The Car

by Gary Paulsen

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Car

  Memories

  1

  2

  Memories

  3

  4

  Memories

  Waylon

  5

  The Ride

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Reader Chat Page

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1994 by Gary Paulsen

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2006 by Harcourt, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Originally published in 1994 by Harcourt, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Paulsen, Gary.

  The car/Gary Paulsen,

  p. cm.

  Summary: A teenager left on his own travels west in a kit car he built himself, and along the way picks up two Vietnam veterans, who take him on an eye-opening journey.

  [1. Automobiles—Fiction. 2. Travel—Fiction. 3. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P2843Car 2006

  [Fic]—dc22 2006041184

  ISBN 978-0-15-205827-2 paperback

  eISBN 978-0-544-83672-3

  v1.1215

  To Stuart, whose name is on The Wall

  The Car

  Memories

  It was to be a normal strike mission. Another hamlet, another set of leaders to take out—sanction, neutralize, terminate with extreme prejudice. All names for the same thing—to kill. There were two of them in the strike team, and they had done this before and expected no real difficulties.

  Come in the darkness by canoe let off from the patrol boat on the main river. Paddle up the small stream to the hamlet, find the two targets, end them, and canoe back to the patrol boat.

  In and out.

  “Clean and gone,” one of the strike team members said. “They won’t know we’ve been there until they find the bodies . . .”

  1

  HE WAS ALONE.

  His name was Terry Anders. He was fourteen years old, living in Cleveland, Ohio, and his parents had left him.

  Of course it didn’t happen quite that suddenly.

  It was true he could not exactly remember a happy time with his parents. He thought there might have been a few moments when he was a baby, but they weren’t memories so much as feelings, or wishes about feelings he would have liked to have had.

  But most of it had been a hassle. All he knew was their fighting. His earliest memory was of them fighting. They never hurt him, never yelled at him much; they just ignored him. They were two people who just shouldn’t have been together.

  He had been ignored for fourteen years. Completely. They didn’t care how he did, what he wore, what he ate, if he was sick or well or doing all right in school or flunking. They weren’t bad to him, nor good to him, nor anything to him. At first it bothered him, but he had become accustomed to it and, finally, had come to prefer it.

  He felt that as far as his parents were concerned he simply didn’t exist and he viewed them the same. There were no other children, no contact with relatives except an uncle or something—Terry was never sure of the relationship to his parents—out in Oregon. Terry had met him once—back when he was six or seven—and the uncle, named Loren, seemed like a nice guy. He had given Terry five dollars and told him to buy candy.

  Other than that, nothing. Nobody. His parents both worked at jobs—his father as a mechanic at a car dealership, his mother as a beautician—and were gone during weekdays. On weekends his father would leave at sunup to go four-wheeling with his friends, and his mother would hit the malls and shop—or something. Terry was never quite sure of that, either, since she never seemed to bring anything home.

  Terry was left to himself. He worked at school some but mostly had poor grades, kind of slithered by. He’d had a best friend named Thor, but Thor’s family had moved just a month before to—of all places—Africa, where Thor’s father was going to be a missionary, and so Terry was alone.

  He didn’t honestly know his parents were gone for nearly two days. He woke up one Monday morning to a quiet house—his parents had spent the whole previous night yelling at each other and the quiet was pleasant—and went about his day as usual, figuring his parents had gone to work.

  Breakfast that first morning was normal. Sugarcoated cereal with milk and more sugar sprinkled on it. There was no bread so he couldn’t do toast and peanut butter, which he loved, but the cereal filled him so it didn’t matter.

  Through the day he worked at mowing lawns in a nearby housing development. He loved working with motors and mechanical devices—he sometimes thought it was the only thing he got from his father—and had rebuilt an old rotary lawn mower that he used for cutting grass. The business had started small but had grown, and he had saved almost thirteen hundred dollars over the last two years, which he kept in a jar in his room.

  Terry worked all day, and when it was evening he pushed the mower home to find his parents still not there.

  Again, this did not surprise him. They were often late, and sometimes his father did not come home at all.

  They lived in a rented old two-story house on the edge of an open field at the end of a road near a housing development, and all of it seemed about to break down and die. The house was in need of paint and repair, the street coming from the development was full of potholes and cracks, and the land around was overgrown with weeds and brush.

  When he got home Terry put the mower in the garage, went into the house, and turned the TV set on to some rerun of a reran rerun about kids in the sixties, who all wore bell-bottom pants and long-collared shirts. He didn’t much like television—it bored him, except for the music videos and some movies—but he kept it on all the time he was in the house because he needed the sound. He’d read something in school about certain people needing background sound like running water or surf or wind in trees—they called it “white” sound—and he thought of television that way. Pretty much worthless except as “white” sound.

