The Car by Gary Paulsen Page A

thing.”
    â€œAnd do you want to know more?”
    He thought again and realized that he did—that he was immensely curious. “Yes.”
    â€œThere it is, man.” Wayne turned to Waylon. “I mean there it is—just like before. It still works. Samuel still works.”
    Waylon smiled and nodded. “It’s a start.”

16
    â€œH OW OLD IS HE? ”
    It was evening and Samuel was still sleeping in the chair. Waylon had found a blanket in the trailer and covered the old man, tucking him in carefully. Then the three of them had made a fire pit and located their bedrolls near it, made a fire, helped Wayne put up the tent—although it didn’t look at all like rain; the sky was clear and the stars seemed so close they could be touched.
    They had eaten spaghetti and were lying around the fire, propped on elbows, and Terry was looking to the recliner where Samuel hadn’t moved.
    â€œNobody knows. He was old when we came here before—twenty years ago. A hundred, a hundred and ten, twenty. He’s past counting.” Waylon took a long pull of his coffee. “Past aging. He’ll just be that way now until . . . well, until he’s gone.”
    Terry stared at Samuel. It was dark, but in the light from the fire the recliner and the man looked yellow. “He looks . . . gone . . . now.”
    Wayne nodded. “Right. But he’s not. He’ll come up and start talking again. You want to be listening when it comes.”
    â€œHas he been here all the time?”
    â€œYeah. Some say he’s an Indian, but I heard he punched cows for a while back when. Nobody is sure how he started, just how he is now. Back in the sixties, seventies, must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of people came past, talking to him, listening to him.”
    Samuel coughed and the three became silent, listening, but he didn’t say anything further. Waylon used the silence to lay back and Terry did the same.
    He pulled his bag up around his shoulders to keep the cool air out, positioned his windbreaker under his head, and lay looking up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Cat and Baby sitting near each other, the starlight gleaming on the chrome, and he tried to remember his other life, how much time had passed. It simply didn’t come. He remembered his parents, that he had parents, but how they looked was fuzzy—he could remember his house, his room better—and he realized with a start that it had only been six, seven days since he’d gone. Since he’d met Waylon in the rain.
    And here he was. On the prairie, listening to an old man, camped with a couple of holdovers from the sixties, learning about a world he didn’t know existed.
    Life
. . . , he thought.
Life rolls funny if you don’t watch
it.
    He closed his eyes and was asleep before he thought another word.
    Â 
    â€œ. . . voted for the son of a bitch and he let us down. . . .”
    Terry wasn’t sure how long he had slept but it was still dark when the voice brought him up. He opened his eyes and rolled over. The fire was well out, the ashes cold, and the sound was coming from Samuel.
    Terry unzipped the bag and wrapped it around his shoulders and stood—saw that Waylon was up and doing the same, though Wayne was still asleep—and moved to Samuel’s side, where they sat against the trailer, bundled in their bags.
    â€œWho?” Terry asked, but Waylon held a hand on his shoulder and pressed him into quiet.
    â€œYou don’t have to ask,” Waylon whispered. “Just let him talk.”
    â€œ. . . there were dreams everywhere, so many dreams you couldn’t count them, and Hoover got in and they
all
went to hell. . . .”
    He took a breath. Terry thought it must be three or four in the morning. He didn’t have a watch. He had one flash of thought:
I’m sitting in the middle of the night