Mary Motor Pool

By William Wresch

As Mary would summarize her story:
“It all started when I found a wallet. Routine maintenance on a fifteen-passenger van and out drops a wallet. That gets me fired. The next day I am in Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency. They have a job for me. For reasons of their own, they want me to do a series of YouTube videos on car maintenance for women. Odd, right? Six months later, I am popular enough to warrant an invitation to a big convention and a chance to meet auto executives. One was from China. The guy was gorgeous. Treated me right. Would I go with him to China? Absolutely.
Loved the man, lived with the man, almost married the man. Change in direction (he married someone else). I stayed in China and did some tourism videos for Chinese cities. That somehow led to bit parts in local movies. Bit parts became bigger parts. The movies I did were of interest to the Chinese government, and to our government. My interest was in the director. Loved the man, lived with the man, decided he would be my husband and the father of my children. Complications along the way? Yup. But he was the one. I was sure. Well, mostly sure.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Wresch
• Release date: May 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215623022

William Wresch

I have three sets of books here. The first is an alternative history of the US, envisioning how things might have gone had the French prevailed in the French and Indian War. That series comes from some personal experiences. I have canoed sections of the Fox, and driven along its banks. I have followed the voyageur route from the Sault to Quebec and traveled from Green Bay to New Orleans by car and by boat. My wife and I have spent many happy days on Mackinac Island and in Door County. The Jessica Thorpe series is very different. It takes place in the tiny town of Amberg, Wisconsin, a place where I used to live. I wanted to describe that town and its troubles. Initially the novel involved a militia take over of the town, and it was called "Two Angry Men." But both men were predictable and boring. I had decided to have the story narrated by the town bartender - Jessica - and I soon realized she was the most interesting character in the book. She became the lead in the Jessica Thorpe series. I restarted the series with a fight over a proposed water plant with Jessica balancing environmental rights and business rights. I put Jessica right in the middle of a real problem we are experiencing here in Wisconsin (and most other places). How badly does a tiny town need jobs? How much environmental damage should we accept? The third series changes the lead character. Catherine Johnson solves mysteries. She also travels. It took her to many places I have been. The last several books take place in Russia. I admit I have no idea what is motivating the current madness there. Catherine looks, she tries to help, she struggles. What else can any of us do?

Book preview

Chapter 1

I get Fired

I found a wallet. That’s how everything started. It was that simple. I was doing scheduled maintenance (four months after it was due) on a fifteen-passenger bus. This one was handicap accessible. You don’t get many handicapped people coming to a water park, but we do get a few. Maybe bit of introduction here. Wisconsin Dells is the waterpark capital of the world. They say so. It might even be true. The water parks are certainly large enough. Mine had thousands of rooms, two golf courses, and six massive water parks with lazy rivers, towering slides, and endless bars serving umbrella drinks. The place was so big it needed small buses just to get customers from one end to the other.

Get the idea? Huge place, hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, and one maintenance shed. Oh, and one maintenance worker – me – Mary Motor Pool. No, that’s not what they called me in the Dells. I was just hey you. Mary Motor Pool was my Navy name. Another story for another day.

But, back to the wallet that got me fired. I did engine maintenance first. Mostly an oil change. Two quarts out, eight quarts in. The buses were always low on oil, and all were driven by people who didn’t give a damn -- and at nine dollars an hour, why should they? So, out comes the blackest, thickest oil, and in goes whatever oil the company could buy in bulk. Done. I checked the tires (all were low on pressure), ran a quick check on tie-rods (had one break a few months ago), then did the only serious cleaning the bus had gotten since the summer season began.

I swept everything to the back of the bus, and decided I would open the back door and extend the handicap ramp as a quick way to sweep everything out. The ramp is pretty simple. Basically it folds in half and stands at the back of the bus. You set all kinds of safety switches in the driver’s area, then open the back door (from outside), and press a large green control switch. Hydraulics push out the bottom of the ramp’s back half, and as it extends, the ramp straightens and drops to the ground. Not a bad ramp, actually. Reasonable incline a person could manage in a wheelchair.

