Truck (5 page)

What I had in mind was a sandbar. With a deft variation of her stroke, Cindy would put us ashore. Kneeling shoulder to shoulder on the beach, we would coax up a fire with moss and flint, then roast frog-legs-and-cattail-root shish kebabs over driftwood coals. Later, while loitering in a muskrat-pelt loincloth and waiting for the tin-can coffee to boil, I would pop the question. The evening would culminate with a postprandial arm-wrestling match, loser wears the engagement ring. In the morning I would take her in my arms and bear her to the canoe. Or vice versa. We would emerge from the wilderness to notify our friends and reserve the Legion Hall.

The fantasy broke when a well-muscled and wholly corporeal local boy hailed Cindy from shore. There followed a good-natured exchange of insults that implied familiarity. He looked woodsy and capable. A real back-of-the-canoe fellow. I was building him up in my own mind. Then, out of the corner of her mouth, Cindy said, “He's a weak-tit.” One feels the gonads shrink. I hope it is a sign of progress when a man subverts machismo to allow room for frank self-assessment. Unable to construct a scenario—beyond faking a seizure and flipping the canoe—in which I would leave Cindy breathless, I resumed my brute-force paddling. Shortly we debarked. Cindy dropped me at the shop with my Impala
and I have not seen her since. I recall her shoulders in the sun and the flex of her calf when she hit the gas.

 

It isn't just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they're everywhere. The statisticians tell us today's woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn't snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it's not about
women
in trucks, it's about
certain
women in
certain
trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately,
ohf…!
I suppose
ohf…!
reflects as poorly on my character as a wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. (My friend Frank once walked around a street corner and came face-to-face with a woman so stunning he yelped, “
Jesus Christ!
” This from a poet and charter member of the local Student Feminist Alliance.) The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck.

Hay bales and a coon dog crate.

Ohf…!

 

Here lately I have been pondering the commodification of higher consciousness as evidenced by the fact that you can get a yoga mat at Wal-Mart. The world needs all the Sun Salutations it can get, but when I leaf through the glossy yoga magazines, I want to know where all the stiff and lumpy people are. (And a gentle pox on yogis who insist on taking out ads in which they pose as human origami. Gratuitous convolutions are to inner peace as home run contests are to baseball. I keep thinking of the
little kid who flips his eyelids inside out and does a little monkey dance hoping you'll notice.) Spiritual discipline, shined up and streamlined for that dream focus group where census and disposable income intersect. If you were there in the beginning—if you did yoga prior to the advent of monogrammed zippered mat bags—you feel a little peevish.

Different crowd, but do you remember when they did it to cigars? My buddy Al is a connoisseur of small-town taverns, smoked carp, and cigars. He'll burn a cigar on his own, but he most of all enjoys smoking in the company of old-timers of the sort who wear stained T-shirts and go bobber fishing down by the bridge. Guys who
chomp
as much as smoke their cigars. I met Al in the early 1990s, right about the time cigars boomed. Bill Cosby and Jack Nicholson were on the covers of
Cigar Aficionado,
as were Demi Moore and supermodel Linda Evangelista. Rush Limbaugh and Bill Clinton were popularizing the cigar across lines of politics and propriety. But perhaps most irritating to Al and his old-school pals, cigars became popular with droves of lean women, high-fiving frat boys, and young sharks in suits. The anachronistic recalcitrance of their habit was suddenly
happening
. To be seen smoking was to be seen as to be trying to keep pace with the It Girls and Boys. Al defined the problem as “Goddamn yuppies.”

The world of American culture and commerce functions like a combination of sponge and sandpaper, absorbing everything and smoothing it down so it slides easily into a designer shopping bag. It's the American free enterprise system at work, and while in general I am a fan, I admit to some grumping while I try to work out exactly where it is that egalitarianism gets tromped by commodification. At what point does the genuine article become frothy? I'm pretty much a live-and-let-live agnostic, but whenever I see churches luring people to their services with puppets and guitars, or these mall churches where they park your car and serve you lattes and let you watch the pastor on your choice of five JumboTrons, I want to say, No, No,
No
. Church should not be easy. Church should be
hard
. I have read that in his last days, Jesus Christ fell on his face and sweated blood. The least you can do is sit on a hard pew and squirm some.

Harleys, tattoos, party platforms, the Wild West, we distill the con
cept to its iconic essence, slap a price tag on it, and get down to the business of overexposure. Politicians pontificate on the concept of the big tent, but pop commerce actually pitches it, finding a way to make square things hip and alternative things mainstream, selling work boots to hipsters and body piercings to insurance agents. You pays your money, you takes your titanium stud through the frenulum. In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups—big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed,
comfortable
pickups—so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running in part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist.

