Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  Later that night, after Sarah and Bill were asleep, she took the Vette out again. No one yet even knew that it was running, let alone that she was driving it. She felt like Mr. Rossi, hoarding her secret knowledge, though if Max had bothered to ask last night, she would have told him, taken him for a drive. It no longer worried her that the car had no tags or registration; somehow, at 2:00 A.M. in West Virginia, it felt as if the law didn’t really apply The road she’d found on the opposite side of the lake into town was long and straight, with only that soft rise toward the end, and she drove it up and back, turning around in the town square to drive it again. Once, before she ran out of road, the speedometer needle tipped up toward 100 and she felt her heart flipping wildly behind her ribs, felt her breathing resume when she slowed. She loved the car, but worried about it, too. Probably just her imagination, but on curves, the car felt loose somehow, as though it might twist free of itself. Mr. Beachy told her in the store once that rust could get so bad that cars had broken in two when their owners tried to jack them up. She thought about the interior, too. It would look pretty shabby once the outside had new paint. One of her catalogs advertised kits that let you replace the entire interior—the seat covers, carpet, door panels, and dash—make it all new, even change its color if you wanted. But the kits were expensive, and she had no clue how to install any of the stuff. On top of that, she’d have to farm out all the bodywork, or else learn to weld, and she had no intention of ever getting anywhere near a welder. She would be here years, not months, trying to finish the car, in way over her head. The idea filled her with dread, as did the idea of teaching again, of moving back to her museum house. But neither did she want to linger on—now that she’d driven the car, she wanted it finished, behind her.

  Flushed and windblown, she eased quietly down the driveway and backed into the garage. It was near three o’clock in the morning. One of the headlight doors got stuck in the up position when she clicked the switch off, refusing to glide back down into the nose of the car. Tired as she was, she slid under the bumper for the second time that day and clicked on her trouble light. Nothing looked wrong. She jiggled the wires a few times, disconnected and then reconnected the vacuum hose. It was the side with the good beams, so she just left it. She could fix it later. The silence she noticed in her garage so late was the missing voices of the men who used to fish the lake, their laughs and shouts. They’d gone home now, given up. When she closed her eyes, she could still hear the echo of them, of all the life carried in those voices. She clicked off the trouble light, and when her eyes closed this time, they stayed closed, and she felt herself falling into those imagined voices, sinking into sleep.

  She awoke to the slam of the storm door, awoke stiff and sore, damp and chilled, her hand still curled around the trouble light. Outside, in ashen light, the moon still up, she found Bill, his tool belt strapped around his waist, standing in the front yard just looking around, drinking coffee.

  She smiled walking up to him, shivering a little. “So what’s the plan now, throw coffee on the house?”

  He seemed a little startled, even though he’d just watched her walk up. “Nah. The plan is go to work.”

  “Work?” She just then noticed his gray phone company shirt, the pocket protector full of small tools. “What about—”

  “Time’s up. Game is over and I lose.” He blinked quickly and drank from his cup.

  “Bill…it wasn’t like it was a competition. You didn’t lose.”

  “I did lose. Can you get it all done, can you make a life before time runs out? That’s the game. Have everything in place before it all starts to quit or die or get old.”

  Or rust, she thought. “Bill, you have a life. A nice home. Sarah loves you.”

  He nodded, tight-lipped. “All true.”

  “You did everything you could. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” He pitched the rest of his coffee into the grass, got into his truck, and drove away.

  Mechanically, power diminished over the years with the advent of emission controls and the use of smaller V8 engines, but even so, the performance and ride still provide an unequaled driving experience.

