Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  “You’re sorry and what?” He let her go and leaned against the Corvette’s fender. “You want me to leave again? So you can call me back here tomorrow?”

  She looked at him, thinking of the way she’d imagined Marty in the basement of their house, a ghost-man rebuilding some old radio, willing it to work, the footsteps of his wife above him falling like hammer blows of accusation, the hard rhythm of all they had missed, all the ways he’d failed her. And now there remained only the rhythm of absence, the quiet tick of months and years passing, some wordless song about time running out. Grass grew under her feet like a million tiny hammers, landing their own blows. Marty was dust now, long in the ground and gone, the wisp of smoke from that soldering iron curling itself into outer space. Max shifted his weight on the Corvette, and something inside it clanked, some part that she would have to fix in a week or two or ten. We restore our radios, our cars, our dams, and all the while our bodies keep failing us, refusing to restore themselves except in the trick of sex, or childbirth, or some sad weight-loss plan. Or a kiss.

  “No, don’t leave,” she said. “Sorry I flinched.”

  He looked at her, thinking. “You know, the real Cinderella got her kiss, eventually,” he said. “And I was promised.”

  “First off, it wasn’t a promise, more like a statistical probability, and second, I can’t believe you’re really going to use that Cinderella thing.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, whatever works.”

  “Typical man,” she said, “pretending to be a fairy-tale princess just to get to first base. I don’t suppose you know the origin of the Cinderella story?”

  He looked at the ceiling, squinting. “Not offhand.”

  “It’s Chinese…eighth century, maybe? Ninth?”

  “Don’t ask me. Those two always run together in my mind.”

  “Hush, and you’ll learn something.” She thought a minute, pulling together the details of the story. “The girl in the Chinese version is named Yeh-shen.” Alison drew nearer to Max, slipped her arms around him, and kissed the whiskered skin along his jaw. “The fairy godmother appears as an enormous fish with golden eyes, swimming at the edge of a pond. Yeh-shen’s evil stepmother kills the fish, but the bones are magic and continue to live in the water.” Her voice dropped down to a whisper, punctuated by tiny kisses that traced the boundaries of his face. He held still, listening, she thought, or not wanting to scare her away. Skittish, he must think of her, or just odd. “Yeh-shen visits the bones every day, talking to them, but mourning them, too, that they are no longer her beautiful golden fish.” She kissed his mouth then, his lips dry a moment until he drew them in to moisten them, her hands moving up to hold his face, her lips moving against his again, their tongues briefly touching. She tasted on him the cigarettes he’d smoked earlier, the taste like the smell of a campfire caught in clothing. “Yeh-shen wanted to go to the spring festival,” she whispered, her mouth beside his, “but had nothing to wear until the magic bones gave her a gown, azure, with a cloak of kingfisher feathers sewn with silver thread.” She kissed him harder and his mouth softened, their bodies touching where her hipbones knifed against the flat planes of his body, holding him like hands, triangulated by his own hardness jutting between them. She pressed against him, his arms drawing her in, his hands delineating her skinny curves, the arch at the small of her back, the cant of her rib cage—places on her body she hadn’t given any thought to for a long time.

  When she drew her mouth away to whisper again, she felt the small thread of saliva that anchored their mouths an inch apart, imagined it as silver under the lightbulb, as if illustrating the story of the azure dress, and as she thought that, she felt herself slipping out of the moment, pulling back from it as though she were watching not only that fragile wet thread but the two of them under the light, her awkward hands on his face, her angled hips, and as soon as she saw them that way, she was not thinking of the kiss or of being in the near dark with a man again, finally, but of the fairy tale. Of all fairy tales, and how they tell lies about happily ever after and the presence of magic in the world. Instead, how about one that explains that life is a spoiled five-year-old, an Indian giver that, in the end, wants itself back? A few nights before, Tyra Wallace had shown up for the dance partnered, Alison couldn’t help but think, with the chrome-and-green oxygen tank she drew behind her on a small stainless dolly. She spent the evening sitting and watching, drawing ragged breaths through the filmy plastic mask. Somehow—either slowly or all at once—life slipped in its thin needle and sucked away its own essence, a lunatic mosquito, feeding on itself. And if you avoided the kinds of accidents that had taken Marty away, then you ended up like Tyra Wallace, the body doing itself in, and you with it. A double-crosser, planning an inside job all along.

