Four and Twenty Beds

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AN AMBULANCE WAS to take Mrs. Watkins to the hospital in Loma Linda, twenty miles away. A few phone calls put in by the doctor at Mrs. Watkins' request had ascertained that Eugene's "Gramma in Frisco" would come the following day to get him and the car, and that arrangements could be made for the boy to stay at the hospital with his mother this first night.

The ambulance would arrive in about an hour. In the meantime, Mrs. Watkins and the baby were sleeping, the doctor had gone home, and Grant and I were sitting on the davenport.

"Aren't you proud of me?" I asked, for the twentieth time. "But what delayed you so?"

"Dr. Adams' car broke down, when he was about a block from his home. He was working on it when I got there. He quick got into my car and we were halfway here when we ran out of gas. We weren't near any service station, so I had to walk about a quarter of a mile to get gas."

"If he had just started out walking from his house it wouldn't have taken him any longer to get here," I remarked.

I picked up the medical book, which somehow had found its way from cabin 3 to our living room floor, and put it into the bookcase.

"I never did get to the part in there about how to deliver babies," I observed. "I must look it up sometime."

When David and Donna were in bed I went back to cabin 3 and peeked in the door. Mrs. Watkins and the baby were both awake now; they lay against the white pillow regarding me with big, beautiful, identical pairs of dark eyes. Eugene was sitting stiffly on a chair.

"Cripes, honey!" Mrs. Watkins exclaimed, motioning me into the cabin. "Ain't it a fit, me havin' the kid in a motel! Wait'll I tell Rodney, he'll bust a gut laughin'! An' look at the kid. Ain't he a smart one? Wouldn' you swear he was lookin' right at you?"

Her huge arm curled protectively around the red, wrinkled thing beside her.

"Cripes, I think the whole thing hurt you worse'n it did me!" she exclaimed, as I sat down in a chair beside her bed. "But you sure did great, honey, and I wanna thank you."

I watched her big, moist tongue flapping as she talked. Her body, under the blankets, was almost as mountainous as it had been before.

"What are you going to name the baby?" I asked.

"Honey, I just been lyin' here thinkin' about that. His middle name is gonna be Moonrise. Yessir, Somethin' Moonrise Watkins. That's the least I can do to show how much I appreciate what you done."

"Well . . . that's very sweet of you," I said. "It really isn't necessary, but if you really want to–"

"Oh, I wanna, all right; An' I'm gonna, honey, so just forget all about it. I can't figure out what I oughta give the kid for his first name, though."

Mrs. Watkins withdrew her teeth and stared at them dreamily.

"Why not name him Rodney?" I suggested. "Oh–no, you've probably already got one named for your husband."

Mrs. Watkins jammed her teeth back into her mouth excitedly. "Cripes, no, I never thought of it." Her sudden laughter shook the bed, and I turned my head slightly so that it wouldn t hurt my ears. "I bet that's what he's been gettin' at all these years–he wanted a kid named after him, but he wanted me to do it without him suggestin' it! He ain't never said nothin', but I'll bet that's it! He's been around plenty an' he coulda been more careful if he didn' want more kids, but we just kept on havin'em! Well, Cripes, this'n'll be Rodney, and then maybe I can quit havin' 'em an' rest for awhile!"

My last glimpse of Mrs. Watkins was twenty minutes later, when two husky, white-clothed young men were hoisting her bulk, on a stretcher, into the ambulance.

"Lots of luck with Rodney Moonrise!" I called, watching Eugene clamber awkwardly in beside her stretcher.

Her dark eyes flashed. "Thanks, honey, thanks so much for everything! I hope I didn' scare you too bad!" She, and the stretcher, shook with thunderous laughter. When the doors of the ambulance clicked shut she was waving her teeth at me in a cheery gesture of farewell.

Grant and I seldom got away from the motel together. But toward the end of March we put the dependable Mrs. Clark in charge of the motel and the children, and took an overnight trip to Los Angeles. A group of our friends were going grumon hunting, and it sounded very appealing.

