Four and Twenty Beds

CHAPTER SIX

EVERY NIGHT WHEN Grant goes to bed he lays out his clothes in exactly the places and positions where they will be easiest to get into in a hurry. (Except on the nights when all the cabins are full by bedtime; then, knowing he won't have to get up to answer the doorbell, he reverts to type and tosses all his things in a heap on the floor!)

But on the nights when our "vacancy" sign is on, he likes to be prepared for the inevitable summons. He wears his underclothes to bed. His trousers hang over a chair beside the bed, and are the first garment he grabs when the bell rings. He thrusts his legs into them quickly, hobbling across the room toward the office at the same time. In the middle of the room is his shirt, hanging on another chair which has been carefully placed halfway between the bed and the doorway to the office. Halting his clumsy gait long enough to seize the shirt, he puts it on and tries to button it with one hand while he zips his trousers with the other. By this time he has reached the doorway which separates the office from the living room; and there wait his slippers. He steps into them hastily, hurries to the outer office door, and opens it–to face a customer who is on the verge of giving up and leaving.

I've often tried to talk him into going to the door in his robe, which wouldn't take a tenth as long to slip into. But he insists that that would look sloppy.

"Any sloppier than going with your pants half zipped, and your shirt buttoned into the wrong buttonholes?" I ask. I don't complain or make suggestions too much, though, because I realize how lucky I am that he takes it for granted it is his job to wait on the customers who come during the night.

Mr. Featherbrain probably never had to untangle his tall frame from the bedclothes to wait on nocturnal customers for the first couple of months after he opened his place. The people who were attracted by his little place were very few and far between. One morning, though, Mrs. Featherbrain called me over, and I sat with them in their nicely furnished living room. It was the day after a highly advertised celebration had been held in the desert northeast of Banning, to which movie stars and humbler creatures had flocked to watch the laying of the cornerstone of what was to be Pioneertown, the future setting of the cream of Hollywood's horse opera crop. Every motel in town had been full.

"We wented four cabins last night!" Mrs. Featherbrain told me ecstatically, waving one of her ever-present cigarettes. She is a plump, dark woman with a very mobile face. She smiles, frowns, raises and lowers her eyebrows, and blinks rapidly while she talks. She is probably twenty years younger than Mr. Featherbrain.

"That's wonderful!" I said warmly. And then I realized what she had said. "Four?" I repeated. "Why, you only have three units to rent."

"Of course, but one couple left about eleven last night, and we wented their cabin over again."

"Really? What time had they come?"

"About ten."

"You mean they left the key, and took all their stuff, and really checked out?"

"That's wight," Mrs. Featherbrain replied, the wrinkles in her forehead appearing and disappearing.

"Did they ask for part of their money back?" I persisted.

"No."

"Well–that's odd," I said.

"Why, that must have happened at your court lots of times!" she protested, a cloud of smoke pouring out from her fluttering nostrils. "Hasn't it? Do you ever go out and look, about midnight, to see if some of the cars haven't pulled out?"

"Why–why, no," I said. "I can't imagine why they would leave. After all, they've paid their money, and if they didn't want to spend the night before traveling on, why would they–"

Mr. and Mrs. Featherbrain exchanged glances. "Have you ever seen any of the motels on Ventura Boulevard, in Los Angeles?" Mrs. Featherbrain asked.

"Mmm–yes, I think so," I said. "There are quite a few of them, aren't there? I remember wondering, in fact, how they could possibly get enough tourists to keep them filled up, right in a big city like that."

My hostess shot a look at her husband, and blinked rapidly several times.

"Well, sir," Mr. Featherbrain began, speaking with apparent difficulty, "Yuh know, not ewybody that stays in motels is tourists."

I looked at him blankly.

His chin was growing red.

Mrs. Featherbrain's features were moving violently, and all at the same time.

"You never were in the motel business before, were you?" she asked.

I shook my head.

She sighed. "Well, you see," she explained, "sometimes young couples that are out together–well, they don't have any place to go, and so–of course it isn't wight, and the sort of people we know don't do it, but–and of course the motel owner isn't to blame if some people, instead of using the cabins to spend the night and sleep in, use them to …" Her eyebrows were leaping wildly, and she turned to Mr. Featherbrain. "You tell her, dear," she begged him.

