Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  It surprised her how angry she felt. Of course, he was only trying to watch out for her, to keep her from throwing away her money. She didn’t know how to tell him that, no matter the amount of money, this rusty car was the only thing she had in front of her, the only thing she could see.

  “Listen,” she said. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Alison, I’m just looking out for your best interest.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I said thanks.”

  “I mean, really, it’s none of my—”

  “Max—”

  They both stopped talking, and the moment hung in the air between them. She knew that if he stayed to help, he would tell her again and again how far gone the car was, how impossible the whole idea was. She didn’t want to hear it, would not hear it. If she had learned nothing else in these two years, she’d learned not to trust the practical, to put no faith in the expected.

  “Really, Max. I’m not mad. Please just go.” She looked at her hands, wiped the rust and dirt on her jeans.

  He was quiet a minute. “I’ll go, but I’ll come back, too. Unless you say not to.”

  She looked at him. His face now, without its smirk or cigarette, seemed so open and guileless…unburdened in a way she nearly envied.

  “I’m not saying not to, okay?”

  He looked around the garage. “I’ll be honest …. I’m not sure what just happened here.”

  That’s just it, she wanted to say, it didn’t just happen. It happened twenty-three months ago, and kept happening, over and over, and would keep happening for the rest of her life. Max stood in the door, waiting for her to say something else, then told her he would see her around. Then he walked out the door, heading up to the house.

  Thirty minutes later the Seven Springs van pulled out of the long drive, and through the big front window she saw Bill and Sarah pushing the furniture back into place, saw Bill sometimes stopping Sarah from her work and patting her stomach, or talking to it, and Sarah playfully pushing him away. Alison smiled, listened for a few minutes to the radio playing some old Cat Stevens song, one of several that had seemed to float through the years of her stay in high school. She remembered reading somewhere that Cat Stevens had changed his name and was now Yusuf something or other, that he had converted to a sect of Islam that shunned all music. At last all the lights in the house were dark except for the hall light they left on for her. She clicked off the coffee-can bulb and looked out to where the men were fishing, their laughter rising and falling, their camp lanterns giving off a dull glow. She turned and studied the Corvette. Propped up on the jack stands, it looked almost as if it were levitating, the wheels hanging down. She knew practically nothing about the car, its own history, beyond the story of the deadbeat nephew. The car was just another deadbeat, a transient tired of the road, found sleeping in an old garage. Like most transients, it had no discernible past—cleaning it out, she’d found a few artifacts—a plastic package that had once held a beach ball, an old roach clip, an eight-track tape by Styx, some bobby pins, a receipt for a 1981 state inspection in Indiana. They might be assembled into a kind of narrative, but that story would always be, at best, a wild guess.

  She had spread an old shower curtain liner under the car to make it easier to slide beneath, and she did so now, holding the orange trouble light Mr. Beachy had sold her. She liked the trouble light almost as much as the Lil Wonder All-N-One, the way the lightbulb was held inside its wire cage like a canary, the way you could swing open the door to remove the bulb when it burned out. The orange cord of the trouble light trailed behind her as she slid under the car. She shone the light on the underside of the Corvette and up into its recesses.

  Ruin.

  Everywhere she looked, everywhere the white beam reached, she saw nothing but patches of rust, ragged holes, wires hanging down. She knew from the manual that every part she could see opened up with bolts or screws or gaskets and held another ten or fifty or a hundred parts inside. Parts inside of parts. And all of it would have to be replaced. Everything. She grabbed the widest part of the frame and shook it. A few parts clanked together, the hoses and wires swaying. The taste of rust bloomed in her mouth, like the taste of a pricked finger. Within that small space, she swung and hit the underside of the car with the cage of her trouble light, swearing as she did it. When it hit, the bulb gave a small metallic snap and went out.

