Rabbit and Nelson, Skeeter and Jill, crushed together in the little car, laugh a lot during this drive, laugh at nothing, at the silly expression on the face of a bib-overalled hick as they barrel past, at pigs dignified in their pens, at the names on mailboxes (Hinnershitz, Focht, Schtupnagel), at tractor-riding men so fat nothing less wide than a tractor seat would hold them. They even laugh when the little car, though the gas gauge stands at 1/2, jerks, struggles, slows, stops as if braked. Jill has time only to bring it to the side of the road, out of traffic. Rabbit gets out to look at the engine; it's in the back, under a tidy slotted hood, a tight machine whose works are not open and tall and transparent as with a Linotype, but are tangled and greasy and closed. The starter churns but the engine will not turn over. The chain of explosions that works by faith is jammed. He leaves the hood up to signal an emergency. Skeeter, crouching down in the back, calls, "Chuck, know what you're doin' with that hood, you're callin' down the fucking fuzz!"
Rabbit tells him, "You better get out of the back. We get hit from behind, you've had it. You too Nelson. Out."
It is the most dangerous type ofhighway, three-lane. The commuter traffic out from Brewer shudders past in an avalanche of dust and noise and carbon monoxide. No Good Samaritans stop. The Porsche has stalled atop an embankment seeded with that feathery finespun ground-cover the state uses to hold steep soiclass="underline" crown vetch. Below, swifts are skimming a shom cornfield. Rabbit and Nelson lean against the fenders and watch the sun, an hour above the horizon, fill the field with stubble-shadows, ridges subtle as those of corduroy. Jill wanders off and gathers a baby bouquet of the tiny daisylike asters that bloom in the fall, on stems so thin they form a cirrus hovering an inch or two above the earth. Jill offers the bouquet to Skeeter, to lure him out. He reaches to bat the flowers from her hand; they scatter and fall in the grit of the roadside. His voice comes muffled from within the Porsche. "You honky cunt, this all a way to turn me in, nothing wrong with this fucking car, right?"
"It won't go," she says; one aster rests on the toe of one ballet slipper. Her face has shed expression.
Skeeter's voice whines and snarls in its metal shell. "Knew I should never come out of that house. Jill honey, I know why. Can't stay off the stuff; right? No will at all, right? Easier than having any will, hand old Skeeter over to the law, hey, right?"
Rabbit asks her, "What's he saying?"
"He's saying he's scared."
Skeeter is shouting, "Get them dumb honkies out of the way, I'm making a run for it. How far down on the other side of that fence?"
Rabbit says, "Smart move, you'll really stick out up here in the boondocks. Talk about a nigger in the woodpile."
"Don't you nigger me, you honky prick. Tell you one thing, you turn me in I'll get you all greased if I have to send to Philly to do it. It's not just me, we're everywhere, hear? Now you fuckers get this car to go, hear me? Get it to go."
Skeeter issues all this while crouched down between the leather backs of the bucket seats and the rear window. His panic is disgusting and may be contagious. Rabbit lusts to pull him out of his shell into the sunshine, but is afraid to reach in; he might get stung. He slams the Porsche door shut on the churning rasping voice, and at the rear of the car slams down the hood. "You two stay here. Calm him down, keep him in the car. I'll walk to a gas station, there must be one up the road."
He runs for a while, Skeeter's venomous fright making his own bladder burn. After all these nights together betrayal is the Negro's first thought. Maybe natural, three hundred years of it. Rabbit is running, running to keep that black body pinned back there, so it won't panic and flee. Like running late to school. Skeeter has become a duty. Late, late. Then an antique red flying-horse sign suspended above sunset-dyed fields. It is an old-fashioned garage: an unfathomable work space black with oil, the walls precious with wrenches, fan belts, peen hammers, parts. An old Coke machine, the kind that dispenses bottles, purrs beside the hydraulic lift. The mechanic, a weedy young man with a farmer's drawl and black palms, drives him in a jolting tow truck back up the highway. The side window is broken; air whistles there, hungrily gushes.
"Seized up," is the mechanic's verdict. He asks Jill, "When'd you last put oil in it?"
"Oil? Don't they do it when they put the gas in?"
"Not unless you ask."
"You dumb mutt," Rabbit says to Jill.
Her mouth goes prim and defiant. "Skeeter's been driving the car too."
Skeeter, while the mechanic was poking around in the engine and pumping the gas pedal, uncurled from behind the seats and straightened in the air, his glasses orange discs in the last of the sun. Rabbit asks him, "How far've you been taking this crate?"
"Oh," the black man says, fastidious in earshot of the mechanic, _"here and there. Never recklessly. I wasn't aware;" he minces on, "the automobile was your property."
"It's just," he says lamely, "the waste. The carelessness."
Jill asks the mechanic, "Can you fix it in an hour? My little brother here has homework to do."
The mechanic speaks only to Rabbit. "The enchine's destroyed. The pistons have fused to the cylinders. The nearest place to fix a car like this is probably Pottstown."
"Can we leave it with you until we arrange to have somebody come for it?"
"I'll have to charge a dollar a day for the parking."
"Sure. Swell."
"And that'll be twenty for the towing."
He pays. The mechanic tows the Porsche back to the garage. They ride with him, Jill and Harry in the cab ("Careful now," the mechanic says as Jill slides over, "I don't want to get grease on that nice white dress"), Skeeter and Nelson in the little car, dragged backwards at a slant. At the garage, the mechanic phones for a cab to take them into West Brewer. Skeeter disappears behind a smudged door and flushes the toilet repeatedly. Nelson settles to watching the mechanic unhitch the car and listens to him talk about "enchines." Jill and Harry walk outside. Crickets are shrilling in the dark cornfields. A quarter-moon, with one sick eye, scuds above the flying horse sign. The garage's outer lights are switched off. He notices something white on her slipper. The little flower that fell has stuck there. He stoops and hands it to her. She kisses it to thank him, then, silently lays it to rest in a trash barrel full of oil-wiped paper towels and punctured cans. "Don't get your dress greasy." Car tires crackle; an ancient fifties Buick, with those tailfins patterned on B-19s, pulls into their orbit. The taxi driver is fat and chews gum. On the way back to Brewer, his head bulks as a pyramid against the oncoming headlights, motionless but for the rhythm of chewing. Skeeter sits beside him. "Beautiful day," Rabbit calls forward to him.
Jill giggles. Nelson is asleep on her lap. She toys with his hair, winding it around her silent fingers.
"Fair for this time of the year," is the slow answer.
"Beautiful country up here. We hardly ever get north of the city. We were driving around sightseeing."
"Not too many sights to see."
"The engine seized right up on us, I guess the car's a real mess."
"I guess."
"My daughter here forgot to put any oil in it, that's the way young people are these days, ruin one car and on to the next. Material things don't mean a thing to 'em."
"To some, I guess."
Skeeter says sideways to him, "Yo' sho' meets a lot Bo nice folks hevin' en acci-dent lahk dis, a lot ob naas folks way up no'th heah."
"Yes, well," the driver says, and that is all he says until he says to Rabbit, having stopped on Vista Crescent, "Eighteen."