Free The Schernoff Discoveries by Gary Paulsen

window to appear nonchalant, like I’d been doing it all my life. Another mile.
    Harold spit and while he had to rise and spit high to clear his half-open window, it still looked good and I envied him. Could there, I thought, be anything in life to equal this feeling? Well, maybe That—That was a mystery still far removed from us—but short of That, there was nothing like this car and this summer afternoon, moving through a day with the motor missing only a little and the transmission quietly growling.
    Another mile and I turned north, thinking I would make a large loop on the section roads and then let Harold drive. Still another mile and I was starting to sing a Hank Williams song when with no warning the engine exploded.
    It was not a small noise, not a diminutive sniffle of a problem, but a full-throated, tooth-rattling bang that shook the car, slammed it to the side, blew a cloud of smoke and ancient dirt and grease into the air and shot a jet of flame back into the passenger compartment with us.
    “Out!” I just had time to yell. I pulled the wheel to the right and brought her to a stop in a shallow ditch. We piled out and ran up onto theroad and stood there while she burned, completely and totally, until nothing was left but the twisted carcass, black and tortured and dead, smoke curling into the Minnesota summer afternoon.
    I cried some. Not a lot, but some, a short sniffle or two. “She was a good car,” I said, and meant it, and would always mean it. In all my life I would never have a car to equal her.
    “She was our car,” Harold said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “She was a good car and she was
our
car. How far did we go?”
    I looked away, unable to bear the grief. It was easy to figure. Each section road was a mile long. “If you figure in leaving the driveway and all, we came just eight miles.”
    Harold looked back down the road in the direction we’d come from and then he looked at me and so help me God he smiled—wide and open, his teeth white against his smoke-stained face.
    “Yes,” he said, “but
what
an eight miles!”
    And we started the long walk back to town, into our lives and all that would come to us.

Afterword

    Time moves faster all the time, especially with age, and while Harold and the rest of them seem still young in my mind they are not; they have gone on to larger and fuller lives.
    Julie Hansen became a flight attendant, married a pilot, moved to Colorado and, through cosmetic surgery, not having children, and never acknowledging stress, has refused to age. She still looks and acts like a cheerleader.
    Chimmer dropped out of school when he was sixteen, rumbled around for a year driving a hotrod and getting in trouble, and then joined the army. He went into straight infantry, loved it (as might be expected, he was the only person I have known who actually
liked
combat), fought in Vietnam and retired as a master sergeant after thirty years. He lives in California with a wife who bosses him and a small, mean dog with a name that cannot be said in public, a dog he’s trained to chase children from his yard.
    Many others I knew then went on to success, more or less. The captain of the football team has bad knees and sells insurance; there are pictures of him as a teenager in his football uniform all over his plywood-paneled office and he makes a point to mention them to every customer.
    Marley, the shop teacher who used a birch rod on children, retired to Arizona, where he secretly nurses the hope that they will allow capital punishment in junior high schools.
    Wankle, the football coach, went on to never win the region, conference or state. He retired frustrated and angry to a small house outside Las Vegas, where he lives with a wife who spends a great deal of time shopping for things he doesn’t like or want.
    As for me, I flunked the ninth grade, took it over, barely made it through high school, joined the army (where I did
not
like infantry), tried a stint