How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (3 page)

It wasn’t until that winter, when the snow came, that the China House’s absence became
my
absence. One morning a few months after the Volkswagen’s death, Northampton woke up to a literary snow squall—eighteen inches of flakes of torn paper falling from the sky. The paper, as it settled, was so heavy that the plows couldn’t move it. No one could work or drive or think clearly—everyone stayed home in their kitchens.

But I was living as an angle-fish on Elm with a roommate I couldn’t stand—he read me his original librettos whenever I came out into the common rooms—so I bundled up and went out for a walk. Nursing a grapefruit of sadness in my belly, I made my way over to the Smith College campus. I was looking for the peace that only the China House could offer me. But when I walked down the hill towards the spot where the House had been, I remembered that she was gone—that she’d moved away to start a new life.

As I walked down the footpath, though, I peered through the falling paper and saw a new house standing in the China House’s place. This house wasn’t shed-like and quiet; it was red, with vinyl siding, and when I stepped closer it said, “Welcome to the Meditation Station!”

I was cold, so I stepped inside. It locked its doors.

“Want peace?” the voice asked. “Want the
moment
? Well you’ve come to the right place. Please wait,” the voice said, and I could feel it scanning me, sending signals through my legs to test the blood in my veins. I could hear it computing. Then it said, “Your peace level is a—” it paused, “three. Want more?” Then it named its price.

At that moment I really missed the old China House. Though I knew
it wouldn’t—couldn’t—hear me, I told this new house that I just wanted to sit here quietly and listen to each piece of page, shuffling down from the sky, falling on the pile of brother-, mother-, and sister-pages and settling to rest.

The Invisible Pickup Truck didn’t see the Tree’s attack on my father, but he did
hear
it—he told me later that he was parked at the far end of the lot, and reading a novel about trout, when he heard the sound of a window shattering. He said he also remembered the noise my father made—an
unk
, he said—as the Tree split open his chest. Atkin’s, caught off guard, began to rev and vibrate nervously, and employees came running from behind the deli counter. The Truck came running, too, and when he saw my father’s body dangling from the Tree he tried to tackle him, slamming his face right into the Tree’s knee.

I don’t think the starving Tree had planned on this—on any sort of struggle or commotion. He might just have been too hungry to have fully thought through what he’d do
after
pulling the stories, and the heart, from my father. Or maybe he panicked when he heard the sudden, faint barking in the distance—Amherst CityDogs, notified and rushing to the scene. The way the Truck tells it, the Tree grabbed him with his free hand, lifted him by his invisible hood and tossed him twenty feet into the street. The Tree must have considered his options for escape—he probably searched the road for cars, then assessed the Invisible Pickup Truck and decided he was too damaged to be driven. Then he must have heard the engine of Atkin’s Farm, that nervous country hum.

With my father’s body still stuck to his hand, the Tree trudged through the broken glass, into the store, behind the counter and into the kitchen. He shifted the farm into first gear and drove it away.

It’s unclear just what happened next—where the Tree went. It’s
possible he turned the farm to the right and sped up 116, burying Atkin’s in the safe wilderness of Belchertown or Hadley. It’s just as likely, though, that he drove out to 47, slipped the farm down into the Connecticut River and laid low for a few days, resting at the river bottom and taking time to camouflage the farm so that it could no longer be identified—so that it resembled every other sadnews in western Massachusetts.

Wherever he went, the farm was not seen for several years; neither were the Cooley-Dickinson Hospital, the Conway Inn or the three Atkin’s employees that worked the bakery counter, all of whom were trapped inside when the Tree fifed the farm.

Five or ten minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot in my slow, rotten VeggieCar and found an empty patch of land, a bleeding hysterical Truck, a few Atkin’s employees huddled together and a pack of CityDogs pacing the ground with coffee mugs in their paws and cigarettes dangling from their lips.

I ran to the half-conscious Truck first and spoke with him as they loaded him into the ambulance. He mumbled a How to Use This Book of what had happened. I remember he just kept apologizing, over and over.

