Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (21 page)

He stroked her cheek with his thumb. “Yeah,” he said. “I wish.”

That night, Alison sat on the porch with Sarah, drinking a beer, gently pushing the glider with her toe. The dancers would arrive in an hour, more practice for the Founders' Day show. Sarah was unhappy about their progress. This was, she said, the dumbest class she'd ever taught. Dumb as toadstools.

“Think you're being just a little hard on them?” Alison asked.

Sarah stopped the swaying of the glider. “You think I have a little reasonable cause to be mad?” She pointed to Bill, whom they'd been watching off and on for the last twenty minutes. He'd used his telephone spikes to climb into the bare upper branches of the trees around the yard, where he was hanging small metal garden pails full of sage and lighting fires in them, the pungent smoke falling in tatters over the yard and house. He'd carried them up on a rope attached to his work belt, and the remaining pails swung down behind him like temple bells.

“So get mad at him, not them.”

She shook her head, her teeth gritted. “I'm so pissed, it spills over. Nuclear anger. I'll have to bury it in concrete for a thousand years when this is all over with.”

“He means well, I guess is what I'm supposed to say.”

Bill pulled another pail from the rope and looped the handle over a branch.

“Yeah, right. So did…” Sarah puffed out her cheeks. “Who am I trying to think of?”

Alison shrugged. “General Custer?”

“There you go. He meant well, too. Meaning well is bull, and we both know it.”

Bill held the long-handled barbecue lighter down inside the pail of sage until the smoke began drifting up. He coughed. Alison didn't know what else to say. Sarah finished her beer and set the bottle on the porch. “I'm getting out of all this.”

Alison looked at her. “What do you mean?”

‘“What do you think I mean? I'm leaving him. I can't stand this anymore.”

“Sarah…”

“Well, to clarify, he'll be the one to leave.”

Alison picked at the bottle label with her thumbnail. “He asked you just to give him until his sick leave is up, right? Then he'll quit?”

“That was the plan.”

“Well, did you agree to that?”

“Yes, I sort of agreed to that. But wouldn't you think he'd stop now, knowing how I feel?”

Alison finished her own beer, and renewed her efforts with the glider. “Bill follows the rules. You know that. He's going to bust his butt to get you magically pregnant, for however many weeks, then when time's up, he'll quit. I know it.”

Sarah was watching her husband, her look far off and clouded. Just then, he dropped one of the small pails he had hooked to his belt, the pail banging through the trees branches, spilling its contents. Sarah's breath caught, her hand jumping up to cover her mouth. “Please be careful,” she said, too quietly for him to hear.

“At least give him his sick leave and then see what he does,” Alison said.

Sarah nodded, wiping her eyes with her thumb. “And if it continues, I'm not kidding.”

“I know.”

“He's gone.”

“I know.”

Bill got the last pail lit and sat in the Y of a tree branch, just watching, the smoke rising into pale arms and settling out around him.

That night at the dance practice, everyone kept asking Alison where her “young man” was, falling into that kind of collective wide-eyed encouragement people usually save for slow children or the desperately shy. She didn't mind. Didn't mind that Sarah kept referring to Max as Yosemite Sam (she'd seen the tattoo, apparently), didn't mind that Mr. Kesler kept giving her secret looks, as if they were both trench coat spies in some old movie. Twice she went out to the garage to turn the key in the ignition and to listen to the buzz of the radio, watch the headlights rise up Lazarus-like from the peeling hood of the Vette. Inside, she drank wine and ate the cheese and crackers and danced and danced with Mr. Rossi, who kept explaining to her how one day the Mississippi River would change course and head straight for the Gulf, leaving New Orleans sitting on the banks of a stinky sewage ditch, and how the OSS had once launched a plan to put estrogen in Hitler's food and turn him into a woman. She just took everything in, thinking about Max, who had gone back to Morgantown to make some measurements of the hotel. It was the most fun she'd had in a long time. Even Bill had given up his alchemy for the night and demonstrated several new moves with Sarah, showing off, dancing her into sweatiness.

Her mood carried into the next morning, when she awoke alone in her bed, the first real bite of autumn chill carried in the air. Max had stayed over in Morgantown, sleeping in the ballroom again, calling her after midnight on his cell phone. His voice echoed in the big room, where she imagined their handprints, fossils, still dotting the dusty stage, their sounds of lovemaking seeping into all that old wood and plaster. He told her that he and Tom had drunk quart bottles of Rolling Rock on the roof, then flown paper airplanes for half an hour, writing little notes on them and sending them off. One of the notes had been to her, telling her he missed her. She'd told him about Mr. Rossi, and Hitler's potential breasts, and how much she wanted him back in Wiley Ford.

