Car Trouble

by Jeanne DuPrau

  Duff reached into his pocket. He slid his fingers around but could not locate his wallet. He reached into his other pocket. No wallet there, either. This couldn’t be true. He tried his back pockets. He jammed his hand down into the space between the seat and the seat back. He bent over and felt the floor by his feet.

  “What’s the problem?” said Stu.

  “My wallet is gone.” Duff’s whole body slumped, as if his bones had turned to rubber. “I must have left it in that restaurant.”

  “Oh, no, man, that’s awful. We’ll stop and call them.”

  “No,” said Duff, in a voice heavy with gloom. “It won’t be there. It’ll be in some biker’s pocket by now. It’ll be speeding down the road on a motorcycle.”

  “Not necessarily,” Stu said. “You could have just left it on the counter or something. They can find it and send it to you.”

  “Send it where?” said Duff. “I don’t know where I’m going to be.”

  “Hmm.” Stu pondered, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “I guess we better turn around and go back for it.”

  “No,” said Duff. “We’re late delivering this car already. Anyway, it would be useless.” Duff turned his face to the window. He felt as dark as the night sky. He knew he would never see his wallet again.

  Chapter 7

  THE CRIMINAL’S DEN

  Stu paid the bridge toll, and they crossed the river and drove through the streets of the city. In the light from the streetlamps, Duff saw crumbling brick buildings and warehouses, but he wasn’t interested in the scenery anymore. “How am I going to get money with no bank card?” he said. “And how am I going to keep going with no driver’s license?”

  “Keep going?” Stu said. “I thought St. Louis was your final destination.”

  “No,” Duff said. “This is just where I drop off the car. I have to get to California—San Jose.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Stu said. “You didn’t want to tell me you were heading for California, too, in case you didn’t want to take me the whole way.”

  Duff didn’t answer.

  “No problem,” said Stu. “I understand. You probably couldn’t tell, just from meeting me once, what a delightful traveling companion I would be.”

  “Right,” said Duff glumly. He couldn’t help it if he was hurting Stu’s feelings. It wasn’t Stu’s fault he’d been robbed, but his loathing of the bikers was so huge that it spread out like a black cloud, and some of it got on Stu.

  “So why California?” Stu said.

  “I have a job there. Silicon Valley. I’m going to be a programmer at a software company. They recruited me, sight unseen.”

  “A programmer,” Stu said. “You mean where you go to an office and sit at a computer all day?”

  “Correct,” said Duff.

  “Weird,” Stu said. “You never know what people are going to like.”

  Duff reached up and turned on the overhead light. He read the directions written down by Carl, and Stu followed them, turning left and right through a maze of dark streets.

  Finally, on a wide, busy avenue, they pulled up in front of a shabby brick house with a square of dead lawn in front. “This is it,” Duff said. “Thirty-six seventy-five Waldo Avenue. We’re later than I thought we’d be. I hope someone’s still up.”

  It didn’t look promising. The windows of the house were all dark. They went up the path, and Duff rang the doorbell. There was a burst of furious barking, and the door shook in its frame. After a few seconds, the porch light went on.

  A voice called, “Who is it?”

  “Duff Pringle, delivering the car,” said Duff.

  “Who?” The voice seemed disconcerted. “Wait a second.”

  They waited. In a minute, the door opened. Behind it was a girl wearing a big white T-shirt and skinny green pants. She was bent over sideways, holding on to the collar of a small, hairy, pointy-eared brown dog barking like a machine gun, wow-wow-wow-wow, and trying to lunge toward Duff’s kneecaps. The girl had a round face, but there was a squareness to her jaw that made her look stubborn, or hard, or maybe angry. She appeared to be about sixteen. She stared at them, and then she stared past them at the car parked by the curb.

  “Oh,” she said. “My mom’s car.”

  A seizure of shyness had come over Duff at the sight of this girl, but he managed to speak in a nearly normal voice. “Correct,” he said.

  “I thought Carl was bringing it,” said the girl.

  “He was too busy,” said Duff.

  “Doing what? He never does anything.”

  “There was going to be a party,” Duff said. “He had a girl with him, named Angie.”

