Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

Everything goes away, eventually. This she knew above all else, lying in her room that night, hearing the TV click off, Sarah and Bill readying for bed. Everything disappears, the world a black blanket spread out then folded over and over by invisible hands, every person and object and era eventually vanishing under its folds. The house fell into silence, and Alison pulled her own blankets up over her head, as if trying out oblivion, as if by knowing it, she might avoid it. But that never happened, and someday the black blanket would enfold her, too. She fell asleep thinking this, dozed fitfully, awoke just after dawn with the hollow plop of the newspaper landing on the porch, and she knew then. Knew that Frieda Landry’s article would be in the paper that morning, that after she’d left yesterday, she had driven straight to the office down on Main Street and submitted it, quick to get away with her first-ever scoop, quick to get away from Alison, who had, after all, deceived the entire town, or aided and abetted the deception. Only her crime was the more grievous, because she was an outsider, she knew, and not one of their own.

  She awoke fully in her bed, alone, Max having gone back the day before, after their breakfast with Frieda Landry, and after they’d finished the time line and spent some time under the Vette, and taken a long walk around the lake. They hadn’t said much and had touched only a little; she couldn’t help thinking that now that he’d gotten what he wanted from her—enough truth to bring his father down—maybe all the rest was superfluous.

  She stood and looked out through her curtains. The lake was up, only the roofs of the town showing, the stone bridge reduced to its backbone, the banks slowly receding. Colaville had gone away twice now, aging unseen. The lake had gone away and come back, but would go away for good someday. Max had gone away with a promise to return, Mr. Kesler in vanity or ego. Mr. Rossi had gone away as a trivia question and come back as a box of ashes, which Sarah, lacking a mantel, had placed on top of the entertainment unit. Come Saturday, the Hotel Morgantown would go away in a cloud of dust and explosion. The Corvette was going away slowly, in decay. Marty had gone away in the violence of an accident, and come back as an imagined ghost, preoccupied in her basement. Lem and Pammy had gone away in the dissolution of a friendship, Mr. Beachy in the dissolution of commerce, Bill’s hopes of magic in the blank face of reality.

  Enough light of a new day drew familiar sounds from the house, Bill and Sarah rushing about, making breakfast, the front door closing, the radio reciting the school lunch menus and the weather. A few minutes later, Sarah called her down.

  “Have you seen this?” Sarah said, rattling the paper in her fist, then tossing it on the table. She looked fatigued and pale.

  Alison sat at the kitchen table to put on her socks and shoes. Bill smiled and downed his coffee, then went out the door to work, probably sensing an argument unfolding. Alison looked over the Style page of the newspaper, but Frieda’s column wasn’t there. Instead, it was on the first page of the Region section, right beside the list of arrests for drunk driving: LOCAL PROFESSOR SETS RECORD STRAIGHT ON LAKE MYTH. One quote from Alison had been highlighted in bold print, “Many such myths find permanence because people want to believe. Someone puts on a Bigfoot costume, and someone else takes his picture.” Had she really said that? She sounded so…finicky, pedantic. The whole time she’d spoken to Frieda, she’d tried to step around her own words, as though vagueness might lift her past what she was actually saying. The article described, in Frieda’s usual thesaurus-driven style, the way that Mr. Kesler had invented the story (“an elaborate facade”) and had planted the car parts (“a nocturnal transgression”). Frieda had not even bothered, Alison realized now, to implicate her in all of this, even though she had admitted to it yesterday. Better, probably, if your source was not one of the criminals. This version of events had been verified in interviews with Max Kesler, who had, the article noted, corroborated the professor’s account. Corroborated. How he must have loved that word.

  Alison folded the paper, sighed, and looked at her other sock still bunched up on the floor. What had she done? Now that the whole thing was in print, it looked awful. A blind-side attack on an old man, cheered on by his only son.

  “How could you do this?” Sarah rattled the paper again.

  “I don’t know,” Alison said. “Max was there … I thought I was telling the truth.”

  “Well, for godsake, Ali. If we plan to run around exposing people’s lies, the Press-Republican is going to start looking like the New York Times.”

  “It meant a lot to Max.…” She drank the coffee Sarah poured for her. “It’s the truth, you know? You’re supposed to think telling the truth is a good thing, right? Isn’t this the message we got as children?”

