Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (5 page)

The balls stop clacking on the other end, and after a moment came the whirring of the tiny motorized train on Ernie's desk, around and around its circular track.

“So, how about it, Al? Say the word, I'll head down to your office right now and warm up your chair until you get back.”

Alison glanced at Sarah, who was now studying the index. “Ernie, I really have missed you, Lord help me. But, I'm just … I'm not ready to be back there yet. I know that sounds lame. Plus, I have a project going.”

“What kind of project?”

She thought for a second. “It's a surprise.”

She heard him cluck his tongue on the other end, the whirring stop. “The thing is…” He hesitated. “The provost wants to take your position. We could lose the slot. And to English on top of it, those greedy bastards. They want to hire a ‘developmental person.' I keep asking them why they don't just go ahead and hire a fully formed person.”

“Hey, you might have just put your finger on my problem.”

“You're fully formed. You just had a few holes punched through you is all.”

“I'm sorry, Ernie.” She suddenly found herself blinking back tears.

“Listen. You still have until Tuesday before registration ends. Don't give any final say right now, okay? Give me a shout Monday evening and let me know.”

She said good-bye and clicked the phone off, then turned in time to see Sarah looking at her, biting her lip. Sarah opened her mouth to speak, then shook her head. She still held the plate of food, which she tossed on the workbench, a tiny corner of the stoneware chipping off. She stared at it a minute, then turned back toward the house. Alison watched until she rounded the corner, then lifted one of the pigs-in-a-blanket. She hadn't eaten all day, but the food had gone cold, the ring of dough grown stale and hard.

The dancers, still flushed and sweaty, sat in the living room, knees locked together, plates balanced in their laps. They took polite bites of the microwaved pigs-in-a-blanket and cookies. Mr. Kesler kept a stack of Oreos on his stereo table, using the social hour to clean and box his record collection. He had arrived earlier that evening, not driving the van from the retirement home, but riding in a battered yellow pickup truck. Alison had been on the porch, half-watching the lake and studying the grease that traced the whorls and loops of her fingertips, already dirty after so little work. He'd eased out of the truck, and someone—his son, the car expert, she guessed—waved to him out the window. Mr. Kesler kept trying to coax him out of the truck and into the house, motioning with his arms. She'd never seen him so animated.

From where she sat the son looked like a college yearbook photo of Mr. Kesler—the same face, only thicker, the same close-cropped graying-blond hair. His glasses were not Mr. Kesler's thick horn-rims, but tiny wires that could barely be seen beyond the flashes of light when he turned his head. He looked not like Mr. Kesler's mad scientist, but more like a real scientist, someone who collided atoms for a living. He kept letting the truck roll forward and back while he resisted being talked inside to meet everyone. “No, no. Go on, Dad,” he said in a clipped, thin voice. His arm hung out the window, his hand patting the dented door.

“Just to meet everyone?” Mr. Kesler said.

“Dad—”

“Just for a few?”

“Maybe next time,” he said. Finally, Mr. Kesler gave up, and his son waved and drove off. Mr. Kesler looked defeated, and Alison felt a twinge of anger. What had been so important he couldn't do this little thing for his father? It had surprised her as well to hear Mr. Kesler wanting his son to meet everyone. His involvement in the dances rarely extended beyond his record collection.

Now Mrs. Skidmore sat talking about the slow disappearance of the lake, about the outboard motors that had been found, along with the two sets of golf clubs (even though the nearest course was fifteen miles away). Her radar for gossip swept in a low, steady arc over all of Mineral County, carefully attuned to both fact and rumor. She said that the mosquitoes around the lake were carrying encephalitis, that there were two cases already over in Garrett County, and
that
was the real reason for draining the lake.

“You know,” Mr. Rossi said, his mouth stained with mustard, “it's not the mosquito's sting that causes the bump, it's the insect's saliva pumped under your skin. She spits into you.”

Several of the others put down their napkins and stared at their plates, while Mr. Rossi looked around at them and said that this was not what you'd expect. Mrs. Skidmore cleared her throat, allowing the interruption to fall away from her. Carrying with her this decades-old mix of rumor and fact, she was, Alison thought, the closest thing Wiley Ford had to a museum. She talked in her shrunken, scratchy voice, pausing to take sips of the beer she always insisted on drinking straight from the can.

