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!"