Car Trouble

by Jeanne DuPrau

  It was Stu, of course. Bonnie had found him right away, or he had found her. They came closer, growing from spots into people again, and when they came up to him, Duff said, trying but failing to keep the irritation out of his voice, “So how come it took you an hour and a half to buy cigarettes?”

  “Time got away from me.” Stu shook his head, smiling ruefully. “The fascinations of beautiful downtown Amarillo, man. I just kind of lost myself in ’em.”

  Should have lost yourself permanently, Duff thought.

  “And listen,” said Stu. “I got talking to a few locals, and it sounds to me like we should get off the freeways and take the scenic route to Albuquerque. There’s a lot of great stuff to see in this part of the country! We’d probably avoid a lot of traffic, too. And instead of staying here tonight, we ought to get out into the desert, find a campground, and sleep under the stars. Much better than some dump of a motel, and a lot cheaper. Doesn’t that sound terrific?”

  Duff and Bonnie answered simultaneously.

  “I don’t know,” said Duff.

  “I’d love to,” said Bonnie.

  “Great!” said Stu. “Let’s get going.”

  Chapter 11

  DUFF FALLS IN LOVE

  Stu drove. Once they got outside Amarillo, he drove at a furious speed, zooming along the highway much faster than you’d expect from someone who’d expressed an interest in scenery. Bonnie sat in front, and Duff sat in back next to Moony’s carrying case. A little way outside the city, they passed a famous attraction—the Stanley Marsh Cadillac Ranch, a line of ten Cadillacs stuck nose first in the ground, as if they’d crash-landed there from a drive through the sky. Stu didn’t want to stop and look at them. “It’s a total waste,” he said. “Those great old cars buried! Old Stanley must have been nuts.”

  After that, the scenery was flat and boring. Every now and then, Duff saw a ball of twigs rolling across the ground. A tumbleweed, he decided.

  Stu seemed to relax after a while. He slowed down, and he and Bonnie started joking around. “This is UFO territory,” said Stu. “They like these big, flat, empty places. Easier to land.”

  “I hope one lands near us,” said Bonnie. “I’ve always wanted to see an alien.”

  “That’s easy,” said Stu. “We’ve got one right in the backseat.”

  Bonnie turned around and grinned at Duff. “But he isn’t green,” she said.

  “No, but he’s definitely from another planet.”

  Duff’s bad mood intensified. He was going to have to get himself away from Stu. Stu seemed to bring out the worst in him. Around Stu, he was jealous, irritable, and defensive, and he felt both superior (in brain power) and inferior (in coolness). Also, something about Stu was very fishy, and Duff didn’t want to be associated with it, whatever it was. The trouble was, how could he get away from Stu without leaving Bonnie, too? In fact, how could he get away from Stu at all, since he had no car to get away in?

  At least, though, he could stop pretending that he thought Stu was just a nice innocent guy. He was going to have to get some truth out of Stu. Like why did he disappear like that back in Amarillo? Why was he suddenly so keen on taking the scenic route? For his own self-respect, he was going to have to ask these questions, though he disliked confrontations so much that even the thought of one threatened to bring on a headache.

  There was a sudden hoarse hacking sound: Kaaagh! Kaaagh! Kaaagh! Engine failure, was Duff’s first thought, but he quickly realized the sound was right next to him. Moony was standing up in his crate, his spine arching, his head stretched forward, his mouth gaping. Uh-oh, thought Duff. He scooched away, but not soon enough. The contents of Moony’s stomach shot through the wire mesh of the crate and landed half on the car seat and half on Duff’s leg.

  “Yeeuugh!” cried Duff.

  Bonnie whipped around. “Oh, Moony! Oh, poor thing. Stop, Stu.” Stu pulled over. Duff thought “poor thing” should really apply to him as much as Moony, but he helped Bonnie clean up the mess. Stu just sat, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Moony should ride in the front for a while,” Bonnie said. “Being in the backseat might be making him carsick.” So they put Moony’s case on the front seat and Bonnie climbed in the back next to Duff. “Of course, it might also be that deviled egg he ate,” she said.

