Truck (19 page)

Frankly, I didn't know what to think, but I did get vaguely sweaty.

Sometimes it's cumulative, like water torture. Last fall I got the urge for boiled dinner, which I associate fondly with crisp air and my mother's cast-iron wood stove. As I riffled through my checkbook, the play-by-play commenced.

“Celery! Yum!” My abdominals tighten.

“Carrots!” My forehead is beginning to prickle.

“Onions!”
You recognize them, then.

“Rutabagas! Oh, I like rutabagas! And cabbage!” I now have visible beads of scalp sweat.

By the time she swipes the smoked ham hock across the scanner and holds it up like she's Liberty Enlightening the World Regarding Cured Meats, my heart is going like hummingbird wings, and my skyrocketing blood pressure is causing an incremental protrusion of my eyeballs, an effect similar to those pop-up timers that tell you the turkey is done. At which point, in a voice that can be heard clear back to the deli department, the checkout lady announces, “LOOKS LIKE SOMEBODY'S MAKING BOILED DINNER!”

I wouldn't turn any redder if she pantsed me.

It's far worse when I'm buying something dietetically naughty. As a fellow who has been known to run nine miles up the road to Kwik Trip at 3
A.M.
to score a twin pack of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies and an extra large Royal Kona Blend, I am deeply grateful to the checkout person who understands that what we have here is the equivalent of a drug buy, and both parties shall honor an implicit commitment to dispassionate efficiency.

Omertà
on the Zebra Cakes, as it were.

 

Fulfilling all suspicions, a couple of months after the construction of the bathroom commenced, John and Barbara announced they were engaged to be married. It turns out Barbara had agreed to join John in his rustic shoe box, but she predicated the move on one very specific stipulation: she would not sign the wedding license until John installed an indoor toilet. The wedding is two weeks off. Everything (and by “everything” I mean to include the license, the cake, and the sewer line) is in place, but the toilet has yet to be connected.

John's first public announcement of pending nuptials was made during the “new business” portion of the monthly meeting of the New Auburn volunteer fire department. I was sitting in the back row of folding chairs. There was a flurry of people straightening in their chairs. Some of the guys shot each other elbows, and
Oh-HO
'd and
oooh
'd in his direction and made him turn red. Another Perry boy off the list. And then, just as quickly they all turned and looked straight at me there in the back row. All these years, and I am the oldest brother and last standing bachelor. They might as well have thrown me to the floor and tattooed my forehead with the words
NEXT PROJECT
.

 

The real wild card with any stoic is rage. By and large, I am the least wrathful of men. But there is within me a vexatious little ball of propane, spritzed with paint thinner, lashed to the tip of a sulfur match, and hidden beneath a pile of oily rags just to the left of my spleen. When specific triggers are tripped, I fly apart like rivets off a tin flywheel. Thankfully, this rarely happens in public. Excepting the tantrums of childhood, and an incident in Wyoming in which I was caught barking at a rototiller, I have remained a closeted rager. In public, I prefer to keep a cork in it. But absent witnesses, I will let fly like a goose exiting a turboprop.

Any number of things will do it. An open cupboard door to the forehead; dropped Internet connections; bookshelf kits short one screw. Some of my most vicious unhingements have erupted during solitary forest strolls. It seems counterintuitive, what with the restorative aspects of nature and whatnot, but try it sometime when it's zero degrees, your cheeks are stiff as lard, and you get snapped in the face by a sapling
switch. A clunk to the head is bad enough, but the impudent smack of a sugar maple sprig is akin to the flick of a doeskin glove from some ruffle-throated dandy. I go from Thoreau to Mr. Hyde in a nanosecond, provoked by the stroke of a branch no bigger than a flyrod tippet. I'm glad you didn't see me last fall, one watery eye clamped shut, in full-out wind-milling flail, varnishing the remains of a birch sprig with spittle and curses. Far above, from the safety of a sturdy oak, a squirrel chattered and wheezed, quite rightly perturbed at the presence of a sinner in the forest.

