Truck (25 page)

 

Anneliese and I sneak two wonderful days, going to readings, dining with writers and book folks, and walking hand in hand up and down State Street. When I got back to the hotel after kicking the car, I had time to clean up before Anneliese arrived, and it felt grand to open the door and welcome her into the room. After we sat and talked and caught up for a while, I asked her if she wanted anything from the goodie basket, in particular, the wine. She looked at me quizzically. “Who is it from?”

“My publisher, I suppose,” I said.

“Did you look at the card?” she asked.

“Um, no.”

“Well you might want to look at the card.”

I opened the miniature envelope and pulled out the miniature card. It was from Anneliese. To celebrate six months, she had written. She also mentioned the future. When I looked up, she was smiling, but she had one eyebrow cocked. “Check the wine,” she said. It was nonalcoholic.

We had the wine then, and talked about that future, and how at six months it seems like six years in a good way, and then we talked about maybe one day having chickens. It always comes back to chickens. Then she drove home and I flew to Kansas City.

 

Out on his deck there, overlooking the old farmstead where he now lives, Ozzie said the doctors at the little army hospital told his wife he had two
good years to live. The doctors at the rehabilitation facility said ten. He's made it to sixteen. “Three-quarters of the guys I went through rehab with are dead now,” he says. “And they had lower-level injuries. They could use their arms and hands and stuff, which I guess when you look back on it might be worse, because that's how they took their sleeping pills. To finish themselves.”

Ozzie and I have had this talk: I've told him sometimes I think of myself in that bed, crazy for someone to itch my eyebrow, and I tell him I'm not sure I wouldn't ask that same person to give me the sleeping pills. I imagine what he feels to be akin to all-consuming claustrophobia, and I think I might be too weak to take it. More than once, after I've finished suctioning an obstruction from his trachea (a process he endures many, many times a day, and which is absolutely essential to keep him alive but puts him through choking fits of coughing every time), I will be heading for the trash with the gloves and used tubing when I will hear a soft clicking noise. It's Ozzie, using his tongue to make a soft
tsk-tsktsk
against the back of his teeth. He teaches you this one your first day on the job. It's his signal that you've forgotten to reattach his ventilator tube. He can't scream, he can't grab you by the neck, he can't stick a boot in your terminally forgetful ass the way he ought to, he just has to patiently
click
. “I don't have any fear of dying anymore,” he says. “I've had a couple close calls where my tubing's come apart and I've had to wait at the most maybe two minutes. Just because a nurse might've gone to the mailbox. I just kind of accept that when my time comes, it's not within my control.

“Sometimes people ask what things I miss the most. If I had to give my top three things, I'd say, first one is breathing, of course. Second is, I'd love to be able to wipe my own ass. Sounds funny, but it's true. It's a personal thing. And my third thing, is drive motor cycle again. That was one of my greatest loves, to get on the road on a bike.”

 

Ozzie has a friend who repairs motorcycles in a little shop west of here. Pat is a paraplegic. He has a bike set up with hand controls. He hoists himself on and off the cycle with his arms, and stows his wheelchair on a metal grate attached to the cycle like a sidecar. He visits Ozzie pretty
regular and he knows how much Ozzie would love to ride again. “I should take you for a ride,” said Pat one day. He pulled the motorcycle into the ditch so Ozzie could drive down onto the grate. His electric wheelchair weighs over four hundred and fifty pounds, so Pat wedged the wheels with a couple of two-by-fours and belted the whole works down.

“I asked him to start off slow,” says Ozzie. He admits he was nervous. All that open air, nothing around him. “I'm going down the road,” he says, “thinking, ‘What the hell?!?'”

But he says it was so good to feel the wind in his face.

They made a three-mile loop, flying down the road, two bikers riding free, one good pair of arms between them.

 

Ozzie believes—hopes—he is in this predicament for a reason. He says this is what keeps him going, and he is at peace with whatever will be. But one unanswered question haunts him, and has since the day his Bronco pitched him into the ditch. He knows the running feet he heard just before the sun went out belonged to an off-duty EMT who just happened to be following him down that Missouri back road. It was the EMT who kept him alive, breathing for him until the helicopter got there and the flight nurse could bag him with an endotracheal tube. He knows it was an EMT, because his mother got the story from someone at the hospital who said an EMT stopped in to see if Ozzie was alive. But the person never left a name. He doesn't know if it was a man or a woman. “There was no name in the police report,” says Ozzie. “I'd sure like to thank that person. I even went so far as to take an ad out in the paper down there. That was ten years ago. No one responded. My mom said maybe they were afraid of getting sued.”

