The Car

by Gary Paulsen

  Wayne’s eyes opened. He was looking straight at the ceiling and they focused at once, glanced first toward the door, then over to where Terry slept.

  He smiled when he saw Terry awake and whispered, “You sleep good?”

  Terry nodded and also whispered, “What time is it?”

  Wayne looked at his watch. “Three.”

  “In the morning?”

  “No. Afternoon. Waylon played until six. I carried you back to the room and you didn’t blink an eye.”

  “Did he win?”

  “He always wins.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know. Fifteen, maybe a little more.”

  “Thousand?”

  Wayne nodded. “Yeah. It’s a lot of money to take out of that little game. I thought we would have trouble, but Annie handled it all.”

  Waylon snorted and made a sound close to gaack and awakened. He sat up suddenly, looked around, then lay back down. “I could use some coffee. I feel like I’ve got a hangover.”

  “And food,” Terry said. “I’m starving.”

  “First we have to do the money,” Waylon said. He started digging in the pockets of his pants, which he’d slept in.

  “Do what?”

  “Bust it up.” Waylon pulled wads of bills from both front pockets, then from both back pockets.

  “How much did you win?” Terry asked.

  “Just at eighteen thousand. I figure it comes to about six thousand each.” He started arranging the money in three piles, stacking fifty- and hundred-dollar bills until they were about evenly matched. He handed one stack to Wayne, jammed one back in his pockets, and the other he leaned across and held up to Terry.

  “You’re giving me six thousand dollars?”

  Waylon nodded. “Sure. You’ve got to disperse wealth or it doesn’t work. What if we get separated?”

  “But I didn’t do anything. . . .”

  “That doesn’t matter. You were there, part of us, part of how we are.”

  “But six thousand . . .” Terry looked at the wad of money in his hand. “It’s so much.”

  Waylon lay back. “It is—only—money. A way to store energy. That’s all it is. You use it, live with it, don’t worship the crap. It’s just something to get you through the night.”

  “Let’s go eat,” Wayne interrupted. “We can always talk. My stomach feels like my throat was cut. It’s OK to be hungry, but starving sucks.”

  They found a hamburger stand and ate burgers and fries and drank malts until they could barely move.

  “So,” Wayne said, looking at Terry, “what do we do next?”

  “Me? You’re asking me?”

  “Sure. It’s your turn.”

  “No.” Waylon cut in. “It’s nearly four o’clock—too late in the day for him to make the choice as to what we do next. He can start in the morning.”

  “Aren’t we going to play more poker?” Terry asked. “I mean you. Aren’t you going to play more? Wayne said you always win. Maybe you could win more and we would have even more money.”

  Waylon and Wayne looked at each other—again, that look. Like they knew something without having to talk about it.

  “You never beat the game,” Waylon said, and Wayne nodded slowly. “You go in, take what you need, get out. Never stay too long and never, never try to whip the game. Stay there too long and they figure you out, start chewing at the corners on you, know your betting. Then maybe two, three of them get together and whipsaw you.”

  “Whipsaw?”

  “Bet against each other with you in the middle,” Wayne said. “One might have a good hand, the other a bad one. The bad one raises the pot even though he knows he can’t win, then the guy with the good hand raises and they keep doing that with you caught between them. Whipsaw. Later they split what they take off you.”

  Terry slurped the last of his malt. “Well, if we aren’t going to play poker, what are we going to do?”

  Waylon pointed across the street. “Wanda.”

  “What?”

  “Wanda,” he repeated. “See that doorway? It leads up a staircase to Wanda. . . .”

  “Oh, man. Wanda isn’t still here.” Wayne leaned back and shook his head. “It’s been twenty years.”

  “Some things, like love,”—Waylon smiled—“never die. I want the boy to meet her.”

  “Nobody does that anymore,” Wayne said. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Not to do—just to meet. He’s too young for the other thing.”

