Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (19 page)

“The men who lived here—what happened to them when the place was sold?” Alison asked.

Max shrugged, picked up an old Chinese take-out menu from the floor, then dropped it again. “I don't know. What happens to anybody? They died, they moved, they went to jails or hospitals. They just went away.”

The gray-yellow light of the building, the corners of shadow, weighed on her, a lead vest that hindered her breathing. How right he was, and how sad that he was right. Everyone just went away, eventually, gathered back up into that filmy nothing that had brought them here in the first place. She'd envied Marty and his easy faith, that he'd believed in a better place, that he'd believed in
some
place, any place. They would argue about the church, about religion, but those arguments never lasted long; he would clam up and retreat to the basement as she pelted him with the Crusades, the Inquisition, Pope Benedict IX. She told him once that
that
was her fear, that people who died just got lost in the nothingness, a black emptiness crowded with the dead. She'd tried to make a joke of it, saying that she worried death was no more than a big shopping mall, minus lights, and that we ended up as lost children, wandering, scared, looking for a grown-up. Marty smiled, told her he believed much the same, only the lights came on and every store was a toy store, giving everything away for free, forever. How she'd envied that.

She drew close to Max as he led her downstairs, telling her she had to see this. They walked into an emptied kitchen, the walls where the fans had been still darkened with grease, and then through wide doors that opened onto the hotel ballroom—an expanse of warped parquet floor, wires hanging from the stamped-tin ceiling where a chandelier had once hung. Their footsteps echoed woodenly, dust spilling upward into the parabolas of light from the high arched windows across the side wall. At the front of the room was a low stage, antiquated speakers still fastened in the corners.

“Some place, huh?” Max said.

“Wouldn't Sarah love this? For her classes? I wish we could move it out to the lake.”

Max nodded. “Dad told me there used to be five hundred people in here on a Saturday night, sweating it out in evening clothes, full orchestra up there, everyone loading up on champagne cocktails.”

“Your father doesn't strike me as the champagne cocktail type.” She pictured him from the night before, elderly heavy-metal burglar, pathetic and devious.

“Well, he was only here once. On his honeymoon.”

“You've got to be kidding me.” She looked at him. “Or…maybe he's kidding you?”

“Not this time. I've seen those slides all my life. Pretty much the way he described it. Back then, drive for an hour and that's your honeymoon. Two nights they spent here.”

She watched as he moved around the room, his neck cords tight as he looked up at the ceiling.

“Max, I don't see how you can tear this place down.”

He smirked. “Oh, come on, Alison. I already have a Hotel Morgantown ashtray, I don't need another souvenir of my parents' marriage. Especially one that takes up half a city block. And it's coming down whether I do it or not.”

“You have a job to do, Herr Kesler?”

“That's mean.”

“I know. I'm sorry. Still…”

“Look, I love old buildings. This one had its day, and now it's structurally not all that sound. Besides, my parent's marriage was a lousy one, even if they had a couple of happy nights here. You shouldn't romanticize everything.”

True enough, she did that. She thought about all the picture books she'd read as a kid, the way
things
always wanted something. Trees that craved friends, raindrops that cried because they hadn't landed on buttercups, rocking chairs that only wanted someone to sit in them. The idea had its appeal, that somehow the whole world needed us, every bit of plastic, every bit of wood.

“We ought to dance in this place. Someone should dance here one last time,” she said.

He looked at her.

“Well, you said don't romanticize
every
thing. I can romanticize some things, can't I? I can romanticize you.”

He told her to wait there, then disappeared back through the kitchen. While he was gone, Alison sat on the small stage and imagined young Mr. Kesler there with his new wife, dashing and awkward in his wedding suit, the two of them slightly drunk, anticipating their bed upstairs. She saw him laughing, his teeth shining, his face spilling over with all the possibility and hope that had pulled him into marriage in the first place, that pulls anyone into marriage.

Just then, Max returned with the dusty boom box from the back of his truck. He carried it to the middle of the floor, set it down, and raised the antenna.

