Christopher Boucher - How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

The Dog leaned over and whispered in my ear. I could smell the prayer on his breath.

• • •

I handed in the story that afternoon, and I stood by Louise’s desk as she read it over. But she didn’t even get past the first line — the lede . She slapped the page with her cheese-wrist and looked up at me. “What is this supposed to be?” she said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Why am I reading about a grove of Kaddish Fruit trees here?”

I happened to have a fruit with me at the time, and I took a bite from it. “The CityDog gave me directions —it’s out behind the high school. I went and saw it myself — rows of them, perfectly ripe, all shining and commanding. I saw it and thought, ‘Now there’s a story!’ You know, we used to have a grove of these in the town where—”

“_____. Where’s the story about the canal?”

“There wasn’t much to that story. No one knew why the streets had filled. And they’re not doing anything to fix it.”

“The fact that the streets filled with water is the story,” she told me.

“How is that a story?” I said.

Louise held out her hands. “Something strange and unexpected happened — that’s newsworthy,” she said, her voice curbing and turning.

“But it’s just a change-and-changeback. The Kaddish one had long-lost religion. Discovery. Nature!”

Louise ran her cheese hands through her cheese hair and looked down at her notepad. “The Statue of Coolidge is holding a press conference at four — I want you there,” she said.

I nodded reluctantly and took another bite of my fruit.

Louise looked up at me. She pointed to my hand, the fruit-bodied prayer. “What is that?” she said.

“This?” I said. Everything felt free.

“Is that what I think it is?”

I smiled. “What do you think it is?”

“Don’t even tell me,” she said.

• • •

Needless to say, I had a lot to learn about journalism. After a little more than nine months, several failed assignments, and a number of disagreements over what was or was not a story, I left the Wheel and decided to dedicate myself to the Crescent Street apartments — to revive them, rent them, do my father proud.

But that didn’t work either. I just didn’t know enough. I could tell you a lot about Volkswagens, but home repair was a different screen altogether. I didn’t understand plumbing, couldn’t wrap my mind around the fundamentals of electricity. A pipe on the first floor burst, and then the burners downstairs broke and I couldn’t fix them. In the years that followed, I sold off every attribute inside them piece-by-piece in order to raise the time to take care of my son.

The story of the 57 Crescent Street house doesn’t crescendo, but fades out instead: Later, a few months after the death of my father, I finally ran out of options and time. I had to sell the place to my brother, the schoolteacher.

By that point the house was empty, and I was living in Deerfield with the Museum. One winter morning, my brother and I met at the house to finalize the deal. Neither I nor the Museum had been able to afford to keep a car or a bio, so I rode her bike all the way from Deerfield to Northampton for the meeting. By the time I got there my nose was a single vowel, nothing more.

Bry and I hadn’t spoken face-to-face in, I don’t know, years. As I stood there waiting for him I lit the fingers on my left hand and smoked them. The keys to the house wept into the pocket of my coat. “Please,” one of them said.

“Shut up,” I whispered, breathing fingersmoke into the amazing air. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Then my brother showed up in his Honda. He was older now; his eyes were closets and he was starting to lose his hair, like I had long ago. He met me on the steps and put his hand out. I handed over the keys without saying a word, stepped off the porch, got on my girlfriend’s bicycle and pedaled down the sidewalk and through the snow.

HOW WORKS A HEART ATTACK TREE

CONDITION

There’s no need to pocket because I know why you’re here: You want to know why and how a Heart Attack Tree works, why it would kill your mother — your father, your children — when it will strike again, where it lives and what we can do to stop it. You’re sick of the fucking changes . And so am I.

THE STORY

I may not have given in to the VW’s pleas to tell stories of traversing across western Massachusetts to look for the Heart Attack Tree, but I didn’t just accept the Tree’s crime either. I did what I could, first, to learn about Heart Attack Trees. Just a few days after I told the VW the Katydids, I took him over to the Smith College Library so we could do some research.

But our findings only echoed the Dogs’ claims: These trees were born with a powerful craving for story and heart, which they can smell in a human being’s chest. They eat the heart to get to the muscle, the story. Without concord nourishment, though, the tree grows foggy and “wanders around in a drug-like state, exhausted and confused.” *I learned that there are seventy-four breeds of Heart Attack Tree in America, and over fifty additional breeds in Europe. In the U.S., apparently, the Heart Attack Tree’s best weapon is anonymity; either they stay hidden in the woods, trying not to be noticed, or they enroll in the Federal Heart Program (FHP), which entitles them to three artificial hearts per day. (In Europe, incidentally, all Heart Attack Trees must register, and are branded with a ring around their trunk. Subsequently, many British Heart Attack Trees live in exclusive communities — pulmonary forests — in order to avoid public scorn.)

One power, though, elaborated further on the makeup of these “Art-Hearts”; apparently they’re made from paper, and bound with glue, and while most Heart Attack Trees attest that they taste sort of heart-like, they’re not nearly as savory or nourishing as the real thing. *They do help reduce attacks, though, and the FHP has a system in place for reprimanding those trees that do attack: They either lobotomize them, relocate them, or both. But they’re extremely hard to track. Many Heart Attack Trees remain fugitives because they never bothered to register with the FHP to begin with; this makes them almost impossible to identify or pick out of a lineup.

Plus, you never know whether you have the tree or its Memory!

The VW and I also started surveying the area. For a while there when I was working at the Wheel we stole away almost every afternoon, drove my VW into Amherst and spoke to anyone who might have seen a tree driving a farm. I interviewed houses, trees, 116 itself. (“I’ve seen farms driving along here from time to time,” the road told me, “but I never thought to look inside them and see who was at the wheel.”)

Then, one day in the spring of ’05, I tracked down a tree who matched the general description, and who’d reportedly gone missing just around the time that my father had.

That afternoon, the VW and I were driving through South Hadley when the VW had a hankering for chai. He began begging for it. I was on my way out to Mount Holyoke to interview an amphitheatre about a lawsuit, but the VW was beligerating — slowing down, whining, stopping abruptly. “So thirsty,” he gasped. “Need chai.”

“Stop it,” I told him.

“Can’t — parched. Need … milk and ginger,” he said.

I custom-swore at him and told him no, but finally I had no choice — he wasn’t going to keep going if I didn’t find him some chai soon. Luckily, the Thirsty Mind Café was right off 47 in the Village Commons, so I pulled over, grabbed my bag with my wallet inside and ran upstairs to the café.