Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (35 page)

Whatever knowledge you
glean
take from
Funny Facts
will become, I hope, part of your
very
own understanding of the world, the understanding that whatever
you
we find along the way is interesting in its own right. A wise man once said, “A clean white pebble is more valuable than a gold nugget, if you've just spent the day looking for a clean white pebble.” Well, readers, that wise man was
me
I, and I
now
offer you now the stories of one hundred and eighty clean white pebbles, each one a treasure. Carry
it
them in your pocket, and guard them well.


“So,” Alison said, “I hope that each of you will take whatever you hear about Arthur Rossi today, whatever stories you have to tell about him, and guard them well.”

She looked around; most of the people were looking at their feet—whether from emotion or embarrassment for her, she couldn't tell. She was just about to ask if any of them might have a word or two to say about Mr. Rossi, when Mrs. Skidmore spoke up.

“Okay, then, we'll all set about trading our stories on Mr. Rossi, and then tomorrow you and your boyfriend and Mrs. Pink Lady over there can come along and tell us how goddamn stupid we all are.” She stood with her arms crossed, a 7-Eleven coffee cup in her hand.

All around was silence, except for water slapping against the docks, a dog barking on the other side of the lake. Alison felt her face growing warm and her hands tensing, and if she'd ever had any inclination to start a fistfight with an old lady, it was now.

“I don't think this is the time—”

“Why'd you do it?” Mrs. Skidmore persisted. “Answer that.”

“I shouldn't have. I—”

“Then why did you?”

Alison closed her eyes. Sarah and Bill, just about her only allies, had gone up on the porch, Sarah having started to cry almost as soon as Alison opened her mouth to speak.

“Because that whole mess was a big lie all the way around,” Mr. Davidow said, his apron from the Red Bird still knotted around his waist. “She just laid out the truth.” Grumblings rippled through the small crowd, little waves of assent or disagreement.

“Old dumb us and our old dumb lie,” Mrs. Skidmore said. “I guess she showed us.” Steam from her coffee rose in wisps.

The sun fell behind dark clouds and the wind kicked up, the day growing colder. Alison held her breath, then let it go. Nothing was going right.

“And I say you're fussing at the wrong person,” Mr. Davidow persisted. “You need to turn your guns on Mr. E T. Barnum over there.” He pointed at Gordon, who looked suddenly as if he were made from porcelain, hardened and white. “The Music Man,” Mr. Davidow said.

Somebody, a man Alison recognized from the Red Bird, laughed loudly at this. “Hey,” he said, “the high school band can manage maybe seven or six trombones in the big parade.” Everyone laughed. Gordon looked as though he were about to be stoned to death. Alison pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, feeling suddenly like she was standing in front of a surly group of freshmen. The five-year-old in the Spider-Man shirt drove his Big Wheel around and around the crowd, ringing the tiny bell on the handlebars.

“Okay,
listen,”
Alison said. “We are here for Mr. Rossi, and—”

“Hey, look!” someone else shouted. “It's Bigfoot!” He waited a beat. “No, hold on a sec, that's just Gordon Kesler in a hat.” Again everyone laughed, louder this time.

“Hear, now, Gordon,” the first man said, “you got a fancy silver race car sitting right there behind you. Wait around until the lake freezes over, and you can drop it in there, too, a set.” By now, the women, polite at first, were laughing as well.

Gordon kept trying to smile, trying to pretend to go along with the joke. He took off his hat and bounced it by the brim in his fingers, then pushed nervously at his glasses, tugged at his earlobes, which were redder even than his face.

“Yeah, go ahead, Gordon. Put the car in the lake. Say it was your uncle's.”

“That is
exactly
what I had in mind,” Alison shouted. This stopped them. In fact, she'd had it in mind for days, and now here it was, right in front of her. “There's meant to be a car in this lake,” she said, all the laughing subsided now, “so, let's put one there.”

Gordon looked at her, wide-eyed. Sarah and Bill had moved off the porch and now stood at the edge of the circle, Bill whispering to Sarah. People in the crowd shook their heads and spoke in a tangle of murmurs, none of which made its way to Alison's ears.

