Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (23 page)

She laid out for Mr. Beachy everything she had done on the car, everything she thought she had left to do, at least to get it running. The day before, a new credit card had arrived in the mail, and she'd called the number to activate it. For now, she wouldn't think about how deeply in debt she was.

“I want the car to run,” she told Mr. Beachy. “I want to get the thing moving as soon as possible, and drive it the hell out of here. Excuse my language.”

He waved away her apology, began thumbing through the thick catalogs. “I'm not too keen on that lake of fire business. Just a story for scaring kids, as far as I'm concerned.” He leaned across the counter and showed her all the belts and hoses she would need, plus new spark plugs and spark plug wires, oil filter, air filter, points, and condenser.

“This is shade-tree stuff,” he told her. “You could do this in your sleep, Alison.”

“That's more or less the plan.”

He boxed all the parts and rang up her purchase. While they waited for the new credit card to be approved, he dropped a few tracts into the box. “New ones,” he said. “Thought about you when I got them in.”

She pulled them out and looked at them. The first one showed a smiling cartoon wife with her kids, ascending into heaven on a cloud-draped escalator, moving toward the beams of light above them, while back on the ground her husband wept over his family's wrecked car. Inside were more cartoons, illustrating a predictable story about Fred and his family finally attending church and praying together after putting it off for many years, saving their souls just a day before the terrible wreck. On the last page, the father was smiling over their graves while a cartoon balloon from his mouth said, “I know that they are with the Lord now, and someday I will be, too!” The tract was titled “
BE NOT AFRAID.
”

“Is this how you picture it?” Alison asked. Mr. Beachy looked up from stapling her receipt to the box, startled. She'd never really talked about the tracts before.

“You told me once it was hard for you to believe,” she said, “so I just wonder about this.” She showed him the cartoon. “It just seems too easy.” She thought of Marty, imagining the afterlife as a mall full of toy stores.

“Well, maybe that's the message, that it is easy. More so than we think.”

“But escalators? Sunlight? You really want to spend eternity in an atrium lobby?”

He took the tract and held it at arm's length to read it. “We just can't picture it, so we make it up best we can. No artist could imagine it.”

“And you really believe this? That we should all be not afraid?”

He thought about this. “Faith is a steep and rocky path, but for the most part, yes, ma'am, I do believe that.”

The thought came to her then that had Marty lived, had he never had any accident that day in Lem's backyard, he would have turned out much like Mr. Beachy. A quiet faith filling up a quiet life. Would he have ever convinced her, won her over to thinking this way? She couldn't say; she was only the man on the ground, standing beside the broken car. The family got clouds and heavenly escalators, while he got only religious tracts and wreckage and his own failed imagination. It didn't seem fair. But even if she had never believed with him, knowing Mr. Beachy had shown her something even deeper, maybe—she could have loved Marty. Over time, his childishness worn down to a simple sweetness, his years of faith and work adding up to a kind of lived life, old age plowing into him a little deeper, she could have. Mr. Beachy cleared his throat.

“Until you need to do an overhaul,” he said, “you've just about spent your last dollar in here. Take her down to the transmission shop once she's rolling, and then Dave Fisher is your man for body and frame work.”

“But I can still come here and talk about theology and brake pads, right?”

“Oh, you have to, Alison. And I want a ride in that car when it's done.”

She leaned across and kissed his cheek. “You got it.”

Wednesday morning's mail brought an envelope from Lem, Polaroid photos of her finished house, all the rooms freshly carpeted and painted, the floors polished. A short note from Pammy told her everything was done, and done right, the way Marty would've wanted it. She showed the photos to Sarah.

“Man, they did a good job,” Sarah said. “Looks new.”

“But the pictures are…weird, you know?” Alison said. “They're like ransom photos. If you ever want to see this house alive again—'”

“—then go live in it?” Sarah said.

Alison didn't answer, just thumbed through the stack again. It didn't look new at all, really. In fact, it looked ten years old, like the first year they lived there, all of the stuff right back where it had been, the hooks in the corner draped with Marty's field coat and ball caps.

“They forgot the velvet ropes,” Alison said.

“What do you mean?”

“A security guard.”

“What?”

Alison shook her head. “Nothing.”

