Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  1. A human being once lived 19 days without food or water.

  2. Because of the earth’s rotation, an object can be thrown farther west.

  3. Almost all the villains in the Bible have red hair.

  4. Pearls melt in vinegar.

  5. A fetus begins forming fingerprints at the age of six weeks.

  6. Peanuts are used in the production of dynamite (tell your friend).

  7. An Indian ascetic held his arm in the air for 45 years.

  8. The Chinese character for “trouble” shows two women living under one roof (tell your sister).

  9. Hummingbirds can’t walk.

  10.

  She turned the paper over, but there was no number ten. Had he meant to leave it off, or could he not remember ten things (she doubted this), or had he maybe just gotten tired of writing? More likely the latter—the word walk was so shaky she could barely make it out. But why…why this? He wanted her to tell Max about the dynamite, tell Sarah about the Chinese writing; maybe he just wanted her to tell, period. Tell about him after he was gone, talk about this odd relic he’d left her with, how much he’d known about everything and nothing, the strange way he had died. Then again, he was no Mr. Kesler, and had never really liked attention, so who knew what he’d wanted, what, if anything, he’d meant. It struck her then what a strange thing a life is—just a brief flash of noisy light, with mystery tacked on each end. She folded the paper and put it in her shirt pocket, then joined Max, pressing against him in the warm bed.

  DO get someone to check on you periodically when you are working alone on a vehicle.

  DON’T allow children or animals in or around the vehicle.

  13

  * * *

  Max lay stretched out beneath the Corvette when he formally invited her to the hotel implosion. It was to be Saturday afternoon, and she would have the best seat in the house, four blocks south of the hotel itself, inside the barricades, standing next to the mayor and the lieutenant governor, with several photographers from the paper there, as well. He made it sound like an invitation to an inaugural ball. She shrugged, looking at the worn thighs of his jeans, at his legs sticking out from under the car, and told him she would be there. He kept clucking and making other noises of minor doom as he checked out the frame and suspension of the Vette for her. She looked back over her shoulder at the lake, which startled her with its filling up as it had with its draining. Almost every hour, it seemed a little more full, the small eye of water growing back toward the middle and expanding. Like a movie running in reverse—she half-expected to see the men return to their fishing by walking backward down the banks, their fishing lines unspooling through the air and onto the water as they turned the cranks of their reels the wrong way.

  Max poked the bottom of the car with a screwdriver, which produced the same shower of falling rust as the first night, when the mice had dropped out of the car. She sat on the floor of the garage and rubbed his leg while he worked, still feeling the warmth and soreness of their lovemaking that morning. Maybe they’d been running the movie in reverse, too, getting back to where they’d been before she helped Mr. Kesler toss the car parts in the lake.

  Max slid out and sat up beside her, the rust like paprika dotting his face. “That thing,” he said, “is cancerous.”

  “Funny, that’s what Bill calls rust, too.”

  He wiped his hands on his jeans. “The frame is shaped like a ladder, okay? You have about five rungs in the ladder.”

  “Crossbeams.”

  “Exactly. Well, three of your crossbeams are rusted through. Holes almost big enough for my fist.” He showed her his hand.

  “So, how do I fix it?”

  “You don’t. Or else you do a total frame-off.”

  She looked at him, brushed some of the rust from his face, and shook her head.

  “That means,” he said, “you take every part off the car. All of them, down to the frame, then you get a new frame or weld this one back up, and start all over.”

  She looked at the Vette as if waiting for it to explain how it had gotten this bad. “That would take years.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, most do.”

  “What if someone else does it?”

  “You’re talking maybe twenty thousand dollars. At least.”

  She drew a breath and let it go. Why did it seem like everything that existed was on some drunken headlong stumble into ruin? She clicked the trouble light off.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I’ll drive it until it breaks. And it might not.”

  “No way. It’s not safe to move the thing, Alison. And if you ever wreck, forget it. The car will break into four pieces, and you will, too, most likely.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  He rubbed her knuckles with his thumb. “Well, I am, okay?”