“Now the funniest part—is that a word,
funniest?
—of this business with the lake is that the intent of the geniuses in charge—of course, the leader of that pack was Newton Hauser, whose idea of an original thought was to put out a fire using a bucket of water—anyway, the whole plan when they built it was to make it a
tourist
attraction. Can you imagine? Out here about seventy-five miles from anywhere, and they think they can just plunk down a water hole and suddenly people are going to drive out from Hagerstown and Washington—this is 1932, did I say that?—just to soak their toes in West Virginia and get eaten by a bear or a wild boar. Maybe that should have been on the brochures: ‘See West Virginia—Get Eaten by a Bear or Wild Boar.' Anyway”—she took a sip of beer, wiped the corners of her mouth—“we didn't even need the lake, not for water supply nor nothing, and all along the state wanted to make it hydroelectric and put it over in Gad, only of course the Baptists put a stop to that.”

Alison interrupted. “The Baptists? I thought they liked water.”

She laughed, took a drink. “Ordinarily. But they didn't want the dam put up over in Gad and having people running around the state saying, ‘They almost finished the Gad dam,' or ‘Let's go visit the Gad dam.' Afraid everyone would be thinking, The goddamn
what?
Said we'd get a reputation for profane language and stupidity all at once. Like that's news for West Virginia.”

Everyone laughed.

“So,” she continued, “thanks to the Baptists, all of Coalville ended up getting baptized. Of course, none of the people, so I guess it doesn't count. Near miss for the holy rollers, they almost converted three hundred in one shot.”

Alison took a sip of her beer. “What do you mean? What's Coalville?”

“Well, we kids used to call it Coca-Colaville and really it never had a real name, just some mining shacks and a company store and a church and a bar or two was about all. The mine stopped producing, so they went and flooded Colaville.”

“The shape of the Coke bottle is modeled on the cocoa bean itself,” Mr. Rossi tossed in while he had the chance.

“Flooded?” Alison said. “The whole town?” The others nodded.

“Like I said, weren't much to it,” Mrs. Skidmore explained. “It happened a lot around here, all those forgotten coal burgs, worthless once the ground was empty. So they filled it up, waited for the tourists to arrive.” She laughed and drank. “The tourist mine came up empty, too, I guess.”

Alison pictured the miners standing around with their wives and children, watching their cellars and kitchens and attics fill up with water. She thought, too, of Mr. Kesler's Chrysler down there, could see it settling in along some narrow water-filled street, the car parked forever in front of the flooded company store, as though its owner had merely popped in—left the engine running—for sugar and lamp oil. She imagined the watery ghosts of that old life gathering to gawk at the wide tires and shiny paint job, while around them dropped the slow accumulation of years—fishing tackle and outboard motors and golf clubs and abandoned shopping carts, maybe someone's wedding ring or a gunnysack of kittens, and then her own stack of self-help books floating down out of the murky water, pages fluttering, the people in the watery town picking them up to read phrases that had not yet been invented, words designed to steer them past the kind of grief that must have been as much a part of their lives as wash day or the evening meal.

She shook the thought away and turned to Mr. Kesler, who was just starting his food, after the other plates had been cleared away. “The person you were with tonight, your son? He's here about the lake?”

He nodded, swallowing. “Max, yes. Living with me for the time being.”

“Well, then, it attracted
one
tourist,” Alison said, and all of them laughed.

“Little Max Kesler,” Mrs. Skidmore said.

“Actually,” Mr. Kesler said, “the town honchos figured that as long as the lake is drained, they should take down the old dam and rebuild it.”

“I didn't know there
was
a dam,” Alison said.

Mr. Rossi spoke up. “Only three natural lakes in all of West Virginia.”

“So Max is going to build the new dam?” Mr. Harmon asked.

Mr. Kesler folded his napkin in thirds, put it on his plate. “Demolish the old one, take it down and clear it out. He can have it down in about five seconds, after all the prep is done.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Works with dynamite.” There arose a chorus of approval at this bit of information.