Sarah was quiet a minute, leaning on the sink, watching her. “You won't go back there, ever, will you? I mean, we should all just chuck that idea.”

Alison looked at the harsh photo of her old bedroom, the clock radio glowing and blurred on the nightstand. When she tried to put herself in the photos, sitting on the couch reading, or at the stove cooking, it seemed fake, like one of those cardboard “pose-your-own-photo” cutouts of ex-presidents on the streets of D.C.

“I can't.”

“Then sell it. It's never looked better. Use the money for a new place.”

“I can't do
that
, either, Sarah. I can't just unload it after all the work they put in.”

“Well, what's your big idea, then?”

She shrugged. “I don't have one. I can't go home and I can't stay here. You know what I'm like? A drunk at closing time. Except one thing…”

Sarah smiled. “What?”

“I'm not drunk.”

That afternoon, Bill began painting all the trim on the house lavender, and planted two holly bushes in the front yard. She didn't even bother asking anymore. His efforts were no different from hers or anyone else's, everyone just spinning their own little hamster wheel, thinking their wheel was the most important one in the whole world. She skipped the final dress rehearsal for the parade, and spent her evening in the garage, installing all the new parts Mr. Beachy had sold her. He was right: She didn't really even need her manual very much for this stuff. It took time, was all, a few bruised knuckles. Near midnight, she was under the car, draining oil, and heard the dancers leaving, heard their excited talk of the parade, heard the van pull away and Sarah close the front door. As she filled the crankcase with new oil, she could hear other sounds, the men fishing the drop-down stream and its small bulge of remaining lake, Bill nailing something else to the house and, from the sound of it, to the trees out front. He had only a few days left on his sick leave. Another drunk at closing time.

At one in the morning, she gapped and installed the spark plugs, changed the wires, checked and set the points, checked the static timing, and closed the hood. She was done with the engine, for now at least, assuming she didn't have to pull it for something major. Next would be bodywork, all that expensive disaster Max kept talking about the first time he'd seen the car. But for now, the car could stop and it could go. She sat in the driver's seat, slid the key into the ignition, and turned it. Nothing. She popped open the battery access, twisted the connections and tightened them, then tried again. The engine turned over, filling her garage with fumes, not quite starting. Something, a trick Mr. Beachy had taught her…what was it? She tried the key again, winding it out until the turning slowed, her battery draining. What was that trick? She pictured someone smoking…a lighter…
lighter fluid
. She got out, finished the coffee in her thermos, and made her way into the dark house. After a quick, quiet rummage through drawers of dead batteries and corn-on-the-cob holders and clothespins, she found the familiar skinny yellow can. Back in the garage, she popped the hood, removed the air filter, and squirted some of the fluid down into the throat of the carburetor. How much? The last thing she needed was a fire, some middle-of-the-night catastrophe. She erred on the side of just a little bit, then sat back in the driver's seat.

On the first turn, the engine kicked over with a throaty
floom
that rattled the walls of the garage, and sat idling. It ran. The damn thing was
running
. She leaned back, fingers shaking lightly on the steering wheel, and just listened. The idle was not quite even, missing now and again. Probably the timing was off, but not too bad. And loud, the exhaust rusted through. She jumped out long enough to replace the air cleaner and latch the hood, to check the house for lights to make sure she hadn't awakened anyone. The
sound
of it, of her car. Like that coma patient she'd always imagined it, suddenly sitting up in bed and asking for steak and potatoes, asking who won the World Series, inviting her out for a walk. Out. She could take the car out. But no, that would be dumb. Her brakes hadn't been bled yet, still had to be pumped just to get any pressure, and no one yet knew how bad the chassis was, if the car was even structurally sound, as Max liked to say. If only Max could be here. So much of the work had been his anyway. She closed the door and flicked on her headlights, watched them slide up, one set still burned out, then levered the gearshift into first, released the brake, let the clutch out. The Vette rolled evenly out onto the gravel drive.

