'Finders Keepers'
By Indiana
Characters: Jonathan Crane
Synopsis: The story of how Jonathan Crane got that truck I won't shut up about.
He'd thought it a hallucination at first.
It was another long, hot day and the boarding house was filled foundations to rafters with more clamour than he cared to suffer through at the moment, so he had quietly slipped out before Miss Crane accosted him to do some chore or another and gone off walking. The town was shrinking and everyone knew it. Everyone feared it. Not Jonathan, though. It meant he had more abandoned, overgrown fields to hide in.
And that was how he found it.
It was just sitting there, somewhere in the depths of a wheat field that had gone to seed once or twice. White with blue trim, it was covered over with several layers of dust but otherwise it seemed to be brand-new. Jonathan had to pause and stare at it for a minute or so, squinting at the heat shimmer and wondering if he had the ability to conjure an entire pickup truck before his own eyes without ever having seen anything that looked like this. When he decided it was unlikely he closed the handful of feet between himself and the vehicle and walked around to look at the rest of it.
The bed was filled with old hay. At the very back of it, where the end met up against the cab, was a metal storage box with a steel loop for a padlock but holding none. Jonathan frowned at it. The rear bumper was as pristine, though dusty, as the front had been, and it still had attached both of the plates it had been issued from the state of Georgia. It honestly looked as though someone had driven it out of the Ford factory in Missouri, filled it with one badly-formed bale of hay, and immediately abandoned it here upon discovering the country life wasn't what they'd thought it would be. The shining steel of the bumpers and mirrors did not even have fingerprints on them yet.
He walked around to the passenger side and squinted through the dusty window. The cab was run across with a wide bench made of dark blue and brown vinyl, and the dashboard also was blue. There was nothing left inside the vehicle at all by whomever had left it here. Not so much as a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror.
Jonathan looked behind him, half expecting to find some irate farmer come to yell at him for touching his precious truck, but he knew as well as the field was abandoned that there was no one else here. He slid his fingers around the door handle and held his thumb against the button. He did not know how to drive so there was not really a point in opening the door and getting into the truck. And even if he'd had some inkling, he could see from the stick rising out of the floor that it was a manual. Plenty of other kids in town could drive manuals, seeing as they had to in order to help with the farm chores, but whatever breed Jonathan was it was not a hardy one. He had learned long, long ago that even in the height of summer he at all times had to be clad in longsleeved shirt, pants, and wide-brimmed hat, for anything less would allow the sun to leave his pale skin bright pink and painful. This was one of those unpleasant days that had already seen his clothes soaked through with sweat, and he knew from experience the interior of the cab would be stiflingly hot and the baking vinyl would sear even through his jeans. But his thumb pushed the button in anyway and the door opened and he decided he may as well do something other than stand in front of this open pickup truck and just keep staring at it.
It was hot. He removed his hat and sat back in the bench there on the passenger side, half-heartedly attempting to get some of his rust-coloured hair out of his face. It was a little too long and he'd been told so many times, but it was either this or incur sunburns on the top of his head when he forgot to wear his hat outside. He had never bothered explaining this, however. There was rarely very much of a point in him doing so. Once he felt as though he were breathing a little easier he looked over the dashboard more closely. There was a cluster of gauges over the steering wheel he couldn't really see from this angle, and in the middle there was a radio and a forced air console. In front of him was a glovebox, and for no reason in particular he opened it.
The first thing he saw was the keys.
He sat there and he stared at them. The keys. They were still in the truck. For an older truck, sure. They were left unlocked and with the keys in the ignition all the time. But one that was brand-new? Jonathan had never even heard of anyone with enough money to buy such a thing, let alone leave it in the middle of nowhere with the keys still inside.
Next to the keys was a book, which he removed from the compartment. It was the owner's manual, and he looked it over cursorily before putting it back. He'd made a lot of progress recently, but anything technical he had to read several times over before he understood it and it was much too hot to concentrate on that right now. There was sweat running down his face and he wiped at it tiredly with his shirtsleeve. His eye fell to the dashboard in front of him, specifically towards the cool blue line of the air conditioning control.