But at last I understood. I got up, embarrassed partly at the conversation and partly at my own display of stupidity, and went home.

This was an aspect of the motel business which was new to me, and I resolved to find out whether such use of motels on the highway was common. I had developed a library-born friendship with Mrs. Barkin, the owner of the rather shabby Sylvan Motel toward town, and I planned to bring up the subject at our next meeting.

I didn't let my unhappy experience with the house movers prevent me from learning to drive. "Twice in a lifetime it couldn't happen!" I told Grant; and I took the car out on Williams street day after day, sometimes staying out only ten minutes, and other times staying half an hour or more; and finally I was so adept at handling the car that I went to the Banning police department on a day when driving tests were being given, took the test, passed it, and received my driver's license.

I clutched the slip of paper proudly to my bosom. This, I knew, rated a special little trip. I must try my wings–or my wheels, rather–somewhere besides on Williams street and the downtown block around which the driving examiner had just accompanied me.

Grant was taking care of the motel; Grandma was taking care of the children; everything had been arranged so that I'd be sure to have enough free time to take both my written and my driving tests, and to get my license. Duty wasn't calling me back to the motel; now that I was a licensed driver our insurance would fully cover any accident I might have. (Not that I contemplated having any; but visions of liability suits had danced through my head every time I had been inspired, by my growing aptitude at driving, to take a little spin away from the dull safety of Williams street.)

So now I had some free time and a driver's license. And there was no place better to explore, I decided, than–the Indian reservation.

"I hope they don't put a curse on me," I thought, zipping along the highway to, and past, our motel at twenty-five miles an hour. I turned left on Hathaway, the cross street east of our motel; Mrs. Clark had told me Hathaway led back into the hills where the reservation was.

Less than a mile from the highway, Hathaway rose to a small peak on top of which was a cow guard, with metal grillwork extending across the road, the bars–between which cows would catch their hooves if they tried to cross–at right angles to it. A fence divided all the land past the cow guard from that on the side I was coming from; except for the open gateway at the road, there was no entrance to the land which a formidable-looking sign declared to be the Indian reservation.

The sign thrust its large white face forward pugnaciously as it stated:

WARNING!

INDIAN RESERVATION

The introduction of

INTOXICATING LIQUOR

into or its possession within this reservation,

or its sale to Indians, is

FORBIDDEN BY LAW

under a penalty of fine and imprisonment

NO TRESSPASSING OR HUNTING

The fact that "tresspassing" was misspelled made the sign a trifle less awesome and pompous than it had seemed at first glance, but I brought the car to a complete stop and pondered for a while.

Well, I wasn't "introducing" any liquor (from what I'd heard, most Indians didn't need an introduction) but to go into the reservation would be trespassing, I guessed. Still, the gateway was open and white people, I knew, drove through it frequently. Maybe by "tresspassing" in this case, they simply meant getting out of the car and going off the road.

Anyway, I had looked forward to this a long time, and, having come this far, I wasn't going to let a misspelled sign stop me.

I drove over the cow guard, my heart bumping as hard as the car. Strangely enough, the character of the land inside the reservation didn't change; it was the same as it was everywhere else, dry, flat until it began to roll up toward the mountains, covered with bristly bushes and a few stunted trees.

A peculiar lump beside the road far ahead turned out to be a fat brown woman sitting huddled inside a soiled shawl. An Indian! In her native habitat! I put on the brake, rolled down the window and called, "Want a ride?"

My temerity amazed me. This would be something interesting to tell people about, though. I was glad I had followed my impulse to stop, because if I had taken time to think it over I would probably never have done it.

The woman's bright dark eyes slid over me and the car in amazement. Afraid that this exotic prize would escape me, I pushed open the car door on her side and smiled invitingly.

After a moment of contemplation, she wrapped the dingy shawl about her broad shoulders more tightly against the wind, struggled to her feet and lumbered toward the car. She sat beside me, her thighs under the cheap cotton dress spreading so that the car seat between me and the right hand door was completely smothered in soft fat flesh. I lowered the window on my side before I started the car.

