Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (18 page)

“We always blame those who let us down, Alison, even if it's not their fault. The town expects to find a car down there, take pictures, the whole nine yards.”

“Well, maybe they just will. You said yourself, and the paper agrees, it's probably in that deep middle part. Soon as Max drains that, I bet it'll be sitting right there. All polished up. In fact, I bet the engine is still running.”

He licked his lips nervously. “Now you're pulling my leg.”

“Yeah? How's it feel?”

He looked at her as though he were genuinely puzzled. He shifted the box, then set it down.

“Gordon,” she said, “I heard about the Lou Gehrig baseball you bought for your son.”

He shook his head, smiling. “Wouldn't believe what I went through to track that one down. Paid out the hummer, too. Then some collector tries highway robbery—”

“Listen, Max and I are kinda-sorta dating, Gordon. He's told me lots of things.”

“Sure, sure. Beautiful woman like yourself. He'd be a fool not to be dating you, if you give him the chance. Yessir.”

She laughed. “You're amazing. Truly. You should start your own religion or something.”

“Well, there's money in it. So what if I did?” This sudden anger struck her as odd, as though he really
were
starting his own religion and she'd stumbled across his plans. But he was probably just like nearly every other man she'd ever known—backed into a corner, they get defensive to the point of idiocy. She recalled an argument with Marty where, to make some now-forgotten point, he'd taken his only two good dress shirts and cut the sleeves off.

Alison tapped the whiskey box with her muddied toe. “What's in the box? Sunday collections?”

He gave a long, heavy sigh, rubbing his eyes with thumb and finger, accidentally swiping the greasepaint into sad-clown makeup. He pulled off his cap, his silver hair dented in a ring.

“You're a mess, Gordon.”

“Alison, there isn't any car in the lake. Never was. Before you stands a prevaricator.”

She started to tell him this was old news by now, then stopped herself. After all, he was, in his way, coming clean. And he did. He told her all of it, how he'd made up the story, brought it to life by sheer force of will, retelling it over and over until the story stood up under its own power and began to walk around, took up residence in Wiley Ford. He spoke evenly, without much emotion, a man confessing an affair he's grown weary of.

“You know, if you told everyone what you just told me, you'd have that monkey off your back. Just look at politicians, everybody's a big fan of public apology.”

“Public humiliation, you mean,” he said. “Media attention instead of stocks in the town square.”

“The
Press-Republican
isn't exactly ‘media attention.' I mean, last week they ran a front-page story about the new Harvest Queen. Turns out, she gets her driver's license next year.”

He half-laughed, stuffed the watch cap into his pocket. “Yeah, but still.” His mouth searched for words. “I just can't, Alison.”

“And this Alzheimer's thing isn't going to fly, and you know it.”

“Had
you
going, missy.”

“Yeah, but I'm easy. And even if they did buy it, it would just give them a reason to say more terrible things about you, figuring you won't even have enough mind to notice.”

His face turned grim. “Hadn't thought of that.”

“Besides, say you live another twenty-five years. Long time to maintain an act.”

“Cursed with long life. All right then, plan B.”

The wind kicked up just then, chilling her bare legs, her feet cold in the mud. The round eye of water at the lake's center purled in quiet folds. All the men were gone, their lamps extinguished. The moon gave everything the blue-white tint of skim milk. Mr. Kesler bent and opened the flaps of the box, revealing a jumble of car parts.

Alison knelt in the mud. Old car parts, most of them rusted, pulled from some junkyard. Half of a knurled steering wheel, a speedometer, a cracked mirror, a taillight lens, and, beneath a few odds and ends, three heavy hubcaps stamped
CHRYSLER
in their centers, stacked like dinner plates.

“You ever watched a magician, Alison?” Mr. Kesler asked, speaking now in hushed tones. “A little wiggle under the tablecloth is all he needs to make us believe the rabbit is there, just before it vanishes.”

She nodded. “And a few busted parts in the mud is going to make people believe in the car underneath it.”

