Car Trouble

by Jeanne DuPrau

  “I bet you have,” Bonnie said. “You just didn’t know it.”

  The car hummed along. Good thing Aunt Shirley had taken care of her Toyota, Duff thought. Another breakdown would be more than he could handle. For this trip, he thought, mentally crossing his fingers, maybe they were through with car trouble.

  “The thing is, about that money,” said Bonnie, “I never had it—since it wasn’t mine—so I don’t feel bad about losing it. My mom will, but I don’t.”

  “Well, the car is yours,” said Duff. “That’s something.”

  “True,” said Bonnie. “I’ll have to get my license.”

  “I hope Rolf and Burl aren’t beating up the poor guys at the gas station,” Duff said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that about them taking it.”

  “No, that was good,” Bonnie said. “It got them off our backs.”

  “They must be extremely unhappy about now,” said Duff. “Having to tell your mom they didn’t find the money.”

  “Serves them right,” said Bonnie shortly. “I’m sick of this whole business of schemes and scams. I’m sick of people like them.”

  “And like Stu,” said Duff.

  “Stu is weird,” said Bonnie. “Sort of a combination of good and terrible. I kind of liked him, actually. He was fun. And I thought he was really going to help me with my career. But he never did tell me that friend’s phone number.”

  “What friend?”

  “The friend in the music business. In LA.”

  “Could be there is no friend,” Duff said.

  “Probably not,” Bonnie said. She sighed. She put the window down a little way and stared out. Wind ruffled her bangs.

  “I suppose he’s heading for Phoenix,” Duff said, “and from there to San Diego.”

  “He’ll probably just keep on running and running,” said Bonnie.

  Duff nodded. “He has to have freedom. He told me that.”

  “Yeah, but freedom to do what? To just drift around, mooching off other people and stealing stuff? What’s the point of that kind of freedom?”

  Duff shrugged. “He’s weird.”

  They contemplated the weirdness of Stu in silence for a while. Not total silence—Moony was moving around restlessly in his crate, scratching and turning the way dogs do when they’re readjusting their bedding. Bonnie turned backward to look at him. “He’s making a mess,” she said. “Pulling the stuffing out of that cushion.”

  She faced front again. “What will you do when we get to Los Angeles?” she asked. “Now that you don’t have a job to go to?”

  “Sleep,” said Duff, “if your aunt will let me stay the night. Then after that—I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “What have you thought?”

  “Well, programming’s what I know how to do. It’s what I like. But maybe I could be a programmer in a different industry.”

  “Like what industry?”

  “Maybe something to do with transportation. Remember that car I showed you on the Web that runs on air?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And that bus in Oklahoma City that ran on soybeans?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I don’t know, I’m kind of interested in all that. I think it might be better than the entertainment software side of things.” In a modest mumble, he told her about wanting to do something important, something that would really change the world. “I might have to go to college,” he said. Strangely, college seemed less useless and terrifying than it had before. Duff no longer thought he already knew everything he needed to know. In fact, he had a hunger for learning, now that he had something new to learn about.

  “Cool,” said Bonnie. “That sounds a whole lot better than making a robot that plays chess, or whatever. I think you’re too good for that.”

  Duff didn’t know what to say to this. Heat rushed up into his face.

  “I don’t mean too good a programmer,” Bonnie went on, “I mean too good a person. I could see that you were a good person, after I got past your showoff stuff.”

  “Show-off stuff?” said Duff weakly.

  Bonnie twisted around in her seat to stare straight at him. “Yeah, all that about how much you know, what an expert you are, what a great job you’re going to—all that. I get so sick of how boys do that. Like Stu, talking about all the famous people he knows. They think it’s going to make girls like them, but it doesn’t.”

  “Oh,” said Duff.

  “But you want to do something good for the world,” said Bonnie. “I admire that. And you said nice things about my singing.”

  “Your singing,” said Duff, “is truly fine. Someone’s going to notice you for sure. I think you’ll make it.”