“Think about it,” she told them. “We roll the car in the lake on the day we remember Mr. Rossi. I bet you'll never forget it. I bet you'll never stop talking about it.” If she had expected protests at this point, she didn't get any. It was her car and their lake. Even Sarah looked too shocked to speak, and the thought seemed to hit them all collectively—they could.

“All right then,” Alison said, her heart thudding now, “I guess…let's do it. Bill? You promised to help, remember?” Bill smiled as he jostled his way through the crowd, moving toward the car. She had imagined Bill and a group of the strongest boys giving the Vette a good headlong shove—Gordon in there, too, his hand pushing—and making it at least up and over the steep bank of the lake. As she thought of this, scanning the crowd for the strongest-looking boys, she heard the door of the Vette open and then quickly slam closed.

She spun around, and Gordon, porkpie hat perched on his head, sat in the driver's seat, his hands on the wheel. He reached across his shoulder and locked the door, then turned the key and started the Corvette, rumbling the ground under their feet.

“Gordon?” Alison said. “What are you
doing?
Get out of there.” He blipped the accelerator a couple of times, pretending not to hear her. Fumes and gray exhaust from the car stirred dust from the gravel in rhythmic puffs, the smell settling out over the crowd.

She tapped her knuckles on the window. “Come on, Gordon—get out of the car. Let's put her in the water.” From where she stood, she could see Mr. Rossi's box wedged down behind the driver's seat.

He shook his head, squared his jaw, then rolled down his window about an inch, just enough to speak. “No.”

“What?”
She felt her face heat up, sensed the crowd at her back. “Gordon…what are you trying—”

“I'm putting it in.” He looked at her through the glass, his eyes hard. “Just the way it was supposed to happen.”

She shook her head and looked at him. He meant it. “I can't let you do that, and you know it.” She hooked her fingertips in the narrow opening. “It's dangerous, Gordon, and the water's cold. Come on out, and help us push. Please.” He eased the car forward, jerking the clutch a little bit, and she was forced to step back. He turned the wheel to aim the Corvette toward the water, rolling right to the edge of the bank. The flash of the photographer began going off, one after another. Frieda Landry hauled out her notebook and thin gold pencil. Some in the crowd pushed to the front for a better look. Tyra Wallace lit a cigarette. The scowl slackened in Mrs. Skidmore's face. By now, most there were worried into silence, the teenage boys grinning and agitated, some of the women covering their mouths, some of the men nodding and whispering, as if putting the car in the lake were no different than cleaning the gutters or raking the leaves, just another job to do.

Alison, with Sarah beside her now, moved toward the car, calling his name—“Gordon!
Gordon!”
—as if he were a lost dog they scoured the neighborhood for. Some in the crowd took up the call, asking him to come out, pleading, others standing alongside Bill, still ready to lean in and help push. Gordon shook his head over and over, tight-lipped, not looking at any of them. He shifted into reverse and backed up slowly, scattering Bill and his helpers. He paused only a second before shifting into first, racing the engine, and then popping the clutch—but instead of rocketing the car forward as he'd meant it to, the maneuver nearly made him stall out as the Corvette pitched forward in fits across the grass, tossing him about in the driver's seat. He stopped for a second, bits of clumped mud and grass clinging to the wheels. Alison, all of them, could only watch. He nodded his head, talking to himself, hitting the wheel twice with the heel of his hand, then revved up the engine so the whole car shook, popped the clutch, and fishtailed across the grass. The car ran out of room before it gained much speed, though, sending him into the glassy face of Wiley Ford Lake not like in a movie, not launched into the air with wheels spinning, not arcing out into the deep water, but bucking and lurching, bouncing on squeaky shocks over the steep bank and down into the shallows with a noisy splash, the nose of the Vette nudging the water, engine stalled, the back end angled high into the air, as if the car were only dipping a toe in to test the temperature. The crowd pressed forward as Mr. Kesler sat for a few moments, looking out through the wind-shield, then shoved with his shoulder against the door twice until it popped open. He stepped out as if he'd arrived at someone's house for dinner, walking out into the waist-deep water, hat crooked on his head, his vest darkening as it soaked through, and then he slammed the door as much as he could and stood there, a little puzzled, while the flash of the camera kept freezing moments in brief whiteness and the crowd held back and Alison stared at him, open mouthed, not sure of what to say, and the engine sent up a hiss of white steam.

