The Car (7 page)

“Let's go.”

Terry started, shifted to second, third, and fourth, and then looked at Waylon. “This is the way those guys in the truck went.”

Waylon didn't say anything but nodded.

“Maybe we should try to avoid them.”

This time Waylon looked. “Why?”

“Because of what they did—they're dangerous.”

Waylon smiled. “Not really.”

Terry remembered the bottle crashing into the windshield frame. An inch higher and it could have killed him. That was dangerous enough.

They had been driving while talking and Terry saw a small farm town a mile or so ahead of them. He slowed. Somewhere he'd read that a lot of these towns were speed traps, or his dad had said it—it surprised him to think it because it was the first time he'd thought of his parents since he'd started, except when Waylon had asked about them—and he didn't want to get a ticket.

Closer he saw that there was a gas station on the outside edge of town.

Still closer he saw that the black truck was in the gas station. He let the Cat slow.

Waylon had seen the truck as well and he motioned toward it. “Let's stop for gas.”

“What?”

“You need gas.” Waylon pushed his guitar off to the side and unbuckled his seat belt. “Stop.”

Terry looked at the VDO gas gauge. It was still at three-quarters full. “We don't need gas.”

“Yes.” Waylon looked at him, his eyes serious. “We do. Stop there.”

This is insane—just looking for it,
Terry thought, but there was something in Waylon's eyes, some force he did not understand, and without meaning to he slowed and brought the Cat up to the gas pumps.

“You pump,” Waylon said, sliding out of the car. “I'll pay.”

Right,
Terry thought,
I'll pump.
He shook his head.
If you think I'm going to stay out here while you're in there. . . .

He left the car and followed, as it worked out, eight or ten steps behind Waylon. Waylon opened the front screen door to the gas station and walked inside like he didn't have a concern in the world.

Terry stopped at the door, holding it open. He could see the inside because of light coming through a back window. There was a counter down the right side of the room with a cash register on top of it near the front door. Two men stood next to the counter, one drinking a Bud, the other smoking a cigarette. Terry recognized the one smoking as the guy in the truck who had thrown the beer bottle. Another man, the owner or somebody who worked at the station, was in back of the counter drinking a Coke. It was clear the three were friends, were talking and laughing—probably about the beer bottle and the Cat.

Too many,
Terry thought.
There are three of them. One of them is too many. Three is an army. Don't—don't do this.
But none of it came out. He just watched.

Waylon walked down along the counter, his arms swinging loosely at his sides.

“Well, look at this,” the man with the cigarette said. “It's them we were just telling you about—from the little kiddy car.” He stood away from the counter and faced Waylon. “Are you a couple of little kiddies?”

Waylon stopped. Terry could not see his face but his voice sounded soft, almost sad.

“It can go either way,” Waylon said. “It's up to you. You can make it rough or you can make it easy. The point is you could have really hurt the boy. I think you should apologize and we'll call it square.”

“Apologize? Hell, I missed him, didn't I? What more do you want?”

Terry did not see exactly what happened next. Waylon seemed to move, a shrug that took his whole body, and there was a chunking sound, like meat being dropped on a counter, and the man went down holding his throat, blood running out of his nose and mouth.

Waylon took a step forward, shrugged once more, and the second man from the truck went down as well. He was holding his knee and also bleeding from the nose and mouth.

Waylon looked at the man who owned the garage, who was still standing in back of the counter, a bottle of soda halfway to his mouth. Not four seconds had passed since Waylon had first shrugged.

“I wasn't part of it,” the station owner said, raising his hands and waving them. “Looks like they had it coming.”

Waylon nodded, moved back to where Terry stood by the door. “You didn't get any gas, did you?”

Terry shook his head. “What did you do to them?”

Waylon didn't answer, instead guided Terry out of the door and back to the car.

“I didn't even see you touch them,” Terry said, following. “You just shrugged or something and they went down—how did you do that?”

