Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (16 page)

“I guess I made a big mistake,” Mr. Kesler said, his voice overly loud.

Max's jaws worked with either impatience or worry, his temples throbbing as if he had gum in his mouth. “Yeah, I guess you
did,”
he said, which struck Alison as a harsh thing to say, given the circumstances. Just then, the porch light clicked on and Sarah came out of the house, hopping two steps to look at what it was she'd stepped in on her own front porch, never guessing in a million years, Alison thought, that it was pomegranate juice. She walked out into the harsh cones of the headlights, clutching her faded bathrobe, legs exposed and almost pale blue in the light. Her hair tumbled over to one side of her head, half of it in her face.

“It is one-
thirty
in the morning,” she said in a loud hiss. “I heard an explosion, which I guess was
you
—” she looked at Max “—and now we're having a little party out in my driveway.” She had walked just past the reach of the headlights, and Alison could see that her sister was naked under her threadbare bathrobe. She felt awful; all of Bill's King Solomon preparations, and here they'd likely interrupted their lovemaking, their latest attempt to form a baby out of superstition and abandoned hope. She imagined Bill upstairs in some makeshift phallic god costume, peeking out from behind the curtains.

“My father is putting on a little show,” Max said. “I apologize for both of us.” He tapped a cigarette from the pack and lit it. “And the explosion wasn't mine, I'm off the clock.”

“Max was just about to drive his father home,” Alison said. She tilted her head, trying to indicate in sister-code that something was wrong with Mr. Kesler. Even now, he kept shaking his watch and tapping its face, holding it to his ear, muttering about having the wrong night. Sarah was too angry to break the code, and just stood watching everything in her dark confusion.

“He can drive himself home,” Max said.

“Well, no, I really think you should,” Alison said. “He's probably tired.” She heard herself using the composed voice that nurses always employ with difficult patients. Hard to say who was the difficult one here.

Max shrugged. “One of us worked today, and it wasn't him. Go on, Pop. Just go out the way you came in.” This reminded Alison of a phrase repeated on nearly every page of her Haynes manual:
Reassembly is the reverse of disassembly
.

“Max, don't you think—”

Alison was interrupted by another flash of orange, another hollow
whoosh
of flame shooting up into the night, the reflection of it caught in the front bay window of Sarah's house.

“I'm going down there,” Max said. “Those dumb bastards are going to kill themselves.” As he turned away from the truck, his eyes locked with Alison's, and he gripped her forearm to lean in toward her. “Don't buy it,” he whispered, then strode off, over the lip of the bank and into the bowl of the lake. So strange it looked, a lake with no water, a man walking in over his head into nothingness. Finally, Alison convinced Mr. Kesler to drive back home, after assuring him that there would be a dance lesson the next night, assuring herself that he was okay. When he started the van, Alison heard the insistent
ping ping
of some warning device, and noticed as he backed out that Mr. Kesler's own seat belt swung free, though his record collection was strapped in tight, a passenger beside him.

“While you were out here playing with your car, or whatever,” Sarah said, “Lem called about nineteen times. Wants to know if you want latex or oil on the front door. Wants to know if you want to keep the carpet leftovers. Wants to know why the hell you've left
him
to do all the work on
your
house.”

“He never said that,” Alison said. She'd never heard Lem curse at anyone, much less her.

“No, that last part was me,” Sarah said. “You can't even be bothered with your own home?” She shook her head, as if she wanted to say more but decided not to.

“I know Lem is working—”

Sarah pushed the hair off her face. “And while we're on the subject, Ernie called and said they had to give up your slot. They'll replace you with adjuncts.” She said this so as to hit hard on “replace” and “adjuncts,” small, sharp daggers to throw at her sister. They landed, too, so that Alison felt a warm thickness in the back of her throat that could quickly become tears if she let it. She'd been replaced, or worse, just phased out. A whole chunk of her previous existence canceled. Sarah backed off a bit.

“Hey, I'm glad to see you getting along with…what is it, Max?”

“Yes, Max. Thanks.”

“That is, you know, if he's okay and all that.”

“Why wouldn't he be?”

“Well, I don't know. He just seems a little strange, is all. And he should be talking you out of this car thing, not helping you with it.”

“He tried. And as for the strange part, maybe I should find a nice normal boy who nails fruit to my house.” She immediately regretted saying this, for letting Sarah, as usual, turn Alison into a version of herself. A little too mean, a little too mouthy. “Listen,” Alison said, “go to bed. I'm going to catch up to Max.” Sarah nodded and went back inside, stepping over the pomegranates, which by now were pulling loose of their nails and plopping onto the porch, the passing hour like some invisible Nebuchadnezzar, tearing down the temple walls.

Mr. Kesler's phantom Chrysler was again featured in the
Press-Republican. A
local woman named Frieda Landry wrote a column called “Out-n-About,” which dealt, apparently, with whatever was on her mind the day she wrote it. One week, she'd write about the family of chipmunks living in her Christmas wreath, and the next, she'd make an earnest appeal for peace in Northern Ireland. Today's column, though, asked “Where Oh Where Can Our Little Car Be?” They ran the same Flow Motor's photo of a Chrysler similar to Uncle Crawford's, and Frieda Landry retold the entire story, embellishing the cold (“bone-numbing”), and the severity of the ice storm that had hit Wiley Ford that winter of 1946 (“a glacial tempest”), and fourteen-year-old Gordon Kesler's struggle to make it out of the freezing water (“a frantic skirmish with death”). Mr. Kesler was quoted, saying he wasn't sure exactly where the car went under, and Frieda herself speculated that the car might have rolled along the sloped bottom and could be anywhere, most likely it had settled in the “bottomless crevasse” of the middle (Alison pictured Frieda writing her column with a thesaurus open on her lap). The article also quoted Max, who explained the very small breach he'd cut in the dam, saying that the middle of the lake would be drained within a couple of weeks and couldn't be rushed because of structural weaknesses in the dam. The thought occurred to Alison that Max was purposely holding things up, so as to prolong his father's agony, but she didn't want to dwell on that possibility. There were other quotes as well, a woman from the National Register of Historic Places, who noted, gently, that while the buildings of Colaville certainly were historically
interesting
, they held no intrinsic historical value. Tanner Miltenberger, who made his living scuba diving golf course ponds and selling the drowned balls he raked from the bottom, said he planned to dive in the middle and see what he could see, as soon as his bad back felt better.

