The Car by Gary Paulsen Page B

listening to this. . . .
But it trailed off and Samuel started again.
    â€œ. . . people died. Jumped from buildings and died because of money. Farms died. People went for food, wanted for food, and starved. And then the droughts came, droughts and dust, dust in your lungs, dust in the cracks of your eyes, dust for air, dust for food, dust for death . . .”
    He stopped again and Waylon leaned over to whisper, “The depression. He’s talking about the depression.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œA bad time. Back in the thirties. When corrupt politicians bled the country dry and a big drought came. Same as the eighties and Reagan . . .”
    â€œ. . . women marrying in dust, living in dust, loving in dust, burying their babies in dust . . . the sky gone in dust . . . the sun gone in dust . . .”
    And Samuel stopped again, breathing deeply.
    Waylon sat silently, thinking, and Terry looked out at the dark sky, trying to see the horizon, and tried to envision what it must have been like sixty years earlier. Once a teacher had talked of the depression but he had just said there were long lines at soup kitchens and something called the dust bowl. Somehow it didn’t seem like it happened to people.
    Until now.
    Now it seemed real. Something in the way Samuel talked, the way his voice worked, made it seem real—the dust, the people, the babies crying. All real.
    â€œHe’s asleep again,” Waylon said. “I’m not sure for how long. We’ll just stay next to him and wait until he wakes up.”
    They sat the rest of the night, leaning against the trailer next to the recliner, sleeping, and that’s the way Wayne found them in the morning, still dozing with Samuel sound asleep between them and, indeed, Samuel did not awaken until nearly noon.

17
    T HEY STAYED all that day and night and left the following morning. They cooked for him and made more coffee, thick with sugar, and sat by the fire when he slept and next to him when he spoke.
    Samuel talked four more times at length: about draft riots in New York during the Civil War, about an influenza epidemic in St. Louis at the turn of the century that killed forty percent of the people there, a short bit about one of his wives—he’d had several but nobody was sure how many—and how good she cooked, and a story about two women who took a wagon across during the Oregon Trail days.
    Then he stopped and stared at Waylon and said, “It’s good you came. Next time bring sugar again. It’s good to have friends with sugar.”
    Waylon nodded. “It was good to see you again.”
    And they packed their bedrolls on the bike and the car and drove away, Terry watching in the rearview mirror until Samuel, the trailer, the junk were all out of sight.
    They were well off the gravel, back on the main road before Terry spoke.
    â€œWill he be, you know, all right?”
    Waylon smiled. “He’s tougher than he looks. When people take care of him he soaks it up, but when he’s alone he gets along all right. And I think somebody from the county comes out and checks on him now and then.”
    â€œAnd all that stuff that he says, that’s all true?”
    â€œI don’t know about all of it. But the things I checked on, or know myself, are dead right. There were draft riots and a Sioux uprising and a dust bowl and a flu epidemic in St. Louis—all those things happened. I don’t know about his wives or the two women who took a wagon to Oregon, but I’d bet it’s right.”
    They came out to the highway then and Wayne, who had been riding Baby ahead of them, dropped back alongside and signaled them to stop.
    â€œWhose turn?”
    â€œWhat?” Terry thought Wayne was talking to him, but when he looked he saw that Wayne was looking across, smiling at Waylon.
    â€œI guess mine,” Waylon said. “Then