How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Read Online Free Page B

smiled.
    “Should I pick one, or two, or …?” I asked.
    “Pick as many as you want,” the Junkman said. “Fifteen a piece.”
    All afternoon, the Memory of My Father and I rummaged through hands. Finding the right one was not easy; some were threaded differently than my wrist, and others fit alright but were less responsive than my old hand. It was also hot and damp in the bus, and it smelled like some of the hands had rotted.
    Finally, I found a hand that seemed to fit. It was a little stiff in the thumb, but I hoped that some oil might be able to loosen it up. Just to be safe, I bought another complete set; they didn’t fit as well, but they’d work as a backup in a jam.
    We walked back through the fields in the late afternoon sun. As we rounded the corner I saw the VW, playing in the mud with an old laptop. “VW!” I yelled, and he looked over at me, his face a freezer.
    “What?” he said.
    “Look at you—you’re filthy,” I said.
    He looked at his elbow. “I am
not
,” he said.
    The Junkman walked out from his house and pointed at the three hands that I was holding. “Find what you need?” he said.
    The Memory of My Father took the hands from me and gave themto the Junkman, and he took a look at each one of them. Then he said, “All three, forty minutes.”
    “Thanks,” the Memory of My Father said.
    I paid the minutes and shook the Junkman’s hand with my one good hand, and then we got back into the VW. I put one hand on and put the spare hands in the trunk, and when I did I saw that the hood was covered with mud. I got in the car and we pulled onto Route 47. “VW,” I said. “What did I say about playing in the mud?”
    “You never said anything about not playing in the mud,” the VW said.
    “Did I, or did I not, tell you to make sure not to get dirty?”
    “He was just playing,” the Memory of My Father said.
    “I told you,” I said to the VW, “that I don’t have time to wash you every two seconds.”
    “You said
dirt
. But you never said anything about mud,” the VW said.
    I started to tell him that it was the same thing, but then I heard a violent crunch in the engine compartment. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw brown smoke. “What’s the matter?” I said to the VW.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Something’s burning, I think.”
    I pulled the car over, got out and opened up the engine compartment. When I did, I saw that my original hand—mangled and charred, and now missing a few fingers—had slipped out from between the firewall and the curtain, and was now caught in the flywheel. I reached my new hand in and pulled my old hand out. It was smoking, hot to the touch.
    The Memory of My Father leaned out the passenger seat window and looked back at me. “What’s up?” he said.
    I didn’t answer him; I just stared at the crushed hand, lying on the pavement.
    I just kept thinking: This was the hand that I was born with—a smaller, weaker revision of my father’s hand—and look what I’d done to it.
HOW WORKS A VOLKSWAGEN
    For years, the inner workings of the Volkswagen have been one of western Massachusetts’s great mysteries, kept by the few who could open the engine compartment and somehow make sense of what looks to most like a chaotic mix of plots and streets, tubes and tunes, metal and sky. Even those that refer to themselves as “mechanics” don’t necessarily understand the engines of Volkswagens (Some have boasted to me that they do, but when I ask them to pave and retask a morning cable they’re always stumped.). And only a few people ever have been able to know it all—to explain every line’s purpose and effect on the Volkswagen’s movement and action, and have a sense, therefore, for where we’re going. History tells us of great triumphs in the pursuit of such understanding—of the great monk Theo, for example, who knew his Volkswagen so well that in the 1980s he managed to start his ’66 Beetle from
twenty feet away
—and of great