Alison's Automotive Repair Manual
Page 27
“All right then,” Alison said, her heart thudding now, “I guess…let’s do it. Bill? You promised to help, remember?” Bill smiled as he jostled his way through the crowd, moving toward the car. She had imagined Bill and a group of the strongest boys giving the Vette a good headlong shove—Gordon in there, too, his hand pushing—and making it at least up and over the steep bank of the lake. As she thought of this, scanning the crowd for the strongest-looking boys, she heard the door of the Vette open and then quickly slam closed.
She spun around, and Gordon, porkpie hat perched on his head, sat in the driver’s seat, his hands on the wheel. He reached across his shoulder and locked the door, then turned the key and started the Corvette, rumbling the ground under their feet.
“Gordon?” Alison said. “What are you doing? Get out of there.” He blipped the accelerator a couple of times, pretending not to hear her. Fumes and gray exhaust from the car stirred dust from the gravel in rhythmic puffs, the smell settling out over the crowd.
She tapped her knuckles on the window. “Come on, Gordon—get out of the car. Let’s put her in the water.” From where she stood, she could see Mr. Rossi’s box wedged down behind the driver’s seat.
He shook his head, squared his jaw, then rolled down his window about an inch, just enough to speak. “No.”
“What?” She felt her face heat up, sensed the crowd at her back. “Gordon…what are you trying—”
“I’m putting it in.” He looked at her through the glass, his eyes hard. “Just the way it was supposed to happen.”
She shook her head and looked at him. He meant it. “I can’t let you do that, and you know it.” She hooked her fingertips in the narrow opening. “It’s dangerous, Gordon, and the water’s cold. Come on out, and help us push. Please.” He eased the car forward, jerking the clutch a little bit, and she was forced to step back. He turned the wheel to aim the Corvette toward the water, rolling right to the edge of the bank. The flash of the photographer began going off, one after another. Frieda Landry hauled out her notebook and thin gold pencil. Some in the crowd pushed to the front for a better look. Tyra Wallace lit a cigarette. The scowl slackened in Mrs. Skidmore’s face. By now, most there were worried into silence, the teenage boys grinning and agitated, some of the women covering their mouths, some of the men nodding and whispering, as if putting the car in the lake were no different than cleaning the gutters or raking the leaves, just another job to do.
Alison, with Sarah beside her now, moved toward the car, calling his name—“Gordon! Gordon!”—as if he were a lost dog they scoured the neighborhood for. Some in the crowd took up the call, asking him to come out, pleading, others standing alongside Bill, still ready to lean in and help push. Gordon shook his head over and over, tight-lipped, not looking at any of them. He shifted into reverse and backed up slowly, scattering Bill and his helpers. He paused only a second before shifting into first, racing the engine, and then popping the clutch—but instead of rocketing the car forward as he’d meant it to, the maneuver nearly made him stall out as the Corvette pitched forward in fits across the grass, tossing him about in the driver’s seat. He stopped for a second, bits of clumped mud and grass clinging to the wheels. Alison, all of them, could only watch. He nodded his head, talking to himself, hitting the wheel twice with the heel of his hand, then revved up the engine so the whole car shook, popped the clutch, and fishtailed across the grass. The car ran out of room before it gained much speed, though, sending him into the glassy face of Wiley Ford Lake not like in a movie, not launched into the air with wheels spinning, not arcing out into the deep water, but bucking and lurching, bouncing on squeaky shocks over the steep bank and down into the shallows with a noisy splash, the nose of the Vette nudging the water, engine stalled, the back end angled high into the air, as if the car were only dipping a toe in to test the temperature. The crowd pressed forward as Mr. Kesler sat for a few moments, looking out through the wind-shield, then shoved with his shoulder against the door twice until it popped open. He stepped out as if he’d arrived at someone’s house for dinner, walking out into the waist-deep water, hat crooked on his head, his vest darkening as it soaked through, and then he slammed the door as much as he could and stood there, a little puzzled, while the flash of the camera kept freezing moments in brief whiteness and the crowd held back and Alison stared at him, open mouthed, not sure of what to say, and the engine sent up a hiss of white steam.