  “I’m going to try, anyway,” Bonnie said. “Even if you and Stu hadn’t come along, I was going to get to California somehow. Sooner or later. I was going to hitchhike.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” said Duff. “Too dangerous.”

  “I would have been fine,” said Bonnie.

  “I don’t know,” said Duff. “Girl hitchhikers always get picked up by serial killers.”

  “Not always,” said Bonnie.

  “Once would be enough.”

  The landscape they were passing through was beautiful, in a strange way, but monotonous. Red rocks. Flat tan earth, little shacks now and then. You didn’t feel that you had to keep looking at it or else you’d miss something. So after a while, Bonnie made her seat recline, bunched up a sweater against the window, and went to sleep.

  Duff’s mind wandered. In a vague aimless way, it drifted over the job question, it considered what his father might say when they next talked, it replayed the touch and the look in the restaurant several times, and eventually it settled on the puzzle of Stu and the money.

  Stu had had the money in Albuquerque—he bought the Toyota with it and said there was a lot left over. It was almost certain that he’d had the money when he left the truck stop. So where had it been in between those two places? Where had it been when Rolf and Burl were looking for it?

  Duff tackled this puzzle in his usual logical way, step by step.

  Step 1: Stu finds the money in the Chevy at Rosalie Hopgood’s house. He takes it. He has to put it either in his backpack or on his person—someone might find it if he hides it in the car.

  Step 2: Location of money remains unchanged through Oklahoma City, Amarillo, and Sunlight Village. There would be no reason to move it.

  Step 3: Chevy breaks down at remote gas station. If Stu does have the money hidden in the car (unlikely), he would certainly move it at this point.

  Step 4: They arrive at Aunt Shirley’s. Stu buys the Toyota, paying with cash. He puts the money in a new hiding place, not on himself, not in his backpack, not in any easy-to-find place in the car. Why would he do this? Why not keep carrying it wherever he’d had it before? Because Duff knew about it now, that’s why. Stu didn’t trust Duff any more than Duff trusted Stu.

  Okay. So when, during the stay at Aunt Shirley’s, did Stu have time to scurry around hiding money? He’d been within Duff’s sight almost every minute—except for when he was out in Shirley’s garage, checking over the Toyota. That had to be when he’d hidden the cash—the only time no one was with him.

  Except Moony, of course, who was out there in his crate, banned from coming into the house.

  And suddenly it all fell into place. “Got it!” Duff shouted.

  Bonnie jolted awake. “What, what?” she said, sitting straight up, her eyes darting back and forth.

  “We have to stop,” said Duff. He slowed down and pulled over onto the side of the highway.

  Bonnie grabbed the armrest. “What’s the matter? Is the car breaking down?”

  “No, no. I just figured something out.” Duff got out of the car, opened the back door, and lifted out Moony’s crate. He set it on the ground and opened its door. Holding on to Moony, he pulled the disgusting cushion out from under him. Bits of whitish fluff came with it, the result o
f Moony’s scratchings.

  “What are you doing?” Bonnie stood over him with her hands on her hips. No doubt she thought he’d gone crazy.

  Duff turned the cushion around until he’d found the biggest rip in its cover. He stuck his hand inside. There was definitely a space in there, but nothing was in it. He hadn’t really expected there would be, but still he was a little disappointed. His theory was correct, though—he was sure about that.

  “This is where Stu hid the money,” he said.

  “Inside Moony’s cushion?”

  “Yep. My guess is he stuck it in there just before he went to ask Shirley if he could buy the Toyota. Then when she told him what she wanted for it, he went back and got that much. The rest he jammed as far in as he could and packed the stuffing around it.”

  “It wasn’t that great a hiding place,” Bonnie said. “Burl could have found it if he’d looked just a little bit harder.”

  “The barf helped a lot,” said Duff. “That was a real piece of luck for Stu.”

  “And so, when we stopped at the truck stop, and Stu said he’d clean the cushion, he wasn’t just being helpful.”

  “He was cleaning out the inside of the cushion,” said Duff.