“Batteries are old, so don't expect much,” he said. He clicked it on to the noisy buzz of static and blipped the dial past nothing, a random voice or two, sports reports, until he found the only signal strong enough to reach them, from the campus radio station a few blocks south. They were featuring, it turned out, a retrospective on ZZ Top, loud, pounding songs, guitars and heavy drums. A nervous-sounding student DJ, rattling his notes.

“Oh, for godsake,” Max said. He hit the off button.

“No, no.” Alison started laughing. “Leave it on.”

Max turned it back on. Over the churn of guitar and bass, the singer growled about his fast car, about women's bodies, about liquor and love. In the faltering light, Alison walked over and took Max's fingers and pulled him up and to her, her body like origami, full of edges, folding into him. She led him, turning him in an easy circle until he drew up her hands and began a clumsy waltz, a grade-school box step, circling around the radio, each pass between it and the window breaking the signal and producing a quick wash of static before the music pulled itself back in. The static was a lighthouse beam, tracking their passes, until they stopped and he kissed her, his beard lightly abrading her chin, his tongue tracing over her lips. The band sang a song devoted to beer, but by now she wasn't much listening, hearing only the static of her own pulse in her ears, the soft exhalations of breath at her ear, and they sank together down into the dark of the floor, where the angled light, sliding up the opposite wall, no longer reached.

They pitched their sleeping bags on the stage and slept there instead of in any of the cramped rooms, the air in those rooms close with the gloom of the men who had lived in them. Toward morning, rain started up, an opaque and chilly downpour that signaled an early autumn. The rain produced a thin echo that dragged her up out of a deep, unmoving sleep, the sound like applause in some far-off room. Alison reached across and rubbed his back, let her fingers mesh with the skin drawn in furrows over his rib cage, and slid closer, taking him into her hand. They made love a second, slower time, quietly, the palms of their hands black with dust from the stage floor. After, they realized they'd forgotten food and so made a breakfast from what Max could find in the truck: a bottle of water, a box of vanilla wafers, and the paper sack of stale pistachios. They sat cross-legged, eating quietly, listening to the downpour, while she thought about the night before, his hands and his body, trying not to compare him to Marty.

The rest of the morning was spent working in the basement, Alison holding a flashlight while Max ran his drill off the generator, drilling holes into the brick columns that stood in rows. She shone the light around, finding blank spots where the water heater and furnace had been, old wooden chutes for coal and laundry, discarded signs advertising the dining room on the top floor. From one of the wooden beams hung what looked like some child's first-grade art project, a mobile made from a coat hanger, yarn, and flashing pieces of aluminum foil. She thought again of two nights before, of tossing the hubcap into the lake. Maybe the whole plan was so dumb, it wouldn't make any difference. The men fishing the lake would find the stuff and throw it away; no one would ever know about it. She looked over at Max as he leaned to wipe his face with his T-shirt. What if she just told him? What would be the big deal? He might just laugh it off, though he hadn't been laughing the other night when his father showed up in the driveway, hadn't laughed at any of Gordon's lies or his efforts to protect those lies. If only Max could see his father the way she did: a desperate old man, digging his nails in, clinging to air. But she supposed you could never see your father or mother, your husband or wife or lover as anyone other than someone wielding your own bestowed trust, levering your faith against your love, one direction or the other. And if she did tell him, and the plan worked, she knew what might happen: Max would call his father on this lie, too, his eyewitness there at his side, holding his hand, making love to him in old hotels.

Max clicked off the drill, pushed his goggles up. “I feel like a coal miner down here. Let's go find some sunlight.”

“I'm starving.”

“Sunlight and food, then.”

The small corner market down the street was open, and they bought microwave burritos and nachos, sodas, and a bag of M&M's, which they took back to the hotel, up the twelve flights of stairs, up an iron ladder, and out onto the graveled roof. Industrial gray boxes were situated here and there, air conditioners, maybe, or fans. This was a football Saturday in Morgantown, and off in the distance they heard the cheers rise up out of the quiet. Just as they were about to sit with their food, they noticed a man sitting in the corner of the rooftop, legs stretched out before him. He raised his arm and gave them a friendly wave, and Alison felt a stir of fear ripple through her.