  They sat for a while without much to say. She tried not to think about how many hours and dollars she’d already put into the car. Thousands of each, it seemed like. And for what? Cancer seemed about right, or maybe it was already dead, this car, and all she’d been doing was dressing it up in a suit, pinning a boutonniere to its pocket, rouging its face. She closed her eyes, thinking of Mr. Rossi, who was to be cremated that afternoon with no more ceremony than you’d burn a pile of leaves. Less, really. Mr. Tucker had told them to pick up his ashes at their convenience.

  “I’ll help,” Max said, breaking into her thoughts.

  “Help.”

  “With the car. A frame-off. We’ll do the whole damn thing, okay? Make it brand-new.”

  She looked at him. “Really?”

  “Really. Yes,” he said, smiling at her like a kid.

  “Okay, then.” She imagined months and months in this garage with him, her car emerging newer than new, shining maroon and black. She imagined, or tried to, a slow falling into love. He took her hand then, the flakes of rust abrading her skin, and squeezed it.

  “Thank you,” she said, feeling nothing so much as a hollow kind of sadness, though she could not have said why.

  Later, they sat on the front porch while Max explained the different phases involved in fully restoring the car. He talked on and on. Every bolt, he said. Every spring and washer. They would need to draw up a plan, a time line (she thought of Ernie, of another semester well under way); they would need to get busy before winter set in, or find a way to heat the garage. Then he switched gears, talking about the Hotel Morgantown, how fifty pounds of dynamite could bring down fifty thousand tons of building, how it would fall right inside its own footprint, how beautiful it would be to watch.

  “What about Tom?” she said, interrupting.

  “What about him?”

  “Where will he go?” She had poured them each a beer, and they sat in the long afternoon light, watching the lake.

  Max drank, shrugged. “Like he said, friends and couches.”

  She shook her head. “You know he doesn’t have friends.”

  “Then, I don’t know, a shelter or something.”

  She leaned back against Max. “Just make sure he’s out of the building?”

  “Tom is like a cat. He knows every little corner of that place. He hides in the walls. But the cops know him, and they’ll be going through that thing with tweezers before we blow it.”

  “Tom cat.”

  “Yeah, that’s him.” Max slipped his arms around her, kissing the back of her neck so it tingled, and the day fell into darkness, slowly.

  She awoke at the very first edges of light, Max lightly snoring, his mouth open. When she tried to imagine taking everything off the car, then putting it back, it seemed impossible. How could anybody even attempt such a thing? Like a jigsaw puzzle, in 3-D, with eighty thousand pieces, some of them broken and missing. It was enough of a worry to keep her from sleep, so she lay facing Max, resting in the narrow penumbra of his body warmth, looking at the Yosemite Sam tattoo on his bicep and tracing Sam’s angry little face with her fingertip.

  Later, they had the house to themselves,
Bill having gone off to work in the early-morning dark, and Sarah stopping by Seven Springs on her way to the funeral home to pick up the ashes. Max told her that he was taking a day off, that he wanted to eat breakfast at the Red Bird and talk about their plans for the car, spend the day with her. He looked boyish in the mornings, his hair not long enough to be messed up, exactly, but kind of like velvet rubbed different ways. His eyes were puffy and narrow, his lips swollen from kissing. They drove downtown in the truck, the air chill enough now for jackets, for keeping the truck’s heater on low, and they listened again to the tape of Pavarotti and Placido Domingo and Theresa Stratas, the slow build of the music somehow sadder under the flat gray sky of autumn. They held hands, and she thought that it felt almost like that first day, when she rode with him down that dirt road, only the windows were open then and her fingertips had slowly stained red as she gave up pistachio shells to the dirt and the wind and the late-summer heat. Now the windows were closed, the gearshift buzzed noisily between them, and there were no pistachios.

