Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  “No, Ali. I want you to go home. Five months ago, I wanted you to stay here forever. Now I want you home. That phone call from Ernie today … I really thought you would just take a deep breath and say, ‘Okay.’ I mean, you have a ‘project’ going? How about having a life going? Like the rest of us.”

  Alison eyes started to burn. “A year was supposed to be the deadline, right? That’s what all those stupid books say. ‘Sorry, time’s up. Feel all better now.’” Alison stopped talking, waved her hand in front of her face. She wondered how many times Sarah and Bill had talked about this. Or Sarah and Ernie, for all she knew. Maybe the whole town and everyone she knew, wondering when she would finally buck up and stand strong and pull herself up by her bootlaces and all those other phrases that were supposed to have kicked in by now. Problem was, she didn’t feel any of it.

  “A year? Year and a half?” Sarah said. “I don’t know how much is enough time. If there’s ever enough.” She wiped her hands on her jeans. “It’s not a deadline. It’s just … You miss Marty, and we do, too, okay? But we have to miss you on top of it. And you aren’t gone for good, that’s what’s so frustrating. I just want to know when you’ll be back. If you’ll be back.”

  Alison looked at Sarah, at their reflections in the narrow, darkened window above the sink, and felt nearly pulled under by the weight of longing. She missed it, too, those Tuesday mornings when Sarah would call and tell her everything about the latest batch of dancers, about who had said what or fallen ill, about some elderly man hitting on her, about Bill asking her to read another book on angels or ESP, and they would laugh as her coffee cup slowly heated a white ring into the surface of the butcher block, and time passed so easily. How had it gotten so far out of her grasp? All of it gone now, not just Marty. When, Sarah had asked, would she be back?

  “I’ll be back when I finish the Corvette,” Alison said.

  Sarah was squeezing out the sponge, wiping the area around the sink. She scrubbed harder, shaking her head. “You have a job, students, a house, us. But you’re pinning everything on that damn stupid car.” Just when it seemed she was gathering herself up for another barrage, she sagged back against the counter. She looked, Alison thought, tired. Just tired. “Then you’d better get busy,” Sarah told her. “That thing is a disaster area.”

  There are a number of techniques involved in maintenance and repair that will be referred to throughout the manual. We hope you use the manual to tackle the work yourself. Doing it yourself will usually be quicker and much less expensive than arranging to get the vehicle into a repair shop. An added benefit is the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that you feel after doing the job yourself.

  3

  * * *

  Even after she and Bill installed a new battery, nothing—not the engine or the headlights or the radio—worked.

  “Electrical,” Bill said, nodding. “You got those mice in there, they chew the wires.”

  Alison looked at him, then back at the exposed engine of the car. A wad of twigs and paper scraps lay tangled in one corner, and on top of the big iron block, oil puddled in the depressions. The bundles of wires were everywhere. Wires, belts, hoses. It bore almost no resemblance to those careful drawings in her manual.

  “Mice eat wires?” She hadn’t heard the clawing noises since that first night. “Why would they do such a thing?”

  “Well, I don’t think they have any particular motivation.” He shrugged. “Their nature. Mice chew up our phone lines all the time.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said. Bill laughed and so did she, but in a way, she meant it. For the past three nights she’d stayed up late, sitting on a stepladder in the garage, reading her new manual, trying to absorb all the instructions and procedures. But there was no mention anywhere of mice, no photos showing teeth marks in wires. Her problem already was in figuring out where to jump into all the mess, some way to get a handle on it. How much harder would that be if she had to worry about mice destroying the car from the inside out? She took comfort in thinking of the men with the white lab coats, imagining them as benevolent doctors, restoration scientists. She wanted to be like them, the way they made it all look so effortless, how they smiled in every photo.

  Late that afternoon, unannounced, Mr. Kesler dropped by with his son, Max. She heard them before she saw them, their low voices as they walked toward the garage. Mr. Kesler knocked on one of the rough boards.

  “Alison? I’d like to introduce you to Max here.” He indicated his son with a pat on the shoulder, as if she might have missed him standing there. She shook his hand.

