Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (8 page)

“As opposed to javelins?”

“No, really. Do you?”

She shrugged. “For good luck?”

“Rice is a crop, grows abundantly and all that. It's for fertility.” He shrugged.

“And less subject to litigation than, say, cabbages.” To her relief, he laughed at this, as she knew he would. She had always liked Bill for his sense of humor, not the kind that caused him to say funny things, but more the kind that let him laugh at anything worthy of it that crossed his path.

“Bill,” she said, “this really is sweet, what you're doing. But…
rice
?”

He pressed his lips together, looked toward his feet. “I want more than anything else for us to be pregnant. Well, Sarah, I mean. Guys at work come in saying, ‘I'm going to be a Daddy,' and they act all like they will be so broke now and no more fun and no more poker games and nothing but worries from here on. But at the same time, everybody is slapping them on the back, shaking their hands, and they just smile.” He picked a grain of rice off his bathrobe sleeve. “We go through it again and again, this letdown every month. I guess that sounds strange.…”

Alison smiled. “And throwing rice on your house doesn't?”

“No…yeah, it does.” He nodded at the orange box. “It sure does. Strange and odd, I know. But we've tried everything, Al. Every thing. So I'm going to try everything
else
. I don't care if it makes sense or not.”

She thought of her Corvette, of her need to see it finished and working. “I hear you, bro,” she said.

“Will you help me?”

She shrugged again. “Sure, I can throw rice if you like. Want me to throw some around back?”

“Nah, not that. Just help me…get the momentum moving. That's what we need, the big mo.”

“But how?”

He looked at her. “Beats heck out of me. But I'll think on it and let you know. Fair enough?”

“Yeah, fair enough.” She walked back down the steps to give him a hug, told him good night, and then went into the house. From the kitchen, she heard the quiet shush of more rice hitting the shingles and trickling down into the gutters. She sat at the darkened table, sipping wine and eating a leftover cheese puff from the dance, listening as if to a rainstorm, until the noise quit and she heard Bill make his way upstairs.

Instead of heading off to bed, she decided to check on the car. She could start making a list of what she would need in the morning from Mr. Beachy. Maybe circle the parts in the diagrams. By this time tomorrow, she could have made real progress, have some little piece of the job done. When Marty and Lem got involved in a big project—repairing a sump pump or constructing a go-cart or building their own computer from a kit—Lem used to take such satisfaction in finishing part of it. He'd walk into the kitchen, flushed and sweaty, tugging his shirttail, and dig a beer from the fridge. “We're eating that elephant,” he'd say, “one bite at a time.”

As she snapped on the coffee-can light, she nearly tripped over the bag at her feet, from Wal-Mart. Inside were two cardboard boxes, each containing a pair of jack stands. On top was a note scrawled on the back of the receipt and weighted down with a piece of gravel:

She slid the note into her jeans pocket and picked up one of the boxes. The nearest Wal-Mart was across the river in Cumberland, which meant he'd driven over and driven back before he had to pick up his father. She tried to picture him doing it, carrying the two heavy boxes in his hands, walking into the middle of the dance practice and asking for her. Strange, it was hard for her to remember exactly what he looked like; she could see only his hammered-metal haircut, the tiny flashes of light his frameless lenses made. But how tall was he? What was the texture of his skin? His smell? These were the same questions she asked her students in Western civ when they talked about da Gama or Karl Marx. How to pull the person out of a boldface name in a textbook, how to give back to them their profanity and lust, their bald spots and infidelities, the sound of their breathing or their coughing when they suffered a head cold. And this was her worry with Marty, too—that the little details of him would start to fade, that his small clutters and messes in the house would be neatened into extinction, her anger and impatience with him swept away, her memory of him transformed into merely the memory of her memory, like a photo in an album, trimmed and aligned, held under plastic.

So tomorrow Max was blowing up a silo. Three seconds, he'd told her, for the library in Charleston. Laid it down like a baby, he'd said. And when the dust settled, that bit of the town was gone for good. Some part of her wanted to know what that looked like—something coming to its end so suddenly and so violently. The thought of it made her breathing subside for a moment, but at the same time, she wanted to see this.

They were met at the silo by a balding man named Donald, who was in shirtsleeves, wore a tie, and carried a clipboard full of pink permits. He stood next to a pickup truck with state seals on the doors, its two-way radio squawking noisily. Max shook hands, then walked around the base of the silo, sometimes stopping to kick it, causing a powdery spill of brick and mortar. He kept muttering to himself, lighting cigarettes and then dropping them, picking up a few grass blades and tossing them in the air, like golfers on TV She and Donald watched him. All around them was nothing but a sloping expanse of red dirt, tiny pink flags stuck on rusty wires here and there into the ground. The county had recently condemned the property to make way for a new bypass. The silo itself leaned a little (almost as bad as her garage), brown bricks scattered around its base. Stored inside, according to Donald, were thousands of plastic gallon milk jugs, some of them spilling through the rotted doors at the base.

“Let me ask you,” he said. “What would someone have in mind to do with maybe five thousand milk jugs?”

Max struck the base of the silo once with a hammer, then shouted, “Wrong, wrong,
wrong.”

“I just don't get all those milk jugs,” Donald said.

Alison shrugged, pushed a stray curl away from her face. “I don't know,” she said. “What's your theory?”

Donald looked puzzled by the array of possibilities. Alison got the impression that a silo filled with milk jugs was the most exciting thing that had happened on his job in ten years. He frowned and scratched his head, then suggested that maybe the owner had a big trotline catfishing operation going.