Back in the civilized world, my own stupidity is a regular flashpoint. I once responded to missing an important meeting by hurling the top half of a papa-san chair across the room like a gigantic Frisbee. I can report that it splintered against the wall with a sharpish ker-
rack!
and I felt immediately improved although a little down in the mouth over the destruction. Later, having smacked my elbow on the file cabinet for the second time in five seconds, I grabbed the nearest unattached object, rared back, and flung it with all the violence I could summon. The object, as it happens, was a 16-count Kleenex Pocket Pack. I cannot recommend the results.

And the language! Well, never mind the language. Suffice to say it would flabbergast those who love me, as I am characteristically easygoing, and prone to utterances no more scabrous than
jeepers
or
dangit
. But what I'm thinking is, should I survive to senescence, I'm bound to be one of those sweet old folks who winds up slinging stewed prunes and cussing like Ozzy Osbourne doing a Mamet play.

 

At 10
A.M.
on the morning of August 23, we gather on the shores of Round Lake for the wedding. John finished installing the toilet at 5
P.M.
last night. He called Barbara, essentially to tell her the toilet was in and the wedding was on. She wasn't home. He got her answering machine. After the beep, he said, “Yah. I've got a message for you.” Then he held the receiver down by the porcelain bowl and hit the flush.

The service is brief and sweet. We gather up around them, standing quietly around the boat landing, where you can hear the water lapping.
I can see John's hands have a tremor in them, something to see in a man who is the best rifle shot among us, and who even when we were kids could squeeze the basement scale and spin it past anything the rest of us could manage, including Dad. It's fun to tell bachelor stories on him, and cast him as this rough-hewn throwback, and it's all true, but when I see him there trembling a little, I am seeing the brother who learned sign language and used to sit in the classroom beside a local grade-school girl and translate her lessons, which must have looked like Grizzly Adams meets Little House on the Prairie. I see the kid who read all the Foxfire books and taught himself to tan hides and make wooden door latches, and who kept cranking the draw weight on his Browning compound bow up tighter and tighter until one day he pulled it back and it exploded. And while I see a man I sometimes envy for his ability to build things and fix things and run things, I also know that last year during the community choir Christmas concert he stepped forward for a solo that culminated in a note so high and pure it put my heart in the rafters.

Barbara looks strong and maybe a little nervous, too, but when they speak their vows in turn you can hear them considering every word. There is no preacher, just a judge, and when it comes time to sign the papers, the judge is at a loss in the open air until John turns and offers his back, and as the judge scribbles across his shoulders, you hear a scatter of laughter, and that's a nice way to end as we walk back up to the picnic tables where all the kin and old neighbors have gathered, and the Nesco roasters are lined up and in the air you catch the scent of charcoal chicken, barbecued and served up hot by the New Auburn Area Fire Department. Sometimes life is so simply good.

After all the usual photographs were taken, John and Jed and I stood shoulder to shoulder for a portrait with our three left hands extended toward the camera, palms in and fingers spread to show three hands and two rings.

 

It takes until the end of the month, but I finally make it over to work on the International. My arrival coincides with that of a flatbed truck delivering the International Mark discovered in the junkyard last month. He
took his measurements and I looked in my books, and we decided it will work. It appears the truck was originally Chesapeake Gray, but the fenders are furred with lichen—at first glimpse it could be the same strain that grew on my truck. It was once fitted with a wooden flatbed, but all the planks are rotted or removed, leaving only the square channel-iron framework.

If the license plate renewal stamps are an accurate indication, the truck was taken off the road in 1975. The plates are old-school Wisconsin style, lemon yellow with black numerals. Inside the cab, the bench seat is still in place, but mice have devoured a big chunk of the upholstery, leaving behind seat and foam croutons. Over by the passenger door I can see an old plastic take-out basket full of fired center-fire rifle cartridges. I take a guess: “30–06?” Mark digs one out and checks the imprint on the rim. “Yep.”