  “The percussionist, right?” she said. “Gene Krupa minus the heroin.” He laughed, his tiny glasses angled down his nose.

  “Yeah, according to Dad. I call myself a freelance munitionist.” He dug around in his jeans pocket and handed her one of his cards, which had his name and a PO box number, along with a little cartoon of Yosemite Sam igniting a powder keg.

  “Freelance, huh?” she said. “I’d guess most of your work is commissioned.” She stuck the card in her pocket.

  “Except when I’m practicing. Then it’s just vandalism.” He had one of those narrow smiles, she couldn’t tell if he were joking or not.

  “I’m going inside to set up,” Mr. Kesler said, his white gloves tucked into the pocket of his jumpsuit.

  “The dance isn’t for another hour, Gordon,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I’m here now. Records could stand a cleaning.”

  She smiled at him. “The early Mr. Kesler.” He paused a moment, looking at the two of them, then turned to go inside.

  “He seems really proud,” Alison said. “A son who blows things up.”

  “He’d be prouder if I were a forty-five of Shorty Rogers,” he said. “And anyway, I don’t really blow them up.” As he spoke he moved around the car. He had his father’s habit of nervously licking his lips. “I just take out the base, the supports or foundation for whatever structure, hold my breath, and let it fall. I just teach things about gravity.”

  “What a coincidence. I teach students about history,” she said, though it wasn’t exactly true anymore.

  He nodded, then pulled out a crumpled pack of Marlboros and lit one. “Good for you.”

  “You know, I’ve seen your work on TV,” she said. “Buildings and bridges coming down. Your father told us about the skyscraper in Brazil.”

  He leaned into the engine bay, cigarette in his mouth. “I wish,” he said. He bounced the car on its shocks, and Alison noticed on his upper arm a tattoo of the same Yosemite Sam drawing he had on his business card. “That’s the Alfonsi family,” he said. “They did the Caldera Building in Brazil, thirty-six stories. I just do silos, a few stone bridges, small-town stuff. I did the library in Charleston two years ago. Came down in three and a half seconds. Laid it down like a little baby.”

  “So, your father’s confused.”

  He laughed, flicked ashes away from the car. “Yeah, I guess you could put it that way.”

  She wondered what he meant by this, but probably it was none of her business. “And now you get to teach the Wiley Ford dam about gravity?”

  He bent down to look beneath the car, his blond crew cut shimmering and angled, like hammered metal.

  He straightened, grinned. “That,” he said, “I’m just going to blow up.” Before she could ask, he said, “No supports as such. It’s just a big stone wall. Just, boom—down.”

  She nodded, wondering suddenly what he was doing here, if this was Sarah’s awkward stab at some kind of blind date. “So, where did you get your munitionist’s degree?”

  He pulled a bandanna from his pocket and wiped his fingers, stamped out his cigarette on the dirt floor, then picked up the butt and put it in his pocket. “Fort Dix. I wanted to be a photographer when I was growing up. Won a Brownie camera in a contest for picking best name for the Munsters’ car. Second place. After that, I took photos of every neighbor, the neighbors’ dogs, the dogs’ fleas. Every
damn thing. I wanted to work for National Geographic and take pictures of the first man to cross the Arctic Circle on foot, or whatever.” He wiped each finger carefully, like his father wiping his record albums. “You ever think about that? If that guy is supposed to be the first across, but the photographer is there to take his picture doing it, then he’s really the second one across, right?” He stopped, as if he really wanted her to answer this.

  “Second. I guess you’re right. He should only win the Brownie camera.”

  “So the captions are bullshit, right? Anyway, the recruiter told me the U.S. Army has the best photography schools in the world.” Max shrugged. “He was less than truthful.”

  She laughed. “And you were more than gullible.”

  “I was eighteen. After my discharge, I kicked around for a while. Sold my darkroom equipment, wanted to be an inventor, own my own business. Lived with a woman who didn’t like me very much. A string of bad ideas.”