Mr. Rossi held up his index finger, his face bright pink. “Invented, ironically enough, by Alfred Nobel, of Nobel Prize fame? Not what—”

“What do they call someone like that, who knows about using dynamite and such?” Lila Montgomery asked.

“Around West Virginia,” Mr. Harmon said, “they're known as ‘fishermen.'” His wife gave him a playful slap on his arm.

Mr. Kesler smiled. “Well, Max likes to call himself a percussionist, but I think the term is munitions expert. That's his company, Kesler Munitions, Inc. Just last month, he took down a thirty-six-story building in Brazil.” He smiled. “Amazing work.”

“But you mean he's just going to blow it up? Isn't it historical?” Alison said. As she said it, Bill began sliding away the glass of wine Sarah had poured for herself, edging it away from her reach. Weird, Alison thought. Earlier, when Sarah had asked for wine, he'd brought her ice water.

Mr. Kesler clucked his tongue. “If by ‘historical' you mean dilapidated, yes.”

“Historical
always
means dilapidated,” Lila said. “Just look at us.”

The evening had grown late, the conversation quieted to a trickle. It was hard to top a munitions-expert son assigned to dynamite part of the town, though Mr. Rossi kept batting around his trivia ball, trying to entice someone to play. Alison was the only one who ever took him up on it, and she nodded at him now, half-listening as he talked about the weight of the Hoover Dam and the distance record for hand-walking. Soon even he stopped talking, and Mr. Kesler left as a horn honked for him outside; then the others moved slowly toward the door, the postdance stiffness seeping into their bones. They gave Sarah and Alison and Bill hugs and handshakes, then left, the van's headlights sweeping across the lake as they pulled out, illuminating the men down in the mud, fishing the lake's shrinking center.

Bill piled plates in the sink, kicked the rug back into place, kissed Sarah good night, and excused himself off to bed.

Sarah and Alison worked in silence, rinsing and stacking plates, sealing leftovers in plastic wrap, handing things back and forth as they did growing up, the easy, old rhythm of any Saturday-night dinner. Alison kept trying to catch her sister's eye, though Sarah resisted looking in her direction. Finally, Alison spoke.

“Sar? Bill was acting kind of strange tonight, did you notice?”

Sarah paused. “More than usual?”

“Well, you know … He kept pushing away your drinks, scooting the wine bottle away from you. I mean, if there's anything—”

“Oh,
that.”

Alison shrugged. “If there's some kind of problem or, I don't know…”

“Ah, shit.” She shook her head. “Okay, the story is, Bill wants us to get pregnant. I want that, too, but Bill wants it in the sense that he wants to keep breathing. For a year and a half now, we've been trying and just…
nothing
. So this is his new plan.”

“A year and a
half
? You never said anything.”

“Well, you've been occupied, haven't you?” She turned away from Alison and busied herself dropping forks into the dishwasher.

“Yeah, but…” She thought for a second. “How does cutting you off from the liquor supply get you pregnant? It's been a while, but that's not how I remember it.”

“This is Bill's idea, that we aren't thinking about it the right way. We aren't
visualizing
, he says. He got the idea from the Olympics, for godsakes. Some javelin thrower talking about how he visualizes a toss. Sees it fly through the air and it does and he wins, and somehow this translates into us having a baby. You know Bill, ready to believe in anything.”

“You've tried doctors, I take it?”

Sarah took her rings off her soapy hands and put them into the seashell beside the sink. “We have had every test they can toss our way and passed them all without even studying.” She puffed her cheeks, blew out a long, low breath. “We've been poked and scraped and injected with dye. ‘Just one of those things,' I think was the official diagnosis.”

“They have drugs,” Alison said.

Sarah looked at the dish towel in her hands, shook her head. “Not if they don't know what's causing it.”

“So, the tried-and-true javelin approach,” Alison said.

Sarah nodded, ran a glass under the hot water, her jaw working stiffly. “We visualize how it will be if we are pregnant, or little sperms backstroking into little eggs. Or Bill does. Mostly I visualize how much I would like to catch a wine buzz and smoke cigarettes again. But I go along, right? Poor Bill. He just intends to…will it so. He talks to my stomach. Our favorite sex toy is now a thermometer.”