The Car

by Gary Paulsen

  “But other than that—about the men?”

  “Well, I guess not much.”

  “That Washington became very wealthy by swindling his own soldiers out of land and had wooden teeth and many slaves, or that Jefferson died in virtual bankruptcy—you’ve never heard that?”

  “No.”

  “The Civil War.”

  Terry leaned back. “I can’t think of anything. You know. Right off the top.”

  “The West.”

  “Cowboys, Indians, like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, just that. I’ve seen old movies. . . .”

  “But no reading about it.”

  “No.”

  For a minute, a full minute, there was silence. Terry heard a bird song that seemed to match the chords Waylon had been picking. Then another half a minute passed, nobody saying anything until Wayne coughed.

  “America—he needs to find America.”

  Waylon looked at him and slowly nodded.

  “That’s what he needs. To go and see it and find it.” Wayne pushed. “Like we did—you know, after the war.”

  “After the war,” Waylon repeated.

  “Yeah. You got to go trucking.”

  “Trucking?” Terry cut in. “I don’t know anything about trucking.”

  “No,” Wayne stopped him. “That’s what we used to call it—traveling. We went trucking. That’s what you need to do. Go see America. Truck on out.”

  “No,” Waylon said, turning to put his guitar back in the case. “It’s what we need to do. We need to go trucking.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah. You’ve got to come with us. We’ve got to go find it again. You take Baby.”

  Wayne looked at Waylon, studied his eyes, then looked down at Terry and back up and grinned. “Yeah—you’re right. We’ve got to go find it again, man. See if it’s still there. Right on. It’s time for me and Baby to ride.”

  Terry sat in the car, looking up at the two men, wondering what they were doing to his life.

  “Who,” he asked, “is Baby?”

  13

  BABY was a Harley.

  Or, as Waylon pointed out later, Baby was the Harley.

  It is possible that of all the Harley Davidson motorcycles owned by all the Harley owners who loved their bikes—and many of them took them into their homes at night, named them, talked to them—there was never a Harley as pampered and loved as Baby.

  Wayne left them and moved back into the metal building and went to a small secondary room at the back that Terry had seen before but assumed was a storage room for paint or materials.

  It was for Baby.

  Wayne opened a door on the side of the room and disappeared inside and came out a moment later wheeling Baby.

  Terry climbed out of the Cat to get a better look It was turquoise-green and white, with a slight rake to the front fork—although not as excessive as he had seen on some bikes—and every square inch, every nut and chrome-plated cover or bolt, or fender or the twin tanks, was absolutely spotless. Even the black leather saddlebags were clean, smooth. Baby shone in the morning sun, seemed to emanate a light of its own.

  “It’s beautiful,” Terry said. “Really beautiful.”

  Wayne smiled. “Thanks. I spend a little time on her.”

  Suze came into the building from the trailer, wearing a long sweatshirt and holding four cups of steaming coffee. She handed one to Waylon, another to Terry, and held Wayne’s until he put the kickstand down on the bike and could take it.

  “You going?” she asked sleepily, sipping her coffee.

  Wayne nodded. “You handle things while I’m gone?”

  She shrugged. “Depends on how long.”

  “Until we get back. We’re going to look at some things. See a little country.”

  “Write if you get work.” Her voice was tough sounding, but she reached out a hand and patted Wayne softly on the cheek, and Terry felt they had done this before, maybe many times.

  Terry took a sip of his own coffee, found she had put sugar in it, and realized with the first taste he was starving. He hadn’t eaten since the sandwich the day before and his stomach grumbled when the coffee hit bottom.

  “We’ll eat after we leave,” Waylon said. He had moved to stand next to Terry and heard his stomach. “On the way . . .”

  Wayne went to the side of the building and pulled down an old duffel bag stuffed with gear.

  “My trucking bag,” he said, and used elastic bungee cords to affix it vertically to the sissy bar on the seat. Then he straddled the bike and smiled. “You guys ready?”