“Smart girl.” He picked up the speedometer and tossed it out into the middle of the water. The splash was quiet, a sudden ripple, then gone.

“Of course,” he said, “there's the problem of you. You've got the keys to the castle, so to speak.” He tossed in the rearview mirror, the taillight.

“Yep. I guess this is the part of the movie where you rub me out, to keep me quiet.”

He smiled. “The Wiley Ford Mafia. Bingo games and church raffles are our usual rackets.” He flung the broken steering wheel, and she watched it tumble end over end, a wounded game bird splashing down. “Unless, of course, you're one of us.”

“Gordon, don't you ever get tired of this?”

“Tired of talking to beautiful women? Who would ever admit to that?”

“Okay, let's cut the bullshit. I mean it. Don't you think about your son? You know, the one who grew up with a compulsive liar for a father?”

He tossed a piece of chrome trim into the lake. “The big teary father-son scene, that's what you'd like to see, huh? Martin and Lewis, reunited. Not gonna happen. Ask him. He means to bring me down like I'm one of his silos. Let me tell you, Alison, I'm an old man, and this is the county of my birth. That car is all I have.”

“You
don't
have it. That's the point.”

“The point is, I do.” He held up one of the wide chrome hubcabs and sailed it toward the water. It skipped once, like a bright stone, and disappeared. He looked back at her, and there were tears on his face. A con, she thought. More lies.

“Are you going to help him?” he said. “Bring me down, I mean?” He choked on his words. Bravo, she thought. Still, it was not an easy thing to watch an old man cry, performance or not. The last time had been Marty's father, at the funeral. Her hands were shaking.

“Mr. Kesler…”

He took another hubcap from the box. “Or maybe it's like I said before. You're one of us.” He offered her the hubcap, the last one, his box empty.

She watched her fingers curl around it. A fraud, a polished lie offered up before eight thousand people. Or maybe he wasn't so much a liar, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, as he was just another stupid optimist, preserving a fantasy, sacrificing junkyard parts to his own invented ghosts. The hubcap felt chilled, absorbing cold from the night, and the hard edge of it bit into her finger as she curled it back like a Frisbee and flung hard, Mr. Kesler smiling at her now, his tears vanished. She watched as it flew, catching and throwing back the moonlight, like some scratchy tabloid photo of a UFO. And that's exactly what it was, this impulse to help him lie, to help him further deceive his son—some hard object thrown from her, flying through the dark, obscure and unidentified.

They left for Morgantown after Alison had spent the morning with Mr. Beachy, learning about engine hoists and stands. Bill had taken her wheels down to Smitty's and had new tires mounted, so that now the Corvette could roll, its tires no longer mush. Together, they had pushed it a bit, just enough to shove it past its ruts. The small movement of the car had thrilled her—two inches seemed as good as a thousand miles. After her morning at AAAA, looking over all the catalog parts she couldn't afford, Max had met her for breakfast at the Red Bird, and then they drove over, holding hands in the truck, listening to Placido Domingo and Teresa Stratas, the high notes making the speakers buzz. The demolition job Max had lined up was a twelve-story building, which had once been the Hotel Morgantown.

“I guess they didn't rack their brains thinking up names for the place, huh?” Alison said as they parked across the street.

“It's to the point,” Max said. “You have to admire that.”

The sign for the hotel was still in place, once-fancy gilt lettering on a dark green wooden board, all of it now peeling and flaked. For the past ten years, it had been used as a “flophouse,” as Max called it, some kind of shelter for indigent men. The front door handles were laced with chains and a padlock, and Max unlocked them with a key he carried on a cardboard tag. The street around the hotel looked as indigent as the men who had once lived here: scattered nests of paper scraps trapped by chain-link fencing, brown bottles smashed in the gutters, the sidewalk broken and buckled, sprouting weeds, a rusted washing machine in the alley between buildings. The brick facade loomed above them, striated with pigeon droppings. Brass doors opened onto columns of dust and the odor of urine, the red carpets rolled up and leaning slumped in the corner. An outline of dirt remained where the front desk had been. Plaster had trickled down from the ceiling into neat little piles, as though some child had scooped them up.