  Just as she felt Max pull back from her, just as he began to ask her what was wrong, a flash of orange lit up the walls of the garage, and she turned in time to see a fireball curl upward and disappear in the dark air above the lake. The noise of the men grew more excited, louder, and then settled back into quiet.

  “Cousin of yours?” Alison said, her voice unsteady.

  Max smiled but seemed worried as well, moving to the window and cupping his hands to look out. He told her he didn’t really like the idea of anything exploding when it wasn’t supposed to. He insisted on walking down to make sure that everything was okay, that no one was hurt. Alison shrugged. Men were always like this, wanting to mother the whole world of strangers, then acting like strangers themselves. She clicked off the light and followed him out.

  Some of the other people who lived in the houses around the lake stood on their front porches, clutching bathrobes to themselves, trying to see what all the commotion was about. She and Max stepped down into the cracked mud along the bank, Max holding her hand, their feet oozing into soft spots. She’d thought enough to bring her new flashlight, the one Mr. Beachy had sold her, and fanned its light out as they walked, picking up broken bottles, pull tabs, muddied scraps of paper. All of them seemed like souvenirs of the night, insistent little reminders that she had just kissed a man for the first time in two years, had her tongue inside his wet mouth. And the first man other than Marty in more than ten years. She tried to convince herself of that old Humphrey Bogart song—what was the line, a kiss was just a kiss? Still a kiss?

  Alison looked back toward the house, where the rows of pomegranates made blotchy shadows in the dark. Bill had given up for the night and disappeared inside. Just then a pair of headlights swung into the gravel drive, and the Seven Springs van lurched to a halt, then sat idling, dust spinning in the air around it. “What the hell?” Alison said. For a few seconds her mind did a little time jog, thinking it was early evening and time for the dancers to arrive. She looked at Max and he shrugged, and both of them walked back out of the lake.

  Mr. Kesler sat behind the wheel, looking at the dark house, slowly turning his attention to the two of them as they approached the van.

  “Dad?” Max said. “What’s going on?”

  “Gordon, is something wrong?” Alison asked. He sat in his powder blue jumpsuit, both hands in his lap.

  “I must have the wrong night,” he said. He looked at his watch and shook his wrist, then looked at the house a few more times.

  “Dad, it’s after midnight. What are you doing out here?”

  “I…” He opened his mouth, closed it. “I think this watch is faulty. Cheaply made and all that.” He looked stung by his own confusion, his eyes old and a little panicked behind his scientist glasses.

  Alison and Max quickly looked at each other. Alison thought, but didn’t bother pointing out, that if this had been the right time, he’d brought the van and no riders.

  “I guess I made a big mistake,” Mr. Kesler said, his voice overly loud.

  Max’s jaws worked with either impatience or worry, his temples throbbing as if he had gum in his mouth. “Yeah, I guess you did,” he said, which struck Alison as a harsh thing to say, given the circum
stances. Just then, the porch light clicked on and Sarah came out of the house, hopping two steps to look at what it was she’d stepped in on her own front porch, never guessing in a million years, Alison thought, that it was pomegranate juice. She walked out into the harsh cones of the headlights, clutching her faded bathrobe, legs exposed and almost pale blue in the light. Her hair tumbled over to one side of her head, half of it in her face.

  “It is one-thirty in the morning,” she said in a loud hiss. “I heard an explosion, which I guess was you—” she looked at Max “—and now we’re having a little party out in my driveway.” She had walked just past the reach of the headlights, and Alison could see that her sister was naked under her threadbare bathrobe. She felt awful; all of Bill’s King Solomon preparations, and here they’d likely interrupted their lovemaking, their latest attempt to form a baby out of superstition and abandoned hope. She imagined Bill upstairs in some makeshift phallic god costume, peeking out from behind the curtains.

