Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  The Founders’ Day Parade was a big deal for Sarah. She and her students would dress up in costumes from the forties (though Alison imagined that for many it wasn’t so much a costume as it was just back-of-the-closet clothes) and ride on a flatbed hay truck, stopping every block to play swing music through a boom box and put on a dance demonstration, using the truck bed for a stage. They billed themselves as the Try to Remember Dancers, named for the line in the old song, but as Alison had watched them last year, following along, whistling and clapping for them at every stop, she heard people in the crowd saying that the dancers were trying to remember the steps, trying to remember where they’d put their car keys, trying to remember to take their medication.

  But now it was quiet and dark, the streets empty, flags stirring lazily in the night air as she and Max rolled through town. She’d told him as they drove home, and it had all tumbled out so quickly that it surprised her, as if the weight of it deserved a bigger story. He didn’t react much, and neither did she, her voice flat, as if she were delivering some lecture on history she’d been through a thousand times before. And really, it was that. Exactly that. Max grimaced some as she told it, almost flinching, then he told her simply that he was sorry. She nodded, then shrugged.

  They rode in silence for a while, the awkwardness like helium filling the cab of the truck, threatening to lift them from the ground. She sat back in the corner of her seat and studied the side of his face, the thin gold wire of his glasses along his temple, the mica flash of his blond stubble in the dash light, the bundle of smile lines at the corner of his eye. He glanced at her.

  “My father made me take a Dale Carnegie course one time, right out of high school.” He stopped, hesitating.

  “Is there more to this story?”

  “A little, yeah. I remember they taught us that if someone tells you a story of loss, you’re supposed to tell one back. They called it ‘commiserative reinforcement.’”

  “Well, that’s robotic of them. So, you have one to tell?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t really. All my sad stories are stories of stupidity.”

  She laughed. What a relief, to tell him and not have to endure his pity. “Then tell me one of those,” she said. “I can take it.”

  He nodded, turned down the stereo volume. “Right out of the army, my friend Keith and I had this plan to open a business raising beef cattle and chickens for vegetarians.”

  She held up her hand, as if in class. “I think I detect a teeny flaw in your thinking.”

  He frowned. “No, just listen. This is back when vegetarianism was this huge fad. Everyone running around saying, ‘It’s bad to kill a cow,’ or whatever.”

  “They have such a complex philosophy.”

  “Well, I might be leaving something out. Anyhow, we decided that most vegetarians want to eat meat, but don’t for ethical reasons.”

  “Chicken murder.”

  “Exactly. So we had the idea to raise them like pets, treat them nice, give them names, let them die of old age, and then sell them as meat. We called it the Natural Causes Ranch.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand. “You’re making this up.”

  He shook his head. “We had eight acres of pasture down near Ripley, plus two chicken houses. We raised the cows and chickens, put out some advertising in health-food stores. We didn’t have a clue. We did learn one thing, though.”

  “What?”

  “Cows and chickens live a long damn time. My idiot friend was always trying to scare them, hoping to give them heart attacks. When we finally did have one die, man, that was the worst, toughest meat you ever ate.”

  At this, she started laughing.

  “Twenty-four years old, an honorable discharge from the army, and this is what I’m doing with my life. Took me an hour to decide to bail.”

  “I have to say, that’s the saddest tale of stupidity I ever heard.”

  He shrugged, then turned to look at her. She could just make out a gray silhouette of him, his face drawn by shadows.

  He shifted and stretched his legs. “My foot’s asleep,” he said, squeezing his calf.

  “If it sleeps now, it’ll be awake all night,” she said.

  “Have you always been a comic?” He lit a cigarette, the coil of the lighter oranging his face.

  She felt her own face warm, as if lighting up all by itself. “I’m sorry. It’s nervous habit. I should borrow some of your cigarettes instead.” She wondered what he’d do if she told him her real impulse right then—not to smoke or make jokes, but to start ruminating on Galileo or the Industrial Revolution. Probably he’d drop her off here, on the dark end of the lake, and not look back. And who could blame him?