 

No pickup should endure the humiliation of being passed through a car wash. I was raised on
working
pickups. One pickup in particular—my father's 1971 Ford F-100—dominated my life from the time Dad purchased it when I was four years old until the day I left the farm for college. Saturdays, I shoveled it full with corn and oats. Dad took them to town to be ground, and when he returned from the mill, the bed was stuffed with feed bags twice the circumference of a tackling dummy. We lugged them one by one into the barn. Other times Dad returned with bags of barn lime, or a pallet of salt blocks, or bundles of baler twine. Once when we repoured the barn floor he came home loaded down with so many bags of cement that the frame was on the axles and the truck looked like a half-sprung lowrider. In the winter we loaded the truck with hay and drove through the sheep pasture, parceling alfalfa off the tailgate flake by flake. The following autumn, Dad mounted the side racks and set up a ramp, and we'd shoo the lambs aboard for their journey to the stockyards in St. Paul. My brothers and sisters and I used to spend hours slinging the truck bed full of firewood from the slab pile by the sawmill. Back at the house we'd reverse the process, unloading and stacking the whole works. I am prejudiced to the idea that you must work a truck to deserve a truck. I am prone to sneer at any truck with comfortable seats or, for that matter, a comfortable driver. I want to
say, No, No,
No
. Pickup trucks should not be easy. Pickup trucks should be
hard
. This tendency is self-centered, unattractive, and, more to the point, irrelevant. I am beginning to think that once you hit forty, you spend the bulk of your time suppressing the urge to harangue everyone who comes within forty feet of your porch.

 

In an effort to help me arrive at the age of eighteen alive and financially solvent, my parents quite wisely forbade me to buy my own car while I was in high school. Which meant I did a lot of dating in the F-100. By the time I got my license, the truck was entering its second decade of hard labor. The side panels were ragged with rust and flapped like buzzard wings. When you gained speed, they flared. The truck pulled drastically to the right. I'd hang off the left side of the steering wheel to keep it moving on a straight line. The transmission, originally three-on-the-tree, had been replaced at some point and converted to a stick shift accessed through a hole cut in the floor. No one is clear on why, but the mechanic put the new transmission in backward so that the gear selection pattern was reversed. You had to go far right and back for first gear and shift against your intuition. There was a gap in the floorboards beside the clutch through which you could gauge your speed based on the road blur. When it rained, my pant legs were mud-spittled. On the sharper turns, sheep ear tags and fencing staples shot across the dash. The brakes were inconsistent. Sometimes the pedal was as soft as squishing a plum. Other times the brakes caught so abruptly that empty vaccine bottles rocketed from beneath the seat and smacked you in the ankle bone.

Naturally, the windshield was cracked.

The heater was passable, but in the summer you'd rely on what a laughing bus driver once described to me as a “2–80” air conditioner: “Roll down two windows and go eighty miles an hour!” There were vents on either side of the cab at shin level, but to open them was to unleash a cyclone of alfalfa chaff and dehydrated horseflies. Picture your date perched beside you on a summer's day, her lips glistening with Bubble Gum Lip Smackers and the cab charged with the scent of Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific! shampoo. You're running fifty miles an hour down
a gravel road when she grows overwarm and bends down to crack a vent. When she rares back, she appears to have emerged from a polluted wind tunnel. Her hair is frosted with feed dust and she's got pine needles stuck in her banana clip. Her lips are dotted like twin strips of flypaper, and there is a June bug in her braces.

You're young. You kiss her anyway.

 

I spent so much time dating in that old truck, I didn't know how to act in anything nicer. Once my grandfather lent me his Ford LTD. It was a beauty. Bloodred paint job with a white vinyl top and air-conditioning. Power steering, power brakes, and a fully automatic transmission. I was dating a farmer's daughter with the cutest button nose. I had coupons, so we got dressed up and went to Pizza Hut. After dinner I pulled out of the parking lot, merged into traffic, leaned back expansively, and draped my right arm across the back of the seat. The girl smiled up at me sweetly. She had grown to tolerate the farm truck, but as we picked up speed, I could see her luxuriating in the smoothness of the LTD. At which point, out of reflex and forgetting I was driving an automatic, I went for second gear, instinctively mashing what should have been the clutch but in the event was the power brake. I had my seat belt on. She did not. The image that endures is of her flailing elbows as she fought to unwedge her button nose from that pinch point where the windshield and dashboard meet.

