begin," she said. "We've sold my car, and we've moved into Herbert's lovely little place in Burbank, and we had a long, wonderful honeymoon. We camped in the mountains near Big Bear Lake for a few days–we got a tent and Herbert put it up all by himself. He's so strong and wonderful. One night we woke up and heard something scratching at the flaps of the tent. We were miles from anywhere, and we were simply terrified. I thought maybe it was one of the big bears the lake was named for. It was pitch black outside, no moon or stars, and we got out of the tent and started to run. One shouldn't become so frightened, of course, but anyway we ran–for miles, it seemed, and all the time this bear, or whatever it was, was right behind us. And then, of all things to encounter in the mountains, we ran up against a fence! It was really dreadful, with the big old creature gaining on us and ready, for all we knew, to kill us the moment he caught us. We scrambled over the fence as best we could, with dear Herbert risking his life by helping me over. It took us quite a while to get across, and we were all scratched up by wire and frightened half to death. The animal had apparently given up in the meantime, because we didn't hear him any more. We didn't dare to go back to our tent, though, so we stayed out there until morning. We were half frozen."

"Well, that was quite an adventure," I exclaimed. "When it was daylight, did you climb back over the fence and go back to your tent?"

Mr. Hawkins and Miss Nestleburt exchanged rueful glances.

"No," she laughed, one of her tiny white hands fluttering up to adjust a blue brooch at her neck. "We didn't climb over the fence when daylight came. We simply walked around it. You see, it was just about five feet long–a remnant of an old fence that had apparently been torn down for years."

When I could stop laughing I said, "What about the animal that had been chasing you? Did you ever find out what it was?"

"No–o," Miss Nestleburt said. "But we looked at the tracks, and Herbert said they couldn't have been made by anything else but a cow!"

"Speaking of cows, my dear," said Mr. Hawkins, brushing a speck of dust off one neatly pressed, striped trouser leg, '"Why don't you give her the present we brought for David? And then we must leave."

"Mais oui! I must go out to the car and get it! I almost forgot all about it!" exclaimed Miss Nestleburt. "Where is David?"

"Grant went to the dentist, and he was to get David from school as soon as he was through. They should be here any minute," I said.

Mr. Hawkins sprang to his feet and held the door open for Miss Nestleburt. Then he closed the door and sat down again.

"Ah, my dear madame," he said to me, "marriage is indeed wonderful. Since Miss Nestleburt did me the great honor of becoming my wife, I have been the happiest man alive."

His brown eyes were full of laughter, as they had been every time I had seen him.

"You never struck me as being a particularly unhappy type," I said.

"No, how true that is, madame! I'm full of joie de vivre, as my dear wife would say."

Just as Miss Nestleburt tapped lightly at the door and came in again. Grant drove up with David. They came in behind her, David making as much noise as a calliope.

"I have a present for you, little David!" Miss Nestleburt said; and she handed David what she was carrying–a large, soft black cat.

David was ecstatic. "Is it really mine? Can I really keep it?" he demanded.

I eyed the cat's bulging sides askance. "I think it's about to calve," I whispered in an aside to Grant.

"Yep, you can keep it," Grant said good-humouredly. "We'll quick fix it a bed in one of the garages."

"Is it a boy cat or a girl cat?" David asked.

"A girl cat, dear," I replied drily.

Miss Nestleburt's blue eyes sparkled as she watched David's joy in his new pet. "Let's go out now and see where the cat wants his bed to be," David cried, pulling a dried piece of gum off his cheek; and Grant and Mr. Hawkins followed him outside.

"Such pretty black, curly eyelashes the boy has!" Miss Nestleburt exclaimed.

I was about to ask her where she got the plump cat when I remembered that there was something else I was curious about.

"A long time ago Mr. Hawkins did something that embarrassed you–one of his practical jokes, I suppose–and you said you'd tell me all about it when you'd known me longer. Do you remember?" I asked. "And do you think you've known me long enough now?"

Rosy color flooded her fair skin, and I saw that she remembered what I was talking about.

I knew I shouldn't have brought up the subject again, but I reasoned that I would suffer more from curiosity if she never told me than she would suffer from embarrassment if she did.

Her bright blue eyes darted around the room, to avoid meeting mine.

"Yes, I remember. Of course I've known you long enough. It's just that one has difficulty in talking about such things …"

"I suppose he played a rather crude joke on you?" I prodded.

"No, it–it wasn't a joke. It was something he gave me. It was–oh, dear, I don't know how to say it. I suppose he meant well, but it was really a most embarrassing gift . . ."

She clasped and unclasped her tiny hands. "It really shocked me, especially since it had been only a few minutes since we had met. You see, he gave me a little undressed–that is, actually nude–ooh!" Miss Nestleburt gasped. Her eyes, in their uneasy jaunt around the room, had caught sight of the bookcase and what was on top of it–the perfume atomizer Mr. Hawkins had given me.