As she got out of bed, there was some commotion outside, and through the window she recognized Tanner Miltenberger pulling up on his motorcycle with the battered sidecar, where he kept his scuba equipment and recovered golf balls. Following him in her big living room-size Cadillac was Frieda Landry, wearing her wide hat and pearls, and some photographer draped in cameras, wearing a fisherman's vest.

Word spread, as it will, through the town like a flu, and soon enough Mr. Kesler was there on the banks of the lake, some of the brooding boys from the vo-tech school, a few neighbors from around the lake. Mrs. Skidmore arrived with Tyra Wallace, the two of them smoking cigarettes and drinking big cups of coffee from 7-Eleven. Tanner Miltenberger looked over his small audience, the first he'd likely ever had for a dive, and smiled, his teeth half-missing and brown. He sat in the grass and tugged on his wet suit, zippering it up the back. Alison stood off to one side, her hands in her pockets, taking it all in until Mr. Kesler sidled up beside her, his powder blue jumpsuit rumpled, smelling of old sweat.

“If this doesn't fly, our little ruse,” he said quietly, “thanks for trying anyway.”

“Why wouldn't it fly?” She drew back a little at the word ruse, but that's exactly what it was.

“They're expecting to find a
car
down there, Alison, not a few scattered parts.”

“But parts equal car—wasn't that the plan?” She found herself speaking in low whispers, her mouth near his ear, drawn into the intimacy of lying.

“This lake has an eight-foot drop-down stream, and they'll never be able to drain that. I mean, drain the lake, the stream is still there, okay? With me?” She nodded. “The
plan
was to say the car was somewhere on the bottom of the stream, and the parts back that up. I wasn't planning on any goddamn diver going down and searching the whole thing. I mean, this is Wiley Ford; we don't have divers.”

“So what?”

“So, it's a magic trick, remember? It's the parts you can see and the bottom you can't.
That
equals car. You send Tanner Miltenberger backstage, tripping over all the wires and mirrors, it ruins everything.”

This made sense to her. Even with the parts, the question remained: Where was the car? Mr. Kesler stood beside her, cracking his knuckles while Tanner Miltenberger fought with his flippers.

“It's like Nessie,” she said. “The Loch Ness monster. If they could drain that lake, no more story.”

He nodded. “You got it, missy. Told you you were smart. Yessir, not knowing preserves our faith. If they ever found Christ's bones, Christianity would turn into Amway. The New Testament becomes last year's almanac.”

“I guess I have a lot to learn about duplicity, Gordon. Here I thought you hired Tanner Miltenberger to corroborate.”

“No, ma'am. My loving son hired him. This puts me in check, right? Tightens the screws? We'll see.”

The idea almost scared her, that Max might be doing this, making a chess game of his father's humiliation. And what scared her was not that he would do it, but that she had no idea if he might be thinking of such a thing. That you could never, ever really know another person, put on your own flippers and touch their dark and murky bottom. Long friendship didn't do it, nor marriage, nor sisterhood. A magic trick was right: You'd think you understood someone, had your eyes on the very last truth of them, and when you reached out your hand, that truth became nothing, the solid bottom melted into silt.

“He told you he hired Tanner Miltenberger for the express purpose of
not
finding your car?”

“Don't be naïve, Alison. No, of course, he said Mr. Miltenberger was checking out the dam, something, something. Gobbledygook.”

Just then, Tanner managed the second of his flippers, then stood up, starting for the mud. He flapped out into it, tipped and awkward, while everyone stood around the banks, watching him walk down the steep pitch of the lake bottom, past the stone buildings of Colaville, past the wide arch of the bridge, under which the stream still flowed, widening out near the dam. He paused for a second to peer inside the door of one of the buildings, the one that had once been the company store. The whole thing looked so strange, a frogman down in a crater, taking a walk through a ghost town, window-shopping. When he reached the point where the arm of the stream widened out, he strode on in, vanishing in slow increments.

