Next Ish put the gear into high, and they shoved again. This was a different story. The car did not budge.
The question was now whether the engine and gears were merely stiff from disuse or whether they were actually rusted tight somewhere.
Looking under the hood, Ish saw that the engine was well smeared with grease, as engines usually were. There was little sign of external rust, but that might show nothing about what had happened inside.
The boys looked at him expectantly, and he thought of expedients. He could try the other car. He could have the boys bring the dog-teams in and hitch them to the car. Then he had another idea.
The jeep which had been in the process of being repaired was only some ten feet behind the one they had chosen to try. If they could shove that one forward out of gear, they might send it against the rear of the other with enough momentum to make something give. Also they might smash something, but that was no matter!
They brought this jeep within two feet of the other, and rested. Then, altogether, they shoved again.
There was a satisfactory bang of metal on metal. Going to look, they found that the first jeep had moved three inches. After that, they could move it with hard pushing, even when it was in gear. Ish began to feel triumphant.
“You see,” he said, “once you get something moving it’s easier to keep moving!” (Then he wondered whether that principle applied to groups of people, as well as to engines.)
The battery of course was dead, but Ish had faced that problem before. First, however, he gave the boys instructions to drain all oil out of the car and replace it with oil from sealed cans, using the lightest oil available.
Leaving them at work, he went off with a dog-team. In half an hour he was back with a battery. He connected it, and turned the key in the ignition switch, watching the needle on the ammeter. Nothing happened. Perhaps the wiring was gone somewhere.
But he tapped the ammeter, and the long unused needle suddenly disengaged and went jiggling over to
“Well, boys,” he said, “here’s a real test…. Yes, I guess this is the acid test, seeing that that’s what we have in the battery!” But the boys grinned blankly, never having heard the expression, and Ish found himself a little disturbed that he had been able to make a pun at such a climax. He pressed the starter-button. There was a long grunt.
Then slowly the engine turned!
After the first turn it moved more easily, and then more easily still. So far, so good!
The gasoline-tank was empty, like most of them these days. Probably their caps were not air-tight, or else the gasoline seeped through the carburetor—Ish did not know.
They found gasoline in a drum, and poured five gallons into the tank. Ish put in fresh spark-plugs. He primed the carburetor, feeling a little proud that he knew enough to do so. He got into the seat, set the choke, snapped the ignition on again, and tramped on the starter-button.
The engine grunted, turned over, turned faster, and then suddenly roared into life.
The boys were shouting. Ish sat triumphantly, nursing the throttle with his foot. He felt a sense of pride in the old achievements of civilization—in all the honest design and honest work of engineers and machinists which had gone into fashioning this engine, fit to work after twenty-some years of idleness.
The engine, however, died suddenly when the gas in the carburetor was exhausted. They primed and ran it again, and still again, and finally the ancient pump brought up gas from the tank, and the engine ran continuously. The problem now—and perhaps the worst of all—was tires.
In the same display-room there was one of the usual tireracks well raised above the floor. But the tires had been standing upright for so long that they had sagged a little under their own weight, and the rubber, where it had rested against the rack, was badly indented. Such tires, even though they might last for a few miles, held obviously little possibility for a long run. By searching carefully, they finally found some tires which had been resting on their sides, and these seemed to be in better condition, although the rubber was hard and full of little cracks, and gave an impression of being dead.
They found a jack, and raised the first wheel from the ground. Even to get the wheel off was a struggle, for the nuts had begun to rust to the threads.
Bob and Dick were unaccustomed to the use of tools, and little Joey kept getting in the way with his eagerness, and was more hindrance than help. Even in the Old Times Ish had never dismounted a tire except once or twice in an emergency, and he had forgotten the tricks, if he had ever known them.
They spent a long time sweating the first tire off the rim. Bob barked a knuckle, and Dick tore a finger-nail half off. Getting the “new” tire onto the rim was even more of a struggle, both because of their clumsiness and because of the tire’s own aged stiffness. At last, tired and thoroughly irritated with one another and with the whole job, they finished getting this one tire onto the rim.
Just as they were pausing, triumphant but tired, Ish heard Joey calling to him from across the garage.
“What is it, Joey?” he answered, a little petulantly.
“Come here, Daddy.”
“Oh, Joey, I’m tired,” he said, but he went, and the two other boys trailed with him. Joey was pointing at the spare wheel of one of the jeeps.
“Look, Daddy,” he said, “why couldn’t you use that one?”
All Ish could do was to burst out laughing.
“Well, boys,” he said to Dick and Bob, “that’s the time we made fools of ourselves!”
The tire on the spare wheel had been suspended in the air all these years, and it was already on a wheel. They had not needed to shift any tires. All they had needed to do was to take this and the other spares, pump them up, and put them on their own jeep. They had done a lot of work for no purpose because they had just barged along and not used their heads.
Then Ish, suddenly recognizing his own stupidity, strangely gained a new pleasure. Joey was the one who had seen! But by now it was time for lunch.
They had brought along only their spoons and always essential can-openers.
Now they went off to the nearest grocery store.
Like all the others it was a scene of devastation and litter and ruin. A mess! It was depressing to Ish, even horrible, in spite of the many times he had seen its like. The boys, however, thought nothing of it, never having seen a grocery store in any other state. Rats and mice had chewed into all the cartons, and the floor was deep with the remnants of cardboard and paper, mixed with rodent droppings. Even the toilet paper had been chewed, probably for nesting.
But the rodents could do nothing with glass or tin, and so the bottles and cans were undisturbed. They even looked startlingly neat, at first glance, in contrast with the mess elsewhere. When you looked closer, they were not really neat. Droppings were scattered even on these shelves, and many labels had been chewed, probably because of the paste beneath the paper. Also the colors had faded, so that the once bright red tomatoes on the labels were a sickly yellow, and the rosy-cheeked peaches had almost disappeared.
The labels, however, were still readable. At least, Ish and Joey could read them, and the others, though they got stuck on many hard words like
The boys were quite ready to sit down in the liner and eat. Ish, however, wanted to get outside. So they went and sat on the curb in the sun.
They did not bother with a fire, but ate a cold lunch out of the cans, each to his choice, from a selection of baked beans, sardines, salmon, liver loaf, corned beef, olives, peanuts, and asparagus. Such a meal, Ish knew, ran high in proteins and fats and low in carbohydrates, but there were few carbohydrates that had been canned or bottled, and the few that you could find, like hominy and macaroni, called for heating. For drink, they had tomato juice. They ate a desert of canned nectarines and pineapple.
When they had finished, they wiped off the spoons and can-openers and put them back into their pockets. The halfempty cans they merely left lying. There was so much litter in the street already that something more did not matter.
The boys, Ish was glad to notice, were in a hurry to get back to work at the car. They had apparently begun to feel a little of the intoxication that was likely to come from a mastery over power. He himself was a little tired,
