The Car

Copyright © 1994 by Gary Paulsen

Reader's Guide copyright © 2006 by Harcourt, Inc.

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Originally published in 1994 by Harcourt, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Paulsen, Gary.
The car/Gary Paulsen,
p. cm.

Summary: A teenager left on his own travels west in a kit car he built himself, and along the way picks up two Vietnam veterans, who take him on an eye-opening journey.

[1. Automobiles—Fiction. 2. Travel—Fiction. 3. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.P2843Car 2006
[Fic]—dc22 2006041184

ISBN 978-0-15-205827-2 paperback

eISBN 978-0-544-83672-3
v1.1215

To Stuart, whose name is on The Wall

It was to be a normal strike mission. Another hamlet, another set of leaders to take out—sanction, neutralize, terminate with extreme prejudice. All names for the same thing—to kill. There were two of them in the strike team, and they had done this before and expected no real difficulties.

Come in the darkness by canoe let off from the patrol boat on the main river. Paddle up the small stream to the hamlet, find the two targets, end them, and canoe back to the patrol boat.

In and out.

“
Clean and gone,” one of the strike team members said. “They won't know we've been there until they find the bodies . . .”

H
E WAS ALONE.

His name was Terry Anders. He was fourteen years old, living in Cleveland, Ohio, and his parents had left him.

Of course it didn't happen quite that suddenly.

It was true he could not exactly remember a happy time with his parents. He thought there might have been a few moments when he was a baby, but they weren't memories so much as feelings, or wishes about feelings he would have liked to have had.

But most of it had been a hassle. All he knew was their fighting. His earliest memory was of them fighting. They never hurt him, never yelled at him much; they just ignored him. They were two people who just shouldn't have been together.

He had been ignored for fourteen years. Completely. They didn't care how he did, what he wore, what he ate, if he was sick or well or doing all right in school or flunking. They weren't bad to him, nor good to him, nor anything to him. At first it bothered him, but he had become accustomed to it and, finally, had come to prefer it.

He felt that as far as his parents were concerned he simply didn't exist and he viewed them the same. There were no other children, no contact with relatives except an uncle or something—Terry was never sure of the relationship to his parents—out in Oregon. Terry had met him once—back when he was six or seven—and the uncle, named Loren, seemed like a nice guy. He had given Terry five dollars and told him to buy candy.

Other than that, nothing. Nobody. His parents both worked at jobs—his father as a mechanic at a car dealership, his mother as a beautician—and were gone during weekdays. On weekends his father would leave at sunup to go four-wheeling with his friends, and his mother would hit the malls and shop—or something. Terry was never quite sure of that, either, since she never seemed to bring anything home.

Terry was left to himself. He worked at school some but mostly had poor grades, kind of slithered by. He'd had a best friend named Thor, but Thor's family had moved just a month before to—of all places—Africa, where Thor's father was going to be a missionary, and so Terry was alone.

He didn't honestly know his parents were gone for nearly two days. He woke up one Monday morning to a quiet house—his parents had spent the whole previous night yelling at each other and the quiet was pleasant—and went about his day as usual, figuring his parents had gone to work.

Breakfast that first morning was normal. Sugarcoated cereal with milk and more sugar sprinkled on it. There was no bread so he couldn't do toast and peanut butter, which he loved, but the cereal filled him so it didn't matter.

Through the day he worked at mowing lawns in a nearby housing development. He loved working with motors and mechanical devices—he sometimes thought it was the only thing he got from his father—and had rebuilt an old rotary lawn mower that he used for cutting grass. The business had started small but had grown, and he had saved almost thirteen hundred dollars over the last two years, which he kept in a jar in his room.

Terry worked all day, and when it was evening he pushed the mower home to find his parents still not there.

Again, this did not surprise him. They were often late, and sometimes his father did not come home at all.

They lived in a rented old two-story house on the edge of an open field at the end of a road near a housing development, and all of it seemed about to break down and die. The house was in need of paint and repair, the street coming from the development was full of potholes and cracks, and the land around was overgrown with weeds and brush.

