Alison's Automotive Repair Manual

by Brad Barkley

  “Midnight rider,” he said in greeting. “Wasn’t that a song a few years back?”

  She parked the car on the gravel and got out, hands still quivering, heart still churning. “I don’t think Milton Tannenberger is going diving in a full lake, and I don’t think car parts will do the trick this time.”

  “Yes, you’ve seen to that, huh?” He was wearing a tattered down vest over his usual zippered jumpsuit. “Put me in my place, once and for all, didn’t you, Dr. Durst?”

  “I’m not a doctor.” She tugged her hair back then let it go, her hands nervous.

  “You just play one in the paper,” he said.

  She walked down toward the garage, and he fell into step beside her. “I didn’t mean to do that, exactly,” she said.

  “Another accidental newspaper interview.” He laughed a little. “I understand you needed to clear your own conscience. But I thought confession usually involved self-confession, not somebody else’s.”

  “It’s one in the morning. Why are you out here?”

  “Max told me it was the best time to find you without distraction, and I wanted to talk to you,” he said, following her to the garage. Alison clicked on the light. They sat on the one stool and the stepladder at the workbench, as if a bartender might appear.

  “Max told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  He squinted at the ceiling. “Yesterday? Time runs together, more and more.”

  “Where is he?” She absently riffled the edges of her Haynes manual, her fingers still shaking a little.

  “Working is about all I know. Is he not tending the home fires?”

  She laughed a little. “We don’t really have those just yet.” She looked at him. “How come you’re still talking to me?”

  “No reason not to. Besides, I wanted to ask how much of your words in the paper came from my son. I’m guessing eighty percent.” He unzipped his vest and laid it across the bench, pillowing his elbows.

  She hesitated. “You know, I’ve been deciding all day whether to try and defend myself by sharing the blame. How’d you guess?”

  “Well, your only enemy punches you in the back of the head, you don’t have to look around very long to see who did it. And you aren’t my enemy.”

  “That’s a sad thing, having a son you can call an only enemy.”

  He nodded. “That might be an exaggeration.” He took the pipe from his pocket and tapped it on the bench. “I probably have three or four enemies.”

  “All them as justified as Max?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Justified? I miss a couple of birthdays because I’m on the road, and he means to humiliate me in return. Not my definition of justified.”

  “And that’s not the story I heard.”

  He tucked the pipe back into his pocket and looked at her, genuinely puzzled.

  “I heard about a man sneaking out at night, parking his car down the road. A man who got his son to lie for him, to his own mother. Who stayed out half the night.”

  He blushed brightly enough that she could see his face darken, even in this weak light. “Well, I suppose most of that is so. Glenda didn’t much care for me spending time in the bar, so a time or two, I did sneak away, and maybe I did ask him to cover my back.”

  “He said it was pretty much every night, not a time or two.”

  Gordon laughed. “You know how it is with kids,” he said. “If it happens three times and you remember those three, it seems like it happened all your life.”

  “And you were just at a bar?”

  He nodded. “Where’d he say I was, some church of Satan?”

  She laughed. “Not quite that bad.”

  “He hates me,” Gordon said, and as soon as he said it, he was crying, his eyes rimming silver in the dim light. He was lying, acting again, she knew. Just like the night at the lake, tears just another tool in his kit. Or maybe Max did have it wrong. Maybe he was like everyone else, and childhood wrongs grew bigger through the long lens of time passing. Who knew? There was, she saw, no way to know, no way to sort out the truth from the tangle of their past.

  “So why the Lou Gehrig ball? All the stories? The car? Why all the bullshit and lies?”

  He thought about this. “To polish things up a little. Give my beggarly world a little meaning. Say you’re a man with a wife and a son, a one-bedroom home, a ten-year-old car, and a job making cardboard boxes. Empty boxes, by the hundreds. That isn’t much of a life to hang your hat on.”

  “It is if the wife and son love their husband and father.”

  “That’s the conventional wisdom. Love conquers all. Maybe so, if love weren’t so flawed to begin with. I’m no cynic, Alison; I love love, but let me tell you, if you have a cardboard-box life and one day you sit down and tell your son about the time you raced motorcycles, because right then there is a motorcycle race on TV, you see the way he looks at you, like you’re magic. You make him believe you used to be in the circus, and one day you bring home a top hat from Goodwill and tell him it was yours. You show your wife medals from a war you didn’t fight. You buy a mounted fish from a tackle store up the road, and all your friends get a good story about how you fought that bass for over an hour. You become something in their eyes, then you become something period. That’s the way it’s always been.”

  He was breathing a little hard, as if all that had taken effort, which she imagined it had.

  “She left you anyway.”

  He nodded. “Happens to the best of us.”

  “You know, you could’ve become something in their eyes with the truth, too,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I guess I never saw the difference. Except now. Lies collapse over time, don’t they?”

  She nodded. “They all do.”

  “Well, then, too bad for me. And too late. I’m an old man, and couldn’t go back even if I were a younger one.”

  She nodded. “I guess you heard Mr. Rossi died.” She said this with more edge in her voice than she intended.