  12

  * * *

  The day brought little change in Mr. Rossi. Alison visited in late morning, talking to “the child,” Sarah’s name for Dr. Tabor, which everyone else had begun using. He didn’t help himself much, either, wearing the Snoopy scrubs, a Three Stooges tie. He told them there was swelling in Mr. Rossi’s brain, that they planned another MRI for the afternoon. He was sleeping, almost in a light coma. Most of Seven Springs Village had gone into full emergency mode, reserved for sicknesses and deaths—which meant, for the most part, the preparing of food. Pies, cakes, and casseroles, having no other place to go, ended up at Sarah’s house. The only person Alison hadn’t seen since all of this started was Mr. Kesler. Maybe Max was right about him; maybe he was off pouting because the accident had stolen the attention away from his car story. Hard to believe that anyone could be that petty. She didn’t want to believe it. The decorations for Founders’ Day had been taken down from the storefronts and telephone poles, and the town looked stripped somehow, exposed and embarrassed about what had happened. The sign for DISCOUNT was out completely while workers stood on ladders trying to repair it, and enough autumn air had settled in now that the big windows of the Red Bird were filmy with moisture dripping down. At home, she and Sarah sat at the kitchen table and ate leftover casserole heated in the microwave.

  “I saw Bill off to work this morning,” Alison said.

  Sarah nodded. “Good, because I didn’t. I slept in. This hospital crap wears me out.”

  “He was upset.”

  “We had a deal, Ali. Time was up. Besides, food all over the house? Fire? I didn’t sign up to be married to the village witch doctor.”

  Alison stood and began clearing dishes. “I know. I just feel bad for him.”

  Sarah still sat, staring at the spot where her plate had been, and then she began crying, her face unchanged, tears dotting the place mat. “For maybe a day and a half, I believed him. I mean, I had faith, you know? This is gonna work, for whatever crazy reason.” She shook her head. “So, I was wrong, Bill’s back at work, and faith is bullshit. I just don’t want my hopes lifted up anymore. I want them left alone.” Alison rubbed her sister’s shoulders for a moment, then finished the dishes and left the kitchen. There was nothing to say, beyond the kind of pep talk she’d given Bill, and that would never fly with Sarah.

  That night, the three of them sat in the living room watching the local news on TV, Bill with his company shirt untucked and boots unlaced, tilted back in the recliner, Sarah doing her usual trick of reading a magazine and watching TV at the same time, and Alison half-watching, thinking about Mr. Rossi, Max, her car, about the order of the British monarchs, Mr. Kesler, and Bill’s failed magic—thinking all of it and none of it, vaguely aware of the man on the TV screen, who was saying something about gun control and violence in our schools. Fall was settling on West Virginia, and Sarah kept the front and back doors open in the evenings, a passageway for the outside smells of cool air, the last grass cuttings of the year, the creosote from the exposed lake bed. Earlier, Sarah said, some people from Maryland had parked at the edge of her drive and walked down to take pictures of Colaville, the tilted buildings and broken-backed stone bridge. Finally—dried, emptied, and seventy years too late—the lake had attracted its promise of tourists.

  An infomercial for some kind of outdoor grill came on, some has-been celebrity nearly orgasmic in his excitement over the invention. Sarah and Bill headed silently up to bed, and Alison sat watching the screen. When she was a kid and turned off the TV in the dark after her parents headed to bed, there would still be that little blue dot in the middle of the screen, and she would sit watching it. The show after the show, she thought of it. The show all shrunk down and reduced to the size of molecules, all the actors and their sitcom problems squeezed down to a little pea of l
ight.

