All American Horror of the 21st Century

Honor System. Jack Ketchum-1

HONOR SYSTEM

by Jack Ketchum

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.

Lin 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 U Mass 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 road-kill 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 f*****g 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.

Farther 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 s**t, 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.