"You don't think it's what makes things run? Human things."
"There must be something else."
She doesn't answer.
"No? Nothing else?"
Instead of answering, she says, "Ollie is back with her now, but she doesn't seem especially happy."
It is easy in a car; the STOP signs and corner groceries flicker by, brick and sandstone merge into a running screen. At the end of Summer Street he thinks there will be a brook, and then a dirt road and open pastures; but instead the city street broadens into a highway lined with hamburger diners, and drive-in sub shops, and a miniature golf course with big plaster dinosaurs, and food-stamp stores and motels and gas stations that are changing their names, Humble to Getty, Atlantic to Arco. He has been here before.
Janice says, "Want to stop?"
"I ate lunch. Didn't you?"
"Stop at a motel," she says.
"You and me?"
"You don't have to do anything, it's just we're wasting gas this way."
"Cheaper to waste gas than pay a motel, for Chrissake. Anyway don't they like you to have luggage?"
"They don't care. Anyway I think I did put a suitcase in the back, just in case."
He turns and looks and there it is, the tatty old brown one still with the hotel label on from the time they went to the Shore, Wildwood Cabins. The same suitcase she must have packed to run to Stavros with. "Say," he says. "You're full of sexy tricks now, aren't you?"
"Forget it, Harry. Take me home. I'd forgotten about you."
"These guys who run motels, don't they think it's fishy if you check in before suppertime? What time is it, two-thirty."
"Fishy? What's fishy, Harry? God, you're a prude. Everybody knows people screw. It's how we all got here. When're you going to grow up, even a little bit?"
"Still, to march right in with the sun pounding down -"
"Tell him I'm your wife. Tell him we're exhausted. It's the truth, actually. I didn't sleep two hours last night."
"Wouldn't you rather go to my parents' place? Nelson'll be home in an hour."
"Exactly. Who matters more to you, me or Nelson?"
"Nelson."
"Nelson or your mother?"
"My mother."
"You are a sick man."
"There's a place. Like it?"
Safe Haven Motel the sign says, with slats strung below it claiming
QUEEN SIZE BEDS
ALL COLOR TVS
SHOWER & BATH
TELEPHONES
"MAGIC FINGERS"
A neon VACANCY sign buzzes dull red. The office is a little brick tollbooth; there is a drained swimming pool with a green tarpaulin over it. At the long brick facade bleakly broken by doorways several cars already park; they seem to be feeding, metal cattle at a trough. Janice says, "It looks crummy."
"That's what I like about it," Rabbit says. "They might take us."
But as he says this, they have driven past. Janice asks, "Seriously, haven't you ever done this before?"
He tells her, "I guess I've led a kind of sheltered life."
"Well, it's by now," she says, of the motel.
"I could turn around."
"Then it'd be on the wrong side of the highway."
"Scared?"
"Of what?"
"Me." Racily Rabbit swings into a Garden Supplies parking lot, spewing gravel, brakes just enough to avoid a collision with oncoming traffic, crosses the doubled line, and heads back the way they came. Janice says, "If you want to kill yourself, go ahead, but don't kill me; I'm just getting to like being alive."
"It's too late," he tells her. "You'll be a grandmother in a couple more years."
"Not with you at the wheel."
But they cross the double line again and pull in safely. The VACANCY sign still buzzes. Ignition off. Lever at P. The sun shimmers on the halted asphalt. "You can't just sit here," Janice hisses. He gets out of the car. Air. Globes of ether, pure nervousness, slide down his legs. There is a man in the little tollbooth, along with a candy bar machine and a rack of black-tagged keys. He has wetcombed silver hair, a string tie with a horseshoe clasp, and a cold. Placing the registration card in front of Harry, he pats his chafed nostrils with a blue bandana. "Name and address and license plate number," he says. He speaks with a Western twang.
"My wife and I are really bushed," Rabbit volunteers. His ears are burning; the blush spreads downward, his undershirt feels damp, his heart jars his hand as it tries to write, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Angstrom. Address? Of course, he must lie. He writes unsteadily, 26 Vista Crescent, Penn Villas, Pa. Junk mail and bills are being forwarded to him from that address. Wonderful service, the postal. Put yourself in one of those boxes, sorted from sack to sack, finally there you go, plop, through the right slot out of millions. A miracle that it works. Young punk revolutionaries, let them try to get the mail through, through rain and sleet and dark of night. The man with the string tie patiently leans on his Formica desk while Rabbit's thoughts race and his hand jerks. "License plate number, that's the one that counts," he peaceably drawls. "Show me a suitcase or pay in advance."
"No kidding, she is my wife."
"Must be on honeymoon straight from haah school."
"Oh, this." Rabbit looks down at his peppermint-and-cream Mt. Judge athletic jacket, and fights the creeping return of his blush. "I haven't worn this for I don't know how many years."
"Looks to almost fit," the man says, tapping the blank space for the plate number. "Ah'm in no hurry if you're not," he says.
Harry goes to the show window of the little house and studies the license plate and signals for Janice to show the suitcase. He lifts an imaginary suitcase up and down by the handle and she doesn't understand. Janice sits in their Falcon, mottled and dimmed by window reflections. He pantomimes unpacking; he draws a rectangle in the air; he exclaims, "God, she's dumb!" and she belatedly understands, reaching back and lifting the bag into view through the layers of glass between them. The man nods; Harry writes his plate number (U20-692) on the card and is given a numbered key (17). "Toward the back," the man says, "more quaat away from the road."
"I don't care if it's quiet, we're just going to sleep," Rabbit says; key in hand, he bursts into friendliness. "Where're you from, Texas? I was stationed there with the Army once, Fort Larson, near Lubbock."
The man inserts the card into a rack, looking through the lower half of his bifocals, and clucks his tongue. "You ever get up around Santa Fe?"
"Nope. Never. Sorry I didn't."
"That's my idea of a goood place," the man tells him.
"I'd like to go someday. I really would. Probably never will, though."
"Don't say that, young buck like you, and your cute little lady."
"I'm not so young."
"You're yungg," the man absentmindedly insists, and this is so nice of him, this and handing over the key, people are so nice generally, that Janice asks Harry as he gets back into the car what he's grinning about. "And what took so long?"
"We were talking about Santa Fe. He advised us to go."
The door numbered 17 gives on a room surprisingly long, narrow but long. The carpet is purple, and bits of backlit cardboard here and there undercut the sense ofsubstance, as in a movie lobby. A fantasy world. The bathroom is at the far end, the walls are of cement-block painted rose, imitation oils of the ocean are trying to adom them, two queen-sized beds look across the narrow room at a television set. Rabbit takes off his shoes and turns on the set and gets on one bed. A band of light appears, expands, jogs itself out of diagonal twitching stripes into The Dating Game. A colored girl from Philly is trying to decide which of three men to take her out on a date; one man is black, another is white, the third is yellow. The color is such that the Chinese man is orange and the colored girl looks bluish. The reception has a ghost so that when she laughs there are many, many teeth. Janice turns it off. Like him she is in stocking feet. They are burglars. He protests, "Hey. That was interesting. She couldn't see them behind that screen so she'd have to tell from their voices what color they were. If she cared."