The night before last, those buildings of Colaville had looked like toy blocks scattered around a rug. She had tramped out into the cracked mud after Mr. Kesler had driven off in the van and Sarah had disappeared inside the house. Max was waiting for her, sitting splay-legged on a stump, smoking a cigarette.

“I thought you went to see what was wrong with those poor bastards,” she said, giving her words enough edge to register her annoyance that he'd lacked equal concern for his father. “Make sure the poor bastards weren't killing themselves.”

“Well, they were, but slowly. Eating fish they were cooking over a Sterno fire. That was the big explosion, throwing Sterno cans on the campfire. Besides, they were mean.”

“Did they threaten you?”

“No. They ate my fairy godmother.”

She punched him on the shoulder with her knee. “You only need the bones anyway, remember?”

“I think they ate those, too.”

She sat beside him, and he extinguished his cigarette by pushing it into the mud.

“Has your father had any other episodes like that?”

“Oh, maybe a thousand, going back to 1965, at least.”

“You think
that
was more pretending? That he's nuts? Or senile? What would be the point?”

“I think you know.” Max squinted and bent over, affecting an old man's voice: “There was a car? What car? I can't remember anything. Poor me.”

“God, are you cynical. Maybe he's really sick.”

“If I'm cynical, then you're gullible.”

Alison bit her lip. “Okay, I already told you about Yeh-shen, maybe we have to move on to Aesop's fables? The Boy Who Cried Wolf?”

“Yeah, and when you get to the end, you'll recall that the idea of the story isn't that we end up feeling bad for that lying little shit, is it? The idea is supposed to be ‘Don't lie.'”

Her face heated up. “So someday your father actually dies, and you sit home watching Oprah while the rest of us are at the funeral crying, because you don't believe it really happened. Is that how you want it to end up?”

“Well, no.” He lit another cigarette. “I don't really want to watch Oprah.”

“I'm serious. At least take your father to a doctor.”

He shook his head, blew smoke at the night sky. “Alison, at home he rattles off Cal Ripken's batting averages for the last fifteen years. He keeps a mental catalog of seventy-eights he doesn't yet own, who recorded it, what orchestra, what label, and so on. His brain is better than both of ours put together.”

She had taken his hand then, laced her fingers through his, which they both took as an end to the conversation, cutting it off before it spoiled the night. They'd sat in the quiet, the only sound the few men left at the lake's center, the crackle of paper from Max's cigarette. Maybe Max was right about his father; she had known him for only a couple months, and Max had known him his entire life. And, since Marty, she was too careful about everything, too worried. Besides, after only one kiss, she could still tell herself that it was none of her business, that she wasn't really involved.

She and Max had spent half the previous day in her garage, working on the last two wheel assemblies. Max did most of the work, without effort, ignoring the Haynes manual, while she stood behind him and watched. After her late night with Mr. Kesler, a gauze of sleepiness had settled behind her eyes, but she cleared it away with coffee and the small quickening of her breath that came when she thought about the night before, the feel of Max's whiskered jaw under her lips, his tongue alive against hers. They worked by way of silences and occasional touches, brief glances. Progress was quick; Max knew what he was doing. He'd offered to come back again today to help with the master cylinder rebuild, but she'd declined. They'd already finished up the last two wheels, so that now all four spun with that smooth hiss of newness. She was glad, but what good was undertaking the whole project if she ended up letting Max do all the work? She'd felt a little foolish telling him, “I want to do it myself,” sounding like an eight-year-old fixing a peanut butter sandwich. But still, that
was
what she wanted, and besides, underneath everything we were all probably eight years old anyway.

After leaning for a full hour under the hood, banging her head on it twice, fitting her hand and a ratchet under and in between everything, and dropping three bolts down somewhere into the bowels of the car, she finally had everything disconnected and had labeled all the hoses and wires with little flags of masking tape, to make sure she put it all back right. The master cylinder now sat on the bench, clamped in the vise. She loved the size of it, smaller than her own two hands, and the way it was all of a piece, so self-contained. It came apart easily, a jumble of springs, retainers, and pistons that dumped out on her bench. The rebuild kit went in just the way the diagram showed it, every piece right there. Too bad they didn't make a kit for the entire car. All of the new parts had to be bathed in brake fluid, like bathing a baby in a washbasin. The fluid was a bright, pale yellow, almost fluorescent, and covered her hands so thickly, it felt as though she'd slipped on a wet pair of woolen gloves. When she finished and everything was back together, she reinstalled the master cylinder, connected it to the brake booster, reconnected the lines, and finally filled the reservoir with fresh fluid. The brakes, she realized as she wiped her hands, were done, except for the bleeding, which Max had promised to help with.
Better know you can make it stop before you make it go
. Well, okay—now she knew.