  Like that, Terry thought—that fast he could leave? And remembered his own leaving, all the gear he had tried to take, and Wayne just flipped the duffel bag onto the bike and was ready to go.

  Waylon put his own pack on the back of the Cat and nodded at Terry. “You ready?”

  Terry nodded. “I think so.”

  Waylon started to get in and then stopped, his hand on the door.

  “What’s the matter?” Wayne had turned the gas and key on the Harley and paused.

  “Legal problem. He’s working on illegal plates. We could get stopped.”

  Wayne smiled. “No-o-o problem. We’ll stop on the way out and register the car in my name, get plates, and we’re on our way.”

  But . . . , Terry thought. But doesn’t that mean you own the Cat? On paper, legal and all? Except that he didn’t say it, couldn’t say it. Wayne had pushed the starter button on Baby and the tuned pipes rattled and roared and it was impossible to say anything.

  With another look at Suze, and a small nod from her, Wayne popped the bike into gear and slid around the Cat and out into the morning, down the driveway and out to the road.

  Waylon dropped into the seat and closed the door. “Follow,” he said, waving his arm backward, “the bouncing bike.”

  And they were on their way.

  14

  THEY DIDN’T head west out of Omaha.

  It was early morning and Terry followed Wayne while he went to the courthouse, took the title papers from Terry, and went inside. Twenty minutes later he came out with license plates. They put them on the Cat, and Wayne took a pen from his saddlebags and signed the place on the title that transferred ownership.

  “All you do is keep the title in my name. When you’re ready to change it—you know, later—you sign your name on it and take it into the courthouse where you live and they’ll transfer the title back to you . . . ,” he trailed off, looked at Waylon. “North all right?”

  Waylon nodded and Wayne fired the Harley up and they moved down side streets until they came to a highway heading north of Omaha before noon.

  Still, Terry noted, without eating.

  It was a beautiful day, however—hungry or not—and nice to be moving, the wind whipping around the cockpit while they followed Wayne on the Harley.

  “Hungry?” Waylon asked when they were well clear of the city.

  Terry nodded. “I could eat road kill.”

  “Just a minute.” Wayne turned and rummaged in a side pocket of his pack and came up with a package of trail mix. Terry hated trail mix—it made him feel like he was eating dry cereal with no sugar-milk on it—but he took some that Waylon poured in his hand and munched it.

  It tasted delicious. Almost sweet. But there was too little of it and Waylon had put the bag back in his pack.

  “Can we have more?” Terry pointed at the pack with his thumb. “I’m still hungry.”

  He was surprised to see Waylon shake his head. “You want to stay hungry—from here on you want to stay hungry.”

  Terry pulled out to pass a truck. “I do? Why?”

  “To learn,” Waylon said. “You always stay hungry to learn. You get full, you get sleepy, lazy; you get lazy, you don’t learn.”

  “What are we going to learn driving on a highway?”

  Waylon laughed. “Anything you want to know.”

  “But what?”

  “T
hat’s the question, isn’t it? What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  Waylon peered at him, then back out the windshield. “I don’t believe it—there’s nothing you want to know?”

  “Well, sure, lots of things. But I can’t think of them now.”

  “Not one thing?”

  Terry frowned. “Well, all right. Why are we heading north? I thought we were going to go west.”

  “We’re heading north because Wayne is heading north and we’re following him.”

  “Why is he heading north?”

  Waylon shrugged. “I guess there’s something he wants to know up north.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll follow him and find out. That’s how you truck. You don’t necessarily get anywhere, you just go. . . .”

  And go they did. Wayne kept the northern pace for almost two hours, over a hundred miles, before stopping for gas. They were just past Sioux City, Iowa, when they stopped.

  Terry filled the Cat while Wayne gently put gas in Baby, then walked over while Waylon paid—he still wouldn’t let Terry pay.

  “Why are we heading north?” Terry asked.

