Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (9 page)

“The truth is, no, I'm not married. I was.” She let it go at that, hoping that he would not, God help her, ask her out, that he wouldn't make her
say
it. He waited for her to continue, then turned to his boxes.

“Hey, you don't have to tell me your private business,” he said, and right then she
wanted
, to, to set him straight, knowing what he must imagine her private business to be: an ex-husband in another state, a messy divorce, the usual cynicism and wariness of so many women she knew. Old story, he must be thinking.

Max set to work, explaining as he went along. He opened the ends of the dynamite sticks with his pocketknife, eased the blasting caps into place, tamped the sticks into the holes with a piece of broom handle, then packed plastic lunch bags of sand in behind them. “To keep our nice little explosion in the hole,” he said. He spoke quickly—overexplaining, smoking as he worked—and she knew he must have mistaken her hesitation for aversion. She didn't know how to tell him otherwise without draping herself in black and spilling the whole sad story. She couldn't take a fresh round of pity.

“This silo is like taking down a tree with a chain saw,” he told her. “We blow out a wedge, cut through the base, and the whole thing lays right down. County brings out a loader and it's gone in two hours.” As he spoke, he finished packing the last of the holes, wired up the caps, then wrapped the base of the silo in chicken wire to prevent pieces of brick from flying out. He spooled cord along the ground until they were behind the truck, where he connected the wires to a worn plastic box with thumbscrew connectors and a push button in the middle, a keyed ignition switch mounted on top.

“Well, that's a letdown,” Alison said. “I wanted a little more Wile E. Coyote, one of those wooden boxes with a big plunger handle.”

“They had to go invent batteries,” he said. “Ruined the whole thing. Are you ready?”

“That's it? We're—you're going to blow it up right
now
?”

“You keep asking that. What is wrong with right now?” This seemed to be the question—the same one Sarah had been asking her, Ernie, everyone. She had no answer for it.

They crouched in the packed dirt behind the truck, to shield themselves when the silo fell. As she tried to think of what exactly was wrong with right now, Max interrupted her thoughts.

“Besides, it's you that's going to blow it up. Alison Durst, honorary button pusher.”

She shook her head. “No, no way. I couldn't.”

He smiled. “What the hell. Pretend it's a piano with Daffy Duck inside.”

“Really, I can't.”

“Why not?” The sweat on his face mixed with the mortar, running along his cheeks in thin white streams.

Because I've done enough damage
, she might have said, but didn't. In the five thousand times she'd been through it in her brain, she knew that she had not killed Marty. The acetone that soaked his sweater had killed him, the gusts of wind, Lem's new welder, or the fact that it hadn't rained that day or that it was July instead of June or November…a spark had killed him, or a million sparks, or the place he was standing when the wind stirred the sparks or earlier when the acetone had tipped off the porch rail and spilled. All of it had killed him—a thousand intersecting moments. But all during the funeral, while the organ music played and the funeral home men stood beside his closed casket in all their polished sorrow and everyone she knew took her hands and held her, a voice inside her repeated
please…please…please
, repeated over the days that followed, a habit of repetition like the lists of history she carried around, until finally she thought to ask the voice,
please what?
And the voice drew back a thin curtain of memory and showed her herself, the night before the accident, yelling at Marty for another wasted day at Lem's, for coming home late and missing dinner, and the next morning in bed, whispering to him to hurry home, to not be away so long this time.
Please
… the voice asked, let it not be that he had rushed because of her. Let it not be that his own impatience had made his movements jerky and hurried. Let it not be that he had failed to change his soaked clothes because the slant of afternoon was already upon him, the hour late. Now those empty, negative prayers echoed across twenty-three months, her anger and pleas drawn down into a small hard knot of doubt.

“I'll just watch you, Yosemite Sam,” she told Max. She forced a smile. “Maybe next time.”

He shrugged, then leaned up over the hood of the truck to shout at the silo. “ANY LAST REQUESTS?” he said. “CIGARETTE OR A BLINDFOLD?” He paused, head cocked, as if waiting for it to answer. He looked at her. “Guess not.”

