Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (3 page)

Alison smiled at this. He ended every eruption of trivia with this same phrase. “That's amazing,” she said. He kept looking at her. “Hawaii, huh?” She remembered a student giving a presentation on how the Spanish first brought pineapples to Hawaii, in eighteen something. She couldn't remember the exact date or much of his talk, only that the boy brought in a fresh pineapple, and when he was done he'd cut it up with a pocketknife and they sat around eating it, juice running down their faces.

Sarah blew her whistle and Mr. Kesler let the needle drop to the vinyl. The speakers, mounted in the high corners of the room, bloomed with a lush, slow rhythm, Sinatra singing “It Happened in Monterey.” Sarah always started with a slow one, to let the dancers take to the floor and gently sway, to get the feeling of movement in their bones. Alison watched their eyes close as they gave in to the music, watched the flashes of gold at the women's throats and wrists. Bill turned Sarah in a slow circle, whispering to her and laughing as she held both his hands. Arthur Rossi stood beside Alison, always too shy to dance at first. Mr. Kesler eyed the tracking of the stylus in the groove, wary of any imperfection.

Alison leaned toward Mr. Rossi to speak, and he bent down to hear her, his silver hair warm under the room's bright track lighting.

“You know pretty much everything, Arthur,” she said. “What do you know about cars?”

He smiled and blushed all at once, happy to have his answers, for once, prompted by an actual question.

“Well, now, Miss Alison, let's check the memory banks. In 1939, Packard put the first air conditioner in a car, and that same year Oscar Meyer began touring the Weinermobile. Nationally, mind you. Same year the cheeseburger was invented, come to think of it.”

“Well, but do you know any hands-on stuff? Like how to fix the motor?”

He looked suddenly defeated. “No, not really. That kind of thing…I'm sorry.”

Alison touched his shoulder. “I love hearing all the facts you know. I really do. They put my teaching to shame.”

He nodded. “Did you know that Henry Ford once wore a suit and tie made entirely of soybeans?”

“Man, you think you know someone…” she said. She smiled at him, but he missed it. By now the dancers were choosing up partners. “Really interesting, Arthur.”

“Certainly is that,” he said. “A man of his stature. Not near what you'd expect.”

Sarah began by reviewing the three-step pattern and a simple under-arm turn. She kept blowing her whistle, smiling and clapping, taking hands with the dancers to show them in slow motion. Mr. Kesler stood next to his records in their varnished wooden box. He would never dance, even if someone asked him directly. Alison swayed to the music as the Harmons took to the floor, as Bill patiently turned Mrs. Skidmore again and again, as Tyra Wallace and Lila Montgomery danced together, their faces alert with color and dampness.

Alison leaned toward Mr. Rossi. “They always look younger on the dance floor,” she said. A brief panic flashed across his face, his mind, she figured, searching for some tidbit of conversation to offer back. Finding nothing, he nodded. She watched the women move, how it seemed as if they could step out of their years sometimes, their bodies recalling a dim memory of muscles and flesh, of bones and sinews and skin—the way she could still feel Marty sometimes, his fingers on her face, the cold in the flats of his palms after he worked outside, the hairs along his wrists brushing her knuckles in a movie theater.

“You want to know about cars,” Mr. Rossi said, interrupting her thoughts, “your man is right there.” He pointed to Mr. Kesler.

“Him? Hard to see him getting his fingernails dirty.”

“Did you know that the fingernails continue to grow a year after a person dies?” He smiled again.

Tiring of this, she pulled him by his sleeve over to Tyra and Lila, who were watching Bill slow-motion his way through a kick step.

“Mr. Rossi needs a partner,” she told them, and they both smiled, looked at one another, while Mr. Rossi stood gaping like a fish. An awkward silence followed. “I noticed…your penny loafers, Lila,” Alison said. “Have you ever wondered how that came about, sticking coins inside your shoes?”

Lila hesitated half a second. “Why, yes, now that you say it. That is an oddity, how a person would ever think to do such a thing.”

“Well, it's not what you'd expect,” Mr. Rossi said. “The loafer, or Weejun, of course, was named for the Norwegian aboriginals who first began hand-sewing the shoes—which follows from their generally smallish fingers—and by 1935…”

Alison left them just as the music faded and Mr. Kesler crouched to put on another record. Sarah lined everyone up to demonstrate another move, some complicated series of arm twists she called “the window shade.” Mr. Kesler concentrated as he dropped the needle, then folded away his white gloves. He looked as he always did, as though he maintained himself with the same care and economy he gave his records. He wore a light blue zippered jumpsuit with some fake coat of arms stitched over the breast, a flap of pocket opposite it. His prickly crew-cut hair was the shade of gray (nickel almost) that looked as if it had once been blond. His face was tan, cut with wrinkles around the mouth, dark eyes held in the lenses of thick black horn-rimmed glasses. He looked like a scientist from some fifties Martian movie. She walked over next to him, smiled as he nodded politely. There were little details about him she had never noticed from across the room: the almost pure white of his eyebrows, hidden by the glasses, his department-store sneakers with Velero straps instead of laces, the brown bowl of a pipe sticking out of the breast pocket in his jumpsuit. The bowl pivoted with his movements, as if his heart had sent up a tiny periscope.

