Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  They pitched their sleeping bags on the stage and slept there instead of in any of the cramped rooms, the air in those rooms close with the gloom of the men who had lived in them. Toward morning, rain started up, an opaque and chilly downpour that signaled an early autumn. The rain produced a thin echo that dragged her up out of a deep, unmoving sleep, the sound like applause in some far-off room. Alison reached across and rubbed his back, let her fingers mesh with the skin drawn in furrows over his rib cage, and slid closer, taking him into her hand. They made love a second, slower time, quietly, the palms of their hands black with dust from the stage floor. After, they realized they’d forgotten food and so made a breakfast from what Max could find in the truck: a bottle of water, a box of vanilla wafers, and the paper sack of stale pistachios. They sat cross-legged, eating quietly, listening to the downpour, while she thought about the night before, his hands and his body, trying not to compare him to Marty.

  The rest of the morning was spent working in the basement, Alison holding a flashlight while Max ran his drill off the generator, drilling holes into the brick columns that stood in rows. She shone the light around, finding blank spots where the water heater and furnace had been, old wooden chutes for coal and laundry, discarded signs advertising the dining room on the top floor. From one of the wooden beams hung what looked like some child’s first-grade art project, a mobile made from a coat hanger, yarn, and flashing pieces of aluminum foil. She thought again of two nights before, of tossing the hubcap into the lake. Maybe the whole plan was so dumb, it wouldn’t make any difference. The men fishing the lake would find the stuff and throw it away; no one would ever know about it. She looked over at Max as he leaned to wipe his face with his T-shirt. What if she just told him? What would be the big deal? He might just laugh it off, though he hadn’t been laughing the other night when his father showed up in the driveway, hadn’t laughed at any of Gordon’s lies or his efforts to protect those lies. If only Max could see his father the way she did: a desperate old man, digging his nails in, clinging to air. But she supposed you could never see your father or mother, your husband or wife or lover as anyone other than someone wielding your own bestowed trust, levering your faith against your love, one direction or the other. And if she did tell him, and the plan worked, she knew what might happen: Max would call his father on this lie, too, his eyewitness there at his side, holding his hand, making love to him in old hotels.

  Max clicked off the drill, pushed his goggles up. “I feel like a coal miner down here. Let’s go find some sunlight.”

  “I’m starving.”

  “Sunlight and food, then.”

  The small corner market down the street was open, and they bought microwave burritos and nachos, sodas, and a bag of M&M’s, which they took back to the hotel, up the twelve flights of stairs, up an iron ladder, and out onto the graveled roof. Industrial gray boxes were situated here and there, air conditioners, maybe, or fans. This was a football Saturday in Morgantown, and off in the distance they heard the cheers rise up out of the quiet. Just as they were about to sit with their food, they noticed a man sitting in the corner of the rooftop, legs stretched out before him. He raised his arm and gave them a friendly wave, and Alison felt a stir of fear ripple through her.

  “What the hell…”

  “It’s okay,” Max said. “That guy’s been hanging around since the first day I went through this place. Just nod a lot; he’s fine.”

  They walked over, passing the cardboard trays of food. “Hey, Tom,” Max yelled. “What’s up, dude?”

  “Yo, hey. Maxwell!” Tom said.

  “Maxwell?” Alison whispered.

  “He’s one of those nickname guys. You’ll have one soon enough.”

  Tom looked to be in his late fifties, with close-cropped white hair under a Batman baseball cap, a deep tan, and a black elastic band holding his big square glasses in place. He wore flower-print beach shorts and a POW/MIA T-shirt. He looked like one of those damaged Vietnam vets always featured on TV news magazines.

  “My buddy Maxwell,” he said. “And you brought your lady friend along to hold the flashlight.”

  “That’s pretty astute, Tom,” Alison said, strangely happy to hear herself described as someone’s “lady friend.”

  “Hell, I’m about half-psychic, you know.”

  “Half?”

  “This is Alison Durst,” Max said.

  “Alison,” he said loudly, pronouncing the second syllable like “sewn.”

  “Tom used to live here,” Max said. He lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Tom, who took two. “Very top floor.”