I held the Truck by his lapel. “Is he alive?” I begged.

“I did everything I could, _____,” the Truck forked.

“Is he
alive
,” I said again.

“His chest was … split,” said the Truck, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the street.

“Were there
stories
in his eyes? Any stories at all?”

The Truck wept. “I didn’t see any,” he said.

The ambulance took the Truck away and I approached the CityDogs, who were taking measurements of the soilpatch where the farm had been and interviewing an Atkin’s employee who’d sustained a deep, literary cut on the chin. I touched a Dog on the shoulder and he turned around, growling softly.

I was breathing so hard I could barely speak. “What about my father,” I gasped.

The CityDog read his report. “Heart Tree needed food—”

“Heart
Attack
Tree,” I said.

“Right,” the CityDog said, and he took a pen in his paw and made a correction.

“He attacked my father,” I said.

“I appreciate that,” the Dog said. “Trees of this variety, they get so hungry they go off their diet.”

I crossed my arms.

“They feed on hearts. Government gives them fake ones, but they’re expensive for the trees and sometimes they don’t work so good. Certainly not like the real thing.”

“Those are my
Dad’s
stories,” I said.

“I’m not saying it’s not a problem—it is,” the CityDog said, and he put his paw on my shoulder. “I’m just saying, we see it a lot.”

“Fuck the Tree,” I said. “My father—how do we find him?”

The Dog looked down at his clipboard. “Truck said … that his chest was almost in two pieces.”

“So we need to track them down quickly.”

The CityDog furrowed his brow. “Did you hear what I just said?”

By that time my family had arrived: My brother and the Promise of Colorado were holding each other off by the once-upon-a-pastures and the Two Sides of My Mother were talking to Cooley-Dickinson’s sister.

I told the CityDog that we could help if needed, that my family could be a part of the search party. The Dog looked down at his boots. Behind him, the other CityDogs were packing up their measuring tools.

I kept pressing. “Do you have an ID on that Tree—any record of where he lives?”

The Dog shook his head. “Those trees live up in the woods. Some of them don’t even have names.”

“I’m just asking where to go,” I said. “Did he pull over and hide or hit the road, do you think?”

“Sir, listen,” the Dog said. But that’s all he said. He looked into my face and his eyes told me the no-plan; to them, I realized, this was just another rideaway.

By then it was cold and growing dark, and most of the Dogs were gone. Eventually everyone left, even the Two Sides of My Mother.

“What about Dad?” I said to them as they piled into the Cadillac.

I knew their answer by the shape of their frowns, by the sound of the Cadillac’s engine as it rose, by the shade of their taillights.

I stood there in the fresh dirt. “What about my
father
,” I said to the night.

The night replied, “Your father is dead.”

•  •  •

Four days later, my ex-girlfriend—the Lady from the Land of the Beans, who’d come over to help, took pity on me and let me faith with her—gave birth to an electric-blue 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. A few months afterwards, horrified at what she’d made, she left Northampton and traveled back to her home (the Land of the Beans) for good. I was left to raise the child by myself.

The Beetle was one story at first, then two, then a series of atonal variations. As I soon realized,
he
was the gain from the covering, a car made in my father’s own image to titeflex his absence. I made promises to myself: I would raise this child, keep him running well. I would finally become an adult—run the 57 Crescent Street apartments, take care of the Two Sides of My Mother and my brother, have a family of my own, be the father for my Volkswagen that my father was for me.

I thought I could. I never, in a million dollars, dreamed that one road could have this many tolls.

Sometimes it was me and the Memory of My Father in the 1971 VW Beetle, sometimes it was me and my girlfriend at the time, sometimes it was a stranger. There was always room for surprise. I might think that I was driving with the Memory of My Father through the Memory of Ludlow, turn the page/shift the clutch and find myself somewhere else (Pelham/Leeds) with someone new (the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, the Chest) or I might think I was with someone and turn and find that all this time I’d been alone, telling stories to myself only.