Without another word he turned the key in the switch and pushed the green button. She knelt lower behind the truck, hands on the fender, peeking over, and saw the base of the silo cut through with fire and beige puffs of sand and smoke, saw the snowman's face erupt a split second before the explosions sounded. Max had wired in delays, he'd told her, but she could not distinguish them, so the sound came all at once, muffled and deep through the earplugs, more a tremor in the cavity of her chest, a rumble in the ground beneath her knees. She tasted the grit of mortar and sand blown toward them, blinking it from her eyes as the silo quivered on its base. It shifted and was changed somehow but did not fall for what felt like seconds, long enough for her to look at Max and for him to nod quickly at her, his eyes wild, telling her
just watch, just watch
, and as she turned a crack sounded from inside, like boards splintering, and the silo slowly twisted, the domed tin top of it cantered and tipping, the silo falling and almost whole in the air but with white spaces between the bricks, like a paint-by-numbers half-completed, spaces of light where the silo's destruction pressed in, expanded, filled it up, and lengthened. There followed a short space of silence, then the ground beneath her shook as if the earth rested on thin boards. The impact spewed up a cloud of red dust rolling skyward, and then the dust boiled away to reveal how the ground held the broken bricks and wood and tin still almost in the shape of the silo, but flattened and spread, a shadow of a structure that was no longer there, the five thousand milk jugs spilling out like fish eggs, rolling away with the breeze or crushed into piles. Stillness rose behind the cloud of dust, marked by the noise of random bits of brick or wood dropping and shifting inside the ruins.

“Like the wrath of God on high,” Max said, nodding. Alison slumped back on her haunches—crying and shaking, unable to breathe, her stomach tight, dust drying the inside of her mouth. He looked up at her, and she saw that he was shaking, too, his hands quivering.

“Hey, listen.” He touched her arm. “First time I shot something bigger than a stump, I had to excuse myself from the site and go throw up. Did not exactly instill confidence in the people who hired me.”

She laughed and wiped her eyes with her thumb. “That really was…amazing,” she said to him, only because she had to say something. He nodded, awkward in the face of her crying, and began to pack up his supplies. She helped him, the two of them stepping around the ruins of the silo, slapping the dust from their jeans, working in all that stillness they'd made.

In late afternoon they started for Sarah's house, and Alison leaned against the window, looking out at nothing in particular, at the trees and the car lots and front lawns. Max filled the quiet in the truck by digging around on the cluttered floorboard for cassette tapes, until he found one that featured arias from different operas. He hummed along, sometimes making little conducting motions with his fingers along the top of the steering wheel, pointing at streetlights or mailboxes as if they were the string or woodwind sections.

“I had you pegged for more of a rock-and-roll type,” she said. “Kind of aging and cool.”

“Thanks a lot,” he said. “I know, like, zero about this music.” He angled his mouth toward her but kept his eyes on the road. “I ended up taking music appreciation at the community college after the army, and just decided I liked this. Don't ask me why. I mean, I grew up on Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Stones. So you were mostly right.” She recognized the tape as a packaged “greatest hits” of arias by Puccini, Mozart, and Verdi, the kind of opera sold in the checkout line of the grocery store. Really, this about exhausted her knowledge of it, too.

“I thought you grew up on Count Basie and Lionel Hampton and…whoever.”

“You mean Dad's stuff?” He laughed. “Back then, it was pretty much the way it is now—his record collection was totally off-limits. When I was a little-little kid, for the longest time I thought ‘Don't touch' meant hearing it. Like if I listened to the music, I was touching it. I used to walk around the house with my ears covered. My mom thought I just hated the songs.”

She looked over at him. He was smiling at the memory, the corners of his eyes dovetailed with lines. “That's pretty sad, really,” she said.

He shook his head. “Nah. No biggie.”

Alison listened with him now as Pavarotti hit a high C. There was something oddly fitting about the way the music went with the rhythm of riding in this broken-down truck.

“I think you like this music because it's noisy,” she said. “It reminds you of work.”