  Terry listened to both of them, his head going back and forth like he was watching a tennis match. He was going to ask more but he was learning—slowly, he thought, but learning—and one of the things he’d learned was to not ask too many questions. They would show him what they meant.

  Waylon looked at his watch. “Four-thirty. About time they got up anyway, don’t you think?” He stood and went to the sidewalk, started across the street, and Wayne and Terry followed.

  The door opened into a stairway and there was another door at the top of the stairs. This second door was locked and Waylon knocked and stood back so he would show in the peephole at eye level in the door.

  There was a moment’s hesitation, a scuffling at the door, then a muffled woman’s voice.

  “He’s too young.”

  “We’re not here for that. We’re looking for Wanda. We’re old friends.” Waylon pointed to Wayne and Terry. “These are friends of mine.”

  Another moment or two, then a clicking sound and the door swung open enough to let a large woman wearing a flimsy negligee fit into the opening. She was not fat, just huge—standing well over six feet—and to Terry she looked like a living mountain.

  “I’m Betty,” the woman said. “I knew Wanda.”

  “Knew?” Wayne had been leaning against the wall through the exchange and he stood straighter.

  “Yes. She passed away three years ago.”

  “Ahh.” Waylon sighed. “That’s too bad. She was a good person.”

  “Yes. She was. Everybody who knew her loved her.”

  “She kept me from deserting,” Waylon said. “I was stationed over at Rapid City for a while when I first went in the army—before I went to . . . school. I hated it and was going to split and she talked me out of it, talked me into staying in. I used to come here every week and she would sit and play classical music on that old Martin she had. . . .”

  He let his voice slide off and for a long time they stood—the large woman in the see-through gown, Waylon, Wayne, and Terry—stood in silence at the top of the small stairway in front of the door and it was then that Terry realized what the place was, knew what Wanda had been.

  “What got her?” Waylon asked.

  “AIDS—what else?”

  “Ahh . . .” Another sigh, deeper this time, sadder. “It gets so many.”

  Betty nodded, again there was silence, then she coughed softly “Are you boys sure I can’t offer you a little something?”

  Waylon shook his head. “Not this time. We’re just traveling through and I thought I’d say hello to an old friend.”

  “Well, then . . . it’s cold standing here this way.”

  “We’ll be going.” Wayne turned to go down the stairway. “Thank you.”

  She closed the door and they were back on the street before Terry spoke.

  “Were they—I mean was she, you know, a prostitute?”

  Wayne said nothing, but Waylon smiled. “She was a lady named Betty. Other names don’t count.”

  “Was Wanda one of them?”

  “Too many questions,” Waylon said. “The wrong kind. Wanda was a lady, Betty is a lady—why do you need other labels?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  Waylon suddenly stopped dead and turned to Terry. “Ever hear of Wild Bill Hickock?”

  Terry nodded. “Sort of. Wasn’t he a marshal or something in the Old West?”

  “Close. He was a drunk who could shoot a handg
un very well—and once was a marshal in Dodge City, Kansas. Mostly he was just a drunk. He died here.”

  “Where?”

  Waylon poked his finger over his shoulder at a bar next to them. “Right there.”

  He led them into the bar and at the back there was a poker table, roped off, with cards lying on the top of it.

  “He was playing poker,” Waylon said. “Had his back to the door and somebody came in, walked up, and put a bullet in his brain.”

  “Aces and eights,” Wayne said. “His hand. Two pair. Aces and eights. It’s still called a dead man’s hand.”

  They turned to go but Waylon hung back for a moment. “Clean . . .”

  “What?” Terry asked.

  Wayne went back to Waylon. Took him by the arm. “Come on, Wail . . .”

  “So clean. In the head. It ended then, didn’t it? Ended . . . right . . . then. Just clean and over. Head shots are so clean. . . .”

  “Let’s go, Wail,” Wayne repeated. “Let’s go now, come on.” He made his voice soft, as it had been when they were at the religious commune. Like he was speaking to a dog. “Come on, Wail, let’s go. . . .”