 

I am a ridiculous pack rat, and it took me two hours of digging through boxes stored in the crawl space above the garage, but I found the Alpine Management letter. It was a kick to reread it. It is one thing to fall for a practical joke hook, line, and sinker. It is another thing to get hooked, landed, stuffed, and hung on the wall. After Eric's wife hung up the phone, all my anger evaporated, replaced by a sweeping feeling of relief and admiration. I was alone in the house, hand still on the phone, but I was grinning. A successful practical joke relies on art and craft, and this was a masterpiece. The bona fide parking ticket (originally obtained by
Eric when he got a parking ticket and the officer filled it out so lightly that the carbon didn't transfer) with its perfectly planted details, the tone of the letter, the carefully chosen nonexistent address, it all worked, but the genius touches were all those little shots to my ego (on the ticket under “VEHICLE COLOR,” Eric had written “
RUST
”). I thought of myself huffing and puffing in the parking lot, speechifying at the windshield, making all those passes up and down Grant Street and running my trembling finger over the city map. The setup was brilliant, but in the end, the joke worked for one simple reason: it was predicated on the fact that my truck is
ugly
…and I love it so.

 

Now February is gone and the truck still sits there. A monument to my dithering. There is a sort of informal open door at my parents' farmhouse every Sunday evening, and sometimes several of us kids end up there at once. Last weekend my sister Kathleen was there with her husband, Mark. I mentioned my desire to get the truck running and he said he would help. He and Kathleen have just had their first child, so Mark's going to be around the house more, I guess. Mark is a hot-rodding machinist and NASCAR fanatic. He proposed to my sister by faking a breakdown in a mud bog and requesting that she fetch a wrench. When she opened the toolbox there was nothing in there but a diamond ring.

F
IVE DAYS INTO MARCH,
and it is ten below zero. On my way out back to dump the compost I discover a plain cardboard box wedged between the doors. The box is about the size of a boutonniere carton. I recognize the logo on the shipping label. My garden seeds. I wonder how long they've been freezing here. Must have been a substitute UPS person. The regular UPS guy never leaves anything out back. A trace of snow has sifted in around the box and the crystals glitter in the sun. I imagine all the little seeds exploding into irrepressible green.

The dog chained to the house across the alley has spotted me and gone to barking. The dog is owned by a skinny man who keeps his mullet tamped down with a NASCAR cap. Thin as he is, the man moves with a stiff muscularity that implies hard luck and fistfights. The dog appears to have been raised on a diet of chain-link fence and burglar heels. Back when the weather was warmer, the man set out to build a kennel from steel hog panels, but he was halfway through pounding stakes when one of the women sharing the house with him stuck her head out the door and said something. He threw his hammer down and stomped inside and that was it. The panels still lie flat there beneath the snow. One day last fall some of the man's pals drove a white van up the alley and parked it beside the clothesline. The man met them with beers, and they popped the hood. By late afternoon, the yard was a scatter of parts and tools and every door on the van was open. The men were gone. When I walked my trash bags over to the village dumpsters across the street, I grinned
at Matt, the village employee with whom I serve on the fire department, and nodded toward the van.

“Whaddya figure?”

He didn't miss a beat. “Two weeks, and it's a yard barn.”

“Never leave the lot under its own power,” I added.

Months now, and the van is still there. The doors are shut, but through the windows I spy Hefty bags and duct-taped boxes.

I could do without that dog, but I do not object to the hog panels or the van. I would be a jerk to do so, what with my International still lodged there out front—out
front,
mind you, not even hidden alley-side—of the garage like a prehistoric carbuncle. What that white van does is take the pressure off. When my clothes dryer died last winter, I wrassled it up the basement stairs and knee-tossed it out the back door. It landed off-kilter in the snow and stuck, like a dotless dice cube frozen mid-tumble, in a position reminiscent of the fifteen-feet-tall steel cube erected by the sculptor Tony Rosenthal on a traffic triangle in New York's East Village. I saw Rosenthal's sculpture once from the back of a cab. It is balanced on one point and can be spun on its axis. He put it up in the late 1960s and named it
The Alamo
. This is the sort of willful obscurantism that hinders the appreciation of modern art in the heartland. Apparently three-dimensional squares
en pointe
were trendy in the late 1960s, because a year later a cube designed by Isamu Noguchi was installed in a nearly identical position outside a high-rise a few blocks uptown on Broadway. Noguchi painted his cube red and named it
Red Cube
. I like Noguchi a little better for that. Riffing off Richard Serra's
Tilted Arc,
I took to calling my dryer
Tilted Lint
.