  “Were you in the war or something?” she asked, pointing at his shirt.

  “Yeah, the war of the sexes. I was a POW for a while. Now I’m missing in action.” He laughed at his joke, revealing large front teeth. She imagined he must wear the shirt just so he could repeat the joke.

  “Where do you live now?”

  “Ah, you know. There’s always a pal, always a couch. Pals and couches.” He nodded.

  Alison took another nacho and offered Tom the tray. He took one, popped it into his mouth, and patted his stomach, smiling. Under his leg he had a stack of paper, playbills and flyers that looked like they’d been torn from telephone poles. One of them, resting in the V of his legs, had been folded into a paper airplane. Alison wondered just how screwed up this guy was, sitting up here. He saw her looking at the plane.

  “I used to fly,” he said.

  Tom held the plane up, his fingers lightly quivering. “I had an old Piper Comanche. When the money for that ran out, I did RC planes for a while, and when that money ran out, I made plastic models. Hellcats, Mustangs, Japanese Zeros. And when that money ran out, here I am.” He tossed the plane so it hit the knee of her jeans.

  “And when that money runs out?”

  He laughed, readjusting his cap. “This one is free, Alisewn. All free.”

  “My father used to do RC planes,” she told him.

  He nodded. “That’s cool.”

  “Tom worked as a flight mechanic for Piedmont Airlines,” Max said.

  Tom shook his head. “Then they got bought out, like everyone else. Fired the old guys and the new guys. Kept the middle.”

  “So how do you earn a living now?” She tried to say this without concern in her voice.

  He bent a corner of the plane. “Oh, I have a small pension, and I play the horses over in Charlestown.”

  “I thought that was how you went about losing money, not making it.” She offered him the last nacho, and he took it.

  “Not if you’re good or careful. I’m good and careful. The Wizard of Odds.” He smiled, chewing.

  “Alison is a mechanic, too,” Max said. “Cars, though, not planes.”

  “Oh, I am not.”

  “Oh yeah?” Tom said. “What are you mechanicizing?”

  Her face warmed. “I have a 1976 Corvette. I’m just fooling around with it. I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

  “God Almighty, 1976,” Tom said. “Our peanut farmer takes office, Chairman Mao heads for that great collective in the sky, the Viking hits Mars and fails to reveal any little green men. Oh, and the Bicentennial, all that off-the-rack patriotism.”

  “Is your last name Rossi?” Alison asked.

  “No, ma’am. Bittner. Seventy-six was a watershed for me. My daughter was born.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Susan Marie Bittner. I still like it. I called her ‘Soupy.’”

  “What’s she doing now?” Alison wondered how she could let her father live this way.

  “God knows,” Tom said.

  “That’s too bad, Tom,” Max said.

  “No, it’s a good thing.” He folded the creases of the airplane, sharpening them with his thumbnail. “If He didn’t know, then I’d be worried.”

  “Go ahead and fly it,” Alison said. “I want to see.”

  “Are you in deep soul love with your lady friend?” he asked Max. “Wi
th Alisewn?” He put the final fold in the plane and held it up to check its evenness.

  “Well,” Max said, cutting his eyes at her. “Could be. It’s too early to tell, probably.”

  Alison smiled at him. Could be.

  “Could be, my skinny white ass,” Tom said. “If you’re in love with someone, you know before you know. You know before you’re born. A priori, my friend.”

  “Then maybe it hasn’t sunk in quite yet,” Max said.

  This answer seemed to satisfy Tom. He turned and knelt at the ledge of the roof, gently tossed the pink plane over. It sailed evenly, circling around on updrafts, out over the rooftops as it slowly spiraled down. By the time she took her eyes away, he’d already folded two more, and he handed one to her, one to Max.

  “Hold up for me,” he said, starting another. They held their planes and waited. Max kept looking at her, holding her glance, conjuring up the telepathy that lovemaking induced, that secret shadow play of intimacy. “Just a final filigree and we’re good to go,” Tom said, licking his fingers to straighten the creases. Alison looked back at Max, who was watching Tom. Deep soul love, she thought, imagining, for the first time in two years, another kind of life for herself. One of blown-up silos and redneck opera cruising and pistachios and old men on rooftops, but still—a life.

