The Car

by Gary Paulsen

  “Ahh, here. The choke isn’t even hooked up.” He worked the choke manually, held it closed. “Try it now.”

  Terry cranked the Cat again and it turned twice before firing off with a healthy roar.

  Waylon smiled, let the engine warm before opening the choke and putting the air cleaner back on. He closed the hood and climbed into the car, holding his guitar in his lap again. “And away we go. . . .”

  Terry made a mental note to fix up some kind of choke system, moved back onto the small highway, and headed west.

  They drove steadily until almost eleven in the morning, then stopped for gas and to wash the breakfast dishes and buy more food because they’d used all the food in Waylon’s pack. Waylon paid for everything—gas, food, a reserve quart of oil, though it didn’t seem they’d need it because the Cat wasn’t using any.

  “You don’t have to pay for everything,” Terry said as they left the station. “I have some money. . . .”

  “I’ll buy. It’s your car; you’re driving.”

  Terry nodded, and the truth was, for the first time in his life he really was driving. He had been working at it since he’d started the day before, working at driving. And he had seemed to be doing it. The car moved forward, backward; he went fast, slow; he steered.

  But through the morning he started to learn to drive. When they came to a corner on the narrow road—and there were many of them—he didn’t just herd the car around the curve, he cornered it, decelerating on the way into the curve, keeping the nose of the Cat on the inside, shifting down if it was a sharp curve that slowed the car so the tachometer dropped below 2600 or so rpm, then powering out of the turn by accelerating until the next turn. He had read hot-rod books and car magazines since he was nine years old, had read about these things but didn’t understand them fully until now; and they seemed to come to him naturally, as if he’d been doing them all his life.

  He was completely lost in the driving, didn’t care where they were going or where they had been, or how long it took to get there. All he cared about was the road and the sound of the engine and the small squeal from the tires when he made a turn correctly; and he learned on every turn, every downshift and upshift, every time he accelerated and felt the center of gravity shift.

  He had wanted to try breaking the rear end loose ever since morning. In one of the hot-rod books he’d read they talked about popping the rear end loose and drifting on a corner until it lined up with the road coming out of the corner, and finally where the road went along a flat field—so he could see past the curve well ahead to make sure there was no traffic coming—he tried it.

  Just as the car started to take the sideways pressure of the curve he jerked the emergency brake once, which stopped the rear wheels and they started to skid sideways, swinging the rear end around. At the same time he shifted down and when it was lined up on the road he powered out. It was rough, but it worked, and he kept a higher speed through the turn than he would have been able to hold driving normally.

  Next to him he saw Waylon smile and nod.

  “I never did that,” Terry explained. “I thought it was a good place to try. . . .”

  “You learn fast.” He patted the dashboard of the Cat. “It’s like one of the old MG-TDs. It even looks a little like one. Tighter, though, and flatter on the curves. People have lost this.”

  “Lost what?”

  “How to drive, the art of driving. Now they get in technological monsters and barf around. They don’t know how to drive, just be driven.”

  Terry nodded, though he didn’t quite understand in what way Waylon meant there was a difference between driving and being driven. He was going to ask, or at least talk more, opened his mouth to say something, when a dark shadow seemed to cover him from the side and the world blew up.

  10

  HE NEARLY WET his pants.

  Waylon was looking over his shoulder and his eyes went wide, then tightened at the corners and Terry turned.

  There was a black Ford pickup next to him, painted in primer, flat black, and rocketing along on tires that seemed higher than the whole Cat.

  It apparently didn’t have mufflers, or if it did it had a cutout ahead of them. The noise was deafening, seemed to almost physically push at Terry as the truck roared alongside.

  He looked up. In the right seat, looking down on him, was a man wearing a T-shirt with a cigarette pack rolled up tight in the sleeve. He had short hair, almost none, and he looked down on Terry and flipped his finger and spit.

  They were doing about sixty and the wind took the spit away, but his meaning was clear. He turned and said something to the driver—Terry couldn’t see across the truck to the driver—then reached over in the seat and came up with a beer bottle. The truck accelerated until it was slightly ahead of Terry and Waylon. The man held the bottle up to his mouth, took a swig, and held the bottle upside down, smiling crookedly.

  “Kick it,” Waylon said, yelling over the bellow of the truck. “Catch a gear and get out of here. Now!”

  Terry floored the Cat and looked at the tach. They were near 3000 rpm now and it barely crawled forward; they were at too high a speed to accelerate without shifting down. If he dropped it a gear it would redline. He shook his head. “It’ll blow the engine. . . .”

  It was too late in any case. The man in the pickup flipped the bottle out of the truck window back at the Cat.

  It seemed to come in slow motion, arcing back, and for a moment Terry thought it was coming straight at his head.

  But at the last moment the bottle caught the steel top edge of the windshield and shattered back in Terry’s face.

  He had barely enough time to close his eyes before the glass hit him, and when it did reflex took over and he jerked the wheel of the Cat down to the right.

  The Cat left the road at sixty, was airborne for three feet, then dropped into the ditch in a whipping sea of grass and dust.