Everything worked just like it should, but I heard something drop underneath. A wallet. It had been caught between the two halves of the ramp, and now that they were open and extended, the wallet dropped to the floor. I picked it up, saw there was money, credit cards, and ID in it, and put it in my pocket. Big water parks have big lost and founds. This would just go in with all the sunglasses and car keys lost by poolside drunks.

Back to cleaning, back to a final check on the bus, back in service. I called the transportation office to tell them their bus was ready and parked the bus outside. Next bus, next oil change/ refill. About an hour later they dropped off yet another bus for me to work on and picked up the bus I had finished that morning. I gave the driver (Joey) the wallet and told him where I had found it. He said he would take it to the lost and found. Why didn’t I do it? Because my maintenance shed is clear out by the golf courses hidden in a grove of trees. Who wants to see a lot full of broken vehicles and a crappy repair shop while on vacation?

So he got the bus and the wallet and drove off. Now, before I explain how I was fired, let me explain that I am not a complete idiot. I did open the wallet, count the money (one thousand, two hundred and two dollars), count the credit cards (four), and scan the ID (Maryland driver’s license). I told Joey what I had counted. He repeated it back to me. Off he went.

The next day I was fired. No one was going to drive clear out to the maintenance shed to fire me. And they didn’t want to fire me mid-shift. They waited until I had done maintenance on four buses, then texted me. I was to report to HR. Fine. I cleaned most of the grease off my hands, got into my ten-year-old Honda Civic, and drove down to the HR office.

If you don’t mind a little description, the HR office is located in what looks like a college dorm. Six floors of rooms, with offices on the ground level. Who lives in the dorm rooms? Foreign college kids in the US on J-1 visas. Supposedly for cultural experiences and work experience. They get an interesting view of our culture as they wait tables and change bedding. And, the waterparks would collapse without them. The Dells has a population of about three thousand. If every man, woman, and child worked for the water parks, the parks would need to hire five thousand more. Would average American families move to nowhere Wisconsin for a seasonal job paying nine dollars an hour? Nope. So the parks bring in thousands of kids from around the world.

So, I parked my car, walked past a group of kids not much younger than me, and told the receptionist I was here. She looked at my hands, looked at my clothes, raised an eyebrow and sent me to a room down the hall. I passed three offices with smiling ladies speaking slowly to new hires from somewhere on the planet and got to an open door and an older guy staring at a form.

I got a wave to come in and a finger pointed at a chair. I sat. He glanced at me, then studied the form again.

How much money did you say was in the wallet you found?

Oh shit. Obviously money was missing. Obviously I was screwed. The best I could do was answer the question and hope the cops weren’t on their way.

One thousand, two hundred and two dollars.

So you say. Joey says it was twelve dollars.

Now I am pissed. Not that Joey stole twelve hundred dollars. Joey works two jobs and hasn’t seen a dentist in decades. He has maybe four teeth left, and they don’t look a healthy color. So, I had no real problem with him stealing the money. He needed it. But why not tell me he was going to do it? Tell me there would be twelve dollars in the wallet when he turned it in. It would be a risk for both of us, but we might have gotten away with it. Now? One or both of us was out of a job. I was guessing me.

Time to shut my mouth until a court-appointed lawyer thought up some angle. Restitution? I had no idea where I would find twelve hundred dollars. Community service? Maybe I could make that work for me. Meanwhile, old guy watches me sweat. Bastard.

Well?

I’ve got nothing more to say.

The owner is thinking of pressing charges. Two thousand dollars is a lot of money. Maybe they will press the DA to charge you, maybe they won’t. In the meantime, we want you gone. I want you to sign this termination form. You will get a check in the mail for your final hours. Sign the form, give me your ID badge, and go away.

And that’s what I did. I read the form carefully. It didn’t accuse me of theft or anything else. It was just me resigning. The company didn’t want it known that employees stole. Fine. Should I have fought the charge? Maybe. But the job sucked, and I had no idea where the two thousand number was coming from. Some shady customer looking to make trouble? Some insurance scam? The company was taking their word over mine. No surprise. I signed the form, dropped off my badge, and walked away.

