How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (13 page)

“_____. Where’s the story about the canal?”

“There wasn’t much
to
that story. No one knew why the streets had filled. And they’re not doing anything to fix it.”

“The fact that the streets filled with water
is
the story,” she told me.

“How is that a story?” I said.

Louise held out her hands. “Something strange and unexpected happened—that’s newsworthy,” she said, her voice curbing and turning.

“But it’s just a change-and-changeback. The Kaddish one had long-lost religion. Discovery. Nature!”

Louise ran her cheese hands through her cheese hair and looked down at her notepad. “The Statue of Coolidge is holding a press conference at four—I want you there,” she said.

I nodded reluctantly and took another bite of my fruit.

Louise looked up at me. She pointed to my hand, the fruit-bodied prayer. “What is that?” she said.

“This?” I said. Everything felt free.

“Is that what I think it is?”

I smiled. “What do you think it is?”

“Don’t even tell me,” she said.

•  •  •

Needless to say, I had a lot to learn about journalism. After a little more than nine months, several failed assignments, and a number of disagreements over what was or was not a story, I left the
Wheel
and decided to dedicate myself to the Crescent Street apartments—to revive them, rent them, do my father proud.

But that didn’t work either. I just didn’t know enough. I could tell you a lot about Volkswagens, but home repair was a different screen altogether. I didn’t understand plumbing, couldn’t wrap my mind around the fundamentals of electricity. A pipe on the first floor burst, and then the burners downstairs broke and I couldn’t fix them. In the years that followed, I sold off every attribute inside them piece-by-piece in order to raise the time to take care of my son.

The story of the 57 Crescent Street house doesn’t crescendo, but fades out instead: Later, a few months after the death of my father, I finally ran out of options and time. I had to sell the place to my brother, the schoolteacher.

By that point the house was empty, and I was living in Deerfield with the Museum. One winter morning, my brother and I met at the house to finalize the deal. Neither I nor the Museum had been able to afford to keep a car or a bio, so I rode her bike all the way from Deerfield to Northampton for the meeting. By the time I got there my nose was a single vowel, nothing more.

Bry and I hadn’t spoken face-to-face in, I don’t know, years. As I stood there waiting for him I lit the fingers on my left hand and smoked them. The keys to the house wept into the pocket of my coat.
“Please,”
one of them said.

“Shut up,” I whispered, breathing fingersmoke into the amazing air. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Then my brother showed up in his Honda. He was older now; his eyes were closets and he was starting to lose his hair, like I had long ago. He met me on the steps and put his hand out. I handed over the keys without saying a word, stepped off the porch, got on my girlfriend’s bicycle and pedaled down the sidewalk and through the snow.

There’s no need to pocket because I know why you’re here: You want to know why and how a Heart Attack Tree works, why it would kill your mother—your father, your children—when it will strike again, where it lives and what we can do to stop it. You’re sick of the fucking
changes
. And so am I.

I may not have given in to the VW’s pleas to tell stories of traversing across western Massachusetts to look for the Heart Attack Tree, but I didn’t just accept the Tree’s crime either. I did what I could, first, to learn about Heart Attack Trees. Just a few days after I told the VW the Katydids, I took him over to the Smith College Library so we could do some research.

But our findings only echoed the Dogs’ claims: These trees were born with a powerful craving for story and heart, which they can smell in a human being’s chest. They eat the heart to get to the muscle, the story. Without concord nourishment, though, the tree grows foggy and “wanders around in a drug-like state, exhausted and confused.”
^*
I learned that there are seventy-four breeds of Heart Attack Tree in America, and over fifty additional breeds in Europe. In the U.S., apparently, the Heart Attack Tree’s best weapon is anonymity; either they stay hidden in the woods, trying not to be noticed, or they enroll in the Federal Heart Program (FHP), which entitles them to three artificial hearts per day. (In Europe, incidentally,
all
Heart Attack Trees must register, and are branded with a ring around their trunk. Subsequently, many British Heart Attack Trees live in exclusive communities—pulmonary forests—in order to avoid public scorn.)