But Waylon didn't speak and continued to not say anything even when they were on the road and moving at sixty-five.

He sat staring ahead while Terry drove. Not saying anything, not smiling, not singing or whistling, just staring and sometimes shaking his head.

Finally, just before dark, he looked at the atlas and leaned across the car. “We'll keep going tonight, drive all night. I'll take over when you get tired.”

“But . . .”

“We need some work done on the car. And me. What I did back there was wrong. We need to get to Omaha tomorrow. To fix things. Just keep driving.”

Terry nodded.

The light dimmed and he turned on the headlights, aimed the Cat west, and let it roll, following the sunset.

T
ERRY OPENED HIS EYES
into bright light.

It was morning, early, and the Cat was burbling along. He had been sleeping with his head straight back against the seat and he sat up to see Waylon driving with a new sun at his back.

He hadn't wanted to let Waylon drive. The Cat was his, a part of him. He had tried to drive himself and had done all right until midnight. But then between midnight and one in the morning a switch had gone off somewhere in his head and it seemed everything shut down. He had tried to stay awake, fought it as hard as he could, but his chin kept dropping and finally he had pulled to the side of the road and let Waylon take over.

Perversely, as soon as Waylon started to drive, Terry snapped awake and for half an hour couldn't sleep. He watched Waylon drive and felt like he'd given his life away.

But Waylon was a good driver, shifted nicely on the power curve and kept the car moving right, and soon Terry had dropped off again.

Until now.

“Where are we?” he asked, squirming in the seat to get a good view. The sky was clear except for a couple of strips of white high cirrus, blue and starting to get hot.

“About twenty miles out of Omaha. Can you wait until we get there to stop or do you want me to pull over now?”

“I'm all right.”

“There's some coffee in a thermos under your feet. It's hot and I put some sugar in it for energy.”

“Thermos? I didn't know you had a thermos.”

Waylon nodded. “I didn't have one. We stopped for gas in the night and I bought one at a truck stop. Filled it, figuring we would want some later.”

Terry shook his head. “And I didn't wake up?”

Waylon laughed. “Not a flicker. You were really zonked.”

Terry poured coffee. He had never liked it, and still didn't, but there was something about it that went with the morning, and he sipped contentedly.

“You want to drive?” Waylon asked.

“I'll take it later, after we get . . . Where are we going, anyway?”

“An old friend named Wayne Holtz. He lives this side of Omaha, ten or twelve more miles. He knows a lot about cars and about me—we both need fixing.”

“I don't know what you mean.” Terry shrugged. “I think the Cat is all right—it runs good, doesn't it?”

“It's great. But it could use a little more . . . just a little more. That's what Wayne does. Makes things work a little better.”

“And you don't seem broken. Those guys didn't touch you, as far as I could see.”

Waylon shook his head. “It's not physical. I shouldn't have done that to them. They were just a couple of good old boys getting drunk.”

“They threw a bottle at me.”

“At the car,” Waylon corrected. “Just being stupid. I . . . hit . . . them wrong. The wrong way. One of them won't ever be right again.” He trailed off, grew quiet, then smiled sadly. “We'll talk to Wayne a couple of days, work on the car, smooth the world out a little.”

For a few minutes they moved in silence except for the wind coming over and around the windshield. Terry heard a meadowlark singing as they passed a fence post, a whip of sound, high and beautiful and gone before it really registered, and then Waylon was slowing.

“Along here, somewhere. Look for a metal sign cut in the shape of an artist's palette. . . .”

“A what?”

“A palette—what they mix paint on. . . . Ahh, there, see it?”

Terry caught a glimpse of a funny oblong metal sign with dabs of color around the outside edge and the word
ART
directly in the center. It seemed to be faded a bit, but they were past it too fast for him to tell anything else about it.