  “My father is putting on a little show,” Max said. “I apologize for both of us.” He tapped a cigarette from the pack and lit it. “And the explosion wasn’t mine, I’m off the clock.”

  “Max was just about to drive his father home,” Alison said. She tilted her head, trying to indicate in sister-code that something was wrong with Mr. Kesler. Even now, he kept shaking his watch and tapping its face, holding it to his ear, muttering about having the wrong night. Sarah was too angry to break the code, and just stood watching everything in her dark confusion.

  “He can drive himself home,” Max said.

  “Well, no, I really think you should,” Alison said. “He’s probably tired.” She heard herself using the composed voice that nurses always employ with difficult patients. Hard to say who was the difficult one here.

  Max shrugged. “One of us worked today, and it wasn’t him. Go on, Pop. Just go out the way you came in.” This reminded Alison of a phrase repeated on nearly every page of her Haynes manual: Reassembly is the reverse of disassembly.

  “Max, don’t you think—”

  Alison was interrupted by another flash of orange, another hollow whoosh of flame shooting up into the night, the reflection of it caught in the front bay window of Sarah’s house.

  “I’m going down there,” Max said. “Those dumb bastards are going to kill themselves.” As he turned away from the truck, his eyes locked with Alison’s, and he gripped her forearm to lean in toward her. “Don’t buy it,” he whispered, then strode off, over the lip of the bank and into the bowl of the lake. So strange it looked, a lake with no water, a man walking in over his head into nothingness. Finally, Alison convinced Mr. Kesler to drive back home, after assuring him that there would be a dance lesson the next night, assuring herself that he was okay. When he started the van, Alison heard the insistent ping ping of some warning device, and noticed as he backed out that Mr. Kesler’s own seat belt swung free, though his record collection was strapped in tight, a passenger beside him.

  “While you were out here playing with your car, or whatever,” Sarah said, “Lem called about nineteen times. Wants to know if you want latex or oil on the front door. Wants to know if you want to keep the carpet leftovers. Wants to know why the hell you’ve left him to do all the work on your house.”

  “He never said that,” Alison said. She’d never heard Lem curse at anyone, much less her.

  “No, that last part was me,” Sarah said. “You can’t even be bothered with your own home?” She shook her head, as if she wanted to say more but decided not to.

  “I know Lem is working—”

  Sarah pushed the hair off her face. “And while we’re on the subject, Ernie called and said they had to give up your slot. They’ll replace you with adjuncts.” She said this so as to hit hard on “replace” and “adjuncts,” small, sharp daggers to throw at her sister. They landed, too, so that Alison felt a warm thickness in the back of her throat that could quickly become tears if she let it. She’d been replaced, or worse, just phased out. A whole chunk of her previous existence canceled. Sarah backed off a bit.

  “Hey, I’m glad to see you getting along with…what is it, Max?”

  “Yes, Max. Thanks.”

  “That is, you know, if he’s okay and all that.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Well, I don’t know. He just seems a little strange, is all. And he should be talking you out of this car thing, not helping you with it.”

  “He tried. And as for the strange part, maybe I should find a nice normal boy who nails fruit to my house.” She immediately regretted saying this, for letting Sarah, as usual, turn Alison into a version of herself. A little too mean, a little too mouthy. “Listen,” Alison said, “go to bed. I’m going to catch up to Max.” Sarah nodded and went back inside, stepping over the pomegranates, which by now were pulling loose of their nails and plopping onto the porch, the passing hour like some invisible Nebuchadnezzar, tearing down the temple walls.

  A caution provides a special procedure or special steps which must be taken. Not heeding a caution can result in damage to the assembly. A warning provides a special procedure or special steps which must be taken. Not heeding a warning can result in personal injury.