Chapter 2

Weird pizza

Now what? I can’t say that I was thinking too clearly. I got in my car, and my car seemed to drive itself. Where do I usually go after work? Pizza Ranch. Cheap food, all you can eat, haven’t been sick once. The car parked in my usual spot, I paid the early-bird price, and I made myself a salad. Bleu cheese dressing (you have to be from Wisconsin to like it), and lots of onions. Normal dinner, normal table, not-so-normal situation. I had a few jobs in my brief college career – never got fired. Three years in the navy – never got fired. Seven months in the Dells – fired. I had trouble adjusting to it.

I always give myself a four-course meal at Pizza Ranch. Salad first. Fried chicken plus potatoes and gravy are course two. Yes, not the ideal food, but I work hard and burn plenty of calories. And the chicken is pretty good.

I loaded my plate and went back to my seat. They had taken my dirty salad plate, dropped off clean utensils, and – this was strange – given me a place mat. That was a first. Especially since this was one of those kid place mats. You know, Johnny won’t eat his vegetables, and while you bargain with him (eat half those vegetables and I let you have ice cream), you keep him busy drawing on his placemat.

This one had word searches. A dozen rows and columns, and you were supposed to draw lines around words you found. I did. Chicken pieces in one hand, I pulled a pen from my pocket and went after words. I found one word. The same word twenty times, vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. Cuidado. If you missed it in high school Spanish, it means careful. Mostly I see it in rest rooms if they have just washed the floor.

Okay, so I have a kid’s placemat under my plate, it is in Spanish, and it only has one word. And I checked – just one word in English or Spanish. Cuidado. Careful. What kind of placemat was I using? Who needed to be told twenty times to be careful? How’s that for odd?

Third course – pizza. Not bad. Usually eight or ten kinds available. Take a plate and pick a few slices. I did. Back at my seat – old plate is gone, and so is my old placemat. New placemat. A maze. Start at one point and draw a line to the middle of the maze – a picture of a rural home. So, pizza in one hand, I start drawing lines. But the maze is defective. Every route I take gets me directly to the center of the maze – home. Eight times I get to home. So, just to be contrary, I start looking for routes that will not get me home. Do I find one? Nope.

Fourth course – ice cream. They had one of those machines that makes ice cream. You pull down a handle and out comes ice cream. Hold a dish under, get as much ice cream as you want, and life is good. Even if you have been fired. Even if finding a new job might be hard. Even if you find yet another weird placemat at your seat. This one is a picture. Or an outline of a picture. Kids are supposed to color it in.

It was a pretty strange picture. A desert scene looking down from a mountain. A road curved through some cacti and there were rock formations here and there. Nothing to attract a kid. No fuzzy bunnies or happy bears. Just a road through the desert. A road with a weird center line. The dashes that marked the center line were uneven. It started out long, short, long, short. Then it was short, long. Then short, long, short, short. Sloppy art? A printer that didn’t copy well? No, there was a pattern to the sloppiness. I read the center line. Morse code. C A L L No numbers after, but I guessed if I stayed for more ice cream I’d find a new placemat with numbers.

I didn’t want more ice cream, and I didn’t want more placemats. And I have to admit I was getting grumpy. I wanted a quiet meal. My usual meal. Comfort food. Getting fired over two thousand dollars I hadn’t stolen (and Joey hadn’t either) was enough disturbance for a day. I didn’t need my nightly meal to be anything other than routine.

So I left.

Home is Montello. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it. People from Wisconsin haven’t heard of it either. It’s a small town on the Fox River but not near an interstate. Important when the Fox was important. Not so important now, although it has a huge gas station with a waterfall. Just saying, if you are ever in the neighborhood…

Back in my Honda Civic, my car almost took the same turn it takes every other night – back to Montello and home. But I stopped at the end of the parking lot. Not tonight. Time for Portage.

