by Brad Barkley
Sarah smiled. “What?”
“I’m not drunk.”
That afternoon, Bill began painting all the trim on the house lavender, and planted two holly bushes in the front yard. She didn’t even bother asking anymore. His efforts were no different from hers or anyone else’s, everyone just spinning their own little hamster wheel, thinking their wheel was the most important one in the whole world. She skipped the final dress rehearsal for the parade, and spent her evening in the garage, installing all the new parts Mr. Beachy had sold her. He was right: She didn’t really even need her manual very much for this stuff. It took time, was all, a few bruised knuckles. Near midnight, she was under the car, draining oil, and heard the dancers leaving, heard their excited talk of the parade, heard the van pull away and Sarah close the front door. As she filled the crankcase with new oil, she could hear other sounds, the men fishing the drop-down stream and its small bulge of remaining lake, Bill nailing something else to the house and, from the sound of it, to the trees out front. He had only a few days left on his sick leave. Another drunk at closing time.
At one in the morning, she gapped and installed the spark plugs, changed the wires, checked and set the points, checked the static timing, and closed the hood. She was done with the engine, for now at least, assuming she didn’t have to pull it for something major. Next would be bodywork, all that expensive disaster Max kept talking about the first time he’d seen the car. But for now, the car could stop and it could go. She sat in the driver’s seat, slid the key into the ignition, and turned it. Nothing. She popped open the battery access, twisted the connections and tightened them, then tried again. The engine turned over, filling her garage with fumes, not quite starting. Something, a trick Mr. Beachy had taught her…what was it? She tried the key again, winding it out until the turning slowed, her battery draining. What was that trick? She pictured someone smoking…a lighter…lighter fluid. She got out, finished the coffee in her thermos, and made her way into the dark house. After a quick, quiet rummage through drawers of dead batteries and corn-on-the-cob holders and clothespins, she found the familiar skinny yellow can. Back in the garage, she popped the hood, removed the air filter, and squirted some of the fluid down into the throat of the carburetor. How much? The last thing she needed was a fire, some middle-of-the-night catastrophe. She erred on the side of just a little bit, then sat back in the driver’s seat.
On the first turn, the engine kicked over with a throaty floom that rattled the walls of the garage, and sat idling. It ran. The damn thing was running. She leaned back, fingers shaking lightly on the steering wheel, and just listened. The idle was not quite even, missing now and again. Probably the timing was off, but not too bad. And loud, the exhaust rusted through. She jumped out long enough to replace the air cleaner and latch the hood, to check the house for lights to make sure she hadn’t awakened anyone. The sound of it, of her car. Like that coma patient she’d always imagined it, suddenly sitting up in bed and asking for steak and potatoes, asking who won the World Series, inviting her out for a walk. Out. She could take the car out. But no, that would be dumb. Her brakes hadn’t been bled yet, still had to be pumped just to get any pressure, and no one yet knew how bad the chassis was, if the car was even structurally sound, as Max liked to say. If only Max could be here. So much of the work had been his anyway. She closed the door and flicked on her headlights, watched them slide up, one set still burned out, then levered the gearshift into first, released the brake, let the clutch out. The Vette rolled evenly out onto the gravel drive.
Where to? She said this aloud to the passenger seat, as if the self that watched her were along for the ride, then turned and looked back at the empty space where the car had sat for so long, and in answer to her own question shrugged and started down the driveway, tires crunching on the gravel, the engine rough but not awful, shocks squeaking. Finally, she made the paved road and the car settled out as she picked up a little speed. Then she tried to brake and braking was not good, the pedal needing three hard pumps before she got any pressure. But once it pressured up, the new brakes held. She’d stopped in the middle of the road, her one headlight mis-pointed off to the weedy side of the road, the dashboard glowing. She clicked on the radio, and the oldies station gave her Steppen-wolf singing “Magic Carpet Ride,” which seemed almost appropriate, except that magic carpets didn’t rattle and scrape along the pavement. As she started up again, she tilted her head back and looked through the open top at the map of stars pasted to the wide sky, noticing then how really cold it was, too cold for an open car and no coat, but who cared? She said it out loud, giving her voice to the wind, speaking again to her imagined self: Who cares? She worked through the gears, then, as Midlothian Road straightened out, she downshifted into third and punched it hard, the car fast enough to press her back into her seat. Midlothian made a gentle rise as she shifted to fourth, the speedometer showing eighty-five now, a long stretch of blacktop before her, the wind a noisy, lunatic thing that lived somewhere above the car, and it felt so good, driving this way, arms sprouting goose bumps, hair tangled out behind her, the car fighting her only slightly, pulling right, the engine buried and rumbling under that long silver hood. She took it to ninety, howled at the night, heard small bugs popping off the windshield as the needle edged up a little more. Then she thought about her brakes, her mushy brakes, and eased off, backing down to the speed limit as the car hit the edge of town.
