Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (7 page)

“Listen,” Max said. “Get yourself some jack stands, raise the car up so you can get to it. And start with the brakes. Better know it can stop before—”

“—before you make it go. Your father told me the exact same thing. You two must sit around memorizing little adages together.”

He laughed. “Maybe we should try that. It would give us something to say to each other—you know, besides The Orioles need pitching,' or ‘Get me a beer.' Liven things up some.”

She busied herself, straightening up the sparse tools on her workbench, the Lil' Wonder All-N-One and the manual (still clean, the pages crisp), the set of wrenches she'd found on the floor. The whole collection of them must look pathetic, held up against the condition of the car. “What's the matter?” she said. “You don't talk to each other?”

Max shrugged. “Sure. We talk about his record collection, TV, work. We get along.”

“He
really
talks to me,” Alison said. This wasn't exactly true, but she wanted to get back at him for making her feel so stupid. “He tells me about his past.”

“Yeah, I suppose he told you about losing the car in the lake.”

She looked at him. “Is your father genuinely confused, or just a liar?”

Max smiled and lit another cigarette. “He's a liar. To the core.”

“You mean the whole thing? There is no Chrysler in the lake?”

“Nope. You and I are probably the only ones in Mineral County who know that.”

She sighed. “Okay, so your father's a convincing liar. You don't seem too bothered.”

Max sucked on the cigarette, then looked at it. “You got one good lie from him, and I've had … God knows. Thousands. He's a liar, Alison, that's what he does.”

Alison shook her head. She thought of all those times when Marty was in the basement, gone for hours, for whole Saturdays and Sundays down there, and at night in their bed she would ask him why. Why was he avoiding her? He would lie, too, tell her how much work he had left on some project, how he was going to make some real money this time, how Lem was counting on him to be there. He'd smile and shake his head, would never tell her what was wrong. They had argued about it the night before he died, after he'd spent that entire day at Lem's and was planning to head back the next day. It had been this way for the last few years, his almost constant avoidance of her.
Why?
she wanted to know. Why?

She looked at him, absently thumbing the pages of her manual. “But why me?”

He blinked behind his tiny glasses. “He's recruiting you.”

“He wants me to lie, too?”

“To cover his back. Help him out when that lake turns up empty and his famous car story turns up bullshit. You're from the
college
, after all. It carries weight if you say the car is buried under mud. He keeps trying to convince me, too.”

She shook her head. “I'm not a geologist. I teach Western civ.”

“Around here? They don't care. He just needs corroboration. You're it.”

She sat on the hood of the Corvette. “How do you know all this?”

“It's his MO.” He shook the red cigarette pack, then crumpled it up and tossed it into the corner. “One time when I was a kid, he gave me a baseball signed by Lou Gehrig, for a birthday present. Came in this glass display box. I cleared off a whole bookshelf to make room for the ‘Lou Gehrig ball,' right? Later on, I was maybe sixteen, I took it to a collector's show in Morgantown, just to see what it was worth.”

“And?”

He smirked. “Total fake. The guy showed me how the ball was all but brand-new, how the signature didn't match. Dad just bought a ball and signed it.”

“What did he do when you called him on it?”

“He recruited somebody. His boss at Celanese comes over for dinner, admires the ball, starts telling me how those collectors are con artists, how they will tell you anything just to steal your stuff. He was convincing. I think because Dad had convinced
him
.”

“That doesn't sound so terrible. Really, it's kind of sweet if you think about it.”

“It wasn't sweet.” He shook his head. “And that was nothing. There was much worse.” He said this with such foreboding that she didn't want to ask. Max looked at his cigarette, flicked it out into the gravel drive.

“So now he wants to convince me. To lie to you.”

“Not me. He
knows
I'm onto him. He wants you to convince Wiley Ford. He's pretty famous around here for that story.”

“Well, if he asks,” she said, “tell your dad I'm not interested in being his little fib partner, okay?”

Max nodded as he stood in the doorway of the garage, looking around for a minute. “Good luck with the car, I guess.”