  Instead, she told him a little of her own history, going back to high school, when she had crammed herself into a mold formed by big sister Sarah before her: class clown and Softball jock, goofing her way to a diploma by way of boyfriends and sneaking out of the house, nights of beer and cigarettes up by the cliffs, of giving up her virginity piecemeal, and days of C averages, ball games, and riding in cars. This had gotten her through college, skimming along a familiar life, when suddenly friends started marrying themselves off into real lives, slipping into suits and dental plans, and one day there was no more class for the clown. So she’d tried to shed that by turning up the volume on her good brain, forcing herself into grad school, cramming the lists into her memory, marrying her vo-tech sweetheart, with his pretty religion. She wanted to be known as smart, the kind of smart where someone much like the person she wanted to be would stand around at cocktail parties sipping martinis and tossing off names and dates and whole histories, only the grown-up world had cheated by not caring all that much, by no longer having time for cocktail parties. So, by default, she’d ended up teaching all those other class-clown jocks and was never very good at it, not any better than Marty had been in all his failings.

  She looked at him. “So now you know. Typical clown, yawning on the inside. Bored with her own pretensions.”

  He took this in, thought about it. “Listen, if you aren’t pretentious in your teens and twenties, you have a genetic defect. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Now, if you’re like my father, pretentious at sixty-eight, you have a problem.”

  “He’s not really pretentious. He just likes to pretend.”

  Max finished the cigarette and flicked it out the window. “Yeah, well, we’ll see how much he likes it when he falls on his ass in front of eight thousand people.”

  There was an edge to the way he said this that bothered her, so she said nothing.

  “You said a nervous habit,” Max said. “What are you nervous about?”

  “Well, number one, that I’ve spent an entire truck ride pretty much spilling, down to my very last gut.”

  “And number two?”

  “Is there a number two?”

  “You tell me, professor. You divide your answer into a part one, there has to be a part two, right?”

  They pulled into the driveway and sat in the dark with the engine idling. She noticed Bill standing on a stepladder at the front door, in his bathrobe again, a flashlight propped on the ground behind him throwing his big loopy shadow over the front of the house.

  Alison pointed. “Wonder what he’s doing now?”

  “Who?”

  “My brother-in-law, the mystic. He’s trying to use magic to get my sister pregnant.”

  Max thought about this. “Maybe you should tell him that’s not how it works.”

  “Oh, they’re using the tried-and-true method, too; this is just…a backup.”

  “So what’s he doing?”

  “I have no idea. Last time, he threw rice on the house.”

  “Well, now I have to know what he’s doing. After you tell me what number two is.”

  “Number two is, I think there’s a good chance that I’m going to kiss you sometime in the next few hours, and that makes me nervous.”

  He nodded. “It’s supposed to do that. Tha
t’s part of the point.”

  She popped the handle on the truck, all that harsh overhead light blasting the fragile moment back into reality. Max’s fair skin was etched in color, his eyes dark-rimmed under the light. The lake, as she turned toward it, looked alarmingly low, as if her day in Cumberland had given it a chance to speed up its own draining away. Several buildings of Colaville were fully exposed now, vague, dark shapes, stone cubes tilted in the mud.

  Bill worked as quietly as possible, nailing rows of fruit around the front door. Splatters of red juice ran down his pale forearms, disappearing into the sleeves of his robe, seeds and liquid dripping down the painted frame and pooling on the landing. He paused long enough to wave at them.

  “What are those?” Alison said.

  Bill stepped down and took the nails from his mouth. “Pomegranates.” He reached in the pocket of his robe and handed her one, then shook hands with Max, his wrist streaked red.

  “I should know what they mean, but I don’t,” Alison said.

