Car Trouble

by Jeanne DuPrau

  Moony charged at him and barked at his ankles as he approached.

  “Hey,” said Bonnie. “Want a bagel?”

  “Thanks.” There didn’t seem to be any more room on the steps, so Duff stood looking down at them. Today Bonnie had her hair in two sprout-like ponytails, one over each ear. She was wearing shorts. She had very smooth knees and her legs were tanned. She handed him an onion bagel.

  “Sleep all right?” she said.

  “Moderately well.” Duff sat down on the grass.

  “We’ve been talking about music,” said Stu. “It’s a big part of Bonnie’s life.”

  “Interesting,” said Duff, wondering how Stu had learned big things about Bonnie in such a small time. “I write songs,” said Bonnie. “And sing.”

  “And she plays the guitar,” said Stu. “She’s heading for the big time.” He clapped a hand on Bonnie’s shoulder, and Duff felt a sudden hatred for him.

  “Listen,” Duff said. “We have to figure out what to do. I have to get moving.”

  “Don’t get in a tizz,” Stu said. “It’s all figured out.”

  “It is?”

  Bonnie answered him. “I called Shirley this morning—my aunt in Albuquerque—and told her I’m coming. Stu said what if you guys drove my mom’s car and we all went together?” She smiled at Duff and then flipped the last bite of her bagel out onto the grass, where Moony instantly snapped it up.

  Duff felt the black cloud dissolve. Stu was useful after all! Of course, there was still the problem of his missing money and driver’s license, but he’d solve that somehow. Make Stu do all the driving. Maybe he’d have time to stop in at a bank and see if he could get his card replaced. “Great!” he said. “When do we leave?”

  “This evening,” said Stu. “It’s going to be a scorcher today, and that Chevy has no air-conditioning. Better to drive at night.”

  Just then Duff heard footsteps crunching up the driveway, and a voice said crossly, “Oh, there you are. I rang the doorbell, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

  Duff whipped around. A short, stout old woman was coming toward them at a determined pace. She wore a baggy lavender-flowered dress, a flat straw sunhat, and flip-flops that slapped against her heels with every step.

  “Hi, Wanda,” said Bonnie.

  Wanda glared at Duff and Stu. Then she glared at Bonnie and said, “How’s your poor mother?”

  “Doing okay,” said Bonnie.

  “Broke her leg, you said?”

  “And her arm.”

  Wanda shook her head and looked grim. “You’d better come over and stay with me while your mother’s away,” she said. “Can’t live here by yourself.” She cast another dark look at Duff and Stu, but Bonnie didn’t introduce them.

  “I’m going to my aunt Shirley’s,” said Bonnie. “Mom knows. I called her yesterday. Thanks anyhow.”

  “Well,” said Wanda. She stood there, not moving.

  Duff could tell she was waiting for more information. The sun shone through the straw of her hat and mottled her face. She looked, Duff thought, the way a toadstool would look if it were a human being. “Who’re your friends?” she said at last.

  “Duff and Stu,” said Bonnie.

  Wanda made a kind of grumphing sound. She stood there a little longer, but Bonnie just gazed at her serenely, and finally she turned to go. “Give my regards to your mother,” she said, and stumped off down the driveway.

  “The neighbor,” said Bonnie when she was gone. “The idea of staying with her…” She shuddered. Clearly the idea was too awful to put into words.

  *

  Duff decided that since he had a whole day here in St. Louis, he might as well see some of those famous sights he’d read about, and maybe get some exercise at the same time. He asked Bonnie for directions, put on his running shoes, and headed for the Mississippi to see the Gateway Arch.

  He was so hot when he got there that he flopped down on the grass beneath the arch and viewed it from a horizontal position. It was huge, bigger than it looked in pictures. It soared up higher than the multistory buildings nearby. The Mississippi River flowed along beside it, carrying barges and tourist boats, and for a moment Duff thought about the travelers who had come through there two hundred years ago, also on their way to the West Coast, journeying not in cars but on foot and horseback. (He thought for a second about horse emissions, so different from car emissions.) It would have been a rough trip, he thought. Engine breakdowns and thieving bikers were nothing compared with what those pioneer guys went through.