I glanced at the Indian woman as I pressed on the starter. Her face was round and greasy. Her eyes were like shiny black buttons, and her straight black hair was stringy. Her full, untinted lips did not move in response to my smile.

The road, which deteriorated rapidly from pavement to dirt once I was inside the reservation, led past occasional brown shacks that seemed made of weary old boards leaning against each other for support. A few of the houses, though, were made of stone, and fairly attractive. No doubt the chief and his relatives lived in these … if the Indians still had chiefs. I recalled what the laundry truck driver had said about the Indians–that those who wanted to collect money from the government had to live on the reservation in order to be entitled to it, and that those who were willing to forfeit their right to the money could live away from the reservation and engage in any type of work they chose.

Livestock of various kinds and sizes meandered about most of the dwelling places. Some of the horses were beautiful, graceful brown creatures with jet black manes and tails that tossed in the wind. There were squat, heavy set cattle with broad heads and broad bodies. Except for the fact that they each displayed a few unmistakable signs of femininity, I would have sworn that they were all bulls.

"You live around here?" I asked, with a circling sweep of my hand, turning toward my obese passenger.

The black button eyes stared at me, not with hostility, but obviously without any particular liking for me.

The dirt road curved slowly back toward the highway. There were innumerable bumpy little roads leading off the dirt road toward primitive looking parts of the lower mountains, but I was afraid to follow them. I didn't want to get too completely into Indian territory!

When we came to a fence broken only by an open gateway across the road, I stopped the car and leaned across the Indian woman, opening the door.

"You'd better get out here," I said.

She didn't move.

"Listen, I don't dare to take you out of the reservation. It might be a violation of the Mann act, or something. Goodbye," I said suggestively.

The fat squaw rolled out of the car, and stood staring at me, her glittering eyes speculative as I started the car.

I bumped across the cow guard, which was a twin to the one I had crossed when I entered the reservation, and glanced into the mirror to see what she was doing. As the dust from the tires settled I saw her squatting beside the road, adjusting her filthy shawl as it whipped in the wind, and settling herself comfortably.

I drove along the stretch of pavement that led to the highway with a vague sense of disappointment.

I hadn't expected to find a bunch of Indians in full war dress, yelling and whooping; I hadn't expected to see any venerable, feather-headdressed chiefs smoking long pipes of peace; and I certainly hadn't expected to be scalped. And yet I left the reservation with a vague sense of disappointment.

I have always worn my hair, which is quite thick, at shoulder-length, curly and with a bunch of little curls at the top. It used to be a fairly attractive and flattering style, but Banning's whirling wind has played havoc with it. I can spend half an hour combing it, smoothing it and adjusting the brown curls; then, after walking across the driveways to one of the cabins, I look as though I not only hadn't combed it for several days, but had lost a piece of thread in it and had allowed the children to search thoroughly for it for several hours. My hair style became what a fashion magazine might charitably christen a "windblown long bob." Whenever I brave the blasts that sweep across the open fields behind the motel, where I hang up clothes on washday, I wear a snugly tied bandana–but I can seldom get it tied so securely that the wind doesn't whip it off several times.

Strangely enough, other Banning women have neat, precisely waved hair which is seldom untidy or out of place. That is something I have never been able to figure out.

In the wintertime, it's people who swarm over Banning and the surrounding vicinities; in the summer, it's bugs. Every imaginable kind of bug spends the summer in Banning; bugs with wings, without wings, with and without antennae, and some with strange appendages whose uses, if any, seem hazy to the bugs themselves. Besides the common black widows, which are so plentiful that people simply ignore them, there are peculiar worms with large, mischievous eyes; there are beetles equipped with hard shiny hoods and galoshes, in case of rain; there are grasshoppers whose heads, instead of being in the place customary for grasshoppers' heads, pivot at the end of long, sticklike necks.

Before we came to Banning, and for a short time after our arrival, I wore open-toed sandals. But an uneasy knowledge of the desert's strange fauna, coupled with the loose gravel, the stickers rampant in the weeds, and the huge flesh-hungry black ants, to whom the presence of stockings were merely a snickerprovoking challenge, soon converted me to oxfords–and, if I hadn't been afraid of seeming too eccentric, I would have worn hip-length boots.