  He pulled another one from his pocket, a birthday magician performing tricks. He hefted the fruit in his hand, tossed it in the air. “Ancient fertility symbols, all those seeds in there. You know King Solomon? From the Bible? Threw this party one time for his bride, and decorated his temple with two hundred pomegranates and lilies. He dressed up like a phallic god.”

  “Well, Halloween is right around the corner,” Max said.

  “So what about the lilies?” Alison asked.

  Bill shrugged. “Food Lion was sold out.”

  Max dipped the toe of his boot in the pooled juice. “Is everyone in this family a history teacher?”

  “Nah, I’m a telephone installer,” Bill said. “I get this stuff off the Internet, a few books here and there.” He shrugged, smiled, and, having nothing else to say, took the fruit from Alison and turned back to his quiet voodoo.

  They left him to his careful tapping and made their way into the garage. A fast, warm lump jelled in Alison’s stomach, her heart thudding in her chest. This all seemed too quick—confront Marty’s ghost at the house, and then tell some near stranger she’s about to kiss him? And she’d announced it, for godsakes, like he’d won a raffle or something. Then again, her brain argued back, no one could say that two years was quick. In fact, everyone had said just the opposite, until they’d gotten bored of saying it and given up. It was high time she kissed someone, wasn’t it? And Max was pretty much the only candidate in the running right now. Maybe she’d lied in the truck, had not spilled down to her very last gut. The very last was her loneliness, her aloneness. It was the nights under a comforter in her sister’s guest bed, listening to the drone of the TV downstairs or the buzzy murmur of voices down the hall, staring up at the watery reflections off the lake pulsing across her ceiling, letting her fingertips move over the heat of her skin, her mind slipping into blue-colored half dreams that became the angled light in the bedroom of her old grad-school apartment, or the seats of parked cars in high school, all the places where the touch of men had settled in her memory. She could hear the sounds that Marty would make in the dark, his long sigh when he shifted in the bed and turned to her, full of want, and felt the way his fingers always traced the same path along her stomach, stopping at the waistband of her underwear, feeling along the seams and stitching, as if the needlework had worn grooves that his fingertips followed like water, his calluses pulling at the threads. Then she would open her eyes, excited and frustrated, her dream thwarted by sadness, the guest room filling up with its darkness. So now what? Was she supposed to think that just because she’d recognized some of her guilt over Marty, had found it stored in the basement of her house, that she had somehow absolved it? She thought of all those times she’d mocked him for making his way into that draped confessional booth on Saturday mornings, and here she was, confessing and absolving all by herself. Her hand quivered as she snapped on the coffee-can light. She told herself to calm down; infidelity to the deceased was not betrayal, and the promise of one kiss didn’t exactly make her a slut.

  “Look at all this stuff,” she said, waving at the latest pile of parts she’d bought from Mr. Beachy, all of them boxed or shrink-wrapped.

  “Hey, pretty nice job on the wheels,” he said, bending.

  “Do you have any idea what they mean by ‘bleed the brakes’?”

  “They who?”

  She pointed at the manual on the workbench. “The book guys.”

  He nodded. “I know what the book guys mean. It’s a two-person job.”

  She pointed at him and then herself. “One, two. Let’s get to work.”

  “Tonight? It’s nearly midnight.”

  “Now you’re Cinderella? So what?”

  “Besides, you can’t bleed the brakes until you finish all the wheels, and it wouldn’t hurt to replace the parking-brake cable while you’re at it.”

  Now she remembered—one of the lab-coat guys had suggested exactly the same thing. “Let’s do something, then. Let’s work on the brake lines.”

  “Listen, tomorrow we’ll get whatever else parts you need and spend the whole day on the car, I promise. I still think you’re throwing good money after bad.”

  “How long did you say those cows and chickens lived again?” She smiled.

  “Okay, okay. It’s your Visa bill, not mine.”

