Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  “One more thing about cars, now that you mention it,” he said. “There’s one on the bottom of that lake.” He tilted his head toward the front door. “I put it there.”

  She leaned back to look at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just what I said. A 1939 Chrysler Crown Imperial. Put it straight down on the bottom.” He nodded, looking away from her. “Damn near killed me, too.”

  She shook her head, confused. “Well…I mean, are you hurt? When did this happen?”

  He looked at the ceiling, squinting. “1946.”

  She laughed. “I guess you’ll live, then. Mind telling me how you put a Chrysler Imperial on the bottom of the lake?”

  “Oh, the usual way, I suppose.” He smiled, and after a few seconds, she realized that he’d made a joke. His teeth looked crowded, all bunched together and overlapping in the front of his mouth. She saw in those teeth something of the carelessness he spoke of, as though his messiness had settled in his mouth, shoved there by his neat jumpsuits, his white gloves, his flattop haircut. He took the pipe from his pocket, squinted to look into the bowl, then replaced it.

  “Just a kid, maybe fourteen or so, and we had this freak winter, kind that kills all the oranges in Florida and makes it onto the nightly news. Anyway, the lake out here froze over and all any of us kids wanted to do was strap some wood blocks to our boots and head out to skate, but none of the parents around here would allow it, having no experience with serious ice. So I took the car from my Uncle Crawford about midnight one night, so cold it felt like my blood might freeze, and I rolled his car down the road and popped the clutch and aimed to drive it out across the ice, and in the morning I’d tell everyone what I did, and we could all go out and skate and I’d be your basic hometown hero. So. You know how this one ends. I got out to the middle, ice made a sound like somebody cracking a two-by-four. I stopped right there. Put my brakes on, then I was in the water.” He shrugged.

  Alison tried to get her mind around all of this. “You weren’t all too bright at fourteen, were you?”

  He shook his head. “Not the sharpest nail in the bin.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Do? Well, the last thing I remember was swimming up out of that hole, my arms stiff and cold, and I stuck my head back down in that water to look. I could see the headlights still shining out through the water, these two yellow cones getting dimmer and dimmer. Before I got out, the car filled up with water as high as the dash, and up floated this pint bottle of rye. Never forget that, had a cork in the neck and a rooster drawn on the label, and I remember realizing it was my uncle’s and that he’d been hiding it under the seat. So here I was, half-drowned and frozen, and all I could think was, Damn, he’s been hiding his liquor.”

  She shook her head. “How did you get out?”

  “I reared back and kicked out the window. The whole world, seemed like, came gushing in.”

  Alison left the conversation for half a second, thinking of when Lem Kerns brought her the news, standing on her porch, stammering, twisting his shirttail, his glasses duct-taped, and when she understood him finally, it was just that: the whole world, gushing in. Mr. Kesler leaned in toward her. “I never told anyone about that. Until just now.”

  She let this sink in a moment. “You mean you never … The car is still down there?”

  “Like I said, it’s still there. Of course, probably under ten feet of mud by now, don’t you think? That’s a deep, deep lake. Had an anchor once on fifty feet of clothesline and couldn’t touch bottom. Reported it stolen.”

  “What?”

  “The car. My uncle reported it, collected insurance. He was happy enough, so I never felt too bad over it.”

  “And you never told anyone? Not your son? Your wife? Your therapist?”

  “I was more than a little embarrassed for a long time, then I was embarrassed that I’d let so much time go by without saying anything.”

  “So then why tell me, if you’re so embarrassed?”

  He smiled again with his crowd of teeth. “I just got over it.”

  Alison laughed at this, but she was touched, too. It felt like some small offering from him, as though knowing her past (as everyone in Wiley Ford did) had caused him to dredge up his own story of loss, however far off and forgotten.

  “Besides,” he said, “what with them draining the lake, I might get exposed here soon.”

  She smiled. “Just say it’s some other Chrysler Imperial down there. I’ll back you up.”

