Read The Car for Free Online Page A

thinking and pushed the light firmly into place—but still, he didn’t want this guy sitting in the car. He didn’t know him, didn’t know anything about him.
    â€œClearly you’re traveling. I noticed all the gear packed on the back luggage rack. Would you be going east or west?” Waylon asked.
    â€œWest,” Terry answered promptly, then shook his head. “I mean I’m not sure.”
I mean
, he thought,
it’s none of your business,
but he didn’t say it.
    â€œMe, too. All the way to where the blue part starts. It’s a long way to run alone, isn’t it?”
    Terry shook his head. “No, I don’t mind. I do it all the time. . . .”
    â€œOf course, of course. Still, a man gets lonely on such a long trip. And then, too, there’s the expense. Gas, oil, breakdowns. Then there’s the intellectual tedium.”
    Breakdowns,
Terry thought. The possibility hadn’t occurred to him. He had almost twelve hundred dollars left and it seemed like a lot of money. Still, if this man was willing to pay his way—he shook his head. He didn’t know the guy.
Some weirdo gets in the car spouting Shakespeare and the next thing you know he kills you and chops you up and puts you in garbage sacks and mails the pieces to South America.
“Intellectual tedium?”
    Waylon nodded. “It’ll cause brain damage. That’s what happened back in the fifties and then again all through the eighties. Tedium that led to brain damage. The whole damn world. You don’t want that to happen to you, not driving across the country. You don’t want to turn into something from the fifties or eighties—a lopped-out, intellectually dead piece of Republican manure—do you?”
    â€œNo.” Terry shook his head, then shrugged. “I mean, I don’t know. I guess not.”
    â€œExactly. And I can keep that from happening.”
    â€œYou can?”
    â€œAbsolutely. I’ve done it before. Many times.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œIt’s complicated. There’s music, and verse, and books, and just pointing at things. How old are you?”
    Terry almost told him the truth, then caught himself and lied. “Eighteen.”
    Waylon studied him in the soft light, then nodded slowly. “I thought so—in fact I actually thought you might be nineteen.”
    â€œYou did?” Terry asked hopefully.
    â€œNo. I’m lying there. You have to look for the lies—I’ll be throwing them in from time to time. It helps to break the tedium. But you look older than your age, anyway. When I was your age I was on the road, except I didn’t have a car. I thumbed it and rode some trains, worked here and there. Back in the early sixties . . .”
    Terry frowned. “That was a long time ago.”
    â€œWas it?” Waylon smiled. “It seems like just last week sometimes.” He lifted the plastic. “Look, the rain is stopping.”
    Terry lifted the plastic and peeked out into the darkness. A breath of warm, soft summer air hit his face and he pushed the plastic farther back. It had indeed stopped raining. A quick summer storm.
    â€œShall we go?” Waylon peeled his side of the plastic back all the way, pushing droplets of water down the side of the car onto the ground. He reached out and got his pack, held it in his lap.
    And Terry thought of all the things he should say but didn’t; thought of telling the man, Waylon, to get out, thought of telling Waylon that he wasn’t really taking a trip but that his parents were waiting at home, but none of it came out.
    â€œRight,” he said. “West it is . . .”
    The Cat was already running. He caught first, moved off the shoulder, crossed a small road, and caught second and third as the Cat nosed up the highway entrance back onto I-40.
    Waylon shook the rest of the plastic off, folded it neatly, and put it down in the