  Sarah frowned. “We also got the one about being polite. About not coming off like the Lone Genius of West Virginia riding in to educate the ignorant.”

  Although Sarah was one of the least qualified to lecture on politeness, Alison knew she was right. She sounded horrible in the article, dissecting the truth, trimming away the lies. Cold and methodical. The professor, in academic gown and mortarboard, big round owl glasses, using her pointer to indicate where the town’s stupidity lay. And how had Max escaped almost all mention? He’d been sitting right there, nodding his head, turning the conversation toward Alison, yet his name only came up once, at the end of the article. The corroborator.

  Alison shook her head. “I blew it. I’m sorry. Everyone is going to hate me.”

  Sarah put a clean bowl and a box of cereal on the table. “I won’t hate you. But if you go to the paper with any of my lies, you’re going to have a fight on your hands.”

  That afternoon she spent polishing the Corvette’s seats with saddle soap, vacuuming the carpets with a spray-on cleaner, cleaning the glass and mirrors. It didn’t look half-bad when she was done, only one small tear in the leather seats, which she fixed with rubber cement. She stood back, sweating, admiring her work, knowing it was only more dressing up, more rouge on the body of the car. The lake was full enough now to send the sun reflecting off it in all directions, to ripple across its surface when the wind blew. She’d heard nothing from Max all day, nothing about the article, or about the car, or about her. Nothing. On the wall of her garage was Mr. Rossi’s last testament, as she’d come to think of it, his arcane list of nine theses tacked to the wall with nails she’d found on the bench. She’d read them over several times, his one disciple, and read them again now, absently, as she picked up the cordless phone and called the chain store body shop in Cumberland—the one she’d been warned away from for their shoddy work, the one Mr. Beachy called “El Cheapo’s” (about the meanest thing she’d ever heard him say)—to find out that they could respray the car for about a hundred bucks. Not a real paint job, but from ten feet away, you probably couldn’t tell the difference. Black, she told the man on the phone. The blackest black you have.

  That night was the second dance class they’d had since Mr. Rossi had died, not because anyone really wanted to dance, Sarah said, but because they wanted someplace to go. Alison had just gotten done with showering and cleaning the grease from under her nails. They spoke in low whispers, as if they were at a funeral instead of just in the presence of Mr. Rossi’s ashes, though as she listened from upstairs, she figured out that it was not his presence in the house that silenced them so, but hers. Her name drifted up the stairs with the clink of coffee spoons and saucers, and she sat on the top stair and listened, straining at the words the way she had as a kid when her parents were downstairs having some minor argument, or when Sarah was downstairs with a boy. She closed her eyes to hear better, afraid to go down and face them, afraid of the attention, and beneath the sound of the talking and the pouring of coffee and of Bill’s quiet laugh and Mrs. Skidmore’s loud one, there was another sound she almost recognized but couldn’t quite. And then she did: careful footsteps on the carpet, like her own, late at night. She opened her eyes, and there stood Lila Montgomery, her jeans neatly pressed, her loafers flashing pennies.

  �
��You can join the party, the sad party,” Lila said. “We don’t bite. Not at our age.”

  “Bite, stomp, kick. I’d better stay here.”

  “I was just on my way to the ladies’, not hunting you down, Alison.” Her hair looked perfect, like cotton candy.

  Alison nodded. “But it’s pretty bad, the whole thing. They must hate me.”

  Lila put her loafer on the next stair up and leaned on her knee. “Puzzlement, is the main deal. Everyone wants to know why you went to the paper. What the point was. Especially given our recent loss.” She said this delicately, a practiced grief.

  Alison sighed. “It’s a long story. And in my own defense, the paper came to me, more or less. I wasn’t thinking, exactly.” She didn’t bother mentioning that the paper had come to Max first.

  “No, I believe you were thinking inexactly. Not considering ramifications. A town like this, about all we have is our old stories, after the plants close down and the mall opens up. Stories and old grudges.”

  “But you know it’s not true. The car in the lake. The whole thing was a lie.”

  Lila rolled her eyes and smiled. “Of course it is. Not everybody knows that, but many do. You make so much of teaching history, then you ought to know how people are. You really think the first Thanksgiving went the way it’s shown in all those grade-school pageants?”