  Late that night, after the dancing ended, after Mr. Kesler packed away his records and gave her a smile on the way out, after the ladies kept dancing in pairs without any music until the van honked for them outside, after Bill plugged in his portable floor polisher to take the scuff marks out of the floor, after quiet and stillness returned, Alison sat on the front porch, watching the lake, the puddles around the exposed bank shining like pot lids. Sometimes she thought she could detect a lowering of the water out of the corner of her eye, as if she could catch the level dropping. But she never did. It always looked the same, looked as if it had not changed a bit, until you could begin to think the city fathers had decided against draining it, and then one afternoon you would notice how much of the steep muddy bank was exposed, or the angle of the boat docks pointing down into the water, some mossy pile of exposed tires, a bundle of Christmas tree skeletons. Late at night, the migrant workers from the cornfields in Paw Paw would venture down through the muck with fishing tackle and lanterns to the retreating edge of the water. Already, the exposed bottom had started to give way to a second bank, a steep slope down into the deep, hidden middle, where Mr. Kesler had lost his uncle’s car. The smaller that middle became, the more regularly the men arrived at night, as if the diminished size increased their chances of the big catch. Alison watched them, heard their echoed laughs and curses, hugged herself against the breeze. She imagined all the fish in the lake retreating to the deep bottom, finding refuge in Uncle Crawford’s car, swimming around the floating rye bottle with the rooster on the label. But that picture was a lie, she knew. Closer, probably, was what Mr. Kesler had said, the car buried under ten feet of mud, the paper label long since disintegrated, the upholstery, the rubber tires, most of the metal itself a casualty of time, worse than her Corvette. She shook the idea from her head. She would not think about that, the whole idea of decay. It was the worst thing—a bad joke built into the design—the way everything wore out, rotted away. The thing to do was to refuse to give in, like Lila Montgomery in her jeans and penny loafers, a seventy-seven-year-old cheerleader dancing away from broken hips and portable oxygen tanks and varicose veins. Alison walked across the yard toward the garage, some part of her mind vaguely trying to remember if Gutenberg had invented the printing press before or after the birth of Leonardo da Vinci. The question had pestered her since her undergrad days, when she’d gotten it wrong on an exam.

  She swung the garage door up and open, clicked on the coffee-can light. The Corvette gave a dull gleam under the shine of the bulb. She opened the door, heard the scratch of claws inside the frame. She sat in the driver’s seat, something she’d forgotten to do earlier. It smelled like any old thing, like the projects Marty had rescued from the basements of friends, from the county dump. Marty, always so hopeful about worn-out things. She put her hands on the wheel and looked out over the long expanse of silver hood, like a little kid pretending to drive. And she did pretend, closing her eyes, imagining what it would feel like to have this car clamor to life beneath her, to sense in her hands, in her bones, the synchronization of gears, of fuel and spark and burning and motion, slipping the pull of the earth, too fast for rust, too swift for wearing out, launching herself—why not?—into the sunset, into the bright, pure blade of the wind.

  The newcomer to practical mechanics should start off with the minor repair tool kit, which is adequate. Then, as confidence and experience grow, the owner can tackle more difficult tasks, buying additional tools as needed.r />
  2

  * * *

  After breakfast on the porch (today, a shopping cart was visible along the banks of the lake), Alison walked toward town, letting her mind tumble through its snarl of dates and places and names. She’d found the address she needed in the Wiley Ford Yellow Pages, AAAA Auto Parts—an attempt, apparently, to best the competition alphabetically. But in Wiley Ford, there was no competition; AAAA was the only auto-parts place listed.

  The front third of the store was nearly empty, a few parts and shrink-wrapped tools hanging on Peg-Board islands. Alison looked around, pretending she belonged there. The names of the tools sounded odd: impact driver…torque wrench…valve reamer. Punch lines to dirty jokes. The walls of the shop hung in loops of rubber fan belts, like the fringe around a tablecloth. The owner, Mr. Beachy, stood behind a counter that ran the width of the store, the front of it papered with out-of-date calendars and posters of bikini-clad women with inflated breasts, posing beside heavy machinery. A cowbell rang behind her as the door swung closed, and Mr. Beachy put his finger in a thick book to mark his place before looking up at her.