She drove through the square, under the DISCO BEVERAGE sign, past the window of the Red Bird, where Mr. Davidow stood in the faint light of closing time, closing out his register. She drove past the dry cleaner’s, past a pair of teenage boys sitting on the Greyhound bench, both of whom whistled at her. Past the Honeybun Bakery, Joe and Benny’s pizza, and the building, now closed, that had once been the YWCA. She left town and came in toward the lake from the other side, all the way around Loop Road, past Sarah’s driveway, then off again, another turn around the lake, then another. She thought of Lem and Marty’s plan for a perpetual-motion machine, magnets mounted on turntables or some such thing, their plans just vague enough to believe in. She had the car going, so what now? And with barely another thought, she turned hard off Loop Road, back onto Midlothian, out onto I-68, heading toward Morgantown.
Half an hour into the trip, she realized how stupid this was, in the same way all impulses are stupid: She hadn’t thought through all that could go wrong. The car could break down, or break in half, according to Max; she had no registration, no license plate, a burned-out headlight. It was 4:00 A.M., she hadn’t slept, and she was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and clogs, freezing in the middle-of-the-night chill. She kept to the speed limit, as though it had been dictated to her by God, and tried to relax, dialing in a talk show on the radio, whistling and patting the steering wheel, as if nervousness would be the first thing the cops noticed. Her car ran. Every so often, she reminded herself of the fact. It ran pretty well, too, with only that little blip in the exhaust—the timing, it had to be—and the tendency to pull right, and the squeaks. The brakes weren’t much of a worry on a highway trip.
Near Finzel, she passed God’s Lighthouse of Redemption, a big tacky church with a nautical theme, a lighthouse in place of a steeple, its revolving green light shining out over the cow pastures and Christmas-tree farms. Their roadside signboard read GOD IS A PORT IN EVERY STORM, and she imagined the preacher wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons, white slacks, and a little white captain’s hat, the ushers in yellow slickers, tossing out life preservers during the altar call, the walls of the church decorated with nets and cork, like a seafood restaurant. She drove past, smiling. A little farther down, a dead deer lay twisted at the side of the road, its mouth still wet-looking, and farther still, a trucker had pulled off and was peeing at the side of the road, lit up by his own taillights. The moon rolled along overhead as the talk show faded out and some old doo-wop song faded in. Something under the car dropped down enough to scrape the pavement, but she kept going, past a law
n chair sitting in the median, a case of empties in the middle of the road, the bright suddenness of truck stops at the tops of the off-ramps. Finally, she pulled off into one and left the Vette idling, afraid that if she turned it off, it wouldn’t start again. The windows inside were fogged over with the steam off the coffeemakers, and a radio hidden somewhere at the back of the counter played country songs. Two bleary-eyed men in plaid shirts and caps sat at one of the booths in back, eating plates of eggs and drinking Cokes, both of them looking at a crossword puzzle.
Alison bought coffee and a package of little powdered doughnuts, and, on impulse, a pack of cigarettes, even though she had not smoked since grad school.
“You headed east or west?” the man behind the counter asked her. He had the thickest black hair she’d ever seen, and a shirt pocket stuffed with tire gauges. She told him she was headed to Morgantown.
“You’re kind of late for Morgantown,” he said, which struck her as an odd thing to say. Did they close Morgantown at night? Then again, maybe she was late, maybe Max had finished his work there, moved on, was sleeping in some other hotel, some other town.