  “My mother better never hear about that,” the girl said. “She’d kill him.”

  The dog made a desperate yelp and pulled against the girl’s grasp. Its little toenails scrabbled on the floor.

  “Shut up, Moony,” said the girl. She picked it up with one arm and held it against her hip.

  Stu said, “Your mother owes us—I mean him—fifty dollars.”

  “Well, she’s not here,” said the girl. “She’s in the hospital. In Virginia. That’s why she asked my grungy cousin to bring back the car.”

  “Oh,” said Duff. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I don’t know where I’m supposed to get fifty dollars,” she said.

  For a minute or so, they all stood staring at one another. The girl looked frazzled, Duff thought. There were dirty paw smudges on her white T-shirt, and her blondish hair was in a style you might call get-out-of-my-face: some of it was yanked up on top of her head and bound with a fuzzy green rubber band, and the rest was stuck behind her ears.

  She was frowning at them. They were probably the last straw for her in a day full of bad surprises.

  Finally Duff said, “I guess we should take our stuff out of the car.” He was seriously peeved about not getting his fifty dollars—especially since he now had zero dollars in his pocket.

  “Okay,” said the girl.

  Nobody moved. Out on the street, someone honked a car horn, and brakes squealed.

  The girl shifted the dog to her other hip. “So are you going?” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Stu.

  “Where?” said the girl.

  Duff and Stu looked at each other. “I don’t know,” they said, both at once.

  “Well, you can’t stay here,” said the girl, “because I don’t know you from a hole in the wall.”

  “Oh, well, no,” Duff said, “I mean, of course you couldn’t…we couldn’t…”

  Stu pushed past Duff and held out his hand. “I’m Stu Sturvich,” he said. “Traveling companion of Duff Pringle, here. He’s on his way to California to become a slave in Silicon Valley.”

  “A slave?” said the girl, giving Duff a curious look.

  “That’s right,” said Stu, before Duff could protest. “He’s planning to crouch over a computer screen for the rest of his life, chained by the ankle to his desk, with his skin turning green from computer radiation and his fingers stiffening into claws and his legs dropping off from lack of use.”

  “Oh,” said the girl. “That sounds fun.”

  “This is not true,” said Duff. “Totally false. I have a good job at a software company.” It didn’t sound glamorous, he had to admit. “A really hot company,” he added.

  “Oh,” said the girl. Then she said, “I’m Bonnie. And this is Moony. He’s a good dog, but strangers get him upset.”

  Stu swept on. “I myself am going out west to ride the waves,” he said. “I am looking for the perfect curl. California is our goal, but tonight we find ourselves temporarily without transportation. Or shelter.”

  “But if there’s a campground or something nearby…,” said Duff “Or a motel… Maybe you could take us there”—he gestured toward the car—“and drop us off?”

  “Or,” said Stu, “maybe we could just stretch out under a bush in your nice backyard. We are harmless guys. Really. Tired, harmless guys wh
o aren’t getting their fifty dollars.”

  Bonnie regarded them, narrowing her eyes and crimping one corner of her mouth. Duff noticed, as he waited for her to say something, that she had a little gold star in one ear and a star and a moon in the other. She was a cute girl, he thought, though of course not his type, though actually he didn’t really have a type, since the two girls he’d liked so far had been utterly different from each other, so how would he know if this girl was his type or wasn’t?

  “How about this,” said Bonnie. “My mom converted the garage into sort of a workshop. You could stay there tonight. There’s a couch, but one of you would have to sleep on the floor. But it’s better than sleeping under a bush.”

  “Oh,” said Duff, “that’s really—that’s—I guess—”

  “Great!” said Stu. He grabbed Duff’s arm and yanked him backward down the steps. “We’ll get our stuff from the car.”

  * * *

  Rosalie Hopgood’s workshop still looked quite a bit like a garage. The floor was concrete, pipes and wires snaked along the walls, and some cobwebby cardboard cartons were stacked in a corner. The workshop part occupied another corner, where a turquoise rug had been laid over the concrete. At one edge of the rug was a couch covered in faded salmon-colored velvet, and at another edge was a desk made of a door and two file cabinets. On the desk was a computer, a fairly new one. Rosalie Hopgood must be in business of some kind.