  “Then put him in the back again,” said Stu, “and you sit up here.”

  “That’s all right,” Bonnie said. “He deserves to ride in the front for a while. He hasn’t had a turn this whole way.”

  Sitting next to Bonnie turned out to be a little disturbing for Duff. Sometimes when the car took a sharp turn her arm pressed for a moment against his arm. Since he had on a short-sleeved T-shirt and she had on a tank top, it was actually skin pressing against skin. Bonnie didn’t seem to notice this at all, but Duff found himself wishing this road through the desert had turns at more frequent intervals.

  Duff didn’t notice any campgrounds along the road. He didn’t see much of anything, in fact, except dry earth and a few scrubby bushes. They’d been driving for over an hour, and it was nearly dark. Where were they going to sleep? Cramped into the car? Stretched out on the ground?

  He could see that Bonnie was getting worried, too. “There’s nothing out here,” she said. “I’m starving. Where are we going to eat?”

  “Don’t worry,” Stu said. But he didn’t offer any solutions.

  More miles went by. More stretches of desert, more twiggy bushes, a few leaning-over wire fences. Not only were there no restaurants or towns or campgrounds out here, there were hardly any cars. They hadn’t seen even one for at least half an hour. “Hey,” said Stu, “if we don’t see a good place to stop, we’ll just drive all night.” But his voice lacked the usual jauntiness.

  More miles, more desert. Darkness everywhere. And then, in the beam of the headlights, a sign at the side of the road. Stu slowed down. It was a handmade sign, a board about two feet long standing on two poles, with these words painted in artistic yellow letters outlined in orange: SUNLIGHT VILLAGE, 1/2 MILE. Beneath the words was an arrow pointing up a dirt road that led off to the right.

  “Aha!” cried Stu. “Problem solved.”

  Well, maybe, thought Duff. But he was relieved. Whatever Sunlight Village was, it couldn’t be worse than sleeping in the car. Or driving all night.

  The road was awful—deep ruts on either side of a weedy hump down the middle. Stu drove it so fast that Duff and Bonnie bounced around in the back-seat like marbles in a can, and Moony’s crate banged against the dashboard. But in five minutes, they were arriving in Sunlight Village.

  It was a collection of small mudbrick houses, with paths winding among them. Light glowed from their windows. Various ancient vehicles stood here and there. They drove until they came to a kind of plaza more or less in the center of the village. On a plot of straggly grass stood several large rectangular panels of glass, each about the height of a person, propped up at an angle, like big flat faces gazing at the sky.

  “Is that art?” said Stu.

  “I don’t know,” said Duff.

  Two people were walking toward them through the warm night—a big man with a black mustache and beard, and a floaty-haired woman in a long green sundress and sandals. A black Lab, its feet brown with dust, trotted along after them.

  “Greetings,” said the man, stooping down to speak to Stu through the car window. His face, what you could see of it behind the hair, was friendly. “What can I do for you?”

  They all got out of the car, and Stu turned on the charm. He introduced the three of them. They were sort of lost, he said, on their way west, had been hoping to find a campground, but… He smiled and shrugged and looked hopefully at the bearded man.

  “You’re welcome here,” the man said. “We’re always happy to take in travelers. I’m Jasper. This is Star.”

  “So what is this place?” Bonnie asked him. She took Moony’s case out of the car and set it on the ground. Moony and the black L
ab sniffed at each other through the wire mesh. “Sort of a commune?”

  “A community,” said Star. Duff noticed that she wore star-shaped earrings and a blue and gold star on a chain around her neck. Probably her real name was Barbara or Jane or something. “Jasper and I and a few others founded it fourteen years ago. We wanted to leave behind the false promise of material possessions and live simply in harmony with the Earth.”

  “Oh,” said Duff.

  “Very fine,” said Stu. “Way to go.”

  “What are these things?” asked Bonnie, pointing to the glass panels standing on the lawn. “Are they meant to be, like, spiritual?”

