by Brad Barkley
The person directly across from them, a woman with penciled-in eyebrows and the smoothest skin Alison had ever seen, took advantage of the lull to rearrange the good-luck shrine she had set up around her place, a complex heap of teddy bears, Beanie Babies, rosary beads, and photos of her grandchildren. Alison leaned back in her folding chair, holding Max’s hand. Lila Montgomery waved from across the hall. Tyra Wallace made her way down from the smokers’ loft to hug them both, and Max bought them Cokes and hot dogs. Benny Pappas announced that Crystal and Jeremy Engle’s baby was doing better and would be home soon from the hospital and that Denton Jamison had left his headlights on in the parking lot.
“And speaking of cars,” Benny said, his voice a muffled echo, “I suspect our local law-enforcement friends best have their ticket books at the ready when a certain hotshot Corvette is soon speeding through town.”
Alison reflexively laughed with the rest before realizing he was talking about her Corvette. Every player from the two tables around them had turned to look, smiling. Max squeezed her hand under the table.
“You’re just hoping I’ll take you for a ride,” she shouted up to Benny, and everyone laughed again.
“Oh, I think that seat will be occupied,” Benny said in his most leering voice. It was Max’s turn to blush. As new as she and Max were, she realized, their story had already been set down in the mind of the town, already written and familiar. The lonely young widow marries the handsome munitions expert. Frieda Landry could have written it. Alison remembered how she’d anticipated missing the car, missing AAAA and Mr. Beachy, knowing that change took everything away. But really, what did she know? Did she know more than an entire town, more than the years that had given them a religion built on repetition, a God who let someone win every game? She saw herself then for how she’d been these past twenty-three months, viewing the town as beneath her for all its provinciality, a town that had lost hundreds to wars and a few more each week to the ordinary ways of dying—she’d thought she knew loss better, knew it more, took it to her empty bed each night. But loss had pulled her out of her life, while the town kept moving on, kept imagining its own existence, its own life—like some fairy-tale creature, dreaming itself into being. It was a town built on quiet belief—that the tourists would show up, that Gordon’s car was down there somewhere, that her Corvette would soon draw speeding tickets. Not a bad way to live a life—write your stories out of what you imagine, and imagine out of whatever past sustains your future. If you missed one or two, if the tourists didn’t show, then you’d played enough cards to win the next one, or the next. Her failure with Marty had been a failure of this same kind of imagination, their unwillingness to foresee a future of happiness, and in that unwillingness the further unwillingness to carve out a space in which that happiness might occur. Already, in the eyes of the town, she and Max were speeding through town in a shiny Corvette, wedding rings on their fingers, their children filling the elementary school and trying out for peewee football. She could imagine a worse future. Could, but—for now—didn’t.
They jumped back into another round of bingo, and Max even won twenty-five dollars on one of the quickie games. They kissed, and Benny Pappas, missing nothing, embarrassed them all over again. Just as they settled in with their cards for a new game, there was a small flurry of commotion by the front door.
“Hold the phone and stop the presses,” Benny nearly shouted through the mike. “Here’s the man of the hour.”
“Who?” Max said. They both looked back in time to see Gordon—once again, the late Mr. Kesler—walking through the entrance, carrying a paper Food Lion sack and dressed not in his usual jumpsuit but in a plaid sport coat and orange shirt, a porkpie hat on his head. He looked like he was there to sell everyone a used car.
“For those of you who didn’t read this morning’s paper,” Benny announced, “be sure and talk to Gordon tonight and ask him what’s what.”
“What is what?” Max said, turning to Alison. She felt her face warming, her eyes burning.
“A little of Gordon’s past, and, I might add, our very own past, came out of that lake yesterday,” Benny said. “A part that’s soon, I understand—am I right on this, Tilda?—to find its way into the Mineral County museum.”
As if it were scripted, Gordon reached into the paper sack and withdrew one of the chromed hubcaps, waving it above his head and beaming, the hubcap shining under the lights. Some of the people there applauded, while Gordon collected backslaps and handshakes.
“I don’t get it,” Max whispered. “What is that?”
The woman with the penciled-in eyebrows leaned across the table. “Congratulations,” she said to Max.
“It’s a car part,” Alison said.
“Not your Corvette…” He looked genuinely confused, and in that second Alison knew that Mr. Kesler had lied to her about Max hiring Tanner Miltenberger, about wanting to “tighten the screws.”
“No, not my Vette.” She could hardly breathe. “Uncle Crawford’s Chrysler.”
Max looked back at his father, still collecting congratulations while Benny announced the last game of the night, while the hubcap made its way like a collection plate up and down the long tables.
“Not possible,” Max said. “He’s lying. That thing didn’t come out of the lake.”