Waylon steered off the highway down a gravel road for a mile or so, then off that road onto a quarter-mile-long driveway, and as they came to the end of the driveway, around a bend and past some trees, Terry saw a large metal building. It was rusty and run down. Next to it stood an old trailer house, also run down and tired-looking, and everywhere else, or so it seemed, there were parts of cars and motorcycles rusting away.

“It's a junkyard,” Terry said.

Waylon shook his head. “No. It's a place to create things. Come on.”

The metal building had a large front door and a smaller door to the side. Waylon entered the side door without knocking and Terry followed, expecting it to be dark inside.

Instead the walls and ceiling were painted flat white and large floodlights lit the center so brightly Terry squinted and had to close his eyes.

He opened them to see a woman standing on a small platform, leaning against a tall stool with her arm across it, facing him full on.

She was completely, absolutely stark naked.

“Unnnhhh.” Terry stopped dead and thought he should turn, knew he should turn, at least close his eyes.

He could do none of those things. He stood and stared. She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, more beautiful than pictures in the magazines he had under his mattress at home. And there she stood. Wearing air.

The woman ignored him, and Waylon. Did not move. To the side a man who looked like he was completely made of hair and wearing only a pair of impossibly torn Levi's had an easel set up with a large canvas on it There was a painting of the woman on the canvas, and the man turned as Waylon came in.

“Waaiiilll-on!” he yelled. He dropped the brush on a shelf on the easel and grabbed Waylon and hugged him. “How in hell
are
you? I heard you was dead. They said a train killed you, but I knew that was a lie. It would take more than a train. . . .”

“It was another guy. I was next to him when the train hit him and they thought it got us both. You know how rumors are.”

“Right, right.” Wayne suddenly seemed to notice Terry. “Who's your friend?”

“A traveling companion, name of Terry. He picked me up two nights ago and we've had a little trouble and need some help with his car.”

“That's what I
do . . .”

Terry was still standing, staring at the woman, and Waylon laughed and spoke to her.

“Maybe you'd better put some clothes on, Suze—I think you're hurting his brain.”

The model nodded but didn't move until Wayne motioned with his chin. “We'll stop for the day. We've worked enough—now it's time to
play.
”

The woman stepped down from the stand, moving as naturally as a soft wind—or so it seemed to Terry—and put a housecoat on, and at last Terry could take his eyes away from her.

It was the first time since he'd come in the room that he could look around, and he saw now that on all the walls, hanging from wire hooks, there were gas tanks from motorcycles and parts of car hoods or air scoops and on most of them were paintings of nude women with large breasts in various poses. Here and there, there was a tank painted with an eagle or a skull and crossbones but most of them were women.

Wayne wiped his hands on a rag and washed his brushes in a sink near one wall, and Terry realized that he lived in this same building. There was a bathroom in a back corner—the only closed-in room—and a large bed off to the right side of the building.

“What's with the car?” Wayne asked, when he'd finished the brushes.

“It's outside. A home-built. It's fine, but we need a little more punch.”

“We'll look at it. Suze—” He turned to the woman, who had moved to a chair under a lamp by the bed and opened a book. “Why don't you start some dinner while we look at the car?”

She looked up, directly at Wayne, and Terry saw in the light that her eyes were purple, and he realized with a start that she was the one not just on the canvas but on almost every gas tank.

“You mean me?” she asked. “You want
me
to cook?”

Wayne frowned, then shook his head. “I guess not.”

“I don't cook. You know that. And I don't clean. I model and you pay me.”

“Right.”

“You'd better get your brain checked,” she said, going back to the book. “Even asking is crazy.”

Wayne turned and went out the front door and stopped outside in front of the car.

“Oh wow, man. It's a Blakely Bearcat!”

“You know the car?” Waylon moved off the side and Terry stood by the car.

“Know it? I helped a guy build one once. A guy named Blakely wanted Ford to build them and sell them, back in the late seventies. He made about four hundred of them and sold them as factory makes. Then Ford said no and he started selling them as kits. They rod up real good, real good.” He turned to Terry. “What's it got inside?”