It was the rabbit that did it.
She’d been driving for hours, stressed-out pretty much all the way up I-75 from her apartment in Naples to her brother’s condo in Sarasota—and just because her brother wouldn’t answer his phone—when instead of going that far north she could have knocked two hours off her travel time and all that driving in the dark along lonely, two-lane State Road 70 by switching to 17 and cutting right on over to Arcadia, the only goddamn town along all this long, awful stretch of highway if you could even call it a highway, the town twenty, maybe twenty-five miles behind her now finally and already feeling like a distant memory.
But no. Joel wasn’t answering his phone. So instead it had been well over an hour and a half on 70 even to get this far, with thick bands of low-lying fog at every dip of the road, so that driving was like diving and surfacing through waves just about to break along the shoreline, diving and surfacing over and over again, her wipers at maximum speed barely up to the job.
Were it not for Joel she could have been there already.
But she had no choice. She had to tell him somehow.
Their uncle was in Lawnwood Regional at Ft. Pierce. He’d been pulling out of a Wal-Mart parking lot when a couple of kids out joyriding came careening around a corner and rammed his car nearly head-on. Despite the belt and harness his head had hit the driver’s-side window hard enough to crack it. Now he was in a coma. His doctors were monitoring him very carefully.
Linda and Joel had spent every summer with Ed and Marion Teale from the seventh grade on, all the way through high school, their aunt and uncle the sole safe haven from their warring parents for six of the most emotionally precarious years of their lives. If you added that up it came to an entire year and a half. A year and a half of sanity and unconditional love in the mountains, woods and lakes of rural New Jersey. It had made all the difference in the world.
Linda met her first boyfriend there, unexpected and delightful as a light summer rain. Childless themselves but infinitely understanding, Uncle Ed and Aunt Marion welcomed the relationship. Her father never would have.
Joel had grown from a fat awkward kid to a reasonably good-looking and reasonably self-possessed young man.
And now Ed might be dying. Her aunt’s voice on the phone made that clear. All the brightness leeched away.
There was no way in hell she wasn’t going see him before that happened. If only to tell him once again how much he’d meant to her, how much she’d always loved him. Coma or no coma.
Joel was of another mind.
“There’s nothing we can do, Lin. Hell, I love the guy too, you know that. But I can’t go through this again. It’s been what? eight months since mom died? A year and a half since dad? I just can’t take another hospital right now.”
“It’s Alice, isn’t it. You look like hell, Joel.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Well, you do.”
The wrinkled UMass sweatshirt didn’t hide much. He was a good ten pounds below his fighting weight. Maybe more like twenty.
“Look. When Jim left me all I wanted to do was climb under the covers and sleep the rest of my life away. I know exactly how you feel. Instead I set the clock, even on Sunday. You going to the office?”
“Of course I’m going to the office.”
“Good. But you’ve got to get the rest of your priorities straight too, Joel. Clean up around here for godsakes. Do a laundry. Answer your goddamn phone or at least turn on the machine. Remember these?”
She held out her left wrist. The faint white scars were horizontal.
The hospital psychologist had called them a cry for help, not a serious attempt at suicide.
“I’m not even sure I’d be here without those two people in my life. Are you? Are you really sure? You want to find me, you know where I’ll be.”
And picturing him standing there so lost and alone in the doorway she could almost cry again. But she wouldn’t. Not with those headlights coming at her over the hill. Not with the fog whipping at her windshield. Not with the black empty road behind her and the black empty road ahead. She dipped her brights and the oncoming car did the same.
Not a car. A truck.
A semi on this narrow lane doing seventy-five at least for god’s sake when they only gave you sixty, so that the little Nissan felt sucked into the vacuum of its wake, shuddering as though somebody had walked over its grave. She flicked on the brights again.
And that was when the dog ran out in front of her.
Dog or wolf—they had them here—something gray in the fog loping across the road maybe three car-lengths ahead so that she instinctively tapped the brake but there was no need, thank god, not really, three car-lengths was far enough away. The dog or whatever it was had disappeared. It was never really in any danger.
It was just that there was so damn much roadkill out here.
She’d been highly aware of it all along, even before Arcadia. But it had gotten much worse now that she was headed toward Lake Okeechobee. It seemed to her that every half-mile or so her brights would race across another carcass, pale against the even paler February frost along the roadside to her left or right and sometimes both together as though they’d somehow died in pairs.