Banning has such hot summers, and such a dry, hot wind blowing continually off the desert, that I, like practically every other woman under seventy who weighs less than three hundred pounds, wear shorts. To this, Grant sometimes pretends to attribute our success.

"Yep, half of our customers just come in here because they see you running around in shorts," he says.

He can be very sweet at times, particularly when he has to go downtown and wants me to sort and count the laundry, or when he is hungry for a home made apple pie. One day–I believe it was a helping hand with some weed-pulling that he wanted–he had complimented me until I was beginning to believe I was rather a femme fatale in shorts. He had gone into the house to make a phone call, and I continued pulling weeds from around the geraniums in the little island under our big neon sign.

Suddenly I noticed a shiny car going past on the highway very slowly. It was full of well-dressed, distinguished looking men who were staring in my direction with absorbed interest. I pretended not to notice, and went on with my weed-pulling. But I was pleased. Maybe I wasn't so bad after all!

The car turned around in the highway, about fifty feet past our place, and cruised slowly by again. I was careful to stoop as gracefully as possible when I lunged for the weeds, and I tucked a geranium, that I had broken off by mistake, into my hair.

The car went more and more slowly, and finally it stopped right in front of the island. I stood up and went closer to the car, smiling graciously. I pretended to think the men wanted to rent a cabin.

The man in the front seat nearest the window cleared his throat, grinned sheepishly, and said:

"Say, ma'am, I wonder if you could tell us what kind of trees those are, in that row down the middle of your place? We've been having a little argument about it."

My smile faded. I was furious. "They're Chinese elms!" I snapped, and I stomped away.

It was that same night that Grant, leaving for the postoffice, told me to be sure to get at least three customers while he was gone.

"Don't worry," I said sarcastically, "I'll just sit out here on the curb around the lawn where they can see me. I'm so beautiful they won't be able to resist driving in. If they try to escape I'll lure them right in."

I was standing idly at the office door about twenty minutes later when I saw our car, a blue sedan, slow down as Grant waited for traffic to clear so that he could make the left hand turn into our place. I smiled suddenly. I'd show him what I meant by luring them right in.

Pretending to assume that he was a prospective customer, I stepped out in full view and made elaborate motions of adjusting my hair, rolling my eyes, and making come-hither gestures with my head. I thrust out one leg and ran my hands over it as though I were pulling up a sheer stocking; I smiled in an over-exaggerated way that would have, I felt, put to shame any of the old time movie vamps. My legs were in a coy Betty Grable pose, and as Grant pulled into the driveway I repeated my gestures of eye-rolling and of motioning seductively with tosses of my head.

"You got a cabin for four people?" asked a woman sitting in the front seat. Why, who–(I would have thought whom, but I was too excited)–had Grant brought home with him? I looked at the man behind the steering wheel questioningly. It wasn't Grant.

The car–well, obviously, ours wasn't the only blue sedan of that particular make and age.

"A–a cabin?" I asked finally. "Sure, of course. Would you–uh–like to look at it?"

Two half-grown boys, in the back seat, were staring at me pop-eyed, their mouths half open.

I'll never forget their expressions, or my own humiliation.

My friend from the Sylvan motel, Mrs. Barkin, stopped in a few days later to give me a library book she wanted me to read, and she laughed heartily when I told her about my experience. She had managed a motel in Riverside, I knew, before she came to Banning after the death of her husband, and when she was through laughing I brought up the subject of motel cabins being rented by the hour instead of by the night.

"Short stops?" she said. "Oh, yeah, we used to get lots of 'em, when we were in Riverside. You get that in any big city, yeah. Lots of money in it too if you have a good location for it–you can rent each cabin several times a night. Only thing is you have to do a lot of work cleaning cabins in the night then, yeah, that is if you're gonna rent 'em again."

Mrs. Barkin was a very short, squat woman with broad hips and enormous arms. Her fat legs, which she had managed to cross, looked uncomfortable. There was a faintly shabby air about her wilted blue organdy dress.