  Alison looked away, thinking of all those weekend projects Marty had done with Lem, the folding ladder they’d tried to invent, the welding cart half-finished, all their plans that came, finally, to nothing. Blown money. Dead ends. A short life wasted in a damp basement.

  “So, what’d you name it?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The Munsters’ car.”

  “Oh, that. I called it the Ghoul Mobile.”

  “That won second? How many entries were there, two?”

  Max smirked. “Hey, listen,” he said. “Three hundred bucks.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry it’s not more, but in all honesty, I’ll just sell parts, then scrap the rest.”

  She looked at him a moment. “This car isn’t for sale. I don’t know where you got the idea…”

  Max shook his head and looked at the garage ceiling. “My ‘confused’ father, that’s where,” he said. “He said he wanted me to see about your car. I just thought…” He spread his hands open before him.

  “Well, sorry, but this one I’m restoring. I just started.”

  “You’re restoring this car?”

  His tone annoyed her. “No, one of the other cars in here. The blue one in the third row.”

  He half-laughed. “Hey, good luck is all I have to say on that. I hope you have a big fat bank account. And the patience of Job teaching PE in junior high. You’re going to need it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well … Alison, right? This car…it’s a goner. It’s terminal. It’s on life support. I mean, call in the priest, okay? The money you’re going to have to spend, you could buy a nice running Vette. A better model, too, a more desirable year.”

  A more desirable year? This sounded so strange, she nearly forgot her annoyance. “What do you know about it anyway?” she said. “Have you blown up Corvettes in your time?”

  He ran his hand along his crew cut, pushed up his glasses. “I’ve spent a little time working on cars. I think that’s what Dad must’ve meant. Help you out some.”

  “Tell him I said great idea. So far you’ve been a godsend.”

  “Hey, sorry. Just trying to save you a little bother and money.”

  Alison felt her face warming. She imagined the ride home for the two of them, Max describing in detail the car’s ruin, the piles of rust, the torn interior. She saw them laughing over her stupid plan, pitying her futility. And she saw herself never finishing the car. What would she tell Sarah then? What would she tell herself? Maybe his description of the car fit her, as well: a goner, a terminal case.

  “Listen,” Max said. “Get yourself some jack stands, raise the car up so you can get to it. And start with the brakes. Better know it can stop before—”

  “—before you make it go. Your father told me the exact same thing. You two must sit around memorizing little adages together.”

  He laughed. “Maybe we should try that. It would give us something to say to each other—you know, besides The Orioles need pitching,’ or ‘Get me a beer.’ Liven things up some.”

  She busied herself, straightening up the sparse tools on her workbench, the Lil’ Wonder All-N-One and the manual (still clean, the pages crisp), the set of wrenches she’d found on the floor. The whole collection of them must look pathetic, held up against the condition of the car. “What’s the matter?” she said. “You don’t talk to each other?”

  Max shrugged. “Sure. We talk about his record collection, TV, work. We get along.”

  “He really talks to me,” Alison said. This wasn’t exactly true, but she wanted to get back at him for making her feel so stupid. “He tells me about his past.”

  “Yeah, I suppose he told you about losing the car in the lake.”

  She looked at him. “Is your father genuinely confused, or just a liar?”

  Max smiled and lit another cigarette. “He’s a liar. To the core.”

  “You mean the whole thing? There is no Chrysler in the lake?”

  “Nope. You and I are probably the only ones in Mineral County who know that.”

  She sighed. “Okay, so your father’s a convincing liar. You don’t seem too bothered.”

  Max sucked on the cigarette, then looked at it. “You got one good lie from him, and I’ve had … God knows. Thousands. He’s a liar, Alison, that’s what he does.”

  Alison shook her head. She thought of all those times when Marty was in the basement, gone for hours, for whole Saturdays and Sundays down there, and at night in their bed she would ask him why. Why was he avoiding her? He would lie, too, tell her how much work he had left on some project, how he was going to make some real money this time, how Lem was counting on him to be there. He’d smile and shake his head, would never tell her what was wrong. They had argued about it the night before he died, after he’d spent that entire day at Lem’s and was planning to head back the next day. It had been this way for the last few years, his almost constant avoidance of her. Why? she wanted to know. Why?

