The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2010

The Jalopy

Tory Hartmann

Donald’s car, an old jalopy, languished on blocks just outside our back fence. Paint peeled and weed-covered, the old heap of junk had been declared off limits to my sister and me. It belonged to our brother, and the sacred jalopy was confirmation that although classified as Missing In Action, our brother would surely come home— home to fix it up, home to endlessly tinker again with its rusty engine.

I don’t know why my parents got so mad when we sat in it. How could a seven- and an eleven-year-old possibly ruin a junked jalopy? But, after we heard the news that Donald was MIA, our parents fell into a funnel cloud of grief and, when they looked our way, their gaze sliced through us as though we had disappeared. We were non-children—invisible in our own house. Instead of feeling jealous or sad, my sister and I took it as an opportunity. This was our chance to slip into the old coupe and play.

In the jalopy, we were Superman and Lois Lane, the Lone Ranger and Tonto; we were in a spaceship that went to the moon. Our play drifted toward Vietnam and we pretended we were on a mission to rescue Donald, our car now a tank and we rode on top, plowing through the jungle looking for him. In this game, my sister’s nickname was Scout. Mine was G, short for GI Joe.

One day, while searing waves of heat rippled above the hood of Donald’s jalopy, we laboriously cranked down the coupe’s old windows to gain a waft of fresh air. Scout was playing with the windshield wiper on her side, a manual lever that moved the small wiper back and forth in a quarter circle. I pretended to drive and bounced on the seat as though we were traveling over a rutted road. We were chasing something, Scout and I, running down a clue that would surely lead us to Donald.

“Straight ahead,” she shouted, pulling the choke in and out, snapping the glove box open and closed. We both felt a shudder and something incredible happened: the car unmistakably rose, teetering from side to side as though it tried to throw us out the door. Totally engulfed in smoke, I couldn’t see my sister sitting next to me. She screamed. So did I. Surely we were on fire and would burn up and die. The car lurched and fell hard; when the haze finally cleared, our back fence had disappeared.

Stunned, Scout and I sat on the front seat and tried to figure out what had happened. Where the heck were we? The only sounds were of cicadas and grasshoppers, thousands of them, the chirruping and piping as loud as a radio. Then a grasshopper—I swear it was big as a rat and had the wingspan of a blue jay—flew in the window, flopped around, bumping into us and making a shivering buzz.

Scout hollered and swatted it away. Tumbling and flying like a crazed bird, the monstrous bug went out the window on her side. We immediately worked our window cranks, sealed ourselves in, and stared out at the tangle of leafy bamboo towering over us.

“Where are we?” she said, as though I would have an answer. “Is this where Donald went? Are we in the jungle now? In ’Nam?”

How could I tell? I’d been to the library once and asked the librarian to show me where Vietnam was. Patiently, she pulled out a large atlas, pointed her crimson fingernail to the small promontory of North and South Vietnam, and repeated the names of a couple of other countries to the north. Vietnam hung like a broken finger. I had no idea if we were there.

“I dunno,” I said to Scout.

Bamboo fifteen feet tall, maybe taller, pushed against the car. I could barely force the door open. When we managed to scramble out, we stood in a strange leafy forest, our bodies pressing against the vegetation in terror and awe. Looking up, I could see trees nearby. Twice as tall as telephone poles, they were the tallest trees I’d ever seen. Scout grabbed for my hand. I was glad to hold onto someone else, even though she was only seven.

Together we quietly pushed our way through the bamboo. We couldn’t have walked more than 25 feet when we smelled something cesspool-strong. Crouching down, we wiggled toward the horrible smell the way we had seen the GIs do in World War II movies. I tried to ignore the crickets and centipedes we disturbed in the grass.

Approaching a clearing, I knew better than to poke my head out, so I stopped Scout and kept hidden behind a thick net of leaves. When I focused and looked through to the other side, my mouth dropped open. A bug flew in and I spat it out, then I stared straight ahead, trying to make sense of the scene before us. Scout sidled up to me. “It’s Donald,” she whispered. “Look. There he is.”