  “Damn . . .” Waylon reached for the wheel, trying to correct, but Terry had his eyes open almost at once and cut back to the left, then right, then left in decreasing swerves until the Cat came to a stop in the middle of the ditch, sitting on the grass.

  The truck kept moving down the highway, and Waylon was out of the car almost before it stopped rolling and stepped around to Terry’s side.

  “Out.”

  The whole thing hadn’t taken ten seconds. Terry got out of the car and Waylon bent him over frontward.

  “Are your eyes clear?”

  “I think so. Yeah.”

  “Brush all the glass out of your hair and off your clothing.”

  “What’s the matter with those guys?”

  “Drunk rednecks, freaks—who knows? There are people in the world who don’t want to be part of the race.” He looked down the road and his voice became quiet, almost a whisper. “There went two of them.”

  Terry cleaned his clothes, then they went through the car and made sure all the pieces of glass were out of the seats.

  “Let’s get it up on the road.” Waylon moved around back. “You drive and I’ll push.”

  Terry slid back into the seat and dropped it in low. Waylon didn’t need to push. The ditch was dry and the wheels grabbed and they were back up on the road in a moment. Waylon got back in and pointed down the highway.

  “Let’s go.”

  Terry started, shifted to second, third, and fourth, and then looked at Waylon. “This is the way those guys in the truck went.”

  Waylon didn’t say anything but nodded.

  “Maybe we should try to avoid them.”

  This time Waylon looked. “Why?”

  “Because of what they did—they’re dangerous.”

  Waylon smiled. “Not really.”

  Terry remembered the bottle crashing into the windshield frame. An inch higher and it could have killed him. That was dangerous enough.

  They had been driving while talking and Terry saw a small farm town a mile or so ahead of them. He slowed. Somewhere he’d read th
at a lot of these towns were speed traps, or his dad had said it—it surprised him to think it because it was the first time he’d thought of his parents since he’d started, except when Waylon had asked about them—and he didn’t want to get a ticket.

  Closer he saw that there was a gas station on the outside edge of town.

  Still closer he saw that the black truck was in the gas station. He let the Cat slow.

  Waylon had seen the truck as well and he motioned toward it. “Let’s stop for gas.”

  “What?”

  “You need gas.” Waylon pushed his guitar off to the side and unbuckled his seat belt. “Stop.”

  Terry looked at the VDO gas gauge. It was still at three-quarters full. “We don’t need gas.”

  “Yes.” Waylon looked at him, his eyes serious. “We do. Stop there.”

  This is insane—just looking for it, Terry thought, but there was something in Waylon’s eyes, some force he did not understand, and without meaning to he slowed and brought the Cat up to the gas pumps.

  “You pump,” Waylon said, sliding out of the car. “I’ll pay.”

  Right, Terry thought, I’ll pump. He shook his head. If you think I’m going to stay out here while you’re in there. . . .

  He left the car and followed, as it worked out, eight or ten steps behind Waylon. Waylon opened the front screen door to the gas station and walked inside like he didn’t have a concern in the world.

  Terry stopped at the door, holding it open. He could see the inside because of light coming through a back window. There was a counter down the right side of the room with a cash register on top of it near the front door. Two men stood next to the counter, one drinking a Bud, the other smoking a cigarette. Terry recognized the one smoking as the guy in the truck who had thrown the beer bottle. Another man, the owner or somebody who worked at the station, was in back of the counter drinking a Coke. It was clear the three were friends, were talking and laughing—probably about the beer bottle and the Cat.

  Too many, Terry thought. There are three of them. One of them is too many. Three is an army. Don’t—don’t do this. But none of it came out. He just watched.

  Waylon walked down along the counter, his arms swinging loosely at his sides.

  “Well, look at this,” the man with the cigarette said. “It’s them we were just telling you about—from the little kiddy car.” He stood away from the counter and faced Waylon. “Are you a couple of little kiddies?”

  Waylon stopped. Terry could not see his face but his voice sounded soft, almost sad.

  “It can go either way,” Waylon said. “It’s up to you. You can make it rough or you can make it easy. The point is you could have really hurt the boy. I think you should apologize and we’ll call it square.”

  “Apologize? Hell, I missed him, didn’t I? What more do you want?”

  Terry did not see exactly what happened next. Waylon seemed to move, a shrug that took his whole body, and there was a chunking sound, like meat being dropped on a counter, and the man went down holding his throat, blood running out of his nose and mouth.

  Waylon took a step forward, shrugged once more, and the second man from the truck went down as well. He was holding his knee and also bleeding from the nose and mouth.

  Waylon looked at the man who owned the garage, who was still standing in back of the counter, a bottle of soda halfway to his mouth. Not four seconds had passed since Waylon had first shrugged.

  “I wasn’t part of it,” the station owner said, raising his hands and waving them. “Looks like they had it coming.”

  Waylon nodded, moved back to where Terry stood by the door. “You didn’t get any gas, did you?”

  Terry shook his head. “What did you do to them?”

  Waylon didn’t answer, instead guided Terry out of the door and back to the car.

  “I didn’t even see you touch them,” Terry said, following. “You just shrugged or something and they went down—how did you do that?”