Didn’t anybody ever clean up around here?
Or was this the fruit of a single day?
It seemed impossible. That so much life could end so violently along one road in the course of just one day. She’d been able to make out the bodies of dogs, skunks, birds, a cat, at least two raccoons, even a huge turtle—and once, lying in the middle of the road across the center line so that both she and the car coming toward her had to brake and slow to a crawl to avoid it, a deer, impossible to tell whether it was male or female, its head little more than a dark pulp glistening in her headlights. She’d had to look away.
They’d made her nervous from the start, all these bodies.
The dog made her more so.
So that the natural impulse was to go faster. To just get the hell out of here as fast as possible. She knew she had to restrain herself from doing that. Doing that could get her killed. Suppose another deer came along? Suppose another deer came along and she had to swerve just as another truck bore down on her?
But the tension of not slowing down was making her nuts. That and all the rest. Her fatigue, Joel, the late hour, the lonely road, the oncoming headlights—would they even dim this time?—her aunt and uncle, the carcasses. All of it. She didn’t even dare to light a cigarette. She wanted it over with. She wanted to be somewhere warm and safe and fucking well-lit for a change. She wanted not to want to cry.
But it was the rabbit that did it.
The jackrabbit leaping out in front of her in a zigzag line across the road and not three car-lengths away this time but simply there in her lights like a sudden ghost image of itself so that she had to slam hard on the brakes, the harness cutting across her chest, something burning inside her chest in that terrible moment of expectation, the implicit impact of living flesh on cold unyielding steel.
Which mercifully never came.
Her heart was hammering anyhow. She couldn’t believe she’d missed it.
She slowed to fifty-five and forced her hands to relax their grip on the wheel.
She felt queasy and light-headed, as though she hadn’t eaten. The half-finished ham and Swiss sandwich in the clear Ziploc bag on the passenger seat was proof that she had. But she was definitely, seriously shaky now… What was the saying? Three’s the charm?
If this happened to her a third time she’d end up in a ditch.
To her left, another dead cat.
Further on, something wholly unrecognizable but for patchy tufts of fur stirring as she passed.
She glanced down at the speedometer. Sixty-eight, heading toward seventy. Not good. She hadn’t been aware of speeding up at all. Yet another wave of fog broke over the windshield. For a moment she could see nothing whatsoever ahead or on either side.
So that when the What-U-Need Motel vacancy sign appeared ahead she knew she could not do another two hours of this shit, no way, not tonight, it was already nearly midnight so she was not going to get to see her uncle tonight anyway, so she pulled off the road onto the gravel driveway—and by simply doing so felt a weight lift off of her. She actually smiled for the first time in what must have been hours. What-U-Need? What I need is a goddamn cigarette, she thought.
In her headlights she saw that the motel consisted of no more than a dozen or so small, dark wooden cabins standing in a half-circle on either side of a brightly lit reception office. That was different. More what you’d expect to find in New England than in Florida, where the usual setup was at least twice as many squat concrete units linked on either side around the barely used yet for some reason obligatory pool.
Vacancy seemed to be an understatement. There wasn’t another car in sight.
She parked and got out of the Nissan and even before she opened the office door had a feeling of emptiness about the place and saw that there was nobody at the desk. She hoped this wasn’t going to be a problem. Midnight wasn’t all that late, was it? Inside she saw that there was no registry book in evidence nor any bell or buzzer to summon clerk or owner either. And then she read the sign over the old antique cash register directly in front of her.
WELCOME TO THE WHAT-U-NEED MOTEL
WE OPERATE STRICTLY ON THE HONOR SYSTEM!
RATES, $15.00 PER NIGHT SINGLE, $30.00 PER
NIGHT DOUBLE
CHECK-OUT TIME, 11:00 A.M.
KEYS TO YOUR LEFT, BAR IN BACK!
ALL DRINKS $2.00, SOFT DRINKS ON THE HOUSE!
TAKE WHAT-U-NEED
AND RING IT UP IN THE MORNING
HAVE A GOOD STAY!
Honor system? At a motel? My god—she hadn’t seen anything on the honor system since grade school, when her dad would slip a newspaper out of the stack in front of The Sugar Bowl on his way to work before Mr. Lister opened mornings and put his dime on top of the stack. Or no—there was also that roadside vegetable and fruit stand up near Uncle Ed’s place by the lake, where everything was priced and you just took whatever produce you wanted and left your money in a cardboard seed box on a rickety wooden table.