  He found TV dinners and cooked two of them (one was never enough)—turkey loaf and beef stew—and ate them watching the show about the kids in the sixties. He watched more TV and worked on a model of a ’57 Chevy he’d been putting together for two weeks. He liked working on models—when he couldn’t work on engines—because it completely occupied his mind, making them look exact, clean, dead perfect. Then somehow it was night and his parents still weren’t home, and he went to bed.

  The second morning he awakened to the same routine, but now there was wonder—they should have been home and fighting by this time—and he thought about calling somebody like the police. But something stopped him. A little tickle, a happiness at the quiet and peace was there in his mind, and he didn’t make the call but went out again to mow lawns.

  That evening they were still not home, and he sat quietly working on the model after two more T
V dinners, and for the first time he thought of the movie about the kid who was left home by himself. Except that the same tickle was there, the feeling that it was actually nice not having them around.

  The first call came at almost exactly eight o’clock.

  His mother called first.

  “Terry, I’m not coming home. I can’t take it any longer. I’ve taken all my things. Tell your father I won’t be there for him to fight any longer. You’ll both have to do without me.” And she hung up.

  He had said almost nothing. Had once more felt a sense of wonder—this time at why he didn’t seem to care all that much that his mother had gone. A part of him felt bad, but it was mostly because he didn’t feel bad that he felt bad—like he ought to feel rotten, only he didn’t. She was gone—that thought was there—and there wouldn’t be any more fights.

  His father called just after nine.

  “Tell your mother I’m not coming back—I’ve got all my stuff, or everything I want. I’m sick of the whole thing.” And he hung up.

  Terry put the phone back in the cradle and looked out the window at the road in the darkness and thought: So, they aren’t going to be here. Neither one. At least for a little while. Mother thinks I’m staying here with Father and Father thinks I’m staying here with Mother.

  I’m alone.

  Just me.

  And the house.

  Oh yes, he thought, and a smile came, widened into a grin. There’s one other thing.

  The car.

  2

  THE CAR WASN’T REALLY.

  A car that is—it was a pile of what seemed to be junk and pieces in the garage. At some point along the way, Terry’s father had done some work for a trucker, and the man hadn’t had enough money to pay for the work and had given Terry’s father the car in partial payment. Terry’s father had objected, had threatened to go to court, had even had a fight with the man—a scuffle in the driveway—but it didn’t help. The trucker had left the car as payment and gone on his way.

  It was a kit car, supposedly a design done by a man named Blakely, called a Blakely Bearcat—a soft red color with sweeping curved-back fenders and the classic old-fashioned open-cockpit look.

  Or it should have been. The truth was Terry’s dad hated being a mechanic. When his day at work was done, the last thing he wanted to do was pick up a wrench and work on a home project. He had tried to sell the kit as it was—piles of red fiberglass pieces and rusting steel frames and paper-wrapped chrome trim—but nobody wanted it. Several came to look and just shrugged and walked away when they saw the mess. The result was that the pile of parts stayed a pile that didn’t resemble any part of a car so much as a start for a junkyard, and over the months, almost a year and a half, nothing had been done to make the kit a car.

  Once Terry had asked his father if he could work on the Bearcat.

  “No,” his father had answered. “I’m going to let it sit there and rot, and every time I look at the thing it will remind me to always get the money up front.”

  And so it had been. The Bearcat—Terry always thought of it simply as the Cat—had remained a pile for all this time. Well, twice he had peeked into it when both parents were gone for the day—dug around in the boxes and crates and paper-wrapped pieces to see what was involved in making a car. He was, to be honest, dying to get into it. But anything he did would certainly be seen by his father, who had expressly forbidden Terry to work on the car.

  But his father was gone now. He’d said he wasn’t coming back. And the same for his mother.

  And the kit car was still in the garage.

  He looked once at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was in the shape of a cat with eyes that went back and forth and the hands were in a circle on the cat’s belly. It was, Terry thought, the ugliest thing he had probably ever seen. He had bought it for a Christmas present when he was nine years old, trying to get his mother’s attention. It hadn’t worked except that she’d put the clock on the wall over the kitchen window where Terry could see it every day.

  Nine-thirty.

  He could, of course, sit and watch television—the thought hit him even as he was moving toward the door that led to the garage. He could sit and watch the tube and munch on some junk, or he could go to bed because it was getting late, or . . .

  He opened the door to the garage, pulled the cord that turned on the overhead light, and looked at the pile near the wall.