  She went out to the garage, got in the Vette, and drove off, going out to the lake road, then onto other roads she’d never been down before, into little towns much like Wiley Ford, a handful of churches and bars, a VFW hall and fire hall, a liquor store. Dried fields of corn divided one town from another, or junkyards piled with dead cars, or long, low industrial complexes. She passed a business called the Lift King, then one called Jenny’s Machine Tools, houses and pole barns and trailers all mixed in together, laced with gravel roads and barbed-wire fences. A pile of leaves smoldered in the dark, someone’s controlled burn from earlier in the day, a glowing red eye in the middle of the yard. The Vette’s open top drew in the smell of the burning, and other smells, of skunk and cold air and Chinese food cooking. Around tight corners the car produced a new sound, the scrape of metal on metal from somewhere under the front right wheel well. She’d brought one of Bill’s old WVU sweatshirts with her, and she steered with her knees long enough to pull it on against the chill. She loved these late-night drives, and it made her sad to think of winter coming on, when the roads might be too slick with snow or ice to drive them. But by then, the car would be done, all sleek and black. Black for sure, she decided just then, to blend it in with the night and the asphalt, to make it part of them. She would have the car registered and tagged and insured, everything legal, but somehow that made her sad, too, like the coming of winter. Part of what she loved about these nighttime drives was that no one knew she took them; no one, not even the cops, not even her sister. It was as if she went out of existence for a few hours, as if she’d been abducted. Only she was abducting herself, taking herself away, accountable only to Alison.

  The gas gauge swept over toward E, and so she turned the Vette around and headed back. The house was dark, and the missing noise of the bulldozers pushing the new dam into place was noticeable at night by its absence. Already, Bill had told her, the dam was just about done, an earth dam a simple thing, really—just stones and logs pushed up together, around a core of clay, the way a kid would make a dam. With the dam complete, the lake would start filling again, the town reburied, possibly for the last time. She imagined all the ghosts of Colaville resigned to it, watching the progression through broken windows, grateful for their weeks in the open air.

  When she got up to the front door, she was startled to see someone sitting on the front steps, not Bill this time, but Sarah, her cigarette a glowing button in the shadows. Alison felt suddenly busted, a sixteen-year-old sneaking in the house.

  “Hey, you scared me. I was just taking the car down the road to check something—”

  “The child called,” Sarah said, her voice flattened at the edges. “Mr. Rossi died while we were in there watching the fucking infomercial.” She drank from the wineglass perched beside her.

  Alison stood there, the words washing over her, finding their way in through tiny paths of understanding. The orange button moved to Sarah’s mouth, then away again. “How?” was all Alison could manage.

  “Seizure, another stroke, they think, if the first one was a stroke to begin with. Basically, his brain died, is how the child explained it.”

  A ragged, breathy noise escaped Alison’s mouth, the minutes before, the rush of the car along the road, tugging at her, at now, wanting to pull her back in time, into their dark comfort. Her hands shook as she dragged them through her hair, as one fluttered down like a windblown scrap to settle on Sarah’s head. “God,” Alison said, a prayer, an accusation. So sweet, Mr. Rossi was, the sweetest man she’d ever known, and for half a second the thought angered her, as though his sweetness had been what killed him.

  “We’ve got to go down there in the morning,” Sarah said. “Somebody has to sign all their crap. Looks like the job falls to us.”

  Alison nodded. “Where’s Bill?”

  “Upstairs, sleeping. I let him sleep. He takes bad news so hard, I just … No reason to tell him until morning.”

  Alison nodded again. “It wasn’t your fault, Sarah.”

  She looked up, ground out her cigarette against the sole of her shoe. “I remember about a year’s worth of time when I had to tell you that, and you weren’t even there when Marty got killed.”

  “Maybe that’s why I thought it was my fault.”

  “You wanted to save him so you could keep saving him, right? Clean him up, teach him a thing or two?”

  “In a way, yeah.”

  Sarah lit another cigarette, the lighter bringing her face into sharp relief, then allowing it back into the dark. She drank. “You and Bill are two of a kind. Only different. He’s going to save me and the whole world.”

  “And the difference?”

  “He thinks alien priestesses are going to land UFOs here and rescue everyone. He’s just speeding the process along.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re the alien priestess.”

  Alison nearly smiled. “Well, I envy Bill. It’d be nice to believe that. But I’m not trying to save anybody anymore.”

  “Good, because you can’t. You can’t save a soul. Hey, I oughta tell Mr. Beachy that, he needs to know.”

  Alison nodded, not knowing what to say.

  Sarah looked up at her. “You’re supposed to be arguing with me. Bill is going to tell me twenty-five times in the morning that this was for the best.”