  Finally, Tom finished and counted three, and they tossed their planes over into the breeze, a blue one, a yellow one, a black-and-white one. The planes swooped and spun, lifting and then turning, circling. Tom clapped his hands and shouted, “Dogfight! Dogfight!” as the planes looped into the hazy dusk that hung over the city, as another cheer went up from Mountaineer Stadium.

  They left Tom napping in his corner of the roof, going back down to finish up what work was left for now: drilling holes, checking the lean of the building with a plumb line, and loading sand, chicken wire, plastic sandwich bags, and rags into the basement, where it would all wait until Max’s order of dynamite came through. Max explained that this job would not be like another silo in another abandoned field. The police would be there that day, to cordon off five blocks surrounding the building. The mayor had already arranged for a photo op of himself pushing the button to set off the charges, which meant that someone from the Dominion Post would be on hand, along with TV cameras from local news and a crowd of onlookers.

  “Man, you’re like a rock star,” Alison said, settling herself in the truck, noticing for the first time how weary her bones were from all the stair climbing and lifting.

  “You think?” Max looked up at the building one last time, probably running through his mental checklist. Her own checklists, her long categories of dates and names, had gotten lost somewhere over the last two days, pushed from her mind by thoughts of work and sex and deep soul love.

  “Sure, all you need is some babe in a spangly dress on your arm.”

  He laughed. “Do you have a spangly dress?”

  “Not hardly.”

  “This’ll have to do, then.” He hooked his finger in the watch pocket of her denim overalls and pulled her to him, kissing her deeply, both of them giving off musty attic odors. Sometimes some of Sarah’s dancers, with a new romance of their own, or new medication, a recent joint replacement, would repeat the old cliché, saying they felt like teenagers again. Alison always resisted the impulse to ask what that meant: Screaming tantrums? Back-stabbing gossip? Bad poetry filling diary pages? Pimples? But now, she had to admit, she knew what they meant. Here she was, parked in a truck, making out, gently sucking Max’s tongue, her hand on his thigh, about to head home while opera music swirled around them in the noisy truck. It all felt so good.

  Later that night, in the dark, they lay on her bed with a quilt thrown loosely over them, wind gently shaking the window screen. It seemed strange that for so long she’d thought of that wind as a breeze off the lake, had described it that way a dozen times, only now the lake was mostly gone, but the breeze remained. Max’s breathing was slow and even, though his eyes were liquid and shining in the dark, looking up toward the shift of light on the ceiling. She leaned up on her elbow and told him a story about the time when she was seven years old and her Aunt Jeannie gave her a Chatty Cathy doll for her birthday.

  “I didn’t even like dolls and never had. I mumbled a thank-you, took it out of the box, and pulled the string. It said something dumb, ‘I want a cookie,’ or something like that. Then Sarah tried it, and it said, ‘Please brush my hair.’ I thought it was the lamest toy on the planet.”

  Max smiled, still looking up at the ceiling. “So, what happened?”

  “I put it—her—on a shelf, then started looking at the box she came in. Probably playing with the box instead of the doll. Anyhow, the box said, ‘Chatty Cathy, the Talking Doll’ or whatever, and then I read, on the side, ‘Says eleven different phrases.’ I mean, good Lord, I just about had a heart attack.”

  Max turned his head toward her. “Sorry to be dense. I don’t get it.”

  “I thought she only said eleven things total. Ever. In her whole life. We’d already used up two of them without even really listening. I mean, wasted them, you know?”

  He laughed. “You didn’t like her anyway.”

  She gave him a small shove. “Now you are being dense. It’s like having eleven wishes. You don’t want to blow any.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I went Secret Service on everybody. ‘Don’t touch the doll!’ ‘Get away from the doll!’ She stayed on the shelf, and I kept trying to figure out what would be an appropriately weighty occasion for another string-pull. I imagined spacing them out over my entire life.”

  “When did you finally figure it out?” He gathered her wiry hair in his fingertips.

  “Well, you know Sarah never passes up an opportunity to explain some incidence of stupidity. So she did, finally.”

  “And what happened to Chatty Cathy?”