  She knew him from the Thursday-morning farmers’ market held at the high school track, where he sold organic cucumbers. He was also a deacon at the Baptist church, and each one of his cucumbers came with a religious tract rubber-banded around it, dozens of them in a bushel basket on the bed of his pickup, the corners of the tracts fluttering in the wind. He spent time between customers attaching the tracts to the cukes, the pile of pamphlets and rubber bands sitting beside him on the tailgate, weighted with a rock. All of the tracts had titles like WHERE DOES YOUR ROAD END? or WHICH WAY IS UP? This most recent one had a drawing on the front of a crying man riding an escalator out of puffy clouds and down into a sea of flames. Sarah would keep the tracts and trim them into shopping lists, and at dinner, whenever she was about to add cucumber to salads, she would always ask, “Christian or heathen?”

  Right after the accident, whenever Mr. Beachy saw Alison approaching, he would quickly slip the tracts off her cucumbers before he sacked them up. She’d seen this same reluctance at Marty’s church back home in Maryland, all those offers of casseroles and Mass cards, a drowning swell of niceness, but no one who actually wanted to face her, just to talk about what had happened. Like Mr. Beachy—embarrassed at the point where faith intersected a tangible death.

  “Alison!” he said now. “Very surprised to see you in here.”

  “Well, you might be seeing a lot of me here,” she told him.

  She explained that she had a ‘76 Corvette that needed fixing. “Really big fixing,” she said, jamming her hands in her pockets. He nodded, leaning on the wooden countertop, where pale elbow rests had worn into the surface. He didn’t say anything, and she felt herself blush. “Everything,” she said, shrugging. “The whole car.”

  “So,” he said, “Bill’s finally saving that Corvette.” She smiled at his choice of words—saving—as if he saw the entire world in terms of redemption and salvation, all the way down to cucumbers and cars.

  “Not Bill, me,” she told him. “I’m planning to fix the car.” This phrase was rapidly becoming some odd mantra for her.

  He raised his eyebrows, pushed his reading glasses up on his forehead. “Well, that’s just fine,” he said, nodding. “That’s terrific.” She felt like a kindergartner showing off a plaster handprint. Mr. Beachy looked around the sparse storefront, as if wondering what his next move should be. She could sympathize. “How much do you know about cars?” he asked.

  “Zip,” she told him. “Where do I start?”

  Mr. Beachy lifted his finger, asking her to wait, then disappeared into the back of the store. She leaned against the counter, looked around at all the strange parts, dug a penny from the Styrofoam cup atop the register and dropped it in the Lion’s Club gum-ball machine. She got a piece made to look like a baseball, painted with perfect tiny red stitches. How did they ever manage such a thing? She bit it, finding it hollow inside, then picked up from a cardboard display box a small screwdriverlike tool named the “Lil’ Wonder All-N-One,” which advertised that it was actually eighteen tools in one. It could be opened and folded and twisted, different attachments and blades carried in the handle for cutting wire, turning screws, and pulling nails. She turned it over, opened it, pulled off the tip, unscrewed the bottom, and let the attachments spill out. This was at least as good as the Swiss army knives all the junior high boys used to carry. She chewed her gum, blew a bubble, then carved a small A in the surface of the counter. Maybe there should be a list of lesser inventions, the ones that are overshadowed by the printing press, the steam engine, the cotton gin—all the hotshot ones. And this seemed like a pretty good start on that list: painted gum balls and the Lil’ Wonder All-N-One. She reassembled it and put it on the counter, her first purchase.

  Mr. Beachy walked out of the back, whistling “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and carrying a shrink-wrapped book, which he tore open. The cover showed an intricate drawing of a Corvette in cutaway, the frame and engine and seats, the smallest wire or fuse rendered in meticulous pen-and-ink lines. She imagined that if she squinted hard enough, she could make out the baby mice curled into fleshy balls, drawn no bigger than the period at the end of a sentence. She opened the manual and turned the new pages, looking over the black-and-white photos of men in lab coats dismantling and reassembling every part of the car.