But a motel? With a bar? In the year 2003?
She couldn’t believe it.
She walked over to the key rack.
Evidently she had her choice of rooms. Every niche had a key in it.
It felt strange, knowing she’d be the only guest. Knowing she was all alone. She wondered if she was even safe here. She was out in the middle of nowhere after all. You could disappear from a place like this and nobody’d ever know. She reached into her bag for the cigarettes and lit one and considered her situation.
The alternative was to get back on the road again. The alternative sucked. And if the rooms had keys then they had locks to go with those keys. She thought that would probably do, that if the windows locked she’d probably be all set. And she did like this honor system thing. It reminded her of simpler times, quieter times, when neighbors were really neighbors to each another and not just the people next door. When you didn’t have to worry about locks and keys.
She’d always been partial to the number three.
Three it is then, she thought. Time to explore.
She took the key off the rack and walked outside into the cold night air.
Number three was in the center to her right. A distance of about five feet separated it from the cabin on either side. She liked the old-fashioned look of the cabins right away—dark clapboard siding, shake roofs—most motels these days were nothing more than subdivided bunkers. And then when she stepped inside she was grinning ear to ear.
She had a fireplace!
No television, not even a phone. But a brick-and-mortar fireplace opposite the bed complete with wrought-iron grate, mesh screen, andirons and a small stack of split wood and kindling.
A fireplace, in Florida! Where you might only want one a month or two every year, if that. This was great!
She checked the windows on either side. Locked. She checked the bathroom. It was neat and clean. She had water pressure in the tub and sink and the water warmed up quickly. The toilet flushed. There was soap and shampoo and even a complementary comb, toothbrush and tube of toothpaste on the sink.
What-U-Need indeed.
She sat down on the bed. Soft but not too soft.
She didn’t care at all about a television or even a phone for that matter though it would have been nice to call Aunt Marion. She had a fireplace and a paperback novel in her purse and a good soft bed. All she could ask for.
A glass of wine would work, though. She wondered what the bar was like.
She was still a little shaky from the drive here.
A bar alone? At night? What the hell, she thought. In for a penny, in for a pound.
She’d expected it to be empty. It wasn’t.
Behind the reception desk she opened a door to the right of the cash register and heard music right away—Elvis singing ”Don’t Be Cruel”—and walked a short, narrow, well-lit corridor past a door marked management and another door marked rest room to a third door marked bar directly ahead of her.
The bar wasn’t much to speak of though it did have some nice old-fashioned touches. Green-hooded lamps hung over each of the four tables, making her think of poker-rooms—though she’d never been in one—old tin serving trays advertising Keubler Beer and Buckingham Cut Plug Smoking Tobacco and Alderney Sweet Cream Butter were tacked above the double row of bottles along with old faded photos of prizefighters, racehorses, ballplayers, none of whom looked familiar. The bar itself sported a wide brass rail and was polished to a high shine.
At first glance the patrons weren’t much to speak of either. Two old men sitting at the end of the bar who looked up and smiled at her when she walked in and three younger men in off-the-rack suits and ties talking at one of the tables—who didn’t acknowledge her at all—a middle-aged heavy-set woman nearest the door who appeared to be drinking whiskey neat from a tumbler and another, younger woman of roughly her own age in the middle of the bar, sipping a glass of red wine. She saw that there was a second glass, as yet untouched, in front of her. Both women nodded and the younger one, a curly-haired redhead, smiled. Lin smiled back and stepped up beside her.
“Evening,” she said.
“Hi there,” said the woman.
“Anyone sitting here?”
“Nope. It’s all yours.”
She sat down.
“You got to help yourself, hon,” said the other woman. She seemed to be studying her whiskey. “No barkeep.”
“Oh, right. Thanks.”
She glanced at the two old men down at the end. “Don’t mind Pete and Willie,” said the redhead. “They’re harmless.”
Pete and Willie smiled at her again as she rounded the service area and began checking out the bottles.
“Watcha lookin’ for, miss?” said the thinner and scruffier of the two. “Maybe I can help.”
“White wine?”
“Icebox, right over there.” He pointed.
