Car Trouble

by Jeanne DuPrau

  A second later, the black car roared up behind theirs and halted. The doors opened. Rolf and Burl got out.

  “Now you listen to me!” yelled Burl, striding up to them. He was breathing hard. He pointed a finger (not a gun, Duff saw with relief) straight at Duff’s face. “You punks took something that didn’t belong to you and we’ve come to get it.”

  “I’m not going back!” Bonnie shouted. She grabbed onto Duff’s arm on one side and Stu’s on the other. “You can’t make me! I’ll turn you in for kidnapping!”

  Burl blinked at her. “Not you,” he said. “We’re not after you.”

  “You’re not?” Duff felt Bonnie’s grip loosen. “Then what? Then what the heck have you been chasing us for?”

  “You know,” said Rolf. He glared at Stu.

  “We do not!” said Stu in a voice of such wounded innocence that Duff forgot for a second that he was lying. “You chase us all over the freeway, you scare the crap out of us, and we have no idea what’s going on!”

  Rolf and Burl both stared at him. Duff could almost hear their minds grinding slowly, trying to decide what to do next. Finally Burl said, “Nice try, kid. You won’t give it to us, we’ll find it ourselves. Empty your pockets, all of you.”

  Well, all right, thought Duff. Change of plan. Money goes back to crime land instead of to Bonnie. Nothing I can do about it now.

  “Fine!” said Stu furiously. “Fine, search anywhere you want! Whatever you’re looking for, you won’t find it.”

  Duff almost had to admire his bold defiance. He must know that his stash of cash was about to be discovered.

  “I don’t get this!” cried Bonnie. “What right do you have to—”

  “Just do it!” said Rolf. His voice was high and shrill, like a knife slicing the air.

  So they all turned their pockets inside out. Nickels and pennies, lint-covered cough drops, some key chains, a jackknife, a couple of barrettes, and a bunch of other small stuff fell to the cracked asphalt. Rolf and Burl thumbed through their wallets, patted them down, and found nothing of interest. They moved on to the car. “Open the trunk,” said Rolf.

  Here we go, Duff thought. He opened the trunk, where their backpacks were stowed. Rolf started tossing things out of the trunk, unzipping packs, rifling through them, flinging T-shirts and underwear onto the ground. He looked in Bonnie’s guitar case and her purse. Burl got in the front seat and rummaged through the glove compartment, scattering maps. He looked under the floor mats and under the seats. He pushed his hand down between the cushions. Finding nothing, he moved on to the backseat.

  “Get this dog out of here,” he said. “It stinks.”

  “Oh, Moony!” Bonnie ran to the car and hauled out his case. “How could I forget you?”

  “Check the dog’s crate,” said Rolf.

  Burl opened the crate door and pulled Moony out with one hand and the cushion with the other. “There’s barf on everything!” he said. He felt around in the crate, shoved Moony and his soggy cushion back in, and then, making gagging noises, grabbed one of the T-shirts on the ground to wipe his hand.

  Duff watched with growing amazement as Rolf and Burl just about took the car apart—pried off the hubcaps, wrenched the interior panels off the doors, unscrewed the headlights, even looked in the engine. Any minute, he expected one of them to come up with a thick packet of bills, wave it in their faces, and speed away. But the only halfway interesting thing they found was an old crumpled sheet of paper on which was typed “Scarlet Desires, by LaDonna Wildmoor.”

  What did Stu do with that money, Duff wondered, swallow it?

  “See? See?” Bonnie said. “There’s nothing!”

  “Now, look.” Rolf aimed an evil look at her. “There was a real valuable item in that Chevy when it left St. Louis, and last night it wasn’t there. How do you explain that?”

  A perfect answer to this question flashed into Duff’s mind. “It’s obvious,” he said. “Someone at that gas station found it. Whatever it was,” he added.

  “Absolutely right!” Stu chimed in. “That’s gotta be it. And you’ve just driven a hundred miles and freaked out some innocent young people for nothing.”

  Rolf and Burl looked at each other. A spark of doubt passed between them.

