The Sundowner is a run-down roadside motel where Carl Henderson and Sandy Henderson pause on their journey home. The stop gathers several strands of their life on the road into one ordinary room: Carl’s concealment of the film documenting his crimes, his habit of reading numbers as signs, and the growing strain in his marriage. The motel offers shelter, but not security or renewal; by the time the couple leave, it has sharpened Carl’s awareness of the risks he carries with him.

Arrival and Setting

Carl and Sandy reach the Sundowner after driving through a hundred miles of small, quiet towns and broad cornfields. They have crossed into Illinois on Route 50, a road familiar to them from years of travel, and arrive close to one o’clock in the morning. Carl has been anxious about Sandy’s driving, repeatedly reminding her to slow down. His fear is practical and specific: a crash could leave him trapped or unconscious, with the rolls of film in the car available to expose him to the law. The motel stop therefore follows a journey already shadowed by the possibility that an accident could turn concealment into discovery.

The building is made of pink cement blocks, and its potholed parking lot holds only three cars. After Carl presses the office buzzer several times, an elderly woman opens the door only a crack. She asks whether Sandy, barely visible in the station wagon’s darkness, is his wife and where the couple have come from. Carl confirms the relationship and tells her they are from a place troubled by robbery and killing, presenting himself as a worried husband whose wife is reluctant to leave the house. The exchange gives the motel a brief social function: it is a place where strangers ask ordinary questions, and where Carl answers by disguising the danger that he himself represents.

The Room and Its Objects

The elderly woman charges six dollars and gives Carl a key marked number seven on a worn cardboard tag. Inside, the room is hot and stuffy, with insecticide odor and a portable television that receives only snow and static. Sandy goes directly to the bathroom. Carl prepares to settle in, then notices six dead flies scattered over the pillows. He counts them, looks again, and finds the number unchanged. The room’s cheap framed picture of flowers and fruit also draws his attention: he considers it forgettable, in contrast to the photographs he makes, which he believes no viewer would forget.

The dead flies turn an unremarkable room into a surface on which Carl can arrange the numbers already occupying his thoughts. There have been six models on the trip; the room costs six dollars; and there are six dead flies on the bed. Carl connects these separate details and recognizes the biblical association of three sixes, an interpretation he imagines his late mother would have made readily. Rather than treating the coincidence as a warning that demands a supernatural explanation, he gives it a practical meaning: it is time to go home. He brushes the flies from the bed and turns the pillows over. The moment shows how his search for signs works: chance details become legible as instructions, but he chooses the instruction that fits a decision he can act upon.

A Temporary Shelter for the Film

The motel room does not put an end to Carl’s anxiety about the film. Later, he wakes in a panic and checks that the station wagon is still in the parking lot. He realizes that he has left six rolls of film in the vehicle, contrary to his own Rule #7. He retrieves them and hides them inside his shoes. The discovery makes the motel a temporary repository for evidence and a point at which the distance between Carl’s private photographic practice and possible legal exposure becomes immediate. Even while the film is indoors, he remains preoccupied with the car, the law, and the consequences of carelessness.

After returning to the doorway, Carl smokes and looks toward a small patch of stars revealed when the clouds shift. He begins to count, then stops himself. Another number might become another sign, he thinks, but it would not alter the decision for that night. The scene contrasts his earlier interpretation of the sixes with his refusal to extend the same process indefinitely: signs can seem decisive, yet their meaning depends on the limits he sets for himself. Sandy, meanwhile, mutters in her sleep, unaware of his renewed worry about the film.

Departure and Narrative Significance

A car door slams in the parking lot the next morning. Carl wakes early, dresses in the same clothes he has worn for the past week, puts the film canisters in his pockets, and sits waiting. He considers waking Sandy but lets her rest, reasoning that they have slept in the car for the previous three nights and are going home, so there is no need to hurry. While he waits, he recounts the money taken from the soldier and remembers an earlier trip when he and Sandy had almost no money and their car’s radiator failed. That recollection places the motel stop within a longer pattern of precarious travel, improvised solutions, and dependence on cash they cannot take for granted.

The couple do not leave until noon. Sandy wakes at eleven and spends an hour getting ready; Carl waits rather than pressing her to move. His attention to her changing appearance and health is intertwined with his concern for the photographs he makes, in which he wants a smile to contrast with suffering. Their departure is thus neither a clean escape from their life on the road nor a reconciliation. The Sundowner gives them a night indoors and gives Carl time to secure the film, but it does not resolve the conditions that brought them there. Its numbered room, six flies, and recovered rolls of film make the stop a compact episode of concealment and omen-reading, after which the pair resume their journey toward home.