“What the hell…”

“It's okay,” Max said. “That guy's been hanging around since the first day I went through this place. Just nod a lot; he's fine.”

They walked over, passing the cardboard trays of food. “Hey, Tom,” Max yelled. “What's up, dude?”

“Yo, hey. Maxwell!” Tom said.

“Maxwell?” Alison whispered.

“He's one of those nickname guys. You'll have one soon enough.”

Tom looked to be in his late fifties, with close-cropped white hair under a Batman baseball cap, a deep tan, and a black elastic band holding his big square glasses in place. He wore flower-print beach shorts and a POW/MIA T-shirt. He looked like one of those damaged Vietnam vets always featured on TV news magazines.

“My buddy Maxwell,” he said. “And you brought your lady friend along to hold the flashlight.”

“That's pretty astute, Tom,” Alison said, strangely happy to hear herself described as someone's “lady friend.”

“Hell, I'm about half-psychic, you know.”

“Half?”

“This is Alison Durst,” Max said.

“Alison,” he said loudly, pronouncing the second syllable like “sewn.”

“Tom used to live here,” Max said. He lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Tom, who took two. “Very top floor.”

“Were you in the war or something?” she asked, pointing at his shirt.

“Yeah, the war of the sexes. I was a POW for a while. Now I'm missing in action.” He laughed at his joke, revealing large front teeth. She imagined he must wear the shirt just so he could repeat the joke.

“Where do you live now?”

“Ah, you know. There's always a pal, always a couch. Pals and couches.” He nodded.

Alison took another nacho and offered Tom the tray. He took one, popped it into his mouth, and patted his stomach, smiling. Under his leg he had a stack of paper, playbills and flyers that looked like they'd been torn from telephone poles. One of them, resting in the V of his legs, had been folded into a paper airplane. Alison wondered just how screwed up this guy was, sitting up here. He saw her looking at the plane.

“I used to fly,” he said.

Tom held the plane up, his fingers lightly quivering. “I had an old Piper Comanche. When the money for that ran out, I did RC planes for a while, and when that money ran out, I made plastic models. Hellcats, Mustangs, Japanese Zeros. And when that money ran out, here I am.” He tossed the plane so it hit the knee of her jeans.

“And when that money runs out?”

He laughed, readjusting his cap. “This one is free, Alisewn. All free.”

“My father used to do RC planes,” she told him.

He nodded. “That's cool.”

“Tom worked as a flight mechanic for Piedmont Airlines,” Max said.

Tom shook his head. “Then they got bought out, like everyone else. Fired the old guys and the new guys. Kept the middle.”

“So how do you earn a living now?” She tried to say this without concern in her voice.

He bent a corner of the plane. “Oh, I have a small pension, and I play the horses over in Charlestown.”

“I thought that was how you went about losing money, not making it.” She offered him the last nacho, and he took it.

“Not if you're good or careful. I'm good and careful. The Wizard of Odds.” He smiled, chewing.

“Alison is a mechanic, too,” Max said. “Cars, though, not planes.”

“Oh, I am not.”

“Oh yeah?” Tom said. “What are you mechanicizing?”

Her face warmed. “I have a 1976 Corvette. I'm just fooling around with it. I don't really know what I'm doing.”

“God Almighty, 1976,” Tom said. “Our peanut farmer takes office, Chairman Mao heads for that great collective in the sky, the
Viking
hits Mars and fails to reveal any little green men. Oh, and the Bicentennial, all that off-the-rack patriotism.”

“Is your last name Rossi?” Alison asked.

“No, ma'am. Bittner. Seventy-six was a watershed for me. My daughter was born.”

“What's her name?”

“Susan Marie Bittner. I still like it. I called her ‘Soupy.'”

“What's she doing now?” Alison wondered how she could let her father live this way.

“God knows,” Tom said.