  Bonnie, who had left Moony in the house, sat down on the couch and folded her legs underneath her. “This is where my mom does her projects,” she said.

  “What sort of projects?” asked Stu.

  “Oh…kind of…creative projects,” said Bonnie.

  “Writing?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Wow, that’s great,” said Stu. “Is she famous?”

  Bonnie laughed. There was a note of bitterness in her laugh, Duff thought. “Right now,” Bonnie said, “she’s a little more famous than she wants to be.”

  Stu looked at her with his eyebrows raised. His whole expression radiated interest, just the way it had when Duff first met him and he asked about Duff’s work. This guy is good at making people like him, Duff thought.

  “Tell me more,” Stu said.

  Bonnie smiled her half smile. She grabbed hold of her toes—she was barefoot, and her toenails were painted gold—and held on to them for a few seconds, staring down at her lap. “I told her she’d get in trouble,” she said. “She thought she was being so clever.” She looked up. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. What difference could it make?”

  She crossed to the computer and flicked it on: a few clicks of the mouse, and she had an email message on the screen. “Read this,” she said. “It’s one of her best ones.”

  Duff and Stu bent over to peer at the screen.

  They read:

  Dear friends,

  I am crying so hard I can barely type this, but you are my only hope. Last week, while my back was turned for one instant, my darling two-year-old son Timmy toddled out into the highway that runs past our crumbling cottage and was sucked under the wheels of a gigantic oil tanker truck. I ran to him, screaming. His limp, mangled body lay in a bloody heap on the pavement.

  Oh, my friends, the tiny crushed bones!!! The blood pouring from hundreds of gashes all over the sweet little body!!! Timmy survived, but it’s going to take 27 separate operations to make him look like a little boy again instead of a squashed eggplant.

  I am a penniless single mom, working 15 hours a day as a raisin picker, and I can’t possibly pay for his treatment. Will you help me? Oh, please! I would be so grateful for anything you could send—even just a dollar or two. My address is P.O. Box 22569B, St. Louis, MO 63321.

  In desperation,

  Melissa Lu Perkins

  Duff turned to Bonnie, his mouth hanging open in amazement. “You mean people actually sent her money?”

  “Yeah, lots of people. I think just on this one she made a couple thousand dollars. She has a whole collection of them. The one about her husband getting both arms gnawed off by a wild boar is a good one, too.”

  “People are stupid,” said Duff.

  Bonnie shrugged. “Or kind. They were trying to help.”

  “She shouldn’t have said ‘raisin picker,’” Duff added. “You don’t pick raisins, you pick grapes.”

  “That’s true,” Bonnie said. She laughed and flashed a smile at him—a real smile, not just a polite one. It made the clamped-down, worried look vanish from her face for a moment, and it caused a little burst of tingles inside Duff, who wasn’t used to making girls smile.

  “That’s a rotten thing to do, taking advantage of people who feel sorry for you,” said Stu, jabbing a finger at the computer screen.

  “I know,” said Bonnie. “It isn’t the first time, either. A few years ago she was into real estate. A lot of people made down payments on islands in the South Pacific that weren’t exactly there. She was in for two years that time.”

  “In?” said Duff

  “In jail,” said Bonnie. “For fraud.”

  “But I thought you said she was in the hospital.”

  “She is.” Bonnie flopped down on the couch. She gave a wry half smile. “She broke her left leg and her right arm.”

  “How’d she do that” Stu asked.

  “Going too fast down the back stairs of this office she rents in Virginia,” said Bonnie. “When she saw the fraud squad coming up the front stairs.”

  Duff listened to all this in amazement. He was in a criminal’s den! Bonnie was a criminal’s daughter! She didn’t look it. He would have expected a criminal’s daughter to be the sort of girl who hides razor blades in her hair, and gets into fistfights in the girls’ restroom, and talks in a nasty, sneering voice. Bonnie didn’t seem to be that kind of person. She did have that hint of hardness in her face, like a warning that she would take no crap from anyone, but mostly she just seemed sort of weary and fed up. He wished he could think of something helpful to say.