It couldn't hurt, could it? The truck was just sitting here. He'd been out to this field enough times to know for certain the owner had long since left. If someone happened to come by to ask what he was doing, he could just claim his family owned the property and he'd thought they had left the truck here. Yes. He could do that. He took the key out of the glovebox and traced the shape of it with his thumb. It was difficult to pull out of his memory the sight of one of the nearby farmers starting his truck so Miss Crane and Jonathan could be driven into town. Jonathan had never even tried to imagine having a vehicle to drive and so had not paid a terrible amount of attention. He looked down at the three pedals and bit his tongue in thought. Then he slid himself across the bench, though not without getting both of his feet stuck on the gearshift on the way over, moved his hat to the passenger side, and slid the key into the ignition. It went in smoothly and felt firm beneath his thumb once he'd pushed it in all the way. He looked down at the floor and took a long breath. He still wasn't sure where to put his feet.
In the end he decided it was definitely the brake and the clutch he was supposed to hold down while he started the engine, and to his pleasant surprise it actually seemed to work. It sounded… nice. Much nicer and better tuned than any vehicle he'd ever been near. He sat there and listened to it for a few minutes before he remembered why he'd started the truck in the first place. He reached over and turned the dial for the air conditioner up as far as he could and at first all the unit blew out was hot air, which was a special degree of suffering all on its own, but once it started to work properly he was much reassured in making this decision. It had been only a minute and he already felt much better. He sat there with his eyes closed for a little while until it seemed it was a little too cold, which was when he turned it down a little and reached into the glovebox for the manual again. It was really more of a pamphlet, and according to the back of it that was probably because it had been divided into separate manuals one could order from the manufacturer. He looked through the first few pages, which did not seem all that complicated, but he did not feel like reading just now.
He looked out the windshield and squinted in the general direction of the sun. He had to get back to the boarding house soon. He collected his hat, removed the key from the ignition and replaced it in the glove box, and opened the door of the truck. He winced. He'd already forgotten it was hot out. He dropped down to the ground and closed it carefully, but before he'd quite walked away from it he turned back to look at it again.
Was it still going to be there tomorrow? Had it been there yesterday, and the day before?
He stuck his hands into his pockets and continued the trip back, which was entirely uneventful. He got the usual earful about his disappearance, which he nodded absently to while thinking about the truck. He almost wanted to ask after it, but if nobody knew it was there now everyone would know once he'd said something. And then somebody would take it. Not a soul here would leave that brand-new truck in the middle of that field. No, if he said anything it would be acquisitioned for someone's farm and he would never see it again. And he couldn't quite explain it to himself, but he did want to see it again. He kept comparing how it felt to sit in it with how it felt to sit in that fifteen-year-old Chevy they took into town sometimes… and it was simply no contest at all. What, Jonathan wondered, did someone have to do to get a truck like that?
/
It was still there the next day.
He walked around it again, and it looked just as nice as it had before. And it was still very, very real. He opened the passenger side again but did not get inside this time. He removed the manual from the glovebox again and looked at it.
He should probably read it. If he really wanted to know anything about this truck, that was.
It was not as hot today so he walked around to the back and climbed into the bed. Hay was not the most comfortable thing to sit on, but it was better than the bare metal so he kicked enough of it out of the bale to cover a good area and sat down. The manual, though not all that long, contained a great deal of words he had never seen before. This made it extremely slow going, and between that and squinting at it he was befallen with yet another headache. He still hadn't figured out what was causing those – it could have been anything from the glasses that did not quite clarify his vision to the fact he seemed to have been born for colder climes – but it had become severe enough that it was not worth the effort to struggle through any more of it. He rubbed at his face and got up. He supposed he'd been here long enough.
But he did go back again the next day. And the next, and the next. It became, in fact, the highlight of his time. He didn't think he'd ever really looked forward to anything before, but the hours he spent in the field sitting in the truck was something he thought about almost constantly.
On the longest days where it was so hot the very thoughts in his mind slowed to a crawl and the act of existing seemed more onerous than the most arduous task, Jonathan would remove his large straw hat from underneath his bed where it was necessary to keep it, pull it over his head, and keep his eyes to the ground as he made his way down the stairs of the boarding house. Then he would start the walk out to the field, though it took him longer on these days than any other. When he had made it there he would climb into the truck and lie back on the bench as much as he could, kicking off his shoes and starting the engine so he could run the air conditioner for a while. Then he would move his hat over his face to shield it from the sun bearing down through the windshield and go to sleep. Never much longer than an hour, but by then the worst of it had passed and he could go and sit in the bed without feeling as though he were attempting to breathe in the world's thickest stew. He would sit with his back against the storage box and his legs at angles in the hopes that the sweat in his jeans would dry out, and he would stare into the wheat ahead of him and listen for the breaks in the silence. He would get up and leave at the first sight of gold in the tips of the stalks so that he did not get reprimanded for failing to be around to help with supper.