 

The last time I saw Dr. Olson, he said all my tests had come back normal. He dilated my eyes again, had a look, compared what he saw to the pictures taken previously. He said the lesion was reducing, which suggested that the episode was indeed acute. None of this resolves the mystery of what happened, if there was a clot, and if so, where it came from and why. Fortunately, the eye is an organ capable of deception. In collusion
with the brain, it convinces you to ignore what you see—or don't see. Over time, the blind spot has faded. It no longer bothers me when I read. In fact, I have to be in the perfect setting—standing in a wide field of snow, say, or inside a white shower stall—in order to see it, and even then I have to gaze up and to the left and concentrate intently, or not at all—the way you do with those hidden 3-D picture books—before it reappears, a hazy gray wedge. It could be worse. Shortly after I found out the blind spot was permanent, I was explaining the situation to my brother Jed.

“Which eye?” he asked.

“My left.”

“Well, at least it ain't your shootin' eye.”

Which is true. My sister-in-law Barbara had the same sort of event, only her blind spot is in the dead center of her right eye. When she looks through a rifle scope, the critical spot where the crosshairs meet disappears. She has had to learn to shoot right-handed using her left eye, which is like trying to drive your car mailman-style. It takes awhile before the reprogramming kicks in.

Every once in a while when I am in a dark room, or drifting off to sleep, I see a little flash in my left eye, as if a teensy paparazzo is firing in the distance. It's a warning light, a reminder that the game can expire at any time. When I recall the period immediately after the blind spot arrived, what comes back most clearly was my desire to just get out of the waiting room and back to everyday chores. While he was waiting for the return of definitive test results, Dr. Olson restricted my activities, and I remember sitting in the fire hall when the other members were roaring off on a call and how badly I wanted to sling on the gear and go, just to run and sweat and bull against the hose.

 

When I first started working for Ozzie, I found it strange to hear him say things like “I cleaned the garage; I rearranged the kitchen; I keep those boxes in the basement; I changed the oil in the van.” It didn't take me long to realize that his use of “I” was deeply intentional. The moment you come on shift, you become Ozzie. The tasks you perform are Ozzie's tasks. I have caught myself—when he interrupts my reading
to summon me from the other room to adjust his headset, or feed him a boiled egg—feeling a small bristle of irritation at his voice in that split second it takes to reorient myself to the fact that for twenty-four hours my legs and arms are not mine. Ozzie's use of the pronoun “I” is a clear declaration of independence.

 

I used to take care of Ozzie at least once a month. This was not a charity gig. I got paid the same as all the other nurses. For the past year, I've been on the road so steady I haven't been able to take any shifts. I do try to call him now and then, or he'll call me, and I like to send him a postcard, especially now when I'm out on book tour. When I'm home, I try to keep Ozzie posted on how things are progressing with the resurrection of the International. He likes to hear about that stuff, and I bring him pictures now and then. I've promised him a ride when I get it running. We'll set up a ramp and run his chair right up in there. Can't be any more dangerous than that sidecar.

Ozzie's got his own project going, a '68 Dodge Charger he's restoring. He had one in high school. This one he's making into a drag racing car. “This guy I'm working with, he's had my car for ten years. He keeps whittling away at it whenever I can afford it. It's got a 426 engine, electronically fuel-injected and blown, it's got wheel tubs in it, a six-point roll cage. I guess when it's all done, I'll hit the car show circuit and show it off, show how my dream came to realization.

“I remember having a conversation with my mother, and what would happen if I died, and I jokingly told her if I do, I would like to be cremated and have my ashes dumped into the fuel tank, and go down the drag strip one last time, for my last ride. Of course, I was joking, trying to make light of the situation. Mom kinda cracked a smile. Shook her head, like,
Okay
.”

 

I declare that my blind spot admits me to the One-Eyed Club, albeit on a technicality. I recognize that the step from losing part of one eye to losing the entire eye is a biggie (which in turn does not compare to the step from partially blind to blind). At best, mine is a provisional membership.
But I'll take it. There is this ridiculous little part of me—residual of the ten-year-old who posed lurid drawn-out death scenes beneath the bird feeder—that likes the idea of being the Hathaway Shirt man, slightly dangerous and mysterious behind the black patch, soldiering nonetheless dapperly on. When you look into my eyes, not all of me is looking back. I am a stoic man of mystery. People sometimes miss this.

