“I say let’s not go to anybody for assistance,” Pee-wee spoke up. “We can get gasoline out of the tank, so you can wash the tar off your face, and I’ve got a folding scissors in my scout knife. I’ll cut your hair for you.”
“How would you like to have it cut?” I asked him, just kidding him.
“I think I’d like it cut dark,” he said.
I said, “Well, we’ll cut it short and then if you don’t like it we’ll cut it longer.”
So we decided that we wouldn’t depend on anybody but would act just the same as if we were on a desert island where there weren’t any barbers and bathtubs and things, because Columbus and Daniel Boone didn’t have barbers and bathtubs and things.
“They depended upon their own initials,” Pee-wee said.
“You mean initiative,” I told him.
He said, “What’s the difference?”
So then I ran the machine over to the side of the road right close to a kind of a grove and we got some gas out of the tank and Brent and I went inside the van. We told Pee-wee to stay outside so as to keep people from opening the doors or fooling with the car, because we were in the village and we thought maybe people would be hanging around.
There was only one thing to do with Brent’s hair, and that was to cut it off, because the tar was so thick there that the gasoline wouldn’t melt it. I made a pretty good job of it with the little folding scissors in Pee-wee’s scout knife. We managed to get most of the tar off his face with the gasoline, but it left his face kind of all black and sooty looking.