"Ten minute quickies, my hubby called 'em," she giggled. "Yeah, we got lots of 'em. Yeah, the good old days. We don't get many of 'em here. I remember one fella used to come there–it was during the war, and he worked swing shift–every night after work, right after midnight, yeah, he'd come. Five nights a week. Every night he had a different girl with him, too. You know, he–" Mrs. Barkin went off into spasms of laughter–"he came to my hubby one time and says, 'Say, don't I get a weekly rate here?' Yeah, he came so often he wanted a weekly rate!"

I laughed with her.

"You're shocked, yeah, I can see that. Well, you're young yet, you'll learn. It shocked me too when we first got that place in Riverside and I saw what was going on. I used to watch the people come in, and I'd try to pick those kind from the ones who really wanted a place for the night. I'd pick out a nice, respectable looking couple, middle-aged, and say to my husband, 'Now, there's a couple that's married, that's been married a long time, and that's on the square.' And then, maybe an hour later, we'd see them come out of their cabin and drive off, leaving the key sticking in their door for us to pick up. Why, you just can't tell who'll do it. In this business you have to keep your mouth shut, yeah–but you can keep your eyes open if you want to. You'll see more'n you'd believe. Why, I got so I wouldn't have trusted my own grandmother not to rent a room with some fella for an hour!"

She uncrossed her legs with difficulty. "You'll see. One of these days even your Miss Nestleburt you were telling me about, and her boyfriend, yeah, the one that's always playing practical jokes–they'll be doubling up, and you'll have an extra cabin to rent!"

Miss Nestleburt and Mr. Hawkins were getting very friendly, all right. (But not that friendly!) Every afternoon she waited until he came back from his work in Palm Springs, and then they strolled together next door to Moe's cafe for dinner. On Saturdays and Sundays they went for long drives together in his car. Her incipient asthma seemed to have disappeared–she told me herself that the desert air had cured her completely–but she stayed on.

I was beginning to think that the desert air had even more marvelous properties than those that had been claimed for it: Mr. Hawkins hadn't played a practical joke in weeks, not since the time he poured a bottle of ink into Grant's bucket of soapy cleaning water. Whether it was the desert air, or the influence of his dainty companion, I didn't know.

One Saturday morning while Mr. Hawkins was getting his car filled with gas at the service station across the street, Miss Nesdeburt waited in the office. She was wearing a dull, inconspicuous dress. She watched Grant, who was putting a door between the office and the living room–to take the place of the filmy curtain that had been there. We had had very little privacy, with only a thin bit of drapery separating our living room from the office. We still wouldn't have complete privacy, since there was a window in the top half of the new door–but as soon as I made little curtains for the window, no one would be able to look into our living room.

When Grant laid down his tools and went out to the garage, Miss Nesdeburt smiled at me, and two delicate fans of wrinkles appeared about her eyes.

"I had a dream," she told me, "and I think people should share their dreams, don't you, ma cherie?"

"Absolutely," I agreed. I was at the desk in the office, catching up on the previous day's bookkeeping.

"I dreamed I was a beautiful young girl," she said, taking her glasses off with one tiny hand, and holding the other hand up, letting it droop gracefully at the wrist. "My hair was fiery red, simply terribly red, and so were my lips. I was built like a goddess. My bosom was high and proud, my waist was just the right size for a strong man's hands to encircle." She stopped, and stood there in ecstatic reverie.

"And then?" I prodded.

"Ah, and then. There was a prince–a gallant, polite prince with the most wonderful sense of humor. He wore a suit of armor and rode a white charger and went out to do battle for me–"

"Wasn't he a knight?" I interrupted.

"No, no, a prince; or at least, he said he was. And I see no reason to think he wasn't being truthful about it.... Anyway, he loved me more than anything else in the world, and he wanted me to marry him."

I finished adding a column of figures. "And did you do it?" I asked, writing down the total.

"No." Miss Nesdeburt's blue eyes were sad, and she replaced her glasses. "I got all dressed up in my hoop skirt and leg o' mutton sleeves, but when it was time for the ceremony it turned out he had worn just red flannel underwear to the church as a joke. He had such a sense of humor, you know."