Grunions are a particularly stupid kind of fish that run for a few nights in the full of the moon during certain months. They swarm up in the surf, coming so close to the beach that a lot of them get stranded on the sand when the wave they came in recedes. They come near to the beach to lay their eggs, which has always seemed rather foolish to me, since years of sad experience should have taught them that a bunch of grunion-happy human beings will be waiting to catch them.

On our way back to Banning the next morning, through Riverside and Colton, we came through miles of highway lined solidly with big, round, sturdy orange trees. The trees were white with bloom; the long stretches of highway were banked solid with fragrant walls of orange blossoms. As we came into Banning there were little boys stationed at intervals of three hundred feet along the side of the highway, selling bouquets of immense white and purple lilacs, and brilliant California poppies.

After a brief and beautiful spring, while it was still spring everywhere else, suddenly in Banning summer had begun again. When I stood out at the clotheslines behind the cabins hanging up clothes, the dried wild grain and weeds in the field whispered and rustled in the strong, persistent wind. The mornings and evenings, before and after the midday assault of the sun, were as lovely as only mornings and evenings on the desert can be. I loved standing, after dark, leaning outside against the corner of the office nearest the highway, where I could see in all directions. The warm, sweet wind blew off the desert, playful, never ceasing. The neon motel and cafe signs, some blinking and some glowing steadily, studded the night with a glittering and colorful beauty, making the whole effect that of an enormous big-city theater marquee. Trucks thundered by, outlined with red lights that were like jewels, and always there were the pairs of bright flashing eyes gliding steadily along the highway from east and west.

The streaks of snow remaining on Mt. San Jacinto and Mt. San Gorgonio were putting up a losing battle with the power-drunk sun. The black widow spiders, after their winter disappearance, were beginning to show their shiny black bodies here and there again, and the newspaper carried warnings that there were rattlesnakes in the fields. California poppies and brilliant wild flowers were still spreading themselves through the fields and the desert itself, and the cacti proudly showed their rare blooms–orchid-like, exotic flowers. All the orchards were at a height of thick green splendor.

The desert area lost its appeal as warmer weather set in, and business began a gradual decline.

Even on a dull night, though, a stranger to the vicinity might have thought traffic heavy enough to justify us in hoping to fill up; what a stranger wouldn't know would be that every night, every motel owner must take a little jaunt in the car from one end of town to the other, inspecting all the signs to see if any have their "no" uncovered; straining to see into the garages, in order to know how many customers the motel in question has hooked. The parade of motel owners alone, if they all happen to go on their tours of inspection about the same time, is enough to make the highway look busy.

Grant is one of those who can't rest until he has made his nightly tour of the town's motels. And he calls me curious!

We didn't try so hard to spot "quickies" when summer approached, except on weekends, because we were sure to have one or two vacancies anyway. During the winter, Grant had made a regular practice of setting the alarm for about three a.m., and getting up to see if any of our customers had checked out. Whenever there were vacant cabins he cleaned them up, turned on the sign, and had the cabins rented again within half an hour.

The extra sleep he got by not having to get up in the middle of the night to clean and rerent cabins was canceled by the fact we could no longer go to bed at nine or ten with the "no vacancy" sign on. As long as our sign proclaimed that we had a vacancy, the doorbell might ring at any hour of the night. Grant had to renew his old custom of spreading his clothes at intervals between the bed and the outer office door, so that he could pull them on as he hopped toward the office when the bell rang.

During the winter, when we were turning away twenty or thirty cars a day, we had often commented that it was too bad there was no way of preserving some of this surplus for the lean summer months ahead. My pet idea had been to put all the extra winter applicants for cabins into a gigantic refrigerator, thus preserving them on ice until we were ready to use them. Now that we were having vacancies again, we could open the door of the huge refrigerator each day, take out the desired number of customers, and fill our cabins up.

Grant wasn't amused by such whimsy, though. To him, life was real, life was earnest; and the fact that we still owed forty-five thousand dollars on the motel, payable at seven hundred dollars a month, customers or no customers, might have had something to do with it.