 

I'm in a hotel room overlooking St. Louis. It's late, and I can see the Arch, all lit up and steely. Tomorrow I fly home. I am missing Amy and Anneliese. Every time I take off in another airplane, right when we are reaching top speed on the runway, I imagine them in my arms, Anneliese on my left, Amy on my right, both with their head resting on my shoulder, and I can make it so real I can feel the curve of their ribs and the warmth of their skin and the scent of their hair. Ozzie told me recently that his wife still calls him sometimes. They were divorced years ago, and she has remarried and divorced twice since. But she still calls. Always after midnight, he says. I'm sorry for the way it had to be, he says, but I know if I had stayed I would have been dead a long time ago. She would probably not agree. But I think that would be the case. I visited her parents last year, and her son. I told her she should come visit, but she chose not to. So I never did see her. I was eighteen days into my marriage when I had my accident. And the weird part was, me and my wife had only spent one night in our house together.

A
LONG ABOUT THE
second week of November, the men of Wisconsin begin to go scruffy. You'll notice it everywhere—at church, at the gas station, in the Wal-Mart—even the jawline of the local banker begins to blur. I am no different. We are the men of Wisconsin, and we are growing our deer hunting beards. The deer hunting beard protects your chin from the chill air and staves off windburn. The deer hunting beard preserves the brotherhood and scratches our women. The deer hunting beard reminds us why most men should keep at it with the razor.

I was years from my first beard when I first skipped school for deer hunting. Grandpa shot a buck out on the west forty, which in those deer-poor days was a remarkable occurrence, so Dad let me run out there to see it. By the time we got it gutted, hauled to the house, and hung, the school bus had come and gone. I remember when I walked back into Mrs. Kramschuster's third-grade classroom I felt chesty and important, as if I were returning from a manly mission. It is no wonder young men go so easily to war. By the time I was old enough to buy a hunting license, the school board had given up and just shut the place down for the entire ten-day season.

Mark and I hoped to have the truck ready by deer season. It's not going to happen. We're getting close. Or more to the point, Mark is getting close. While I was on book tour all last month, Mark reattached the bed, rewired the six-volt system to twelve, and painted the box and body. When Anneliese, Amy, and I went to Mark's house for our annual
family Halloween party last night I saw the truck sitting there under the yard light and was flabbergasted at how good it looked. Mark used a flat marine green paint, which is perfect because it doesn't reflect the light, and all the dings and wrinkles recede. He's done the brush buster, the bumpers, and all the trim in black. The combination is pleasant to look at. Clean and calm, nothing flashy. Under the mercury-vapor light it looked like the truck had rolled right off the set of
M*A*S*H.
We stood there and admired it for a while, me a cowboy with a fake mustache, him a vampire.

 

On the third of November, we receive our first snowfall. I am running errands with Amy belted in her car seat and to my everlasting shame I am sneaking a listen to the local sports talk radio station. The NFL show. The host is assessing the play of the Seattle Seahawks and from the back of the seat I hear Amy's happy little voice: “That's where you were!”

Wow. Yes. Four weeks ago. She was asleep when I called from my hotel room.

I think about the map on her bedroom wall, the one with all the lines and circles.

I turn off the blankety-blank radio.

 

I get over to Mark's place once to help outfit the International with a new radiator and heater hoses and refill the antifreeze. We've been frustrated in our search for a pair of windshield wipers, but while we're talking in the parts store it hits me that there may be a pair on the L-180. Thinking Kathleen might have tired of looking at the fenderless hulk in her driveway every morning when she came home from work, I had my brother Jed bring it home on his equipment trailer one night when he was working with Mark, and now it's stored behind Jed's barn. I'll swing out there during deer hunting.

The running boards on the old truck were beat up and bent, and rather than try to straighten, repair, or replace them, Mark has suggested I opt for nerf bars—essentially a doorstep made from tubular steel and mounted to the frame rails beneath the cab. You can order them pre
made, but they're pretty spendy. Mark says he can make a pair if I just buy the raw iron stock. We decide to go this route, although it means the cool silver exhaust pipe will now extend out into the middle of nowhere, and will have to be cut back and replaced with something more modest.

But the thing that has us grinning right now is that the new seats are in. They are figure-hugging stock car seats. We bought them from a mail-order company that sells racing equipment. We ordered the ones with four-point restraining belts. There was actually some reasoning here—the seats are thin and create a little more legroom for Today's Man inside the relatively teensy Comfo-Vision cab, and the belts are a genuine safety upgrade, but mostly we got them because they look so delightfully silly in that fat bug of a cab, in a truck geared to lug fourth at 10 miles per hour. They make it difficult to get in and out, but someone once said trucks should not be easy.