Where to?
She said this aloud to the passenger seat, as if the self that watched her were along for the ride, then turned and looked back at the empty space where the car had sat for so long, and in answer to her own question shrugged and started down the driveway, tires crunching on the gravel, the engine rough but not awful, shocks squeaking. Finally, she made the paved road and the car settled out as she picked up a little speed. Then she tried to brake and braking was not good, the pedal needing three hard pumps before she got any pressure. But once it pressured up, the new brakes held. She'd stopped in the middle of the road, her one headlight mis-pointed off to the weedy side of the road, the dashboard glowing. She clicked on the radio, and the oldies station gave her Steppen-wolf singing “Magic Carpet Ride,” which seemed almost appropriate, except that magic carpets didn't rattle and scrape along the pavement. As she started up again, she tilted her head back and looked through the open top at the map of stars pasted to the wide sky, noticing then how really cold it was, too cold for an open car and no coat, but who cared? She said it out loud, giving her voice to the wind, speaking again to her imagined self:
Who cares?
She worked through the gears, then, as Midlothian Road straightened out, she downshifted into third and punched it hard, the car fast enough to press her back into her seat. Midlothian made a gentle rise as she shifted to fourth, the speedometer showing eighty-five now, a long stretch of blacktop before her, the wind a noisy, lunatic thing that lived somewhere above the car, and it felt so good, driving this way, arms sprouting goose bumps, hair tangled out behind her, the car fighting her only slightly, pulling right, the engine buried and rumbling under that long silver hood. She took it to ninety, howled at the night, heard small bugs popping off the windshield as the needle edged up a little more. Then she thought about her brakes, her mushy brakes, and eased off, backing down to the speed limit as the car hit the edge of town.

She drove through the square, under the
DISCO BEVERAGE
sign, past the window of the Red Bird, where Mr. Davidow stood in the faint light of closing time, closing out his register. She drove past the dry cleaner's, past a pair of teenage boys sitting on the Greyhound bench, both of whom whistled at her. Past the Honeybun Bakery, Joe and Benny's pizza, and the building, now closed, that had once been the YWCA. She left town and came in toward the lake from the other side, all the way around Loop Road, past Sarah's driveway, then off again, another turn around the lake, then another. She thought of Lem and Marty's plan for a perpetual-motion machine, magnets mounted on turntables or some such thing, their plans just vague enough to believe in. She had the car going, so what now? And with barely another thought, she turned hard off Loop Road, back onto Midlothian, out onto I-68, heading toward Morgantown.

Half an hour into the trip, she realized how stupid this was, in the same way all impulses are stupid: She hadn't thought through all that could go wrong. The car could break down, or break in
half
, according to Max; she had no registration, no license plate, a burned-out headlight. It was 4:00
A.M.
, she hadn't slept, and she was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and clogs, freezing in the middle-of-the-night chill. She kept to the speed limit, as though it had been dictated to her by God, and tried to relax, dialing in a talk show on the radio, whistling and patting the steering wheel, as if nervousness would be the first thing the cops noticed. Her car ran. Every so often, she reminded herself of the fact. It ran pretty well, too, with only that little blip in the exhaust—the timing, it had to be—and the tendency to pull right, and the squeaks. The brakes weren't much of a worry on a highway trip.

Near Finzel, she passed God's Lighthouse of Redemption, a big tacky church with a nautical theme, a lighthouse in place of a steeple, its revolving green light shining out over the cow pastures and Christmas-tree farms. Their roadside signboard read
GOD IS
A
PORT
IN
EVERY STORM
, and she imagined the preacher wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons, white slacks, and a little white captain's hat, the ushers in yellow slickers, tossing out life preservers during the altar call, the walls of the church decorated with nets and cork, like a seafood restaurant. She drove past, smiling. A little farther down, a dead deer lay twisted at the side of the road, its mouth still wet-looking, and farther still, a trucker had pulled off and was peeing at the side of the road, lit up by his own taillights. The moon rolled along overhead as the talk show faded out and some old doo-wop song faded in. Something under the car dropped down enough to scrape the pavement, but she kept going, past a lawn chair sitting in the median, a case of empties in the middle of the road, the bright suddenness of truck stops at the tops of the off-ramps. Finally, she pulled off into one and left the Vette idling, afraid that if she turned it off, it wouldn't start again. The windows inside were fogged over with the steam off the coffeemakers, and a radio hidden somewhere at the back of the counter played country songs. Two bleary-eyed men in plaid shirts and caps sat at one of the booths in back, eating plates of eggs and drinking Cokes, both of them looking at a crossword puzzle.