I refused to do any more worrying. We had paid off all that we had borrowed to make the down payment on the place, and in the lush winter months we had saved enough to carry us through till the next winter if we didn't take in another cent until then. And business now was bad only by comparison to winter's business; actually, if we took in every month of the year what our present monthly average was, we'd be paying off the mortgage rapidly and having money to spare.

"Air conditioning . . . that's the answer," Grant said one night as I was getting into bed. He sat down on the foot of the bed, drumming his fingers against his knee. He was eating a thick sandwich, and I delicately looked away from the conglomeration of its ingredients.

"The answer to what?" I asked.

"Business. Not one motel in Banning has air conditioning."

"They don't need it. That perpetual wind keeps the place cooled off. 'Air-conditioned by Nature.' That would be a good slogan for one of your advertising signs, wouldn't it?"

"Uh," he said absently. "Mm–hmm. What's the first thing people think of when they get in off the hot desert?"

"A glass of beer?" I asked drowsily

"Of course not! A cool place to sleep."

"Well, that's just what Banning's got."

"Sure it has! But they don't know it. They take it for granted the nights in Banning are just as hot as nights on the desert. They look for 'air conditioning' signs, and they don't see one. We don't need air conditioning, but people don't realize it. If we'd get air conditioning once, and a big neon sign to let them know we've got it, they'd come pouring in here all summer long."

With business slowing down, we resumed our old practice of renting doubles as singles whenever it was necessary. If, after all our singles were gone, a couple appeared who wanted a single, we locked the back door of one of the doubles (so they wouldn't think they were getting twin beds for the price of a single, and use both beds!) and rented them the front room as a single. If it were a man alone, however, we didn't bother locking off the back room, as there wasn't much danger that one man would occupy more than one bed. Once, however, we got fooled; after renting a double cabin to a man alone, we found in the morning that both beds had been slept in. We never were able to decide which was more likely–that he had gotten up in the night to go to the bathroom and, becoming confused, had returned to the wrong bed; or that he was an exceptionally delicate and finicky person whose esthetic senses demanded a change of linen during the night.

We began getting "day sleepers" again–people who traveled the desert by night, to avoid the intense heat, and came into the motel at dawn or before to sleep in the daytime. We couldn't help laughing to ourselves whenever such customers had small children in the car. We knew, even if it hadn't occurred to them yet, that their children had been dozing in the car all night, and would be refreshed and ready to greet the new day with the leaps, yells, and fights that distinguish children from the young of any other species. Any sleeping the adults might accomplish during the daylight hours would be purely coincidental.

The bigger and healthier and noiser our own children grew, the more cramped and tiny our living quarters seemed. Expansion, though, appeared to be almost impossible. To expand in a northward direction, by cutting a door in the wall of our living room that would lead into cabin two, would be the simplest method of adding two rooms, but it would also be very expensive, chopping down our income by about one thirteenth. To expand south, to the front, would be illegal. All the buildings for about half a mile on each side of us were set back sixty feet from the highway, and none were permitted to be built closer to the highway. To go west would be to protrude into the wide, inviting driveway that was supposed to lure customers in, and would destroy the symmetry of the motel. To go east, toward Featherbren's motel, would be futile, since our land extended only four feet past the sides of the buildings. "There are just two directions left," Grant said. "Down, and up. A cellar, or a second story."

A second story seemed to be our best bet, but it would be expensive to add a couple of rooms upstairs, and it might necessitate strengthening the present ceiling and roof in order to make them support the burden. We decided to file the idea away in our minds for future consideration.

We alleviated the space situation to some extent, temporarily at least, by getting bunk beds for the children and moving our bed into their room. That left the living room as a living room, not a combination playroom, living room and bedroom. The bunk beds were along one wall and our bed was along the opposite wall, with the foot of it near the east window that overlooked Featherbren's new lawn and his row of oleanders. Between his cherished, thrice-daily watered lawn and our window was the four foot expanse of land that the building code demanded should be left at the sides of the land when the buildings were constructed.