As time wore on, he found himself walking out there earlier and earlier, and staying later and later, to the point where he would go directly after school and remain there with his books and his schoolwork long after it was dark, using a flashlight he had stolen from someone who probably wouldn't miss it with the radio inside the truck turned low when the silence made it hard to concentrate. The radio itself became an unexpected simple pleasure. It only received six channels with any clarity, none of which he particularly liked, but the mere fact that he got to choose which of those six stations to leave the dial on was something he liked a great deal. Sometimes he just sat in the truck and listened to it because it was so novel to be able to actually hear what was playing. Quiet was anathema inside the boarding house most of the time, and the radio was just another contributor to the auditory mess. But now he understood it was something that could be appreciated rather than confronted with dread. It led him to wonder how many other things like that there were out in the world that he had not had a chance to see for himself just yet.
And it was there, too, that he read and re-read the application form for the university in Atlanta so many times that he had to acquire a new copy because his removing it from and replacing it in the glovebox of the truck every day with his sweaty, dirty hands had ruined it. The biggest issue was not the application itself, but the sending of the question and the receiving of the answer.
Jonathan's town was so small and so insignificant that it did not receive mail; anything and everything was sent to the post office in the next town over, and about once a week Miss Crane would make the trip there and collect it and catch up on gossip with the mail clerks. Jonathan would never be able to sneak the application into her mail pile, and even if he managed that he knew for a fact no letter from the university, rejection or otherwise, would ever make it back to him. She would simply read it herself, laugh, and discard it before she ever returned to the boarding house, mentioning it offhand as some minor hilarity some months from now when it was too late and he was well and truly stuck here. The obvious solution, of course, was to simply drive the truck into town, mail his application, and then check with the post office himself every week or so until the answering letter arrived. And he told himself that many times while lying awake in his room, staring at the ceiling. But for some reason it was not that simple. So many times he had sat in that truck but never once had he ever attempted to put it into gear. Thinking about it, even, made him uneasy. It was as good as his, and he knew that, but it still seemed as though it were simply supposed to exist exactly where it was. As though it were a feature of the very field itself, and he was only supposed to utilise it if he did not move it. If he did not take ownership of it.
It was silly, and superstitious, but it almost seemed as though… as though it were a reflection of himself, really. Something perfectly good and serviceable with many a year left in it, but abandoned off in the middle of nowhere and silently waiting to be forgotten because really, was there a point in doing anything at all? And was there? Jonathan could not drive. Jonathan could barely read or write, and his entire life's plan was to make reading and writing the primary use of his time? How ridiculous! How absurd! Who did he think he was, anyway? He wasn't going to go anywhere. He was just going to stay here, and the truck was just going to stay there, and everything would stay. Everything would just stay.
The night before the deadline to mail the application, though, found him not doing that. It found him walking out to the field with bare feet and tshirt and pyjama pants, and when he arrived there the truck was still, as always, in the place where he had left it. Where the original owner had left it. Where it was probably just going to stay, forever, forgotten in this abandoned wheat field on the edges of a dwindling town, and that would be that. He stood there and he stared at it, settled patiently in front of him and glowing blue underneath the clear moonlight, and wondered if he could do it.
He didn't, not for a while. He just sat there with the windows rolled down and his hands on top of the steering wheel only barely, as though so much as attempting to wrap his fingers around it would cause the entire thing to collapse around his ears. He stared at it until his vision lost focus.
He learned to drive this truck right now, or he went back to the boarding house and remained there for the rest of his life. There were no other options. There was no other recourse. He did this now or it was all over.
If that was the case, why then did it seem so hard when the answer was so easy? Of course he didn't want to stay here forever. Of course he wanted to take charge of his own future. Of course he did. Of course.
Then why was he sitting here with his forehead on the steering wheel and the engine cold and the application tucked under the operating manual inside the glovebox? Why had he whittled away his days doing absolutely nothing until the very last minute? What reason could there possibly be?
Fear.
Fear that he wouldn't be able to drive the damn thing. That even if he made it to the post office, the university would fail to receive his application. That he would be rejected, and his one and only way out would have been closed to him. That this imaginary future he had conceived where he could just drive to Atlanta and become someone new was stupid, and foolish, and naïve. That he simply… couldn't.