  She looked at him, absently thumbing the pages of her manual. “But why me?”

  He blinked behind his tiny glasses. “He’s recruiting you.”

  “He wants me to lie, too?”

  “To cover his back. Help him out when that lake turns up empty and his famous car story turns up bullshit. You’re from the college, after all. It carries weight if you say the car is buried under mud. He keeps trying to convince me, too.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not a geologist. I teach Western civ.”

  “Around here? They don’t care. He just needs corroboration. You’re it.”

  She sat on the hood of the Corvette. “How do you know all this?”

  “It’s his MO.” He shook the red cigarette pack, then crumpled it up and tossed it into the corner. “One time when I was a kid, he gave me a baseball signed by Lou Gehrig, for a birthday present. Came in this glass display box. I cleared off a whole bookshelf to make room for the ‘Lou Gehrig ball,’ right? Later on, I was maybe sixteen, I took it to a collector’s show in Morgantown, just to see what it was worth.”

  “And?”

  He smirked. “Total fake. The guy showed me how the ball was all but brand-new, how the signature didn’t match. Dad just bought a ball and signed it.”

  “What did he do when you called him on it?”

  “He recruited somebody. His boss at Celanese comes over for dinner, admires the ball, starts telling me how those collectors are con artists, how they will tell you anything just to steal your stuff. He was convincing. I think because Dad had convinced him.”

  “That doesn’t sound so terrible. Really, it’s kind of sweet if you think about it.”

  “It wasn’t sweet.” He shook his head. “And that was nothing. There was much worse.” He said this with such foreboding that she didn’t want to ask. Max looked at his cigarette, flicked it out into the gravel drive.

  “So now he wants to convince me. To lie to you.”

  “Not me. He knows I’m onto him. He wants you to convince Wiley Ford. He’s pret
ty famous around here for that story.”

  “Well, if he asks,” she said, “tell your dad I’m not interested in being his little fib partner, okay?”

  Max nodded as he stood in the doorway of the garage, looking around for a minute. “Good luck with the car, I guess.”

  Two days later, the Wiley Ford Press-Republican ran a story on the draining of the lake, Colaville, the new dam replacing the old one. The article talked about Kesler Munitions as if it were some big company, instead of just one guy with a tattoo. There was a sidebar about the lake itself, its history, most of the things that Mrs. Skidmore had spoken of at the last dance lesson. And when Alison turned the page, her eyes fell on an accompanying photo of an old Chrysler, though not Mr. Kesler’s (the caption said “Photo courtesy of Flow Motors”), and two paragraphs in the middle about “the Kesler Chrysler,” about young Gordon Kesler and the frozen lake, how he was anticipating finding the car again and bringing it out. They even quoted him, telling the lie over again. Alison folded the paper, didn’t bother reading the rest.

  The old joke in Wiley Ford was that at 7:00 every evening they wanted to roll up the sidewalks, but everyone was asleep. This was not quite true, though you would never mistake it for anything other than an American small town, as if you might turn a corner and find Norman Rockwell sitting in a chair with his pipe and sketch pad. Cumberland, where she’d lived with Marty, was small, but not this small, and nothing like the Baltimore suburbs where she’d grown up. The worst thing about a small town was also the best thing: Everywhere you went, you saw the same people. Every church gathering or bar or ball game or parade, you would turn around and see the same ten people you’d just seen that morning, or yesterday, at the market or the Laundromat or at the fire hall, buying fried chicken to raise money for new uniforms. Like a high school play where the same actors play three or four different parts. It was comforting, this familiarity, and claustrophobic, all at once. Tonight, feeling it closing in on her, Alison walked alone through the streets downtown, away from the lake, away from the dance lessons. Five minutes into the dancing, she’d had her fill. Five minutes of watching Mr. Kesler clean and reclean his records, five minutes of Tyra Wallace complaining about the new library committee, of Sarah blasting her coach’s whistle, of Mr. Rossi talking about some tiny country where fruit was used as currency. So she’d left.