Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (32 page)

“No, I believe you were thinking inexactly. Not considering ramifications. A town like this, about all we have is our old stories, after the plants close down and the mall opens up. Stories and old grudges.”

“But you know it's not true. The car in the lake. The whole thing was a lie.”

Lila rolled her eyes and smiled. “Of course it is. Not everybody knows that, but many do. You make so much of teaching history, then you ought to know how people are. You really think the first Thanksgiving went the way it's shown in all those grade-school pageants?”

She shook her head. “Another friend of mine says that everybody lies.”

“Everybody chisels the truth into whatever they need it to be. We just needed a couple of stories attached to our lake, so it didn't seem so worthless. So stupid to have built it in the first place. All you did was come along and say, No, it was pretty stupid.”

Alison nodded. Maybe her whole life would never be more than a series of quiet betrayals—Marty, Lem, Max, and now Mr. Kesler and all of Wiley Ford. She thought of the
DOOMED
TO
REPEAT IT
shirt Ernie bought for her that time; it seemed pretty accurate right now. “I'm sorry,” she said. As much as she wanted to explain Max's involvement, that would just look worse, spreading the blame around.

“Don't be sorry to me. I'm not mad. But I will be if you don't let me find the bathroom.”

Downstairs, Alison paused in the living room on the way to her garage, and it was worse than she imagined. Lila, of course, was the nicest of them all, as she was with everything. The rest sat around with their napkins and cookies and coffee cups, glancing up at her and then looking away, letting their eyes settle on the TV, where some smiling magician in a silk shirt was threatening to make the Statue of Liberty disappear. She gave a weak “Hi,” and the others muttered the same back. Mrs. Skidmore added, “How are you, Professor?” Bill saved her, finally, offering her a cup of coffee to break the silence, but she declined. She wanted to say something to them, but what? Damn Max for doing this to her. Damn herself for going along. She wanted to tell them, Never mind, forget the article in the paper, forget the entire blip of the world that day, and everything that was in that article—and, by saying the words, put Mr. Kesler's Chrysler back where it belonged, in the deep mud of lake bottom and memory alike. But that was impossible, she knew, like folding a waking person back into the dream they wanted to keep having.

All that was visible of Colaville now was the very top edge of the bridge, that narrow backbone of gray and brown. The ends of the docks were floating again, though still too steeply to walk on, and the streetlamps that dotted driveways and backyards around the lake reflected where they always had, as though they had been waiting for the water to return. She stood looking out across the lake. What a mess everything was, a mess she saw no way of straightening out. Inside the garage, her Haynes manual lay spread open on the bench, the page edges filthy with grease, some of the pages by now pulling out of their binding. The book was open to the page on changing the headlights, which was her next job, especially if she planned to keep driving at night. Mr. Beachy had already told her never to replace one of anything that came in a set—brakes, lights, tires, spark plugs—replace them all. She had called him that afternoon to ask him to order the headlamps for her, and gotten pretty much the same reception she'd gotten just now in the living room, mitigated by his natural gentleness. He'd been cordial—that was about the best she could say—businesslike, for the first time in all their business together. Near the end of their conversation, she'd asked if he had any more tracts, told him she might swing by to pick one up.

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out, “I'm sure they wouldn't interest you.”
Snotty, eggheaded you
is what he meant. Before she could think of a response, he'd asked if there was anything else, told her that her order would be on Tuesday's truckload, and quietly hung up the phone. She looked now at the car, thinking only of those fist-sized rust holes in the frame, the car disintegrating.