  For a while, he wandered along the riverbank, watching the tourists and the boats, forgetting momentarily about his troubles. He thought how nice it must have been back in riverboat days to float along with only the sound of the water rippling, or the paddle wheel turning, or whatever sound a riverboat made. Did riverboats have fumes, he wondered? What did they run on? Steam? But what heated the water to make the steam? Coal? His mind roamed pleasantly.

  He got back to Bonnie’s house around four o’clock. Sounds were coming from inside. Voices, and laughing. He went up the steps and rapped on the door. “Hullo?” he called. No one answered. Then a blast of noise came at him so hard he nearly fell backward. It was music, he realized after a second. He opened the door and groped forward through the firestorm of sound. He made it to the living room, where he saw Stu and Bonnie flinging their arms around and moving in little jerks. Dancing together! Looking like morons.

  He knocked on the door frame to get their attention. “Hey!” he yelled. They looked at him in surprise and stopped dancing. They turned off the music.

  “Hi,” said Bonnie. “Do you like Hairy Oatmeal?”

  Duff was hungry, but not that hungry. “No, thank you,” he said. “Why don’t we just order a pizza?”

  Stu and Bonnie broke into shrieks of laughter. “No, no, it’s the group, it’s their name, Hairy Oatmeal,” Bonnie cried. “They’re so great, don’t you think?”

  Duff felt a horrible blush heating up his face. “No,” he said. “I think they sound like dying roosters.”

  “Who do you like, then?” Bonnie was breathing fast from dancing. Her face was rosy, and one of her ponytails had slipped out of its rubber band.

  Duff was so mad and embarrassed that he said the first thing that came into his head. “Right now I like Hot Triple-Cheese Pizza, and I like Ice Cold Jumbo Coke, and I think Basket of Fries with Ketchup is pretty good, too.”

  “Hey, he does have a sense of humor,” said Stu. “Let’s order some dinner.”

  *

  The pizza came an hour later. Salad, too—Bonnie said people couldn’t live just on pizza and bagels, they had to have green things at least now and then. Stu paid for the food, and they ate it sitting on the living-room floor. It was an odd living room, Duff thought. It looked as if Bonnie’s mother had started to furnish it and then lost interest. In one corner was a huge shiny television and sound system, and in the opposite corner was a brown armchair of the kind that leans back and puts out a footrest when you pull a lever. There was a coffee table made of a chunk of wood and a sheet of glass. But other than those things, the room was more or less empty. Some limp cushions lay on the floor, two folding chairs, folded up, leaned against the wall, and a striped bedsheet hung over the window for a curtain. The room looked as if whoever lived here had not quite finished moving in, or else was about to move out.

  Stu told a long, involved story. It had to do with some friend of his who used to know the brother of the drummer in Hairy Oatmeal, and how this brother was a skateboard pro who traveled all over doing exhibitions, and how Stu himself had been to Baltimore and met either the brother or the drummer, Duff couldn’t tell which because he wasn’t really listening. He was watching Bonnie pluck at the long strings of cheese that looped from her pizza to her mouth, and he was trying to think of something he could talk about if Stu would ever shut up.

  “So,” Stu said, “I really got to know those guys. They said I could come and stay in th
eir penthouse anytime.” He took a bite of his pizza. Some tomato sauce dribbled down his chin, and he had to stop talking for a moment to wipe it off.

  Duff seized the opportunity. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been to Baltimore, too. I went there for this conference about games and entertainment and, you know, lifestyle stuff. Mostly I went to the part about games, because that’s my—that’s what I’m going to be doing. In my new job. But also they had this expo about twenty-first century electronics. Where they showed how things are going to be in the future.” He took a gulp of air and kept going. “Your house will have chips built in, so when you come home it’ll say hello to you, and turn on the lights for you, and make the air smell like whatever you want—like, you know, pine trees, or ocean or whatever you like. And robots will fix your dinner and clean the floors and play chess with you. Or you could, like, have a sword fight with a hologram opponent. And your wallpaper will turn different colors to match what mood you’re in. And you’ll even have chips implanted under your skin, so you’ll be able to download your thoughts right from your brain onto your computer.” He glanced at Bonnie to see if she was amazed. He couldn’t tell.

