The $300 Car

A couple of my posts have already mentioned our vehicles.
We have quite a collection. As I write this, we have 4 cars
and 2 trucks. For 2 people. Yeah, we have a problem.
Now I didn't say they were all in working order.

One of the trucks has the bed located about 150 feet from
the cab. It is our '67 Chevy collector truck that is being fixed
up for car shows. It has been in the process of being fixed up
for going on 7 years now.

The other non-running car is the topic of this post. The $300
car. Oh, the asking price wasn't $300. We got quite a bargain.

My husband spotted it on the way home from work, a dark
blue 2-door 1996 Toyota Tercel, parked beside a trailer on
a rural blacktop road. It had $400 written on the windshield.
He came home and said, "It has to be a good car. They've
been driving it every day. Now they have a truck, and this
one is for sale." He is always checking out people's yards to
see what items of their junk he can make his treasure.

So I scrounged around and came up with $400 and turned
him loose. As he told me later, the minute he pulled into
their driveway, a teenage kid came out of the trailer and said,
"You can have it for $300. We got a truck and need to get
rid of this car." That should have been his first clue that this
was not really a bargain: 25% off the asking price before he
even made an offer.

Next thing I knew, he was back home to get the gas can.
This should have been his second clue: the car would not
run for the 3-mile drive home--downhill. About 15 minutes
later he came in pulling this bargain behind his truck. Third
clue: it wouldn't run even after he put gas in it.

He took the kid that sold him the Toyota back home, and
came to the house to get #1 son, 9 years old at the time.
He was excited to go see Dad's new car.

A few minutes later,the boy ran to the house, yelling,
"Mom! Dad caught the new car on fire, with ME in it!"

Here came Dad behind him to do damage control. "I told
him to sit in the car and push the gas while I shot ether into
the engine. It blazed up a little bit, but I put it out."

Since when has it been OK to set a car on fire with a
9-year-old in it? Must be a redneck thing.

He coaxed the boy back to the car by promising him a ride if
they got it started. They did, and proudly pulled up in front of
the house. Oh, did you know that the front of the house was
the yard? He said he was going to drive it around the yard,
so if it stopped running they'd be close to home. The boy was
struggling to put on a seatbelt. For a ride around the yard in
a $300 car.

The thing was smoking so bad I could hardly breathe. They
did a couple laps and came back to the front porch. The boy
got out. He had flecks of yellow-gold stuff all over his back.

"What's that all over you?" I had to ask.

"Oh, that's part of the seat. It looks like someone locked a
cat up in this car and it tore up the seats trying to get out."

As I write this, the $300 car is parked by the barn with 2 flat
tires. It has been upgraded to seats from a Porche. You
guessed it. Someone at work was going to throw them away,
so Hubby took them. Oh, and we still have the cat-scratch
seats under the lean-to. You never know when you might
need some junky seats from a 1996 Toyota.