“Or maybe he was a moonshiner,” Alison said. “They use jugs, I think.”

Donald snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Hey, that's exactly right. I read that somewhere. In some book.” When he said the word
book
, she realized—she'd missed her Monday-night deadline to call Ernie back and keep her spot in the fall semester. They would not need her again until mid-January.

Donald gave up on solving the mystery of the milk jugs (this sounded like one of the Hardy Boys books she and Sarah had traded as kids, preferring them to prissy Nancy Drew), saying this was cutting into his lunch hour. He sat in his white county truck, said something into the mike, and drove off. Max walked over and drew some rough sketches on the back of a fast-food sack he found in his truck. He jotted math problems in the corners, as if he were balancing his checkbook instead of readying to blow something up. Finally, he took a stick and traced in the dirt a set of parallel lines leading out from the base of the silo.

“You do such precision work,” she said. “I would've just used my finger.”

He looked at her, and seemed to tear himself loose from the wild concentration that had held him the last twenty minutes. “I tell you what, if we were the Alfonsis, we'd be doing all this by computer model,” he said. He stuck his pencil behind his ear. “But if you're me, the dirt-and-stick method works fine. Want to help with the dynamite?”

“Just like that?” Her hands were shaking a little, and she was half-hoping Donald might come back to watch. “You mean…
now
?”

He smiled. “We could wait around a few years, see if it falls down all by itself.”

They walked to the back of the truck, where he pulled from under the camper top a cardboard box of dynamite. He handed her one of the sticks, which felt heavier than it looked, the outside covered in waxy red paper.

“Hey, you know, this looks just like dynamite,” she said.

“It is dynamite.” He pulled other, smaller boxes from the truck.

“I know, but it
looks
like dynamite, in bad-guy movies. Like Wile E. Coyote dynamite. I expected, I don't know, something more high tech.”

“I have plastics and emulsions for special jobs, cutting steel cable and such. But mostly I just use good old TNT. Nitroglycerin and wood pulp and paper. Nothing beats it for velocity.” Max tossed the box of dynamite on the ground, and she jumped. “Relax,” he told her. “Until we connect the caps and cord, it's harmless as a box of pencils. Just don't get the stuff inside the sticks on your hands.”

She looked at her fingers. “Why not?”

“The nitro is what's called a vasodilator. Gets under your skin and gives you one hell of a headache.”

“All these years, I never knew my sister was a vasodilator.” Max smiled as he continued to count and make notes. She was nervous, making dumb jokes. She tried to think of something else to say, but all that would come to her were the kind of things Mr. Rossi might have said had he been here—Marco Polo's introduction to gunpowder in Asia, Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite, and so on. She used to mention all of these to her students, impressing them with easy ironies while they sat in the dark watching World War II documentaries.

“You ever go to Ocean City?” Max asked.

She put the stick back in the box. “Every summer when we were kids in Baltimore. Us and about seven million others.” She thought of her trips there with Marty, of the obsessive way she'd watched their videos after his accident, watched as if they were the Zapruder film and could be made to reveal some truth about what had been wrong with them.

“In 1922, a dead whale washed up on the beach there,” Max said. “Huge thing. The rescue station towed it out to sea, and it came back in on the next tide. You know what they decided to do with it?”

“Turn it into a funnel-cake stand?”

He looked at her. “They blew it up. Fifty pounds of dynamite. Newspapers said it rained blubber and blood for five minutes.”

“That's pretty gross.”

He nodded slowly, as if he'd never considered this angle of the story. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

He turned to his work, motioning her back as he fired up a gas generator from the truck bed and ran a long extension cord over to the silo. He hooked up a huge drill all coated in white dust, and handed her safety glasses and foam earplugs. She put them on, and he clicked on the drill and leaned into it, his arm muscles making Yosemite Sam twitch. He bored a series of holes into the brick around the base of the silo. On one side, the holes formed what looked like a snowman's face, button eyes and a wide smile. Max turned off the drill, wiped his forehead.

“You need to add a nose,” she said, pointing to the face. Her ears buzzed.

Max lifted his safety goggles over his glasses, the ghost of the goggles still on his face where the white dust hadn't reached. “Listen, I'm really awkward with this kind of thing.” He paused, and she thought for a second he was talking about the drill. “You're not married or…involved or anything, are you?” He busied himself with dismantling the drill. “That's the word these days,
involved
, like you're a calculus problem.”

She looked at him, the top of his head bent toward his work, the dust on his shirt, on the hairs of his arms. He didn't know. Somehow, he hadn't heard the gossip, or hadn't been around enough to find out, or maybe it had faded away by now. Why in the world hadn't his father told him? He had to be the only person in Wiley Ford unaware of what had brought her there, unaware that she'd become, for a time, the town's official Grieving Widow. She felt her mouth opening and closing.

“I think I'm more like long division,” she said.
Dumb
.

“Well, are you? Involved?”

“The thing is…” she said. He looked up at her then, and her vision fell away, so that she saw the two of them crouching before this broken-down silo with its snowman face of holes, the foam plugs muffling their words to each other, the dust settling out around them. Max waited for her to speak, the safety goggles resting at his hairline, his face sweaty. She felt the two of them preserved in this moment somehow, a snapshot held by the corners of his not knowing and her not being known. She thought of how she'd imagined Mr. Kesler's Chrysler Imperial slipping down into Colaville, and its presence there, also preserved, the burning of its headlights and the shine of its paint. A lie, yes, but a pretty lie.