  The Red Bird was nearly empty this late in the morning, and they took a table by the front window, looking out through the green filter at the square, at the trees full of browning leaves and squirrel nests. The walls above the counter were filled with the usual graying photos of the food from the menu, dingy-looking plates of eggs and pancakes, washed-out hamburgers, like pictures from some dusty photo album. On the wall behind their table hung curling thank-yous from an elementary school group, full of dried paint drips and drawings of spiky suns, and, next to those, photos of all the Little League teams Mr. Davidow had ever sponsored, some of the kids by now probably the fathers of Little Leaguers themselves. The waitresses stood in the corner by the big flat grill, flirting with the ponytailed kid who did the cooking during the day. Alison recognized several of the old men in their cardigan sweaters and bib overalls. They sat hunched over their plates, strung evenly as paper dolls down the length of the counter. The coffeemakers boiled their smells into the air, and the grill hissed when the kid with the pony-tail cleaned it, pouring water on the surface and scraping it with a spatula. The ceiling fan above the counter was missing a blade and spun, Alison thought, with a limp.

  The night of lovemaking and excitement over the car had left her with a deep hunger, and the two of them ordered eggs and toast and extra bacon, coffee, oatmeal, glasses of milk, a plate of pancakes to share. Max asked for tomato slices with his eggs. After they’d eaten most of it and enough plates had been cleared away, he drew a piece of crumpled notebook paper out of his denim jacket. While Alison chewed the scraps of bacon, he spread the paper out before them and drew his time line for the car across the top. The first thing he listed was DISMANTLE BODY, with a little check-mark box drawn in beside it, and a target date, Christmas Day, then a sublist of tools and other things they would need to have, or rent, or buy. After that was PULL ENGINE and all the steps involved, with a New Year’s Day deadline.

  “You need one more item on there,” she said, and took away his felt pen. Right after “New Year’s” she wrote in KNOCK OVER LIQUOR STORE.

  “After New Year’s is good,” she said. “They have lots of money.”

  He laughed. “Really, it won’t be all that bad. I mean, it will, but we’ll do the bulk of the work ourselves. Expenses will be pretty low, and we’ll spread it out. What it will cost is time, but we have plenty of that, don’t we? We aren’t those guys just yet.” He tilted his head at the old men lined up along the counter.

  “Not quite,” she said, and squeezed his hand under the table.

  The front door whooshed open, stirring the rack of real estate circulars beside the door, and Frieda Landry walked in. She was without any of her big hats today, her hair frosted the color of pink lightbulbs. She wore another boxy wool suit, in blue this time, a silk scarf spilled over her shoulders and pinned into place with a brooch, a newspaper under her arm.

  She waved at the waitresses and the cook, who began putting together her meal without her having ordered it. She sat at the table right next to Alison and Max and opened the newspaper to her own column, reading over what she must have written just the day before. Max didn’t pay any attention to her. He was busy thumbing through one of the parts catalogs, bending down pages of parts that corresponded to their new time line. He was methodical; she had to give him that. Frieda Landry finished reading herself and turned the page, flipping back and forth between the comics and the obituaries. One of them made her laugh out loud, the back of her hand covering her mouth, her coffee spilling over into its saucer. When she looked up from the page, she caught Alison’s eye and nodded, smiling at her, and then saw Max, who was chewing a corner of toast, scanning a page of pistons and connecting rods.

  “Oh, Max. And Ms. Durst,” Frieda said. “You are just the one I wanted to see.” Alison didn’t know which of them she meant. Frieda came over and joined them, carrying her coffee, settling herself in between them. She turned her chair toward Max, while he looked at Alison and gave a slight shrug.

  “May I ask you a question or three?” Frieda said. Practiced, this little joke an old one.

  “Sure,” Max said. “I guess so.” He still held Alison’s hand under the table, and she felt him nervously working her fingers.

  “Your father…” Frieda smiled and touched her neat hair, and Alison thought, please, please go away, please leave us alone. “He’s quite the something, isn’t he?” Frieda said.