  Bonnie took advantage of it. “Is my mother ever going to be mad at you,” she said, “when I tell her you almost killed us.”

  Burl wavered…. Duff could see uncertainty in his eyes. But then he pressed his mouth into a tight grim line. “Take your shoes off,” he said.

  “Our shoes!” Bonnie yelled. “That is too much! I can’t believe—”

  But both Burl and Rolf came at them in such a menacing way, as if about to rip their feet off, that they all bent over, undid their laces, kicked away their shoes, and peeled off their socks. “Check ’em,” ordered Burl.

  Rolf peered into all the shoes. He turned all the socks inside out. Nothing was there but lint.

  This was apparently the last straw. Rolf did some creative swearing, and Burl turned on him with a furious look. “Shut up,” he said. “You’re driving this time.”

  Without another word, they turned around and got back in their little black car. Rolf started the engine and stepped hard on the gas. The tires spun on the asphalt, throwing up scraps of weed, and the car took off down the bumpy road and headed for the highway.

  As soon as it disappeared, Duff and Bonnie and Stu all shrieked and whooped and (as soon as they’d put their shoes back on) jumped around, joyful for their different reasons. Stu picked up rocks and threw them in the air, Bonnie let Moony out of his case, held him by his icky front paws, and danced with him, and Duff ran three times around the abandoned restaurant to get the tension out of his muscles.

  Then they picked their stuff up off the ground and put it back in the trunk. Stu replaced the hubcaps Rolf and Burl had pried off, and he put back the inside panels of the doors as well as possible, given that they were kind of torn up. In just over half an hour, they were on their way again.

  Stu drove. He put the window down and hot wind rushed in. “WOOHOO!” he shouted. “Good guys win, bad guys lose!”

  Duff sneaked a sideways glance at him. Without turning his head, Stu grinned. It was a gloating grin, the grin of a person who clearly considered himself not just a good guy, but a really smart good guy.

  “I still don’t understand what they were looking for,” said Bonnie from the backseat, where she was wiping off Moony’s paws with a rag she’d found in the trunk. “It wouldn’t be drugs. My mom isn’t into drugs at all. I don’t think she is, anyway.”

  “Maybe she is,” said Stu. “Yeah. That must be it. That would explain the whole thing.”

  Chapter 17

  TRUCK STOP

  They drove along merrily past endless vistas of scrub brush, tumbleweed, and flat-topped mountains. Stu was in such high spirits that he started singing without even turning the radio on, and he and Bonnie sang loud, out-of-tune versions of one song after another, Bonnie doing the high parts and Stu making twangy, strummy noises to imitate the guitar parts. Duff looked out the window at the scenery. Now that they were headed for California and would (barring any further disasters) actually be in California sometime that night, he had to face the great blank abyss of his future. He tried to picture something that would fill up that blank, but nothing came to him. His mind was as empty as the landscape.

  They had crossed the border into Arizona. The country became more dramatic. Ridges of reddish rock slanted up out of the ground. Pine trees started to appear on hills.

  Stu and Bonnie had stopped singing now. Everyone was quiet. They’d been up since six o’clock and had been through a lot since then. They were tired. They passed a sign on the highway for something called Petrified Forest National Park, and Stu said halfheartedly, “We ought to go see that,” but no one answered and he didn’t turn.

  After a while, Stu said, “Anybody hungry?” It was just after one o’clock by then.

  “S
tarving,” said Bonnie.

  “Me, too,” said Duff.

  “I saw a sign for a truck stop café,” Stu said.

  “That’s where the best food always is, at truck stops. Want to try it?”

  They did want to, and so a few miles farther on, Stu took an exit off the highway and drove up to a little restaurant with about a hundred huge trucks in the parking lot, many of them with their motors rumbling and their exhaust pipes puffing and gasping. They were like a herd of enormous animals at a watering hole.

  “Perfect,” said Stu. He parked the car. “I’m gonna change into a better shirt. This one’s all sweaty from our little episode of terror.”

  Bonnie took Moony out of his crate and put his leash on. “I’ll walk him around a little bit,” she said. “Poor baby.”

