The Car

by Gary Paulsen

  It was not possible. The rains came wrong or didn’t come at all, the war came wrong all the time, disease hit the rice and the people, babies kept coming, and there was never enough rice to keep them anything other than thin.

  The team had come to kill two of the people in the collection of shacks.

  That was its job, the team. To kill people. Village leaders who were working for the Communists, selected men and women who were suspected of working for the Communist cadre, people that somebody didn’t like or approve of—the team killed them.

  They were called the Phoenix Teams and that was their job, to kill people.

  This night there were two men in the team just as there were two men to kill, but they were not to split up. They would both be at the killing of each man.

  The killing was a simple thing, a stupid thing to have so much importance given to it. The two-man team came up the river in a wooden canoe, paddling themselves three miles from where they had been dropped by a river gunboat. Each man carried a small knife sharpened on both sides with a straight point and a .22 automatic pistol with a silencer attached.

  They had memorized maps of the river and the layout of the huts and knew where their targets—they didn’t think of them as men but as targets, didn’t speak of them as men but as targets—were sleeping with their families.

  The plan was simple. That was best. The very best plans were simple. Go into each hut, find the target by using an infrared light and special glasses they had brought, put two rounds in the head of each target, and then back into the canoe and dawn the river to the waiting patrol boat.

  Simple.

  They had done it before and they would probably do it again.

  But an earlier visitor—a virus—had come to change things, change them dramatically. The virus had come in four days before, entered the children of the targets, and after four days of internal battling, the virus had won and the children had colds. They coughed and fretted and this night, the night the team was to hit, the children were at their worst.

  The team could hear the coughing yards from the nearest tent. Then the soft voice of a woman comforting a child.

  The team froze, waited for silence to resume, then made its way to the first target hut, where the coughing had been the worst.

  They did not pause at the door to silhouette themselves, but stood to the side and rolled quickly in, using the light and glasses to locate the right sleeping pallet.

  One of the team covered the rest of the sleepers and the other leaned down and fired twice into the temple of the sleeping target. The .22 made a sound like somebody clapping underwater and the target stiffened, the target’s legs trembled, then the target became still.

  They left the hut as they had come in, nobody awakened, no sounds.

  In the second hut it was different. The team moved in, scanned with the infrared light and found the target, moved to the side of the target, and one of the team members leaned down to terminate, began to squeeze the trigger on the Colt Woodsman .22 automatic, when there was a sound.

  The team functioned in darkness, silence. Any light, any sound was a threat to be dealt with, and the team member who was covering the security of the operation spun to handle the sound, spun and released two silenced rounds at the source of the sound to quiet it, to bring back the needed silence, while the first member of the team went ahead and terminated the target as they had terminated the first target. It was called sanctioning, the act of termination. When a target was terminated, in the code of reporting it was said to have been sanctioned.

  The unexpected target to be sanctioned by the covering team member was a three-year-old child who had started to cough, would have coughed except that instinct and training took over and the two rounds went perfectly, exactly into the center of the child’s head and forced it into silence and the child was sanctioned.

  The first team member completed the termination of the target subject and turned to leave the hut and get back to the river and the boat and safety.

  The covering team member stood, the .22 still raised, aimed at the spot where the child had sat up next to its mother before dropping to lie by her. Now there was other sound. The start of the child’s cough had begun to awaken the mother; she stirred and her movement disturbed others in the room sleeping on mats.

  Still the team member remained standing, frozen, his eyes wide and white.

  “Come on,” the first team member whispered. “We have to go!”

  But the second team member couldn’t make his feet operate. Nothing worked. He stared where the baby had been, stared where the bullets had gone, and stood.

  “Damn it, Waylon, we have to move!”

  “Leave me.”

  “No.”

  “Leave me, Wayne. Now. I’ll stay here. It’s better that I stay.”

  Wayne nodded, pretended to obey, and stepped closer, chopped once with the .22 pistol beneath Waylon’s ear, up and hard and brutal, and Waylon was instantly unconscious and beginning to drop. Wayne caught him beneath the armpits, threw him up and over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and ran out of the hut while people were sitting up, turning to see the bodies, before they could scream and react; out of the hamlet and down to the river and back into the darkness away from light, back into the silence.

  The long silence.

  Waylon

  5

  HE WALKED IN BEAUTY.

  Wherever he went, no matter what was happening around him, to him, of him, he walked in beauty, in clouds of color, sprays of greens and blues and reds. He could see sunsets in a bus depot bathroom, hear Schubert in the roar of an engine, feel grace in a pile of mud.

  Waylon Jackson.

  He looked relatively normal for a forty-five-year-old child of the sixties and seventies. He was balding, with rounded shoulders that made him seem bearlike, strong arms, not fat but with a slight gut that pushed his jeans down and gave him a faintly redneck look. He kept his hair cut short on the sides, where he had hair, which enhanced the country look, and kept his beard short and even, or as even as he could hack it with scissors.