One power, though, elaborated further on the makeup of these “Art-Hearts”; apparently they’re made from paper, and bound with glue, and while most Heart Attack Trees attest that they taste sort of heart-like, they’re not nearly as savory or nourishing as the real thing.
^*
They do help reduce attacks, though, and the FHP has a system in place for reprimanding those trees that do attack: They either lobotomize them, relocate them, or both. But they’re extremely hard to track. Many Heart Attack Trees remain fugitives because they never bothered to register with the FHP to begin with; this makes them almost impossible to identify or pick out of a lineup.

Plus, you never know whether you have the tree or its Memory!

The VW and I also started surveying the area. For a while there when I was working at the
Wheel
we stole away almost every afternoon, drove my VW into Amherst and spoke to anyone who might have seen a tree driving a farm. I interviewed houses, trees, 116 itself. (“I’ve seen farms driving along here from time to time,” the road told me, “but I never thought to look inside them and see who was at the wheel.”)

Then, one day in the spring of ’05, I tracked down a tree who matched the general description, and who’d reportedly gone missing just around the time that my father had.

That afternoon, the VW and I were driving through South Hadley when the VW had a hankering for chai. He began begging for it. I was on my way out to Mount Holyoke to interview an amphitheatre about a lawsuit, but the VW was beligerating—slowing down, whining, stopping abruptly. “So thirsty,” he gasped. “Need chai.”

“Stop it,” I told him.

“Can’t—parched. Need … milk and ginger,” he said.

I custom-swore at him and told him no, but finally I had no choice—he wasn’t going to keep going if I didn’t find him some chai soon. Luckily, the Thirsty Mind Café was right off 47 in the Village Commons, so I pulled over, grabbed my bag with my wallet inside and ran upstairs to the café.

As I was waiting at the café counter, though, I noticed a glass case in
front of me with some bulges of plastic beneath it. When I looked closer I saw a purple organ with blue arteries beneath the plastic. These were actual fake hearts, I realized, and expensive ones, too—two hours a pop, according to the piece of paper next to them.

When I think now about what my
father’s
heart was worth—how many hours!

“Those hearts?” I asked the typewriter behind the counter.

He nodded. “Made by Pothole Pastries. They’re good.”

“They for trees?”

He nodded.

“Sell a lot of them?”

The typewriter shook his head. “Barely any. They’re big with some breeds, but we don’t get so many trees in here anymore. There used to be one, he’d come in almost every day on break.”

“He doesn’t buy them any more?”

“He doesn’t come by—he hasn’t been here in months,” the typewriter said.

As subtly as I could I reached into my bag, turned on my book of power and pushed the button for it to record. “How come?” I said.

The typewriter looked at me skeptically. “Can I get you a coffee or something?”

I reached into my wallet and slipped an hournote across the counter.

“What’s that?” the typewriter said.

“That’s time. For information about that tree.”

“What for?” the typewriter said.

I slipped another note to him. “Because I like trees.”

“There are plenty of—”

“I’m interested in
this particular
tree,” I said.

“Like I said, he doesn’t come in anymore. But he had lambchop sideburns. These heavy, drooping eyelids.”

“Did you ever see him driving a farm?”

The typewriter stared at me. “What?”

“A farm,” I said.

“I only ever saw him when he came in for coffee. I think he works at
Fedora’s—sometimes he came in wearing an apron.”

I shook my head—I didn’t know the place.

“It’s a restaurant and bar. Right around the corner.”

“And he stopped coming by?”

The typewriter nodded. “A month or two ago, maybe.”

I made a note in my power:
Fedora’s
. “Anything else I should know about this sideburned tree?” I said.

The typewriter crossed his arms. “You aren’t going to hurt him, are you?”

I leaned against the glass case and studied the wrapped hearts. “Ever try one of those?” I asked.

“Me? No.”

I tapped my fingers on the glass. “Let me get one to go. And a medium chai.”

The typewriter took out a pair of tongs and pulled one heart out of the case. “That’ll be three hours.”

I looked deep into my wallet. I heard screams. I saw a tongue wagging. Finally, I saw four hours balled up in the corner. I handed them over and the typewriter put a paper cup on the counter and placed a heart in my hands.