  “Nobody better put a computer chip under my skin,” said Stu. “They could track you, with one of those. They’d always be able to find you.”

  “Who would?” Bonnie said.

  “The authorities,” Stu said darkly.

  Bonnie sighed. She picked some crumbs off the floor and folded up the pizza box. “Well,” she said to Duff as she walked toward the kitchen, “hope you have fun doing all that.”

  *

  It was after seven o’clock. They’d decided to leave at eight-thirty, so Duff had a little time to kill. He checked his email again—nothing of interest—and then, just for fun, typed “car that runs on air” into his search engine. He found this: email

  A French engineer named Guy Negre has invented a car called the e.Volution that runs on air. Compressed air pumped into the vehicle’s tanks is slowly released to power pistons that drive the car. A fill-up at an “air station” takes three minutes, and a fully pumped e.Volution can travel about 120 miles for a mere 30 cents. The car’s only tailpipe emission is air.

  Incredibly cool, Duff thought. The more he read about it, the more interested he got. His mind ticked off the possibilities, and pretty soon he was fixing the entire world. No more oil lights on dashboards. No more thrown rods, or noxious fumes, or wars over oil-rich countries. No more oil-drenched birds. All the cars on the freeways puffing out clean air, changing the earth’s atmosphere. It really grabbed his imagination—so much so that he found the engineer’s email address and fired off a note to him:

  Dear Sir,

  The air car is totally brilliant. I wish I had one right now, as I am driving to California for my new programming job in a car that has serious emissions problems. If everyone had an air car instead of a gas car, what a different world.

  Yours truly,

  Duff Pringle

  He closed up his laptop. He was full of energy—excited by his interesting discovery, eager to get on the road again, and (he had to admit it) stirred up by little tinglings of attraction toward Bonnie. All this surged around inside him and made him feel as if the programs in his body were running too fast—the heart program, the lungs program, the brain program—and if he sat still with all that going on in him, his whole system would crash. If he’d been at home, he would have gotten on his bike and taken a long, fast ride. Instead he decided to take a quick run around the block, since he was going to have to sit still for the next several hours.

  He went out to the sidewalk and started running. He ran about the same speed as the traffic on the street, which was backed up because of a fender bender up ahead, and when he came to a corner he turned right, and at the next corner right again. He went around the whole block twice.

  He was breathing hard when he got back to the house. For a moment, he stood still by the steps. The front door was open, and so were the front windows, but he didn’t hear any sounds of movement inside the house. So he went up the driveway toward the backyard, where he saw Bonnie sitting on the grass by a big lilac bush. He could tell she hadn’t heard him coming. Her arms were wrapped around Moony, who was curled up on her lap, and her face was pressed against the thick brown fur on Moony’s back. Duff stopped. Something told him Bonnie might not want to talk right now. He was about to head quietly to the garage—but Moony, who must have heard his feet crunching on the gravel, burst into his machine-gun bark, and Bonnie jolted upright and looked straight at Duff.

  Her face was streaked with tears.

  Duff was instantly paralyzed. Crying! What did you say to someone who was crying? He had no idea. Should he just go away? Or would that seem unkind? Or was it unkind to stand there staring? He didn’t know. His legs had turned into concrete.

  Bonnie dumped Moony off her lap. She stood up and slapped the grass blades off the seat of her shorts. Then she glared at Duff. There were red splotches under her eyes. “What are you lookin’ at?” she said, and she stomped across the lawn, climbed the back steps, and went inside, slamming the door behind her.

  Chapter 9

  AN ALL-NIGHT DRIVE

  Duff was confused. Bonnie had been fine when he went out for his run. What could have upset her? Whatever it was, he’d probably made it worse by standing there gaping at her.

  In the garage, Stu was cramming his belongings into his backpack. When he saw Duff, he straightened up and grinned at him.