  He washed his clothes regularly, worked when he needed money, had long before given up booze and drugs—which he’d tried in the seventies—and for thirty-two years had not had a place to live other than a room now and then, had not owned anything, and appeared on no forms except arrest blotters.

  He was learning.

  Now and then when he talked to people about himself—actually very rarely—and they asked him what he was doing and why, he would say, simply:

  “I am learning.”

  And he meant it.

  He tried to learn from every single thing he did or that happened to him or around him or of him. If asked he would say he learned from wars and flowers, weather and bugs, windows and rocks, sticks, cities, prisons, mountains, curbs, women, children, and liars.

  “Everybody,” he would say over his “furniture,” “but politicians.”

  His “furniture” was a worn, loved, almost constantly used Martin twelve-string guitar that he carried in a beat-up leather case. It had been with him so long he didn’t think of it as separate. When he dressed he put on his pants and shirt and shoes and picked up the guitar. He ate, drank, loved, and lived with the guitar next to him just as the music from the guitar was part of his breath, his life.

  Sometimes he sang.

  Throaty songs because his throat was old, but full, rich, earth tones that mixed with the bass chords on the guitar and stopped people when they tried to walk past him singing on the sidewalk; stopped them and made them throw money in his open guitar case and think of things like mothers they had never seen or loves they wished they had or dreams they hoped to have.

  He walked in beauty, but he walked.

  With the beauty, with the music in his head, the colors in his eyes and mind and soul, with the silver tinkling bells of his memories he walked; he lived, completely, for travel.

  “You learn by moving,” he said,
and sometimes sang, for many things he thought and wanted to say came out in songs. “A stone is new if seen from the back; life floats in a moving stream and you have to move with it or it leaves you. . . .”

  His travel took him to all places and all times. He’d been in race riots; hoed sugar beets with illegal Mexican workers; traveled down rivers with Pete Seeger; demonstrated against injustice; occupied university offices; been part of sit-ins, lay-ins, love-ins, stoned-ins; worn long collars and bell-bottoms and short hair, long hair, short hair, and finally almost no hair; tried to live with money, then without; married once for show, once in fear, and then, finally, not at all; did boycotts and strikes; rode the rails and jet airplanes; and at last, at the very last and yet the newest new part of his life, he’d come back to this:

  Hitchhiking.

  To stand on a road with a small cardboard sign that said in black felt-pen letters:

  Will Sing for a Ride

  Through the late eighties that way, through the messy, greedy, petty, vicious little late eighties, trying to get rides with a cardboard sign and facing the yuppies who stopped and tried to understand his anguish when he had none.

  Will Sing for a Ride

  And he would. Sing songs to them while he rode, sitting in the backseat, going nowhere, everywhere, no time, every time; sing songs of how ridiculous they were in their BMWs, sing songs of children starving while the yuppies wore their designer jeans and drank special water and spoke of gourmet wines and cultured yogurt and politically correct poetry. Not in anger, the songs, but in a kind of love and pity that they had become so shallow, so burned, so focused on self that the world had ceased to be important to them except for what they could print on a T-shirt.

  Will Sing for a Ride

  Across the country east to west and then north into Canada and back across west to east and twice more that way, singing and learning and hitchhiking until his songs had taken him to the edge of the middle.

  The heart of it, close to the heart of it. Where food was grown by work to sing about, where steel had been made and fire tamed and freedom fought for; there, to stand there with the sign—the tenth sign, the hundredth sign. He had forgotten how many signs, how many towns, how many states, how many mountains. Forgotten everything but the people.

  To stand with the sign:

  Will Sing for a Ride

  In Cleveland, Ohio.

  The Ride

  6

  TERRY LOOKED SIDEWAYS at the car, kneeling down to make sure everything was even with the load on the luggage rack on the trunk lid. He could not think of it as a “boot.”

  He had packed his life, or so it seemed.

  When he started he somehow didn’t think of how far it was to go. But he found the road atlas in a corner of the closet and just looked at the distance across from Cleveland to Portland, Oregon, where the uncle lived, and it seemed another world.

  He would be crossing most of the width of the United States. Except for a disastrous school trip on a bus that went to a museum in a town forty miles away—he couldn’t even remember the name of the town—he had never been anywhere. All he saw on the trip was a roomful of pioneer artifacts—for some reason he remembered a brass hand pump that went on a sink—and a big kid named Richard Barris, who kept saying, “I’m going to beat the hell out of you” to Terry for absolutely no reason. Terry didn’t even know the kid.

  And now he was going to drive across the country.

  When he went in to pack he was not logical. He took a couple of T-shirts, an extra pair of pants, and some socks. All this he crammed in a zipper bag he found in his parents’ closet, and for some reason at first he thought that was all he would need.

