Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (24 page)

Alison bought coffee and a package of little powdered doughnuts, and, on impulse, a pack of cigarettes, even though she had not smoked since grad school.

“You headed east or west?” the man behind the counter asked her. He had the thickest black hair she'd ever seen, and a shirt pocket stuffed with tire gauges. She told him she was headed to Morgantown.

“You're kind of late for Morgantown,” he said, which struck her as an odd thing to say. Did they close Morgantown at night? Then again, maybe she
was
late, maybe Max had finished his work there, moved on, was sleeping in some other hotel, some other town.

Back in the car, she found the same country station that the man had on in the store. Some song about tears and raindrops. She never understood why this music—so effusively sad and woeful, so maudlin about love and heartbreak—had been embraced by truckers and redneck boys and workingmen. Maybe they needed an antidote to all that male stoicism. Or it was code, sent out to the women in the world:
Listen to us, we're just as sad and broken as you are
. She drove, keeping her speed down, smoking in shallow drags and flicking her ashes through the T-top.

She took the airport exit into Morgantown, then tried to remember—right or left? The last thing she needed was to get lost in town in the middle of the night. Morgantown didn't have all the problems of a big city, but it did have its share of bad stuff, even gang violence, though she always imagined the gangs in West Virginia as just minor-league farm teams for real gangs. Finally, the terrain started to look familiar, and she made her way downtown, rode in her rumbling, scraping car up and down the grid of streets until suddenly, almost without realizing it, she was in front of the Hotel Morgantown. It was 5:30, the first edge of slate-colored morning just beginning to peel back along the horizon. By now, she was shaking with highway cold and nerves, her teeth chattering. She turned off the Vette, then quickly restarted it, just to be sure. The engine ticked in the quiet cold. Off somewhere in the distance was some grinding, mechanical sound, like a giant fan turning. Music echoed from somewhere, and a dog barked a few times, then stopped. The wind gusted, paper cups and leaves moving up the lighted sidewalks as if they had someplace to be.

The doors of the hotel were chained shut, and, now that she thought to look for it, Max's truck was nowhere around. She rattled the doors a few times, knocked, peered inside. Where could he be? She walked around the back, where the tall windows opened up on the ballroom, and stood on a trash can to look in. Empty. She knocked on the window a few more times before giving up. On the way back around front, she noticed the door to the kitchen, behind the trash cans, had been propped open slightly with a soda can. She recognized the kitchen from last time, the stove with its shadow of grease, the fans above it missing.

“Max?” She walked through the ballroom, trying not to let her clogs echo so loudly. “Are you here?” Somewhere in the building, water dripped. She found their vanilla wafer box still on the stage, and some of Max's det-cord spools sitting by the basement door.

Upstairs, the carpet rolls had, been removed, and here and there holes had been drilled into the walls. She called his name on all the floors, knowing he wasn't there, but reluctant to leave. Though the Corvette had gotten her here, it seemed somehow impossible that it could take her back. At the end of the top floor, she climbed the iron ladder and opened the door out onto the roof. Dawn had arrived, finally, the sky a lumpy pinkish gray. There was a dampness to the air and hints of low fog, as though it had just rained. She walked around on the gravel, looking over the edge, even though it made her dizzy. From here, the Vette looked pretty bad, the silver paint peeled and blotchy, a dull gray underneath. Maybe it would be like a house—paint would make it look new. But silver wasn't quite right; something about the silver and maroon together was just too tacky, a bridal suite in Las Vegas. She could replace the entire interior, but she liked maroon. Black paint would look good. Black and maroon. She squinted at the car, trying to imagine it with brand new paint. Then she spit over the side and watched it fall, wondering what the attraction was—almost every male she'd ever known was a big fan of spitting over the sides of things. Probably half of the Colorado River was spit.

“Alisewn!”
she suddenly heard, and jumped so her knee banged the low wall around the ledge. When she turned around, it took her a second to find Tom, who sat in the opposite corner from last time, knees to his chest, bundled under a blanket.

“Damn it, Tom,” she said, “you about sent me over the side.”