Grant finally got around to carrying out a plan we had made whereby Donna wouldn't be underfoot all the time, and whereby she could go outside in the sunshine without constant supervision. He fenced the whole four foot strip, from under the bedroom window clear along the cabins from number 2 to 6. Out in the field behind the cabins, he let the four foot strip widen into a fenced yard about twenty feet square. Later, when Donna was big enough to need a larger yard, but not yet big enough to be trusted to run around loose, he would fence our entire field behind the cabins for the children to play in.

The biggest complication now, of course, was that there was no back door through which Donna could go into her four-foot runway. Grant could have taken out the east window and substituted a door for it, but it would have been a lot of work and expense.

"She can climb up on the foot of our bed," I suggested, "and then–"

"And then what? Jump out the window?"

Grant has a low opinion, not only of my capability, but also, I'm afraid, of my common sense. I suppose in a way his attitude is justified: he is so capable, and his ideas are so good, that my feeble little brain children seem to him very poor by contrast. However, this time I felt that I had a good idea, and I elaborated upon it, in spite of the sense of helpless inferiority he always inspires in me.

"Well, there could be boxes outside for her to climb onto," I said. "You know, a big box on the bottom, with its closed, solid side up; another smaller box sitting right in the middle of it. You know, sort of steps."

They were "sort of" steps when Grant got through with them, all right. He followed my basic idea, nailing and pounding out there for about an hour, and finally he called me to look out the window at the finished product.

When I looked out the window it wasn't wooden boxes, nailed firmly together into the shape of a short stairway, that I saw; I saw blessed relief from the constant, demanding presence of a sweet little tyrant who was happy only so long as I was giving her my full attention.

"It's absolutely beautiful," I said fervently.

Donna learned very quickly to navigate on her new steps. For the first few days she came in the window and went out, over and over again, gurgling with glee at the unconventionality of this means of entrance and exit. After the novelty of that had worn off, she began making daring excursions along the entire length of the four foot strip, which Grant had cleared of weeds and covered with gravel. David's kittens usually scampered along with her.

My principal worry, after she had reached the point where she was playing out in her little yard for hours daily, was that she would see a black widow outside and pick it up. I tried to teach her to be afraid of all insects, but somehow the idea became twisted in her mind.

"Bug scarda Donna!" she would exclaim. "Bug see Donna, bug run way!" And she would rush ferociously at whatever bug had, by its appearance, inspired her remarks. Usually the insects could escape her small clumsy fingers, but occasionally she caught an unwary slug or ladybug.

I thought of warning her, "Bug might bite Donna," but it occurred to me that she might get that warning, too, twisted.

Anyway, the one crowning virtue of black widows is that they're as much afraid of people as people are of them; and I didn't think there was much danger that she'd ever be able to catch one. A glimpse of a child with a face apparently made of brown hair should have been enough to send any bug scurrying for cover, I thought. Donna's hair, although it was growing longer and thicker rapidly, was still too fine and soft to hold a bobby pin, or to submit itself to any kind of confinement that I had yet been able to discover. One day, though, I found that the front part of her hair–the part that screened her eyes from sight most of the time, the part that I had refused to trim into neat bangs–was long enough to braid. Since then she has had a prim little pigtail right in the middle of her forehead–drawn back and secured at the top of her head with a pert bow. She looks very chic now, and her nickname–Little Chief Hair-in-the-Face–has been tucked away into our mental chest of souvenirs.

Grant decided that a big window in the front of the office would do a lot to attract business. The south wall, facing the highway, was solid, and the occupants of cars coming from the east couldn't see the light inside the office until they had gone a little past, where they could see the window in the west wall above the driveway. For the daylight and early evening hours the proposed window wouldn't have much value, but Grant figured that the extra nighttime business it would bring would pay for it in a week's time. Around midnight or later, travelers hesitated to disturb motel owners unless they could see that they were up anyway. The advantage of a window would be that Grant would be able to lure customers in by sitting comfortably in the office reading a paper, instead of having to run outside whenever a slow car approached, so that its occupants would be sure to see him. One summer of that had been enough for him, and I knew exactly how he felt. The idea of a huge window facing the highway appealed to me, too; never again would I have to perch on top of a typewriter case set precariously on a chair, while with one eye I watched out the kitchen window for slow cars from the east, and with the other eye tried to read.

