How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (20 page)

“Don’t use that—you’re going to snap the latch right off,” the VW said.

“I won’t—I’ll be careful.”

“Dad—”

“Give it,” I said, and I took the box from him. I stuck the prybar against the latch and turned it, which created a little gap between the two halves. I heard moans inside.

“What’s that sound?” the VW said.

The latch wouldn’t give. I pushed hard on the crowbar once, twice.

“Careful—”

“I’m being careful,” I said, and pushed again, but this time the wood cracked.

We both stared at what I’d done.

“Did I tell you?” the VW said.

I’d pried the lock right out of the wood, ruined the lid. I said a custom-made swear.

“Didn’t I tell you not to use the crowbar?” the VW said.

“Just don’t tell the Memory of My Father,” I said.

“Like he won’t know.”

“He won’t know, not if you don’t tell him,” I said. “I’m sick of you two conspiring against me.”

“What?” the VW said.

“Everyone in this
engine
is conspiring against me,” I said.

“Dad,” the VW said. His face was plaid. “Do you really think that?”

I heard a soft
boom
inside the box, and then small voices.

“Are you going to open that thing, or what?” the VW said.

“I’m getting to it,” I told him. “Don’t push me—I’ll open it when I’m goddamn good and ready.”

“Alright, alright,” the VW said.

I slowly opened the lid and we both peered inside. Immediately I knew what we were looking at.

“It’s a
war
,” I whispered.

It was night inside the box—the stars and the moon hung below me. Tiny men the size of eyelashes were running across a field. Then, the
crack and flash of a bomb. All of the running men stopped and froze, then dropped back behind a hill. Gunshots came, and a new team of men surrounded them.

All of the soldiers were of one mind. You could see it in their faces as they aimed and fired, ran and hid, destroyed the hearts of others, lost their legs and eyes and either a) died or b) did not die.

The VW pulled back from the box and his face shawled. “What are they doing?” he said.

I was upset, of course. What was this war
about
? And what was I supposed to do with it?

“They’re fighting,” I said.

“What for?” the VW said.

“It’s a disagreement of some kind.”

“Over what?”

“I don’t know the specifics,” I told him. “It could be anything.”

The VW didn’t say anything. He stared into the box, at the dead on the field, and then he looked down at his shoes. “Can I go to my room?”

I felt guilty all of a sudden. “Sure you can, buddy,” I said.

I placed the lid back on the box and I called the Memory of My Father, and he came over an hour later. He sat down on a stool in front of the box. “Open it,” I told him.

“What’d you do here?” he said, pointing to the lid.

“I don’t know how that happened,” I said.

“You tried to pry it open, didn’t you?” the Memory of My Father said.

“I didn’t touch it—the VW must have done that,” I told him.

•  •  •

We kept the war going through the fall. The Memory of My Father left the box in the basement, and every few days I would check on it and see what was happening. Many lives were lost. The sun rose and fell. I looked to see if there might be any end in sight, but I didn’t have the whole thing—this box was apparently only one piece of a much larger
conflict—so I never knew who was who and whether one side was making more progress than the other.

One Sunday that winter, the Memory of My Father met an antiques collector at an estate sale. He told this man about the box and the designs on the front, and the collector said he’d like to see it. The Memory of My Father called me that afternoon and told me to clear out the war so that he could show the box to the collector.

“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked.

“You’re a big boy, you can figure it out,” the Memory of My Father said. “Just scoop it out.”

Something inside me was sad. “Did you tell him about the lock?”

“Bah,” the Memory of My Father said. “He won’t even notice it.”

I thought long and hard about how to get rid of the war—I didn’t want to just pour it out. Instead, I put the box in the freezer, thinking that all of the soldiers would freeze and die, and then I could dump the whole thing into the trash—hills and bunkers and bodies and all.

But somehow the soldiers survived the cold. I opened the box after two days in the freezer and I saw a division dressed in fur, marching stiffly along a perimeter. By this point I was using a magnifying glass (which I borrowed from my son’s science kit) to see closer, and I could see every face as individual and unique. I saw two men huddled together for warmth and another a few feet away, writing a letter. I snatched it from his hand and read it.

Things get worse all the time. This cold front is upon us and every day we lose more men. My Sergeant says that we will never give up, never die, but if I can’t get warm soon I don’t think I’ll make it
.

I think back to home. Remember the shower day? That Tuesday before the concert? I think of you and how warm that was
.

God, my hands. I can’t hold the pen. Have to go. I’ll write again tonight
.

Love

I brought the box with me when I went home that night for dinner and I held it out to the Memory of My Father. “The war’s still in there,” I told him.

“What?” he said. “I told you to clear it out.”

“I tried to freeze them but it didn’t work.”

“Just get them out of there, what the fuck!” the Memory of My Father said. Then he took the box under his arm and went outside. The late afternoon sun was a piece of candy. The Memory of My Father turned on the hose and opened the box. All of the fighting stopped and the soldiers looked up into their sky, past their sun and into the Memory of My Father’s face. He sprayed the inside hard, until all the dead bodies and the hills and streams and stars and moon were pushed out onto the pavement, and within minutes the box was completely empty. With his holy hose, The Memory of My Father forced them down the driveway and towards the gutter at the curb.

The antiques collector didn’t buy the box—he was upset when he saw that it had a broken lock—and so the Memory of My Father brought it home and stored it in his garage.

A few years later I found the box again, dusty and stashed in a corner. I opened it up and peered inside. I saw six or seven men huddled around a fire. I think there was a crude map of some sort at their feet. It looked to me as if they were making plans.

There are several reasons why your Volkswagen might stall, stop or not start. The most common culprits are the
fuel injection system (pump, condenser)
or a glitch in the
timing
. But don’t overlook the possibility that it might also be a malfunctioning
control unit
—a much more serious problem.