  Waylon turned away from the poker table with the cards arranged the way they were supposed to have been the night Wild Bill Hickock was shot in the back of the head.

  Outside they stood for a time, adjusting their eyes to the sudden bright light of the late afternoon sun.

  “Looks like it’s going to clear,” Wayne said, still holding Waylon’s arm. “Be a nice day tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.” Terry nodded. “I’ll have to think what to do.”

  “Why don’t we go back to the room? Order pizza and pig out and watch television, then get an early start in the morning. Can you dig it?” Wayne led Waylon along the sidewalk, away from the bar.

  “Sounds good.” Terry followed.

  “Maybe there’ll be a good movie on. A western. I dig those old John Wayne westerns. The Duke—man, he could kick some serious . . .”

  “He dodged.” Waylon had stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and spoke suddenly, his voice soft but his eyes were back and his lips were in a half smile.

  “What?” Wayne asked.

  “The Duke. He dodged—skipped combat. Played all those hero roles and he dodged. Couldn’t handle the freight, you know? Like the president. They talk good and wave the flag, but when it came time to pay dues they dodged.”

  Wayne shook his head. “Man, the Duke?”

  Waylon nodded. “But I like the pizza part and getting an early start.” He started walking ahead of them, as if the bit in the bar had never happened, his step light. “What are we going to do tomorrow?” he asked over his shoulder to Terry.

  “I don’t know. Anything. You know, about what to look for or anything.”

  “What do you want to know about?”

  Terry frowned. “I’m not really sure. Maybe, you know, what it was like, really like out here. Back before cars and highways and all of it. Maybe back when it was just Indians and cowboys. . . .“

  “It never was,” Waylon said. “Indians and cowboys. It was Indians and soldiers. This whole place, from here to Portland, the West—it was like Vietnam. A war.”

  “Then that,” Terry said. “I want to start early and see something that would show me what that was like. What is there to see?”

  Wayne said nothing and for a time Waylon didn’t, either. Terry thought he was going to remain silent all the way to the motel room. But just as they stepped off the curb to cross the street to the motel Waylon stopped.

  “Custer.”

  “What?” Terry bumped into his back.

  “The height of it, what happened out here—it has to be Custer. The Custer battle.”

  “Are we close to that?”

  “Half a day of driving, if the weather is good.”

  “Then that’s it,” Terry said. “We’ll go there tomorrow.”

  21

  THEY STOOD ON A HILL next to a group of small white stones and a large monument, a beautiful rolling prairie spread out before them, low and covered with knee-high grass leading down to a river lined with trees. It was all thick and green and soft. Meadowlarks sang around them and it was midafternoon and Terry tried to think of what it must have been like.

  “The stones are where the bodies were found,” Waylon said. “All white. They all looked white to the soldiers who came and found them. White against the green grass. Several men said that. They stopped a mile away and asked each other what all the white pieces were—they thought they were bits of paper. Scrap. Garbage. But it was the bodies. . . .”

  The Custer battlefield.

  They had gotten up early, well before daylight, after watching bad movies and eating pizza and going to bed before ten—this time Terry and Wayne slept on the floor and Waylon won the toss for the bed.

  There had been no rain and they had driven across the Wyoming prairie with the sun warming their backs. There had been almost nothing to see until they pulled into Sheridan and had a hamburger, then fifty more miles up the highway, the Cat wheeling along in back of the Harley until they entered Montana and came to a sign that pointed up to the small hill.

  “It seems like such a—I don’t know, small place.” Terry looked down the hill to the river. There were white markers scattered down a shallow ravine and he thought, They died along the way, died trying to get up to this hill.

  “It is small.” Waylon nodded. “Everything moved on horses then, slowly, and there was no artillery. Just guns and arrows. You had to be close to hit anything. All just a small engagement.” He snorted. “Think of it. In the Gulf War with Iraq more people were killed in the first seven minutes than died in all of the Indian wars with all of the tribes and all the armies and civilians on both sides. . . .”

