Truck (22 page)

I have been trying to live up to that man ever since.

 

On my next trip to the shop, the weather has gone cold, and the building has the feel of a clubhouse again, muffled in warmth. I do a lot of miscellaneous things: put nuts on the taillight studs, clamp the taillight brackets to the bed so Mark can weld them in place, take a wire brush to the floor of the cab to prepare it for repainting. The speedometer has never worked, so I slide under the truck on the creeper and detach the cable where it inserts in the transmission. By fiddling with it I can get the odometer to spin, but the speedometer needle doesn't budge. Intending to rob the speedometer off the L-180, I find that the indicator needle on that unit is missing completely. Honestly, what good is a speedometer in an International? If I get caught speeding I should get a little plaque or something. Before I leave Mark comes in and we lift the detached bed into place on the frame. He finished trimming the fenders last week, and the truck looks more nimble. It's not, of course, but it looks good. “The entirely new fender line,” wrote Raymond Loewy after streamlining his 1943 Caddy, “visually seemed to lengthen the body and provide a feeling of speed.” Yeah, buddy.

Mark says he's about ready to paint the thing. We're getting there.

 

I have had the opportunity to watch the women of my family move through the days of their children dying, and within this circumstance beyond all others seems to lie the very paradoxical essence of womanhood. That fierce and mysterious capacity for life, hamstrung by its one great vulnerability: love. To see a strong woman living beyond the death of her child is to see all women living and grieving in this man's world. One night while driving in the rain far from home and after midnight, I was listening to Patty Griffin sing her live version of “Mary,” a song she wrote for her grandmother. In the chorus, Jesus kisses his mother, tells her he cannot stay, and then, as he goes flying to the heavens, Griffin's voice soars into the line, “
the angels are singing his praises in a blaze of glory
.” Griffin draws her voice inward now, breathing out the final line with weariness and resolve:

 

Mary stays behind and starts cleanin' up the place…

 

It is the history of womankind in a single line. I flashed on images of my mother and my grandmothers beside caskets holding their children and sometimes their men. I pulled over for a while, played the song twice more, and hoped the tears on my cheeks would count for reverence.

I
T WAS RECENTLY
my duty to describe my left testicle to a strange woman over the telephone, a privilege for which some men would pay upward of $3.95 a minute, but which I found discomfiting, although markedly less so than the moment when I sat in a paneled office beneath a stuffed deer head and described that same testicle to my insurance agent, Stan. Talk about your festival of averted gazes. Stan bent to his paperwork with all the diligence of a first grader determined to win a blue ribbon in penmanship, crossing and recrossing his
t
's, carefully scribing each loop and line, no doubt desperate to get everything right the first time, terrified he might have to repeat this little sharing session of ours. I felt bad for him. There was a palpable sense of him yearning to talk fender benders. When we moved on to discuss the blind spot in my left eye, he sagged with relief.

The deal is, the damage is adding up. Here on the cusp of forty, I am daily grateful for my health and do not for one minute request special pleading. Still:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
One hesitates to sully Yeats with equations to my nascent gout, but with each little hitch and failure, the message is: you are in possession of a machine programmed to self-destruct. I used to have weird dreams about my teeth coming loose; now I have weird dreams about my crowns coming loose. In addition to the eye and the testicle (specifically, its benign epididymal cyst, otherwise known as a
lump
), my inventory includes sand in the gears of my neck (I find myself checking blind spots in traffic by pulling
half a chin-up on the steering wheel and then rotating my cranium, neck and shoulders as a single unit) (very little-old-man), a frayed rotator cuff, persistent tinnitus, hyperacusis, a world-record kidney stone, transient numbness of the left leg, a partially detached clavicle, a little click in my thumb that has lingered since I jammed it in someone's shoulder pads during a Friday night football game in roughly 1982, and yes, here lately, in both big toes but particularly the right, the first twinges of uric acid accumulation.

I have been purchasing my own health insurance since 1992, and for years I put my faith in luck and youth and covered myself with a high-deductible catastrophic medical-surgical policy. When my left eye went goofy in 2000, the tests and treatments left my savings pretty much tapped, and I decided it was time to upgrade. I quickly discovered that my faulty left eye and irregular left testicle made potential insurers scarce. One company simply ignored my inquiries. Another rejected me outright. I remember when I read that letter, I got a cold little clench in my gut. I imagined my eye growing darker, or my liver failing, or some red-light-running yahoo taking a bead on my femur. Based on extrapolations from the invoices for my eye, I did the math and got this vision of my sturdy old house, my savings, and my used Chevy spinning down a drain.

