Rabbit tells him, “You better get out of the back. We get hit from behind, you’ve had it. You too Nelson. Out.”

It is the most dangerous type of highway, three-lane. The commuter traffic out from Brewer shudders past in an avalanche of dust and noise and carbon monoxide. No Good Samaritans stop. The Porsche has stalled atop an embankment seeded with that feathery finespun ground-cover the state uses to hold steep soil: crown vetch. Below, swifts are skimming a shorn cornfield. Rabbit and Nelson lean against the fenders and watch the sun, an hour above the horizon, fill the field with stubble-shadows, ridges subtle as those of corduroy. Jill wanders off and gathers a baby bouquet of the tiny daisy-like asters that bloom in the fall, on stems so thin they form a cirrus hovering an inch or two above the earth. Jill offers the bouquet to Skeeter, to lure him out. He reaches to bat the flowers from her hand; they scatter and fall in the grit of the roadside. His voice comes muffled from within the Porsche. “You honky cunt, this all a way to turn me in, nothing wrong with this fucking car, right?”

“It won’t go,” she says; one aster rests on the toe of one ballet slipper. Her face has shed expression.

Skeeter’s voice whines and snarls in its metal shell. “Knew I should never come out of that house. Jill honey, I know why. Can’t stay off the stuff, right? No will at all, right? Easier than having any will, hand old Skeeter over to the law, hey, right?”

Rabbit asks her, “What’s he saying?”

“He’s saying he’s scared.”

Skeeter is shouting, “Get them dumb honkies out of the way, I’m making a run for it. How far down on the other side of that fence?”

Rabbit says, “Smart move, you’ll really stick out up here in the boondocks. Talk about a nigger in the woodpile.”

“Don’t you nigger me, you honky prick. Tell you one thing, you turn me in I’ll get you all greased if I have to send to Philly to do it. It’s not just me, we’re everywhere, hear? Now you fuckers get this car to go, hear me? Get it to go.”

Skeeter issues all this while crouched down between the leather backs of the bucket seats and the rear window. His panic is disgusting and may be contagious. Rabbit lusts to pull him out of his shell into the sunshine, but is afraid to reach in; he might get stung. He slams the Porsche door shut on the churning rasping voice, and at the rear of the car slams down the hood. “You two stay here. Calm him down, keep him in the car. I’ll walk to a gas station, there must be one up the road.”

He runs for a while, Skeeter’s venomous fright making his own bladder burn. After all these nights together betrayal is the Negro’s first thought. Maybe natural, three hundred years of it. Rabbit is running, running to keep that black body pinned back there, so it won’t panic and flee. Like running late to school. Skeeter has become a duty. Late, late. Then an antique red flying-horse sign suspended above sunset-dyed fields. It is an old-fashioned garage: an unfathomable work space black with oil, the walls precious with wrenches, fan belts, peen hammers, parts. An old Coke machine, the kind that dispenses bottles, purrs beside the hydraulic lift. The mechanic, a weedy young man with a farmer’s drawl and black palms, drives him in a jolting tow truck back up the highway. The side window is broken; air whistles there, hungrily gushes.