What a small thing it was. What a small and easily explained away set of thoughts that, regardless, settled around his shoulders like the hands of a knowing adult about to tell him something he didn't want to hear. Of course he couldn't do it. Of course he shouldn't even try. Of course he should just stay here and forget all of this. Of course.
He looked out of the driver's side window at the rustling of the stalks and up into the sky filled with stars he didn't know the names of, and that made him think of all the people he would never meet and all the things he would never see and all the roads he would never, ever travel, of all of the things that were down here just as the stars were up there, except that even the things he could reach he had not even tried to. Because he was afraid. Of everything. Of doing things and not doing them. Of never starting and of never stopping. But he was going to have to do something. It was either that or he went back to staring out the window back at the boarding house, squinting at the license plates of places he would always have to rely on hearsay to know anything about. The answer had been presented to him here in this wheat field, and he had come here and looked at it and touched it and stood in its presence every single day, but it could be the answer for only one afternoon more. Beyond that it was just going to be yet another abandoned pickup truck and he was just going to be yet another abandoned boy. And really. Who cared about those?
He started the engine without really thinking about it. The air conditioner and radio were still on from the last time he had slept in it and he reached over and turned them off without looking. And he sat there and he listened to it, and it seemed almost… to want to be driven. It wasn't supposed to just… sit here and bake in the sun and be used as some sort of hideaway by an indecisive teenager. It was supposed to do something. He could hear it in the rumble of the engine.
He put his toes on the edge of the clutch. He'd already started it. He might as well take the next step, right? There was no one out here. No one was coming to claim the truck, or to tell him not to. It was just sitting here, and he was just sitting here.
He stalled it out several times before he forced himself to stop and start to think. This, just like each and every other thing, had a process, and he needed to quit poking his hands and feet everywhere haphazardly without even trying to ascertain what that was. He took a breath that was less a calming behaviour and more of a sigh of disappointment towards himself and started the engine again.
Once he put the effort in, it was not as difficult as he'd told himself it would be. If he listened, the engine would tell him when he was supposed to change gears. One of the dials on the dashboard also probably indicated that, but he did not care to puzzle those out right now.
It was not too difficult to find the remains of the old driving trails forged by the person who had once owned this farm. The halogens seemed almost to trace them for him. The steering wheel was warm and smooth beneath his palm, though given the length of the field he did not have to use it that much. On the few occasions he did have to turn it fully he grasped the top of it underhanded and let it rotate beneath his hand so that when the turn was complete, the heel of his palm was against the top again. His left arm rested inside of the open window. Maybe he'd need both hands someplace else, but not here. He used two fingers to contain the steering wheel when he needed to change gears, but he was not all that interested in putting the engine through its paces. And oddly enough, it seemed to him as through the truck wasn't either. It was all very strange but he decided it best not to think about it too much.
He wished he knew why he'd never tried this before. It wasn't hard. It almost seemed to lend him a grace he wasn't quite capable of on his own two feet. And all he had to do was listen carefully to know when to downshift or ease on the brake pedal or to turn the wheel a little harder. He drove somewhat mindlessly, not really caring where he was going or how long it took him to get there. It only occurred to him to look for the fuel gauge after he realised the sky was beginning to tinge orange.
The dial was closing in on the far left side and he bit his tongue in annoyance. All right. He'd been to town before. He knew where the gas station was. He needed to return to the boarding house quickly and find some cash before everyone woke to ensure that all of his plans were not thwarted by something as stupid as his truck running out of gasoline. He drove it back to the place he had found it and shut it off, where he sat for a few minutes with his thumb fingering the key inside the ignition. He wanted to take it back with him. It was his key. It was his truck. But taking it was a bad idea. If anyone found out about it now…
He pushed the key back into the glovebox and climbed out, closing the door and looking at it with something approaching apprehension. He almost felt as though, this time, leaving would mean it would disappear in his absence. But it wasn't going to. He'd made his decision and nothing was going to prevent him from seeing it through. Nothing.
He managed to scrounge up several dollars and squirrel them away to his room before Miss Crane came yelling up the stairs for him to come down. He didn't want to. He was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to close his eyes for a few minutes. But he got dressed and did as he was told and spent as much time as possible thinking about that time in the early afternoon where he would disappear and get some peaceful sleep inside of his very own truck. Miss Crane, of course, noticed his distractedness and scolded him for his attitude, but he cared even less than he had before. None of this mattered any longer. She did not matter any longer. He was going to get away from her as soon as possible. It was time to do it now.