It was true. One of the men sitting around a small fire, roasting things on sticks held tentatively by bound hands, looked like our brother, only skinny and bald. Behind the men sat a low cage made out of bamboo sticks pounded into the ground. Craning their necks and tilting their heads from side to side, the men suddenly acted like they heard something. Donald looked around—I swear he stared straight at us—then frowned as though he were confused. My hand came up to wave to him and I almost called out, but I knew I shouldn’t speak. The danger was obvious. Not only were their hands bound, so were their feet. I didn’t want that to happen to me.

Voices echoed from the other side of the clearing, and men in black loose-fitting pants holding rifles walked up, shouted in another language, and forced the Americans into the stick house. I could see sores on the bottoms of their feet as they crawled like caterpillars into the cage. Before Donald went in, he turned his head and looked our way, but I couldn’t tell if he saw us. Scout pulled on my shirt and we scampered back to find the safety of the coupe.

Afraid to make a noise, I pulled the door slowly until no gap was left and then jerked it until the latch caught. Both of us pressed down our door locks. “What do we do now, G?” Scout whispered. “I want to get out of here. I wanna go home.”

She was right. This game of ours was too real, and I began doing what I had done to get here: I pretended the car could fly. Next thing, the bamboo around the car rustled and from between the stalks, men peered out at us, jabbering in another language. One of them gave the jalopy a kick. Scout screamed, “Step on it!”

“I’m trying!” I said, stomping on the pedals, twisting the stick shift. Anything to get it going again. What had we done to make it happen before?

Scout fiddled with the windshield wiper lever, and I wrenched the steering wheel back and forth pretending to drive, but nothing happened. I banged the starter button on the dash. I yanked the stick shift around. Scout started to pull the choke in and out. “Oh G, get it going. Please, please. Come on! They’re looking at us!”

One of the men shouted and hit the car with the back of his gun. Just then, the jalopy sprang to life. The men jumped back as I pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The motor roared and smoke billowed around the car, obscuring everything. We lurched forward, the bamboo parted and the men yelled after us as we pitched through the thick clog of vegetation. Somewhere behind, guns fired. We heard a crash of metal. I pressed the gas pedal all the way down, and we rocked and reeled, swayed and wobbled through the smoke. Haze filled the car again, and in two giant heaves, the jalopy rose and vibrated uncontrollably. Then, just as quickly, it felt as though we were dropping over a waterfall. I remember Scout’s shriek. I suppose I screamed, too.

I don’t know how long we sat dazed and bewildered, stunned that we were suddenly home, relieved that the smoke cleared and we could see our back fence. Finally, when the silence became unbearable, I heard Scout whisper, “That was real.” She turned to me and jerked my arm to make me answer. “Wasn’t it, G? Wasn’t it real?”

“Naw,” I said. My voice quivered with bravado.

“I want outta here.” She pushed open the door on her side and slipped to the ground. “Look,” she said, pointing to something at the front of the car.

I got out and followed her gaze. The biggest grasshopper I ever saw was caught on the chrome rungs of the car’s grill. The air around me evaporated; my lungs wouldn’t work. There were no grasshoppers that big around Fresno. We’d get swarms of them sometimes coming off the fields, but they were little ones, about two or three inches long. This one was longer than my hand.

Scout poked at it with a stick, and the giant hopper flopped down on the weeds below the car, its legs waving in the air, its body steaming in the sun. I ran for the garbage can, found an empty Alta Coffee jar and shoved the grasshopper inside. “You know what this is?” I said, lifting my finger in the air as though testing the wind. “Evidence. This grasshopper proves we were really there.”

Our eyes met; then we both stared back into the jar. As life drifted out of the insect, we watched its legs twirl the air as though it wanted to walk away. Our voices reverent, we both whispered at the same time, “Evidence.”

I don’t remember what we did the rest of the day, but it couldn’t have been much. The two of us had the biggest secret of our lives, and yet we had no one to tell it to. Not wanting to risk playing the jalopy game again, we spent the next days playing in my mother’s maze of flapping laundry. My sister and I used the billowing sheets as a backdrop for hide-and-seek and catch-me-if-you-can. When we were bored, we left the yard and played detective by spying on our neighbors.

