Well, so far, for a total geek, he was doing just fine. Besides, it wasn’t true that he never thought about anything but computers. Sometimes he thought about his social life, or rather his lack of it. He thought about his future, which would involve lots of money and some sort of electronic greatness. Now and then he even thought about the state of the world, when he happened to see a newspaper headline or watch a special on TV. He knew the air was polluted, the ice caps were melting, the rain forests were being chopped down, the fish were croaking in the poisoned lakes, and the sea birds were mucked up by oil spills. There were wars all over the place, because Country 1 wanted what Country 2 had, and Country 3 wanted what Country 1 had, and Country 4 didn’t have anything. He knew about all that. But he didn’t dwell on it. Why should he? There was nothing he could do about it.
The coffee shop was full of people. All the stools at the counter were occupied, and so were the three spindly tables near the window. At one of these tables, he saw the guy who’d been at the gas station an hour or so ago—the one with the tropical shirt. The guy noticed Duff, too. He pointed his fork at him and said, “Hey. Seen you at Dave’s.”
Duff nodded.
“Have a seat,” said the guy, giving a shove with his foot to the empty chair at his table.
“Thanks,” said Duff. He sat down.
“You live here?” said the guy. He had big rabbity front teeth, and his blondish hair fell in wiggly strands down the back of his neck.
“No,” said Duff. “I’m here because my car broke down.”
“Oh, bummer,” said the guy. “So it’s being fixed?”
“Nope,” said Duff. “Can’t be fixed.”
“Whoa,” said the guy. “What are you going to do?”
“I have a plan,” said Duff. He was proud of his plan, and tempted to talk about it—but he didn’t know this person, so he hesitated.
The guy held out his hand, as if he could tell what Duff was thinking. “I’m Stu,” he said. “Stu Sturvich. I’m heading for California.”
Duff shook his hand and introduced himself. “You’re driving?”
“No, hitching,” said Stu. “But man, it’s hard to get a ride around here. I stood out there by the freeway entrance for hours this morning. People just looked at me and drove on. Finally I gave up. Went and found that garage and hired myself out to the guy there for a few hours.”
“You’re a mechanic?”
“Oh, yeah. Not a pro, but I know everything about cars. Cars are my thing.”
“But you don’t have one,” Duff noted.
“Well, not right now,” Stu said. He didn’t explain further.
A waitress in a pink outfit came by, and Duff ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, fries, a strawberry milkshake, and two pieces of apple pie.
“So why are you going to California?” he asked Stu.
“To surf, for one thing,” said Stu. He stood up abruptly from the table, flung his arms out, bent his knees, and assumed a twisted-sideways position. “Hang ten, man,” he said. “Wipeout.” He grinned. There was ketchup on his big front teeth. Then he sat down again and said, “Are you going that direction?”
Duff nodded.
“Getting yourself a new car?” Stu asked.
“Driving one for someone else.”
“Any chance I could get a ride with you? Even part way?”
Duff hesitated.
“Share expenses?” said Stu. “I have some cash.”
Ordinarily, Duff would have said no right away to such an offer. But he was in a good mood just then because he’d solved his transportation problem. And Stu seemed a friendly kind of guy, easygoing, laid-back. Duff wasn’t used to easy, friendly, laid-back people. His friends, the few he had, were mostly very much like himself, more on the tense, serious side. It might be refreshing to know someone like Stu, he thought. But was Stu only being friendly because he wanted a ride?
It occurred to him that he could find this out by running a little test.
“Here’s the problem,” he said. “This car I’m getting—I’m like ninety percent sure the owner wouldn’t want me to take a hitchhiker along. So…” He held out his hands, palms up. “Sorry, but I think I better not offer you a ride.”
Stu’s face fell. “Really?” he said. “You sure? I wouldn’t get the seats dirty or anything.”
“I better not,” said Duff.