  He nodded, not looking at her.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, leaning down to look at his face. “Everyone was here, clustering around their grief, and where were you?”

  “Cut open and bleeding. Couldn’t leave the house. I don’t do all that well around death, never have. Arthur was the good one out of that whole bunch, the one I liked best. Or at all, really.”

  She smirked. “I barely saw you say two words to each other.”

  He jerked as if she’d yanked his clothing. “We understood each other. Never needed to say much. Someone your age and gender, you may not understand that. But we had our talks.”

  “Sinkholes.”

  “That was one.” He nodded, looked at her. “He was good, and I miss him.”

  She studied his face, trying to see him all the ways Max saw him: liar, ruiner, con man. Maybe so, and maybe just now she was hearing the truest thing he’d ever said. It felt true, and was true, no matter who said it—Mr. Rossi was good, and he was missed.

  “You know, if it’s any consolation to you, about the article,” she said, “the whole town hates me now.”

  He patted her arm. “And me. You’re just the messenger.”

  “Yeah, but you’re one of theirs. They have to forgive you. And according to Lila, some people already figured out there wasn’t any car down there.”

  “That may well be.” He reached under his glasses to rub his sleepy eyes. “But you know people want to hang on to their myths until they get exposed. You go along believing in Santa Claus, don’t you? About age ten or so? You believe and you don’t, hedging your bets. Then somebody in the schoolyard calls you on it, and what transpires? You denounce the whole business as baby stuff.”

  “Well, yeah—”

  “And take a look at Saint Peter. Gives up his fishing business and a wife to follow Jesus down the road, then somebody calls him on it, and he turns tail, assails the whole thing. Three times, mind you. All you did was call the town o
n believing my crap, and they are ready with hammer and nails.”

  “Pretty fancy company you keep, Santa Claus and Jesus. And I don’t think anyone is ready to crucify Santa for not being true. Or you.”

  He nodded, his face worn-out, his eyes yellowed and heavy.

  Alison looked around at her empty garage, out at her car sitting in the gravel, out across the lake, at the way the water looked like oil, so dark and smooth. A piece of glass from her headlight had worked its way into her shoe and now pressed against her foot. She noticed just then something hanging down under the Vette, probably broke loose as she skidded over the road.

  “Gordon? What are you doing on Saturday?”

  He shrugged. “Not much. And don’t try to drag me to the explosion. I hate those things.”

  “At this point, I don’t plan to attend the explosion. Your son is as good at disappearing as you are.”

  “From you? Then he’s a fool.”

  “Maybe so.” She sighed. “I want you to keep the day open, okay? I have a few plans to make.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I think we need to do something to remember Mr. Rossi. We’ll have a wake. A nice one.”

  “I’m not Catholic, or even very religious. And Rossi—he was a scientist. He swapped all belief for empiricism.”

  “Then we’ll make one he’d like. The empirical wake. The wide-awake wake.”

  He laughed, almost wheezing, and leaned over against her for a moment. “Okay, then,” he said. “You talked me into it.”

  By the time he left, it was almost three o’clock in the morning. Bill would be up in two hours, readying for work, Sarah with him, cooking eggs. The mornings didn’t feel right anymore, Sarah said. Maybe because of Mr. Rossi’s box of ashes on the entertainment unit. It made the house not feel like a house anymore, like they were intruders, Alison thought, living in a mausoleum. She pulled the car back into the garage as quietly as she could, then sat listening to the ticks of the engine. No wind tonight, and the lake made no sound.

  Sarah had left her mail sitting next to the lamp on the hall table—several Visa bills, junk mail, and another envelope from Lem and Pammy, stiff with new Polaroids. She shrugged and tore it open, too tired for guilt right now, too drained. She tilted the envelope, and the Polaroid, just one, slid into her hand. This time, it wasn’t a ransom photo at all. Instead, Lem and Pammy were wearing costumes Alison recalled from some long-forgotten Halloween party—Lem dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi, wearing a brown tunic, holding a plastic lightsaber, and Pammy as Princess Leia, her own tunic pleated and white, her long hair wound in buns over her ears. They stood on the porch of Alison’s house, their house, posing, proud, Lem’s stomach grown too big over the years, his tunic raised enough by it to expose his brown sandals, his red-striped gym socks. The trim around the porch had been painted some dark color, and a row of yellow mums lined the sidewalk on both sides. Though she couldn’t imagine what the picture meant, she didn’t much care. And maybe it was simple. Maybe this was only a thank-you from two people who were too shy to come out and say it. They smiled openmouthed in the picture, laughing at themselves, their faces caught in a slight blur, looking dated in the muted colors of the Polaroid, looking silly and otherworldly, looking like something from long ago, from a galaxy far away.

  Reassembly is the reverse of disassembly.

