“It’ll be five for the night, and five for deposit.”

The driver drops two crumpled fives on the counter while the clerk reaches to the pegboard to grab a key.

“Number eighteen,” he announces. “Upstairs, and just around the corner.”

The driver takes it by its ridiculous wooden adornment: a carved and painted blue whale. It makes him vaguely aware that the few other keys on the board were attached to different, though similarly crafted, animals. Through the glass door he notices that the motels sign is a large ark, like the biblical cartoon of Moses’s, if the driver’s religious knowledge serves him correctly. Above that, written in fat, happy-looking rain drops beneath a light-up thundercloud, reads “Forty Winks, Forty Nights Motor Inn”; while black letters on a celluloid marquee advertises rates simply as “biblically low”.

“Checkout’s ten a clock,” a bored voice calls out from behind as he exits the office. The clerk wastes no time in settling back into his chair and returning to his inattentive watch over the front desk.

The driver pulls the pickup as close as he can to the staircase leading up to the second floor walkway. It’s underneath a porch light that would reveal the hairs on an ant’s head, let alone the mangled, unconscious body of a biker’s girlfriend. Luckily, it is late and there’s no one around.

Each one takes a side and half-drags, half-lifts her up the stairs. Her feet clunk one step at a time, and towards the top, she loses a shoe.

They get her in and toss her on a bed. The hitchhiker falls onto a bed adjacent while the driver sinks into a chair. They both gasp to recover from the haul up the stairs. Either unconscious weight is as good as dead weight, or the drug has greatly sapped their strength. The driver unscrews the top of his rye and turns it straight up, into his mouth. The hitchhiker reaches out across the bed and the driver isn’t so cruel as to deny him a swig. They both mark their refreshment with a loud smack and a drawn-out sigh.