  Stu got his backpack out of the trunk. He tossed the car keys to Duff and said he’d take the barf-stained cushion with him to the men’s room and clean it off. Duff walked with Bonnie and Moony around the edge of the parking lot, where Moony lunged eagerly at sandwich crusts and bits of french fries and peed on various rocks and bushes and truck tires.

  Inside, the restaurant was crowded with truckers and also with tourists—dads studying maps, moms mopping up spilled drinks, kids yelling and wailing and dropping food on the floor. The restaurant was plain but pleasant, with big windows, and booths with red plaid seats. It smelled like a weird mixture of hamburgers and air freshener. Bonnie and Duff got one of the few empty tables, and the waitress gave them menus. Just the sight of all the different things on the menu made Duff feel suddenly almost faint with hunger. No wonder, he thought, remembering how small and pale his last two meals at Aunt Shirley’s had been.

  “Trucker’s Delight,” Bonnie read. “That sounds good.”

  “Or what about the Long-Haul Burrito?” said Duff, scanning the choices. “Or the Tanker Sandwich?”

  “Yeah,” said Bonnie, laughing. “Real food!”

  “I don’t know how your aunt Shirley survives on what she eats,” Duff said.

  “I don’t, either. She wants to keep herself all small and neat and perfect. Her whole life is small and neat and perfect.” Bonnie’s smile faded. She put her menu down and frowned at it. “She’s so different from my mom. I think my mom has a much better imagination than Aunt Shirley. She ought to be the writer. She’d probably be a better writer than a con artist.”

  It seemed risky to say anything about Bonnie’s mother, seeing how Bonnie had reacted to Duff’s clumsy attempts at sympathy before. So he said nothing. He looked out the window, where a couple of trucks were heading out of the parking lot, groaning and puffing.

  Bonnie didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then, in a husky voice, she said, “I’m sorry for snapping at you the other day in the park. I can’t stand it when people are nice to me about my mom, because it makes me want to cry, and I hate crying. I hate for anyone to see me crying. Like that day in the backyard.”

  “Well, yeah, I sort of figured that out,” Duff said. “That you’ve had a rough time, having your mom be…gone so much.”

  “I hate it. You just can’t imagine how much I hate it.”

  “I bet I can,” Duff said.

  “No, you can’t, not unless you’ve spent a million hours by yourself waiting for her to come home when she said she would. Or moved constantly from one crummy place to another to keep ahead of the law, so you just get to know people at your school and then you have to leave. My whole life, my mother’s had these stupid schemes that she says are going to make us rich. She’s wanted all over the place.” Bonnie turned to look out the window. “Unlike me,” she said.

  “Unlike you?”

  “I mean, I don’t feel exactly wanted anywhere.” Bonnie picked up her paper napkin and looked down at her lap as she unfolded it.

  “Oh,” said Duff. Once again, he had no words. But he had a feeling, a strong one: it was an ache of sympathy, a pain somewhere around his heart. Without thinking, he reached out and laid his hand on Bonnie’s arm, just for a second or two. She looked up and their eyes met. A slim invisible arrow shot through Duff’s chest. Then Bonnie smiled and picked up her glass of ice water. She took a drink, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and thumped the glass back down.

  “But now,” she said, “things are going to be different. This time I’m not going back. I bet Amelia will have me, and if she won’t, I’ll…I’ll…I’ll do something else.”

  The waitress arrived with her little pad of paper. “Ready to order?” she said.

  And only then did Duff realize that Stu had been in the men’s room a very long time, even for someone who was washing off a stained dog cushion.

  Bonnie must have realized it, too. “Where’s Stu?” she said, looking around.

  “I don’t know,” said Duff. “Maybe I should go look for him. You order some food—I’ll eat anything.”

  He made his way among the crowded tables to the back of the restaurant, where a hallway led to the restrooms. He pushed open the men’s room door. An elderly man was in there, combing his hair. No one else. On the floor beneath the sink was Moony’s cushion, not washed. As soon as Duff saw it, he knew: Stu had split. While he and Bonnie had been talking, Stu had been out in the parking lot catching himself a ride with one of those truckers.