Do you have a special place? Some place you go to think through problems, or remember special times, or just feel somehow more relaxed? To me, that place is Portage Wisconsin. If you are from Wisconsin, you are laughing your ass off since Portage is just a sorry old town. No one goes there. You drive past on Interstate 39. Maybe you get gas. But mostly you just drive past.

Me too. Except. There is a place. I said Montello is on the Fox River. If you are from Wisconsin, you know a bit of French history. Marquette and Joliet took the Fox to the Wisconsin River and then down to the Mississippi. For a century or so it was a major trade route. Now it’s been chopped up and dammed up into little lakes that fill with weeds and scum in the summer. No longer famous, no longer navigable.

But when I was in high school a bunch of us canoed from Montello to Portage – the place where the Fox meets the Wisconsin River (and you portage your canoes from one river to the other). We never made it. Too much beer, too much fooling around, too many mosquitoes. But the next weekend the boy I shared a canoe with drove me down to Portage to see where the rivers meet. There is a canal the last mile or so, and a lock that used to lower boats from the Fox down to the Wisconsin. It doesn’t work anymore. The canal is filled with trash and the lock is filled with sand. But there is a little park. Barry and I stood there for a while saying profound things about history and change and Marquette and Joliet.

He held my hand for a while. And he repeated everything we had learned in history class while I pretended it was all new to me. I stood close and thanked him for bringing me. I thought one thing might lead to another. It didn’t. He took some other girl to prom. I decorated the gym.

So. Bad memory? A rusty river lock? Why go there? A different memory.

First, the location. If you go, the lock is on Lock Street, right off the main east west route (Highway 33). Be careful where you park. There’s four houses next to the lock and one guy does not want your car in front of his house. I have never seen any cars parked in front of any of the houses, but, well, some people. I got down there in about half an hour, parked under some trees, and climbed the hill to the lock.

Now. Why? Not the view. You do get to see a long stretch of the Wisconsin river, plus the canal and lock. But there is something else. Marquette even mentions it in his journal (yes, we read an English translation in our history class). The Fox flows back to Green Bay and the Great Lakes. Farther along that flow is Quebec. Their home. The Fox would lead them back there. The Wisconsin flows west and south and then meets the Mississippi which flows even more south. Marquette didn’t know where the Wisconsin River went, but it was obvious it went away from home.

Having taken a geography course in college, I could put the rivers in a different context. The Fox was part of the Great Lakes Water Shed. The Wisconsin was part of the Mississippi Water Shed. There is a place where you can stand on the grass next to the old lock, and if rain falls on your left shoulder, it will drop to the Fox, begin flowing, and end up in the North Atlantic. If it rolls off your right shoulder, it will hit the Wisconsin and end up in the Gulf of Mexico. A foot left or right at Portage, but thousands of miles difference in the ultimate journey.

So why was I standing on that grass two hours after being fired? It was a decision time for me. An inflection point. What I would do in the next few days was likely to take my life in a new direction. Maybe a direction as different from the North Atlantic as the Gulf. This was where I stood when I picked the college I would attend (UW Stevens Point), what I would major in (math), and – when my parents divorced and I decided to quit college – this was where I decided to join the Navy. Major changes in my life. All of them.

Now? This felt different. I looked left up the canal, or right down the Wisconsin, and I wasn’t feeling like I was making a choice. I was being pushed. Maybe my choice was to push back. But I thought of that high school girl who stood here with a boy, and later stood here picking a college, and I wondered how any of that had put me in a maintenance shed in Wisconsin Dells. Which river had led me there? Twenty-four years old and my life was changing oil and sweeping out buses. How had that happened?

I looked up the Fox canal – trash-filled and stagnant. That route gave Marquette comfort. It would take him home. As it turned out, he never used it to go home. He came back north on the Illinois River as far as present-day Chicago, then paddled up the western shore of Lake Michigan. He never saw the Fox again. And he never saw home. He died on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Me? Home was Montello, sharing a small house with my mother. Working some silly job, waiting for some HR flunky to fire me, or lay me off, or just ignore me while I performed some task hour after hour, year after year. No. Wrong river.