  She clicked the button off and on, put the light down, laid her head back on the shower curtain, looking out from under the car. Faint light from the town pulled a dull gray color from the walls, the light from the radio dial spilling a luminous green on the floor. Above her, the parts of the car were hard to see, the whole thing now just a looming murkiness. She felt her breath moving in and out, a sense of the working of her lungs in this compressed space. The shower curtain crinkled and puckered beneath her as she stretched out her arms to the sides, palms turned up, as if she imagined the car might break loose of its stands and fall on her in the dark and she would embrace the whole of it. It felt immense above her, massive and impossible. She brought up her hands and held them tented over her face, then balled them into fists and hit the bottom of the car—a dull, hollow thunk—then hit it again and again, the skin of her hands scraping, grit falling on her face and arms. Nothing was adequate. Nothing was enough. No work she could summon equaled the brokenness of the car, no memory equaled ten years of shared life, no damaged love could keep anyone from dying. A car disappears into rust, a town into the lake that swallows it, a silo into its parts, a man into fire, a marriage into the man, a woman into the marriage, into the absence of the man. What was the point of this world if the whole thing or any part of it could be wiped away by any brief, dumb accident, leaving no meaning in its wake, no dust to trail our fingers in? Alison held her hands over her face, her own breath grown metallic and rusting, the dull space inside her chest an urn made from some brittle alloy—bright, polished, and empty.

  By 7:30 the next morning, she sat on the brick wall outside AAAA Auto Parts, waiting for Mr. Beachy to unlock the door. By 8:30, she had filled the back of Bill’s truck with boxes and boxes of car parts, nearly twelve hundred dollars’ worth—steel brake lines and a power-brake booster, rebuilt calipers and new rotors and pads, enough for all four wheels. Not everything she needed, Mr. Beachy said (some of it was special order), but enough to keep her out of trouble for a while. He smiled when he said this, and slipped two new tracts into her hand with the credit-card receipt.

  Six hours later, her knuckles were bruised and bleeding, she had chipped the crystal on her watch, and she’d fully exercised her vocabulary of swearwords. But progress was definite. She’d managed to replace one brake line, install a new rotor, and repack the wheel bearing just the way the manual showed her, rubbing it into the grease on her palm. As she worked—prying away the crud, soaking the bolts in penetrating oil—the lightly oiled gleam of new metal slowly took the place of rot. When the first assembly was finally done, she put the wheel back on, gave the tire a slap with her palm to watch it spin, and listened to the faint hush it made. As it slowed, she looked at her greasy hands, marveling at what they had done, as if they possessed more skill than she ever could. Six hours earlier, this wheel, like all the others, had been encrusted with rust and mud; now it shone and spun. That’s all this amounted to—taking away an old part, replacing it with the new. Piece by piece by piece. She could do this. She imagined finishing the job, replacing the last hose or clamp or wire, and having then two cars: the new one, shining and perfect, and the old one, dismantled in a heap of cast-off parts, as though its wearing out were nothing more than a shell peeled away and discarded.

  The manual said that the next job, after finishing all four wheels, would be to bleed the brakes. Bleed them? She thought of poor George Washington, killed after doctors drew his blood five times in one day for nothing worse than a sore throat. As for bleeding the car, though, she had no idea, but could glean enough from the manual to know it was a two-person
job. She hoped she didn’t kill it completely, when the time came.

  By afternoon, the next day’s ache had already begun to settle into her bones. She packed up her tools, put away her now-dirty manual, clicked off the radio, and headed to the house. She glanced toward what remained of the lake (as everyone in the town did, making checkout-line talk over its progress) and noticed something new: the top of an arched bridge sticking up above the water, the stone arches as sloped and knobby as a backbone. Mrs. Skidmore had described the stone bridge across the river, which separated the mine from the town it had created. Also visible now was the long, dark wall of the dam, the top of it tapering down and meeting itself in the water’s surface.

  Tonight, there was a dance lesson, and inside the house, Sarah busied herself making Toll House cookies and lemonade. For all her desire to think of herself as a gifted cook and hostess, most of Sarah’s attempts at cooking and party-throwing, like Alison’s own, ended in disarray and a dozen tiny disasters; neither of them had ever gotten along with housework all that well, just like their mother, who many nights gave up and ordered Chinese. Their father always insisted that the best cook in the house was the telephone.