The car. The damn car, her big plan. She looked at it as if challenging it to respond, to speak to her, defend itself, and then she raised her knee and kicked the front grille with the toe of her sneaker, snapping the plastic vents. She kicked again and heard the crack and watched the grille fold in on itself, then again so the pieces dropped away like teeth and fell to the dirt. Her pulse pounded in her ears, through her temples. The stupid fucking car, her religion, her salvation, her ticket out. She was done with it. She stomped the front bumper and cracked the fiberglass. Done with the car, done with Max. She stomped again, fiberglass shredding, her ankle throbbing. Done with marriage and teaching. She kicked the headlight, shattering it to bright bits that fell to the floor and into the folds of her sock. Done with everything else she had failed. She kicked the other headlight, catching her sneaker. She imagined kicking the car into pieces, the pieces into fragments, the fragments into bits, the bits into dust. She stopped. Breathing hard, sweating. Her whole leg throbbed now, her sneaker ripped. Outside, the dancers spoke and laughed a little as they left, and the lake water made tiny slapping sounds at the edges of the docks, a noise she hadn't realized was missing until she heard it again just now.

For a long stretch of time, she sat in the doorway of her garage, looking out at the lake. Already it was hard to remember exactly what it had looked like with the water gone. The bottom had been picked clean by scavengers, and whatever garbage they'd left behind had been gathered one afternoon by a troop of Girl Scouts. Now the lake would need a whole new history to amuse the ghosts of Colaville, new outboard motors dropped in, new fishing tackle, engagement rings, self-help books. She imagined the inhabitants of Colaville returning to their watery homes, wondering what had happened to all they'd accumulated, to all their trash, vandalism in reverse. And Mr. Kesler's Chrysler was no longer down there for them to admire; she and Max had seen to that. Maybe the ghosts of Colaville worried that they were next, their stories, and thus them, extinguished forever.

Finally, the dancers left, and one by one the lights in the house went off. Guided by no more than habit, Alison sat in the driver's seat of the Vette and fired it up, quietly tapped the accelerator a couple of times, and began to let the clutch out, rolling out onto the gravel. She pulled the headlight switch on the dash, and of course she had no lights. No lights and no frame. She rolled to the edge of the road, and the parking lights cast their mix of white-and-yellow light over the blacktop, wavery half circles, a man holding two lanterns before him. Enough light, she decided, if she went slow. There was never any traffic on those back roads anyway, and she could hardly be less legal than she already was, so she went.

Soon enough, she got used to it, straining her eyes to see ahead of her, the moon bright as a flashlight overhead, the tinted highway stripe disappearing under her. Before she knew it, Jenny's Machine Tools passed by in the narrow arc of orange light, the grass at the edge of the road the color of fire, whites of the speed limit signs glowing amber, her speed picking up. As she drove, her mind drifted back over the old familiar frustrations, trying to remember the names, in order, of the sixty-six British monarchs. Automatically, she thought of asking Mr. Rossi, but of course he had answered his last question, his last bit of knowledge now nailed to her garage wall. Not that he would've known that one anyway. It was too much of history, not enough of trivia. More likely, he would have known what the British monarchs ate for breakfast, what size shoes they wore, how many were left-handed. But that somehow seemed backward to her now—history was
more
about breakfast and shoes than lists and dates, the same way a town was about its lies, a person about his quirks and whims. Which mattered more in her memory now, the fact that Marty had been born in 1964 or the fact that he spoke to his radios when he worked on them? The cause and date of his death, or the way he liked to mug for the video camera, or the way he would eat a grilled hot dog but not a boiled one? She levered the gas, downshifted, and picked up speed. The British monarchs would just have to line up and march through history without her; she was done worrying the question.

As she crested the slight rise in the road, a fleshy ripple of brown and white streaked across her vision, held there by the yellow lights, her muscles bunching up inside her hands as she jerked the wheel hard right and her foot stomped stomped stomped the brake pedal into the floor, into mush, until the brakes held and the car pivoted around itself, swimming across the road, tires chattering and squealing as the sweep of orange circled across the other lane of blacktop, the steering wheel pressing her chest as she was moving backward, shoved against the door, breathing rubber and gas, the gravel at the side of the road spitting against the underside, the car somehow missing the deer which had been close enough—she realized now, as the car drifted to a halt—that she could smell it, warm and sweaty. The Corvette sat sideways in the road, engine idling, back wheels in the weeds. Her hands shook uncontrollably.