  “This here is the bible of shop manuals,” Mr. Beachy told her. She nodded, and the two of them leaned in together while he showed her all the divisions of the manual, the different section titles—emissions, braking, electrical, clutch, and driveline—the entire car, those ten thousand parts on the cover, neatly divided and parceled out. Her eyes drifted to the stack of tracts on the counter beside her elbow, pushed in behind the gum-ball machine. The one on top showed a drawing of a man crying (they were always crying) as he stood beside a Mercedes and a wheelbarrow full of money, the crucified Jesus, rendered in cartoon lines of light, towering above him. The title was WHERE WILL YOU STORE YOUR TREASURES? Maybe for Mr. Beachy these tracts were just another kind of instruction manual, a detailed explanation of how to solve eternity, how to fix your broken afterlife. They made it all seem so easy—birth, sin, rebirth, forgiveness, death, eternal reward. When she used to go with Marty to St. Luke’s, she’d sit there wishing it could be that easy, that bread and wine could absorb all your sin. She could see the appeal, the desire to believe that all the disarray and breaking down and decay of a life could be repaired by ten pages of a cartoon man purging his regret, by a quick handful of Bible verses and a prewritten “Sinner’s Prayer.” Everybody wanted to impose a little order on all this mess. It’s why someone went to the bother to print up religious tracts or shop manuals for broken cars. And why not? Slip on your white lab coat, find some space in which to work, and go through your existence part by part. It might even run when you finished, or at least make sense. So, okay then, she decided—let the Corvette be her religion for a while. She bought the Haynes manual and the Lit’ Wonder All-N-One, and then, just to make Mr. Beachy happy, she picked up a handful of tracts and dropped them into the paper bag.

  The plan was that after lessons that night, Sarah’s students would stay for snacks and drinks. Alison was supposed to be helping her with chocolate-chip cookies and pigs-in-a-blanket, but instead spent all afternoon in her garage. She cleaned the small, high windows, filled four garbage bags for the curb, cleared off the workbench in the corner, and hung up the assortment of hand tools that Bill had left scattered around the floor. She placed her new Lil’ Wonder All-N-One on the bench next to her shop manual. In the attic, she found a dusty kitchen radio, which she plugged in and hung from the Peg-Board above the bench, to let its old songs and talk shows keep her company. While she was at it, she washed the Corvette with a bucket of suds and sprayed away some of the muck underneath with the hose. At least it looked better. Once or twice, she looked at the drawing of the engine in the manual, and
then at the engine itself, finding almost no correspondence between the two, the drawing like some foreign road map in a hilly, complicated land.

  Toward evening, Sarah brought her a glass of iced tea, a plate of pigs-in-a-blanket, and the cordless phone. “Some guy,” she said, handing it over.

  “Me? Who would call me?” she whispered.

  “Want me to ask?” Sarah said.

  Alison shook her head as she took the phone. “Hello?”

  “Al, how you doing?” The loud voice belonged to Ernie Holloway, her department chair from the community college. She heard a clack clack clack in the background, and immediately could see him sitting in his windowless office, desk cluttered with his executive desk toys, a tiny putting green and gold putter, a ball meant to be squeezed as a stress reliever, a yo-yo, and—the source of the background noise—a set of ball bearings that swung inside their frame, dangling from fish line and hitting into one another as some experiment in momentum.

  “Ernie, you sound like you’re a thousand miles away,” she told him.

  “I might as well be, as much as we ever see of you. The Invisible Woman.” He laughed, and she could see the way his face flushed when he laughed, his thinning hair sprayed into place and his freckled scalp visible beneath it.

  “Yeah, well I can hear you there, Ernie, still playing with your balls.”

  “Hey, hey, let the world know they’re steel ones, okay? Grant me that much.”

  Alison started grinning. These were long-standing jokes between them. “As if there were any doubt. The way you stood up to the dean last fall? You want new ice trays for the lounge, and by God you get them.” Sarah pretended to be suddenly absorbed in the Haynes manual, when Alison knew she was only waiting around to hear how this conversation turned out.