How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Christopher Boucher

Author:Christopher Boucher [Boucher, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-006-8
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2011-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

JAWS

If the quiet, teethy taupe of your VW’s dashboard legumes, the VW is asking for Jaws—the Jaws Junkyard, on Route 66 in Westhampton. There are several junkyards in western Massachusetts—Highway Auto, Ludlow Salvage—but I know of no other yard as volkstocked as Jaws. They literally have rows of VW corpses to pick through. Also, they have a car in the front yard that was once a shark. I’m serious; it has fins and teeth but it drives on the road. I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.

I think of Jaws now and my lungs ache. How many afternoons, pre-attack, did I spend there with my father, picking through bodies for parts for our cars?

What I’m saying is, they have great prices.

If you do go to Jaws, though, remember that not all Volkswagens are the same. Some have external feeders, others have internal ones and some burn paperless altogether. I once lifted up an engine compartment lid on a VW at Jaws and found a nest of screaming birds. I opened another and found a field of crops. Where were the morning cables—the combustion chambers? I have no idea how it could be that the inside of each was so different, but there it was, for our review, the VW undercover variation.

Even so, always be sure that the part they give you is right for your car—the balloons at Jaws’ll sell you any old part they can.

One time, the VW and I went out to Jaws to see about getting a new believer—the circuit which connects the storypump via sunrise to the middle transmission. In the weeks before that, the VW had stopped believing in almost everything—the road, the book of power, every story I told him. That’s how I knew his believer was shot.

So I did what I had done so many times before—I drove us out to Westhampton, parked the VW at the salvage yard entrance and stepped into the office trailer. I spoke to a dirty red balloon who was sitting behind the counter, reading a magazine and eating a grinder.* When I leaned against the desk I could hear the stories in his chest—one about volume, another about a new set of curtains. He looked up at me and I said, “Looking for a new believer for my son.”

The balloon put down his food and swiped his hands together. Then he picked up a clipboard. “What year is your son’s car?”

“He is the car.”

“What year?”

“Seventy-one,” I said. “Beetle.”

The balloon flipped a page on the clipboard. “Only one we have is a four-point from a state prison.”

“A prison,” I said.

The balloon nodded. “It should work. Beliefs for Bugs and state prisons—” he scanned the page—“should be interchangeable.”

“You sure?”

“That’s what the listing says.”

“You don’t have any VW believers—factory parts?”

The balloon let out a little air. “This is the only believer that I have on the whole lot,” he said.

“How much?”

“Three and a half,” he said.

“Could you order a Volkswagen-type believer from another yard?”

“I can put your name on a list,” he said.

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