The dryer (or
installation
, if I may) remained in my backyard well into summer. When the snow melted, it settled to the ground.
Gotta get rid of that,
I'd think, every time I had to circumvent it on my way to water the garden or cover an ambulance call (the Serra reference was becoming more apt—
Tilted Arc
was removed after people got sick of detouring around it). I began entertaining fantasies in which I would preserve valuable landfill space by repurposing the dryer. It would make a fine industrial-strength compost turner. I'd trade out the belts for a chain drive and hook it up to my old Schwinn Varsity. I would schedule
organic spinning classes for my friends in the renewable energy crowd. On a less vegetarian note, I also believed that given twenty minutes with a cutting torch, a welder, and a bundle of rebar, the dryer could be converted to a monster hibachi with rotating spit. I'd hire out for weddings and pig roasts. Alternatively, it might do for a deer blind. I'd have to strip the guts and motor and drill out peep holes, but then I'd be good to go. Just hide inside, and when a big buck wanders by, pop the lid and
rata-tat-tat
. In this county the idea of camouflaging yourself inside a dryer is not at all absurd, as the local forest creatures have grown blasé about the presence of home appliances in the wild. Like overgrown cubist toadstools, feral refrigerators and washing machines are generally found clustered at the bottom of eroded gullies, or at the terminus of dead-end roads and abandoned driveways. Trouble is, discarded white goods make popular targets, and are often so ardently perforated as to appear to have been caught in the crossfire at Panzer fantasy camp. Come November, when the woods are filled with trigger-happy amateurs sporting blaze-orange bomber caps, your perspicacious Leatherstocking does not take shelter in a Maytag.

Ultimately, I sent the dryer away with the village junk man (the title is unofficial, but the work is steady). You don't
schedule
the junk man as such. He keeps his trailer parked at the implement store out on Highway M, so you call out there and they pass the message the next time he drops by. If you're not home the first couple of times he stops, he doesn't sweat it, because he knows your dryer isn't going anywhere. He tows the trailer behind a teensy pickup truck, which magnifies the fact that the trailer is roughly the size of a volleyball court. Fully loaded, it has the appearance of a postapocalyptic Costco on wheels. Depending on the nature of your junk and the going price of scrap iron, he'll dispose of larger appliances in exchange for a modest donation. He also accepts odd lots of steel, aluminum, and old wire. I don't know much about the junk man except that he lives in the trailer court and his truck used to have Missouri plates. He has an Appalachian drawl and a smoker's cough, and he gets short of breath quick. I helped him fight the dryer aboard the trailer, jockeying it back and forth until it fit between two beat-up washing machines and a harvest gold oven. He was wheezing
pretty good when I handed him a few bucks, and before he eased them into his pocket, he took time to crease and fold each bill neatly, almost as if he was buying time to catch his wind. But when he pulled out of the driveway, he leaned out the window to grin and wave. Before he heads for the scrap yard he'll pop the shields off the washers and dryers and stoves and yank all the wiring in order to strip out the copper, which sells for a higher rate than the steel. He does this day after day after day. I see him running all the time. I can't imagine the grind of his week, or what he'd rather be doing, but every time that truck passes by he's got the hammer down, and he'll always return your wave. Lacking an
ACT LOCALLY
bumper sticker or hemp shorts, he nonetheless manages to do the right thing for Mother Earth.

 

First chance I get, I take the seeds to my basement and set them to sprout. From November on, I look forward to the day I can flout the ice and snow by puttering under the lights of my gardening bench. It is all I can do not to jump the gun. I get so hungry for green, sometimes I plant things way too early. This year, I came home from watching the Super Bowl at a friend's house and scattered some pots with last year's leftover oregano and sweet marjoram. I have nursed trays of stunted lettuce on a windowsill in January just so I could pick a leaf and hold it on my tongue while observing the formation of snowdrifts.

But today I want to cheat the seasons in earnest, so I scratch a match across the concrete floor and ignite two of three burners on the portable LP heater (the third burner has a habit of howling like a demonic calliope) and position it at the back of my steel folding chair. Then I plug in a plastic boom box at the workbench. The boom box won't play CDs anymore because I karate-chopped the lid during an embarrassing spasm of rage triggered when it began skipping tracks, driving home the fact that I got exactly what I deserved for buying a $24.95 piece of outsourced superstore junk despite knowing full well as I stood there in the cavernous aisles of the High Church of Cheap Consumption that any money saved would one day be expended threefold on blood pressure medication and knuckle stitches. I own two of these chintzy electronic farces. Both have
fractured stubs where the CD lid used to attach. As slow learners go, I am a real drooler.