"Mm hmm. And how do you interpret the dream?"

"Oh, I've figured it all out very carefully, according to Elmo's teaching, and there's only one possible meaning. I'm either going to inherit a large sum of money soon, or else it means a close relative of mine will inherit some."

I laughed as she went out to get into Mr. Hawkins' coupe, which had just driven up onto the gravel. The idea of Mr. Hawkins as a prince or as a knight amused me, and I was still smiling about her obvious little dream when the telephone rang, about half an hour later.

It was a gentleman who, in short, clipped phrases, wanted to reserve three cabins that evening, for a large party of people who were going to spend a few days in the desert.

I had hardly finished writing the name in which he made the reservations after the numbers of the three cabins on that day's list, when the telephone rang again. This time it was a clerk from a Banning hotel, who said that the hotel was full already. Could we accommodate three ladies who wanted separate beds?

We could, and I took the reservation. Then I surveyed the list happily. A few of our customers were staying over from the day before, and with all these reservations, we had only four vacancies left. At that rate we'd be full tonight–and early enough so that we could have one of our rare evenings away from the place.

I started joyously outside to tell Grant, who was cleaning cabins. Just as I shut the door, though, the telephone rang. It was the owner of the Crawley Motel, on the west edge of Banning, calling for "some clients he couldn't take care of"; did we have a cabin that would accommodate five?

No, but we could give them two separate cabins.

That would be fine; they'd be over within half an hour.

That left two vacancies, and it wasn't even noon yet! There must be a rodeo or celebration around, or the season for hunting some kind of animal which lived around here must have just opened; or else it was a holiday that had escaped my notice. According to the calendar, though, neither that day nor the next was a holiday; I couldn't quite figure out the rush for cabins.

I wasn't much surprised, though, when the telephone rang twice more in the next hour. I took the two reservations and went out to uncover the "no" of our sign.

"No Vacancy," our sign proclaimed; and the owner of the Blue Bonnet Motel directly across the highway hollered across wonderingly, "We haven't got a one! How'd ja do it?"

"Oh, you just have to know how," I laughed. Then I went inside, picked Donna up out of her playpen, and hurried out to help Grant finish cleaning the cabins.

All afternoon occasional cars slowed down by our motel, until their drivers noticed the "no vacancy" sign hanging there grandly. Then they picked up speed and drove on down the highway, turning into the driveway of one of the other motels.

By late afternoon I was beginning to get uneasy. Not one of the people for whom the cabins had been reserved had shown up. It was conceivable that one, or even two, might be late or might disappoint us altogether; but for all of them to do it–! I didn't dare, though, to cover the "no" again and start renting cabins. I'd be in a terrible spot then if–

Suddenly a brown roadster swung out of the lane of cars and drove up to the office. At last! I thought, they had started coming. If the rest of them would only hurry, maybe Grant and I and the children could still go out–at least for a little drive.

But the women in the car didn't have a reservation. They didn't even want a cabin. All they wanted to know was, did we have a man named Smith staying here?

"We don't have hardly anybody staying here," I told them savagely, if not very grammatically.

One of them laughed, and indicated our sign.

"Then why do you have your 'no vacancy' sign on?" she asked.

"I'm beginning to wonder about that, myself," I replied.

Mr. Hawkins and Miss Nestleburt drove in about seven-thirty. I was standing in the office doorway.

"Not very busy tonight, are you?" Mr. Hawkins called, his car slowing down. I had the familiar, uncomfortable feeling that he was secretly laughing at me.

"We're full already," I said, motioning unhappily toward our sign.

They drove on back toward their own cabins.

I stood thoughtfully in the doorway for a while. There had been something in that man's expression . . .

I walked furiously toward the "no vacancy" sign, and put the cover back over the "no." It would be Mr. Hawkin's idea of a good joke, I knew, to disguise his voice and call up several times for reservations. I was positive now that it had been he who had made all those phone calls.

Because of our late start, all the motels in our end of town filled up before we did. It wasn't until four-thirty the next morning that Grant could uncover the "no" again.