“Aaah,” he said, almost a gargling sound, “you don't want to do that.” He slurred his words, and she noticed then the scattered pile of quart beer bottles beside him on the gravel. She walked over to him and squatted down.

“Are you okay, Tom?”

“Me? Yeah, I'm just a little sick. Upset stomach…an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. You know…the usual.”

She pointed. “Four quarts of Bud.”

He smiled. “The reference eludes me. However, I'm in bang-up shape. Never better.” Beneath his blanket, a collection of paper airplanes lay crushed and wrinkled.

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“Have you seen Max?”

He looked at her, squinting, his lips cracked. “Since you're his lady and I most decidedly am not, I ought to be asking
you
that, shouldn't I? Trouble, I take it?”

“Yes, trouble. He's not here?”

“He was yesterday, drilling most of the day. Brought me a sandwich and we broke bread around noon. That was the last.”

“Well, thanks anyway, Tom.”

“Is he not treating you well?”

“He's fine…” She hesitated. “Maybe you should ask how I'm treating him.”

Tom pulled his blanket higher around his neck, the wind stirring the airplanes in tight circles around him. “I have a hard time pegging you for any meanness.”

“I lied to him, Tom.”

He clicked his tongue, coughed. “They say all politics are personal, right? Well, the inverse is also true. Just say you're sorry and try to mean it. Everyone lies.”

She smiled. “You're pretty cynical for a man who plays with paper airplanes.”

His laugh drew him into a hacking fit, his face reddening. “God love you,
Alisewn
. I'd keep you even if you did lie.” He held up two of the wrinkled planes, his yellow fingers shaking. “Have at it,” he said.

She took the green one, and he took the white, and they tossed them again on the count of three, watched them limp and loop their way to the ground.

“Tom,” she said, still looking with him over the ledge, “where I live, they flooded a town to make a lake, and when they did, one man refused to leave.”

“Harry Truman,” Tom said.

Her mind jumped to the atom bomb and the Marshall Plan. “What are you talking about?”

“Harry Truman is the dude's name who did the same thing when Mount Saint Helens blew. Refused to leave. I guess that twenty-five feet of scalding ash kept him warm for the winter.”

“Our guy was named Winston Ackerman. He chained himself to his front porch.”

“A flair for the dramatic. I wonder if those guys form a club in the afterlife. Dumb Asses Anonymous or something.” He shook his head, his eyes still following one of the planes, which was lifted on updrafts over and over.

Alison looked down at him, the top of his head covered with thinning brown hair and faint scars. “Listen,” she said. “I hope you don't have any plans for joining that club.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. When this building comes down, you'd better have someplace else to be.”

“Friends and couches. Don't worry over me, Alisewn.”

She nodded and patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, if you see Max, tell him I'm looking for him.”

“He'll be around. Why don't you leave a note?” Tom produced a chewed-up Bic pen from his windbreaker and offered her the back of one of his stolen flyers. She scrawled a quick note, telling Max she would be in her garage or at the Founders' Day Parade, that she wanted to see him, that she was sorry. Tom folded the note and stuck it in his pocket, where, she imagined, it might stay forever.

She was pulled over by the state police only a hundred yards or so from her exit. It was not yet rush hour, the sun just an idea of orange low on the horizon, the policeman's eyes puffy with fatigue. She had not slept at all, and felt jangly and frayed. While the cop ran her license through his computer, she sat in the chill and smoked another cigarette before deciding it was a bad idea and chucking the entire pack out the window into the ditch. Dumb. Now he would write her up for littering. She had smoked at grad-school parties when she and Marty first started going out, and though he didn't like it, he said nothing until after they were married. He had used on her the argument that her body was God's temple, a justification that struck her as so old-fashioned and quaint that she'd been moved to hear him use it. Now that she'd made the connection, it struck her as exactly the kind of reasoning Mr. Beachy would use. What a thing, to have married a man who thought her body was a temple, a place of worship, who wanted only to love it and see no damage done to it. And what had she done? Mocked his argument, asked him why it was okay to stuff God's temple with Vienna sausages and pork rinds. She was clever and funny, that she was, but if she was also touched and moved, what would it have hurt to have shown him that as well? She imagined him sitting right beside her, right now, in the passenger seat, the way all those TV psychics insist the dead stake us out, sitting in his floppy work boots, his leather watchband smelling of sweat, his hair trimmed too far above his ears. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, and if she could find any faith in anything, have any of the belief that had come so easily to him and to Mr. Beachy, then she wanted only ten seconds' worth, enough to believe that he heard her.