  “Well, no arguments from me. I agree with you. You can’t save anyone. Not even yourself.” Her eyes felt hot and full.

  “Hey, Ali”—she was slurring her words—“that’s not what I meant.”

  “Too bad, because you would’ve been so right. Look at me. Exhibit A on how not to save yourself.”

  “Please stop.”

  “I couldn’t save Marty, couldn’t even clean him up. Couldn’t save Mr. Rossi and can’t save me. I had thought to start with a car, you know. Tackle inanimate objects and work my way up.”

  “The car, the car.” She poured her wine out in the grass, the way Bill had with his coffee when the day began. “You are saving the car, Alison.”

  “The car is a piece of shit. It’s falling apart. I’ve already put more into it than it’s worth.” They were Max’s words, more or less, but true enough. The whole thing was folly. She worked the shark’s tooth back and forth on its chain, then squeezed it, letting it cut into her palm. Sarah was crying now in her silent way. Alison turned and headed toward her garage, blood throbbing in her temples. She sat in the car in the dark, looking out through the garage door into the tunnel of paler light, out at the corner of the dried lake she could see from this angle. Soon the lake would fill again, the docks floating instead of limp against the banks, the light reflecting into her window. Mr. Rossi wouldn’t be here to see it. She remembered with Marty, and even with her grandmother before that, the way time divides itself into before and after whatever terrible thing has happened. And it would keep dividing, would divide again, twice, when her parents died, again and again with whoever died after that—Max, or Sarah, or Lila, or Bill, or God knows who. Time just kept halving and halving and halving, like Zeno’s Paradox, the arrow that never reaches its target. We are shot through time, aiming toward—what? Death? Understanding? That must be it, because we reach death all too soon, but understanding keeps falling, always, away and away. She turned the idea over in her mind, but it was only that, an idea, a floating scrap in the slow wash of grief. She laced her hands through the spokes of the steering wheel, cried quietly for Mr. Rossi, and slept.

  In the full light of morning, she put on her one girl dress, had coffee with Sarah and Bill (who, as predicted, kept saying that Mr. Rossi’s “passing” was for the best), and headed over into Ridgely to make arrangements with Tucker Funeral Home. The director, Vernon Tucker, greeted them in the parking lot, as though he’d been waiting there. He wore a too-short pale gray suit and a thickly knotted, oily-looking tie that reached only to about the middle of his belly. He was friendly enough, though, donning the narrow glasses he wore on a cord around his neck to read their nam
es and Mr. Rossi’s name off a page in his notebook, taking care with pronunciation, his jacket puckered around his elbows. He drew them into his office, offered them a green vinyl couch as he sat behind his desk.

  “Now, according to this, the deceased has no family per se, so you have been appointed to oversee the disposition. Am I correct in that?” He looked at them over his glasses. The shelf behind him held the photographs of all the peewee football teams he’d sponsored.

  “Is that legal?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” Alison said. Typical Sarah, looking for a loophole.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Vernon Tucker said, “the deceased did a pre-arrangement with us back in 1985, and recently amended it to add your names as executors.”

  “Would you mind calling him ‘Mr. Rossi’ instead of ‘the deceased’?” Alison said. Something about the word made him sound like some species, as though death imparted only a generic title.

  “Nineteen eighty-five?” Sarah said. “Talk about planning ahead.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Vernon shuffled his notes. “You can take advantage of the calendar and lock in your arrangements at today’s prices, then sit back and laugh at inflation.”

  “I’m not sure inflation will be my first worry when I’m dead,” Alison said. The whole place was starting to give her the creeps, not for its aura of death, but for its aura of used-car lot.

  Mr. Tucker gave a gentle, practiced laugh. “Now then, the de—Mr. Rossi arranged for a cremation, no funeral service per se. He was a man of austere tastes.”

  “Did you know he was a champion trivia player?” Alison said. “He used to win tournaments all the time.”

  “How much is all this costing?” Sarah said.