  Actually, he was right to be worried about her Visa bill, without even knowing it. She had not collected a paycheck in nearly two years now, living off the modest life-insurance payment and the tiny bit of money they’d saved. Since the start, she’d bought groceries for Sarah (the only way Sarah would let her contribute anything), but the last two times, she’d had to put them on her credit card. Now she was buying car parts, expensive parts for an expensive car, with no way of paying for them. Maybe Mr. Beachy would hire her and give her an employee discount, or, better yet, pay her in parts. Selling the car once it was all done seemed pointless, like those game-show contestants who sell their new boats to pay for the taxes on them. Anyway, if Max was right about the rust, the car wouldn’t be worth half of what she’d put into it. So now she’d put herself into the same kind of predicament that she’d always bitched at Marty about—throwing away money on some big plan, on the next perpetual-motion machine. In the morning she would be back at Mr. Beachy’s, running up her bill again, her own impossible project taking on the kind of meaning that Marty’s must have held for him. The dead indict us, over and over, guilt by association.

  She was distracted by the noise of the men who fished the lake and turned to look out at the circle of them gathered at the lake’s center. The laughing rose up hollow, almost wooden-sounding. Already they had occupied the two small stone buildings left exposed along the bottom, the square windows filled with yellow lamplight. They moved in and out of the buildings, faint shadows of men.

  “Looks like they’ve settled in,” Max said. He stood behind her, close enough that she felt the aura of heat that surrounded him. She let herself float into that heat, leaning back into him until her shoulders were against his chest. Then she leaned forward and back again, bumping him. Then again, as if it were only a game, only playground flirting, instead of what it really felt like at the warm center of her chest: a need for touch that rivaled, just then, her need for air.

  “I don’t want to jinx it,” Max said, “but I might have a job coming up in Morgantown soon. A big job. If it materializes, I want you to come with me.”

  “What are you dynamiting this time?”

  “Something big. Puts grain silos to shame.”

  “A whale?”

  “Bigger.”

  She bumped him again, and he put his hands on her shoulders and held her there, keeping her against him. His chin rested atop her head.

  “Are all our dates going to involve blowing something up?” she asked him. “Not that I’m complaining.” She settled back, leaning against him fully.

  “Are we dating?”

  “Aren’t we?”

  �
�Then will you go with me? We’ll have to be there a few days. You can be my good luck.”

  “Gee, you sure know how to make a girl feel like a rabbit’s foot. When did you get so superstitious?”

  He slipped his arms down around her, pressing her arms to her sides. She loved to be held that way, all wrapped up. She’d forgotten how much. “If you’re working with dynamite,” he said, “superstition kind of goes with the job.”

  “You told me it was safe as a box of pencils.”

  “Yeah, well, exploding pencils. I left that part out.” She felt his chin moving as he spoke, the vibration of his throat against the back of her neck.

  “You’re as bad as your father.”

  He was quiet a minute, then let out a long sigh, his breath stirring her hair. “I’m not like my father in any way, Alison, okay?”

  Her face heated up. “Fine, I’m sorry. But for the record, I happen to like your father.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  “You know, Max, you make it sound like he was some crackhead who used to beat you with a board, instead of this harmless guy who likes to tell stories.”

  “And make a career out of bullshitting his son. And tell enough lies to drive his wife away. He’s done damage.”

  “Who hasn’t?” She found herself widening her eyes to prevent tears from forming. Max nodded in answer, making her own head nod with his. She turned inside his arms and faced him, leaning back a little to look up at him. He was shorter than Marty, his shoulders wider. He had a different smell, different angles to his body. He tightened his grip and bent to kiss her, her heart stretching out like drum skin across her chest, the fronts of their thighs touching and trading warmth, and at the last second she turned her head, so that his kiss landed clumsily at the corner of her mouth, a moist smear, the lens of his glasses tipped by her cheek. They were quiet a few moments, his forehead resting against her temple.

  “It’s been a while for me, too,” he said. “But I don’t think my aim has gotten that bad.”

  She nodded. “No, that was me. I’m sorry.”