  “So then,” said Bonnie, sitting down on the backseat with her legs out the side of the car, “do you think he had this plan in mind the whole time? He never meant to keep the bargain he made with you?”

  “I don’t know.” Duff felt inside the cushion one more time, just to make sure Stu hadn’t left them even a little consolation prize, but he felt nothing but cotton fluff. “Maybe he meant it when he said it. But then here was this perfect opportunity—a place where trucks are heading south, where he can get a ride without standing out on the highway, where he can slip off to the men’s room with a really good excuse to take the cushion with him—maybe it was all just too much to resist.”

  “Probably,” said Bonnie. “Well, I can’t be too upset about it. What would I have done with that money anyway? I’d have had to turn it in to the police. I’m just as glad not to have to deal with it.” She sighed. “Too bad about the nonexistent friend in LA, though. I guess I was dumb to believe him about that.”

  They got back in the car. Moony rode on Bonnie’s lap. She wrapped her arms around him and rested her chin lightly on his head.

  Three hundred miles to go, Duff told himself.

  Even though his back hurt from driving so long, and his plan for Stu and the money had failed, and his future loomed ahead of him like the shadowy gulf below a cliff, he was happy. It was a straight shot now—all he had to do was drive.

  Chapter 19

  SUNSET OVER THE OCEAN

  You wouldn’t think driving could make a person as tired as it does. After all, you’re sitting down the whole time, and you’re not doing anything very strenuous with your muscles, just pressing with your foot and moving your arms a little bit. But hour after hour of driving, the whole body in more or less one position, the hands gripping, the eyes looking always forward, the legs with not too many choices of where to go—it wears you out worse than running, or biking, or anything Duff had ever done before. It was even worse after it got dark, and there was nothing to look at except the taillights up ahead and the dotted line on the highway, endlessly zipping underneath the wheels of the car. Duff began to think of driving as something very much like torture.

  Bonnie’s voice kept him going. When they started getting closer to Los Angeles, and freeways curved and branched off from one another like a tangle of enormous concrete ribbons, she kept him from panicking. “Just follow the signs,” she said. “Every time it says Santa Monica, go that way. That’s all you have to do.”

  It seemed to Duff that the sound of tires on pavement was humming down deep in his bones, putting him into a trance. The whole daytime world had vanished, and all the thoughts that went with daytime were gone, too. His mind, usually such a yakker, was quiet and empty. Nothing existed except the darkness, the cars and trucks driving along with them, and the dotted white line.

  Then he became aware of taillights flashing ahead.

  People were putting on their brakes. Traffic was jamming up. “How could there be a traffic jam in the middle of the night?” he said.

  “In Los Angeles,” said Bonnie, “there can be a traffic jam anytime.”

  They slowed to a crawl. Sometimes they stopped completely, and an eerie silence came over everything. It was like being in a dream—the cars like strange humped creatures nosing forward, the shadowy figures inside them, the sense of being in a nowhere land, and not knowing why you were there, and being helpless to get out. They couldn’t go forward, they couldn’t go backward. They couldn’t even escape by taking one of the exits off the freeway, because they’d end up lost in the vast maze of the city.

  It didn’t matter, though. They weren’t in a hurry anymore. No job waited for Duff tomorrow morning. What difference did it make if they got to Amelia’s by midnight or two AM or even seven in the morning?

  So they crept forward inch by inch.

  “What the world needs,” said Duff after a long time, “is a car that flies.”

  “You could invent one,” said Bonnie.

  “Uh-huh,” said Duff. They were too tired and spaced out even to carry on a conversation. The image of a flying car—a bubble-shaped thing with a couple of rockets for tailpipes—floated briefly through Duff’s head. He pictured himself gunning the throttle and sailing up over the freeway, looking down from a distance at the long red necklace of taillights, and then zooming off into the sky, where no traffic jams could slow him down.