Our nearest neighbor, a man we were always told was crazy, usually sat on his front porch. Looking back, I realize that he was young, still in his twenties, but when you’re only eleven, everyone seems old. His name was Burke, and I wasn’t sure if it was his first name or his last.

When my mother asked what we did that morning, I told her we had watched Burke talking to himself on his porch swing. “Burke Dawson’s crazy, that poor boy. Crazy,” she said. Then, as though it was something she worried about, she added, “Vietnam.”

I watched her bite her lip and stare into the agitating water of one of her washing machines. “I don’t want you or Carol Anne to go too close to him. You hear me, Terrence?”

I had never known that Burke had been in Vietnam, so after lunch my sister and I scurried right over to his house. We found him reading a book and rocking in his porch swing, his thick brown hair pulled back into a low ponytail.

“Hello, Burke,” I said, coming up to the bottom step. I was afraid to venture further.

He nodded toward me, but didn’t speak.

“Could I…I…”

He stopped reading and stared down at me.

“You…um…you’ve been in Vietnam, right?”

“What of it?” he said, slamming his book shut as though I had just ruined his afternoon.

“Um. Um…well…”

Without hesitation, Scout walked right up his stairs, stood beside his swing, and helped him rock the bench back and forth. He turned and smiled at her, and I could see his straight teeth. His eyes were dark as garden soil. “What are you reading?” she asked.

“The Time Machine,” he replied. “What’s your brother want?”

“We want to know about Vietnam. Our brother Donald is there. He’s MIA. That means they can’t find him.”

“I heard that,” he said, shaking his head and looking down at the dry porch boards.

Not to be outdone by my sister, I walked up a few creaky stairs and tried again. “Vietnam’s near China and it’s a jungle, right?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Lots of bamboo?”

“Yeah, there’s bamboo.”

“But it’s different from our bamboo, right? It’s leafy and thick.”

Burke grunted. Somehow I found the courage to go on.

“The other day, my sister and I were playing… and thought of Donald. And um…we saw him. He was in a cage sort of thing. There were sticks all around. And mud. And the men sat around a small fire roasting things on long twigs, like a weenie roast but without the weenies. Then other men wearing back baggy pants came in with guns and made them go into that cage made of sticks. It was a low, boxy thing like for pigs, only men lived in there. American men covered with mud with ripped-up clothes, and their hands were tied at the wrist. It smelled terrible, like when our septic tank overflowed.”

Burke leaned forward and squinted at me, his eyes red-rimmed and nearly pulsing. “What the hell have you been smokin’?”

I shrugged and looked down at my untied sneaker.

“You just pretty much described what it’s like. You see a movie or somethin’?”

“We don’t go much to movies,” Scout said, still rocking his porch swing. “My dad isn’t working regular, and Mom says her laundry business just covers groceries, so we don’t get to go to the movies. We were playing a game in my brother’s jalopy and then we went there.”

“Where?”

“’Nam, I guess. We even brought back the biggest grasshopper you ever saw.”

“Oh yeah? You brought a grasshopper back from ’Nam? I’d like to see that. I’d give you a buck to see that.” A smirk grew across Burke’s face. He didn’t believe us.

The two of us flew back to the coupe and plucked the Alta Coffee jar out of the weeds. The hopper was dead now. Dead for sure, its legs motionless and stiff and sticking straight up. We walked back carefully, not wanting to jiggle our prize specimen. Burke, deep into his book again, barely looked up when we clambered up his stairs.

I held the jar proudly aloft, then slowly brought it down and presented it to him. I expected to get a buck, but instead, a whole slew of swear words came out of Burke’s mouth and he shot out of his swing like someone had needled him in the behind. Then he looked right and left. I was sure he was going to run, but it didn’t look as if he could choose a direction. I wondered if he would throw the jar on the ground and smash it into a million pieces, then step on our prize hopper, because he sure looked mad. Eventually, he sat back down. I heard him whisper in a croaky voice, “Where the hell you get this?”

Our shoulders moved up and down. We didn’t know. Not really. We thought we knew, but how could we?

“You just tell me now,” he said softly. “You just take your time and tell me all about it. Tell me how you got this here grasshopper and I’ll believe you.”

