Four and Twenty Beds

I was bewildered, and finally he saw that I didn't know what he was talking about. He checked his fury long enough to explain that his name was, always had been, always would be, Featherbren, Feather b-r-e-n, not Featherbrain.

He stalked away.

I ran outside and called after him, "Mr. Featherbrain!–I mean, Mr. featherbren!"

He stopped haughtily, and waited for me to catch up with him.

"I'm really sorry," I said. "Maybe this makes us even now, even though what I did wasn't intentional. Let's be friends again, shall we?"

A smile spread over his face like the sun bursting out from behind clouds. His chin flushed rosily with pleasure. He grasped my hand and pumped it up and down vigorously. "I been awful sorry, what I done about yer water. I ain't been mad at yuh noways for a long time now," he said. "But a course I couldn't admit it."

A bout with housecleaning having kept me in the house most of the day, I beat Grant to the office one evening when the bell rang.

"I haven't set eyes on a customer all day," I told Grant.

"You go read a book; I'll take care of this one."

'This one' was a lanky, nice-looking man of about forty.

"That radio on the desk there," he said without preamble. "I noticed it's for rent. Guess I'll take it."

"Okay. Fifty cents," I said.

He flipped half a dollar toward me, picked up the radio, and exclaimed, "Sold!"

"No, just rented," I answered wittily.

We laughed, and he went out, carrying the radio. Grant had been listening.

"Who was that?" he asked casually as I came into the living room.

"A man from one of the cabins."

"Which cabin?"

"Well–well, I don't know. I've been cleaning house–you did the renting today."

"Did you make sure that he really was staying in one of our cabins, and wasn't just someone off the highway?" Grant pursued relentlessly.

"Of course. Well, that is, naturally he's not just someone–I mean, after all, he said that it was when he was renting a cabin that he noticed the radio."

Grant was silent, for the obvious purpose of giving me a chance to find the flaws in my reasoning. He went into the kitchen, where he stripped the outer leaves off a head of lettuce, rinsed it, and began cutting it into shreds.

"Where did you get the lettuce?" I asked, partly from curiosity and partly from a desire to change the subject.

"From a truck driver," Grant said, putting the shredded lettuce into a bowl and spooning honey over it. "Truck parked in front of the driveway–I asked the driver to move the truck once. He had a big load of lettuce, said he'd give me some if I'd let him stay there long enough to run across the street and get a beer." Grant opened the cupboard door and inspected the cans of seasoning critically. After some deliberation he selected nutmeg, and sprinkled it lavishly into the bowl. Then he got a fork and began to eat.

I was hoping he had forgotten about the radio, but after he had swallowed a few mouthfuls he continued, as though he hadn't drifted off the subject:

"I'll bet a horned toad any stranger could pull in off the highway and ask you for a roll of toilet paper and you've quick give it to him."

There are times when I wonder what, exactly, it was that I saw in Grant that made me want to marry him.

It was one of these times, when I was standing at the office desk chewing a pencil and dwelling morbidly on the things about Grant that I didn't like, when a young woman stopped in and asked if we had cabins with kitchens. She was a very vivacious creature, with dark eyes and sparkling hair and a body that all seemed touched with electricity. Even my glum negative reply to her question seemed to bounce off the aura of her gaiety. She was so full of life that some of it had to spill out; apparently she couldn't pass up a human being without talking, happily and loudly, for a while.

She was one of those women whom, after a very short time, you feel as though you had known for ages. Suddenly, when she seemed on the verge of leaving, shrieking with laughter after telling me about a joke she had once played on someone, I gave birth to an idea that positively scintillated. Since she had a sense of humor and wasn't above a harmless joke herself, she'd enjoy this as much as I would. I'd show Grant he wasn't as smart as he thought he was!

I explained to the lively young woman what I wanted her to do. She agreed, her eyes dancing.

Grant, I knew, was sorting and putting away clean laundry. I led her out to the garage of cabin number 2, then I stood back so that Grant wouldn't be able to see me.

"My husband just rented cabin 16 from your wife," she said to Grant. "Now he's gone downtown and I seem to have locked myself out. I wonder if I could borrow your pass key?" Just then the telephone rang. I went inside to answer it; it was someone calling from Los Angeles, wanting to reserve a cabin for a week from Saturday night. There was a great deal of confusion, repetition, and mind-changing; and by the time I hung up and looked outside, I saw that the vivacious young woman had driven away.

I smiled as I went out toward the linen closet to bring my joke on Grant to its climax.

"Who was that woman talking to you just now?" I asked.

"Oh, she's the wife of the guy you rented 16 to," Grant replied airily, lifting an armful of neatly folded snowy sheets onto a shelf of the linen closet. "She was locked out. She just borrowed the pass key; she quick brought it back again."

I tried to look shocked as I said, "Sixteen! Why, I didn't rent sixteen to anyone! Here, let me have your pass key!"

I seized the key and dashed across to 16. Grant, by the linen closet, couldn't see me. I unlocked the door of 16, slammed it loudly for his benefit, and raced back to him.

"She's cleaned the place out!" I cried, with a malicious enjoyment of the expression on his face. "Lamp, throw rugs, ash trays–everything's gone! And you're the smart boy who's been bawling me out for not checking up on people before I give them what they want. I'd give toilet paper to a stranger off the highway, maybe, but believe me, before I'd give anyone a pass key I'd be pretty sure–"

Grant was getting up slowly, starting toward the cabin. I leaned against him, giggling.

"It's all a joke!" I gasped. "I fixed it up with that woman to ask you for the key–she didn't really take those things out of the cabin–so I'd be able to get back at you for all the things you said about me. I wanted you to feel foolish, for once. It was just a joke!"

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.