“Well, yes, he’s lying, but also yes, it came out of the lake.” The warmth and smoke smell and noise settled over her, pressing her down, sticking her shirt to her back. She felt the hot dog and Coke churning her stomach.
“Alison, there’s no Chrysler down there, just an old, old lie.” He looked, for half a second, as if he doubted this assertion, as if, like the rest of the town, he wanted to be pulled into believing.
She leaned in to whisper. “The parts are down there because he put them down there. He threw them in so people could find them.”
Above them, Benny called out, “I-forty-three,” and the players marked their cards.
“How do you know about this?” Max said.
She looked at him. It’s such a small thing, she wanted to say. Just an old man’s story, just let it be.
“He told me,” she said. Her own lie.
“B-twenty-three,” Benny called. Clouds from the smokers up in the loft spun in slow wisps around the arc lights.
“Why?” Max said. Across his shoulder, she saw Gordon heading in their direction, smiling, carrying his hubcap in both hands like a salver.
“No, he didn’t tell me.” She shook her head. “Max, this whole thing…it’s just so mindless. I mean, what’s the point?”
“He told you and he didn’t tell you? Which is it, Alison?”
Gordon slowly made his way down the aisle toward them, stopping now and then to show the hubcap to someone else. Benny called, “G-nineteen,” and flashed it on the board.
“I helped him,” she said as evenly as she could. “He had a whole box of parts and I helped him throw them in.”
He drew back to look at her. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head again. “It was a whim; I thought I was helping.”
Max’s face had grown tight and hard, his round glasses reflecting the arc lights.
“Tell them,” he said. “Tell everyone—her—” He pointed to the woman with the Beanie Babies and teddy bears. “Tell her right now what you just told me.” His voice grew louder.
“Max, please…”
“Tell her it’s a lie.” A muscle throbbed in his jaw.
“Why does it matter?” she said. She reached out, expecting him to draw back. Instead, he took her hand and held it flat on his palm to examine it, her hand some found object, a vaguely interesting rock. He set her hand back on her leg.
“If you don’t understand that,” he said, “then you don’t understand a thing about me.”
He stood up to leave just as Gordon reached them with the hubcap.
“Your old man made the paper yet again, son,” Gordon said. He offer
ed the hubcap, and Max took it. From where she sat, Alison saw his face reflected in the chrome, curved and distorted, a portable fun-house mirror. The name CHRYSLER, stamped in red, cut across the middle of his rounded face.
“That’s really nice, Dad,” he said. What else could he say? The whole town thought it was nice, too, the nicest thing that had happened to them in a long time.
“You see that?” Max held the hubcap out to her, she saw herself reflected in it, the entire room behind her held in that curve of polished steel. “What do you have to say about that?”
She could say to everyone here—stand up, as in class, and lecture—that somehow a myth could look like only a cheap lie to someone, while it held great truth for someone else, like those optical illusions where the drawing is both a skull and a beautiful lady. She could tell Max to let it go and stop torturing himself with the past, tell Gordon the same thing, ask for a show of hands, how many here had shitty fathers?, ask God in his corner how it was that a single betrayal could be so small and weigh so much, could be held in nothing more than a junkyard scrap that in turn could hold the whole town in its shiny face. But God had just called the winning number again, and a small whirlwind of celebration stirred near the back, while the rest tossed their used cards in quiet defeat. It was the last game of the night. Alison said nothing as Max turned and walked out. Gordon strode into the mingling crowd with his hubcap. Benny Pappas shut down the scoreboard and drew a canvas cover over the ball machine, putting away his deification for the night. Back to earth, back to making pizzas, back to being human again.
Regardless of how enthusiastic you may be about getting on with the job at hand, take the time to ensure that your safety is not jeopardized. A moment’s lack of attention can result in a mishap. The possibility of an accident will always exist with any restoration project, and it would be impossible to compile a comprehensive list of all dangers involved in any such undertaking.
10
* * *
Days passed with no word from Max, days in which she kept calling his cell phone, imagining it ringing out in that big empty ballroom, echoing its beeping little tune. Mr. Kesler had been all over town making appearances, had been asked to cut the ribbon at the opening of Flow Motor’s new service center, posed for pictures at the Mineral County museum, and had spoken to a group of Cub Scouts as part of the Founders’ Day festivities—he and his hubcap, as if they were Hollywood’s brightest new couple. Finally, she gave up on Max’s phone, went to the Red Bird and loaded up on coffee, and headed to Mr. Beachy’s to prepare for a long night of work. She noticed on the way that DISCOUNT RAGE had fixed the burned-out neon tubes only to have others go bad, so that the sign now read DISCO BEVERAGE.
She laid out for Mr. Beachy everything she had done on the car, everything she thought she had left to do, at least to get it running. The day before, a new credit card had arrived in the mail, and she’d called the number to activate it. For now, she wouldn’t think about how deeply in debt she was.
