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.