Stu sighed. He took a big bite of his hamburger and chewed on it for a while, staring down at his plate. “Well,” he said, “thanks anyway. I’ll just get out the old thumb again. Want this pickle? I don’t do pickles.”
“Sure,” said Duff. He stuck the pickle into what was left of his cheese sandwich.
“What’s that mean on your T-shirt?” Stu asked.
Duff looked down at his chest, forgetting what his T-shirt said. Oh, yeah: TWENTY TERAFLOP CAPABILITY.
“It’s the speed of a superfast computer,” he said. “A teraflop is a trillion floating-point operations per second. Like, you know, doing a trillion math problems in one second.”
“Wow,” said Stu. “So you’re into techie stuff? That’s so cool. I never learned any of that in my lousy school. One ancient Apple in each class that nobody knew how to use. Might as well have been 1960 in that dump. The pencil sharpener didn’t even work.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Florida. It was this little town no one has ever heard of.” He slurped the last of his soda, making a gargling noise with his straw. “So say something in high tech,” he said. “I like to hear it.”
Duff thought for a second. Then he rattled off a long sentence—it didn’t make much sense, but Stu would never know—containing the words gigahertz, hexadecimal, turbocharged hard drive, nanotechnology, and spherical harmonic functions.
“Man, that is awesome,” said Stu. “I don’t know what a single one of those words means.” He balled up his paper napkin and lobbed it toward the wastebasket across the room. It missed, but he didn’t seem to care. “I guess you can make a bundle doing high-tech work, can’t you,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Duff. “I’m planning to, for sure.”
“I’d like the money,” Stu said, “but I wouldn’t like the work. It’s amazing to me, you guys who can do that stuff. I guess geeks kind of run the world now.”
Duff smiled modestly. This had never happened to him before—to have someone be actually interested in what he knew, and even impressed by it. And Stu couldn’t be just buttering him up, because Duff had already said he wasn’t giving him a ride. This must be a genuine kind of guy, an unprejudiced, open-minded guy, with at least half a brain.
By the time they’d finished eating, and Stu had expressed his admiration for Duff’s knowledge several times, Duff had started to think, Why not have this guy along for the ride? In his mind, he set up a chart to examine the question. On one side were the pluses, on the other the minuses.
On the plus side: Stu was willing to share expenses, and he had some money. He knew about cars, which could come in handy. He seemed pretty friendly, not the jock type, although Duff guessed surfing was a kind of jockism. But at least it didn’t involve shoving other guys over or trampling their faces into the dirt.
On the minus side: He hadn’t pictured making this trip with another person, someone he’d have to talk to. Duff had a hard time with conversation. Words didn’t just spring out of him the way they did from some people. He had to find them in his head and put them together. Even after he’d done this, they often came out wrong. He couldn’t see it, but other people did. He could tell from the way they pressed their lips together trying not to laugh and looked sidelong at one another. Why talk to people at all if they were going to be like that? But the more he didn’t talk to people, the harder it was when he did talk to people, because he never got any practice. Maybe he could get some practice with Stu.
On the whole, it seemed like the plus side outweighed the minus. At least I could take him as far as St. Louis, Duff t
hought. I’ll tell him I’m only going that far, and then if I don’t like traveling with him I can ditch him there.
“I wish I could give you a ride,” he said as they left the coffee shop. “Hold on—let me try something.” He got out his cell phone and punched in the number for getting the correct time.
“The time…,” said the operator, “is…”
“Hi,” Duff said into the phone. “This is Duff, the one who’s going to drive your car?” He paused.
“And forty seconds,” said the operator.
“Yeah,” Duff said. “I wanted to ask you a question. Would it be okay with you if I brought along a friend to share the driving?” He paused again, listening to the time lady say, “At the tone, the time will be…”
Then he said, in a surprised voice, “Really? That’s great. Thanks a lot!” and pressed the Off button.
“It’s okay?” said Stu. It was sort of touching, how pleased he looked. His eyebrows went way up, and his eyes got round.