“I want the car to run,” she told Mr. Beachy. “I want to get the thing moving as soon as possible, and drive it the hell out of here. Excuse my language.”
He waved away her apology, began thumbing through the thick catalogs. “I’m not too keen on that lake of fire business. Just a story for scaring kids, as far as I’m concerned.” He leaned across the counter and showed her all the belts and hoses she would need, plus new spark plugs and spark plug wires, oil filter, air filter, points, and condenser.
“This is shade-tree stuff,” he told her. “You could do this in your sleep, Alison.”
“That’s more or less the plan.”
He boxed all the parts and rang up her purchase. While they waited for the new credit card to be approved, he dropped a few tracts into the box. “New ones,” he said. “Thought about you when I got them in.”
She pulled them out and looked at them. The first one showed a smiling cartoon wife with her kids, ascending into heaven on a cloud-draped escalator, moving toward the beams of light above them, while back on the ground her husband wept over his family’s wrecked car. Inside were more cartoons, illustrating a predictable story about Fred and his family finally attending church and praying together after putting it off for many years, saving their souls just a day before the terrible wreck. On the last page, the father was smiling over their graves while a cartoon balloon from his mouth said, “I know that they are with the Lord now, and someday I will be, too!” The tract was titled “BE NOT AFRAID.”
“Is this how you picture it?” Alison asked. Mr. Beachy looked up from stapling her receipt to the box, startled. She’d never really talked about the tracts before.
“You told me once it was hard for you to believe,” she said, “so I just wonder about this.” She showed him the cartoon. “It just seems too easy.” She thought of Marty, imagining the afterlife as a mall full of toy stores.
“Well, maybe that’s the message, that it is easy. More so than we think.”
“But escalators? Sunlight? You really want to spend eternity in an atrium lobby?”
He took the tract and held it at arm’s length to read it. “We just can’t picture it, so we make it up best we can. No artist could imagine it.”
“And you really believe this? That we should all be not afraid?”
He thought about this. “Faith is a steep and rocky path, but for the most part, yes, ma’am, I do believe that.”
The thought came to her then that had Marty lived, had he never had any accident that day in Lem’s backyard, he would have turned out much like Mr. Beachy. A quiet faith filling up a quiet life. Would he have ever convinced her, won her over to thinking this way? She couldn’t say; she was only the man on the ground, standing beside the broken car. The family got clouds and heavenly escalators, while he got only religious tracts and wreckage and his own failed imagination. It didn’t seem fair. But even if she had never believed with him, knowing Mr. Beachy had shown her something even deeper, maybe—she could have loved Marty. Over time, his childishness worn down to a simple sweetness, his years of faith and work adding up to a kind of lived life, old age plowing into him a little deeper, she could have. Mr. Beachy cleared his throat.
“Until you need to do an overhaul,” he said, “you’ve just about spent your last dollar in here. Take her down to the transmission shop once she’s rolling, and then Dave Fisher is your man for body and frame work.”
“But I can still come here and talk about theology and brake pads, right?”
“Oh, you have to, Alison. And I want a ride in that car when it’s done.”
She leaned across and kissed his cheek. “You got it.”
Wednesday morning’s mail brought an envelope from Lem, Polaroid photos of her finished house, all the rooms freshly carpeted and painted, the floors polished. A short note from Pammy told her everything was done, and done right, the way Marty would’ve wanted it. She showed the photos to Sarah.
“Man, they did a good job,” Sarah said. “Looks new.”
“But the pictures are…weird, you know?” Alison said. “They’re like ransom photos. If you ever want to see this house alive again—’”
“—then go live in it?” Sarah said.
Alison didn’t answer, just thumbed through the stack again. It didn’t look new at all, really. In fact, it looked ten years old, like the first year they lived there, all of the stuff right back where it had been, the hooks in the corner draped with Marty’s field coat and ball caps.
“They forgot the velvet ropes,” Alison said.
“What do you mean?”
“A security guard.”
“What?”
Alison shook her head. “Nothing.”
Sarah was quiet a minute, leaning on the sink, watching her. “You won’t go back there, ever, will you? I mean, we should all just chuck that idea.”
Alison looked at the harsh photo of her old bedroom, the clock radio glowing and blurred on the nightstand. When she tried to put
herself in the photos, sitting on the couch reading, or at the stove cooking, it seemed fake, like one of those cardboard “pose-your-own-photo” cutouts of ex-presidents on the streets of D.C.
“I can’t.”
“Then sell it. It’s never looked better. Use the money for a new place.”
“I can’t do that, either, Sarah. I can’t just unload it after all the work they put in.”
“Well, what’s your big idea, then?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have one. I can’t go home and I can’t stay here. You know what I’m like? A drunk at closing time. Except one thing…”