  Duff felt strangely calm. He walked out to the parking lot, just in case, by some miracle, Stu was back at the car doing something innocent. But Stu was nowhere to be seen. So Duff returned to the men’s room and picked up Moony’s cushion. With a wet paper towel, he scrubbed off the worst of the barf. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? he asked himself. They’d all been feeling so happy to have escaped Rolf and Burl, and Stu was being friendly and cheerful and offering to help with cleanup and everything—Duff just forgot for a moment about being suspicious. He could have been mad at himself for this, but it seemed useless. Sooner or later, Stu would have found a way to take off.

  Duff put the cushion back in the car with Moony and went back into the restaurant. It was time to tell Bonnie everything, he decided. He plodded over to the table, where Bonnie was sipping on a soda. “Stuff has happened,” he said, sitting down.

  Chapter 18

  THE WEIRDNESS OF STU

  Luckily, they still had the car. Stu could have taken off in it, along with Moony and all their belongings, but he hadn’t. That was nice of him. It was typical: as he’d said, he wasn’t into crime in a big way, just a small way. He’d lie and steal and betray people and weasel out of things, but he wasn’t really mean.

  So Bonnie and Duff, when they’d finished their lunch, which took a long time because there was so much to talk about, went back out to the car to start on the last lap of the trip. Bonnie brought a big paper cup of water from the restaurant and got Moony as clean as she could. She put him and his pillow back in the crate, and she settled herself in front next to Duff.

  It was 2:30. If Duff could hold up as the sole driver, they had a chance of making it to Los Angeles by midnight. The bad thing about this was that it seemed impossible. Duff was already pretty tired, and he could feel a headache waiting to attack him just at the thought of the five hundred miles ahead. The good thing was that it gave him nine hours or so to be with Bonnie, with no Stu to distract her with his flaky promises. Duff’s nervousness about talking to her had gone away. Or maybe not exactly gone away but amped up into a kind of excitement that was more thrilling than disabling. It had started when he touched her arm and that one serious look flashed between them, and then it grew as he told her about Stu and why he disappeared in Amarillo and where the money to buy Shirley’s Toyota had come from and the deal Duff made with him in Albuquerque—and Bonnie, instead of calling him an idiot for being taken in, said she thought he’d done the right thing, or at least tried hard to, and she admired him for it. She wasn’t very sympathetic about his lost job, though. “That wasn’t the right job for you, anyway,” she said.

  Now, in the car, he felt as if his blood were spee
ding through his veins. Not only speeding, but had an added ingredient, something fizzy like soda water. His whole body fizzed and hummed. His eyes felt more open, he could feel the roots of his hair tingling. All the right side of him, the side next to Bonnie, was electrically charged. Was this happiness? Was it maybe even love? Maybe it would keep him going during the long hours of driving that lay ahead.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Bonnie, as they sped west out of Flagstaff, “is where he put the money. Do you think he just left it at Shirley’s?”

  “No,” said Duff. “I could tell from the way he looked at me after we got free of Rolf and Burl that he was pleased with himself for outsmarting them. He had that money, but he hid it somewhere they missed.”

  “Maybe it’s still in the car,” said Bonnie, “and he went off without it and left it for us to find.”

  “I think not,” said Duff.

  “I think not, too,” said Bonnie.

  They drove along looking out the window for a few minutes. Duff thought it was too bad he was missing all the sights he’d intended to see. Just up north of them was the Grand Canyon, which he’d been looking forward to. He’d have to take another trip some time in the future, a more leisurely one.

  After a while, he said, “So tell me about your aunt Amelia.”

  “She’s great. She’s an actress.”

  “Really? Is she famous?”

  “Not especially. She does TV ads mostly. She lives by the beach. She has a bulldog named Ernie—Moony will love him. And she’s the only sister who hasn’t been divorced even once.”

  “Pretty good. What’s her husband’s name?”

  “Linda. It’s a she.”

  Duff’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh,” he said. “Hey. That’s, um…wow. I’ve never met any gay people.”