Grant hired a man to cut away the wall and put in the window. He helped the man and watched every move he made, and if ever again in the course of Grant's life it becomes necessary for a window to be installed in a building that belongs to him, I know that he will install it deftly, correctly, and without assistance.

It was like stepping straight from a one-room prison on a desert island, to the geographical center of Times Square. I had never realized how much had been going on, or that we had been missing so much. When the window was finished, we could stand at the office desk and see life whirling by us on wheels; we could see life pulsing and throbbing in the accidents, quarrels, and petty encounters that were an inevitable part of a fast highway neighborhood; we could see life a trifle in its cups, staggering in and out of the bar across the street. We could see busses, cars, motorcycles, trains (on the track parallel with the highway, a block away) trucks, highway maintenance equipment, bicycles, and an occasional weird departure from conventional methods of transportation such as a covered wagon drawn by burros. Horseback riders cantered or galloped past daily, and it was a common, pleasantly exhilarating thing to see the great planes drifting down toward the airport, outlined against the sky and then silhouetted against the crowding mountains.

Even from the living room we could get a clear view of what we had, except when we were outside, been missing. I had never realized how many east-bound cars that had exceeded the speed limit going through town, were stopped almost directly in front of the bar, or how many minor fights originated in the bar and continued after the participants were outside. Major fights, of course, we would have gone out to see anyway, as they would have been announced by the customary loud threats and insults. But now we were able to enjoy the pantomime of these quieter fights also, which we would have missed entirely if the office window hadn't been there. It was like a movie, where the spectator is safe and comfortable as he watches gunfire and robbery or people struggling against blinding snow. In the office, we were close enough to get a good view of what was going on, but far enough away to avoid any danger of connecting with a poorly aimed left. It was better than a movie in one sense: it was real, and the angry expressions on the faces of the performers weren't assumed for the sake of a camera. But there was one thing which even the lowiest B movie has that I missed–explanatory dialogue. It was maddening to watch the quarrelers gesticulate and utter tantalizingly elusive sentences which were, even when I opened the door of the office in hope of eavesdropping, swallowed up in the roar of traffic.

"Why don't you shout?" I wanted to prod them. "If you're really mad, then yell, so you can hear each other–and so I can hear you, too!"

I guess I ought to take up lip reading.

Business did make a noticeable upswing after the window was installed. It wasn't much of an inconvenience for one of us to be in the office, reading or writing, until quite late every night, and the very visible presence of either of us seemed to act as a magnet to undecided drivers.

Grant's idea factory, however, was still producing; it was never slowed down by success. "Why don't we get a big picture of a man," he suggested, "life size, and hang it behind the office desk once? People will see it from the highway, and I'll bet a horned toad they'll think it's a real man. We could have a little calendar at the bottom, as an excuse for hanging it there. After the people ring the bell and we get up and let them inside the office, they'll see their mistake–but by that time we'll have them, so it won't matter."

He mulled over that a while, grinning, and then came up with something even better.

"Grandma's dress form!" he exclaimed. "Have her quick send it to us, and we'll put some kind of a head or hat on top of it and stand it behind the office desk." (Grandma's dress form has been through so much already that a little more wouldn't hurt it. Every few weeks its bolts and screws are loosened and Grant hammers it from a size forty down to a size twelve–or vice versa–depending on whether it's Grandma or I who wants to make a dress.)

"I know what we could do that would be a lot less trouble," I said. "Every night late, when all the motel owners around here are asleep, why not sneak out and take the covers off the "no" on each of their signs? Then this will be apparently the only motel that has a vacancy, and all the cars will come here. Then, after we have filled up, you can sneak out again and put the covers back on the signs, so that in the morning the other owners won't know they have been tampered with."