  “No,” said Jasper. “They’re photovoltaic panels. The sun shines on them and turns into electricity. That’s our power plant.”

  Duff stared at the glass rectangles. He’d heard of getting electricity from the sun, but he’d never seen it in action. Did these panels—there were eight of them—run the whole village? What happened on cloudy days? What happened at night? He was about to ask these questions, but Star was leading them on toward a large building with a covered walkway across the front, where some dusty-footed children were playing with a cat. “This is our meeting hall,” said Star. “It’s our dining room, too. Down at that end is our guest room. You boys can put your stuff in there. Bonnie, you and your puppy come with me. I have a spare bed at my house. We’ve had our dinner already, but I’ll bring out the leftovers for you.”

  The guest room was next to the kitchen, at the far end of the meeting hall. There were four beds in it, and between the beds were bamboo screens that stood about six feet high, so you could make yourself a little private space. Duff and Stu chose beds at opposite ends of the room. There appeared to be no other guests.

  At dinner they sat in a big room full of long tables, where the residents of Sunlight Village were talking and laughing over their after-dinner tea. Star brought out dishes of unfamiliar foods accompanied by brown rice. There was a reddish stew that seemed to be made of peppers, a greenish gravy over pale spongy lumps, and a bowl of something smooth and orangish that might have been pumpkin or sweet potatoes. Duff ate a lot of everything—whatever it was, it tasted good—and he noticed that Stu and Bonnie did, too. “Better eat up while you can,” Bonnie said. “My aunt Shirley basically lives on cottage cheese.” She reached for another hunk of butter-soaked cornbread.

  This brought back to Duff’s mind the whole purpose of his journey, which was starting to slip his mind. “How long does it take to drive from Albuquerque to Los Angeles?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bonnie said. “Probably a long time.”

  Duff ran through his schedule calculation again. Today was Friday, June 28. He’d get to Albuquerque tomorrow, Saturday, the twenty-ninth. But how was he going to get from there to San Jose by Monday morning? By car—even if he had a car—there just wasn’t enough time. He was going to have to take a plane after all. How much would a one-way plane ticket cost? Did he have enough left in his account? He didn’t know. Even if he did, he’d arrive in San Jose pretty much penniless.

  All around them, the residents of Sunlight Village were having lively conversations. Star was talking about the vegetable garden, where the fourteen zucchini plants were coming along well. “I’ve found so many great recipes for them,” she said. “This year we’ll have zucchini bread, zucchini soup, zucchini pudding, and stuffed zucchini. And let’s see, zucchini leather, curried zucchini, sweet-and-sour zucchini, zucchini chutney…” Someone else was going on about a jammed-up tractor engine, and down at the end of the table, Duff heard bits of a conversation about beetles in the potato patch. But what he wanted to know about were those big glass panels.

  When he’d eaten as much as he could, he excused himself and went out to look at them again. There was just enough light in the starry sky to glimmer on the polished surface of the panels. He could see that silver wires ran beneath the glass, making an elegant crisscross pattern. The panels didn’t hum or buzz—they were perfectly silent. It was beautiful, he thought—the vast bowl of the desert sky overhead, strewn with stars, and down here the windows glowing with soft yellow lamplight, produced by sunbeams that had fallen on these panels during the day.

  It was so beautiful, in fact, and so ingenious, that Duff fell in love with the whole idea. He knew about solar power, of course; a few people in his neighborhood back home had panels on their roofs. He’d just never given it much thought. Now it seemed to him that solar panels should be running everything—office buildings, cities…could you run a car on solar power? What about an airplane? Maybe—

  “Hey!” called a voice. “Duffer! Get in here!” It was Stu, beckoning from the doorway of the meeting hall. “Bonnie’s going to sing,” he said. “Hurry up.”

  Duff hurried. Inside, people had gathered down at one end of the room, where Bonnie was taking her guitar out of its case. She plugged its cord into an outlet in the wall (a sun-powered electric guitar, Duff thought) and perched on the edge of a table.

