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!"
I laughed with her.
"You're shocked, yeah, I can see that. Well, you're young yet, you'll learn. It shocked me too when we first got that place in Riverside and I saw what was going on. I used to watch the people come in, and I'd try to pick those kind from the ones who really wanted a place for the night. I'd pick out a nice, respectable looking couple, middle-aged, and say to my husband, 'Now, there's a couple that's married, that's been married a long time, and that's on the square.' And then, maybe an hour later, we'd see them come out of their cabin and drive off, leaving the key sticking in their door for us to pick up. Why, you just can't tell who'll do it. In this business you have to keep your mouth shut, yeah--but you can keep your eyes open if you want to. You'll see more'n you'd believe. Why, I got so I wouldn't have trusted my own grandmother not to rent a room with some fella for an hour!"
She uncrossed her legs with difficulty. "You'll see. One of these days even your Miss Nestleburt you were telling me about, and her boyfriend, yeah, the one that's always playing practical jokes--they'll be doubling up, and you'll have an extra cabin to rent!"
Miss Nestleburt and Mr. Hawkins were getting very friendly, all right. (But not that friendly!) Every afternoon she waited until he came back from his work in Palm Springs, and then they strolled together next door to Moe's cafe for dinner. On Saturdays and Sundays they went for long drives together in his car. Her incipient asthma seemed to have disappeared--she told me herself that the desert air had cured her completely--but she stayed on.