No grown-up had ever spoken to us like that before, and the story of our jalopy ride came tumbling out. I told some, then Scout, then me again. And at the end, Burke leaned back, tilted his face to the waning sun, clasped The Time Machine to his chest like it was the Holy Bible, and exhaled. “A wormhole in time,” he whispered to himself. “And a little child shall lead us.”

Scout and I looked at each other. She rolled her eyes and squelched a giggle. “You’re just like Boo Radley,” Scout said. “You ever read that book To Kill a Mockingbird? Our teacher read it to us. It’s my favorite. That’s why I like the name Scout. Want to know my favorite line in the book?”

Burke looked right through Scout, then he stared back down into the coffee jar.

“Please pass the damn ham,” she said, dissolving into a fit of giggles. She knew she wasn’t supposed to swear, but I didn’t scold her. I kept my eyes on Burke.

Presently, he turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and stared deep into my eyes. “Can I come with you next time?”

“Uh…sure. Why not? I mean, you’ll have to sit in the backseat.” I wasn’t going to surrender my place behind the steering wheel, and I needed Scout to do whatever it was she did to make the car move. No way Burke was going to ride shotgun.

“Okay,” he said, tossing the book on the porch swing. “Come over tomorrow morning. Early. Say, oh seven hundred.”

“What’s that?”

His gaze slit right through me. “Seven o’clock. Before the heat kicks up.”

“Sure. We’ll come get you and…uh…we’ll have to go the back way, sneak you over. My mom…”

“Yeah, I know what she says.” His voice went into a silly falsetto. “Stay away from that guy, he’s crazy.” Heat colored my face while Burke cackled, “I’m not crazy. I just get sad, that’s all. ’Nam is a miserable place. I think about it and it makes me sad. I was MIA. I was in a cage like what you said and I don’t want to think about it, but sometimes I can’t think about anything else. Understand?” He stared down at the grasshopper jar, picked it up again, shook it, then moved it around and around. It was his own private kaleidoscope and he took his time getting the full show. “These are good eating. Did you know that? When I was captured, we ate grasshoppers every chance we got.”

Scout and I wrinkled our noses.

“You split them open and there’s a big wing muscle on each side. Roast it like a ballpark frank. Tastes like chicken.”

On our way home, we talked it over. Tomorrow we would bring supplies. A thermos of water. Some bread. Hats. Maybe we still had some 6-12 bug oil. We had to do this carefully. We couldn’t be stopped by Mom or Dad—not that I thought they would notice, but parents were sometimes unpredictable.

The valley heat fired up at dawn. Our family used to be up then, my dad leaving for work, my mom starting the first loads of wash. Since Donald went missing and Dad lost his job, my parents seemed to sleep more and more. Scout and I padded around the empty kitchen, fixing our cold cereal, making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and stuffing our meager supplies into an old grocery sack. Right on schedule, we tapped at Burke’s door.

He opened it and stood there in a three-color camouflage uniform with lots of pockets with flaps. A faded green hat with a brim all the way around was on his head. On his feet were scuffed-up boots with netting above the ankles. He was scary. He was thrilling. He was a real GI Joe, and he was coming with us.

“What did you bring?” I said, envying his backpack.

His voice was official as a sergeant. “Canteen. Flashlight. Shovel. Compass. C-rats.”

“Rats?” Scout yelped.

He looked down at her. “Food packs.”

Scout grinned. “We brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

My sister always embarrassed me. Here we were with a real soldier and she had to come out with that.

Taking the back way, we walked up to my brother’s jalopy, and I was embarrassed all over again. It was stupid to think that we had gone anywhere in this thing, anywhere at all. Burke dropped his backpack on the tamped down weeds and walked around the old car. At the back right fender, he whistled.

“What?” I said, coming over to him.

“Took some flack here,” he said.

“Oh no!” I said, kneeling down on the soft, dry grass. Three bullet holes as even as the stars in Orion’s Belt pierced the dull metal. Had they been there before?

“They shot at us,” Scout said, rocking back and forth and hooking her thumbs in the straps of her overalls. Excuses I would give to my father, should he notice the holes, were swimming in my head. On one hand, the holes were evidence, but on the other hand they would have to be repaired. I heard Scout say, “Did you bring a gun, Mr. Burke?”