 

People ask you sometimes when you knew you were falling in love, and I have the answer. Back when we first met, maybe the third or fourth date, Anneliese picked me up in her car, the battered little Honda. When I ducked my head and dropped into the worn seat, she was apologetic. “I know I should probably drive something that's in a little better shape,” she said, “but I'm too cheap.” I don't remember what does it for you when you're twenty-five, but when you're self-employed and crowding forty, that kind of talk makes you want to skip around and fling daisies.

She's not cheap, of course. She's frugal. But I liked her even better for choosing the word
cheap,
as it spoke to a certain kind of raising. I drive a used Chevy not out of some self-depriving morality but because the money arrives in fits and starts and I want to minimize the amount of time spent working for the financing company. When it comes to love, I am told cash flow is a leading cause of cancer, and in this Anneliese and I agree: low overhead is the key to survival. You will notice I fail to itemize the costs related to the repair of the International, as this would be unpoetic. Montaigne has earlier noted our capacity for contradiction.
I'm still wrapping up the book tour, and over the weekend I did a little spate of events in Kentucky and Illinois. At one point I was hosted at a wine and cheese party attended by a woman of some academic tenure. While I was cruising for cheddar in the kitchen, I could hear her in the drawing room, comparing the attorney general to a pair of Nazis. She was particularly dramatic on the issue of privacy, becoming visibly exercised regarding her confidence that right now someone was preparing to peek in her bedroom and plotting to pull her library card. “Terrifying!” she kept saying. “Terrifying to have these people in power!” Fair enough, and pass the brie. But my interest was piqued when five minutes later she declared she didn't understand why—if people
had
to own guns—why they would be loathe to submit that information in written form and accept some “reasonable government oversight.”

Suddenly Himmler and Goebbels are Andy and Barney.

I held my peace, as I am a polite guest and a coward and hadn't had any of the wine, and cheese makes you peaceful, but perhaps due to the impending deer hunting season her paradoxical take got in my head and I chewed on it for a while. I first squeezed the trigger of a gun sometime around the age of nine or ten, doing so under the direction of the same father who forbade us to own toy guns or pretend to shoot each other with our fingers. Naturally when we visited friends we dove straight for the plastic pistols and went full-on OK Corral. That is, when our friends could pry us away from their television (also banned from our house and to which we were consequently drawn like lost Amazonian tribesmen to a functioning Lava Lamp). Before I ever touched a rifle Dad repeated two simple rules, over and over: Treat
every
gun as if it is loaded, and
never
point it at another human being. Then he showed me how the gun worked, how it came apart, how to check the chamber with your finger and your eyeball to make sure it was empty, and then once you had assured yourself that it was empty beyond a doubt, to treat it as if you were certain it was loaded and ready to fire. He taught me never to switch the safety off unless you intend to shoot, and never shoot unless you have identified your target. He taught me how to line up the front sight and the rear sight, and he had me watch while he fired. When we looked at
the punctured steel cans and the chunks blasted from the log, he made sure I understood the destructive power of a piece of lead half the size of a pencil eraser. Only then did he hand me a live round. I chambered it and fired it under his watch, and understood I had been given responsibility for a potentially deadly tool.

We took Dad's admonitions seriously and I can't recall a single instance of horseplay, although we did shoot grackles out of the tops of pine trees, and if we missed, the bullets would go whining through the sky to who knows where. Sometimes when I went to bed I'd lie awake thinking maybe a round had dropped from the sky and winged one of the Teed family. If by morning there was no news, I resumed life with a clear conscience.

I own three rifles, two shotguns, and one revolver, which is probably low average for my geographic peer group, and leaves me in Ted Nugent's dust along with all the rest of you, but puts me well ahead of other outspoken celebrities who believe guns are evil unless they are rented with bodyguard attached. One of the rifles is a .22 semiautomatic; the other two are 30–06 bolt actions. Both shotguns are twelve gauge; a pump action and a single shot. The revolver is a rather gigantic Ruger Super Redhawk .44 Magnum with a seven-inch barrel. I got it after several recent bear encounters. In the old days, you saw a bear, you yelled at it, it ran off. These days, with more houses and more people and more garbage cans and feeding stations, they are not so much frightened anymore. Recently my brother John was unable to open his front door, as it was blocked by a bear. When he pushed the door open, the bear stuck his nose in the crack and tried to come in, which you could say forced the issue. I am not panicked by bears, or I wouldn't be walking around the woods. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a bear in the wild is going to run the other way. I have no desire to shoot one. But neither am I willing to test the
just play dead
theory with Bear Number 100, especially if he comes disguised as Bear Number 17. I don't recommend handguns in general, as they handle like sports cars and similarly tempt you to operate a little faster than you should. And buying one for home security is silly on the order of sweeping the sidewalk with a feather duster, although with a feather duster you might actually hit something.
But if you're working in the woods, it's easier to strap on a sidearm than tote long iron.