  “Because that’s where Samuel is,” Wayne said. His hair had been in the open wind all the while—there was no windshield on Baby—and both his hair and beard were blown back and stuck full of bugs.

  “Who is Samuel?”

  “Samuel is somebody you have to meet if you want to understand America. He’s far out.”

  Waylon came out then with Cokes for all three of them and a package of doughnuts. They stood by the pumps and the car and bike, eating doughnuts and drinking Coke. Terry could feel the sugar tear into him, but when he’d had only one doughnut Waylon closed the sack and put it in the car. “Enough.”

  They headed out again. Once they were in traffic and the Cat was up to speed in back of the Harley, Waylon leaned over.

  “You find out why we’re heading north? I figured you’d ask.”

  Terry shrugged. “He wants me to meet somebody named Samuel. Who is Samuel?”

  Waylon smiled. “Samuel is somebody you have to meet if . . .”

  “. . . I want to learn about America. Yeah, he said that, too.”

  “Far out,” Waylon said, smiling.

  “And he said that, too.”

  “Right on—we’ll go until dark and then camp. Drive on, Macduff. . . .”

  Camping was more formalized with Wayne along.

  Darkness caught them at a campground just out of Yankton, South Dakota, down along a river under tall elms. The campground was deserted except for one pickup camper with a couple that sat inside watching television on a small set that made a blue-gray glow out the windows of the camper.

  Waylon was ready to just pull the tarp up and sleep in the car, as they’d done the first night out, but Wayne shook his head.

  “No way. That was old stuff, letting the weather have you. We’ve got some class now.” Wayne opened the duffel bag and pulled out a cylindrical waterproof bag that contained a three-man tent.

  “Bought it last year at a rummage sale,” he said. “Just in case I decided to go trucking. We sleep in the open but if it rains we can move inside.”

  The tent was comprised of slip-together fiberglass rods that curved to make an igloolike shelter and was up in minutes.

  “And a fire,” Wayne said. “We need a fire in that pit. You handle that,” he added, pointing to Terry.

  Terry looked for scraps of wood and didn’t find any until he located a rack left by the chamber of commerce loaded with cut firewood pieces already split and dried for campers. He carried some over to the concrete pit with an iron grate on top and dropped them. “I don’t have any matches.”

  “Later,” Wayne said, positioning the tent well away from the fire. “First shelter, then food.”

  Waylon had set up his stove and was working at a meal by the time Terry returned with more wood, and it seemed in moments they had a camp set up, food cooking—this time a vegetable stew with ingredients from Waylon’s surprise pack and Wayne’s duffel bag. Wayne found matches and made a fire and they sat around it, waiting for the stew to cook, drinking hot chocolate Waylon had picked up at a truck stop along with three cups and two bottles of water.

  “Oh, man, this brings back memories, doesn’t it?” Wayne leaned back on an elbow and sipped the chocolate.

  “Did you guys go tripping a lot?” Terry asked.

  Waylon laughed. “That’s the wrong term. Trucking, we went trucking. Tripping was using drugs.”

  Wayne nodded. “We did that, too, man. We tripped on all kinds of shi—drugs. After we came back, I don’t think I was straight for two, three years.”

  “Back from where?”

  “The ’Nam. We were in Vietnam.”

  Both men became quiet, looking at the fire, and Waylon spoke quietly. “Yeah, we pulled tours in the ’Nam. . . .”

  “That’s where we started tripping. They had drugs there that would scour your mind, man. Make you think you were inside out.” Wayne sighed, remembering.

  “All bad,” Waylon added. “All that crap . . . Even when it was cool to do it, drugs sucked. Even when we did it, it was the stupid thing to do. There were garbage heads running around turning kids on—that writer and his Acid Trip bus, Timothy Leary—and everybody thought it was cool, but it wasn’t. It kills everything, did then and does now. Just crap.”

  A mosquito fought the smoke and landed on Terry’s neck and he brushed it away. “Did you guys go to Vietnam together and then just stay together afterward?”

