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Show City Motel 124 Mrs. Jackson, startled from her newly found reverie by an extra long, 18-wheeler whose vibrations rattled her window, thought she saw fingers and hands and wrists behind the veins of the ceiling. "Help me. Help me," the hands seemed to plead. She could almost see the pulse on the wrists at the top of blue-green veins, but then she put her hand to the pulse at her own throat and realized that she was panicking. If she kept this up, she would be of no use to her husband on the highway. She had to get control of herself. Mr. Jackson was so down-and-out tired of driving. They hadn't stopped for three months except to sleep, sometimes in a motel, sometimes in their car. They'd been on every back road in the Midwest, the Southeast, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and now Ohio, trying to travel every line on the Rand-McNally Road & Reference Atlas before their credit card expired. Because Mrs. Jackson had been the one to urge the rolling wheels idea on her husband, she f e l t highly responsible for getting a good night's rest to ease the burden on her husband. She had tried to rejoice in this work, remembering the preacher's words in Ecclesiastes-"a man should rejoice in his own works." If she was too tired, this would be impossible. "Rejoice, rejoice," she repeated over and over to herself, while she tried counting sheep. But the breathing interferred with her mental pictures of woolly bodies and barbed wire. She thought of meditating, something she'd seen demonstrated on TV by a TM person at a motel in Virginia. "0--hi-o-hi-o," she chanted her newly devised mantra with each in and out breath. While Mrs. Jackson was trying to calm herself to sleep, Thelma Roberts in Room 3 woke up thirsty and decided to get a drink of water. She wasn't |