  Yeah, he thought. I could go to bed or watch the tube, or I could go over there and just take a look at what’s involved.

  He went to the workbench at the end of the garage where he worked on his mower. He had a complete set of tools—sockets and wrenches, feeler gauges, everything to work on motors. He’d bought the set at a rummage sale for thirty dollars two years before without knowing how complete the set was; it had belonged to an old man who had passed away, who had done all his own work on his car, and the tools were so complete they included a torque wrench and special deep-well sockets. There was even a small dental mirror for looking up in hard-to-see places, and everything, from the mirror to the largest wrench, every tool had been kept in top condition.

  Terry kept them the same way. He’d bought a large bag of clean red mechanics’ rags at the discount store and each time he used a tool he wiped it carefully before putting it back.

  His toolbox was the kind that sat upright with four drawers that pulled out, and he moved to the box now and opened the top, pulled the drawers out, and made sure—as he always did—that the tools were all there.

  Then he turned to the car.

  The boxes and parts were in a haphazard pile on top of the frame. The man who had initially owned the kit car had done some basic work on it. The frame was bolted and welded together correctly and the wheels and tires had been put on. The motor and transmission were also bolted into position on the frame, set in rubber motor mounts, and the drive shaft was in place back to the rear differential, but none of the body was on nor any of the controls for the wheels or motor. The car sat on the floor on tires—the frame, the motor—and stacked on top was the rest of the car in torn paper wrapping and cardboard boxes.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got . . . ,” Terry said under his breath and started taking the boxes off, setting them around the garage on the floor, looking in each one as he did so.

  Much of the stuff he couldn’t identify. There were large boxes with the fenders, the rear trunk lid, the hood (tags called the hood a bonnet and the trunk lid a boot), doors, interior panels, molded black dashboard, windshield. All of that he knew, could understand, but there were numbered bags and boxes with just bolts and parts, and many of them made no sense to him, and he despaired of ever understanding it all when in the bottom of one of the boxes he found the instructions.

  They were in the form of a book or magazine and seemed incredibly complete, explaining things in detail with step-by-step instructions and with photos to show each step being accomplished.

  “A monkey could do this,” he said, sitting on the frame, going page by page. “You don’t have to know anything about cars at all. It’s beautiful. . . .”

  Not only were the instructions complete but they explained what was in each numbered box or bag—what each set of bolts was for—and he set about organizing all of them to get ready for starting work on the car.

  Time seemed to stop while he worked. He used a notebook to catalog and place items, writing them down as he put them in order on the garage floor, and after a period he felt hungry and went into the kitchen for some lunch meat. Once he started to eat he was amazed at his hunger and he looked up to the cat clock, stunned to see that it was three in the morning.

  I should feel tired, he thought, but the sandwich seemed to give him energy, and he moved back to the garage to start work on the car.

  Memories

  Initially the strike went as planned, was so smooth it seemed choreographed.

  The river patrol boat dropped them with their canoe, where the stream from the ham
let entered the main river. They were dressed in black, with black hats and black camouflage makeup. They did not smile and squinted so the whites of their eyes didn’t show, and against the black wall of the Vietnamese jungle they simply did not exist.

  One of them bumped a paddle on the side of the flat black canoe and the other hissed a curse at the thumping sound, but they were still far from the hamlet—4.7 kilometers, according to the map they had studied when planning the strike—and there was nobody to hear the sound.

  They moved away from the patrol boat, working their paddles silently without taking them from the water, and within a hundred feet they were part of the night. . . .

  3

  HE WENT to the instructions again, starting with page one, picture one, working against what had already been done, double-checking what the original owner had completed.

  He didn’t know the man’s name at first, but a few minutes after he started, a piece of paper fell out of the instruction book with the name Tom Haskell written on it, and he thought of the owner as Tom after that.

  Whatever the name was, Terry admired his work. The things that were done were done right. Bolts on the motor mount were torqued to the correct foot-pounds of torque. Everything was aligned properly, squared, and checked, but when Terry was working on the radiator, checking to see if all the hoses were there, the lack of sleep caught up with him.

  He closed his eyes—to blink, nothing more—and they just didn’t open again. He slept sitting on the frame, his forehead against the radiator, which was braced across his knees, for nearly two hours.

  When he awakened, his legs were asleep because the radiator had cut off the circulation, and he stood carefully, went back into the house—walking like Frankenstein—and drank the last of the milk.

  It was eight in the morning. He’d worked all night, except for the two hours’ sleep. His brain was still numb and he went to the couch, flicked the remote to turn the television on, and fell asleep in the middle of a game show.