The cop, it turned out, loved Corvettes, and so he let her off with only a written warning. She told him to go get some sleep, and he smiled and patted the car.

She napped for a couple of hours, her sleep fitful and interrupted by the shouts and noises of Sarah assembling everyone for the parade, the screen door banging with the arrival of the Seven Springs crowd, rehearsal music from the boom box and the shuffle of all those pairs of feet. Finally she gave up, got up, and showered, the drive to Morgantown coming back to her now like some elaborate dream, the conversation with Tom seeming days or weeks ago, instead of just a few hours. She let the warm water wash over her, trying to forget Max's présence in this same shower with her just days ago. Time kept slipping out from under her, a fun-house floor beneath her unsteady feet. Her sleepy brain played tricks on her, and twice she shut the water off, thinking that someone was calling her name. When she closed her eyes, she got a picture of Harry Truman, the ex-president, holding aloft his
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
newspaper while piles of scalding ash fell down around him.

She took her coffee out onto the front porch and suddenly saw, as if it had been that way all along, that the dam was gone. Yellow bulldozers moved over and around the empty space where the dam had been, a child's mouth with a tooth knocked out. The lake was almost totally dry now, except for the drop-down stream, which—though it was a wide, slow-moving creek—looked insignificant at the bottom of that big lake bed, skirting around the dam through a big trench gouged out by a backhoe. She stood a moment, watching the bulldozers crawl around, wondering what was going on. What happened to Max? To blowing it up?

In the morning's mail was another packet of photos from Lem. They no longer even looked real to her, they looked like photos of someone's dollhouse, paper floors and balsa-wood stairs. She didn't know how to read the fact that Lem was sending the photos. Maybe he was just proud of his work or hoping to tempt her back into her nice new house. Maybe he was just being a good friend. But it also really did feel like he was sending ransom photos, with the same kind of threat behind them: Pay up. And she
did
owe him, in fact. Had never, since Marty's death, paid enough sorrow or sympathy, enough guilt or suffering. And who better to pay it to than Lem, who had lost the one person he most loved in the world? Now he'd built a shrine, and she was absent even as penitent. She stuck the photos away in the kitchen drawer.

Mr. Rossi, all decked out in his silver-buttoned vest, his hair slicked back, moved around the edges of the living room while Sarah shouted out a string of reminders and some of the others practiced their moves. He paced back and forth, rubbing his hands together, bouncing on his toes. Last year, he'd been nervous, too (he was one of only three repeat students), saying he didn't like an audience and never had. She stood with him now, patted his big shoulder, and told him he would be fine, the best one out there. He smiled down at her.

“You're a charitable soul, Miss Alison,” he said.

“They should make you keynote speaker. I bet you know more about this town than anyone.”

“Well, I know a good bit. Did you know Wiley Ford once elected a pony as mayor of the town? Had to go to state court to overturn it.”

She smiled. “See what I mean?”

“But they don't want to hear about that down at the shrine hall. They want to hear about all the captains of industry who hail from their fair burg. As if any existed.”

“Dates and occasions,” Alison said. “Believe me, it's the same in teaching. Everybody learns the little rhyme about Columbus. No one cares that he had blond hair and was known for gambling.”

Mr. Rossi nodded. “Last spring, after I won the tournament at Charleston, I was asked to speak at the elementary school. I mentioned in passing that an elephant weighs less than the tongue of a blue whale, and the next day I got a phone call, someone wanting to know why I was spreading indecency through our schools. Indecency!” By now, his face was red, as if he really had been spreading indecency.