Back in the car, she found the same country station that the man had on in the store. Some song about tears and raindrops. She never understood why this music—so effusively sad and woeful, so maudlin about love and heartbreak—had been embraced by truckers and redneck boys and workingmen. Maybe they needed an antidote to all that male stoicism. Or it was code, sent out to the women in the world: Listen to us, we’re just as sad and broken as you are. She drove, keeping her speed down, smoking in shallow drags and flicking her ashes through the T-top.
She took the airport exit into Morgantown, then tried to remember—right or left? The last thing she needed was to get lost in town in the middle of the night. Morgantown didn’t have all the problems of a big city, but it did have its share of bad stuff, even gang violence, though she always imagined the gangs in West Virginia as just minor-league farm teams for real gangs. Finally, the terrain started to look familiar, and she made her way downtown, rode in her rumbling, scraping car up and down the grid of streets until suddenly, almost without realizing it, she was in front of the Hotel Morgantown. It was 5:30, the first edge of slate-colored morning just beginning to peel back along the horizon. By now, she was shaking with highway cold and nerves, her teeth chattering. She turned off the Vette, then quickly restarted it, just to be sure. The engine ticked in the quiet cold. Off somewhere in the distance was some grinding, mechanical sound, like a giant fan turning. Music echoed from somewhere, and a dog barked a few times, then stopped. The wind gusted, paper cups and leaves moving up the lighted sidewalks as if they had someplace to be.
The doors of the hotel were chained shut, and, now that she thought to look for it, Max’s truck was nowhere around. She rattled the doors a few times, knocked, peered inside. Where could he be? She walked around the back, where the tall windows opened up on the ballroom, and stood on a trash can to look in. Empty. She knocked on the window a few more times before giving up. On the way back around front, she noticed the door to the kitchen, behind the trash cans, had been propped open slightly with a soda can. She recognized the kitchen from last time, the stove with its shadow of grease, the fans above it missing.
“Max?” She walked through the ballroom, trying not to let her clogs echo so loudly. “Are you here?” Somewhere in the building, water dripped. She found their vanilla wafer box still on the stage, and some of Max’s det-cord spools sitting by the basement door.
Upstairs, the carpet rolls had, been removed, and here and there holes had been drilled into the walls. She called his name on all the floors, knowing he wasn’t there, but reluctant to leave. Though the Corvette had gotten her here, it seemed somehow impossible that it could take her back. At the end of the top floor, she climbed the iron ladder and opened the door out onto the roof. Dawn had arrived, finally, the sky a lumpy pinkish gray. There was a dampness to the air and hints of low fog, as though it had just rained. She walked around on the gravel, looking over the edge, even though it made her dizzy. From here, the Vette looked pretty bad, the silver paint peeled and blotchy, a dull gray underneath. Maybe it would be like a house—paint would make it look new. But silver wasn’t quite right; something about the silver and maroon together was just too tacky, a bridal suite in Las Vegas. She could replace the entire interior, but she liked maroon. Black paint would look good. Black and maroon. She squinted at the car, trying to imagine it with brand new paint. Then she spit over the side and watched it fall, wondering what the attraction was—almost every male she’d ever known was a big fan of spitting over the sides of things. Probably half of the Colorado River was spit.
“Alisewn!” she suddenly heard, and jumped so her knee banged the low wall around the ledge. When she turned around, it took her a second to find Tom, who sat in the opposite corner from last time, knees to his chest, bundled under a blanket.
“Damn it, Tom,” she said, “you about sent me over the side.”
“Aaah,” he said, almost a gargling sound, “you don’t want to do that.” He slurred his words, and she noticed then the scattered pile of quart beer bottles beside him on the gravel. She walked over to him and squatted down.
“Are you okay, Tom?”
“Me? Yeah, I’m just a little sick. Upset stomach…an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. You know…the usual.”
She pointed. “Four quarts of Bud.”
He smiled. “The reference eludes me. However, I’m in bang-up shape. Never better.” Beneath his blanket, a collection of paper airplanes lay crushed and wrinkled.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Have you seen Max?”