He made it into town that afternoon, somehow; the method he wasn't quite sure of. He had meant to sleep a little but had been kept awake by his thoughts attempting to trace out the path to the post office. He could not remember, exactly, but once he was on his way there bits and pieces of it came to him and he arrived without incident. Once parked in front of the building he opened the glovebox and removed the envelope holding his application, which he slipped out to look at one last time. He didn't know why he was doing that; he had written all of this out weeks ago, and he had not brought anything with which to make corrections. Perhaps it was just the fact that this sheaf of paper was his polite request to some panel of men far away to let him have a chance at a different life. It all seemed so large and so small all at the same time.
Once he had given the envelope to the postmaster, it was all in that man's hands. All Jonathan could do now was wait. He sat back in front of the steering wheel and rubbed his forehead. He had a terrible headache from all of this mess. He would return to the field and sleep a little and hopefully make it back to the boarding house before supper.
He did not realise he had forgotten to go to the gas station until later that night, when he started the engine so that he could use the radio to arrest the tumult of his thoughts. Well. It was nighttime, and he had seen enough miscreants siphon gasoline to entertain themselves that he had some awareness of how it was done. He would go acquire some and return to town tomorrow to fill the rest of the tank. It wasn't the most fun thing he'd ever done, but hopefully the experience would turn out to be enough of a deterrent that he would not forget again.
He didn't go back home after that. He took his shoes off and slept in his truck until the heat coming through the windshield woke him up, and then he reluctantly collected himself. He only had to do this a little while longer. Only a little while longer until he could leave and never have to go back there again. He'd done it, he'd mailed the application and all he had to do now was wait. And the waiting was hard. More than once he arrived in town far too early, before the mail truck had had the chance to arrive at the post office, and he was forced to wait outside of it, fingers drumming absently against the steering wheel as he squinted into the sun for the large square whose arrival would mean his patience had been rewarded. The work at the boarding house, which had become increasingly onerous over the years, was now nearly unbearable. He could not believe he had once resigned himself to doing this forever. He could not believe anyone would, and yet Miss Crane was the living proof. It was almost amusing, the way she really thought he would continue to do as she asked as long as she asked him to do so. He was disposable and yet indisposable, both at the same time. Well, she could find someone else to replace him with. If this did not work, he would think of something else. Anything. He would rather take his truck and just drive and drive and drive than stay here very much longer.
When he finally received his letter from the university, he merely shoved it into the glovebox and drove out of town. Then he parked his truck back in the field and opened the operations manual to read through it again. It was not until the sun had been absent for some hours that he finally put that aside and picked up the envelope.
He didn't want to open it.
He knew, without consideration, it was because he was afraid. If the news was not as he wanted, he did not want to know. He didn't have to lift the flap and slide out the paper inside. He could just leave it in the glovebox. Move on from this. Move away from it.
He didn't want to do that either.
He got the end of one index finger underneath the top right corner of the fold and slid it across the top slowly, inch by inch until there was a long and careful tear through the top. He put the envelope in his lap, leaned up against the steering wheel, and put his thumb inside just far enough he could press it firmly against the paper inside. He pulled the sheet up, up past the letterhead and to the opening lines upon the page, which read:
Dear Jonathan
We are pleased to inform you that
He didn't need to read any farther.
Not right now, anyway. He let the paper slip back down into the envelope and put it on the bench beside him. Then he started the engine and put the radio on and sat there with his hands folded in his lap, and he closed his eyes for a moment. This wasn't the end, of course. Far from it. He knew there was a lot yet he needed to do, and a lot yet he didn't know. But he was going to get there. Ohhh, he was going to get there.
He put his hand on the gearshift and smiled to himself.
Author's note
I know this is different from the backstory post I wrote but anything in this fanfic series is more (personal) canon than any backstory/headcanon posts so until/if I revise the backstory post this trumps it. The original ask about Jonathan's childhood I actually banged out on my iPod while I was at work so it was more a general hashing out of my floating thoughts than set-in-stone anything.
Yellowcandy, the Tumblr user who came up with the truck a few years ago and sparked my (admittedly weird) fixation on it, recently deactivated their blog. I don't know where they went, or why, and we weren't friends or anything so I don't really have the right to know. But I hope they know what a wonderful, lasting impact they had and that I will never forget the time I knew them for though it was brief. Wherever they went, I hope it was because they are doing well and Tumblr just wasn't a thing they needed anymore.