  But Waylon didn’t speak and continued to not say anything even when they were on the road and moving at sixty-five.

  He sat staring ahead while Terry drove. Not saying anything, not smiling, not singing or whistling, just staring and sometimes shaking his head.

  Finally, just before dark, he looked at the atlas and leaned across the car. “We’ll keep going tonight, drive all night. I’ll take over when you get tired.”

  “But . . .”

  “We need some work done on the car. And me. What I did back there was wrong. We need to get to Omaha tomorrow. To fix things. Just keep driving.”

  Terry nodded.

  The light dimmed and he turned on the headlights, aimed the Cat west, and let it roll, following the sunset.

  11

  TERRY OPENED HIS EYES into bright light.

  It was morning, early, and the Cat was burbling along. He had been sleeping with his head straight back against the seat and he sat up to see Waylon driving with a new sun at his back.

  He hadn’t wanted to let Waylon drive. The Cat was his, a part of him. He had tried to drive himself and had done all right until midnight. But then between midnight and one in the morning a switch had gone off somewhere in his head and it seemed everything shut down. He had tried to stay awake, fought it as hard as he could, but his chin kept dropping and finally he had pulled to the side of the road and let Waylon take over.

  Perversely, as soon as Waylon started to drive, Terry snapped awake and for half an hour couldn’t sleep. He watched Waylon drive and felt like he’d given his life away.

  But Waylon was a good driver, shifted nicely on the power curve and kept the car moving right, and soon Terry had dropped off again.

  Until now.

  “Where are we?” he asked, squirming in the seat to get a good view. The sky was clear except for a couple of strips of white high cirrus, blue and starting to get hot.

  “About twenty miles out of Omaha. Can you wait until we get there to stop or do you want me to pull over now?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “There’s some coffee in a thermos under your feet. It’s hot and I put some sugar in it for energy.”

  “Thermos? I didn’t know you had a thermos.”

  Waylon nodded. “I didn’t have one. We stopped for gas in the night and I bought one at a truck stop. Filled it, figuring we would want some later.”

  Terry shook his head. “And I didn’t wake up?”

  Waylon laughed. “Not a flicker. You were really zonked.”

  Terry poured coffee. He had never liked it, and still didn’t, but there was something about it that went with the morning, and he sipped contentedly.

  “You want to drive?” Waylon asked.

  “I’ll take it later, after we get . . . Where are we going, anyway?”

  “An old friend named Wayne Holtz. He lives this side of Omaha, ten or twelve more miles. He knows a lot about cars and about me—we both need fixing.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Terry shrugged. “I think the Cat is all right—it runs good, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s great. But it could use a little more . . . just a little more. That’s what Wayne does. Makes things work a little better.”

  “And you don’t seem broken. Those guys didn’t touch you, as far as I could see.”

  Waylon shook his head. “It’s not physical. I shouldn’t have done that to them. They were just a couple of good old boys getting drunk.”

  “They threw a bottle at me.”

  “At the car,” Waylon corrected. “Just being stupid. I . . . hit . . . them wrong. The wrong way. One of them won’t ever be right again.” He trailed off, grew quiet, then smiled sadly. “We’ll talk to Wayne a couple of days, work on the car, smooth the world out a little.”

  For a few minutes they moved in silence except for the wind coming over and around the windshield. Terry heard a meadowlark singing as they passed a fence post, a whip of sound, high and beautiful and gone before it really registered, and the
n Waylon was slowing.

  “Along here, somewhere. Look for a metal sign cut in the shape of an artist’s palette. . . .”

  “A what?”

  “A palette—what they mix paint on. . . . Ahh, there, see it?”

  Terry caught a glimpse of a funny oblong metal sign with dabs of color around the outside edge and the word ART directly in the center. It seemed to be faded a bit, but they were past it too fast for him to tell anything else about it.

  Waylon steered off the highway down a gravel road for a mile or so, then off that road onto a quarter-mile-long driveway, and as they came to the end of the driveway, around a bend and past some trees, Terry saw a large metal building. It was rusty and run down. Next to it stood an old trailer house, also run down and tired-looking, and everywhere else, or so it seemed, there were parts of cars and motorcycles rusting away.

  “It’s a junkyard,” Terry said.

  Waylon shook his head. “No. It’s a place to create things. Come on.”

  The metal building had a large front door and a smaller door to the side. Waylon entered the side door without knocking and Terry followed, expecting it to be dark inside.

  Instead the walls and ceiling were painted flat white and large floodlights lit the center so brightly Terry squinted and had to close his eyes.

  He opened them to see a woman standing on a small platform, leaning against a tall stool with her arm across it, facing him full on.

  She was completely, absolutely stark naked.

  “Unnnhhh.” Terry stopped dead and thought he should turn, knew he should turn, at least close his eyes.

  He could do none of those things. He stood and stared. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, more beautiful than pictures in the magazines he had under his mattress at home. And there she stood. Wearing air.

  The woman ignored him, and Waylon. Did not move. To the side a man who looked like he was completely made of hair and wearing only a pair of impossibly torn Levi’s had an easel set up with a large canvas on it There was a painting of the woman on the canvas, and the man turned as Waylon came in.