And then, all by itself, the Corvette started to roll.

Mr. Kesler moved back, almost losing his footing, and the car made a sound like scraping metal as ripples of water pushed out in front of it, bubbles escaping from underneath, rolling faster now, picking up speed down the steep slope of the bank, but still in slow motion. The water began raining into the open window, raining—only she knew this—on top of Mr. Rossi's hidden bronze box, filling her leather seats with water, filling the floorboards, water now up as high as the T-top, rushing into the space behind the back glass, the front fully submerged, the eight-track and Styx tape filling with water, her brakes, the round lenses of the taillights, the rounded bumper, and then it was gone completely, no more than a glimmer of silver under the water, a slow-moving flash you could almost glimpse, a hidden monster, a mythic fish.

Mr. Kesler smiled and waved his hat, wishing the Corvette a bon voyage. The crowd pressed around the rim of the lake, talking and pointing, many of them clapping now, the photographer snapping photos of Mr. Kesler, of the crowd, of the surface of the lake as the ripples healed over. Frieda Landry gripped her spiral book and her narrow pencil, writing and writing and writing, pink feather bobbing, tongue pushed to the corner of her mouth with the effort of getting it all down. But no matter how much and how fast she wrote, she could never write it all, could never get at everything contained in that moment, for it was too much, too spread out, too full of all those other moments that had already happened or were about to or would in time. She could not see enough, could not write how the Corvette gained momentum as it rolled down the pitched floor of the lake, a kind of slow-motion speed as it receded into murkiness, and how, a minute or two from this moment, it would come to rest five feet away from the stone bridge, its wheels mired in silt.

She could not write how even then the lid and welded seams of the brass box were leaking, how Mr. Rossi's ashes were slowly seeping out of the box, floating, drifting, and dispersing through the water, spreading out over Colaville like a cloud.

She could not write how, only minutes before, about the time that Gordon had closed and locked the door of the Corvette, Max had pushed the green button and the sticks of dynamite buried deep in the bones of the Hotel Morgantown had unfolded themselves in violence and explosion, one and then another and another, and how the building had paused, then buckled, then fallen neatly inside its own foundation.

She could not write about how later that night Alison, in the cold and quiet, would make one more trip to her empty garage and write in, for the last entry on Mr. Rossi's list, “A man in West Virginia had a Viking funeral in a 1976 Corvette.”

She could not write about the ghosts of Colaville, shy in their buildings, at home again, coming out slowly to gaze at the silver surface and graceful lines of the Corvette, the prettiest thing they'd ever seen.

She could not write that the shark's tooth felt right at home in the water.

She could not write about the thick column of black dust and soot that rose up as the Hotel Morgantown came down and how, at the center of that roiling black mass, high above, three paper airplanes—white, yellow, and pink—circled around and above all that was broken, like fragile doves, like torn angels.

And she could not write about the fetus growing in Sarah's womb, the source of all Sarah's recent fatigue and the product of Bill's hope—six weeks old as she scribbled, and, according to the list, already forming fingerprints.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B
RAD
B
ARKLEY
, a native of North Carolina, is the author of a novel,
Money, Love
, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a Book Sense 76 choice.
Money, Love
was named one of the best books of 2000 by the
Washington Post
and the
Library Journal
. Brad Barkley was also named as one of the “Newcomers of 2002: Breakthrough Writers You Need to Know” by
Book
magazine. German, Japanese, and Portuguese editions of Money,
Love
are forthcoming. He is also the author of a story collection,
Circle View
. His short fiction has appeared in over two dozen magazines, including the
Southern Review
, the
Georgia Review
, the
Oxford American
, the
Greensboro
Review,
Glimmer Train, Book Magazine
, and the
Virginia Quarterly
Review, which has twice awarded him the Emily Balch Prize for Best Fiction. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, once earning “Special Mention,” and was shortlisted in
Best American Short Stories, 1997
. His work will be anthologized in
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2002. A
story collection,
The Properties of Stainless Steel
, is also forthcoming. He has won four Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Brad Barkley teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University. He lives in western Maryland with his wife, Mary, and their two children.