Truck (11 page)

As far as my cowlick, I recall it fondly. As of this writing, a little ves
tige remains. For years I cursed the genes that set me up with a patch of hair that ran against the grain, little knowing that complete follicular failure was percolating in those same genes, and had been since the moment I was conceived. From the get-go, my hair was programmed to fall out. One is grateful this so rarely happens with the pancreas or the eyeballs.

By the time I cut it, I wasn't fussing with my hair much anymore, but now my beauty regimen is really streamlined. No need to use conditioner. No need to blow it dry. No need for combs. No hair in my eyes no matter which way the wind blows. Six minibottles of motel shampoo and I am ready to go for the year. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian sect that not only frowned on vanity but viewed long hair on a man as sinful. My hair experimentation was just that—experimentation, not rebellion—but members of the church still saw it as a form of defiance. I left the church long ago. In that sense, my going bald may have put me on the path to redemption.

 

I work the sanding wheel late into the night, clearing a larger and larger patch in the fender, which gleams ever more silver. Now and then I take a break to stoke the fire and rest in the orange chair. I wonder if I am about to introduce another woman to my family only to have them inquire after her fruitlessly a few months from now. I have never surrendered to cynicism, and I don't intend to start now, but over the past twenty-two years, certain patterns have been established.

I mailed a note to Anneliese today. Told her how much I enjoyed the evening. Made a wry comment about the pad thai. I've always been one for writing follow-up notes, probably because I'm so mumbly in the moment. For all my failed relationships, I can say I have never written a love letter I didn't mean.

And I have never written one I could bear to go back and read.

I
AM EAGER TO PLANT
the garden, but my mother, wise after decades of fickle springs, tells me to wait. Let the ground warm a bit more, she says. For now my seedlings will remain under their lamps.

It is still early days with Anneliese, but so far, so good. I went to her house for a sit-down dinner with several of her friends. While the food was being prepared, I joined Anneliese's daughter Amy in the living room. We set up a corral on the carpet and she instructed me in the choreography of plastic horses. I threw myself into the role, making clipclop noises and nickering in the way I thought a plastic horse might do. Things were going swimmingly and we were smiling broadly when Amy froze her horse in mid-canter and said, “You have funny teeth.”

Well, fair enough. I have a gap between my incisors that runs about an eighth of an inch. Officially, this is called a diastema. Madonna has one. So does David Letterman. Ditto the astounding Lauren Hutton. Sometimes I wear a T-shirt that says,
I'M GAP-TOOTHED, AND I VOTE!
and you better believe it. Because of the diastema, I can spit water like a human Super Soaker. When the time is right, I will show this trick to Amy and perhaps win her love forever.

 

As far as the community is concerned, Anneliese and I had our official coming-out party as a couple when we dined together at the recent New Auburn Area Fire Department annual chicken barbecue dinner. Ostensibly a fund-raiser, the chicken dinner generates a few hundred bucks
for our department every year, but the main purpose of having it is to have it. Along about mid-morning we drive all the rigs out of the fire hall and park them in a row along the street so folks can gawk at them on the way in. Next we take to the empty truck bays with a garden hose and push brooms, sweeping up the grit and sluicing it down the cast-iron drain grates. When the floor is clean we rummage around in the storage racks at the back of the hall until we find the spray-painted plywood signs that say
CHICKEN B-B-Q 4–8 PM FIRE HALL
. A couple of the guys toss the signs in a pickup and run around town planting them at strategic intersections—one out by the freeway exit, one by the stop sign just past the railroad tracks, and one up where Elm Street hits Old Highwy 53, just up from the fire hall. We used to put a sign in the parking lot of St. Jude's to catch all the Saturday-afternoon Catholics, but since Bishop Burke closed the church, that demographic is lost. There was some protest over the closing and even television cameras, but Bishop Burke is not one to trifle. I went to the final service just to show solidarity for my Catholic friends—the ones who tithed this modest building into existence and regularly opened their doors to people of other faiths when room was needed (including my brother, on the day he buried his first wife). Bishop Burke looked a little pinched, but he did not waver. That boy is going places.

Next come out the folding tables and chairs. Over in a building on Pine Street they have a machine that converts plastic beads into plastic tablecloths for Wal-Mart, and they give us as much as we need, as well as cardboard barrels for the trash. We tape the tablecloths to the underside of the table, and set each table with a bowl of sugar packets and creamer, as well as a salt-and-pepper set, the ones sold in a shrink-wrapped two-pack and fitted with plastic tops that allow you to select “pour” or “sprinkle” with a twist of your fingertips.