She drove back along the road as slowly as she could, gripping the steering wheel, opening her eyes wide to press them against the dark. Her mind gave her images of hitting the deer, the car breaking apart, snapping at the crossbeams, the carcass of the deer tumbling bloodied and wet up the long hood and into her lap through the T-top, on her, that smell smothering her, sweat and feces. She slowed even more, and a car pulled in behind her, headlights bearing down. The police, probably. Someone had heard her noisy skid and reported it. She kept on, waiting for the jarring spill of blue light, but none came on the road around the lake, and none came as she slowed at Sarah's drive, though the car was behind her still, and none came as the car followed her into the drive, and now she thought about what to do, to honk the horn and wake Bill or to push out the door and make a run for it, and as she thought this the car behind her began flashing its headlights, and then stopped. The door swung open and in her rearview mirror, in the red of her tail-lights, she watched Mr. Kesler swing open the door of the Seven Springs van and hop down.

“Midnight rider,” he said in greeting. “Wasn't that a song a few years back?”

She parked the car on the gravel and got out, hands still quivering, heart still churning. “I don't think Milton Tannenberger is going diving in a full lake, and I don't think car parts will do the trick this time.”

“Yes, you've seen to that, huh?” He was wearing a tattered down vest over his usual zippered jumpsuit. “Put me in my place, once and for all, didn't you, Dr. Durst?”

“I'm not a doctor.” She tugged her hair back then let it go, her hands nervous.

“You just play one in the paper,” he said.

She walked down toward the garage, and he fell into step beside her. “I didn't mean to do that, exactly,” she said.

“Another accidental newspaper interview.” He laughed a little. “I understand you needed to clear your own conscience. But I thought confession usually involved self-confession, not somebody else's.”

“It's one in the morning. Why are you out here?”

“Max told me it was the best time to find you without distraction, and I wanted to talk to you,” he said, following her to the garage. Alison clicked on the light. They sat on the one stool and the stepladder at the workbench, as if a bartender might appear.

“Max told you?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

He squinted at the ceiling. “Yesterday? Time runs together, more and more.”

“Where is he?” She absently riffled the edges of her Haynes manual, her fingers still shaking a little.

“Working is about all I know. Is he not tending the home fires?”

She laughed a little. “We don't really have those just yet.” She looked at him. “How come you're still talking to me?”

“No reason not to. Besides, I wanted to ask how much of your words in the paper came from my son. I'm guessing eighty percent.” He unzipped his vest and laid it across the bench, pillowing his elbows.

She hesitated. “You know, I've been deciding all day whether to try and defend myself by sharing the blame. How'd you guess?”

“Well, your only enemy punches you in the back of the head, you don't have to look around very long to see who did it. And you aren't my enemy.”

“That's a sad thing, having a son you can call an only enemy.”

He nodded. “That might be an exaggeration.” He took the pipe from his pocket and tapped it on the bench. “I probably have three or four enemies.”

“All them as justified as Max?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Justified? I miss a couple of birthdays because I'm on the road, and he means to humiliate me in return. Not my definition of justified.”

“And that's not the story I heard.”

He tucked the pipe back into his pocket and looked at her, genuinely puzzled.

“I heard about a man sneaking out at night, parking his car down the road. A man who got his son to lie for him, to his own mother. Who stayed out half the night.”

He blushed brightly enough that she could see his face darken, even in this weak light. “Well, I suppose most of that is so. Glenda didn't much care for me spending time in the bar, so a time or two, I did sneak away, and maybe I did ask him to cover my back.”

“He said it was pretty much every night, not a time or two.”

Gordon laughed. “You know how it is with kids,” he said. “If it happens three times and you remember those three, it seems like it happened all your life.”

“And you were just at a bar?”

He nodded. “Where'd he say I was, some church of Satan?”

She laughed. “Not quite that bad.”