Distracted, Burke scratched his forehead. “Yeah. Yeah, I did,” he said, continuing his trip around the car. “Where was that grasshopper?”

“Here.” I pointed to the grill at the front of the hood.

Burke squatted down, staring into the grill as though it might be a television. Then he pulled a large straight knife out of somewhere near his boot, stuck the flat blade through the grill, and pulled out a smashed mosquito as big as a quarter. “Hate these guys,” he said to himself. He stood up and continued his inspection. We met at the rear of the coupe.

“Well, you lead,” he said. “You kids did something. This car went somewhere. I don’t know the how, nor the why.” His voice trailed off and he spat toward the fence, then straightened his shoulders. “So let’s try to do it again. Okay, buddy?” He nodded toward me. “You just do what you did.”

I opened the driver’s side door, pulled back the seat, and set down our lunch bag, which now had spreading jelly stains on the bottom. The smell of peanut butter permeated the air. “You sit back here,” I said, pointing. Burke tossed his pack next to our paper sack and crawled in. Scout opened the door on her side and jumped in, slamming the door behind her. “Not so loud,” I warned. “You’ll wake up Mom and Dad.”

“Sorry,” she whispered.

Now that we were in the jalopy, I was embarrassed to do what I had done before: bounce around and make motor noises. The whole thing seemed childish and stupid. Self consciously, I turned the wheel as if I were driving, but I couldn’t muster any spirit. Scout was worse. She stared straight ahead like an old lady out for a Sunday drive.

Burke sighed. “Mind if we open a window? It’s hotter than Hades in here.”

“Sure,” I said. Since I couldn’t seem to manufacture the great game of pretend we had going the other day, I worried that we weren’t going anywhere.

“Open windows mean you get smoke and bugs in here,” Scout warned.

“I’ll take the chance,” Burke said, dryly. I knew he didn’t believe us. “Is this what you did? Just sat here sweltering and then you took off?”

“No,” Scout said. “We were pretending something. We got all excited and banged around. I was fiddling with the windshield wiper and pulling the choke in and out. We called it our throttle. Sometimes I pretended it was a rocket launcher.”

“And then it just happened,” I said, turning around. Burke’s tongue poked into the side of his mouth and made it misshapen. Suddenly, a deep flush of shame wafted over me. Involving a grown-up was a stupid idea from the start.

“Then maybe we should pretend something,” Burke said.

I nodded, but I couldn’t think of anything. Then Scout said, “Okay, Mr. Burke. I’m Dale Evans and this is my spaceship and I’m in trouble and you guys are going to shoot the people chasing me.”

“Dale Evans doesn’t have a spaceship,” I said.

“She does, too. And this is it.”

“No. I’m Flash Gordon and we’re running from Ming and the Moon Creatures.”

“Well, I’m still Dale Evans, and I carry a ray gun and a purple purse.”

Burke caught on. “Holy smokes, Moon Creatures at two o’clock. Better step on it. Move out, soldier!”

“They’re behind us, too!” shrieked Scout. “Zoooo. Zoooo,” she cried, pointing and shooting her ray gun.

I made the motor noise and bounced around the seat, pretending we were going over boulders. “Fire guns at two o’clock,” I commanded. Scout reached up for the windshield lever and stroked it back and forth. Leaning down, she pulled the choke in and out. I twisted the thing for the headlights, fiddled with a lever, and tried to shift the car into another gear.

“Another one at twelve o’clock!” Burke shouted. “Get him!”

“Blam, blam. Shoof, shoof.” Scout was everywhere. She shot with one hand and worked the levers with the other, then opened the glove box for more ammo. The car lurched and smoke billowed, and the sense of rising became heavy against my arms and neck. I heard Scout say between her teeth, “Here it comes again,” and the next thing I knew the car dropped as fast as it had soared, only this time we were spinning out of control.

There were no seat belts, nothing to hold us down, and this time the landing, perhaps because of Burke’s weight, came with a great thud. I could hear his head hit the car roof and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Scout slam against the dash. I held fast to the steering wheel and pushed back as hard as I could.