Every year, the rookie lowest on the roster has to scrub the toilet. This year it's Ronnie. We wait until he's in to his elbows, then one of the guys sneaks in behind him and snaps a Polaroid with the camera we use to document accident scenes. As soon as the picture develops, we tape it to the white board in the meeting room, where it will remain on display until someone new joins the department and bumps Ronnie up
a rung. Later, when Ronnie's wife arrives, we will make sure she sees the picture, so she knows he is capable of such a thing.

 

After the dining area is set up, we start cleaning chicken. For the sake of sanitation, we use the medical gloves from the rescue truck, so everybody has blue hands. The chickens arrive plucked and quartered, so “cleaning” basically consists of giving them the once-over and thumbing out the kidneys. This year we went through four hundred and fifty quarters and a bunch of drummies for the kids. The meat is only partially thawed, and halfway through the job my thumb tips ache with cold. I am working beside Bob the One-Eyed Beagle, and because he is a butcher, the cold meat doesn't bother him at all. We work standing around a rectangular folding table and joke and yap and flick each other with kidney bits.

A couple of the guys on the department have rigged up a barbecue trailer. It's basically a steel box the size of a small Jacuzzi set on wheels and fitted with a hitch. Tim, one of the designers, backs it around behind the hall, parks it just outside the back door, and levels it with the trailer jack. Every year Tim and the chief argue about how much charcoal is required. And every year it winds up being eight bags, one dumped in each corner, two in the center, and two bags added later. After the application of enough lighter fluid to defoliate Rhode Island, whoever has the charcoal lighter sticking out of his back pocket sets each pile aflame.

While the charcoal burns, we pack the chicken on three grates made from industrial-strength expanded metal. The grates are hinged so they shut like a book. You put the chicken on one side and then fold the other side over and latch the handles. The chicken is squeezed tight so that when the grates are flipped back and forth on their center pivot, the quarters stay put. If we arrange them carefully, we can get forty-five quarters on each grate.

When the briquets are flickering white, Tim uses a shovel to spread them evenly across the bottom of the trailer. Then we lower the grates in place. The chief grabs an industrial-sized lemon pepper shaker and
douses all the quarters, and then we settle in for what is always the best part of the day—the tending of the chicken.

For the most part, this is a hen party for roosters.

 

We have a pretty good chunk of cooking time before the crowd arrives. Some of the guys smoke, some dip a new chew, some nurse a soda, some stuff their hands in their pockets and just stand around. We fiddle with our ball-cap bills and tell stories. There was the time I roared up first on scene with the new brush rig at a cornfield fire and then couldn't get the pump to start. Finally an untrained bystander reached in and turned off the kill switch. Eric remembers how he and I were making an interior attack on a barn fire when I spun around and hollered, “I think I left my teakettle on!” When he wound up running a tanker shuttle into town, he swung by my house and let himself in the back door. Sure enough, upstairs in the bedroom where I do my writing, the hot plate was on, the kettle was starting to scorch, and the plastic whistle had melted.

The story stick passes around. Ryan fell through the ice on his way to go fishing last winter. He went all the way to the bottom and bounced back to the top without losing his fire pager. Now we call him the human fish finder. Ryan in turn reenacts the night Bob the One-Eyed Beagle bent over to pull up his bunker pants and we all saw the hearts on his boxer shorts. Every now and then flames spring up from the briquets and the chief knocks them down with his trusty squirt bottle. It's what a fire chief does. At regular intervals, we flip the chicken.

We keep a big steel pot of water boiling off to the side on an LP burner. The pot is filled with gizzards and sliced onions. Every now and then you jab a gizzard, dash it with salt and pepper, and then eat it. It's hard to wait for it to cool, and you wind up chewing in fast breathy bites.

This year the chief is armed with a digital meat thermometer and he keeps jabbing the chicken. “It ain't done,” says the chief.

“It's done,” says Tim.

“Hell if it is!”

“Hell if it ain't!” And so on.

“Guaran-damn-teeya, first person brings their chicken back 'cause it's red on the bone, I know whose ass I'm gonna chew.”