And then, all by itself, the Corvette started to roll.
Mr. Kesler moved back, almost losing his footing, and the car made a sound like scraping metal as ripples of water pushed out in front of it, bubbles escaping from underneath, rolling faster now, picking up speed down the steep slope of the bank, but still in slow motion. The water began raining into the open window, raining—only she knew this—on top of Mr. Rossi’s hidden bronze box, filling her leather seats with water, filling the floorboards, water now up as high as the T-top, rushing into the space behind the back glass, the front fully submerged, the eight-track and Styx tape filling with water, her brakes, the round lenses of the taillights, the rounded bumper, and then it was gone completely, no more than a glimmer of silver under the water, a slow-moving flash you could almost glimpse, a hidden monster, a mythic fish.
Mr. Kesler smiled and waved his hat, wishing the Corvette a bon voyage. The crowd pressed around the rim of the lake, talking and pointing, many of them clapping now, the photographer snapping photos of Mr. Kesler, of the crowd, of the surface of the lake as the ripples healed over. Frieda Landry gripped her spiral book and her narrow pencil, writing and writing and writing, pink feather bobbing, tongue pushed to the corner of her mouth with the effort of getting it all down. But no matter how much and how fast she wrote, she could never write it all, could never get at everything contained in that moment, for it was too much, too spread out, too full of all those other moments that had already happened or were about to or would in time. She could not see enough, could not write how the Corvette gained momentum as it rolled down the pitched floor of the lake, a kind of slow-motion speed as it receded into murkiness, and how, a minute or two from this moment, it would come to rest five feet away from the stone bridge, its wheels mired in silt.
She could not write how even then the lid and welded seams of the brass box were leaking, how Mr. Rossi’s ashes were slowly seeping out of the box, floating, drifting, and dispersing through the water, spreading out over Colaville like a cloud.
She could not write how, only minutes before, about the time that Gordon had closed and locked the door of the Corvette, Max had pushed the green button and the sticks of dynamite buried deep in the bones of the Hotel Morgantown had unfolded themselves in violence and explosion, one and then another and another, and how the building had paused, then buckled, then fallen neatly inside its own foundation.
She could not write about how later that night Alison, in the cold and quiet, would make one more trip to her empty garage and write in, for the last entry on Mr. Rossi’s list, “A man in West Virginia had a Viking funeral in a 1976 Corvette.”
She could not write about the ghosts of Colaville, shy in their buildings, at home again, coming out slowly to gaze at the silver surface and graceful lines of the Corvette, the prettiest thing they’d ever seen.
She could not write that the shark’s tooth felt right at home in the water.
She could not write about the thick column of black dust and soot that rose up as the Hotel Morgantown came down and how, at the center of that roiling black mass, high above, three paper airplanes—white, yellow, and pink—circled around and above all that was broken, like fragile doves, like torn angels.
And she could not write about the fetus growing in Sarah’s womb, the source of all Sarah’s recent fatigue and the product of Bill’s hope—six weeks old as she scribbled, and, according to the list, already forming fingerprints.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
BRAD BARKLEY, a native of North Carolina, is the
author of a novel, Money, Love, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a Book Sense 76 choice. Money, Love was named one of the best books of 2000 by the Washington Post and the Library Journal. Brad Barkley was also named as one of the “Newcomers of 2002: Breakthrough Writers You Need to Know” by Book magazine. German, Japanese, and Portuguese editions of Money, Love are forthcoming. He is also the author of a story collection, Circle View. His short fiction has appeared in over two dozen magazines, including the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, the Oxford American, the Greensboro Review, Glimmer Train, Book Magazine, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, which has twice awarded him the Emily Balch Prize for Best Fiction. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, once earning “Special Mention,” and was shortlisted in Best American Short Stories, 1997. His work will be anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2002. A story collection, The Properties of Stainless Steel, is also forthcoming. He has won four Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Brad Barkley teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University. He lives in western Maryland with his wife, Mary, and their two children.
The Dzanc Books eBook Club
Join the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1st of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints, Other Voices Books, Black Lawrence Press, Keyhole, Disquiet, and Starcherone. For more information, including how to join today, please visit http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/.