  7

  * * *

  Mr. Kesler’s phantom Chrysler was again featured in the Press-Republican. A local woman named Frieda Landry wrote a column called “Out-n-About,” which dealt, apparently, with whatever was on her mind the day she wrote it. One week, she’d write about the family of chipmunks living in her Christmas wreath, and the next, she’d make an earnest appeal for peace in Northern Ireland. Today’s column, though, asked “Where Oh Where Can Our Little Car Be?” They ran the same Flow Motor’s photo of a Chrysler similar to Uncle Crawford’s, and Frieda Landry retold the entire story, embellishing the cold (“bone-numbing”), and the severity of the ice storm that had hit Wiley Ford that winter of 1946 (“a glacial tempest”), and fourteen-year-old Gordon Kesler’s struggle to make it out of the freezing water (“a frantic skirmish with death”). Mr. Kesler was quoted, saying he wasn’t sure exactly where the car went under, and Frieda herself speculated that the car might have rolled along the sloped bottom and could be anywhere, most likely it had settled in the “bottomless crevasse” of the middle (Alison pictured Frieda writing her column with a thesaurus open on her lap). The article also quoted Max, who explained the very small breach he’d cut in the dam, saying that the middle of the lake would be drained within a couple of weeks and couldn’t be rushed because of structural weaknesses in the dam. The thought occurred to Alison that Max was purposely holding things up, so as to prolong his father’s agony, but she didn’t want to dwell on that possibility. There were other quotes as well, a woman from the National Register of Historic Places, who noted, gently, that while the buildings of Colaville certainly were historically interesting, they held no intrinsic historical value. Tanner Miltenberger, who made his living scuba diving golf course ponds and selling the drowned balls he raked from the bottom, said he planned to dive in the middle and see what he could see, as soon as his bad back felt better.

  The night before last, those buildings of Colaville had looked like toy blocks scattered around a rug. She had tramped out into the cracked mud after Mr. Kesler had driven off in the van and Sarah had disappeared inside the house. Max was waiting for her, sitting splay-legged on a stump, smoking a cigarette.

  “I thought you went to see what was wrong with those poor bastards,” she said, giving her words enough edge to register her annoyance that he’d lacked equal concern for his father. “Make sure the poor bastards weren’t killing themselves.”

  “Well, they were, but slowly. Eating fish they were cooking over a Sterno fire. That was the big explosion, throwing Sterno cans on the campfire. Besides, they were mean.”

  “Did they threaten you?”

  “No. They ate my fairy godmother.”

  She punched him on the shoulder with her knee. “You only need the bones anyway
, remember?”

  “I think they ate those, too.”

  She sat beside him, and he extinguished his cigarette by pushing it into the mud.

  “Has your father had any other episodes like that?”

  “Oh, maybe a thousand, going back to 1965, at least.”

  “You think that was more pretending? That he’s nuts? Or senile? What would be the point?”

  “I think you know.” Max squinted and bent over, affecting an old man’s voice: “There was a car? What car? I can’t remember anything. Poor me.”

  “God, are you cynical. Maybe he’s really sick.”

  “If I’m cynical, then you’re gullible.”

  Alison bit her lip. “Okay, I already told you about Yeh-shen, maybe we have to move on to Aesop’s fables? The Boy Who Cried Wolf?”

  “Yeah, and when you get to the end, you’ll recall that the idea of the story isn’t that we end up feeling bad for that lying little shit, is it? The idea is supposed to be ‘Don’t lie.’”

  Her face heated up. “So someday your father actually dies, and you sit home watching Oprah while the rest of us are at the funeral crying, because you don’t believe it really happened. Is that how you want it to end up?”

  “Well, no.” He lit another cigarette. “I don’t really want to watch Oprah.”

  “I’m serious. At least take your father to a doctor.”

  He shook his head, blew smoke at the night sky. “Alison, at home he rattles off Cal Ripken’s batting averages for the last fifteen years. He keeps a mental catalog of seventy-eights he doesn’t yet own, who recorded it, what orchestra, what label, and so on. His brain is better than both of ours put together.”

  She had taken his hand then, laced her fingers through his, which they both took as an end to the conversation, cutting it off before it spoiled the night. They’d sat in the quiet, the only sound the few men left at the lake’s center, the crackle of paper from Max’s cigarette. Maybe Max was right about his father; she had known him for only a couple months, and Max had known him his entire life. And, since Marty, she was too careful about everything, too worried. Besides, after only one kiss, she could still tell herself that it was none of her business, that she wasn’t really involved.