  “How come your mom was in Virginia?” Stu asked.

  “Oh, she works out of all different places. It makes her harder to trace.”

  Stu sat down cross-legged on the turquoise rug near Bonnie’s feet. “So what about you?” he said. “With your mom away, what will you do? Live here by yourself?”

  “Are you kidding? The social worker would be on me in a second. No, I’ll go stay with one of my aunts.” She reached up with both hands and yanked at her little topknot, which had been coming loose from its fuzzy rubber band. “I have two aunts,” she said, “one in New Mexico and one in Los Angeles. My mother’s sisters. I haven’t seen either one of them since I was about eight, but I know they’d have me.”

  “So you’ll drive your mom’s car?” Stu asked.

  “No. I don’t have a driver’s license. I’ll probably go on the bus.” She unfolded her legs and stood up. “How are you going to get where you’re going?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stu. “Go back to hitchhiking, maybe.”

  Duff shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “Too slow. I have to figure out some other way.” He suddenly remembered that he had no money and no driver’s license, not to mention no car, and for a moment he felt so depressed he couldn’t even breathe.

  Phone Call #2

  Thursday, June 27, 1:12 AM

  Duff: Hi, Dad, it’s me.

  Duff’s father: Duff. Good lord. Do you know it’s two in the morning here?

  Duff: Oh, yeah, sorry. I didn’t think. I’m in St. Louis, just wanted to let you know.

  Duff’s father: St. Louis! That’s over eight hundred miles from here!

  Duff: Yeah, well, I wanted to get as far as I could my first day.

  Duff’s father: And where are you?

  Duff: Oh, a motel. It’s, uh, the Hopgood.

  Duff’s father: And you had no trouble on the way? Car worked okay?

  Duff (telling the biggest lie of his life): Oh, yeah, no problems.

&nb
sp; Duff’s father: Well, good, Son. Maybe you’re going to prove me wrong after all. I was sure you’d get into some kind of mess your first day out and come running back.

  Duff (piling lie on lie): Oh, no, Dad, I’m doing fine.

  Duff’s father: I called Wade Belcher and told him you’d be getting in touch.

  Duff (thinks): Not likely. (says): Okay, Dad. Talk to you later.

  Chapter 8

  READY TO ROLL

  It was already hot when Duff woke in the morning. The garage door was open, and Stu wasn’t around. Duff stepped outside. Cars went past in a steady stream. The air was hazy and smelled like cleaning fluid. Duff thought again about what Phil at the gas station had said about noxious chemicals. He could feel them at this very moment, seeping into his lungs. What the world needs, he thought grouchily, is a car that runs on air.

  He went back inside and opened up his laptop. No problem with his wireless connection here in the city. Maybe, by some miracle, his email would give him an answer to his predicament. Instead he found this:

  Dear Duffy:

  Gearing up here! Project Rapid Vortex is ready to roll. Just to let you know—had to cut a couple other projects. Budgets are tight!! But Vortex is top priority!!! Looking forward to getting you on board—see you Monday!!!!

  Ping

  Ping’s email voice was exactly the same as his real voice—speedy, energetic, and excited. He was a fast-paced person, Duff thought, probably the kind of person who wouldn’t be too pleased if his newly hired programmer didn’t make it to work on the first day. Right now, Thursday, June 27, Duff had no car, no cash, and no driver’s license. He was still probably two thousand miles away from San Jose. Several miracles would have to occur for him to get to California by Monday. But sometimes miracles did happen. So he wrote this note:

  Dear Ping,

  I’ll be there.

  Duff

  This looked unfriendly compared to Ping’s email, so he added a few exclamation points:

  Dear Ping,

  I’ll be there!!

  Duff

  He clicked Send, closed his laptop, and went outside again, feeling like one of those cartoon characters with a black cloud hovering over his head. Hearing voices, he looked into the backyard, where he saw Moony nosing around in the grass and Stu and Bonnie sitting on the back steps of the house, eating something. Also laughing. A stab of unpleasant feeling went through Duff. Why hadn’t they asked him to come and eat something, too?