“You know what?” Alison said. “Every impulse I have tells me to give this place a good cleaning before you tear it down.” The idea made her think of Lem and Pammy, who by now had likely finished her house, all of it new, painted, and empty.

“It's really an amazing old building, if you can overlook all the squalor.”

“Squalor. That's a word you don't hear every day.”

Max walked around the narrow lobby. “Yeah, I got it from the ‘Word Power' section of
Reader's Digest
. My father subscribes.”

“Every old person I know subscribes. It's like you start running out of time, you want to read everything in condensed form.”

“Well, I read it all the time now. Learning new words every day.”

“What on earth for?”

He shrugged as he snapped the key off its paper tag and slid it onto his own key ring. “To keep up with you, I guess. You're a smart woman.”

She stopped and looked at him. One of Marty's constant worries had been that she would grow bored with him as she became more enamored of her colleagues in the history department. He told her once he was getting smaller and smaller from where she was, an ant on the ground. Early in their marriage, talk of going back for her doctorate had sent him into the basement for weeks.

“And you're a smart man. One of the smartest I've ever met.”

“Well, thanks. That's very beneficent of you.”

She smiled. “I know men ready themselves for dates, same as women,” she said. “But you never hear of anyone
cramming
for a date.”

“Yeah, but you're impressed, aren't you? Admit it—you venerate my recent linguistic proficiency.”

“Of course. You know what they say about the size of a man's vocabulary.”

He clicked his tongue. “Such indecorous licentiousness.”

“Okay. Stop that now, and I might stay.”

“All right, all right. Come on. I'll give you a tour.”

She followed, stifling a yawn, every wash of sleepiness reminding her of the night before, out until the wee hours, helping Mr. Kesler put one over on the town, on his own son, who was right this second tugging her along into the quiet of an old hotel, this man who might possibly love her. She'd felt charitable last night, helping out a sad old man, the way she'd helped a sad young one—Bill—perpetuate his own dumb hopes. They were slowly forming a club, a secret society of losers who put their belief in belief, instead of in the ordinary world of sex and loss and hurt, like everyone else. She thought about how Mr. Kesler had nearly cried, or had cried. She could see him now, his salty tears gathering the makeup into tiny black pearls, but that was a lie, too, wasn't it? Hadn't she noticed him
not
crying, despite all his upset and worry? Moments, like history, slowly harden into mistruth and fabrications. A severed ear. Henry Ford and his soybean suit. Mr. Kesler and his tearful agony. He'd begged her, was how the story went in her mind, and against that she held up the freshness of the memory, which told her he'd merely offered, merely held out the last hubcap and made her complicit in his lies. She's taken it, taken on his years-long burden of bullshit, of lying to an only son. Only later, with the passing of time, could she tell herself he'd begged her, and she
would
, she knew. The way she'd lied to herself about Marty until his basemented presence called her on it. She felt awful, as though she'd slept with someone else, as if she'd betrayed Max already, while they were still so new.

The line of open doors down the hall spread alternating rectangles of light on the floor. Brass numbers hung loose from the wooden doors or were missing altogether, the rooms no more than boxes, minus their furniture, which had been sold at auction. The third room they passed had its walls and ceiling entirely covered in aluminum foil, its former occupant, according to Max, fearful of Russian radio signals entering his brain and controlling his actions. Here and there were old cigar butts and bottle caps, a piece of toast, a broken yardstick, gum stuck to the wall. Another room was covered in
Playboy
centerfolds, another with careful pencil drawings of fish and birds, another with ancient peeling wallpaper patterned with roses. It all felt like some museum display, an exhibit on natural habitats. At the end of the hall, someone had left behind a milk crate with a typewriter atop it, all its keys jammed.