He laughed and reached down to the floorboard, and somehow among the scatter of food wrappers and crumpled Marlboro packs brought up a brown bag full of pistachio nuts. He offered her some and she took them, eating and tossing the shells out her window while her fingertips slowly stained red. When she and Sarah were little, they would wedge the shells onto their fingertips for fancy nails. She tried it now but could no longer make them fit. For a long space of time, she and Max didn't speak, just chewed and listened to the music. Her mind went back to Max's earlier question. What
was
wrong with now? She'd told Sarah she would get her life moving when the Corvette could take her, and so far, what had she done? Bought a kitchen-drawer gadget and a manual and sat on a stool, looking at pictures of men in lab coats. She'd tried to undo the bolts on the hood, to lift it away as the manual told her to, but the nearest-size wrench she had kept slipping off and bloodying her knuckles. The car was no closer to restored than it had been a year ago, or the year before that. Up until Marty died, the whole idea of right now never carried much weight. All during her growing up she lived in the same house in the same neighborhood, which backed up to the shopping center where her mother bought groceries and her father got his hair cut. They lived there still, just outside Baltimore, older and slower, retired, but mostly unchanged. They watched TV and read biographies. They mowed the grass by taking turns walking the narrow lawn, and at Christmas decorated their dusty plastic tree. When Alison visited them, she ate off the same stoneware dishes she'd eaten off all her life. In the soft pine surface of their kitchen table she could trace the pencil imprints of her handwriting from fourth grade, or sixth, or tenth, loopy cursive describing the Spanish-American War or tallying square roots. And all the time of her childhood and teenage years, and even now, Sarah, always the look-alike, always two years and two months older, would point to herself and say, “This is what you'll look like at fifteen”… “This is what you'll look like with boobs” or with braces or a tan or a first swipe of graying hair. As if Sarah forged ahead over the next year and the next, tracking the landscape for her, beating down the path, showing Alison what now would look like when she finally got there.

But the last couple years had taught her how stupidly arbitrary now could be—a silo could stand for decades and then one day not, or she could find herself on a country road in a pickup truck spilling opera and pistachio shells. None of it meant anything. In her classes, she would spend more time covering the War of Jenkins's Ear than she spent on the War of 1812, only because she liked telling about it better, and it shook the boredom off her students and made them laugh. If she gave that war and its ridiculous cause more importance than some other war, who was to say it
wasn't
more important? The present was just a tangle of uncertainty, and history no more than stumbling through the tangle, looking backward, naming its random parts once they'd slid past. And everything could be named: love, anger, Corvettes, arias, pistachio nuts. Dynamite. A war fought over a severed ear. The newspaper had had words ready when Marty died,
ACCIDENT CLAIMS LIFE OF LOCAL RESIDENT
. Section B, page 1, below the fold, all the particulars stored in their inverted pyramid. This was the way of all history: If it could be named, delineated, it could be made to make sense,
ACCIDENT CLAIMS
(not
TAKES
or
STEALS
or
ENDS
)
LIFE
. The words could be cut out and filed away, kept, stored on microfiche. Her loss parceled out, labeled, gone through, and finished. All the books she'd thrown in the lake had said so, so it must be true. Alison held another shell out the window and gave it up to the wind, noticing how early twilight came these days.

Back at the house, the energy of music and dance spilled out of the narrow windows and across the lawn. They sat inside the truck in the dark, Max's finger poised over the eject button while they waited for the aria to end.

“You don't even have to understand the words, you can tell what they're saying anyway.” He looked over at her. “Love, sex, heartbreak. These guys and Elvis are pretty much singing about the same things.”

“Yeah, the big three,” she said, and popped open her door, filling the truck cab with light. “Thanks for showing me the silo.”

“I bet you're going to say you had a blast,” Max said, and she laughed.

“Munitionist humor,” she said. “Hey, thanks for the pistachios, and music, too.” She slammed the door and hesitated, not wanting to go into the house, where she'd have to watch the dancers, or help with the food, or make conversation with Mr. Rossi or Mrs. Skidmore. Max must have sensed her hesitation.