A greasy haze filled the car. Coughing and choking, I checked myself over. Nothing was broken, but I wanted to spit the burned smell out of my mouth. I didn’t dare. If my brother knew I had spat in his car, he’d never forgive me, so I wrinkled my eyes and swallowed. From the backseat, I could hear Burke rubbing his head and cursing. Wow, that guy knew some pretty fancy swear words.

“You okay?” I asked Scout.

“Damn, that hurts,” she said, clutching her head.

I let her get away with swearing. After all, she had a bump on her eye the size of half a hard-boiled egg.

Peering over the hood with her good eye, she mumbled, “There’s that bamboo again.”

“Holy—” Burke gulped and didn’t finish his sentence. “Stay down,” he whispered, opening his backpack and groping through it. “This is crazy. Man, this is crazy!” I could hear the click of metal against metal. Burke had loaded his gun.

“Should we show him where Donald is?” Scout whispered.

I would have been content to just stare at the bamboo and then try to get back home.

“There’s probably Cong everywhere,” Burke said. “You kids stay here. I’ll take a look around.”

That wasn’t fair. This was our trip, and here was Burke acting like he owned the place. But he couldn’t get out of the backseat without me getting out of the car first. “I’m coming, too,” I said, jumping out of the car and holding the door open for him.

Burke leaned down so his mouth was next to my ear. “No talking,” he whispered. Then he looked at Scout and put his finger to his lips. She stared up at him with one big eye, the other one swelling into a homely wink. She was going to have a real shiner.

Burke squatted by the edge of the car and sniffed like a dog. He looked funny, but this was no joke. Heart pounding like a hammer, I crouched behind him. Scout lined up behind me, ready for a game of follow the leader. For a long time, Burke didn’t move. He just sniffed and listened while the sun beat down on my back and made sweat trickle everywhere. I closed my eyes and listened and let the jungle fill me up with the sounds of bugs, the smell of leaves and sour grass.

Five minutes passed, maybe ten before the sound of voices drifted towards us. Burke began to creep. He moved slowly, like a snake after its prey, while Scout and I followed him inch-by-inch. After a while, I again detected that foul odor, that stench of human waste we had smelled the other day. It was the same clearing, only now we were over by the edge of the trees where the bamboo ended. Surely Donald would be near.

Burke stopped moving and stared ahead. The voices were closer now and I could catch some English words. I crept up alongside Burke and could finally see what he saw: a group of guys sitting in a wooden cage. Burke shed his backpack, opened it up and handed me a compass, a knife, and a couple of green zippered packs. “Stay here,” he whispered, taking everything back from me and stuffing it into the pockets of his vest. Then he slipped his backpack on again. “I’ll be right back. If something happens, leave without me, okay? I’ll make it on my own.”

Scout and I flattened ourselves against the grassy earth and huddled together watching Burke crouch as though he were starting a race. Suddenly, he bolted through the bamboo, ran up to the cage, and stuffed his items through the rungs.

Distant gunshots made me cringe. Burke motioned for us to go back, but he ran in the opposite direction and I lost sight of him.

Scout and I worked our way back the way we came, only this time we moved much faster. We climbed into the coupe and hid in the backseat. The smell of hot peanut butter nearly made me throw up. We waited, but Burke didn’t come back.

The sun moved across the sky. Bugs crept in through the cracks in the windows. Centipedes, moving with the precision of swimmers, crawled across the windshield. We even saw a snake slither across the glass. We marveled at its golden underbelly, praying it would leave us alone, relieved when it fell off the side of the car. Still, Burke didn’t come back.

Scout declared that she was hungry. She opened our lunch bag and brought out the thermos of water, which we shared, then unwrapped the melting waxed paper holding our stack of sandwiches. We each ate one then fell asleep on the backseat of the stifling car. The next thing I remember, a burst of gun fire awoke us. I felt Scout grip my arm.

“Where’s Burke?” I whispered.

“Dunno,” she said. “I can’t see him, but I hear voices. They’re coming.”

Alert as hunting dogs, we peered over the back seat, watching and waiting for Burke to return. Slowly, I climbed into the front seat, put the window down a bit and lifted myself so my ear was right up next to it. I could hear voices. Shouted commands. Then came more shots.

“Let’s go,” Scout said. She scrambled head first into the front seat.