  Finally, they came to the source of the problem: an enormous truck lying on its side, stretching across two full lanes and half of a third. Police cars and fire engines had nosed in around it like bugs around a carcass, their lights flashing. Flares spit white sparks. Fire had blackened the truck’s cab. The seat was still smoldering, and a thin, throat-scorching smoke hovered in the air.

  A scene from hell, Duff thought. Interesting that a traffic accident had marked both the beginning and the end of his cross-country journey. At least neither one had been his accident.

  After that, traffic sped up again. Around two o’clock, having followed Bonnie’s directions and gotten lost only a couple of times, Duff drove up in front of a small house and parked the car. The windows of the house were dark, but a porch light shone. When he opened the car door, he smelled the ocean, fresh and seaweedy. It was a new world.

  “We made it!” shouted Bonnie. She sprang out of the car, slammed the door, and ran around to where Duff was standing zombielike at the curb. “You’re a total hero!” she said, and she flung her arms around Duff and hugged him. The shock of this, plus the fact that exhaustion had dissolved his muscles, caused him to stagger backward, buckle at the knees, and collapse like a wet paper sack onto the ground.

  Inside the house, a light went on.

  * * *

  “More orange juice?” said Amelia.

  “Sure.” Duff held out his glass.

  He had slept last night on Amelia’s couch and wakened to see morning light pouring through the windows. He’d glimpsed the back of a tall blond woman as she went out the front door—Linda, he learned later, off to her job as a hotel restaurant chef. Now, having taken his first shower in three days and dressed in the clothes he’d meant to wear on his first day of work, he was sitting on the deck outside Amelia’s house, gazing at the endless ocean, where the morning sun was making the wavelets sparkle. Ernie, the bulldog, was snoring at his feet. Bonnie was swinging lazily in the hammock, half asleep, her arms around Moony, who was stretched out on top of her, his nose pressing against her chin.

  Amelia sat down beside Duff. She was a slim, bright-eyed woman with brown hair cut straight across her forehead in bangs. “I understand you came out here for a job,” she said.

  “Correct,” said Duff. “But now that I’m here, the job isn’t.”

  “So I heard,” said Amelia. She didn�
��t say, “So what are you going to do now?” Duff appreciated that, since he wasn’t sure of the answer. All he knew was that he was glad to be sitting here by the ocean, with a little space around him in which he could think about his next step.

  Amelia and Bonnie went inside after a while and sat down across from each other at the kitchen table. Duff could tell from the way they settled in and their serious voices that they needed to have a good talk. So he fetched his laptop, took it out on the deck, plugged it in, and checked his email. No apologies from Ping Crocker. Lots of spam. He went onto the Web and wandered around idly. Just for fun, he typed a car that flies into the search engine.

  The results surprised him. It seemed that plenty of people were working on this concept. The guy who seemed the most serious was actually in California. He’d devoted his entire life to making a flying car that was guided by a very sophisticated computer program. According to his website, he was almost ready to launch. Incredible. It seemed like, all over the world, people hardly anyone had ever heard of were working on ideas that could change the whole course of the future. Why couldn’t he be part of that somehow?

  He sat there for quite a while, watching the seagulls diving and screaming, gazing out at the distant hazy line where the water met the sky. Thoughts of new possibilities swirled slowly around in his head, like ribbons of chocolate in vanilla ice cream. All this had started when the old Ford Escort broke down, and he’d stood at the window of the motel room in Chipper Crossing griping to himself about oil, something he’d hardly given a thought to in his entire previous life. Driving across the country had put the whole question of energy right in his face: What makes things go? Well, oil and gas. But not only those. Air could do it, too, and the sun, and french fry oil. Alternatives were out there; he’d just never noticed them before. But in the last five days, they’d been popping up everywhere. It was like when you hear a new word, one you’ve never heard even once—and then in the next week, you hear it five more times.

  All that day, Duff thought and slept and walked on the beach with Bonnie. His mind churned sluggishly, trying to solve the problem of what to do next. But his usual logical powers had deserted him. Maybe they didn’t work in the different air of California. Or maybe he was just tired.