It's hard to talk about guns without sounding defensive or blustery. I'm pro-gun the same way I'm pro–potato fork. I use them both to gather food for the year, with the caveat that if you break into my house, I won't be waiting for you at the top of the stairs with a potato fork. And even that last comment I offer knowing that I'm a heavy sleeper and will probably get into action way too late, because although the shotgun leans against the wall beside my mattress, it is unloaded and trigger-locked, with the key and shells stored in two separate locations within the bedroom. This quite intentionally impedes the likelihood of a drowsy quick-draw. But all the well-reasoned arguments against providing your own armed defense tend to go a little pale the first time you stand in your own dark house watching some guy get stomped—not beaten up, stomped—outside the bar in the middle of Main Street and thirty minutes pass before the cops show because they are geographically overstretched. Having time after time seen the results of violence—including deadly gun violence—so close I could smell it in the back of an ambulance, I go out of my way to live like a peaceable fraidy-cat. But when it comes down to my front porch, I tend to vote with Teddy Roosevelt. Here in Wisconsin there's been a strong effort to establish a law giving properly permitted citizens the right to carry a concealed weapon. The only thing I find less convincing than the arguments for a law like this are the arguments against it, and if it ever passes, I'll apply for a permit only because I think a guy is silly not to avail himself of all options. At the moment the point is moot, as the law has been vetoed, and furthermore, while it is possible to carry a Ruger Super Redhawk .44 Magnum, concealing it is out of the question.

 

Perhaps the potato fork allegory will not hold up under scrutiny. Perhaps a better way to put it is that there are legions of us out here who have guns and have always had guns, and we attach to this all the dramatic significance of having silverware. Once when I was standing beside my brother John at his sawmill, our fire department pagers went off and called us in to stand by with the county SWAT team. “We have a report of
a man holed up in his house with a gun,” said the dispatcher. John looked at me quizzically. “
Hmmm…,
” he said. “That's me every night!”

 

Anneliese is in the swing of the university semester, and I am deep in magazine deadlines. We e-mail each other more than we see each other. We are working around the edges of how we might combine our lives. I have told my friend Gene I am certain this is it, but then when Anneliese invokes the phrase “formalizing the relationship,” I'm not sure how to respond. I'm not put off, or short of air, I'm just not sure what the next move should be.

She is game but not overly enthused about my commitment to the ten-day Wisconsin Gun Deer Season as administrated by the Wisconsin DNR (Department of Natural Resources, although some locals will tell you Damn Near Russia). I readily acknowledge her reservations but am pretty much inflexible on the issue. For a rampant skitter-brain like myself, deer-hunting season is my one consistent source of reorientation. Since that day in third grade, I have not missed a season—no matter where I was living at the time or what kind of job I held. In our family this is a tradition handed down over at least five generations that I know of, and life will not unravel if one year I have to be somewhere else, but that week of trees and swamp adjusts my head and puts food in my freezer, and for now I am not prepared to miss it.

Let us not, however, fool ourselves into yodeling golden ballads about carrying on the primal traditions of the hearty provisioners of yore. A lot of hunters around here set up cameras along the deer trails and attach them to a motion sensor so they can learn which deer are working where. If you run into these guys down at the gas station they'll pull the photos off the dashboard and show you. You can pick out the deer immediately—they're the ones with glowing white eyeballs. A neighbor set up one of these devices during bear season and when he picked the film up at Wal-Mart he had several excellent pictures of himself filling the bait station. You can buy digital shooting scopes and range finders, GPS units have replaced the ol' bubble compass, walkie-talkies have replaced frantic waving, and at the extreme edge of things laws are currently being es
tablished to address the idea of remote hunts via the Web, in which your weapon is a wireless mouse. My rifle barrel is made of stainless steel and rests in a synthetic stock. I use a scope. I hook a slab of flexible foam to my belt so I always have somewhere soft to plant my hinder.