Two days later, the
Wiley Ford Press-Republican
ran a story on the draining of the lake, Colaville, the new dam replacing the old one. The article talked about Kesler Munitions as if it were some big company, instead of just one guy with a tattoo. There was a sidebar about the lake itself, its history, most of the things that Mrs. Skidmore had spoken of at the last dance lesson. And when Alison turned the page, her eyes fell on an accompanying photo of an old Chrysler, though not Mr. Kesler's (the caption said “Photo courtesy of Flow Motors”), and two paragraphs in the middle about “the Kesler Chrysler,” about young Gordon Kesler and the frozen lake, how he was anticipating finding the car again and bringing it out. They even quoted him, telling the lie over again. Alison folded the paper, didn't bother reading the rest.

The old joke in Wiley Ford was that at 7:00 every evening they
wanted
to roll up the sidewalks, but everyone was asleep. This was not quite true, though you would never mistake it for anything other than an American small town, as if you might turn a corner and find Norman Rockwell sitting in a chair with his pipe and sketch pad. Cumberland, where she'd lived with Marty, was small, but not this small, and nothing like the Baltimore suburbs where she'd grown up. The worst thing about a small town was also the best thing: Everywhere you went, you saw the same people. Every church gathering or bar or ball game or parade, you would turn around and see the same ten people you'd just seen that morning, or yesterday, at the market or the Laundromat or at the fire hall, buying fried chicken to raise money for new uniforms. Like a high school play where the same actors play three or four different parts. It was comforting, this familiarity, and claustrophobic, all at once. Tonight, feeling it closing in on her, Alison walked alone through the streets downtown, away from the lake, away from the dance lessons. Five minutes into the dancing, she'd had her fill. Five minutes of watching Mr. Kesler clean and reclean his records, five minutes of Tyra Wallace complaining about the new library committee, of Sarah blasting her coach's whistle, of Mr. Rossi talking about some tiny country where fruit was used as currency. So she'd left.

Now she sat on the low brick wall that surrounded the square at the end of Main Street, next to a store that sold sandwiches and frozen yogurt. Across the street was the Discount Beverage Center, which had found a place in her heart during her time here, not for the liquor they sold but because at night their neon sign lit up to read
DISCOUNT RAGE CENTER
, a few of the red tubes burned out. Every time she came this way, she imagined a long line of the timid and shy, waiting their turn to purchase hostility, to stock up on anger. The thought made her think about her own rage right after Marty's accident, long since subsided, discounted by nothing more than time.

Next to
DISCOUNT RAGE
was the Red Bird Cafe, all lit up and filtered pale green through the plastic window film. Inside, the waitresses slid around on their crepe-soled shoes, carrying coffeepots and trays. As she walked closer, she could make out Mr. Beachy in a corner booth, a book spread open before him, next to his pie and coffee. She pushed open the door and walked inside, sat on the stool opposite him.

“Evening, Mr. Beachy.” She swiveled around to face him, after ordering coffee. He looked up from his book and then politely closed it. The title was Rangers
of the Lone Star
, a Zane Grey novel.

“Well, Alison, how are you tonight? How's the work coming along on that Corvette?”

She carried her saucer and cup to his booth and sat down across from him, grateful for innocuous company, for small talk.

“Slow, I guess. I don't know what I'm doing. But I've decided to fix the brakes first.”

The corners of his mouth turned down, as if he were giving this careful thought. “That's fine, you have to start somewhere. Just jump right in. Come by the store tomorrow, I'll fix you up with parts.”

“I'll need jack stands,” she told him. She had no idea what these were, but now that she was learning some of the jargon, she wanted to try it out. She wanted to throw it around like a pro, like a restoration scientist.

He nodded, chewing his coconut pie. “Yes, of course. Plus new lines if they're cracked. And a master cylinder, or will you rebuild yours?”

She mentally leafed through the pages of the manual, trying to remember “master cylinder.” Nothing came to her. “Oh, definitely a new one. Absolutely.”

