The Schernoff Discoveries

by Gary Paulsen

  “I don’t know. Maybe a mile an hour. Enough to make standing in one place hard.”

  “And we’re on the inside of the curve here. The water comes along this edge, say at a mile an hour, then swings out there, except that it has to come back into the bank after the curve—aha!”

  “What?”

  He pointed to my left as I faced him. “There, around the side of the bend slightly. Look for a shallow depression or a downslope right where that little curl in the current is happening.”

  “What curl?”

  “There—see it ripple? That’s a vortex. Right there, look right there.…”

  I moved to where he pointed and felt the bottom suddenly drop away until the water was to my chin, and my nose and my head went under and just there, as I went beneath the surface, my feet came into contact with several round-feeling objects.

  I pushed up, took a deep breath, flipped over and dove. As soon as my hands hit the bottom I felt them.

  Dozens, hundreds of them. There was a shallow hole perhaps six feet across and it was absolutely filled with golf balls. Wherever I spread my hands I felt them. I grabbed and came up with four in each hand.

  “We hit it! You’re right—they’re all over the place. Hand me the bag, quick.”

  We had found an old potato sack in back of the clubhouse and Harold sat down on the bank and held it out over the water. I dumped the balls into the sack and dove again.

  And again and again—over and over, and each time I filled my hands until, after an hour, I couldn’t find any more balls even by groping in the mud and looking for other holes.

  I came up onto the bank. My body was so chilled I couldn’t stop shaking and my hands looked like prunes but there was a hefty pile of balls in the sack.

  “How many?” I stood shivering, my arms crossed in front of me. “How many balls?”

  “Enough, I think, for a car.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “An old car.” He smiled in the moonlight.

  “How many?”

  “A very rough estimate, mind you—you were throwing them in the sack at a great rate so I can’t be sure—”

  “How many?”

  “I came up with five hundred and eighty. But I was being careful. I would think well over six hundred.”

  “Lord.” Not swearing. A prayer. A dime a ball. Like finding gold.

  “Over sixty dollars.” He knew what I was thinking. “A goodly sum.”

  “Oh, it’s more than that. It’s … it’s like a fortune.”

  At that time a grown man worked an entire week in a factory for only forty dollars. A visit to the doctor’s office was only five dollars. A hamburger was fifteen cents. Ten cents to go to a movie, another nickel for a Coke and ten cents more for popcorn. Rides at the fair were a dime. I set a whole line at the bowling alley for only seven cents. Sixty-plus dollars might as well have been a million. It represented two months of me working sixteen hours a day on a farm, falling dead into bed at night, up before dawn to milk and then work in the fields again.

  “I never … never thought I’d see this much money at one time.…”

  “It’s not money yet.”

  “Still, thirty dollars each for a couple hours work. Harold …”

  “No. Sixty dollars for a car. We’re going to buy a car. That was our goal and we’ll stick to it.”

  I wanted to argue, wanted to explain how many Pepsis and peanuts, how many movies, how many hamburgers and malts it would buy, but he was so positive, so sure.…

  We dressed and started lugging the sack back to the clubhouse, where we slept in the entryway of the pro shack. He’d told his parents we would be camping and mine didn’t know if I was home or gone half the time.

  The golf pro came at eight o’clock the next morning and he didn’t want to pay us. When he’d spoken to Harold he’d thought a couple of kids, eight or ten balls. Not six hundred and seventy-two balls (we counted them in the daylight).

  He hemmed and hawed and worked around and fought it but finally he came up with the money and we left with sixty-seven dollars and twenty cents. Three twenty-dollar bills, one five, two ones and two dimes, which Harold jammed into his pocket.

  “Now,” Harold said as we pedaled back to town, “to find the right vehicle.”

  Gleaming black caught the sun between the dents and rust, flashed it back in our eyes in a deep, dark kind of glory. She sat there, tires nearly bald, windows cracked and sun-faded, the cloth-upholstered seats worn bare and impregnated with dust, the steering wheel cracked and chipped, the spare tire flat on its rear mount, the floor covered with squirrel droppings and mouse nests, the body leaning on her tired leaf springs—she was, in short, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. And she was about to be ours—or so I hoped. Prayed.

  A 1934 Dodge sedan.

  “All four doors latch,” the old farmer who was selling her said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice that almost but didn’t quite miss his right foot. “Ain’t she a pisser?”

  There had been an ad in the paper for the car. Since the farmer lived only a mile out of town we had left the bikes and walked—thinking we would drive home. We had said it that way as we walked, casually, as though we had a lot of experience, as though we had been at this business of buying cars for years: “We’ll just drive her home.…”

  I put my hand on the fender. It seemed warm, alive. “I think this is the one. This is the one we want,” I said to Harold in a soft voice. I was in love.

  But Harold had read an article in Popular Mechanics about car dealing and knew more than I did. He shook his head. “I don’t know.…” He turned to the farmer. “How much do you want for it?”