“Yeah,” said Duff. “They don’t mind. I’m taking the car to St. Louis, so I can drive you that far.”
“Oh, thanks!” Stu clapped Duff on the arm. “This is fantastic. Thanks a lot!”
“The guy’s bringing the car to that motel out by the gas station. Meet me there about one-thirty.” He wanted Stu to arrive after Carl had safely left, just in case the real-life Carl didn’t want him to take a passenger.
Stu grinned. “Thanks, dude,” he said. “I really appreciate it. This is going to be great.”
In his mind, Duff heard the faraway echo of his mother’s voice saying, “Don’t pick up any hitchhikers.” He’d forgotten to add that to the minus side of the chart. But it wasn’t important. It was just something people said, like “Don’t talk to strangers.” He felt pleased with himself, in fact, for not being chained to an archaic parental rule. An independent person had to judge each situation separately. He was going to trust his intuition on this one.
Chapter 5
THE COOL CAR
At one o’clock, Duff was in the Doze Inn’s parking lot sitting on his duffel bag. At one ten, a car pulled in.
It was a huge car. Its long, streamlined body projected way out in front and way out in back. Chrome-edged tail fins pointed backward on either side of the trunk, like the fins of twin sharks. The car made a slow turn into the motel parking lot from the street, scraping its low front end on the pavement. It pulled up in front of Duff and stopped. Just behind it was a green compact, which also stopped.
The window of the big car went down, and the driver poked his head through and said, “You Duff Pringle?”
“Correct,” Duff said. “You’re Carl?”
“Right.” The car door opened, and a scrawny guy in a black T-shirt got out. He looked about Duff’s age, maybe a year or two older. At first Duff thought he had a smudge of engine grease or maybe chocolate milk just below his nose. Then he realized it was a thin mustache.
Carl stuck out a hand. “Carl Hopgood,” he said, “and that back there is my girlfriend, Angie.” He pointed at the small green car. Inside, Duff could see a girl with a reddish black pony tail and very long eyelashes. She opened the window and waggled her fingers at him, then got out and walked over to Carl. He wound one of his long arms around her waist, and she curved herself against him.
Carl smiled and gave her ponytail a tug. “I’m ridin’ back with her,” he said. “See, this aunt of mine wanted me to drive her car to St. Louis tonight, and I said okay, because she was going to give me fifty bucks for doing it, but then Angie told me about this party a guy is having over where we live. It’s one of those parties you don’t want to miss, know what I mean?” Carl sniggered and bumped his hip against Angie’s. Angie bumped him back and draped an arm across his shoulders. “So I thought, hey, maybe I can get someone else to drive the thing for me. And I got lucky!”
“Yeah,” said Duff. “Me, too. What kind of car is this, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s a classic. Chevrolet Bel Air, 1957.”
“Nineteen fifty-seven?” Duff did a fast calculation. “You mean this car’s, like, half a century old?”
“Yep. Works pretty good, too. Rosalie, that’s my aunt, she bought it from one of those car fanatics. She’s gonna get it totally renovated.” Carl reached into the front seat and retrieved a piece of paper. “Here’s the directions to her house in St. Louis. She wants the car there by tonight, she said. You better be there. My aunt Rosalie is not one to mess with, I’ll tell you that, because she—”
Angie tweaked Carl’s ear. He yelped. “You’re just talking and talking, honey,” Angie said to him.
Carl pouted. In a babyish voice, he said, “That hurt.”
“I’ll make it better,” said Angie. She kissed Carl’s ear, and he grinned.
Duff wondered how anyone could like having his ear kissed. “Did you tell your aunt you’re getting someone else to deliver the car?” he asked Carl.
“’Course not,” Carl said. “Why should I? She’d just get all upset. Only thing that matters is the car gets there. She doesn’t have to know who’s driving it.” He narrowed his eyes and glared at Duff. “You will get it there, right? ’Cause if you don’t, I’ll have to tell her it got stolen from me by a hitchhiker I picked up named Duff Pringle.”