I wanted the other river. The one that took me to new lands. Great thought. But. How would I get started on that new river?

Chapter 3

A visitor

The sun was setting. Time to climb down the hill and get back in my car. I had just turned in that direction when a new car arrived. A really cool Miata convertible. Blue. It parked right in front of the no parking sign. Out stepped this tiny woman/girl. She looked like she might be too young to drive, but there she was, sliding out of the car wearing this white silk sack dress. Not sure what else to call it. Long sleeves, off the shoulder, skirt well north of her knees. But shaped like it might be a potato sack. It just hung all over her and blew in the wind. She looked up the hill, waved to me and started climbing in stiletto heeled sandals.

Did I know her? I certainly didn’t recognize her. And I was pretty sure I would remember. She was tiny. Maybe five two. Size zero. Dark brunette parted in the middle to frame her face. Big smile. Big blue eyes. Heart shaped face. I thought anime. But she seemed real enough. She waved again as she climbed. As she neared the top, she reached out to me, and I took her hand to help her up the final rise.

It’s lovely up here.

Big smile. She kept hold of my hand. Looked at me, looked past me at the river, looked at me again.

Yes.

That’s me. Always with something clever to say. I just stood there and waited for her to move the conversation along. She did.

This isn’t home, and this isn’t safe, but I can see why you like it. Famous crossing, right? Marquette and Joliet portage over this rise, drop into the Wisconsin and become legends.

They gave France the Mississippi water shed, including the Ohio River and the Great Lakes.

And Montello.

She had this easy, comfortable smile, just two women chatting like we climbed this hill together nightly. Oh, and she was still holding my hand. I was baffled.

You were at the Pizza Ranch.

Yes. Odd name. I thought maybe you lassoed your pizza or something.

I was supposed to call someone.

Yes. You got the easy part. I am a bit disappointed you didn’t understand the rest of the message.

You didn’t leave a number.

Of course we did. You’ve been getting numbers all day. My phone’s in my car. Let’s go see if you know the number to call.

She pulled my hand, and we started down the hill. I should say I’m five six and well, larger than a size zero. So I didn’t have to go where she pulled me. But I went. Curious. And at this point I was thinking more about numbers than about where she was leading me. I just followed. She got behind the wheel of her pretty Miata and pointed to the passenger seat. Tiny car. But pretty cool. Leather seats. Very comfortable. A girl car. Sorry guys, I know you think it’s a sports car, and it is, but it really is sized for women. I slid in, closed the door, and took her phone.

Numbers? I was thinking numbers. She was driving.

Where are we going?

I’ll drive. You dial.

Dial what? What numbers did I know? One I knew for sure – the amount in the wallet I had found. One thousand, two hundred and two dollars. 1202. Shit. How brain dead did I have to be to not recognize that number? Country code 1, area code 202. Washington DC. But the last seven digits? I had been hit with four digits – the two thousand dollars claimed to be in the wallet. 2000. Maybe the last four digits of the number? What about the middle three numbers? Two thousand minus twelve oh two. Seven ninety eight. I started dialing.

Good evening, Mary. Are you enjoying your ride?

Where is she taking me?

A good question. Another question might be why you got into her car? But neither is really important. What matters is you are with her. Hopefully the start of a beautiful friendship. Enjoy the trip, Mary. And upgrade your puzzle skills. You should have called me an hour ago.

Female voice. Reminded me of my math teacher in high school. Pre-calc. How could I have missed the derivative? She expected more from me. Sent me off to college a math major when I had thought history was more interesting. Calculus had only one right solution. History had so many.

My car?

A reasonable question. She had turned on to the interstate. It didn’t look like we would be going back to Portage any time soon.

It will be taken care of.

And I am to trust you and assume everything is fine because you have a number in Washington?

Pretty much. Trust has to start somewhere, why not with that?

Big smile. An interesting smile. The wind was blowing our hair around, over and around our faces. She pointed to the glove box. I found two baseball