During the winter rush season, whenever we invited friends from Los Angeles to stay overnight at our motel, we always stipulated that they must come on a Sunday night, since even during the height of the busiest season there were almost always vacancies on Sunday nights. For most of our friends it was difficult or impossible to be away from home over Sunday night, since work, school, and the regular routine of living must begin again on Monday morning. As a result, very few of our personal friends had been to see us, except the several who came out the first summer. Now, though, with at least one vacancy every night except Saturday, we let them know that we would be "at home" any night except Saturday, and that they could have the use of a spotless, modern, new and well-furnished cabin–on the house! On an average of one couple or one family per week, our friends began making the pleasant, just-far-enough trip out to see us. This was very nice, but I couldn't pretend that it lifted the monotony or relieved the boredom, because around a motel there isn't any of either.

For months I had been resisting the mercenary advances of men who wanted to install coin-operated radios in our cabins. Grant and I had agreed that the commercial, cheapening effect of such radios would not be justified by the small revenue they would bring in.

One day, though, one of the salesmen whom I had turned away tackled Grant while I was downtown. For all his caginess and shrewdness, Grant becomes as limp and compliant as gelatin under the pressure of a good sales talk. And this man, a short, wiry creature with very intriguing mannerisms, was hard to ignore.

When I drove into the driveway the radio man was installing the last radio. He lifted his cap to me and wiggled his ears mockingly as I stalked past the cabin where he was working and into the house.

I sat down, seething, and mentally prepared some blistering hot coals to rake Grant over.

Having the radios installed turned out to be a pretty good idea, though. Our customers seemed to be pleased with the convenience of them, in spite of the fact that reception is poor in Banning because of the surrounding mountains.

The radios were attractive, with a walnut finish that blended with the maple furniture in the cabins. Each radio had a slot in the top where the noise-hungry customer could put his quarter for one hour of music, drama, comedy, quiz program, news or soap opera. Every two weeks the owner of the machines would come around with his keys, take off the backs of the radios, and unlock the coin boxes inside. Three fourths of the money he would keep; twenty-five per cent of it–"enough to pay mosta yer utilities"–would be ours.

As it turned out, our share of the take–about twenty dollars a month–was barely enough to pay for one utility, the electricity. But that, as Grant pointed out, with more spirit of self-defense than originality, was something.

And the customers did like having the radios in their cabins. We always gave them their change in quarters now instead of in fifty-cent pieces, so that if they wanted to play the radios they'd have the proper coins. And often a customer would come to the office and ask us to give him quarters in exchange for a fifty-cent piece or a dollar.

Our own little radio, that we had been renting out for fifty cents a night, was no longer in demand. And sometimes I pointed out acidly to Grant that eight separate quarters, for eight full hours of playing time, had to be dropped into the slots of the coin-operated radios before we'd make as much as by renting our own radio once.

The man who installed the radios in our cabins and came every other week to get the money out of them, became simply "the radio man" to us. I suppose he had a name, but if he did, I never discovered what it was.

"That radio man's the funniest guy I ever saw," Grant remarked, after the first time he had come to get his money. "He points his finger at you, with his thumb up in the air; then he quick bends his thumb, and the knuckle cracks, and it's just as if he's shooting at you."

"I know," I said. "He did that to me several times, to emphasize his arguments when he was first trying to make me let him install the radios. But," I added pointedly, "I didn't fall for it."

"And," Grant hurried on, "did you notice there are hinges tattooed on the insides of his elbows?"

"Mm-hm. I wouldn't be surprised if he had hinges tattooed on the backs of his knees, too. He's just the type."

The small cement block building that was being erected across the highway from us, west of the bar and the Blue Bonnet motel, turned out to be a bakery. "Purtel and Purtel" announced their big neon sign. "Doughnuts, pies, and pastry."

Grant went over to buy a pie the first day they opened. After talking to the Purtel brothers an hour–his absolute minimum for a conversation–he came back and reported that they had a nice place, that they were old men with beards, and that he had promised them that I would come over soon and meet them.

We demolished the pie at dinner time, and after I had washed the dishes I decided to return the tin.

The front part of the bakery was clean and delicious-smelling. One of the Purtel brothers was putting things away, getting ready to close for the night. When I introduced myself he dashed away to call his brother, who was in the rear part of the building.