“We can’t leave without him,” I whispered.

The yelling came closer. Scout put a vise-grip on my arm. “He said to go if he didn’t come back. Let’s get outta here.”

“Hush. You’re too loud,” I whispered. Looking out the front window, I listened again. I knew Burke said to leave without him. But how would he get back home?

The bamboo shook. I expected Burke to burst through it, but instead, a mean looking man rose slowly in front of the hood. Scout screamed. I screamed. We both began to bang around, pull things, jerk levers, and work the shift. Anything we could grab onto, we toggled and punched.

“Come on, G,” she cried. “Do it. Make it go!”

“It’s not working!”

“Do what you did before!” Scout screamed.

She fiddled with the door lock, the windshield wiper lever, and the glove box. I worked the shift and the clutch pedal and the starter button. In the distance I could hear more voices.

The car lurched. The men yelled. There were men all around us. I trounced the gas pedal and we lurched again, then rocked. Smoke surrounded us and I felt heavy, like we were in a fast elevator soaring upward. Bullets rocked the car. Scout screamed and I looked at her. A scrape the width of a rope had appeared on the back of her hand. There was a bullet hole in the windshield. Helpless in flight, we gazed at each other. Now that we were flying, we would have to come down.

“Hang on!” I yelled.

She grabbed the door handle with one hand and braced herself against the dashboard with the other.

“Here it comes,” I said, between gritted teeth. Scout was a mess. Her eye was bulging and blue and now there was blood coming down her arm. “You okay?”

She nodded and then growled like a wounded dog. Amidst the hiss of smoke and the smell of burning oil, we were being thrown forward and back, up and down. After the fog cleared, the stillness made my ears buzz.

“That was your worst damn landing yet,” Scout said.

I didn’t correct her. It was nearly dark now, and there were bigger things to think about. I knew we would be in trouble for being so late. I wondered what fib we should tell our parents.

I had no time to think. Dad met us at the back gate, the fear on his face morphing into a mask of anger. “What the… Just where do you think… The police are looking for you. Just where have you two been?”

I’ve gone over and over in my mind what we should have said. What we could have said. There was no right answer and, I suppose, no wrong answer either.

We said we’d been with Burke Dawson and we had gone to Vietnam and Donald was coming home soon. Instead of congratulations, we received a whipping and were sent to bed without dinner. Scout and I didn’t mind about the dinner as we were still full of peanut butter sandwiches, but the sting of the switch on my backside and legs reminded me of insects and snakes and those centipedes we saw crawl over the car.

The next morning, Dad went over to Burke’s house. He didn’t find him. We could have told him that.

Scout and I were grounded for the next week, but we didn’t care. We still managed to sneak over to Burke’s place and rap on his back door, even though we knew he couldn’t possibly be there. We thought of going to get him in the jalopy, but we had been punished too severely and had been told that if we even went out the back gate, or thought of going inside that old car, we would be sent to juvenile hall. We didn’t know where that was, but it sounded pretty bad.

Mom and Dad wanted to know how Carol Anne got her black eye and that nasty scrape on her wrist. We both had the same story and this confounded them. Scout was even spanked again for lying. I vouched for her, but that didn’t do any good. I got punished all over again, no dinner and another whack on the backside.

Mom said that because we had disobeyed and hung out with Burke Dawson, we couldn’t tell the difference between a lie and the truth. The arguments about this went on for hours and always ended up the same way: we were told to go to our rooms and think about what happened to liars. I suppose I was to envision hell, but, since I’d told the truth, I occupied myself with comic books.

Just as our confinement came to an end, my parents got a call from the Army. Donald had returned to his unit. He was being shipped out to McClellan Air Force Base within the week, and we were to pick him up. Mom cried. So did Dad.

Except for Scout and me, no one was prepared to see Donald as skinny and listless as he had become. Day after day, he sat ghost-like in the living room and stared at the television. He would get up before dawn and we would find him watching the test pattern, that round bull’s eye with the station number in the middle, and listening to the high-pitched insect whine coming from the set. I don’t know how he stood it.

