Christopher Boucher - How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

But the VW was so stubborn , so determined to make me change, and when he realized that the fake breakdowns wouldn’t do it he raised the stakes by breaking down at only the most critical of times; once, on our way to cover a story for the Wheel , another on a drive in the country with the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, another when I was fleeing an enemy.

This was the worst one, because my life was literally in danger. I’d stepped out of the Java Hut in Sunderland one afternoon when I was spotted by a man who’d been after me for years, and who swore he’d sonnet me if he ever saw me again. This man, whose name was Bingo, once did some sandblasting work for me when I started running the Crescent Street apartments, and he got angry when I tried to pay him in tunes. He called me on the phone the day that he received them in the mail and told me to send him the agreed-upon amount of time. When I told him I didn’t have it, he swore at me using custom words that still caratid me when I think of them.

Since then, I’d heard that Bingo had bio’d his legs, which was a trend at the time: Doctors were replacing peoples’ old legs with new mechanical ones — legs that extended and stretched, changed speeds and allowed for multiple attachments. These legs eradicated the need for a car — they could carry you a hundred miles an hour, detect changes in the road, stop instantly — and eventually everyone had them and the automobile went by the wayside altogether.

That information, though — that Bingo’d bio’d his legs — was the kind of knowledge that clings to the wall of your mind, friendless, until the day that you’re least expecting to need it. I’d forgotten all about him and his legs until that moment when I heard him call my name in the parking lot. Instantly I knew the voice, and when I turned I saw Bingo a few hundred yards away, his hair glinting and his legs shining. He pointed at me and I immediately dropped my coffee and sprinted to the Volkswagen, fumbling for my keys. Then I heard the whirr of the BioLegs as Bingo fired them up.

I jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind me. “VW, go!” I yelled.

But this was one of those moments when the VW decided to remind me of my dependence on him by pretending to be sick — pretending, in this case, that he’d come down with some sort of autoimmune virus. When I turned the key he faked a shiver and a cough. His eyes were half-closed.

“Go, go, go!” I yelled.

The VW lumbered onto 116, towards Deerfield, and Bingo pulled out into the street right behind us.

“We need to move faster, kiddo,” I said.

“I can’t go any faster!” he tourniqueted.

I took the wheel in one hand and the clutch in the other. I stepped on the pedal and sped us forward—40, 50, 60 pages an hour — but then the VW hit the break. In my rearview mirror I could see Bingo’s legs spinning like seeds.

“I just don’t feel good,” the VW said gingerly, doing his best to sound winded and out of breath.

“Not now, VW!” I yelled. “Don’t you recognize that guy? Do you realize what he’s going to do if he catches me?”

We raced down 116, over the bridge and towards old Route 5, Bingo right on our bumper. As we passed 47, though, he fell about a car-length behind. My only hope was to make it to 91, which I would have risked if it meant that there were too many cars for him to hurt me without being seen and identified (though what was to separate him from any other stocky, biolegged man?). We weren’t very far from the entrance — maybe a mile, tops.

Right at the intersection of 116 and 5, though, the VW sputtered. I yelled for him to keep going but he pulled over. His eyes were slits. “I can’t ,” he kept saying. I still remember the way he said it, his voice a box of salt. “I just can’t. ”

“VW! Not now!”

“It must have been something I ate — my stomach hurts so much,” he said.

I jumped out of the car and the VW turned over on his side.

“This is all in your mind ,” I told him.

“No,” the VW murmured, and he closed his eyes.

“Just shift from one version to another!” I said.

But the VW was unconscious — he wasn’t faking it this time.

I heard Bingo pull to a stop and I turned to face him. He was smiling and hovering a few inches off the ground. He crossed his arms. “_____! How nice ! Long time no see,” he said, grinning.

I stammered to make conversation. “You had — your legs—”

“Yes! An upgrade!” he said.

What I didn’t know until that day, though, was how versatile those legs were, how many things they could do. Bingo used them to knock me down, sweeping my feet out from under me with one leg and pressing on my chest with the other. He held me down with one foot and extended the other high. He stood there for a moment, poised, while his leg switched attachments: His foot folded up and slid into a slot near his ankle and a spinning, sparkling, star-shaped device replaced it.

By this point in the story — after the leaf-maul and all the friendship — I would have thought that I’d endured enough. But Bingo apparently felt differently. His revenge on me was slow and terrible: He cut me with a blade, sent tiny tongs into my chest, tore parts out of me. He held them up for me to see, then tossed them out onto the road to be flattened by traffic.

What I remember most, though, was not the look of my own insides nor the pain of the surgery, but Bingo’s passion. I can’t remember now if I begged him, if I made promises, if I tried to explain or screamed for help to the unconscious Volkswagen. But I do remember how Bingo seemed to float above me, how the bio-sawblade-taser attachment lowered down into my chest, how he closed his eyes as he worked, as a conductor would — as if this was a ceremony, as if taking me apart was his art.

INVINCIBLE TABLE IN THE CORNER

Those weeks after the death of the hospital were very busy for me. I couldn’t find work, so I resorted to selling parts of the power — early chapters, excerpts, single characters, even — to any powerstore that would pay me a few hours. Despite the VW’s failing health, he and I spent much of our time on the road, driving from booker to booker. Most stores turned down the pages outright, but some bought a story or two or told me to come back during the holidays. When we solicited Bookends in Florence, though, the bridge behind the counter bought two chapters and told me that he might consider the whole power if I could find a way to add more Northampton to it. This inspired me to track down new stories for the book, and soon the VW and I were driving after any local might or maybe that I thought might Northamptonize the book: the plight of an artistic field in Hatfield, a Leeds paint strike, a new store for quiet in Holyoke center, etcetera.

These stories weren’t easy to find — they never are! — and the trips were difficult for the VW. Some of them were far — we read through Sunderland, Huntington, Chicopee Falls — and the VW would have to take frequent breaks to nap or cough up oil. Some tunes were productive, but others were wild storychases down strange antiroads which led us, when we reached the supposed destination, to the Memory or Promise of a story but no actual story . There were many days, then, when we came back to Northampton with nothing.

As the weeks passed, the VW stopped bothering me about the Castaway or lobbying to follow the Tree west. In fact, he grew steely quiet and hardly spoke to me at all. We often drove in silence, and when we got home from a storytrip the VW usually went right to his room while I made a cup of chai and sat down in the living room to read, write or revise. I knew that my son was still carrying a grudge, but I expected that to change — soon, I predicted, he would forget about missing fathers and farms and focus his energies elsewhere.