  Max glanced at Alison. “That he is.”

  “I suppose you have grown up with hearing about the lake car all your life?” She withdrew her little leatherette spiral notebook and a thin gold pen.

  Max gripped Alison’s hand under the table, squeezing. Alison felt her heart expanding, thudding against her bones.

  “All my life,” Max said. “Since day one.”

  For some reason, Frieda wrote this down. “And have you heard there will be a special display at the county museum, all about the Kesler Chrysler? Right next to those mannequins dressed like miners, and all those pictures of Coalville. They kind of go along with each other.”

  Max pinched his lips together. “No, I hadn’t heard that.”

  Frieda frowned at her notebook, apparently frustrated that she wasn’t getting better quotes. “As his only son, you must be awfully proud of him. A local folk hero, really.”

  “Well,” Max said, his fingers working, “since the story is so familiar to me, I don’t have much to say about it. Alison here, though, she has some brand-new insights into the whole thing.” He looked at her evenly, and her heart jumped up, her pulse noisy inside her ears.

  “Insights?” Frieda said. “What sort of insights?”

  Alison looked back across the table at him and barely shook her head. He squeezed her hand hard, squeezed her fingers together, held her gaze. Amends. The word circled back toward her from several nights before.

  “She knows’ the truth about the Kesler Chrysler,” Max said. “The real, honest truth. Think your readers might be interested in that?”

  “Yes, of course,” Frieda said. “Certainly.” She scooted her chair toward Alison.

  Don’t do this, Alison thought. Max patted her hand now, the way you might encourage a child—go ahead and just tell the truth, and she wanted the truth just as badly as he did, wanted a truth that meant that her husband’s memory had forgiven her enough that she could fall in love with a man, make a life out of moving forward. A life of restoration, of rebuilding. Every nut and bolt and washer.

  “You…” She looked at Frieda, the pale blue of her eyes. “You mentioned ‘folk hero,’” Alison said, “and that’s an apt way to put it.” Max rubbed her hand, patted it. He smiled. Go on. He wanted her to be his, to love him enough to dig him out of all those lies. “Like, say, Paul Bunyan is a folk hero. Or—”

  Frieda smiled. “Or Johnny Appleseed.”

  “Well, actually Johnny Appleseed isn’t the best example of the…of the type of mythmaking I’m talking about.” She felt
herself picking out words, stepping around meaning, self-conscious, the way she felt in class.

  Frieda shook her head, writing. “What’s wrong with Johnny Appleseed?”

  “John Chapman actually lived,” Alison said. “He actually did travel and spread seeds across the wilderness.”

  “Well”—Frieda gave a little bark of disgust—“I believe your father actually lived, did he not?” she said to Max. “Or was he just a spook all these years?”

  He nodded and rubbed Alison’s hand under the table. Patting her, stroking her. You’re doing fine. “I think she means the claims he made, not the fact that he lived.”

  “Johnny Appleseed?”

  “No,” Alison said. “Gordon. Mr. Kesler.” When she said it, his name felt all wrong in her mouth. She saw him the way he’d been that night at the lake, his eyes blackened, a happy bandit, stealing nothing more than another few weeks of attention. She wanted this to stop.

  Frieda’s face flushed deep pink, her faint instinct for story suddenly informing her, it seemed, that she was onto what amounted in Mineral County to a scoop.

  “Aren’t you a college professor?” she asked Alison.

  “Well…” Yes and no was not a good answer, Alison knew.

  “Yes,” Max said, and laced his fingers with hers. “She is.”

  “And what you want to tell me about Gordon Kesler is that you have a reason for saying that he didn’t do with that car everything he said he did?”

  The question was so baffling in the way it was asked that Alison spent a moment trying to unravel it, Max looking at her, Frieda looking at her. But finally, the phrasing of the question didn’t matter all that much. The truth, she told herself. That’s what matters. He squeezed her hand.

  “No,” she said as Frieda scratched lines with her pen. “No, he didn’t.”