  She shook her head. “Another friend of mine says that everybody lies.”

  “Everybody chisels the truth into whatever they need it to be. We just needed a couple of stories attached to our lake, so it didn’t seem so worthless. So stupid to have built it in the first place. All you did was come along and say, No, it was pretty stupid.”

  Alison nodded. Maybe her whole life would never be more than a series of quiet betrayals—Marty, Lem, Max, and now Mr. Kesler and all of Wiley Ford. She thought of the DOOMED TO REPEAT IT shirt Ernie bought for her that time; it seemed pretty accurate right now. “I’m sorry,” she said. As much as she wanted to explain Max’s involvement, that would just look worse, spreading the blame around.

  “Don’t be sorry to me. I’m not mad. But I will be if you don’t let me find the bathroom.”

  Downstairs, Alison paused in the living room on the way to her garage, and it was worse than she imagined. Lila, of course, was the nicest of them all, as she was with everything. The rest sat around with their napkins and cookies and coffee cups, glancing up at her and then looking away, letting their eyes settle on the TV, where some smiling magician in a silk shirt was threatening to make the Statue of Liberty disappear. She gave a weak “Hi,” and the others muttered the same back. Mrs. Skidmore added, “How are you, Professor?” Bill saved her, finally, offering her a cup of coffee to break the silence, but she declined. She wanted to say something to them, but what? Damn Max for doing this to her. Damn herself for going along. She wanted to tell them, Never mind, forget the article in the paper, forget the entire blip of the world that day, and everything that was in that article—and, by saying the words, put Mr. Kesler’s Chrysler back where it belonged, in the deep mud of lake bottom and memory alike. But that was impossible, she knew, like folding a waking person back into the dream they wanted to keep having.

  All that was visible of Colaville now was the very top edge of the bridge, that narrow backbone of gray and brown. The ends of the docks were floating again, though still too steeply to walk on, and the streetlamps that dotted driveways and backyards around the lake reflected where they always had, as though they had been waiting for the water to return. She stood looking out across the lake. What a mess everything was, a mess she saw no way of straightening out. Inside the garage, her Haynes manual lay spread open on the bench, the page edges filthy with grease, some of the pages by now pulling out of their binding. The book was open to the page on changing the headlights, which was her next job, especially if she planned to keep driving at night. Mr. Beachy had already told her never to replace one of anything that came in a set—brakes, lights, tires, spark plugs—replace them all. She had called him that afternoon to ask him to order the headlamps for her, and gotten pretty much the same reception she’d gotten just now in the living room, mitigated by his natural gentleness. He’d been cordial—that was about the best she could say—businesslike, for the first time in all their business together. Near the end of their conversation, she’d asked if he had any more tracts, told him she might swing by to pick one up.

  “Well,” he said, drawing the word out, “I’m sure they wouldn’t interest you.” Snotty, eggheaded you is what he meant. Before she could think of a response, he’d asked if there was anything else, told her that her order would be on Tuesday’s truckload, and quietly hung up the phone. She looked now at the car, thinking only of those fist-sized rust holes in the frame, the car disintegrating.

  The car. The damn car, her big plan. She looked at it as if challenging it to respond, to speak to her, defend itself, and then she raised her knee and kicked the front grille with the toe of her sneaker, snapping the plastic vents. She kicked again and heard the crack and watched the grille fold in on itself, then again so the pieces dropped away like teeth and fell to the dirt. Her pulse pounded in her ears, through her temples. The stupid fucking car, her religion, her salvation, her ticket out. She was done with it. She stomped the front bumper and cracked the fiberglass. Done with the car, done with Max. She stomped again, fiberglass shredding, her ankle throbbing. Done with marriage and teaching. She kicked the headlight, shattering it to bright bits that fell to the floor and into the folds of her sock. Done with everything else she had failed. She kicked the other headlight, catching her sneaker. She imagined kicking the car into pieces, the pieces into fragments, the fragments into bits, the bits into dust. She stopped. Breathing hard, sweating. Her whole leg throbbed now, her sneaker ripped. Outside, the dancers spoke and laughed a little as they left, and the lake water made tiny slapping sounds at the edges of the docks, a noise she hadn’t realized was missing until she heard it again just now.