Once I was on my way towards Route 116 in Amherst when, in the middle of those cranberry turns, I looked over and found my passenger to be an old, creaky mechanical bull. This bull rode with a bottle of wine between his legs, and he wore a wide-collared shirt, and his face told me that he’d been forced over the course of his trip to say goodbye to people that he loved. He was holding in that love. It burned inside him like a soldier.

We rode in silence. I guessed that we’d been riding this way for hours, but I swear that I’d never seen him before, that I have no memory of picking him up.

Then, as automatic as his arrival, he pointed. “There,” he said. He was pointing down the road, at the entrance to Hampshire College. I took a right turn and went up the hill. “Take a right at the circle,” he said, and I did.

As we sunk deeper into the stomach of the campus, I felt a new approach to thinking and knowledge taking me over. “This drive is my education—I feel smarter already,” I said, and I laughed, but the bull didn’t seem to think that it was funny. He looked out the window with those bull’s eyes. Those eyes were like government checks, cold and blue.

Soon we were driving by the campus apartments. “I’m up here,” he said.

“You’re a student?”

“No, but the person I’m looking for is,” he said, and he cracked his knuckles.

I pulled over and he got out.

“Thanks,” he said. “I do hope you find your way—you know, back to Atkin’s.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Had I told him the story during the drive? Did my son say something about it? “OK,” I said.

“Don’t ever give up
home
,” he said.

“Home?” I said.

“ ‘Hope,’ I said,” he said. “Don’t ever give up
hope
.”

“I won’t,” I told him.

He turned and carried his bottle of wine inside.

I tell you, my hands would get so wet and tired when I booked that I often had to take them off and dry them out on the back porch. After a while I could only get one or two pages a day for them, and I was asked to do more than that at work alone!

Then, I was trying to change a time-action filter on the Volkswagen one afternoon when one of my hands, soggy and limp, got stuck between the theater’s asbestos firewall and curtain. They postponed the show scheduled for that night, and a crew of tiny men—fifteen or twenty of them—raised ladders and tried to help pull my hand out. But it just wasn’t budging.

Finally, I unscrewed the hand and left it there, and I went inside and called the Memory of My Father and told him the situation. He came barreling over in my father’s old Invisible Pickup Truck, looking like my
Dad had when I was five: scraggly beard, a full head of wild, black hair, black square glasses, dark jeans and a button-down shirt.

The two of us got into my son and I drove down onto Route 9. I didn’t even have to ask where we were going; I knew the Memory of My Father was taking me to see the Junkman.

I love the Revision of Route 2 and the Route 5 Mango Punch (and of course I’m excited about the
new
melodies, when they appear), but my favorite road in all of western Massachusetts is Route 47—especially the stretch going from Hadley to Montague. Once you turn off 9 there is only one stop light; the rest of the road is winding and fast, with surprises on each side: beaming patches of land, gravesites, the Connecticut River, animals you might never have seen before. Once, I saw what looked like a horse with a harp for a rear end, grazing in one of the pastures. Another time, I saw a cow riding a sit-down lawnmower, a walkman over his ears and a plastic cup in his hand.

If you catch it right, Route 47 can get you anywhere you need to go. (I don’t know if it changes its mind in the night, or what!)

The VW roared through Hadley and Sunderland and into Montague—a small, no-cheese town. I didn’t even need to tell him where to turn. We pulled up beside the Junkman’s home—a collage of vinyl siding, shingles, cinder blocks and pieces of old cars. There was no one around, just some bicycles playing in the yard. I told the VW to introduce himself to the bikes and see if they might want to play, and the Memory of My Father and I walked around behind the Junkman’s house and looked out into the fields. It was spring, and the junkcrop was rising high: sprouts of old busses, ovens, bikes, toasters, VCRs, clothes, skiis.

Then, in the distance, I saw the Junkman trudging through the rows, his beard dangling to his knees. He saw us, waved and cupped his hand to his mouth. “What do you need?” he yelled.