  “Garage sale, probably. Salvation Army, the island of misfit toys. Who knows.”

  He was smiling but sleepy, his eyelids weighted. “Somehow,” she said, “the last two years have felt like that. Like Chatty Cathy.”

  He looked at her. “You mean you feel like her? On a shelf?”

  “Not exactly that. And not me, really. More like … I don’t know. The time.”

  “I’m not sure how you mean.”

  “Like, even if she did only have eleven things to say, you have to pull the string anyway. If that makes sense. I don’t know.”

  She left it at that and fell asleep happy, slipping down into her pillow, under the crook of his arm, beginning that slow tumble into dreams, which, despite her quiet happiness, came in as dreams will: dark, insistent, and bottomless.

  If several components or circuits fail at one time, chances are the problem is a fuse or ground connection, because several circuits are often routed through the same ground connection.

  9

  * * *

  Two days later, Max figured out the electrical problem was not the battery or the mice, but just bad grounds, dirty connections in the fuse box or at the starter, or anywhere, really.

  “Well, how do we fix that?” Alison asked.

  “You need a special tool,” Max said, staring into the engine bay. “Probably very expensive, too.”

  “More good news. Mr. Beachy can build a new wing and name it after me.”

  “Wait here,” he told her. “I think Sarah has the tool you need.”

  “Sarah? Her idea of a tool is a coffee cup.”

  He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Just wait.”

  He disappeared into the house and came back in five minutes, carrying a pencil. He offered it to her, holding it on outstretched hands.

  “What? I write a letter and ask for real help?”

  “No, you use the eraser to clean the electrical connections. Just erase all the gunk.”

  She took the pencil, feeling dumb, doubtful, as if he’d just handed her a spoon to remove the wheels. Sure enough, though, when she tried the
first connector at the fuse box, the dirt erased easily, turning the black to bright copper. She did this for all the connectors she could find, back to the battery behind the driver’s seat, while Max sprayed oil into the cylinders through the spark plug holes.

  “I thought oil went in the thing on top,” Alison said.

  “Usually, yeah. But your cylinders are probably a little rusty, and you might not have oil pressure first time you start it up.”

  “But if they’re rusted and I try to start the engine, I’ll break a ring, right?”

  He smiled. “You’re getting pretty good at this. And you could break a ring, but we’ll deal with that if it happens. Let’s just get it running first.”

  She was getting good at this. More and more, she knew exactly what she was looking at when she bent under the hood, knew what was wrong and how to fix it. She would visit AAAA Auto Parts and listen to Mr. Beachy explain things she already understood, wanting to absorb not so much his knowledge now as his quiet patience. She’d come to love the new rubber and clean oil smell of the place, the worn wooden counter, the fringe of fan belts, the cartoonish religious tracts. Someday, the Corvette would be done and she would no longer have any excuse to walk in there and lean on the counter next to the gum machine. Someday, that counter wouldn’t even exist, nor Mr. Beachy with his patient explanations. He, his store, would go the way of the Hotel Morgantown, of those tuxedoed bands in the ballroom and the indigent men who came later, of Marty and her old, empty house. Ashes to ashes must be the world’s oldest economy, and amazing, really, in its scope. Every damn thing found its end, and as you got a little older, you could mourn a wooden counter almost as easily as you could a dead husband. But thinking that way was probably just sentimentality, a Hallmark card to your wonderful self and your wonderful existence. Everyone seemed to believe that change was good—she’d seen the idea expressed on bumper stickers—but why? Change was just the world gearing up to get along fine without you. So maybe that’s why she’d thrown that hubcap into the lake, just to let Mr. Kesler keep his own damaged past for a while, lies and all. She knew from her marriage that the worst kind of history was one built on lies, because when it finally crumbled away, all you had left were doubts and regret, half-ghosts of everything you did wrong. When the Hotel Morgantown was no more, Max had told her, the local officials planned a historical marker to note where it had once stood. But there were no markers for imaginary hotels, no forged baseballs in the Hall of Fame, no plaques to failed marriages. Lies crumbled like dust in the wake of moving forward, and even the dust was a lie, and crumbled into nothing.