  For a long stretch of time, she sat in the doorway of her garage, looking out at the lake. Already it was hard to remember exactly what it had looked like with the water gone. The bottom had been picked clean by scavengers, and whatever garbage they’d left behind had been gathered one afternoon by a troop of Girl Scouts. Now the lake would need a whole new history to amuse the ghosts of Colaville, new outboard motors dropped in, new fishing tackle, engagement rings, self-help books. She imagined the inhabitants of Colaville returning to their watery homes, wondering what had happened to all they’d accumulated, to all their trash, vandalism in reverse. And Mr. Kesler’s Chrysler was no longer down there for them to admire; she and Max had seen to that. Maybe the ghosts of Colaville worried that they were next, their stories, and thus them, extinguished forever.

  Finally, the dancers left, and one by one the lights in the house went off. Guided by no more than habit, Alison sat in the driver’s seat of the Vette and fired it up, quietly tapped the accelerator a couple of times, and began to let the clutch out, rolling out onto the gravel. She pulled the headlight switch on the dash, and of course she had no lights. No lights and no frame. She rolled to the edge of the road, and the parking lights cast their mix of white-and-yellow light over the blacktop, wavery half circles, a man holding two lanterns before him. Enough light, she decided, if she went slow. There was never any traffic on those back roads anyway, and she could hardly be less legal than she already was, so she went.

  Soon enough, she got used to it, straining her eyes to see ahead of her, the moon bright as a flashlight overhead, the tinted highway stripe disappearing under her. Before she knew it, Jenny’s Machine Tools passed by in the narrow arc of orange light, the grass at the edge of the road the color of fire, whites of the speed limit signs glowing amber, her speed picking up. As she drove, her mind drifted back over the old familiar frustrations, trying to remember the names, in order, of the sixty-six British monarchs. Automatically, she thought of asking Mr. Rossi, but of course he
had answered his last question, his last bit of knowledge now nailed to her garage wall. Not that he would’ve known that one anyway. It was too much of history, not enough of trivia. More likely, he would have known what the British monarchs ate for breakfast, what size shoes they wore, how many were left-handed. But that somehow seemed backward to her now—history was more about breakfast and shoes than lists and dates, the same way a town was about its lies, a person about his quirks and whims. Which mattered more in her memory now, the fact that Marty had been born in 1964 or the fact that he spoke to his radios when he worked on them? The cause and date of his death, or the way he liked to mug for the video camera, or the way he would eat a grilled hot dog but not a boiled one? She levered the gas, downshifted, and picked up speed. The British monarchs would just have to line up and march through history without her; she was done worrying the question.

  As she crested the slight rise in the road, a fleshy ripple of brown and white streaked across her vision, held there by the yellow lights, her muscles bunching up inside her hands as she jerked the wheel hard right and her foot stomped stomped stomped the brake pedal into the floor, into mush, until the brakes held and the car pivoted around itself, swimming across the road, tires chattering and squealing as the sweep of orange circled across the other lane of blacktop, the steering wheel pressing her chest as she was moving backward, shoved against the door, breathing rubber and gas, the gravel at the side of the road spitting against the underside, the car somehow missing the deer which had been close enough—she realized now, as the car drifted to a halt—that she could smell it, warm and sweaty. The Corvette sat sideways in the road, engine idling, back wheels in the weeds. Her hands shook uncontrollably.

  She drove back along the road as slowly as she could, gripping the steering wheel, opening her eyes wide to press them against the dark. Her mind gave her images of hitting the deer, the car breaking apart, snapping at the crossbeams, the carcass of the deer tumbling bloodied and wet up the long hood and into her lap through the T-top, on her, that smell smothering her, sweat and feces. She slowed even more, and a car pulled in behind her, headlights bearing down. The police, probably. Someone had heard her noisy skid and reported it. She kept on, waiting for the jarring spill of blue light, but none came on the road around the lake, and none came as she slowed at Sarah’s drive, though the car was behind her still, and none came as the car followed her into the drive, and now she thought about what to do, to honk the horn and wake Bill or to push out the door and make a run for it, and as she thought this the car behind her began flashing its headlights, and then stopped. The door swung open and in her rearview mirror, in the red of her tail-lights, she watched Mr. Kesler swing open the door of the Seven Springs van and hop down.