Icebox? She hadn’t heard that in years. Where did these people come from, anyway? Her own car was the only one in the driveway. She guessed they’d parked around back somewhere. They did seem friendly enough, though. It had worried her a bit, walking into the bar alone. But she wasn’t feeling threatened here.
They didn’t have much selection. They had a Rhine wine and a Chablis, a rose and a couple of inexpensive champagnes. She didn’t like rose and since the Chablis was open she chose that, found a glass on the shelf behind her and poured. She walked over and set the glass down between the redhead and the older woman.
“Might as well do what I do, pour yourself another while you’re back there,” said the redhead. “No bartender, right? And hell, it’s all on the house.”
“I thought that was just soft drinks. Wine’s two dollars, right?”
The woman smiled.
“Suppose you’re right, though. Save myself a walk. Can I get either of you anything?”
“Could do with another Johnnie,” said the older woman.
“Johnnie?”
“Johnnie Walker red. Right behind you. No ice.”
She poured the scotch and another glass of wine and set them on the bar and walked back the way she’d come.
Pete and Willie smiled again. The men at the table were still deep in conversation and didn’t seem to notice her at all. It was probably just as well. She figured them for salesmen. Except for the sandy-haired one, too much oil in their hair, too many rings on their fingers. Guys with wide lapels and thin ties hitting on her was not on her agenda tonight or ever.
She lit a cigarette and sipped her chardonnay.
“Not bad,” she said.
“No,” said the redhead. “They got a nice stock in this place.”
“You from around here?”
“Lauderdale originally. You staying at the What-U-Need?”
“Uh-huh. I can’t believe they have fireplaces. And this whole honor system thing, you know? I mean now? In this day and age? It’s amazing.”
She smiled again, nodded.
Elvis fell silent a moment and then switched to “Are You Lonesome Tonight.”
“I remember when I was a girl,” said the older woman, “Philbert’s grocery had this big old ice-chest outside filled with chipped ice and soda pop. This was way before them soda-machines. Thing was big as a coffin. Didn’t have no room for it in the store so what you’d do is, you’d open it up and take yourself a soda pop and go pay for it inside.”
“Heard this one before, Harriet,” said the redhead.
“I know you have but she hasn’t. One day I didn’t have the dime. So I just took one and walked away with it. I figured, nobody around to see. Problem was old man Philbert happened to peek out the window just then looking for his delivery boy. I tell you, my daddy took the strap to me so bad it was a week before I could sit down to table. I shoulda known. See what I’m saying? I shoulda known.”
“What room you in?” said the redhead.
“Three.”
“Nice room. I’m in six myself.”
“Eight,” said the older woman. “Harriet Peasely. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Linda Wright. Lin.”
“I’m Amanda.”
They shook hands all around.
“I don’t get it,” she said, “I thought I was the only person staying here.”
“Nah. I think we’re pretty well full up in fact, wouldn’t you say, Harriet?”
“Pretty near, I guess”
“But the keys…”
“What keys?”
“The keys in the key rack, out there in the office. It’s full.”
Amanda shrugged. “Duplicates, I guess. Why?”
“But that doesn’t make sense. I mean, what if I’d decided on number eight or six, say—your rooms—instead of three? Or any other for that matter?”
She laughed. “I guess somebody would have been pretty surprised, wouldn’t they.”
It didn’t make sense at all. They hadn’t been duplicates. There was only one key per niche. She felt down the rabbit hole all of a sudden.
“Okay, but then where is everybody? Where are all the…?”
And she was about to say cars when the sandy-haired man at the table shouted fuck it, fuck it! I’m outta here! his face an angry blotchy red and his chair clattering to the floor behind him and she saw that all three men were on their feet now, the other two trying to restrain the guy, taking hold of his arms. She heard one of them say something like, you just gotta accept what you did, John, you just gotta something or other trying to calm and quieten him but the man twisted suddenly in their grasp and shugged them off him and then he was moving fast in her direction, headed for the door. His eyes caught her own.
“So what the fuck are you looking at?” he said.
And then he was gone.
The other two men sat down again, shaking their heads. They resumed their conversation.
“What was that all about?” she said.
“Nothing you need to worry about, Lin,” Amanda said. “He just does that sometimes. He’ll get over it. Always does.”
“You all know one another?”
“Not everybody. I do know John, though.”
