the bike to a dead stop. He remembered. As fat and rubbery as a garden hose. He searched ahead with his flashlight. They saw nothing. They rolled on, half speed, which was a pain through the potholes, with one beam ranging far, and the other sweeping close.
A hundred yards later they saw it.
Fat and rubbery and lying across the road.
They stopped four feet short.
Patty said, “How does it work?”
“I guess inside there are two metal strips. Somehow held apart. But when a wheel goes over, they get pressed together and a bell rings. Like a push switch.”
“So we can’t let a wheel go over.”
“No.”
Which was a problem. Shorty couldn’t lift the quad-bike. Not at either end. Maybe an inch for a second, but not enough to ease it over the wire and set it down again.
“How much further?” he said.
“About three hundred yards.”
“I’ll carry the suitcase.”
“Wait,” she said again.
She ducked down and eased her fingers under the fat rubber wire. She lifted it. It came up easily, an inch, a foot, as much as she wanted. She tested it side to side, and pulled and tugged to make it equally loose.
“Get ready,” she said.
She lifted it up, gently, on open palms, head high, arms wide. Shorty ducked low and pushed the bike under it. She held it until he was clear. She felt like she was performing a dance ceremony at a hippy’s wedding.
“OK,” Shorty said.
She laid the wire back down, gently, like she was bowing. Then they pushed on, energized. Safe. On the last lap. Not far to go. Their flashlight beams bounced and swayed, first showing nothing but trees and the track between, but then a different kind of void loomed up ahead. The two-lane road. Where they had turned in, what felt like a thousand years ago. Shorty had said, OK? Patty hadn’t answered.
Now she said, “We need to find a place to hide the suitcase. But not too far from the road. So we can load it easy when we get a ride.”
They let the bike slow to a stop where the mouth of the track widened out to meet the road. Hiding places looked to be in short supply. Tree trunks crowded in either side. The last yard of shoulder was thick with underbrush. Although maybe a little thinner where the frost-heaved posts were set. Maybe the ground had been disturbed many years earlier. Maybe the brush was coming back slower. Maybe there was a suitcase-sized hole behind one or the other.
Patty went to check. In the end she figured the right-hand hole was better than the left. They huffed and puffed and got the bike as close as possible. Shorty spread his arms wide and lifted the suitcase off the bike, and then he grunted and gasped and turned and dropped it in the bushes, where it scraped and crackled through the lower branches and came to rest pretty well hidden. Patty walked up the road a spell and used her flashlight like an approaching headlight beam, and said she saw nothing much. Certainly nothing anyone would stop for. Just a dark shape, way low down, behind the base of the post. It could have been the corpse of a deer. She was satisfied.
Then her voice changed and she said, “Shorty, come here.”
He went. They stood together on the county blacktop and looked back the way he had come, back along her flashlight beam, which was wavering on a wide area centered on the frost-heaved post, with the dark shape low and behind it. Which you couldn’t really see unless you knew it was there. He was satisfied, too.
He said, “What am I looking for?”
“Think, Shorty,” she said. “What did we see when we turned in?”
He thought. He visualized. He took two sideways steps left, nearer the center line of the road, where the Honda’s wheel had been. He squatted down a little, to approximate the level of the driver’s seat. What had he seen? He had seen a frost-heaved post, on which was nailed a board, on which were screwed ornate plastic letters, and an arrow pointing into the woods. The letters had spelled out the word Motel.
He compared his memory with the scene in front of him.
He was pretty sure it was different.
He stared. Then he saw. Now there was no board. No letters, no word, no arrow. Now there was just a post. Nothing on it. Same both sides of the track.