  No, I thought, terrified that he would ruin the chance, would somehow kill the opportunity. No—don’t do this.

  I needn’t have worried. We were dealing with a master. The old man screwed up his face, looked at the car, at us, and smiled. “I was looking for a hunnert and fifty dollars …”

  My world came crashing down. We weren’t even close—a hundred and fifty dollars. It was ridiculous for us to even consider buying a car for as little as we had. It was a car, for God’s sake, a car.

  “… but you two sprats look like you would take good care of her. She’s been a good car and getting the right home for her is worth more than money. How much do you have?”

  Harold shook his head. “It isn’t a question of how much we have—”

  “Sixty-seven dollars,” I blurted. “And twenty cents.”

  Harold blanched and looked like I’d stuck a knife in him but the farmer smiled at me and spit again. “Well, I think I could maybe let her go for sixty-seven dollars—no less, mind you. This is as far down as I go.”

  “Fifty.” Harold tried but it was no use. I had blown it. The farmer knew he had us and he shook his head.

  “Fifty-five.”

  “Nope. Sixty-seven and I’ll throw in a tank of gas and that’s my final offer if you want this here Dodge touring automobile.”

  It was those words that did it for Harold. He told me later that the word car didn’t affect him but when the old man had said “touring automobile” it seemed to have something in it, some high tone. “I couldn’t see that much for a car,” he told me. “But for a touring automobile …”

  We turned over the money. The old man went for gas and Harold and I stood looking at each other across the hood of the car.

  “I can’t drive yet,” Harold said. “I know the theory but I lack the practice at motor skills.”

  I nodded. “I can.” I had worked farms and driven tractors and trucks. Not much, but some. “I’ll take her at first and you can watch.”

  Of course the battery was dead. We climbed in and closed the doors and I turned the key and pushed the starter pedal on the floor. There was a soft click and then nothing.

  “Back off,” the old man said, shaking his head. “We’ll have to crank her. No problem, she starts easy.”

  He reached into the
passenger compartment and pulled the choke knob out a bit, wiggled the floor shift to make certain it was in neutral. Then he pulled a crank from the floor in back of the seat.

  “Just lean back. Don’t touch nothing,” he said, inserting the crank.

  He jerked and it turned but didn’t fire. Another jerk, another turn, nothing, then a frustrated series of high-speed cranks and he spit and spewed such a line of swearing that I think he would have been honored even in the bowling alley pits, where Kenny had the record for using the noun-verb seven times in a nine-word sentence where the two other words were “bowling ball.”

  Once more, while swearing, the farmer attacked the crank and there was still nothing, except right at the end, just on the last part of the last turn of the crank, when she seemed to give a soft cough, like she was clearing her throat.

  “Push the choke in all the way.” He hung on the radiator cap, wheezing for breath, his face almost purple. “She’ll start now.”

  But he was wrong. He cranked and cranked and swore so much that he at last started over, combining the words in new patterns, cranking and getting redder and redder and louder and louder, the car whoofing and sputtering a bit more with each crank until finally, as if in pity, it whoof-whoof-whoofed and continued to turn over by itself. Lest she be thought a quitter, as a last effort she back-kicked on the crank so hard it lifted the old man off the ground and threw him to the side in a heap.

  He stood, swearing, holding his right wrist in his left hand, but he was smiling.

  “See? I told you she started easy. There you go—you’ve got a car.”

  And if there had been any negative thoughts, any trepidation at how hard she was to start, the feeling left with that phrase.

  We had a car.

  It’s hard to describe what that did for us, to us. I looked at Harold, he looked at me. The motor slam-banged and whuffed over and over, spitting out of a hole in the virtually disintegrated muffler, coughing and wheezing. Vibration filled the interior with dust until we could barely see each other. We smiled and nodded.

  Everything had changed. We were free of the silly shackles of voice-changing, pimple-ridden, shyness-tormented youth; we had grown in stature and our own minds with the sound of her engine firing and turning over. That world was gone forever.

  We were men now, pure and simple.

  “Shall we,” Harold said, pointing out of the old man’s yard to where the highway beckoned, “go?”

  And I nodded and pushed the clutch in, ground the transmission into first, eased the clutch out until she was moving forward, and we left, jerking and bouncing. We accelerated into second—which I shifted into with only a little difficulty—and then, grinding and hacking, I tried to get her into third, but she wouldn’t go.

  No matter. By this time we were on the section road and headed away from town, the summer breeze coming through Harold’s partially opened window. My window would not open but it was of no consequence. I got enough wind from Harold’s side and we were moving well now, running a little high in rpm because she wouldn’t shift into third. But we were free and clear as we passed the first section road, a mile gone, then another mile, and another, where we actually passed another car.

  I pulled out confidently and passed the Chevy with one elbow propped on the edge of my closed window to appear nonchalant, like I’d been doing it all my life. Another mile.