He looked at her, squinting, his lips cracked. “Since you’re his lady and I most decidedly am not, I ought to be asking you that, shouldn’t I? Trouble, I take it?”
“Yes, trouble. He’s not here?”
“He was yesterday, drilling most of the day. Brought me a sandwich and we broke bread around noon. That was the last.”
“Well, thanks anyway, Tom.”
“Is he not treating you well?”
“He’s fine…” She hesitated. “Maybe you should ask how I’m treating him.”
Tom pulled his blanket higher around his neck, the wind stirring the airplanes in tight circles around him. “I have a hard time pegging you for any meanness.”
“I lied to him, Tom.”
He clicked his tongue, coughed. “They say all politics are personal, right? Well, the inverse is also true. Just say you’re sorry and try to mean it. Everyone lies.”
She smiled. “You’re pretty cynical for a man who plays with paper airplanes.”
His laugh drew him into a hacking fit, his face reddening. “God love you, Alisewn. I’d keep you even if you did lie.” He held up two of the wrinkled planes, his yellow fingers shaking. “Have at it,” he said.
She took the green one, and he took the white, and they tossed them again on the count of three, watched them limp and loop their way to the ground.
“Tom,” she said, still looking with him over the ledge, “where I live, they flooded a town to make a lake, and when they did, one man refused to leave.”
“Harry Truman,” Tom said.
Her mind jumped to the atom bomb and the Marshall Plan. “What are you talking about?”
“Harry Truman is the dude’s name who did the same thing when Mount Saint Helens blew. Refused to leave. I guess that twenty-five feet of scalding ash kept him warm for the winter.”
“Our guy was named Winston Ackerman. He chained himself to his front porch.”
“A flair for the dramatic. I wonder if those guys form a club in the afterlife. Dumb Asses Anonymous or something.” He shook his head, his eyes still following one of the planes, which was lifted on updrafts over and over.
Alison looked down at him, the top of his head covered with thinning bro
wn hair and faint scars. “Listen,” she said. “I hope you don’t have any plans for joining that club.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. When this building comes down, you’d better have someplace else to be.”
“Friends and couches. Don’t worry over me, Alisewn.”
She nodded and patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, if you see Max, tell him I’m looking for him.”
“He’ll be around. Why don’t you leave a note?” Tom produced a chewed-up Bic pen from his windbreaker and offered her the back of one of his stolen flyers. She scrawled a quick note, telling Max she would be in her garage or at the Founders’ Day Parade, that she wanted to see him, that she was sorry. Tom folded the note and stuck it in his pocket, where, she imagined, it might stay forever.
She was pulled over by the state police only a hundred yards or so from her exit. It was not yet rush hour, the sun just an idea of orange low on the horizon, the policeman’s eyes puffy with fatigue. She had not slept at all, and felt jangly and frayed. While the cop ran her license through his computer, she sat in the chill and smoked another cigarette before deciding it was a bad idea and chucking the entire pack out the window into the ditch. Dumb. Now he would write her up for littering. She had smoked at grad-school parties when she and Marty first started going out, and though he didn’t like it, he said nothing until after they were married. He had used on her the argument that her body was God’s temple, a justification that struck her as so old-fashioned and quaint that she’d been moved to hear him use it. Now that she’d made the connection, it struck her as exactly the kind of reasoning Mr. Beachy would use. What a thing, to have married a man who thought her body was a temple, a place of worship, who wanted only to love it and see no damage done to it. And what had she done? Mocked his argument, asked him why it was okay to stuff God’s temple with Vienna sausages and pork rinds. She was clever and funny, that she was, but if she was also touched and moved, what would it have hurt to have shown him that as well? She imagined him sitting right beside her, right now, in the passenger seat, the way all those TV psychics insist the dead stake us out, sitting in his floppy work boots, his leather watchband smelling of sweat, his hair trimmed too far above his ears. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and if she could find any faith in anything, have any of the belief that had come so easily to him and to Mr. Beachy, then she wanted only ten seconds’ worth, enough to believe that he heard her.