Beds have been rumpled and remade. The kitchen has prepared each item on its menu. Waitresses have served dinner to the maids and bellmen and other surrogate guests. The dishwasher has returned his steak saying it is too medium. His chief maintenance man is called in to change a guest’s tire. His manager goes to his chef with a complaint from his bartender that her children are disturbing the people in the next room by playing the TV too loud. He thinks they may be jumping on the beds. He is as diplomatic as it is possible to be. The chef promises to see to it that the children behave. The manager is very understanding. The day desk clerk requests a babysitter for his small boy and hires the manager. A busboy complains of chest pains at three in the morning. The team from Richmond looks on approvingly. Flesh looks on approvingly. Inspired, he grabs a night auditor from the cashier’s office and tells her that he is worried about his puppy in the Inn’s kennels. He explains that the puppy, so recently taken from its mother, must be held while it feeds. The bookkeeper reassures him, says she will see to it that the request is relayed to his dining-room hostess. Ben asks a maid for the best route to Bar Harbor, Maine. Pretending drunkenness, he asks his bartender for one more for the road. The bartender suggests coffee. Ben becomes belligerent, makes a racial slur against white people. The bartender coaxes him into passivity, gently reminds him it’s time to settle accounts, and hands him his check to sign. Ben writes a hundred and fifty dollar tip across the bottom of his bar bill. The bartender crosses off the last two zeros, puts a decimal between the one and the five, and helps him to his room. A waiter from room service hands the news dealer, who places the Chattanooga and Atlanta papers in the Honor Box, a Master Charge card which the man checks against the numbers on the latest list of inoperative accounts that Master Charge sends out. Ben’s accordion player from the marching band asks the cashier to help carry the lifeguard’s wheelchair with the lifeguard in it up the stairs to the second-floor room they have taken. One of the men from Richmond drowns in the swimming pool. The telephone operator lugs him to the shallow end. They are all having a wonderful time.
“I’m,” a black housemaid tells the desk clerk, “Horace Tenderhall, General Sales Manager of the Volume Shoe Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri. I arranged with your people months ago that my people would hold our semiannual Southeastern Sales Conference here in Ringgold in preparation for the opening of the new fall line, and what do I find when I get here but that the meeting room where the meeting is to take place is all set up for a banquet with the Daughters of the Eastern Star? Now I have no intention of making a foofaraw, but I put down a $550 deposit and here my people are arriving on every other airplane that flies into Chattanooga and there isn’t any place to put them. Now whut you gone do ’bout dat?”
The driver of the courtesy car goes through a guard rail at the top of Lookout Mountain. Three people are killed and four are critically injured. Ben’s manager immediately contacts the four other Inns in the Chattanooga area on the Inn-Dex machine and, pressing their courtesy cars into service as ambulances, dispatches them to the scene of the tragedy. In this way they are able to save three of the critically injured guests.
The team from Richmond beams. Ben and the staff and the Richmond people shake hands all around and Ben throws a switch and the lights of the Travel Inn Grand Sign come on and the team is driven back to the Chattanooga airport in the courtesy car and the one thousand two hundred eleventh Travel Inn in the continental United States is officially open for business.
And three hours later no one has come.
The staff, which has nothing to do, drifts back into the lobby. His chef takes a place on the sofa. (The tables are set for dinner, the salads are crisping on a bed of ice, the side of beef warming on the steam table.) A few of the maids step out onto the driveway with the head housekeeper to watch the traffic on I-75. Ben joins them, has an idea, signals the maids and housekeeper back inside, addresses them and the rest of his help still seated in the lobby.
“Go out back,” he says, “where your cars are parked. Drive them around to the front. Park them where they can be seen. Two of you drive right up to the office, leave your cars in the driveway. Afterward,” he tells the housekeeper and her people, “open the drapes in every second or third room that faces the highway. Turn on the lights.”
Still no one comes.
“Well, it’s just only four o’clock,” John Shoe, his manager, says.
“They should be here by now,” Ben says. “
Someone
should be here.”
“Richmond is supposed to get us some guests. They’ve been alerted. I know that. They’ve instructed the toll-free number to divert some of the Chattanooga business our way.”
“I didn’t know that,” Ben says. “Why didn’t they say something?”
“Maybe it’s supposed to be a surprise,” his manager says.
