At least once every day since we have been in Banning, a dark-skinned man or woman with straight black hair has strolled through the grounds of our motel. Sometimes they come in groups of three or four, coming from the little country road--Williams street--to which the back portion of our land extends, and ambling on out to the highway. These, I learned, are Indians. There is an Indian reservation a mile or so north of us, in the first hills that comprise the sloping upward into the mountains. Jed, our freckled laundry truck driver, told me as much as he knew about them, one day after he had finished lifting our heavy sheet-filled laundry bags into his truck. They still hold their tribal ceremonies at regular intervals far back in the hills and, according to legend, no white man has ever witnessed any of these ceremonies.
The principal pastime of these Indians, according to Jed, is to maintain and increase their fearsomeness and mystery. They give special attention to fostering awe of themselves in those people, most of them from the Eastern parts of the country, who believe that Indians still go on the warpath and scalp people--or that, if they haven't actually done either of those things recently, they are quite capable of doing either at any moment.
"Far as I'm concerned, they're just a bunch of showoffs," Jed said, rubbing his nose. "D'you know what they did? They even put a curse on Banning in 1935. You'd be surprised how many people were terrified, and left."
"Why did they put a curse on the city?" I wanted to know.
"They were mad because so many curious white people kept coming out and snooping around their reservation."
"H'm." It would be interesting to look an Indian reservation over, especially if the inhabitants--or inmates--or whatever you'd call them--were the curse-putting kind. My own curiosity, seldom dormant, was definitely aroused, and I promised myself that the Indians would have one more white person to be angry at, as soon as I could possibly arrange it.
The ubiquity of the Smiths never became a personal thing to me until we moved to Banning. Never a week goes by that a car doesn't drive up in a flurry of gravel and belch forth a person who rings the bell and inquires, "Have you a party staying here by the name of Smith?" The only variation in this routine is the wording. Sometimes it's "Is dere a guy, name a' Smith, stayin' here?"
It happens so often that, if there weren't so many different people involved, I'd think it was some kind of a gag. As it is, whenever a Smith actually registers to spend a night with us, I can hardly resist telling him, in a coy and enigmatic manner, that someone has been looking for him.
With two children playing noisily and constantly, and customers ringing the office bell blithely at the most inconvenient moments, and Grant coming into our cabin every now and then to ask me where's that mmm screwdriver, it was impossible for me to be able to concentrate enough to do any writing. Therefore, each day while the baby took her nap, when the cabins were cleaned up, the laundry sent out, and everything as nearly under control as possible, I loaded up with paper, pen, a reference book or two, and the partially done article or story I had been working on, and went to cabin number 15, which is almost directly across from the cabin in which we live. There, in glorious solitude, I wrote, interrupted only by the occasional intriguing sight of customers driving up to the office, ringing the bell, and being confronted by Grant. Whenever such an event occurred, I had to stop my work, go to the window, and peek breathlessly between the slats of the Venetian blind at all that went on. This is always an unnecessary distraction from my work, and I know I should have more will power and self control; but there is something in me ('your damn curiosity!' I've heard it called by irritated objects of it) that won't allow me to sit by, quietly absorbed in something that can wait, when things are happening which I might just as well be investigating.
I did my writing in longhand, although I had always used the typewriter before we came to Banning. I wrote longhand now because, with all my other paraphernalia, I didn't want to haul the typewriter back and forth all the time. To relieve the boredom which frequently attacked me, while I was writing, I used different colored ink on different days. My original manuscripts were gorgeous things of purple, green, red and blue. I couldn't leave my writing equipment in any cabin overnight, naturally, because we hoped to rent every cabin every night--although we weren't at all sure of filling up, except on Saturday nights.