Despite my Samsonite gorilla act, the radio receiver still functions. For basement puttering, I split my time pretty evenly between public radio and Moose Country 106.7. I like that Moose Country. They play the one-namers: Waylon and Willie. Buck and Merle. George and Tammy. Loretta. It is silly to say bad things about popular music, but for the record, Johnny Paycheck is to Kenny Chesney as corn whiskey is to wine coolers. This new stuff suffers from overgrooming. Even the redneckiest tunes ring tinny. One sometimes fears the lyrics of the latest busted-heart song were transposed from a marriage encounter handbook. It isn't that today's superstars aren't talented and hardworking. It's just that their way of doing things has passed me by. I look at the pretty cowboy on the Jumbotron and think, It is one thing to polish your craft, it is quite another to wax your abs. Recipe for the real deal: Combine two parts busted heart with one part busted knuckles, sprinkle with cheap trucker speed and crushed Valium to taste, and marinate in hard luck and leaky motor oil. Stir in Genesis and Revelation, add a dash of hope, and finish off while being forcibly evicted from a hotel bar. Hello, Tanya Tucker.

The local public radio station is on the opposite end of the dial. Literally, and however else you wish to parse it. The Venn diagram of listenership may come up a little short on overlap, but I'm happy to go on record as supporting both formats (it being only fair to point out that both have supported
me
). Near as I can tell, the commonest complaint about public radio is predicated on the inconvenience of encountering opinions in conflict with your own. That, and unctuous tone. Indeed, the NPR snootiness sometimes unhinges my own inner redneck, but in general I defend their usually steadfast refusal to dumb down. One does not ask Alistair Cooke to do the Chicken Dance. Any reservations I had about the format remain neutralized to this day by the fact that during the OJ Simpson trial, NPR was the only place to which I could tune at the top of the hour and expect a newscaster to lead off with
news
.

I will listen to NPR today because I have brewed a mug of green tea, and nothing says public radio like green tea. I dial the needle leftward until I pick up the unmistakably civilized tones of WHWC 88.3. I roll
the tuner back and forth, easing the stereophonic sound to full swell. It shortly becomes clear that the host and guest are discussing the Rwandan genocides of 1994.

Pulling nested trays from a shelf beneath the bench, I unpeel them one by one and begin to parcel out the potting soil. After shaking the trays to settle the soil, I press the eraser end of a pencil into the center of each cell, creating a depression to receive the seed. Then I place the seed company shipping box on my lap and open it. The packets are in a uniform row. Fingertipping through them Rolodex-style, I pull out the ones I think will benefit from an early start. Leeks. Peppers. Tomatoes. Peel back the gummed flap, tip the seeds into my palm. Pinch them one by one and drop them in the pencil dimples. Top them off with another sprinkle of potting soil and a pat, then move on to the next seed packet. I take my time. There is no clock in the basement, but the top of the hour is marked by a chirp tone that triggers local station identifications, followed by the familiar, “
From NPR news in Washington
…”

The familiar voice will always have a familiar name. “
From NPR news in Washington, I'm Karl Kasell…Anne Garrels…Linda Grad-stein
…
Brian Naylor
…
David Welna
…
Craig Windham
.” The tone is always unhurried, and eminently civil. Some of the names are poetry in themselves: “
Korva Coleman
…
Don Gonyea
…
Mara Liasson
…
Sylvia Poggioli
…” Those last two, if I had first seen them on paper, I would have mangled the pronunciation. Having heard them again and again in the newscasts, I can recite them flawlessly. Same with Frank Stasio and John Ydstie. I get a special kick from Corey Flintoff and the specific care with which he pronounces his own last name, floating down into those twinned final
f
's as gentle as parachute silk settling to the ground, deflating with just enough force to generate the velvet fricative. Flint
ohhfff
. NPR should consider marketing a CD featuring Corey Flintoff repeating the phrase
alfalfa foofaraw
. Over and over, on a loop. The effect would be similar to those sound conditioner contraptions that lull you to sleep with the sound of electronically generated surf. When Lakshmi Singh does the news, I find myself saying her name just to hear it.
Lakshmi Singh
. She'll be leading off the newscast and she'll say, “
For NPR News in Washington, I'm
…” and I'll jump right in rhythm and say,
“
Lakshmi Singh!
” The part where the consonants
kshm
mesh and take us from the vowels
a
and up to
i
is luscious. She will sign off, and five minutes later I am still reciting the mantra:
Lakshmi Singh…Lakshmi Singh…Lakshmi Singh
…

Ah, but if NPR must be reduced to one voice, let it be Shay Stevens. All others are chattering children by comparison. Shay's voice is the personification of strength and reassurance. Warmth, ease, and a dusting of rasp. You imagine the enfolding motherly bosom, sensual but steady as she goes. I reject your big booming boys and nominate Shay Stevens for the Voice of God.