Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (no david read aloud TXT) 📗

street and realized, then, that it was more road-worthy than he had hoped for. And if, somewhere down the road, the old Schooner stopped, so would he. There were other ways to get home.

While Kit looked the other way, Big Al took the Jaguar through a few figure eights and then gleefully pronounced the sleek car fit. “I think I’ll drive it for a while myself,” he chortled, his big lips bouncing. But when he saw Kit blanch and move, unblinking, toward the car that was still his, he hollered, “I’ll throw in a tank of gas and a month’s propane,” and pocketed the keys. Then he did Kit a bigger favor than either of them realized at the time: he insisted that Kit clean out the Jag, bumper to bumper, before leaving it behind. “You never know what you might turn up,” he said wisely.

So Kit emptied the glove compartment, checked the trunk, tipped the visors, glanced in the ashtray, and at the last minute peered under the seats. The string-bound box he found under the driver’s seat puzzled him. It was about the size of a Bible and inordinately heavy. He thought that it must belong to Holly, must have slipped out of her luggage, out of sight, been forgotten. But with Big Al waiting impatiently to close the deal, Kit simply added the box to the maps and flashlight he’d retrieved from the Jaguar and stashed the lot in a handsome wooden trunk bolted to the floor next to the Schooner’s driver’s seat. Then he went into Al’s cluttered office and made everything legal.

Halfway into his cringing chair, Big Al suddenly froze. “Got the title with you? Can’t do the deal otherwise,” he said, looking as if he might well cry.

“Oddly enough, I do,” Kit said, and he too looked close to tears. He’d been delighted when, upon turning eighteen, he’d been able to transfer the car into his own name. His father had encouraged the exchange, convinced that it would teach his son to be responsible about his possessions, but Kit knew that it would enrage his father to realize how easy he had made it for his son to take flight.

“Shouldn’t keep the title in the car, you know,” Al said, lowering himself all the way into his chair, which whined a bit before surrendering. “Makes it easy for thieves—present company excepted, of course,” he added, braying.

With his pen poised, Kit looked up. “I don’t suppose you’d rent it to me for a couple of weeks?”

“Don’t rent,” said Big Al. “Never have. Never will, Buy, sell, or get out of the way. That’s the business I’m in.”

“Well, I guess I’ve come this far. Might as well go all the way.” But his hand shook a little as he penned his name.

“The owner’s manual is in the glove compartment, but I’d better warn you right up front,” said Al, now that the deal was done. “You’ll have to learn a few tricks to keep this baby on an even keel. Watch your corners, even more important, watch your overhead clearance, watch your gas gauge—this thing is a truck, you know. Burns gas like nothin’. But ’cause it’s a truck it’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Fields, dirt roads, snow. No problem. Trust me. Oh,” and here he stopped, pursed his lips and made a face. “You’ll have to figure out your own method of waste disposal. Depends where you are, of course. Lots of campgrounds have dumping facilities. Some gas stations even. Laws vary, state to state. The Schooner’s equipped with a tank you can drain with a hose into any toilet. Or you can get a portable thing and just flush the stuff, or dig a deep hole, or burn it, I suppose. I don’t mean to go on about it, but nothin’ll put you off motoring faster than a stench. But you’ll figure out what suits you, soon enough.”

As he had before, Kit suddenly felt as if he had lost all control and were in someone else’s hands entirely. What in God’s name am I doing? he wondered, more frantically than before and with a measure of anguish brought on by the sight of his Jag basking outside Al’s office window. The thought of attending to toilets and the like horrified him. He had begun to feel excited, however, about this adventure. So he said good-bye to Big Al, shook his pudgy hand, boarded the Schooner, and set sail.

Rarely in his life had Kit felt foolish. He’d never been a foolish boy and had not evolved into a foolish young man. At least he’d never thought so. But for the first fifty miles after leaving Big Al’s Used Cars and Trucks, Kit made up for lost time, to the disgust of his fellow travelers. For mile after agonizing mile, he struggled to master the combined arts of steering the thirty-eight-foot Schooner along the winding country roads, urging it up the rolling hills, bringing its unwieldy tonnage to a stop in a dozen small towns, negotiating their corners, and changing lanes. After nearly wrecking his new home when he misjudged a left-hand turn in the middle of a congested town—and forcing eight cars behind him to back up into oncoming traffic so that he could extricate himself—Kit pulled into a church parking lot, switched off the engine, and laid his head gently on the Schooner’s big steering wheel. He stayed that way for a while, tired, terrified, and ashamed of his incompetence, while the traffic hustled by him. He wondered if his father had ever had moments like this. He tried to picture him afraid, undone, but could not. He tried to picture him as a boy, dirty with play, laughing, curious about the world. But he could not do this either.

He realized then how little he knew about his father. He had seen photographs of his grandparents, long dead, and heard some stories about their lives. More about them than about his