The housekeeper has come back with the maids. The people have returned to the lobby after reparking their cars. Ben feels simultaneously in Lord of the Manor and Head Butler relation to them. His staff. His crew. His people. Ben’s men. “Suppose no one comes?”
“That’s not possible,” his desk clerk says.
“But suppose. Suppose no one comes? There’s no guarantee. I’m in over my head here.” It seems to him an astonishing admission. A strange way to talk to his employees. And something occurs to him. The notion of employees. In his life, except for the time he was in the army, he has always had employees. People dependent upon him for their living. He has always been Boss. It is a remarkable thing. Why, he thinks, I have been powerful. It’s always been my word that goes. I am higher than my father, who, before he was a boss, had been only a partner. How strange, he thinks, how strange to be a boss. How peculiar to tell others what to do, how mysterious that they do it. And how odd that so frightened a fellow, a man running scared, should command payrolls, control lives. Who had elected him to such office? Where did he get off? How many had worked for him over the years? Hundreds? At least hundreds. What could have possessed so many to do what he told them? A man who had not even come up from the ranks? Who had never lifted a finger? A mere beneficiary of someone else’s bad conscience? How many more must there be like him? he wondered. Baskin-Robbins hotshots who had no calling for ice cream? His life had reduced itself to what the dozen and a half people who stood before him in Ringgold, Georgia, could do for him. To what the men and women, total strangers, whizzing by on I-75 could. The 220 million or so Americans who hadn’t the vaguest notion who he was. (A franchiser, hiding behind others’ expertise, paying them for their names.) If they failed him he would fail. The banks would get him. He was struck by the enormity of things and had to tell them.
“Listen,” he said, “you don’t know. A lot’s at stake here. My God,” he said, “we’ve got a dining room, place settings, service for eight hundred. Think,” he said, “the linen alone. A hundred fifty rooms. Three hundred double beds. That’s six hundred pillows, six hundred pillowcases. The towels. Think of the towels and washcloths and bathmats. A thousand maybe. What are we into here? I’m a bachelor, I’ve got a thousand towels, three hundred sheets for three hundred double beds.”
“More,” his housekeeper said.
“What?”
“More. For every sheet and pillowcase and towel there’s another for when they get dirty.”
“Jesus,” Ben said, “I didn’t even think about that. Twelve hundred pillowcases. Jesus. Two thousand towels.” He thought of all the other Travel Inns, of all the rooms in all the Travel Inns. He took a Travel Inn Directory from the registration desk and opened it at random. It opened on pages 120 and 121—Michigan, Grand Rapids to Kalamazoo. There were seventeen motels with 2,136 rooms. He multiplied this by the 204 pages that listed Travel Inns in the United States. There were 435,744 rooms. “That doesn’t count Canada,” he said. “That doesn’t count Japan. It doesn’t count Mexico or Zaire or Indonesia. That doesn’t count Johannesburg or Paris or Skanes in Tunisia or Tamuning in Guam.
“Almost half a million rooms,” he said. “Service for three and a half million. That doesn’t count Ramada, it doesn’t count Best Western. It doesn’t count Quality. That doesn’t count Hilton, Travelodge, Hospitality Inn. It doesn’t count Rodeway or the Sheraton motels or Howard Johnson’s or the Ben Franklin chain. It doesn’t count Holiday Inn. It doesn’t count Regal 8 Inns, Stouffer, the Six’s, Day’s Inn, Hyatt, Master Hosts, Royal Inns, Red Carpet, Monarch, Inn America, Marriott. It doesn’t count all I can’t think of or those I don’t know. It doesn’t count the independents. It doesn’t count hotels. And it doesn’t count tourist cabins in national parks or places where the Interstates ain’t.
“What are we up to? Twenty million rooms? Twenty-
five
? What are we up to? What are we
talking
here? Service for 250 million? A ghost room for every family in America? And almost every one of them air-conditioned, TV’d or color TV’d, swimming-pooled, cocktail-lounged, restauranted, coffee-shopped.
“How will they find us? How will they know? What’s to be done? Yes, and occupancy rates never lower or competition stiffer. Go! Reroute traffic. Paint detour signs. Paint
FALLING ROCK
, paint
SLIPPERY WHEN WET
, paint
DANGEROUS CURVE
. Paint
CAUTION, MEN WORKING NEXT THOUSAND MILES.