I tried to talk to Donald, but he would only answer my questions with one or two words. I didn’t know how to bring up the damage to his jalopy, and he didn’t go out the back gate to see it. As usual, it was Scout, still sporting the last remnants of her shiner, who began to blabber about it.

She climbed up on Donald’s lap one morning, curled up against him, and began sucking her thumb, even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to do it anymore. As she twiddled a piece of her hair, she said, “Donny, do you remember that cage they put you in?”

He jerked and tried to look at her, but her head was wedged up under his chin and he couldn’t see her face. “Well, G and I—you know, Terry—we went there.”

“Where, Carol Anne?”

“To the place where they kept you in that cage with those five other guys. We saw you sitting in a circle roasting things on sticks. We saw the way your hands were tied and the sores on the bottom of your feet. Did you know we were there? Did you see us behind the bamboo? Did you?”

Donny didn’t answer.

“We went twice. Once by ourselves, then we took Burke.”

“Who’s Burke?” he asked.

“He’s a guy who moved into the Johnson’s old house. He came with us the week before last and he’s the one who brought you the stuff. Remember? A knife, a compass—you know, some Army stuff.”

Donny stood up and abruptly put Scout down, then fished something out of his pocket. “This?” he said.

I took the compass from his hand and turned it over. Burke P. Dawson, it read on the back. “Wow, it’s his.”

“You know him?” For the first time, Donny’s face flushed with color.

“I told you,” Scout said. “He came with us that day.”

“That guy. He slipped it through the cage.” Donny was silent for a time, then taking the compass back from me, he said, softly, “I’d like to meet him.”

“He didn’t come back with us,” I said, my voice somewhat shaky.

Donny’s face wrinkled up, making him look old.

“It wasn’t our fault,” I said. “He told us if he didn’t return, he’d find his way back and we were to leave without him.”

Donny nodded and flipped the compass over and over in his palm. “Yeah,” he said. “When he slipped it through the bars, he said he wouldn’t be needing it anymore. He said to head north, then circle around to the south.”

“We waited for him,” Scout said. “Then the men came and they had guns and we got scared so we had to come back alone.”

Donny stared at us again, then he noticed the television. “Turn that TV off,” he said. “I can’t stand that high pitched noise anymore. Sounds like bugs.”

Scout switched it off. “You wanna’ see a bug? You ought to see our hopper.”

Donny fondled the compass, moving his hand up and down as though pondering its weight. “So you know this guy?”

I nodded.

“Poor bastard ran into the forest,” Donny said.

“Maybe he’ll come back just like you did,” Scout said.

“Maybe,” Donny mumbled. “Can you show me his place?”

We walked him over there, climbed up the rickety stairs, and knocked on the door. Of course, Burke wasn’t home. We knew that. Then Donny sat on the porch swing and Scout snuggled in beside him and began to suck her thumb. I sat on the other side of Donny and the three of us just rocked.

I was in high school when Donny began to fix up that old jalopy. He wanted to make it into a hotrod, and so he drew up his plans, and chose a color scheme for the paint job. On weekends, I would help him. First we took out the rusted engine and cleaned each piece by soaking it in gasoline and scrubbing it with a wire brush. It was while we were cleaning the engine that Donny let out a yelp.

“You hurt?” I said, rushing over to him.

Donny removed his hands from behind the engine well. He had scooped up something that sounded dry and crinkly. I thought the six or seven husks clutched between his palms were seed pods and I bent my head down into the gaping hole where the motor had been and took a closer look. Cradled within his hands, grasshoppers crackled like fresh potato chips. Grasshoppers just as big as the one Carol Anne and I had found in front of the jalopy the day we took our first ride.

Eventually, I dumped the newfound grasshoppers in with the first one, and from time to time, Donny and I would stare into the jar and admire them. Donny wouldn’t say more about what happened out there in ’Nam and I never forced him to. I was relieved he didn’t complain about the bullet holes in the back fender.

Whenever the family gathers, we usually find ourselves out in the shed talking. I pull down that old coffee jar and the three of us, Donny, Carol Anne, and I, gaze into the mess of bodies. As grown-ups we don’t like to conjecture about what happened that strange summer Scout and I flew away in Donald’s jalopy. I guess we’re all so glad to have Donny back, we want to leave the how and the why of it well enough alone.