I'm told you're the one to talk to about a car. I mean fixing a car.” Alison jammed her hands into the pockets of her overalls.

He peered at her through his glasses, rocking on his toes, his pipe wagging. “Is someone setting you up? Yanking your chain?”

“What? No, not at all. I have an old car and I want to make it new. I heard you might be the person to talk to.”

He licked his lips, which looked painfully dry and chapped. He wiped away her question with a motion of his hand, the fingertips of his white gloves inching out of the pocket of his jumpsuit. “My son, now he knows a thing or two from the army. Practically an expert. As for me, well…” He laughed. “Fix the brakes. Better know you can make it stop, before you make it go.”

His rheumy eyes watched her, behind their thick frames, the lines in his mouth deepening, then disappearing. “That's it?” Alison said. “I have a whole car to…to redo, and the extent of your advice is ‘fix the brakes'? Maybe somebody was yanking my chain.” She felt echoes of the same frustration she'd felt with Sarah earlier, as though she couldn't understand why her desire to fix the car was not instantly contagious, had not become, in the last hour, a cause taken up by the whole community. And why not? There wasn't much else going on in Wiley Ford.

Mr. Kesler shrugged. “Take it to a mechanic. Or, like I say, Max will be here soon, helping out with the lake, and he'll know a thing or two.” He bent long enough to snap the clasp on his record box, which looked homemade, a little bit crooked. He straightened. “That's a true puzzle, how I get the reputation for knowing the first thing about cars.”

Sarah gave a short blast of her whistle as she showed the dancers what not to do as they practiced some move she called “the corkscrew.”

“I guess, you know, you have a reputation for…meticulousness.” She shrugged. “Maybe someone thought your careful maintenance extends to cars.”

He made a pinched face, so his eyebrows drew together. “Meticulous? Careful?”

She tapped on his wooden record box. “Most people don't wear nuclear radiation gloves to handle Perry Como, Mr. Kesler.”

“Oh, that. Well, listen, Alison…” This sounded strange; he had never said her name before, but everyone in Wiley Ford knew who she was by now. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Thing is, I had a collection of over a thousand LPs and twice that many seventy-eights and now, out of my own carelessness, this is all I have left. I'm a careless man.” He nodded. “That I am.”

He paused long enough to remove his glasses and hold them up to the light. He blew on them once, then replaced them. “The National Archives,” he said.

She blinked. “Did I miss something?”

“That's where I get the gloves. They use them for handling documents.” He hesitated. “As for my long-playing records…I used to leave them in piles around the hi-fi, just scattered around the floor, cats walking on them, spilled food.” He stopped, wiped the tiny white flecks from his lips. “Just fix the brakes.”

She nodded. “Well, thanks.”

“Hey, Mr. Kesler,” Sarah said. “That's your cue. Late again.” Mr. Kesler slipped on his gloves to change the side, then lowered the needle until the room flooded with Count Basie. Alison started to move toward the couch, but Mr. Kesler took her arm, his grip a firm pinch. He drew her back.

“One more thing about cars, now that you mention it,” he said. “There's one on the bottom of that lake.” He tilted his head toward the front door. “I put it there.”

She leaned back to look at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said. A 1939 Chrysler Crown Imperial. Put it straight down on the bottom.” He nodded, looking away from her. “Damn near killed me, too.”

She shook her head, confused. “Well…I mean, are you hurt? When did this happen?”

He looked at the ceiling, squinting. “1946.”

She laughed. “I guess you'll live, then. Mind telling me
how
you put a Chrysler Imperial on the bottom of the lake?”

“Oh, the usual way, I suppose.” He smiled, and after a few seconds, she realized that he'd made a joke. His teeth looked crowded, all bunched together and overlapping in the front of his mouth. She saw in those teeth something of the carelessness he spoke of, as though his messiness had settled in his mouth, shoved there by his neat jumpsuits, his white gloves, his flattop haircut. He took the pipe from his pocket, squinted to look into the bowl, then replaced it.