When he got home Terry put the mower in the garage, went into the house, and turned the TV set on to some rerun of a reran rerun about kids in the sixties, who all wore bell-bottom pants and long-collared shirts. He didn't much like television—it bored him, except for the music videos and some movies—but he kept it on all the time he was in the house because he needed the sound. He'd read something in school about certain people needing background sound like running water or surf or wind in trees—they called it “white” sound—and he thought of television that way. Pretty much worthless except as “white” sound.

He found TV dinners and cooked two of them (one was never enough)—turkey loaf and beef stew—and ate them watching the show about the kids in the sixties. He watched more TV and worked on a model of a '57 Chevy he'd been putting together for two weeks. He liked working on models—when he couldn't work on engines—because it completely occupied his mind, making them look exact, clean, dead perfect. Then somehow it was night and his parents still weren't home, and he went to bed.

The second morning he awakened to the same routine, but now there was wonder—they should have been home and fighting by this time—and he thought about calling somebody like the police. But something stopped him. A little tickle, a happiness at the quiet and peace was there in his mind, and he didn't make the call but went out again to mow lawns.

That evening they were still not home, and he sat quietly working on the model after two more TV dinners, and for the first time he thought of the movie about the kid who was left home by himself. Except that the same tickle was there, the feeling that it was actually nice not having them around.

The first call came at almost exactly eight o'clock.

His mother called first.

“Terry, I'm not coming home. I can't take it any longer. I've taken all my things. Tell your father I won't be there for him to fight any longer. You'll both have to do without me.” And she hung up.

He had said almost nothing. Had once more felt a sense of wonder—this time at why he didn't seem to care all that much that his mother had gone. A part of him felt bad, but it was mostly because he
didn't
feel bad that he felt bad—like he ought to feel rotten, only he didn't. She was gone—that thought was there—and there wouldn't be any more fights.

His father called just after nine.

“Tell your mother I'm not coming back—I've got all my stuff, or everything I want. I'm sick of the whole thing.” And he hung up.

Terry put the phone back in the cradle and looked out the window at the road in the darkness and thought:
So, they aren't going to be here. Neither one. At least for a little while. Mother thinks I'm staying here with Father and Father thinks I'm staying here with Mother.

I'm alone.

Just me.

And the house.

Oh yes,
he thought, and a smile came, widened into a grin.
There's one other thing.

The car.

T
HE CAR WASN'T REALLY.

A car that is—it was a pile of what seemed to be junk and pieces in the garage. At some point along the way, Terry's father had done some work for a trucker, and the man hadn't had enough money to pay for the work and had given Terry's father the car in partial payment. Terry's father had objected, had threatened to go to court, had even had a fight with the man—a scuffle in the driveway—but it didn't help. The trucker had left the car as payment and gone on his way.

It was a kit car, supposedly a design done by a man named Blakely, called a Blakely Bearcat—a soft red color with sweeping curved-back fenders and the classic old-fashioned open-cockpit look.

Or it should have been. The truth was Terry's dad hated being a mechanic. When his day at work was done, the last thing he wanted to do was pick up a wrench and work on a home project. He had tried to sell the kit as it was—piles of red fiberglass pieces and rusting steel frames and paper-wrapped chrome trim—but nobody wanted it. Several came to look and just shrugged and walked away when they saw the mess. The result was that the pile of parts stayed a pile that didn't resemble any part of a car so much as a start for a junkyard, and over the months, almost a year and a half, nothing had been done to make the kit a car.

Once Terry had asked his father if he could work on the Bearcat.

“No,” his father had answered. “I'm going to let it sit there and rot, and every time I look at the thing it will remind me to always get the money up front.”

And so it had been. The Bearcat—Terry always thought of it simply as the Cat—had remained a pile for all this time. Well, twice he had peeked into it when both parents were gone for the day—dug around in the boxes and crates and paper-wrapped pieces to see what was involved in making a car. He was, to be honest, dying to get into it. But anything he did would certainly be seen by his father, who had expressly forbidden Terry to work on the car.

But his father was gone now. He'd said he wasn't coming back. And the same for his mother.

And the kit car was still in the garage.

He looked once at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was in the shape of a cat with eyes that went back and forth and the hands were in a circle on the cat's belly. It was, Terry thought, the ugliest thing he had probably ever seen. He had bought it for a Christmas present when he was nine years old, trying to get his mother's attention. It hadn't worked except that she'd put the clock on the wall over the kitchen window where Terry could see it every day.