Four and Twenty Beds

"Maybe–maybe you should go look for him," I said hesitantly.

"I think I will." Grant moved toward the door. "I'll call his home first, and if he's been gone awhile I'll start out looking for him."

Mrs. Watkins replaced her teeth, wiped her eyes, and beamed at me.

"I'm awful moody, an awful sentimental," she admitted.

Eugene edged to the door behind Grant.

"I'm gonna go with him, ma. 'Bye, ma'am."

"The kid's gittin' scared," Mrs. Watkins remarked, chuckling, when the door had closed behind them. "So's your hubby. Men are all alike, ain't they? Pantywaists, when you git right down to it. Pantywaists!" Her great booming laugh filled the cabin, while I tittered politely and wondered where she got the idea that men had exclusive rights to the term. My legs felt as though they were made of jello that hadn't quite set, and my hands were useless, quivering hunks of ice.

"How long do you think it will be," I began; "I mean, you've had so many, maybe you can almost tell…"

"How soon I'm gonna have the kid? Cripes, it ain't gonna be long, honey, I can tell you that! Wouldn' it be a fit if I had it before the doc come?"

I collapsed onto a chair.

Mrs. Watkins looked at me sympathetically, and clucked her huge red, wet tongue. Her tangled grey hair formed a rough halo around her face.

"Don't you worry none, honey," she comforted. "The doc'll git here all right."

Then she had another pain.

Watching her, I thought I had never felt so alone in my life–dreadfully alone, although there was one human being in the room with me and strong indications that there would very soon be another.

I began to review the pitifully little I knew about officiating at births–just in case. First, you had to be sure the baby cried, so it could start breathing properly. Second, you had to tie its umbilical cord. That was as much as I knew.

I wiped my forehead and glanced at Mrs. Watkins. She was gazing at me now, her dark eyes full of compassion. I had a feeling that if a stove and a pan had been handy, she would have climbed out of bed to make me some hot tea.

For her benefit, I summoned what I hoped would pass for a brave smile. "I'll be right back," I said. "I'll just get some string and–can you think of anything else I might need?"

"You look like you might need a good stiff snort, honey!" Her merriment thundered behind me as I slipped out to the linen closet.

On the bottom shelf of the linen closet was a pile of string, salvaged for months past from neatly wrapped and tied packages of clean laundry. I gathered great handfuls of the string, thrusting it into the curve of my arm. Then I happened to notice the heavy, folded rubber sheet that we lend to customers with small children. That, I reasoned, might come in handy.

A large round head appeared in the doorway of the garage, announcing itself with a cough. "You the lady that rents cabins? I want a cabin. How about renting me a cabin?"

"Not now!" I snapped. "I'm busy! Can't you see I'm having a baby?"

After the head had disappeared I surveyed the linen closet distractedly, wondering what else I should take. There were stacks and stacks of snowy sheets, pillow slips, towels, bath mats and wash cloths. There was the untidy pile of tooth brushes, pajama tops, slippers, hot water bottles, blouses, and odds and ends that customers had left and failed to come back for. There were extra blankets, pillows, boxes of toilet paper and soap, coat hangers and water pitchers. None of it seemed especially appropriate for the occasion.

I went back into cabin 3. I threw the string onto a chair and held up the rubber sheet, not knowing how to suggest, in a delicate way, that it might be wise to put it on her bed.

She got the idea immediately. She replaced her false teeth, from which she had been deriving solace again, and said, "I'm glad you thoughta that, honey. I don't wanna cause you no more trouble than I got to."

She heaved up her mountainous body while I slipped the rubber sheet under and adjusted it so that it would be smooth and comfortable for her to lie on.

A horrified expression shot over her face. "Cnpes! I hadnt ought to've pushed myself up like that. I'm afraid we're in for it now. I–oh, cripes!"

My heart pounded in my throat as I realized that I was about to become a midwife, whether I wanted to or not.

"Oh, wait!" I pleaded. "Please wait! The doctor will be here in just a few minutes."

"Honey," she gasped, "I can't wait. You oughta know that. Cripes, I wisht Rodney was here! That man ain't never around when I want him, only after the kids is born, and then all he does is git me that way again!"

"Can you wait just one minute?" I beseeched. "I'll get my medical book–I didn't think of it till just now–please, oh, please wait!"

I staggered out the door and along the sidewalk until I reached our door. I threw myself into the living room, tore open the door of the bookcase, and snatched out our heavy, important looking medical book.

I was starting back toward cabin 3 when I heard the anguished shriek of a very young human being. I froze in horror.

"Already?" I must have said it out loud because David, who had appeared from nowhere, said, "Huh? You better take care of Donna, Mama. She's sure crying–don't you hear her?"

"Oh, is that Donna?" I was so relieved I could have kissed him. I hurried into the children's bedroom, David jabbering about something loudly and excitedly behind me.

Donna was holding up one small fat hand. "Donna hurta finger!" she wailed. "Mama kiss it."

Apparently she had hit her finger with one of the blocks she was stacking into piles. David was still talking excitedly.

"Oh, be quiet!" I said. "Whatever it is you're talking about, it can wait. I'm very, very busy. Now hush and go play."