We're already unloading the rack, using steel tongs to snatch the quarters and drop them into insulated coolers lined with butcher paper. The meat is seared with the diamond pattern of the metal grates and you can't hardly stand not to pick at it. Tim pulls a quarter apart to test it. We all stab our hands in, stripping off pieces. The plain meat tastes so good in the open air. Even better are the bits of chicken skin stuck to the grate. Crispy, greasy, smoked, and tangy with lemon pepper. At this point we'd be happy to take down the signs and eat the whole works ourselves. We pick the steel clean. Then we put on fresh gloves and pack the grates with chicken again. There is the age-old question of why men who won't heat their own macaroni water will nonetheless hump forth to grunt and wave sharp sticks over meat cooked al fresco. Ours is an emancipated department, recently hovering near a dead-even fifty-fifty distribution of men to women. And yet, elements of the chicken feed tend to break down along the lines of sex. Each member of the department is expected to provide a tray of bars for the dessert table, which is set up against the wall in the space usually occupied by the brush truck. The table is stacked edge to edge with desserts. Not a single one baked by a married man. This is nothing new. When Jimmy Smith joined the department a year after his wife, Brianna, he said it was because he was sick of making brownies. Of all the bachelors on the department, I am the only one who baked his own tray of bars. The other single guys just brought store-bought cookies. Which I might as well have done, as my bars are inedible. The recipe was simple. Oatmeal bars with chocolate frosting. Mix oatmeal with Karo syrup, spread on a pan, bake. Not sure how you screw that up, but I did. The syrup turned so hard it is as if the oatmeal is set in amber. I frosted them anyway. It was like spreading spackle on chipboard. I had to use a cleaver to cut the individual squares, leaning all my weight on the blade and rocking back and forth. Then I plated them under plastic wrap and made a show of putting them on the table. The important thing here isn't that you
make
bars or that people
like
your bars, it's that your fellow firefighters and auxiliary members see you coming through the door
with
bars.

I mentioned the need for bars to Anneliese the week prior. She detected my hopeful tone, and did not go for it. “Our relationship,” she said, “has not reached the stage where I make your bars.”

 

While the second batch of chicken is cooking, I sneak home to straighten up the house in preparation for Amy and Anneliese, even running a vacuum over the living room rug. When I get back to the hall the rescue truck is just returning from a medical call. I didn't hear the pager over the noise of the vacuum. I make the mistake of saying so. “Why are you
vacuuming,
Mikey!?” asks the Beagle.

Big laughs all around.

As soon as the second batch of chicken is done, I sneak home one more time to shower and put on a clean department T-shirt. When I get back this time, the brush truck is just returning. This time I missed a small grass fire. The pager went off while I had my head under the shower. Remarking my second missed call in a row, the Beagle says, “Mikey, yer gettin'
all
tuned up!” More laughs.

We set up the serving benches. Napkins, plastic silverware, and Styrofoam trays to the right. Then buns and butter. The chief's wife has made gigantic tubs of cole slaw and potato salad, which we'll transfer to serving bowls and ladle out with ice-cream scoops. We have two Crock-Pots brimming with pork and beans. The chicken in the insulated coolers cools if you flap the lid, so we serve it from Nesco roasters. The Nesco roaster is as essential to community functions as folding chairs and willing citizens. It is the centerpiece of family reunions and church suppers and graduation parties. I like the older version best, all overbuilt and sturdy, a cross between a chamber pot and a bathtub, an enameled white Buick of an appliance. Lately here they've sort of leaned out the design, adding contemporary graphics and a ventilated handle, and I intend to write them a letter. Much of the comfort in the classic Nesco roaster derives from the old-school sturdy look. It is the tugboat of comfort food, and should not be fiddled with.

We place the drinks table just inside the doorway leading from the serving bench to the big truck bays where the dining tables are. Another
folding table, two more coolers, one filled with water, one with punch mixed by the gallon, and two big thirty-cup aluminum coffeemakers flanked by stacks of Styrofoam cups bearing the logo of a local insurance company. For the cold drinks, we have plastic Budweiser cups left over from the Jamboree Days beer tent. Between the roasters, Crock-Pots, and coffeemakers, we always blow the breakers. While the chief cusses and punches the reset, four of the guys rustle up extension cords and braid them every which way, spreading the load so we can eke by.

I am still helping with the setup when Anneliese arrives. Amy is trailing behind her, weepy because the training wheel on her bicycle has loosened. Tim, who has three girls of his own, grabs a wrench and fixes the problem. He is a big man, and Amy looks at him with reservations until he puts her back on the seat and she pedals away smiling. I can see Anneliese is talking to a couple of the firefighter's wives. It's cool and overcast, and she must have stopped by the house, because she is wearing my old flannel shirt. There is no better way to quicken a man's breath.

 

The first trickle of customers arrive, mostly elderly couples. Lieutenant Pam takes their money at the folding card table and makes change from the tin box, then they move around to the serving bench where each person picks up a Styrofoam tray. Most of the men wrap their plastic fork, spoon, and knife in a napkin and tuck the package in a pocket—front of the dress shirt for the older generation, back of the jeans for the younger. A few “lakers” up from the city call their order in, then pick it up to take back to the cabin. A pair of sisters who live in the retirement village call on the phone, and we send someone over there with the order. Shortly the trickle picks up speed, until before you know it the line is wrapped around the garage and the walls echo with chatter and the scrape of chairs.