While they waited, there was not much to say, and talk fell to the snap of cold weather, the prospects for the high school basketball team this winter. Some of the vo-tech boys stepped inside the garage, checking out the Vette. Mrs. Skidmore told a story about a man named Winston Ackerman, who was reputed to have stayed in his house when the Corp of Engineers flooded Colaville, refusing to leave. Frieda made notes while Mrs. Skidmore explained how Winston had argued his position with a shotgun, had tacked down his rocking chair to the front porch with angle irons, then bound himself to the chair with a logging chain. He didn't want his face floating up for all those developers and town fathers to laugh at, Mrs. Skidmore said. He was staying put. When the waters began to rise, the last anyone saw of Winston Ackerman was him sitting chained to his rocker, shotgun across his lap, a cat cradled in his arm, a plate of sausage and beans on a table beside him.

“Oh, for godsakes,” Gordon said. “That rot will be in tomorrow's paper, I'm sure.”

“You're just jealous,” Alison said.

“I suppose next week we'll have Winston Ackerman sightings. ‘The Rocker Man of Wiley Ford.' Banging his logging chain against his bean plate.” Gordon nervously polished his glasses with a handkerchief, huffing on them repeatedly, frowning at the results. Alison kept her eyes on the fading ripple where Tanner Miltenberger had disappeared. She imagined an entire city for him down there, instead of the one or two ruins left standing, imagined the water flooding over again, imagined the car as real and him climbing in the door, starting the engine, taking a slow tour of Colaville, waving at the bony remains of Winston Ackerman and his cat. She shook the idea away and focused on the pool of water where Tanner had disappeared, the muddy banks tapering down. Love, death, lies—they could all be so big when they were hidden, so cavernous in the dark of imagining them, and then so small and shallow when the dark drained away.

When Tanner Miltenberger came up dripping out of the water, arms held aloft as though he were being taken hostage, he held in his hands two of the hubcaps they'd tossed in. Alison watched, and felt Gordon lean in against her shoulder. “His and hers,” he said. The next morning, sure enough, there were photos of Tanner Miltenberger in his wet suit and mask, carrying the two hubcaps. He looked like some space-movie alien, big shiny eyes revolving at the ends of black tentacles. The article confirmed the name
Chrysler
stamped on the side of the hubcaps, and Tanner's assertion that there were more parts down there, which he would've gone in for again, except for his bad back. Frieda Landry spent a long time describing the hubcaps, writing, “The vagaries of weather and time have done little to dull the coruscating shimmer that must have caught the inquisitorial eye of our own young Gordon Kesler.” There was no mention of the condition of the dam, and the question of where the rest of the car might be never came up—not in the article, and not at Mr. Beachy's store, not in any of the gossip around town, nor in the Red Bird Cafe, where Alison sat, waiting for Max to make it back from Morgantown, to join her for lunch, to witness the quiet triumph of his father's prevailing lie.

Late that afternoon, they sat on the front porch of the house, dipping carburetor parts into a bowl of kerosene and cleaning them with old toothbrushes. She and Max worked in silence, laying the parts out on newspaper to dry. As they worked, the Founders' Day week of celebration officially began with the boom of a cannon from the high school track, signaling the start of the annual Founders' Run. Twice around the quarter-mile track, then out into the town, down past the dry cleaner's and the Honeybun Bakery, ending back at the track. All of the runners were in costume, the men wearing tutus and long blond wigs, the women in fireman coats and greasepaint mustaches, some of them carrying tennis rackets or giant cigars or poodles along the way. No one, not even Mrs. Skidmore or Frieda Landry, could remember how or why this particular tradition had gotten started, and Alison was glad for that. It was her favorite kind of history, the history with no past, like those celebrities who are famous and recognizable, but no one can recall exactly why.

Max had been held up in Morgantown and had missed that morning's paper and Frieda Landry's article, missed the cycle of gossip that had carried with it the car parts and Tanner Miltenberger. Once, when they first took to the front porch, he'd started to open the paper and read it, but she had grabbed it away from him and quickly spread it out on the porch floor for their dirty parts. How silly was this, hiding a paper from him? And for what? A fifty-year-old lie and some junkyard scraps? Alison picked up another carburetor jet and scraped it with the toothbrush, watching Max the whole time. The thought hit her again that he really couldn't care this much, that she'd somehow gotten caught up in Mr. Kesler's own paranoia, and that when Max did find out, he would laugh for five seconds and that would be the end of it. It was such a little thing, nothing.