  “We worked with each other over in-country,” Wayne said. “But not afterward. I bought Baby when I came home and hit the road and didn’t see Waylon for four, five months. Or was it more?”

  “Six,” Waylon said. “Almost seven.”

  “Then we went trucking together.”

  “On bikes?”

  “Just Baby. The two of us.”

  Terry looked at the flames for a time, thinking of what they’d said: the war, the bike, drugs—it all swirled together. Then he remembered Waylon hitting the two men in the gas station. “Is that where you learned to do that?” he asked. “You know, those two guys you hit. Did you learn that in Vietnam?”

  Neither man said anything and Terry realized he’d asked something he shouldn’t have and took a sip of his chocolate, which was getting cold. “I didn’t mean to say anything wrong—I just didn’t know.”

  Waylon looked up sharply. “You know who Robert E. Lee was?”

  Terry nodded, glad to at last know something. “He fought for the South in the Civil War.”

  “Right. He commanded the South. You know what he said? He said, ‘It is well war is so terrible, we should get too fond of it.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” Wayne cut in, standing up, “that it’s time to eat.”

  And that was the end of conversation for the night. When they’d finished eating, they rolled out foam pads near the tent, let the fire die down, and each slid inside his bag.

  Terry was using his windbreaker for a pillow and couldn’t get it quite right and kept moving it around to find the most comfortable position. At last he folded and refolded it and then lay looking at the red coals of the fire. Waylon and Wayne were breathing evenly and he thought they were asleep. At last he felt his eyes closing, the warmth of the coals making him drowsy, when Waylon spoke softly.

  “You’re starting to learn.”

  “What?”

  “You’re starting to want to know things. More things. You asked questions, pushed. That’s good—that’s how you learn.”

  Then he was silent, his breathing smoothed, and Terry closed his eyes and let sleep come.

  15

  SAMUEL WAS SO OLD Terry thought he was dead when they first met.

  He had awakened to the smell of Waylon making coffee and the sound of Wayne coughing softly.

  They had a small br
eakfast of leftover stew and a doughnut each, then fired their engines and started driving. The camper was still there and Terry thought they must have been awakened by the Harley’s motor, which rumbled like thunder in the morning mist, but there was no sign of life.

  He still had no idea of where they were going and followed Wayne and Baby while they stopped at a grocery store and Waylon went in to buy provisions. Then they drove on, Terry expecting to drive all day, but at midmorning Wayne suddenly slowed and took a gravel side road.

  It was rough and the Cat bounced enough to cause the hood to make a rattling sound where it hit the body, and Terry slowed to a virtual crawl, let Wayne get out well ahead, and just followed the dust plume from the back wheel of the Harley.

  Hie gravel went for nearly seven miles, then turned into a two-rut road that kept Wayne active on the bike and twice snatched the wheel out of Terry’s hand when the front tires caught the ruts.

  “If it rains we aren’t getting out of here,” he said, looking at the dirt tracks. “This will turn to mud.”

  Waylon nodded but said nothing.

  They were by this time well out into the South Dakota prairie. Terry could see for miles and there didn’t seem to be anything worth going to—just grass and softly rolling hills.

  But they rounded a curve and in the distance he saw what looked like a dump with an old trailer house sitting in front of it.

  “Is that where we’re going?” he asked Waylon.

  Waylon nodded. “Samuel.”

  They hit a bump and Terry was thrown up and forward so hard he thought if he hadn’t been belted in he would have been flipped out of the car. “I hope he’s worth all this.”

  Wayne turned Baby into a track leading up to the trailer and Terry nosed the Cat in after him, bouncing to a stop in front of the trailer.

  Close up, the place looked even worse. There was junk and garbage everywhere—old beer bottles, food containers, trash. And the trailer was well past its prime, covered with peeling tar paper that had once been painted silver but had turned to gray.

  In front of the trailer, to the side of the door, was an old recliner chair, weather-beaten with stuffing coming out of it, and sitting in the chair was a man so old he didn’t look alive.