Integrité

Anita Helmbold 19 tennis ball, for the rather inconsequential purpose of improving his golf swing, while keeping only one hand on the wheel (76). When Bonnie‘s behavior startles him into (literally) dropping the ball, an act which surely serves as another metaphor for Glen‘s upcoming moral failure in regards to Bonnie, Glen‘s thoughtless action provides the catalyst for his moment of moral clarity, provided, aptly enough, by the initiative of Sunshine, who darts after the dropped ball with the sudden action of a ray of light breaking through the fog. Glen loses his tenuous grip on the wheel, the car slides and spins, and when they manage to right themselves, they have just narrowly missed being mowed down by a convoy of logging trucks that roars past them out of the fog.

This near-death experience is transformative for both Glen and Bonnie.

After observing that they have just escaped physical annihilation—―I thought we were goners,‖ Bonnie says, and Glen adds, ―They wouldn‘t even have found us….

Not even our shoes‖ (82)—both recognize that they have been given a rare gift, a second chance at life, and both avow renewal, a change on the moral plane of life. ―I‘m going to change my ways,‖ Bonnie declares immediately, and she knows precisely what to do. She tells Glen, ―I‘m going to pay back the money I owe, and write my mother a letter, even if she is a complete bitch. I‘ll be nicer to Sunshine. No more shoplifting. No more…‖ (82) and the traffic drowns out the rest of the declaration, but the second crisis of the story makes it clear that she desires to turn her back on a life of prostitution.

In the face of this near-miraculous salvation, Glen, too, desires to change.

He echoes Bonnie‘s declaration of resolve, but his usual foggy thinking obscures the possibilities for him. As the omniscient narrator points out, Glen‘s affirmation is sincere if fuzzy, since Glen, in the first place, ―wasn‘t sure just what was wrong with his ways‖ (82). Fortunately, the second and decisive climax of the story is approaching, and it will provide Glen with an unambiguous, although not easy, answer to his uncertainty.

On the road again, Bonnie affirms a sense of a special link bonding her to Glen—not, as she puts it, ―boy-girl feelings‖ (82) but, presumably, something more profound—whatever name one puts to the experience of having survived near-certain death with another person. But Glen, despite his acknowledgement of this inescapable intimacy, fails the moral test that arises from it. When they reach Seattle, Bonnie gives him the address of the girlfriend with whom she intends to stay. The friend lives in a transients‘ hotel, but she is not at home; as Bonnie explains, her friend ―came and went at all hours‖ (83). When Glen asks where the woman works, Bonnie replies, ―Around. You know. Here and there….

I don‘t want to stay with her, not really. I don‘t want to get caught up in all this again‖ (83).

Glen listens, and he feels that he should help Bonnie; in fact, he recognizes that he wants to. But he easily talks himself out of trying, instead thinking of the complications that she would bring into his life and that of his roommate, Martin, who is also his boss at work and the owner of the car Glen is driving. Ultimately, he opts out with the easy lie, telling Bonnie ―that he really wanted to help out but that it wasn‘t possible‖ (84), adding, for good measure, the supererogatory lie that his roommate is allergic to dogs. Adding insult to injury,