  Plus the money, of course. He took the money and put some in each pocket, all the way around—he was down to just over twelve hundred dollars now, what with antifreeze and food—and was halfway to the garage door with the bag, all set to leave, when he thought of a jacket.

  He might get cold. There might be some cold weather between Cleveland and Portland. He went back for his windbreaker and then he saw a raincoat and thought suddenly that the Cat didn’t have a top. Of any kind.

  He needed some way to cover himself if it rained, and that made him think of where he was going to sleep. He couldn’t just drive all the way through without sleeping, and that brought up camping, and if he was going to camp he needed some kind of gear. . . .

  Pretty soon he had half the house in the garage and was trying to load it on and in the Cat. He had an old tent he found in the garage along with a sleeping bag and a large piece of plastic sheeting and a small camp stove his father had used when he tried to take a fishing trip that didn’t come through as planned—a huge mound of stuff.

  He shook his head, looking at the pile, and started over, loading each item carefully, thinking long on whether he would need it or not.

  First his tools. He would probably need his tools. He put the whole four-drawer toolbox in the trunk, plus a canvas roll of screwdrivers and a tire tool and an old jack. The car had a small cheater-spare but it also had steel radials, so he hoped he wouldn’t need it.

  After the tools his clothes. Just enough for three days—he could stop at laundromats and wash. A jacket and a baseball cap and some wrap sunglasses to make him look older topped it off. He was tall and thin and the glasses gave him—he thought—a mysterious look and added at least five years to his life.

  He took the plastic sheeting but left the tent. The sheeting was large enough to cover the whole cockpit and then some, and if it rained he could cover the car and sit inside and wait it out. He had never been camping in his life and didn’t think this was a good time to start. At the last minute he threw in the sleeping bag.

  He left everything else. Toys, models, a tired Nintendo, some comic books, junk he’d had since he was four.

  The license plates posed a problem until he found a set. His father was always involved in one car deal or another and there was a set of car plates on the back of the workbench from one of his trades. According to the sticker the plates didn’t expire for seven more months.

  He put them on the car, figuring at least he didn’t look completely illegal now. He still didn’t have a license, but there was a chance he wouldn’t be stopped.

  As for everything else—how to drive in traffic, what all the signs meant, how to handle different road conditions, everything would have to be learned as he went.

  What was it they called it? He frowned, trying to think of what a teacher had said once about learning while you worked. Ob yeah. On-the-job training.

  He would do on-the-job training to learn how to drive.

  He started the Cat, listening to the engine a moment before backing out of the garage.

  He stopped, left it running while he closed the garage door and returned, backed out into the street, and caught low and started forward.

  It was already different, driving. Just going around the block, even with the steam boiling out of the cooling system, had given him a feel for the clutch and shifting. He was still a little rough, and he didn’t use the brakes quite right, but it was smoothing fast and by the time he had driven eight more blocks and was near where he would get on the freeway heading west he had improved a hundred percent.

  The Cat was a good teacher. It was responsive and tight and forgiving. If he oversteered, all he had to do was let the wheel go and it self-corrected, and though he sat low in the car he had enough visibility to see all around. It felt, he thought, like he was riding a four-wheeled motorcycle. He could hear and see things around the car as if he were out in the open.

  The fuel gauge was wiggling between half and a quarter so Terry stopped at a small gas station to fill it up and check the oil and take a quick look at the engine.

  “Nice car.” A man came out of the station and looked at the Cat while Terry was filling the tank.

  “Thank you.” The gas cap was down on the side in the rear and it was hard to put gas in without dripping on the fibe
rglass.

  “What kind is it?”

  Terry shrugged. “I’m not sure what you call it. The name is Blakely Bearcat, but it’s got all Ford parts. . . .”

  “Oh. A kit car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice job. You build it?”

  Terry nodded. And for the first time he felt proud of what he’d done. He liked the car and was happy building it, but there was something about having somebody else like it that made him feel proud.

  The gas suddenly squirted back out of the hole as the cut-off on the pump worked. Apparently the filler tube was too narrow. He’d have to watch that in the future.

  He paid and checked the oil again. It was still up and there didn’t seem to be any oil leaks or steam from the antifreeze, so he clamped the hood down with the side hooks and started the car.

  He looked both ways, jerked the clutch a little getting out into traffic, and accelerated until he got to the highway entrance, then downshifted and headed up the ramp onto I-40 heading west.

  He was in traffic, moving west at sixty miles an hour, before he realized three basic problems.

  First, it was getting dark and he had never really checked the headlights to see how they lined up.

  Second, it was starting to rain. There were huge, gray clouds piling up and drops of water hitting the windshield.

  Third, the car didn’t have a top.

  Somehow he always thought of riding in the sun. Didn’t think of it raining when he wanted to drive, only at night when he was ready to stop.

  He had the plastic sheet but he couldn’t stop out here in the open, and even while he was thinking of it the rain was increasing.