The cab is full of these distracting treasures. A notebook with notes toward an indeterminate engineering project; a 1974 edition driver's education manual; three maps, one of Idaho, one of Montana, and one combining Nebraska and both Dakotas; a canvas carpenter's apron with nail pouch; the toe binding from a downhill ski; various matchbooks; a receipt for nine and a half yards of concrete; a savings passbook indicating that in 1975 a man named Lester had $9,088.66 in a local bank. These disparate threads of someone's story are seductive. One minute you are checking out the state of the accelerator pedal, the next you are trying to fill in the blanks. The simplest object is immeasurable. Every footnote has a footnote. I am thinking again now of Borges and his Garden of Forking Paths, his infinite Library at Babel. I am thinking sometimes a little Ritalin might not hurt a guy.

Mark is under the hood. He says the fuel pump is gone, but it looks like the carburetor is the same model, so we may be able to rob parts from it sometime if need be. Meanwhile, while scavenging the detritus in the cab, I notice that the floor is covered by a rubber mat. At first I figure it's something a previous owner slapped in there, but then I clear away a water-stained parts box and there between the shifter and the firewall is the classic Raymond Loewy IH logo, embossed right in the rubber. Without meaning to I say, “
Oh!
” probably just like Kathleen
did when she found her engagement ring planted in the toolbox.

Solid and square and formed so simply of the two sturdy block letters, the IH logo was first used on tractors in 1945. By the time my beloved L-Line debuted, it was in use throughout the company, appearing on over seventeen hundred items—everything from boxes of Irma Harding–approved freezer paper to the distinctive pylons jutting from the Loewy-designed International Harvester Servicenter buildings dotting America. Known as the man who streamlined everything “from lipstick to locomotives,” Loewy came to America from France after fighting for his country in World War I, during which he demonstrated his commitment to esthetics by hand-tailoring his uniform and draping his trench with fabric. In a career that extended into the 1980s, Loewy had a hand in a mind-boggling number of projects ranging from the iconic Lucky Strike cigarette pack (bet $50,000 by the president of American Tobacco that the packaging couldn't be improved upon, Loewy collected in short order by simply placing the distinctive bull's-eye image on both sides of the box, so no matter how the carton was tossed, the logo landed up) the Greyhound Lines logo (he replaced the original “fat mongrel” with a lean silhouette approved by the American Kennel Club), and the Exxon logo.

By his own account, Loewy designed the International logo on the back of a dining car menu on the train taking him to New York after his meeting with International in Chicago. Declaring the previous International logo (the letters IHC stacked on top of each other and enclosed in a circle) “frail and amateurish,” Loewy centered a lowercase
i
over an uppercase
H
, drawing for his inspiration the image of a farmer on a tractor: the dot his head, the two legs of the black
H
representing twin drive wheels. “Before we passed through Fort Wayne,” he wrote, “International Harvester had a new logo.” For all that has been written about Loewy's sleek contributions to redefining industrial form (he once designed an aerodynamic pencil sharpener), he is quoted as saying that he preferred simplicity over streamlining. Perhaps this was a tad disingenuous, like Edward Hopper saying his critics had overdone “the loneliness thing,” but it sure enough worked for the International logo, blocky as it is. There are some things that just sit right with your eye, and
that logo is one of them. That logo doesn't say streamline to me. It says boots on the ground.

I call Mark around and we carefully peel the mat from the floor, then lay it out on the concrete. It's a little crusty and dusty, but appears to be in perfect shape. I hose it down and then scrub it with a push broom. It looks factory new. Gorgeous. We stand there looking down at it, grinning. Every time I climb in my truck now, I'll be able to look down and see my favorite monogram in the world, right at my feet. Courtesy of a man who designed forks for the Concorde and the toilets on Skylab, and who combated the distasteful odors in his deep-sea diving helmet by adding Chanel No. 5 to the air-pumping mechanism.

The floor mat is a delight and a coup, but our primary purpose today is to rob the fenders and grille from this truck so they may be grafted to mine. You keep a junker like the L-180 in the weeds out back and “part it out” as necessary, cannibalizing it whenever you're short a door handle or a mirror or a distributor cap. Kneeling at the front bumper, we give the grille a once-over. The L-Line grilles reflected a major change in design, and remain one of the easiest ways to distinguish the trucks from their ancestors and offspring. The horizontal grille strips of previous models were replaced with vertically oriented slots overlain with two horizontal bars. In collectors' circles, this is known as the mustache grille.