First, there may be a problem with the
ignition
, “How to Use This Book.” Have you reviewed it to make sure that it reads at the right speed?

Second, it’s possible that the scene clutch is failing to engage with one of the transmissions. To check the linkage, press your ear to the page and knock on it. Do you hear a hollow echo or the sound of metal against metal? If it’s the latter, the linkage—or the page—is probably twisted. You can either reshape the page by hand or get underneath the car, drop the transmissions, and use a pair of april-plyers to straighten out the twisted parts.

If both the linkage and the ignition appear to be OK, though, your next step should be to check the timing. The quickest way to do so is to open the engine compartment and take a look at the sun and moon(s). Watch them through at least one cycle (no matter how long it takes). Then decide: Are they timed correctly? Volkswagens have more problems with engine timing than any other car I know of—they constantly fall behind or speed forward, or slip from one version to another (both inside the engine compartment and on the road—in the story—itself!). My 1971 Beetle was notorious for this—I can’t tell you how many times we drifted unknowingly from one speed to the next. One minute the sun was hanging still in the sky, the next the moon was swimming laps around the earth. And I’ll never forget the time we found ourselves on a road on which the time wasn’t moving
at all
!

My advice is to try and avoid these situations if at all possible. There are ways to adjust the time if you find yourself lost in a shift, but most drivers in that situation simply keep their eyes on their surroundings—the traffic, the scenery, the road—and do their best to adjust.

The most likely scenario is that there’s something wrong with your
fuel system
, though, so let’s review it.

First, check your stories. Are they burning quickly and completely? Sometimes, in order to render a story more likely to be burned, you need to strip an actual occurrence—a “true” story—down to its frame. Take “Rear Differential” for example, which I fed the VW out of desperation on one of our most trying trips, the wild chase west. That part was built
from a change that actually did happen to me. I really did have a friend—not a bull but a barricade—who drove out to Hampshire College while we were both students in Boston, and he
did
have a jug of wine that he kept hoisting up and drinking out of as we drove. It was a cold night and I remember dropping him off at a lonely hut-like dorm at Hampshire, watching him knock on the front door, the potato on his face as he looked back at me, unsure if his friend was inside or not. Then the warm door opened and he slipped inside, and I drove off towards Smith, where my girlfriend at the time was waiting for me.

I saw this friend years later, in fact, his blond hair tamed and his face imprisoned by glass and metal. The Mechanical Bull was working in the city as a banker, his muscles pressed into a skintight grey suit.

My point is, the real story is soft and it licks your face but the one I fed the VW carries water and minerals—a bull, some hope, a home. But the vertebrae—the trip, the wine, the eyes, the campus—are in place, distilled and even truer than I remember them to be.

And why this particular story, this tune? I can’t say for sure why the VW chose it to burn, but I do know what drove me to tell it to him. There was real rubble to it; I was excited to be with this Bull, who I admired, and also frightened that his drinking might get us in trouble. The car felt smart and Hampshire felt like home, and it was one of those nights that I wished would pass but now would trade almost anything to return to.

None of these complicated procedures reach the surface, but they’re always happening nonetheless; words are burning, experiences changing, information is being transformed to actual motion. Even now, I still find that pretty amazing.

If the Volkswagen has fuel, its timing is set properly and each of the components of the fuel system—the minutepump, the sensors, the feeder and the morning cables leading to and from the
compressor
and
expansion tank
—seem to be working, you may have a problem with the
control unit
, which is to say that the VW might be stalling or not starting because he or she
doesn’t want
to move forward. They may be confused, mentally ill, overly cautious or simply upset about something.

I ran into this situation more than once with my car. In his third year, the 1971 VW grew tired of our routines—going to and from home, work and my parents’ house in Longmeadow. Then he heard Cooley-Dickinson’s song and he begged me to follow it. “How can you continue to spool around Northampton when the tune clearly goes west?” he said to me one evening as were driving to Hadley, where I was meeting a woman for dinner.

“Who says the farm went west?” I said. “You don’t know that for sure.”

“It’s what the hospital said,” the VW said. “It’s what we
saw
at the Castaway.”

“We’ve been over this,” I said. “I really don’t think that was the same farm.”

“It
was
the same farm,” said the Volkswagen. “I told you it was but you wouldn’t listen to me.”

I shrugged. “If it was then the Dogs will find him—they said they’d resume their search, didn’t they?”

“Still,” the VW said. “Why can’t we try too?”

“Because I said so,” I said.

“But
why?
”

“Because we’d have to drive fast—”

“So?”

“—and the only way we could get west fast would be to take ninety-one north to two,” I said.

“Let’s do that, then!”

“I told you,” I said. “Ninety-one is off limits. There’s too much sound!”

“Too much sound? I can handle it,” he said.

“No you can’t,” I said.

“You never give me any credit,” the VW said.

“It’s not a matter of credit,” I said. “What if we broke down?”

“We won’t break down.”

“We
always
break down,” I said.

“We won’t this time.”

“You’re damn right we won’t, because we’re not going,” I said.

“How come I’m healthy enough to drive
you
places, but never to go anywhere I want to go?”

“Enough, OK? I said no.”

The VW mumbled something.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said.

“No, what?”

“Nothing,”
he said again.

“It
better
have been nothing,” I said.

The VW was quiet for a minute, and so was I. I twisted the rearview mirror so that I could see my face. Then I said, “I feel nauseous—do I look pale?”

“Pale?”

“Am I underdressed?”

“You’re fine, jeez,” the VW said, and he took a right into the parking lot of the restaurant. This was Sienna—that fancy pasta cord a few miles from Amherst Center. The woman I was meeting—a Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass (See “Valve Adjustment”)—was already there, waiting by her stained glass car.