  14

  * * *

  In Wiley Ford, spreading the word about anything was a simple matter of telling Mrs. Skidmore, who was in good standing at several of the local bars and one of the local churches, at the day room of Seven Springs, where she drank coffee all morning, and at the Red Bird, where the third stool next to the glass cake stand was generally understood to be hers. Alison let her know that she wanted everyone, as many as could make it, to gather at Sarah’s house tomorrow, that she wanted to do something, hold some kind of service to remember Mr. Rossi. Despite Mrs. Skidmore’s gruff nod and everyone’s general disapproval of Alison at the moment, they all quickly agreed, none of them maintaining a single bad opinion of Mr. Rossi, with the possible exception that he talked too much, a flaw, as Mr. Harmon said, that could not very well be held against the deceased.

  By afternoon, she was getting phone calls, people wanting to know if alcohol would be permitted (yes, if they brought their own), or what they could bring (nothing, unless they planned to drink). She told everyone it would be informal, that they might even decide to dance. Alison managed to track down the number of the president of the Tri-State Trivial Gaming Association, and invited her and all her members to attend. She invited Mr. Rossi’s nurse from Sacred Heart, and even Mr. Tucker from the funeral home, who said without thinking that he couldn’t make it because Saturday was his “best day.” Finally, Alison called Frieda Landry at the Press-Republican and invited her to come to the lake on Saturday at noon.

  “If this is another…performance that involves the taking of car parts from the lake,” Frieda said, “I believe we’ve had our fill of that, Ms. Durst.”

  “Ms. Landry, it is nothing of the sort. It’s a wake.”

  “What’s awake?”

  Alison rolled her eyes at the wall. “The event. We’re holding a wake for Arthur Rossi. You did a column on him once, when he won a trivia contest.”

  “I know Mr. Rossi very well. I also know that he has been cremated already.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Don’t misunderstand me—I think it’s more than fitting that we memorialize Mr. Rossi. I mean, he was something of a local celebrity. But a wake…it’s inappropriate, this far along.”

  “Then it’s not a wake. It’s a memorial service. Won’t you come?”

  She grunted, clicked her tongue. “For Mr. Rossi’s sake, I suppose I will.”

  “Good, great. And bring your photographer friend,” Alison said.

  She spent the rest of that afternoon in her garage, straightening up, putting tools on their hangers, tossing out the oily rags. She fitted the T-top onto the Vette (though the seals were bad), and gave it a going-over with a cloth, just enough to get rid of the dust, then vacuumed out the interior and pushed the broken headlight door closed by hand. She closed the cover on the Haynes manual and left it on the bench, stacked up with all the catalogs and brochures Mr. Beachy had given her, and set her Lil’ Wonder All-N-One on top of the stack. If nothing else, she kept a neat shop. She smiled again at the photo of Lem and Pammy, which she had tacked up on the wall next to Mr. Rossi’s list. They seemed just then like the only things she owned in the world—the photo, the list, and her Corvette, and they felt like plenty.

  Bill came home from work and dropped his tool belt on the mud porch, then sat in front of the TV, watching a game show and drinking a glass of milk. He put so much depression into this simple act that the milk might as well haye been a fifth of whiskey, the game show a snuff film. Alison worried over him, over Sarah. The two of them seemed to be running out of things to say to each other—Bill worked long hours, and Sarah seemed constantly exhausted and irritable, depressed over Mr. Rossi.

  “Bill?” Alison said. He started from his glaze-over and looked up at her. “Did you hear about tomorrow? The wake?”

  He looked momentarily confused. “I heard ‘memorial service.’ But yes, everyone seems to be planning to attend.” He looked at her a moment longer, then turned back to his milk and the game-show contestants.

  She stood in the doorway, watching him. “I need your help.” He turned again and looked at her. “Some plans I have to remember Mr. Rossi. But you can’t tell anyone. Not even Sarah.”

  “Not a soul,” he said, looking suddenly as if she’d promised to reveal to him the secrets of the UFOs, the ancient gods, and all the magic that resided in the world.

  Ernie always kept his office hours at the community college during what he called “suppertime,” between five and six o’clock, with the idea that absolutely no one would be by to see him then. And usually it worked. Alison waited until 5:30 to call him,
and he answered on the first ring.

  “Well, well, how’s life in exile?” he asked.

  “One excitement after another,” she said. “Do you know they actually deliver pizzas right to your door these days?”

  “I need to get out more.” In the background, over and over, was a persistent thunk, thunk, thunk.

  “Ernie, what are you doing?”

  “Talking to you.”

  “I meant the noise. I don’t recognize it. New toy?”

  The noise stopped. “Well, I have this basketball hoop that connects to the trash can, and a bunch of little foam basketballs. Not a toy, really. Just a stress reliever.”

  “By now, I think you have relieved it all, ad infinitum.”

  “Ooh, Latin. So this is an obscene phone call.”

  She laughed. “What do you do with your trash, if the can is full of basketballs?”

  “I no longer produce any trash. I became perfectly efficient about six months ago. We had a big ceremony and everything.”

  She smiled. “Ernie, I think I want to teach again. If you give me a little leeway in the syllabus, I want to try a few things.”

  He was quiet a moment or two. “I always give everyone total leeway. You just never took it. But, Alison”—he sighed—“I finally lost your position, remember? There’s a little adage about barn doors and horses that you need to learn.”