  “Hey, good news, man,” he said. “I found your wallet.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. Weirdest thing! It was in my backpack.”

  “What? How did it get there?”

  Stu shrugged. “I don’t know, but here’s my guess. One of those bikers snatched it off the counter while you were dancing. Grabbed what he wanted out of it and stuck it in my pack. I didn’t notice, because I was busy watching you.”

  A vision of himself dancing threatened to rise in Duff’s imagination, and he shut it out. “What got taken?” he said.

  “Just money. Everything else is there, looks like.”

  Duff took his wallet from Stu and sat down on the salmon-colored couch to examine it. What Stu said was true: his license was there, and his bank card, and his triple A card, and a few other things. All the money was gone except for forty-six cents. The biker who nabbed his wallet had gotten over three hundred dollars, which would probably be spent on chrome polish and beer. But Duff was so relieved to have his license and bank card back that he almost didn’t care.

  “I’m ready,” said Stu, slinging his pack over one shoulder. “Are you?”

  Duff put his wallet in his pocket. He snapped closed his laptop and zipped his duffel. “Let’s go.”

  They went out to the car, which was parked at the end of the driveway. Stu got in the driver’s seat and honked the horn. The door of the house opened, and Bonnie stepped out.

  She had a battered brown suitcase in one hand and her guitar case in the other. The setting sun shone in her face; she squinted her eyes against it. Duff wondered how she felt. Was she sad to be leaving her house? Or maybe angry at her mother for screwing up? He couldn’t tell.

  He opened the door on the passenger side of the car and then went over to Bonnie and took the suitcase, which he put in the trunk. Bonnie went back to the house and came out with a big plastic carrying case with a wire screen on one end. She set it down long enough to turn and lock the front door, and then she brought it to the car. “Moony has to ride in his crate,” she said. “Otherwise, he jumps all over the place. Sometimes he gets carsick, too, so it’s good if he isn’t in anyone’s lap when he does.”

  They got settled in the car. Bonnie sat in front. Duff sat in back next to Moony, who was turning round and round and pawing at an old ripped cushion Bonnie had provided for him. When he had his bedding properly arranged, he lay down, pressed his black nose against the wire mesh, and whimpered.

  “Okay,�
�� said Stu. “Three, two, one, zero—blast off!” He floored the accelerator, and with a squeal of tires they were away.

  Duff grabbed Moony’s case to keep it steady. “Where are we heading?” he asked.

  “Albuquerque, of course,” Stu said. “Home of Bonnie’s esteemed aunt Shirley.”

  “Yeah, but it’ll take a couple days to get to Albuquerque,” Duff said. “Where are we heading tonight?”

  “First stop, Oklahoma City,” Stu said. “We should be there by morning.”

  They drove. Stu and Duff took turns at the wheel. Whoever was in the passenger seat was supposed to make sure the driver didn’t fall asleep, and whoever was in the backseat slept. Bonnie got less sleep than the other two, but she didn’t seem to mind. When it was his turn to drive, Duff concentrated on the road, trying to keep his mind strictly blank, avoiding troubling questions such as: How long would it take to get from Albuquerque to San Jose? How was he going to get there without a car? How much did a plane ticket cost? He pushed all these thoughts aside and concentrated on the road.

  When it was his turn to sleep, he lay uncomfortably on the backseat with his legs draped over Moony’s crate, drifting in and out of an uneasy doze. It was a strange, dreamlike trip—the headlights approaching and passing like the eyes of big night animals, the hum of the motor, the long, rhythmic rumble of the wheels on the road. It was peaceful, in a way—no hard decisions to be made. Duff was almost sorry when light started to show around the edges of the sky.

  They came into Oklahoma City hungry for breakfast. Once off the freeway, they wandered up and down city streets until Duff spotted a bank with an ATM machine, where he replenished his supply of cash. Not far from the bank was a fast-food place. They pulled in and parked. Bonnie took Moony for a short walk around the parking lot and served him his breakfast in the car. Then the three of them went inside. They ordered their food and flopped down at a table by the window.