  “Damn it,” Sarah shouted, her face streaked with cookie dough. The cookies broke in half as she tried to spatula them from the baking sheet. She looked up at Alison. “This sucks. ‘Pardon me, would you care for a chocolate-chip shard?’Just great.”

  Alison took the pan and spatula away from her. “Let them cool off first, the same way we handle you.” She set it aside. “Let me go clean up, then I’ll help.”

  Sarah blinked. “You will? We get to see you tonight?”

  She smiled. “I might even dance, if you’re lucky.”

  Sarah ate one of the cookie pieces. “Boy, somebody must’ve had a good time at the silo explosion yesterday.”

  “It’s not that. I finished a wheel on the car. You should see, it’s like new.” She calculated that by sometime Saturday, she could have the other three wheels finished.

  Sarah nodded, took a breath. “I love seeing you like this, Ali. I do. But that car … What if you don’t finish it? Then what?”

  Alison shrugged without answering, not wanting Sarah to get started. Finishing one wheel really didn’t prove anything, she knew. Her mind kept going back to the night before, the decay she’d seen under the car, creeping like tendrils into all its darkened corners.

  After she’d showered (her fingernails impossibly dirty) and dressed, she went out to her garage to take a look at her work, at the newness of all that clean steel. Soon after, the van from Seven Springs swung into the drive, Mr. Harmon at the wheel, and a little while later Mr. Kesler arrived, riding in Max’s truck. When Mr. Kesler opened the door, she heard the aria spill out of the pickup, then silence after he slammed the door closed. As Max started to back out of the drive, he spotted Alison and stopped, his brake lights turning the grass and gravel bright red. He waved at her, smiling, and she waved back. She felt the impulse to walk over to the truck and talk to him. He’d said he’d be back, but not this soon. Too soon. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what thread was left from yesterday’s conversation. He hesitated, too, lifted his hand a second time to wave, and she waved again as well, and then she saw him decide to leave. The taillights dimmed as the truck rolled backward. She thought of the lifeguards at Ocean City, communicating over long distances, waving semaphore flags in the wind.

  Since she’d last seen him, Mr. Rossi had placed first in a trivia contest sponsored by a Cumberland radio station, and the event had recharged him. He began spouting trivia without any kind of segue at all. Near the beginning of the evening, Sarah and Bill demonstrated a new move, which Sarah called “shuffling the deck,” with lots of leg kicks and movement. After a couple of slow walkthroughs, Sarah asked if there were any questions.

  “Did you know,” Mr. Rossi said, “that the king of hearts is alone in not having a mustache?”

  Everyone stopped and looked at him for a second, the record player needle caught in the groove and making a low thump-hiss through the speakers. Sarah nodded. “I wasn’t really after rhetorical questions, but thanks, Mr. Rossi.”

  He nodded and smiled, gave a little wave to the room. “Nothing more than a medieval copying error,” he said. Alison patted his arm.

  Mr. Kesler made his way back from the soft drinks, lifted the needle, and put on another side. Benny Goodman’s “King Porter Stomp” crackled through the room and the dancers all took to the floor to practice shuffling the deck. Mrs. Skidmore danced with Bill, Mr. Rossi with Lila, who didn’t much mind his paroxysms of trivia. The Harmons danced in matching golf clothes, their movements practiced and smooth, Mr. Harmon reaching out his hand without even looking at it, finding his wife’s hand, her fingers slotted into his, her weight falling against him. Through long familiarity they’d worn grooves and depressions in one another, the years rubbing smooth the edges of their differences. One of the things Alison used to think about most in the first months after the accident was how Marty would always remain thirty-four years old—a young man in photos, in the videos from Ocean City, in the memory of everyone who’d known him. She would go off and wrinkle and decline without him, would draw down into an old age that he had simply sidestepped. It felt almost like a betrayal of him, or him of her. The idea had made her think of eleventh grade, Mr. Loggin’s natural science class, and the film strips they had watched to learn Einstein’s general theory of relativity. One of the filmstrips showed a cartoon of twins, young red-haired men with big drawn-on freckles, one of whom boarded a rocket and flew through space at the speed of light, gone for seventy years or so before returning to earth. In the last frame (flipped to after the accompanying record gave its loud ping), the door of the rocket was open, with a stepladder leading down, and the earthbound twin, now an old man with a cane and wire glasses, was there to meet his astronaut brother, who had aged only a minute or so, his red hair still thick and wavy. Years later, Alison remembered nothing about Einstein’s theories, but still saw in her mind the expressions on both brothers’ faces, the exclamation points drawn above their heads, the shock of their recognition, or their lack of it.