I kissed Donna's upraised finger and, turning to leave again, noticed that she had been stacking more than just blocks. Her soft, stuffed dolls and teddy bears formed the base of a pyramid of toys that culminated, two feet up, in her little rocking chair.

I charged back to cabin 3, clutching the heavy medical book.

As I opened the door Mrs. Watkins shoved her teeth back into her mouth. "Did the doc git here?" she gasped.

"No!" I snapped. "Now just don't be so impatient. I've got this medical book. We'll get along without the doctor." I was unreasonably angry at her.

I snapped on the light and opened the book at random. I tried to concentrate on the print that swam and bounced before my eyes.

Mrs. Watkins was breathing hard, and grunting spasmodically. I decided to read aloud, to keep Mrs. Watkins' mind off her troubles and to reassure her that I was capable and efficient, that I was doing something, that I wasn't just sitting idly by.

A few of the words finally detached themselves from the swirling pages. "Whenever material from the bile, called bilirubin, gets into the bloodstream, it is followed by a yellowish discoloration of the skin." Maybe, I thought, there was some bilirubin loose in my blood right now. Goodness knows I felt bad enough for there to be quarts of it coursing around through my veins. And since yellow symbolizes cowardice and fear, what could be more appropriate than for my skin to take on a virulent shade of that color?

Mrs. Watkins grunted, and caught her breath. "There ain't no use worryin' about anything like that now, honey," she panted.

She gave a longer, sustained grunt, and then she began to laugh weekly. "There ain't no use worryin' about anything. It's all over, honey."

"Over!" I threw the book onto the floor.

Mrs. Watkins pulled back the blanket, uncovering herself. For the next few minutes I was a very reasonable facsimile of a whirling dervish.

There was a tiny, obscenely red and gooey creature, howling till I thought my ear drums would break. Fighting to think in spite of the noise and Mrs. Watkins' uncontrollable laughter, I clung to the two things I could salvage out of the chaos that was my mind. The baby's umbilical cord must be tied and the baby must be made to cry so that he would start to breathe.

Well, there was no use in worrying about his breathing. His lusty howls were shredding the air all around us. That left only one urgent task–the tying of the umbilical cord. Throwing fastidiousness and delicacy to the winds, I seized the heap of string and tackled the job.

By the time I had finished, the baby was literally swathed in string, but his umbilical cord was tied. I wasn't exactly sure why a new baby's cord must be tied, but in order to be certain that I had accomplished whatever purpose the ritual serves, I had tied it in four separate places.

Just as I was washing my shaking hands in the bathroom, David burst into the cabin.

"Mama! A customer's waiting for you. And Donna's all bloody. I turned on the light and she's all bloody."

"I'll be right back," I told Mrs. Watkins, rushing through the door.

Judging by the wreckage and her bleeding upper lip, Donna must have tried to sit in the chair that was perched on top of the pyramid of her toys.

"Donna hurta mouf!" she wailed, when she saw me. I picked her up out of the mess and tucked her under my arm, heading for the bathroom to wash her lip. I glanced into the office on the way. A young man with a pale, quivering mustache was standing there. His expression stated plainly that he had been standing there for some time.

I was afraid I'd begin to gibber if I tried to explain the delay to him, so I waved my free hand at him in a ghoulish attempt at cheerfulness.

"Let's wash Donna's lip," I suggested, when we were in the bathroom. Donna sent up an immediate howl of protest, and I applied psychology–although I was tempted to apply something less abstract and more painful.

"Oh, yes," I crooned, "we must wash Donna's lip, and her hands, and her feet."

"Wash Donna's feet?" she repeated, her round blue eyes interested behind their veil of untidy wisps of brown hair.

I nodded, looking more closely at her lip. I decided the cut wasn't very serious. It had bled a lot, but it wasn't bleeding now. I'd wait on the impatient young man and get him out of the way before I took the time to wash her lip.

I left Donna in the bathroom and hurried back to confront the quivering mustache.

The prim, thin-lipped mouth beneath the mustache was opening to speak, when David hurtled into the office and clutched my dress.

"Mama!" he yelled. "She's having another baby!"

"Twins?" I shrieked. "Oh, dear, what'll we do?"

The mustache was twitching with shock now. "You'd better rent a cabin somewhere else," I said. "I'm–" I paused. What was that splashing noise?

I deserted the mustache and ran into the bathroom. "Donna washing hands and feet," Donna explained. She was standing in the toilet.

I looked at her dumbly, too confused to be able to decide whether to take care of her or to rush out and get to work on the second baby's umbilical cord.

David, who had disappeared, came excitedly up to me again. "I was just out there again," he cried, "and now she's got another one! And this newest one is solid black!"

I pulled Donna out of the toilet. Then I lowered the seat cover and sat down heavily.

"Black?" I repeated in a whisper. My lips felt dry, and my head was throbbing. "Oh, no, it couldn't be black. You must be mistaken."

"Nope, it's black, all right. And you should see the second one–all white, with black legs and ears! Well, I'm going back to see if she has any more. Gee, won't Miss Nestleburt be surprised when we tell her the cat she gave me turned into four cats?"

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."