Outside I met the VW and we sat down on an iron-wrought bench. “What took you so long?” the VW said.

I handed him his chai. “That café sells hearts,” I said.

The VW wrapped his hands around the cup and took a slow sip. “Yes,” he said. “Yeah, mama. Good old American
chai
,” he smoothed.

I set the heart down on my lap and opened up the wrapping. Inside was a stack of paper, bloody and bound.

“What are you doing?” the VW said.

I sniffed the heart—it smelled sour, like blood.

“Dad—what are you doing?”

I shrugged. “I’m curious—aren’t you?”

“About what?” Then the VW’s face changed, and I could tell he realized what I meant. “Oh, Dad. Please. Don’t tell me.”

“Just a bite,” I said.

“Ugh,” the VW said, resting his cup of chai on the arm of the bench.

“Why not?” I said. “It’s not like it’s real—it’s manufactured.”

The heart was cold to my lips and it tasted like paper. I took a bite of it, swished it around in my mouth. It was freezing cold, and slippery. It had the texture of the sole of a shoe. It was very tough to chew and swallow, but I did my best.

The VW was obviously put off. He leaned back and his face lost its blue color. “Why in the world would you
do
that?” he said.

•  •  •

That whole experience turned out to be a wild tree chase, though. I spoke to Fedora’s and they told me that the tree was on leave, but after some additional elsing at the
Wheel
I found out why: He’d been admitted to Holyoke Hospital a month earlier. He had testicular cancer—a cyst in his right testicle, which he’d thought was benign, turned out to be a tumor. He went in to get it looked at, but by then it was too late.

Flat tires are perhaps one of the more serious emergencies that you’ll encounter with your VW. If your son or daughter gets one, the best thing to do is to pull them off of the road, sit cross-legged on the car and wait for help.

I have received countless letters asking whether fixing tires is something that one can do oneself, and the answer is
NO!
I have known vulcanizers to do it, but some of those
same
vulcanizers have crashed their children because their tires were running on voided, cancelled messages.

Tires are simple devices made out of rubber, with tubes inside filled
with breath. But not just
any
breath. Volkswagen sends out nomads whose sole job is to find drivers/parents with flat tires, heal those tires and breathe them full. These are the people that you’re waiting for. You might sometimes see them walking alongside the road, their hands dirty and their feet rolled. I have known people who waited two
days
for one to arrive, but once they’re there they can fix the tire within three or four hours tops.

I have only had this happen to me once (thank god!), when I was lost with the VW in Wilbraham. The road happened to be taking a nap at the time. It turned over in its sleep and its fingernail punctured the right rear tire.

I heard the tire go and the VW said a custom-made swear. I pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car and debated whether to try and change the tire myself. But I didn’t know where to start—how to get the tire off the car, even.

So I did the only other thing I could: I climbed on the back of the VW and I sat there with my legs in an X. The sun beat down on me. I heard frequencies in the air—person-to-persons, distance jams, other books of power. I tried to be still.

Later that evening the Volkswagen nomad arrived. I saw her condensing down the road, her body like a game. Even from afar I could see her VW action suit, the insignia emblazoned on her chest. As she approached I saw that her hair extended to her ankles, and that half of it was natural and the other half mechanical. The mechanical strands moved on their own.

I hopped off the car and the nomad took the VW in her arms as if she were his mother. She held him and breathed into the flat tire. It only took a few minutes—only one or two continuous breaths, actually—to inflate the tire completely. I watched everything she did and I still have no idea how she did it. Before I knew it she was finished, and the VW was standing there ready to be driven.

This nomad’s face was beautiful, and my thoughts were grazing. I offered her time of money, but she must have seen a pause in my eyes because she held her hands up and refused. I tried to talk to her, to start a conversation, but I’m not sure that she’d been given a voice to respond with. If she did, she didn’t use it with me. I managed to thank her and that was it; as quickly as she arrived she was gone, walking down the side of the road as the hot sun ridiculed above, her long hair crinkling and chirping as she went.