Paint
BRIDGE OUT AHEAD
.
How will they find us? What’s to be done
?”
He wrung his hands. “See?” he said. “I wring my hands. I am wracked. I chafe. I fret. I gall. I smart and writhe. I have throes and am discomfited. All the classic positions of ballet pain.”
“Mr. Flesh,” his housekeeper, Mrs. Befilicio, says.
“Yes? What? You know a way? Something’s occurred to you? Say. Mrs. Befilicio? Anyone. Everyone.” He speaks over her shoulder to Mr. Shoe. “A suggestion box. Have Mr. Wellbanks put a suggestion box together for the employees.” Mr. Wellbanks is the chief maintenance man. “Mr. Wellbanks, can you handle that?” He turns to his employees. “There’s bonus in it for you. How will they know us? What’s to be done? How will they find us? Yes, Mrs. Befilicio, yes, excuse me.”
“It’s just that…”
“What? What is it just? It’s just what? Just what is it?”
“Well, sir, it’s just that it’s past four-thirty and the maids go off duty.”
He stares at the housekeeper. “They’ll take their cars? Remove their cars from the driveway?”
“Well, yes, sir, that’s probably what we’ll have to do. Yes, sir.”
“Yes,” Ben says, “of course. We’ll see you in the morning.”
And at six the two desk clerks go off duty. His cashier leaves. Mr. Wellbanks does. John Shoe says he’ll stay on awhile.
Two people come in but it is only Miss McEnalem and Mr. Kingseed, his night auditor and night clerk.
Then his first guests arrive.
The couple are in their thirties. The woman, who holds the car keys, speaks for them. The waitresses, the hostess, the man from room service, the chef and her assistants hang about to watch them register. John Shoe glances peremptorily at his personnel and lightly claps his hands together, dismissing them.
“Have you a reservation, Mrs. Glosse?” the night clerk asks.
“No. Do we need one?”
“How long do you plan to be staying with us?”
“Just overnight.”
“Oh,” the night clerk says, “in that case I think we can fix you up then. Room 1107.” He gives the Glosses their room key and tells them how to get there. The instructions, as Ben has always found them to be, though he has slept most of his life in motels, are extremely complicated.
“Excuse me,” Ben says, “I happen to be in the room next to yours. I was just going there. I’m the blue Cadillac. You can follow me.” They walk along with him as he goes toward his car. “You’re lucky,” Ben says, “that room happens to be poolside. The water’s terrific. I took a dip before dinner. Dinner was great. The prime ribs are sensational. They do a wonderful Scotch sour. I’m going to watch television tonight. There are some swell shows on. It’s color TV. The reception is marvelous. I may doze off though, the beds are so comfortable.” He drives around to the rear of the long central building, stops and waits for them to make the turn. When they are abreast of him, he lowers his electric window. “Yours would be the fifth room in from the end of the building.” They nod and drive on to where Ben is pointing. Flesh slips his car in just next to theirs in the otherwise vacant parking area. “It’s convenient, isn’t it? The parking.”
“Real convenient,” Mr. Glosse says.
“Well, you folks get comfortable,” he tells them. “Maybe I’ll see you in the lounge later on. They’ve got a super combo. Really excellent. Young, but real pros. The kid with acne on drums is something else.”
The Glosses stare at him. “There’s free ice,” he says lamely. “In the corridor. Very cold.” Ben lets himself into his room and turns on the television set. He waits a few minutes, leaves by the door that opens onto the corridor, and returns to the lobby.
“Did anyone check in while I was gone?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” John Shoe says. “Some people named Storrs. A couple with kids.”
“Teenagers? Babies?”
“No. About ten, I guess. A girl ten, a boy about seven.”
He bites his lips. Teenagers would have been $3 extra apiece. A baby would have meant another dollar for a crib.
Ben sat with his manager in the small office behind the wall of room keys. He could hear everything that happened at the front desk, could hear the switchboard operator as she took wake-up calls. It was not yet midnight.
Ultimately twenty-seven rooms were let. Five to individuals, nine to couples, four to families with two children, five to families with one child. Four doubles went to sisters or to friends traveling together. There were seventy-two guests in the motel. The last room had been rented at twenty minutes to ten. It was an 18 percent occupancy rate. They broke even at 60 percent.
“Why don’t you get some sleep? Anyone traveling this time of night would just keep on going, I expect.”