The car tended to lurch when she shifted, her relation to the clutch hit and miss. They slowed, stopped; a car in front somewhere broken down at the entrance to the bridge. Something wrong. Lights flashing ahead.
He leaned over her and honked the horn. Which set off a chorus of honks from behind. A few in front. Behind. Nothing moving but the noise.
“Have patience,” she said.
The fumes in the air were choking him.
They were moving again — slowly — three lanes filtering into one. The car lurching each time she shifted from first to second. Slamming on the brakes, stalling.
They switched places again, Christopher at the wheel. Half a dozen horns groaning at them like guns being shot. “If I had a machine gun, I’d kill them all,” he said.
“You wouldn’t.” She turned on the radio, moved from station to station, nothing quite what she wanted.
The car had a gamy smell and he had the notion, which was consoling, that it was made from human skin specially treated to have the consistency of metal.
It was hard to keep his eyes off the river. He drove in the outside lane, glancing at the water as if it might suddenly reveal something to him. Getting over the bridge — the Volks buffeted by the wind as they crossed — exhilarated him. They were, if nothing else, if nowhere, out of the city.
They stopped for gas on the other side. He paid for a full tank, which left him with eight dollars in his wallet.
“How much money do you have?”
She gave him a twenty-dollar bill.
“Do you have any more?”
She shook her head. “A few dollars and some change.”
It was as if they were chained invisibly to the city. Their car like a dog let free on an enormous leash. When they reached a certain distance, the end of their rope, they would be jerked back to where they had been.
He slowed down — there seemed less hurry now — the view the same: trees, grass, sky, wherever you looked. The same trees, the same grass. The sky a pale blue, the clouds like threads of smoke. He gave up all hope of getting away.
Looking over, he noticed that Rosemary had on sunglasses — had she had them on before? — large ones that masked her expression. He couldn’t remember the color of her eyes, dreamed them brown. Dark brown, the color of her glasses. Dove into them as if they were a muddy river.
“I’d like to go swimming,” she said. “It’s too hot to drive in the heat of the day.”
He thought of leaving her somewhere at the side of the road, taking her car and her money, maybe screwing her again for good measure. Would she forgive him that? Was there no end to her capacity for forgiveness? It would be better, less dangerous, he decided, to have her with him.
The news was on — the time eleven o’clock — Rosemary talking about some book she wanted him to read. Christopher thinking about the war, about Parks. His orders to report for induction on August 4. There were two days left.
“Five women and a child were killed this morning in a Pearl City, Texas, beauty parlor by a handsome eighteen-year-old named Calvin William Hoover,” the newscaster was saying. “This is the fourth mass killing in the past year, which is, unofficially, a new record. The previous unofficial high for a year was three.” The voice went on, but for a moment he had stopped listening.
“After discarding the idea of suffocating his victims with plastic sandwich bags, the youth entered the beauty shop today, forced his victims to a back room, and calmly shot each of them. When asked why, the former honor student is reported to have said, ‘I wanted to make a name for myself.’”
“It’s frightening,” she said.
She was saying something else, but he wanted to hear the news — 181 of the enemy killed in a search-and-destroy operation — and told her to be quiet.
“A New York priest, thirty-five-year-old Father James Gatz Fitzgerald was brutally shot down by enemy fire today while giving last rites to American soldiers in War Zone C. Notified of Father Fitzgerald’s murder at his desk in Washington, the President vowed that this tragic loss of life shall not be in vain. ‘God will take His just vengeance,’ he told reporters.” He shut off the radio, angry at its noise.
Went off the parkway to look for a motel with a pool. His clothes like skin — the red upholstery like another flesh, open, bleeding. He swam through the heat, a fish in the belly of the car’s flesh. Turning and turning.
If there was something he had to do, something important, he felt himself getting farther and farther away from what it was. In losing his pursuers, losing himself.
Mr. and Mrs. James Hoover. He signed the register, paid eight dollars in advance. Rosemary waiting for him just inside the office door. He admired her cool, envied it. How impressive she seemed in her dark glasses.
The shower felt good. It was the first thing he did. Rosemary reading a magazine, lying on the double bed. For all he knew, calling the police or some priest to get him. He wouldn’t be able to hear if she phoned — the shower roaring like the ocean inside a shell, the shell his head. Or was it the air-conditioning, which the manager had insisted on turning on for them? The faint distant humming, a sound he had never, no matter where he was, gotten away from. In the city it was always there, the whine of some machine. He didn’t wash, just stood there under the nozzle letting the water rain over him. A sweet private pleasure. He stood, eyes closed, like a flower in the rain. Brave in his skin. Until he began to worry what Rosemary was doing — could she be trusted? — what lay ahead, what was next? His balls ached from the cold. What was he, standing there, kissed by the water, burned, torn? What kind of thing was he?
She moaned when he came in as if awakened from a bad dream, though she hadn’t been asleep.
“What are we doing here?” Her voice uncomplaining.
“You said you wanted to go swimming.”
It was six medium-size steps from the plastic-tan door of the room to the pink wall at the other end. He counted them as he paced. Sometimes five. When he increased the length of his strides, four … three and a half.
“Is that why we came here, so I could go swimming?”
Sometimes three. “I’m not going to touch you if that’s what you’re afraid of.” He was sitting at the edge of the bed, staring at her feet.
“If I were afraid of you, why would I have gone off with you, without asking where we were going, without any questions?”
“You want something from me,” he said. He saw his reflection in her eyes, hunched over, swollen, not quite human. Glowing. Her pity like a light.
Someone was knocking at the door — he thought the police or Parks, she thought her aunt; the facts of the city closing in on them. “Hey, do you want these here suits?” a voice called. “Should I wrap them up or will you eat them here?”
“Tell him to go away.”
The manager knocked again. “It’s Mr. Quick,” he bellowed, his voice coming at them as if he were in the room, his mouth to their ear. “I have those items you wanted, folks. One boy’s suit, one girl’s suit.”
Christopher opened the door just enough to reach for the suits, but Quick, before relinquishing his items, wedged his foot in the opening. “This is the best time of the day for the pool, kids,” he said, peering into the room. “Don’t forget to return them when you’re through.”
He made a move to close the door, but Quick’s foot remained as if it belonged permanently to the space it occupied.
“Just about two weeks ago, a young married took off with a couple rented suits — these very suits, come to think of it. It was a lucky thing I had their license number.”
“He wants a deposit,” she said. Rosemary at her purse, a brown shoulder bag, which was on the white imitation-wood dresser. “Ask him if five dollars will cover the suits.”