Cadillac Cathedral Read Online Free PDF

he’d found behind Cougar Lake. No one could recall ever having seen a Renault before, orange or otherwise. Everyone wanted to have a look, everyone wanted to sitbehind the wheel and discover what it felt like to drive a French automobile. A French voiture ! Minnie Lewis swore she could smell Parisian perfume in the upholstery, though Arvo’s nose could recognize only mould. Brian Lundy closed his eyes and imagined, aloud, that he was cruising down the Champs Elysées, circling the Arc de Triomphe. But Arvo began to suspect the car might have been offended by this excessive attention, since no matter how much he tinkered, the damn thing rabbit-hopped across intersections as though it were trying to throw him through the windshield.
    When he’d realized there was no hope the others would allow him to establish a private relationship with the unruly foreign car, he removed all re-usable parts and stored them in the loft on the slim chance that another needy Renault might show up during his lifetime. The chassis quickly disappeared beneath the weeds and vines behind his house.
    It was possible that someone had seen him drive the Cathedral hearse onto his property, but they would have to be content with imagining what he was up to. The workshop’s windows were too high for anyone to see without going to the trouble of bringing an extension ladder.
    Not even Peterson and Herbie Brewer were welcome to watch. Once the hearse was safely inside his shop, he’d suggested they leave. “I never worked on a hearse before. I don’t want to think about anything else.”
    “You forget who found this thing?” Herbie said.
    “He knows who found her,” Peterson said. “He knows we showed him the way to get to her, too, so he could bring her back and act like he found her himself.”
    “Dammit,” Arvo said. “I’d like to get this out on the road first thing tomorrow. You think Martin can wait much longer?”
    Peterson was not happy about this, but Herbie reminded him that they’d promised Cynthia they would stop by to fix the catch on her gate. “She’s scared Glover’s bull will get into her yard and ambush her when she goes out to pull her carrots.”
    It wasn’t easy for Arvo to imagine a bull fierce enough to scare Cynthia Howard. She might be small — “wiry” was the word she used for herself — but she could be as “fierce” as any bull if she needed to be. He’d been told that even the tallest toughest student would cower when she gave them a certain side-long look, though he had never seen this for himself.
    As soon as he’d barred the pair of doors, and drawn the bolt across the inset door as well, he started up the hearse in order to listen closely to its engine. Only the slightest adjustment was needed in order to get it idling as smoothly as he knew it should. “She’s sounding hopeful,” he said. He turned the engine off and leaned in to test the fan belt with his fingers. Still strong enough. “We’ll soon be on our way, Martin, though I don’t suppose you’re any more interested in motors now than when you were alive.”
    The shed was narrower than his house but high enough for spare parts to be stored in the loft. The corrugated metal roof was laid over ten-inch beams that rested on rows of twelve-inch posts. His tools — hacksaw, pipe cutter, pliers, grease gun, socket wrench, grease gun — hung on the wall above his workbench, which ran the full length of one wall, with a powerful vise-grip mounted at one end and a coffee maker at the other, beneath a coloured magazine photo of Elizabeth Taylor in her Cleopatra costume. Sunlight came in through the row of small windows just below the roof-line.
    Beside the coffee maker and a goose-neck lamp was a kitchen chair where he could sit to read his mechanics magazines for a break without having to clean himself up and return to the house. Cans of motor oil and rolls of paper towelling sat next to the tower of JamesLee Burke crime novels, most of