  Alison sidled over by Mr. Kesler just as he bent down to his record collection, and the pipe stuck in the pocket of his jumpsuit fell out and clattered across the floor. As he retrieved it and straightened up, he looked startled to find her next to him.

  “You know,” she said, “you could have briefed him a little bit before you brought him over.”

  He looked around the room. “Who…what?”

  “Your son, about my husband’s accident.”

  He flushed and began fingering the bowl of his pipe, as Max had busied himself with the drill yesterday.

  “Well, Alison. That’s your business to tell him or not tell him. I’m no gossip.”

  “I wish you were a gossip. The whole thing was awkward as hell, for me at least.”

  Mr. Kesler nodded. “He put his foot in it, did he?” He snorted a little.

  “Yeah, and by the way, I thought I was the only one you ever told the car story to.”

  He tucked the pipe away in his pocket and wrinkled his brow thoughtfully, looking for all the world like one of her freshman students trying to explain a plagiarized paper. “No, if you think back, the part I told just to you was about Uncle Crawford’s bottle of rye.” He winked at her. “Don’t want to sully the family name.”

  For half a second, given her usual doubt of her own memory, she believed him. But no.

  “You’re good,” she told him. “I’ll give you that.”

  “Well, I suppose you read about my exploits in the paper. That story has been making the rounds for fifty-odd years, if you can believe that.” He shook his head sadly, grimacing theatrically. “Thing is, I hate to see so many folks around here disappointed.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, if—-just if—that car sank so far in the mud it isn’t there to be found anymore,
it would be a letdown for everyone, once the lake drains.”

  She smiled, amazed at how accurately Max had his father figured. “Think of the children, right?”

  “Just talking to Rossi earlier,” he continued. “He was telling me about sinkholes in Florida. Half a minute, an entire house gone. God knows how far under that Chrysler is by now. Could be twenty feet under, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said. “Just today I saw people hauling a grocery cart out of there. I saw part of a pool table, of all things.” So, maybe she wanted to see him squirm a little, too. Whether out of sympathy for Max or for some other reason, she couldn’t say.

  He shook his head, licked his lips, adjusted his glasses. “Well, sure, a cart, or some recent thing. But we’re talking about a car. We’re talking fifty-plus years. You’re a smart girl; I don’t have to explain the physics.”

  They both became aware of the thump-hiss of the needle again, and he crouched to change the record. By now, the dancers had reached that stage Alison liked so much, their clothes lightly damp with sweat, their faces bright pink, mouths open as they guzzled water, their bodies shedding years, reclaiming their heat and blood. Mr. Rossi, in particular, was deep red in the face, his skin glistening with sweat he wiped away with a checked bandanna.

  Alison turned back to Mr. Kesler. “You know, it could be nobody even cares about that car anymore.”

  He reached in his pocket and pulled out the newspaper article. He had laminated it by pressing it between two pieces of clear shelf paper. “Right there,” he said, pointing to his own printed name. “They care. A town like this, about all we have is our old stories, wars and heroes, a fire, a flood, a scandal or two.”

  “Well, I guess you’re right,” she said. “And you must be the king of old stories.”

  “Yesterday afternoon, Vern Macy called me and offered free towing to drag it out of there.” He kept nervously readjusting his glasses, and Alison felt a surge of sympathy for him, a slight anger toward Max for wanting to watch his father’s public embarrassment.