  Harold spit and while he had to rise and spit high to clear his half-open window, it still looked good and I envied him. Could there, I thought, be anything in life to equal this feeling? Well, maybe That—That was a mystery still far removed from us—but short of That, there was nothing like this car and this summer afternoon, moving through a day with the motor missing only a little and the transmission quietly growling.

  Another mile and I turned north, thinking I would make a large loop on the section roads and then let Harold drive. Still another mile and I was starting to sing a Hank Williams song when with no warning the engine exploded.

  It was not a small noise, not a diminutive sniffle of a problem, but a full-throated, tooth-rattling bang that shook the car, slammed it to the side, blew a cloud of smoke and ancient dirt and grease into the air and shot a jet of flame back into the passenger compartment with us.

  “Out!” I just had time to yell. I pulled the wheel to the right and brought her to a stop in a shallow ditch. We piled out and ran up onto the road and stood there while she burned, completely and totally, until nothing was left but the twisted carcass, black and tortured and dead, smoke curling into the Minnesota summer afternoon.

  I cried some. Not a lot, but some, a short sniffle or two. “She was a good car,” I said, and meant it, and would always mean it. In all my life I would never have a car to equal her.

  “She was our car,” Harold said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “She was a good car and she was our car. How far did we go?”

  I looked away, unable to bear the grief. It was easy to figure. Each section road was a mile long. “If you figure in leaving the driveway and all, we came just eight miles.”

  Harold looked back down the road in the direction we’d come from and then he looked at me and so help me God he smiled—wide and open, his teeth white against his smoke-stained face.

  “Yes,” he said, “but what an eight miles!”

  And we started the long walk back to town, into our lives and all that would come to us.

  Afterword

  Time moves faster all the time, especially with age, and while Harold and the rest of them seem still young in my mind they are not; they have gone on to larger and fuller lives.

  Julie Hansen became a flight attendant, married a pilot, moved to Colorado and, through cosmetic surgery, not having children, and never acknowledging stress, has refused to age. She still looks and acts like a cheerleader.

  Chimmer dropped out of school when he was sixteen, rumbled around for a year driving a hot rod and getting in trouble, and then joined the army. He went into straight infantry, loved it (as might be expected, he was the only person I have known who actually liked combat), fought in Vietnam and retired as a master sergeant after thirty years. He lives in California with a wife who bosses him and a small, mean dog with a name that cannot be said in public, a dog he’s trained to chase children from his yard.

  Many others I knew then went on to success, more or less. The captain of the football team has bad knees and sells insurance; there are pictures of him as a teenager in his football uniform all over his plywood-paneled office and he makes a point to mention them to every customer.

  Marley, the shop teacher who used a birch rod on children, retired to Arizona, where he secretly nurses the hope that they will allow capital punishment in junior high schools.

  Wankle, the football coach, went on to never win the region, conference or state. He retired frustrated and angry to a small house outside Las Vegas, where he lives with a wife who spends a great deal of time shopping for things he doesn’t like or want.

  As for me, I flunked the ninth grade, took it over, barely made it through high school, joined the army (where I did not like infantry), tried a stint at electronic field engineering (as a glorified technician) and then settled into telling stories. I raised dogs, too, remarkable dogs that did not chase children; instead they pulled me on a sled in two Iditarods and completely changed my life in many wonderful ways.

  And Harold?

  Harold went on to graduate from high school with a 4.0 average (he even mastered gym by using what he termed “a scientific approach” that involved leverage, inertial energy and “mind over body”) and received a full academic scholarship to MIT, from which he graduated with honors. He then got a doctorate and now works in pure research involving physics, the mass of light, time curvature and other things that I cannot understand even when he writes to tell me about it in simple terms. Oh yes, he married and has four children, all of whom were reading novels by the time they were three and playing classical piano befo
re they were able to walk, judging by his letters. His wife? He married the fair Arlene of the disastrous first kiss. I have not asked nor has he said how their romance got past that first date but one would guess that he used scientific research to figure out that kissing thing.

  GARY PAULSEN is the distinguished author of many critically acclaimed books for young people, including three Newbery Honor books: The Winter Room, Hatchet and Dogsong. His novel The Haymeadow received the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award. Among his Random House books are Notes from the Dog; Mudshark; Lawn Boy; The Legend of Bass Reeves; The Amazing Life of Birds; The Time Hackers; Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day; The Quilt (a companion to Alida’s Song and The Cookcamp); The Glass Café; How Angel Peterson Got His Name; Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books; The Beet Fields; Soldier’s Heart; Brian’s Return, Brian’s Winter, and Brian’s Hunt (companions to Hatchet); Father Water, Mother Woods; and five books about Francis Tucket’s adventures in the Old West. Gary Paulsen has also published fiction and nonfiction for adults, as well as picture books illustrated by his wife, the painter Ruth Wright Paulsen. Their most recent book is Canoe Days.