  Duff was standing next to Star, who said, “I adore music. Every morning, I sing my song to the sunrise. It’s an ancient Pawnee chant.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Duff, though he wasn’t really listening. He was too busy watching Bonnie, who looked quite different tonight. Her hair wasn’t in a ponytail or pigtails. It fell straight down beside her face, covering her ears, curving forward at the ends. Her guitar was the flat shiny kind with a sort of horn at the top. She plucked a string, and a bright twangy note flew out. She twisted a key, plucked again. Was she nervous? She didn’t look it. She almost looked unaware of all the people watching her.

  She bent her head, and her hair fell across her face. Then she looked up and flashed a smile at her audience. “I’ll sing you this one I wrote myself,” she said. “It’s called ‘Lost Dog.’”

  She looked up at the ceiling for a second, as if maybe the words were printed there—and then her fingers ripped across the guitar strings, her head jerked back, her eyes closed, and out of her mouth came the strongest, wildest, most heart-wrenching voice Duff had ever heard.

  Duff was thunderstruck. Some door he hadn’t known existed opened up right in his deep middle, and Bonnie’s voice blasted through it, scorching everything that was in there. For the second time within ten minutes, Duff fell in love. How could he be all shaken up by a girl wailing about a lost dog? But he was. He was.

  Chapter 12

  STRANDED

  Duff couldn’t sleep that night. He lay on the guest room bed, listening to Stu’s boring breathing, wishing he knew how to make Stu disappear. He wasn’t surprised that Bonnie liked Stu better than him. Stu was cool. Duff was not so cool. Stu had an easy way of talking and joking; Duff did not. But he was smarter than Stu, wasn’t he? And he was a good person. Why wouldn’t a girl go for a good person, instead of someone shifty like Stu, who was probably a runaway and maybe something worse?

  Duff wanted a chance to prove how smart and good he was. If he could just show it to her somehow, maybe she would take notice of him. Scenes arose in his mind in which he did wonderful things while Bonnie happened to be watching. The trouble with these scenes was that the wonderful thing he did was always very vague. In the scene, he had just done it, whatever it was, and Bonnie was full of wonder and admiration, and she was saying how she’d never understood before what an amazing person he was, and he was saying it was really not much, and she was putting a hand on his arm and looking up at him and…

  When he wasn’t thinking about Bonnie, he was thinking about Stu. Now that it was night, when everything seems more fraught with peril than in the daytime, getting the truth out of Stu felt dangerous. What if Stu was one of those people who seemed normal most of the time, but when threatened went into a psychotic frenzy and attacked? Or what if Stu was completely innocent after all, and Duff ended up feeling like an idiot for accusing him?

  All this interpersonal stuff was so horribly hard. He had no built-in program for it, the way other people seemed t
o. All he could do was blunder through it and hope not to look like too much of a fool.

  In the morning, having slept a total of what felt like fourteen minutes, Duff got up as quietly as he could, dressed, and went outside. Star was standing on the east side of the courtyard with both hands lifted above her head, singing something in a high, tremulous voice—her Pawnee chant, Duff guessed. The first rays of the sun were hitting the glass panels, and now Duff could see that they were a beautiful deep blue. Jasper was tinkering with something in back of one of them. Duff went over to him.

  “How do these things work?” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know the technical details,” said Jasper. “But in some way the panels take the energy of sunlight and convert it into electricity, and then the electricity runs down this wire”—he pointed to a wire that ran from the foot of the panel into the ground—“to the batteries that are in that shed over there. The batteries store the electricity, so we have power not just in the daytime, but some at night, too, and on cloudy days.”

  “I like it,” said Duff.

  “Yep, we like it, too.”

  “So why aren’t there more of these around?

  Jasper shook his head. “This technology’s not ready to take over the world yet. To power a city, you’d have to have acres and acres of these. Thousands of ’em.”

  “Could you run a car on them?”

  “It’s been done. The trouble is, the batteries are so heavy. Someone’s got to make a big technological leap before we can get power really efficiently from the sun.” He went back to his task, tightening a screw on the stand that held the panel. “Where are you heading today?”