Duff frowned. He didn’t like this guy. He didn’t like the girlfriend, either, whose pale little eyes peered out at him from under those spidery eyelashes. But he needed the car. “I’ll get it there,” he said. “Will your aunt be there for me to deliver it to?”
“Nope,” said Carl. “Somebody will. Probably my cousin. I’ll call and say you’re coming.” He tossed the car keys to Duff. “Here you go. Have a good trip.”
Carl and Angie, their fingers hooked in each other’s belts, walked away toward the small green car. Carl murmured something; Angie giggled and gave him a shove. Carl reached for her ponytail; she dodged away from him. They got in the car still laughing and roared away.
A sleazeball, thought Duff. Both of them were sleazeballs. He hated that kind of mushy behavior; it made his skin crawl. If, some day in the remote future, he decided he wanted a girlfriend, he would have to find one who did not giggle and who would never kiss his ear.
He turned his attention to the amazing car. But before he’d had a chance to examine it, he saw Stu trudging into the parking lot, a backpack on his back. When Stu saw the car, he started trotting toward it.
“Is this it, man? The car we’re driving?”
“This is it,” said Duff.
“You have got to be kidding,” said Stu. He shrugged off his backpack and let it fall to the pavement. He stood staring at the car with his mouth open for a moment, and then he began circling it slowly, like an animal sniffing. He ran his fingers over the chrome V in the front, and over the two hood ornaments, and across the grill, which looked to Duff like the evil grin of someone with a lot of braces.
“Man,” Stu breathed, “I’ve never been this close to one of these.”
“What’s so great about it?” Duff said.
“Just one of the coolest cars ever made,” said Stu. “Too bad no one’s been taking care of it. Looks a little banged up.” He unlatched the hood and peered inside. “Engine’s not real clean,” he said. “Man, I’d sure love to get my hands on this car. All fixed up, it could be worth twenty thousand dollars. Or even more.”
Duff felt a twinge of nervousness. He’d have to watch for flashing lights on the dashboard. Stop at the first hint of a funny noise. He could sense that damaging Rosalie Hopgood’s property—which was going to be worth a lot some day but wasn’t yet—would not be a good idea.
“Let’s get going,” Duff said. “We’re supposed to be there by tonight.”
They loaded their things into the car’s enormous trunk. When Duff sat down behind the wheel, he felt small. The hood of the car extended into the distance in front of him, vast and level as a plain.
He examined the dashboard. “We’re going to have to wa
tch the oil light carefully,” he said with a knowledgeable air. “An old car like this, it might have a tendency to run out of oil.”
He started the car and moved it slowly through the parking lot and into the street. It was like maneuvering an aircraft carrier. What was the back end doing? Was it following along? Was it about to hit something?
Once they got onto the highway, he calmed down. The car did run smoothly. It glided. Being encased in that much metal and glass made him feel safe. Beside this one, other cars on the road looked like little tin bubbles.
Stu sprawled happily in his seat. He turned up the radio, which was tuned to an oldies station currently playing “Hound Dog,” by Elvis Presley. “This is cool,” he said. “Look how people are staring at us.”
It was true. The car turned heads. It was a new sensation for Duff, who had never before attracted attention for being cool.
They glided along through the green hills of West Virginia. Duff kept glancing at the oil light, but it didn’t blink once. The radio played “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Blueberry Hill,” and “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Warm air blew through the open windows and whipped Stu’s stringy strands of hair against his face. Duff breathed a long, contented breath.
He breathed again, this time sniffing the air. “Do you smell something?” he asked Stu.
Stu sniffed, too. He wrinkled his nose. “Exhaust,” he said. “Maybe we should put the windows back up.”
“Is it us or someone else?” Duff asked.
His question was answered a second later, when a red Toyota passed and its driver glared at them and held his nose as he went by. Duff looked in the rearview mirror and saw a cloud of thin gray smoke. “Yuck,” he said.
Car Trouble Page 3