“Just a kid, maybe fourteen or so, and we had this freak winter, kind that kills all the oranges in Florida and makes it onto the nightly news. Anyway, the lake out here froze over and all any of us kids wanted to do was strap some wood blocks to our boots and head out to skate, but none of the parents around here would allow it, having no experience with serious ice. So I took the car from my Uncle Crawford about midnight one night, so cold it felt like my blood might freeze, and I rolled his car down the road and popped the clutch and aimed to drive it out across the ice, and in the morning I'd tell everyone what I did, and we could all go out and skate and I'd be your basic hometown hero. So. You know how this one ends. I got out to the middle, ice made a sound like somebody cracking a two-by-four. I stopped right there. Put my brakes on, then I was in the water.” He shrugged.

Alison tried to get her mind around all of this. “You weren't all too bright at fourteen, were you?”

He shook his head. “Not the sharpest nail in the bin.”

“So what did you do?”

“Do? Well, the last thing I remember was swimming up out of that hole, my arms stiff and cold, and I stuck my head back down in that water to look. I could see the headlights still shining out through the water, these two yellow cones getting dimmer and dimmer. Before I got out, the car filled up with water as high as the dash, and up floated this pint bottle of rye. Never forget that, had a cork in the neck and a rooster drawn on the label, and I remember realizing it was my uncle's and that he'd been hiding it under the seat. So here I was, half-drowned and frozen, and all I could think was, Damn, he's been hiding his liquor.”

She shook her head. “How did you get out?”

“I reared back and kicked out the window. The whole world, seemed like, came gushing in.”

Alison left the conversation for half a second, thinking of when Lem Kerns brought her the news, standing on her porch, stammering, twisting his shirttail, his glasses duct-taped, and when she understood him finally, it was just that: the whole world, gushing in. Mr. Kesler leaned in toward her. “I never told anyone about that. Until just now.”

She let this sink in a moment. “You mean you never … The car is still
down
there?”

“Like I said, it's still there. Of course, probably under ten feet of mud by now, don't you think? That's a deep, deep lake. Had an anchor once on fifty feet of clothesline and couldn't touch bottom. Reported it stolen.”

“What?”

“The car. My uncle reported it, collected insurance. He was happy enough, so I never felt too bad over it.”

“And you never told
anyone?
Not your son? Your wife? Your therapist?”

“I was more than a little embarrassed for a long time, then I was embarrassed that I'd let so much time go by without saying anything.”

“So then why tell me, if you're so embarrassed?”

He smiled again with his crowd of teeth. “I just got over it.”

Alison laughed at this, but she was touched, too. It felt like some small offering from him, as though knowing her past (as everyone in Wiley Ford did) had caused him to dredge up his own story of loss, however far off and forgotten.

“Besides,” he said, “what with them draining the lake, I might get exposed here soon.”

She smiled. “Just say it's some
other
Chrysler Imperial down there. I'll back you up.”

Late that night, after the dancing ended, after Mr. Kesler packed away his records and gave her a smile on the way out, after the ladies kept dancing in pairs without any music until the van honked for them outside, after Bill plugged in his portable floor polisher to take the scuff marks out of the floor, after quiet and stillness returned, Alison sat on the front porch, watching the lake, the puddles around the exposed bank shining like pot lids. Sometimes she thought she could detect a lowering of the water out of the corner of her eye, as if she could catch the level dropping. But she never did. It always looked the same, looked as if it had not changed a bit, until you could begin to think the city fathers had decided against draining it, and then one afternoon you would notice how much of the steep muddy bank was exposed, or the angle of the boat docks pointing down into the water, some mossy pile of exposed tires, a bundle of Christmas tree skeletons. Late at night, the migrant workers from the cornfields in Paw Paw would venture down through the muck with fishing tackle and lanterns to the retreating edge of the water. Already, the exposed bottom had started to give way to a second bank, a steep slope down into the deep, hidden middle, where Mr. Kesler had lost his uncle's car. The smaller that middle became, the more regularly the men arrived at night, as if the diminished size increased their chances of the big catch. Alison watched them, heard their echoed laughs and curses, hugged herself against the breeze. She imagined all the fish in the lake retreating to the deep bottom, finding refuge in Uncle Crawford's car, swimming around the floating rye bottle with the rooster on the label. But that picture was a lie, she knew. Closer, probably, was what Mr. Kesler had said, the car buried under ten feet of mud, the paper label long since disintegrated, the upholstery, the rubber tires, most of the metal itself a casualty of time, worse than her Corvette. She shook the idea from her head. She would not think about that, the whole idea of decay. It was the worst thing—a bad joke built into the design—the way everything wore out, rotted away. The thing to do was to refuse to give in, like Lila Montgomery in her jeans and penny loafers, a seventy-seven-year-old cheerleader dancing away from broken hips and portable oxygen tanks and varicose veins. Alison walked across the yard toward the garage, some part of her mind vaguely trying to remember if Gutenberg had invented the printing press before or after the birth of Leonardo da Vinci. The question had pestered her since her undergrad days, when she'd gotten it wrong on an exam.