He smiled. “No reason to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, right?”

They were quiet a moment, and suddenly the whole thing felt awkward; Mr. Beachy seemed exposed, almost frail, without the long counter in front of him. She stirred her coffee, drank it. The waitress refilled her cup. She tried to think of something else she could say about the car without sounding like an idiot.

“It's not a very desirable year, is it?”

“Well,” he said quietly, “I don't think anyone would wish on themselves the kind of year you've had. But things can only get better is how I feel.”

“Oh, no, I meant—” She groped for words. “I meant the car, Mr. Beachy. Not a good year for Corvettes.”

He flushed deep red. “Oh,
that.”
He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “You see, customers ask me all the time about blue-book value, and what this or that might be worth. I tell them, if you love the car, then it's priceless.”

She smiled and nodded. “You should be a diplomat, Mr. Beachy. Or a marriage counselor.”

“Alison, I do wonder if during…during the year or so you've been through, has the church been much of a comfort to you?”

Oh,
man
. The last thing she wanted was to have Mr. Beachy trying to convert her. She wanted suddenly to get out of there, to be back sitting at the edge of the lake in the quiet and the dark, or in her garage, tinkering.

“A few Mass cards, some flowers from Marty's church, but really, Mr. Beachy—”

“Oh, so you're Catholic, then? My late wife was Catholic. I never did join up, though. Never had much use for any religion until after my surgery. I guess I'm not too original in that, am I?”

“Hey, that is the very same with Marty and me,” she said. “He grew up in the church, and I just kind of went along.”

Mr. Beachy smiled, his teeth small and white, like baby teeth. “Well, that would be me, too. I liked the pageantry of it, I suppose, but could never get behind following a priest or any kind of preacher, really. I wanted to chart my own course.”

“Marty used to tell me that Mass was like obedience school—you know, stand, sit, kneel. If you don't learn young, you'll never get it. I was just an old dog, or a bad dog, I guess.”

He laughed, and she felt her face warm. “But not too bad. You went, didn't you?”

“Every Sunday, every day of obligation.”

“So, why did you?”

She thought about this, sipping her coffee. “Marty liked dressing up for church. Some Sundays, they asked him to do the collection baskets, and he just
loved
that. He was so happy. The only time I ever saw him in a tie was at church.” This was the same tie that still hung knotted in the closet at home.

“Wearing it some other place would've spoiled the whole effect.”

“Exactly. So, how could I not be there?”

He nodded. “You couldn't.”

She patted him on the arm, put a dollar on the table. “I should get back, before I'm missed.”

“Okay, Alison. Just remember that all the answers you need are in the book.” He gave a solemn nod, and it took her a good five seconds to realize he was talking about the Bible—
that
book, not her Haynes manual. Her silence made him blush.

“I don't mean to proselytize. You come on by tomorrow, and we'll get you fixed up.”

As she walked out of the diner, she turned to see him back reading his Zane Grey novel where he'd left off, his finger shaking a little as it followed slowly along each word, the next, and the next.

When she got home the dancers had left, and the little window light was out in the kitchen, which meant Sarah had gone to bed. Alison walked to the house in the slight chill of a summer night, anticipating having the quiet house, the porch, the lake to herself. Instead, she found Bill in his bathrobe and slippers, standing in the shadows under the front windows, tossing handfuls of Uncle Ben's rice onto the roof of the house.

“Bill?”

“Alison! You scared the heck out of me. I thought you were upstairs.” He stood holding the orange box as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“I just got in. I was downtown.”

“Oh. Well. Good night, then.”

“You know I'm going to ask, Bill.” She leaned on the porch rail, looking down at him.

He held up the box and studied it, as if just realizing what it was. She could tell from the way he held his arms that he was embarrassed. “This?” He nodded at the box. “I know Sarah told you about the javelin throwers, right?”

“Yes. Why the javelin? Some kind of phallic thing?”

He waved away the question. “You know why they throw rice at weddings?”