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."
A second story seemed to be our best bet, but it would be expensive to
add a couple of rooms upstairs, and it might necessitate strengthening
the present ceiling and roof in order to make them support the burden.
We decided to file the idea away in our minds for future consideration.
We alleviated the space situation to some extent, temporarily at least,
by getting bunk beds for the children and moving our bed into their
room. That left the living room as a living room, not a combination
playroom, living room and bedroom. The bunk beds were along one wall
and our bed was along the opposite wall, with the foot of it near the
east window that overlooked Featherbren's new lawn and his row of
oleanders. Between his cherished, thrice-daily watered lawn and our
window was the four foot expanse of land that the building code
demanded should be left at the sides of the land when the buildings
were constructed.
Grant finally got around to carrying out a plan we had made whereby
Donna wouldn't be underfoot all the time, and whereby she could go
outside in the sunshine without constant supervision. He fenced the
whole four foot strip, from under the bedroom window clear along the
cabins from number 2 to 6. Out in the field behind the cabins, he let
the four foot strip widen into a fenced yard about twenty feet square.
Later, when Donna was big enough to need a larger yard, but not yet big
enough to be trusted to run around loose, he would fence our entire
field behind the cabins for the children to play in.
The biggest complication now, of course, was that there was no back
door through which Donna could go into her four-foot runway. Grant
could have taken out the east window and substituted a door for it, but
it would have been a lot of work and expense.
"She can climb up on the foot of our bed," I suggested, "and then---"
"And then what? Jump out the window?"
Grant has a low opinion, not only of my capability, but also, I'm
afraid, of my common sense. I suppose in a way his attitude is
justified: he is so capable, and his ideas are so good, that my feeble
little brain children seem to him very poor by contrast. However, this
time I felt that I had a good idea, and I elaborated upon it, in spite
of the sense of helpless inferiority he always inspires in me.
"Well, there could be boxes outside for her to climb onto," I said.
"You know, a big box on the bottom, with its closed, solid side up;
another smaller box sitting right in the middle of it. You know, sort
of steps."
They were "sort of" steps when Grant got through with them, all right.
He followed my basic idea, nailing and pounding out there for about an
hour, and finally he called me to look out the window at the finished
product.
When I looked out the window it wasn't wooden boxes, nailed firmly
together into the shape of a short stairway, that I saw; I saw blessed
relief from the constant, demanding presence of a sweet little tyrant
who was happy only so long as I was giving her my full attention.
"It's absolutely beautiful," I said fervently.
Donna learned very quickly to navigate on her new steps. For the first
few days she came in the window and went out, over and over again,
gurgling with glee at the unconventionality of this means of entrance
and exit. After the novelty of that had worn off, she began making
daring excursions along the entire length of the four foot strip, which
Grant had cleared of weeds and covered with gravel. David's kittens
usually scampered along with her.
My principal worry, after she had reached the point where she was
playing out in her little yard for hours daily, was that she would see
a black widow outside and pick it up. I tried to teach her to be afraid
of all insects, but somehow the idea became twisted in her mind.
"Bug scarda Donna!" she would exclaim. "Bug see Donna, bug run way!"
And she would rush ferociously at whatever bug had, by its appearance,
inspired her remarks. Usually the insects could escape her small clumsy
fingers, but occasionally she caught an unwary slug or ladybug.
I thought of warning her, "Bug might bite Donna," but it occurred to me
that she might get that warning, too, twisted.
Anyway, the one crowning virtue of black widows is that they're as much
afraid of people as people are of them; and I didn't think there was
much danger that she'd ever be able to catch one. A glimpse of a child
with a face apparently made of brown hair should have been enough to
send any bug scurrying for cover, I thought. Donna's hair, although it
was growing longer and thicker rapidly, was still too fine and soft to
hold a bobby pin, or to submit itself to any kind of confinement that I
had yet been able to discover. One day, though, I found that the front
part of her hair--the part that screened her eyes from sight most of
the time, the part that I had refused to trim into neat bangs--was long
enough to braid. Since then she has had a prim little pigtail right in
the middle of her forehead--drawn back and secured at the top of her
head with a pert bow. She looks very chic now, and her nickname--Little
Chief Hair-in-the-Face--has been tucked away into our mental chest of
souvenirs.
Grant decided that a big window in the front of the office would do a
lot to attract business. The south wall, facing the highway, was solid,
and the occupants of cars coming from the east couldn't see the light
inside the office until they had gone a little past, where they could
see the window in the west wall above the driveway. For the daylight
and early evening hours the proposed window wouldn't have much value,
but Grant figured that the extra nighttime business it would bring
would pay for it in a week's time. Around midnight or later, travelers
hesitated to disturb motel owners unless they could see that they were
up anyway. The advantage of a window would be that Grant would be able
to lure customers in by sitting comfortably in the office reading a
paper, instead of having to run outside whenever a slow car approached,
so that its occupants would be sure to see him. One summer of that had
been enough for him, and I knew exactly how he felt. The idea of a huge
window facing the highway appealed to me, too; never again would I have
to perch on top of a typewriter case set precariously on a chair, while
with one eye I watched out the kitchen window for slow cars from the
east, and with the other eye tried to read.
Grant hired a man to cut away the wall and put in the window. He helped
the man and watched every move he made, and if ever again in the course
of Grant's life it becomes necessary for a window to be installed in a
building that belongs to him, I know that he will install it deftly,
correctly, and without assistance.
It was like stepping straight from a one-room prison on a desert
island, to the geographical center of Times Square. I had never
realized how much had been going on, or that we had been missing so
much. When the window was finished, we could stand at the office desk
and see life whirling by us on wheels; we could see life pulsing and
throbbing in the accidents, quarrels, and petty encounters that were an
inevitable part of a fast highway neighborhood; we could see life a
trifle in its cups, staggering in and out of the bar across the street.
We could see busses, cars, motorcycles, trains (on the track parallel
with the highway, a block away) trucks, highway maintenance equipment,
bicycles, and an occasional weird departure from conventional methods
of transportation such as a covered wagon drawn by burros. Horseback
riders cantered or galloped past daily, and it was a common, pleasantly
exhilarating thing to see the great planes drifting down toward the
airport, outlined against the sky and then silhouetted against the
crowding mountains.
Even from the living room we could get a clear view of what we had,
except when we were outside, been missing. I had never realized how
many east-bound cars that had exceeded the speed limit going through
town, were stopped almost directly in front of the bar, or how many
minor fights originated in the bar and continued after the participants
were outside. Major fights, of course, we would have gone out to see
anyway, as they would have been announced by the customary loud threats
and insults. But now we were able to enjoy the pantomime of these
quieter fights also, which we would have missed entirely if the office
window hadn't been there. It was like a movie, where the spectator is
safe and comfortable as he watches gunfire and robbery or people
struggling against blinding snow. In the office, we were close enough
to get a good view of what was going on, but far enough away to avoid
any danger of connecting with a poorly aimed left. It was better than a
movie in one sense: it was real, and the angry expressions on the faces
of the performers weren't assumed for the sake of a camera. But there
was one thing which even the lowiest B movie has that I
missed--explanatory dialogue. It was maddening to watch the quarrelers
gesticulate and utter tantalizingly elusive sentences which were, even
when I opened the door of the office in hope of eavesdropping,
swallowed up in the roar of traffic.
"Why don't you shout?" I wanted to prod them. "If you're really mad,
then yell, so you can hear each other--and so I can hear you, too!"