How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Read Online Free

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.
    * A fact that my son had a very hard time with. I told him, “You may drive the same routes as Muir’s cars, kiddo—that doesn’t mean you
are
one!”

II. HOW WORKS A VOLKSWAGEN
REAR DIFFERENTIAL
    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