Maybe it was the glass of wine she’d already finished but this was all getting to be just a bit too much for her. On top of an exhausting day, a damn sight too much. That fire, that nice soft bed—they simply beckoned. She’d work it all out in the morning. Or she wouldn’t as the case may be. She needed to get some sleep.
She slid off the barstool and picked up her second glass of wine.
“Think I’ll take this with me. I’ve really got to get some rest, you know? It was nice meeting you.”
“Nice meeting you too, Lin,” said Amanda. “See you tomorrow night?”
“No. I’m leaving first thing in the morning. Good talking to you, though.”
Amanda just smiled again.
“You take care, now,” said Harriet. Her second scotch was already half gone. “You take good care now, hear me?”
“Thanks. I will. ’Night.”
And it was only when she was outside and halfway to her cabin that she realized she hadn’t paid for her drinks. Oh, well, she thought, she’d leave the price of the drinks in the register in the morning along with the rent money. Come to think of it she couldn’t remember seeing a second register in the bar so maybe that was what you were supposed to do anyway. Strange way to run a business, though. Strange place all around.
By the time she had the fire going, filling the room with warmth and the delightful smell of pine, she’d pretty much forgotten all about the bar. She didn’t even bother opening her paperback. She just lay there between the sheets staring at the flames, worrying about Joel and her uncle and sipping at the wine until in a little while sleep claimed her.
In the morning she showered and dressed and used the complementary toothbrush and toothpaste and towel-dried her hair. She felt refreshed and ready to go. The scent of fire lingered in the room so that she almost hated to leave it. She put two dollars on the end table for the maid and stepped out into the chill of morning.
There was a surprise waiting for her at the reception desk.
A registry book. Bound in black leather—and evidently brand new. It lay open to the first page and there wasn’t an entry in it. She signed her name and guessed her check-in time to be about twelve-fifteen a.m. and then looked at her watch. It was ten twenty-five. She wrote down ten twenty-five as her check-out time. Then she went to the register. She depressed the OPEN key and got another surprise.
It was empty.
She’d expected it would at least have held change for a twenty. A twenty was all she had. What the hell, she thought, fifteen for the room, four for the drinks and a single to the invisible barman. She put the twenty in the till and closed the drawer. She punched in $20.00 and hit TOTAL and the drawer popped out again so she closed it again and then read the audit strip to be sure it had recorded the amount correctly. She smiled. It was quite an audit strip.
It read $20.00, payment on the honor system. We have what we need. You’ve got What-U-Need. Have a nice day.
She still was smiling when she walked out the door.
“It just happened,” said her aunt. “Just like that! One minute he’s god knows where and the next he’s asking me what time it is, like he’s got some lunch date or something…I was so surprised I actually looked at my watch and told him. I said, why, it’s ten twenty-five, Ed! And now look at the big dope. Look at him smiling. He scared all of us half to death and now he’s smiling like it’s Christmas morning!”
“It is Christmas morning,” said her uncle. “My favorite niece is here. Gimme a hug, Lin.”
She was so relieved she was shaking with laughter and crying at the same time.
“Hey. Does your favorite nephew get in on that too?” She turned and there was Joel behind her, standing smiling in the open doorway.
“He sure as hell does. Come here, you two.”
And it was only as she released him and turned to hug her brother too that she thought of exactly what she had been doing at ten twenty-five that morning and then of the audit strip on the register at the What-U-Need Motel.
She drove State Road 70 a number of times after that in both daylight and nighttime and never saw it again. It didn’t surprise her. She wondered where it was now and where Amanda and Harriet and the others were now and resolved that if she ever had a child he or she would know all about the honor system in the old days and the new and be careful not to flaunt it.
Thanks to C. for the notion.
~*~
My friend Carolyn Kessaratos Shea once worked as a saleswoman driving though New England and she was stunned one night to find herself at a motel out in the sticks somewhere that actually operated on the honor system. Said it was one of the spookiest and most delightful experiences of her life.
Driving Florida’s SR70 alone in the fog at night was one of the most unnerving experiences of my life. I wanted a place to stop so badly that I could’ve pulled into the Bates Motel without a qualm. But unless you counted the trucks roaring by there wasn’t a single sign of human habitation for miles.
There was roadkill everywhere I looked including the deer carcass directly in front of me in the headlights—and that goddamn rabbit damn near killed me.
I put the two together and sprinkled in a barfull of ghosts.
—JK