  A tour came along, tourists following a guide. There was a building at the battlefield headquarters, where tour guides gave talks, and the three of them had stopped to hear one of the lectures and look in the museum. There were guns and pictures—there was even Custer’s jockstrap in a case—but it didn’t seem to mean anything to Terry until they walked up the little asphalt path with rattlesnake warning signs to the battle site itself.

  The stones, Terry thought, the white stones. It was like seeing the bodies to him. Two hundred and eighty some men just gone. In less than an hour, probably.

  “Snuffed,” Wayne said, as if reading Terry’s thoughts. He measured the ground with his eyes—to Terry it seemed like an engineer or scientist studying the ground—and nodded. “They must have thought they could hold if they got up here. Good terrain, high ground. Drop the horses and get down in back of them. . . .”

  “Too many,” Waylon interrupted. “Way too many Indians. Thousands. And smart. While the light was going on, Crazy Horse took a big group of warriors back around the hill to cut off retreat and they swarmed up and over Custer and the rest of his men before they could set up a reaction. Bad fields of fire, bad perimeter . . .”

  “. . . bad luck,” Wayne finished.

  “That, too. All the bad luck there is.”

  “Poor bastards.”

  Waylon nodded. “Nobody won this one.”

  “What do you mean?” Terry turned from the stone marking the mass grave at the top of the hill. “I thought the Indians won. . . .”

  Waylon shook his head. “Maybe this fight. But the battle set off a public reaction across the country—around the world. They lost any hope of a good settlement—if there ever was a hope. The United States came after them with whole armies, slaughtered them, drove them to the ground after the Custer battle.”

  “But wasn’t it all the white man’s fault?” Terry sat on a small corner of the monument.

  Waylon nodded. “They broke treaties, took everything from the Indians—but it wasn’t these soldiers who did that. It was prospectors, railroad tycoons, bankers—that’s who stole the land. And these soldiers were sent to deal with it. Hell, most of them didn’t even want to come
out here. Irish immigrants trying to find the pot of gold in America, and the recruiters talked them into coming west. Custer’s desertion rate was sometimes over ten percent per month. The soldiers were the losers. And the Indians, of course.” He looked at the body markers, the prairie dropping around them. “Only the bankers won. And the politicians.”

  They spent the rest of the day at the battlefield, later moving down to the points defended by Reno and Benteen.

  “They made it here,” Wayne said. “Look at the shallow pits they dug when they established the perimeter. It was a bad defensive position but they made the best of it, and they held. Like it could have been another Custer but they held. . . .”

  Terry smiled. Wayne seemed to be thinking like Waylon, in military terms and jargon. “You talk like it happened yesterday.”

  Wayne nodded. “Some things never change. They had different weapons. But they still had to have a perimeter, defensive positions, fire power, interlocking fields of fire. For the grunt it’s always the same, no matter when.”

  Waylon nodded but didn’t say anything, and instead led the way through this secondary battle site.

  There was a small circular walk that led around to posts with written information on them, pointing to the different aspects of interest. Reno and Benteen had come in from different angles with their men, supposedly to support Custer, but they had run into overwhelming forces.

  “One of the scouts said there were so many hostile Indians that the soldiers couldn’t carry enough bullets to kill them all,” Waylon said. “There might have been two, three, maybe even four thousand warriors—maybe ten or fifteen warriors to each soldier. Maybe more. And these guys held.”

  “How?” Terry looked down to the river. There were ravines, gullies for the Indians to use for cover. “Why didn’t they run over these men like they did Custer and his men?”

  Wayne laughed but there was no humor in it. A soft sound mixing with the meadowlark songs and soft buzz of flies. “Because they didn’t want to. . . .”

  Waylon nodded. “That’s part of it. They worried that other soldiers were coming—bigger forces that would wipe them out. And they were right. So they fought here for the day, then gathered up their wounded and dead and left.” He pointed to a range of snowcapped peaks in the distance. “Up there. They ran into the Bighorn Mountains and hid.”