Stan had handled my car insurance for years, so I made an appointment and told him of my troubles. He submitted an application to a Major Insurance Company and shepherded it through, which led to my telephone conversation with the nice lady. A few days after that heartfelt exchange, Stan called with good news. I had been approved by the Major Insurance Company. Mostly. “You'll have to sign a rider,” said Stan, quietly. “One for your eye, and…and…and one for…”

“I understand,” I said. Poor guy. I drove to his office and signed the paperwork, including two “Special Exception Rider” forms that drastically limited coverage of my left eye and any complications related to the cyst. Having done their own math, the Major Insurance Company wanted no part of those parts of me. I was surprised at how easy it was to make the trade-off. During my health insurance search, I read consumer literature that said you should never accept a policy with riders,
but I was ready to deal. A friend told me that when it comes right down to it, you'd give your left nut to have some health insurance. On a related matter, should you ever join me in a bar brawl, you will note that I lead with my right.

 

My truck and my garden will languish this month, because I am on a book tour that has me on the road all but two days in October. It helps to know that we got such a freeze on the first day of the month that the cucumbers are done for good. I will miss duck hunting and rutabaga season and six or seven lamentable metaphors spawned by the falling leaves, but book tour is an all-expenses-paid scavenger hunt in which you run around the country attempting to collect the items on your list: bookstores, radio stations, public access television stations in the back of tire shops, hotel rooms, rental car return lots, departure gates, coffee, small towns in Michigan. Your life boils down to showing up to yap. But I am well taken care of, the people I meet run to the high end of well-read and pleasant, and I collect miscellaneous anecdotes. A literary escort in Kentucky once told me she knew she had moved to a small town when the editor of the community weekly—unable to send a photographer to cover a local wedding—simply dropped the newspaper camera off at the reception and asked the family to return it with a few decent shots. She added that soon after her arrival in that same town, she had car trouble. A man strolled over and helped her get the vehicle running. She took his name, gave him twenty bucks, and wrote a letter to the local newspaper lauding his sterling character. In the letter she said she assumed that this man's actions spoke to the character of the town in general, and that as a newcomer, she was thrilled to be part of such a community and would do her best to maintain the standard of conduct. Her letter was published on the back page. On the front page was an article describing how the man in question had taken the twenty bucks, bought beer, got drunk, and stole a truck.

The term
literary escort
has always struck me as sounding simultaneously high-brow and naughty. Synonyms for
literary escort
cumulatively include wrangler, restaurant critic, psychiatrist, race car driver, smooth
operator, expediter, ego polisher, brilliant conversationalist, silent partner, procurement artist, navigator, parking savant, and restroom locater. Plus they fill a seat at readings. I spend the majority of my book tours running solo, during which time I am perpetually sweaty, late, lost, nervous, tired, lost, late, and furthermore sweaty. But occasionally if I am in a big city or at a large event, the publisher arranges an escort, and suddenly book tour becomes a day spa. A good literary escort shaves fifteen points off your systolic blood pressure. Above all, they know where everything is. I can spend a full day hammering around San Francisco and make maybe one radio interview and two bookstores. With a literary escort, I just sit in the passenger seat and get delivered. We go from bookstore to bookstore without pause. The best literary escorts have the same sort of ineffable cool I usually associate with old-school television gumshoes. Once in Chicago I was being taken to a downtown radio station by a legendary escort I shall call Bill. There wasn't a parking spot in sight. Bill eased up to the curb of a major high-tone hotel. This was clearly a No Parking zone. As we exited the car an immaculately uniformed doorman approached. I got the usual law-abiding flop sweats. Bill strode ahead of me, and as the two men passed, their hands met briefly. The doorman gave Bill a collegial nod, and we were on our way. And to this day Bill remains one of the coolest guys I know, because midway through some story in some bar somewhere, Bill can lower his beer glass coolly and say, in all truth and without batting an eye:

“
So I just slipped the guy a fin…”

I get shivers.

 

I call Anneliese nearly every night, although most times we keep the conversation short. We are developing a counterintuitive theory that long phone talks during periods of separation tend to fray more than they bind. You have two people, both executing the responsibilities of the day, each quite understandably focused on the view from their respective perspective, and if the conversation goes on too long, a subtle one-upmanship emerges in which each person attempts to prove to the other that life on this end of the phone is no bed of begonias, either, and before you know it, long-distance pillow talk becomes an interrup
tive and blameful downer. Perhaps one day I will recant, but for now I vote for short phone calls. I do try to drop a sweet note in the mail here and there. Raised by a sometimes-single mother who climbed poles and strung telephone wire for a living, and having been a single mom herself for three years now, Anneliese is not given to pining over the tenor of my angst as I gaze out a hotel room overlooking San Francisco or order room service in Albany.

But gosh, it lifts my heart to hear her voice.

 

Three years ago this month, I was walking across a plowed field beneath clear skies when a shadow fell across my left eye. At first I thought it was a prodigious floater. I blinked hard and rolled my eyes, but the shadow remained. There were no symptoms—no dizziness, no headache—so I chalked it up to some trick of light and continued walking. Half an hour later, while trying to read a book while perched in a deer blind, the dark shape kept sliding on and off the page. It eased through the periphery of my vision, only to dart away when I tried to pin it. I could study it best when I gazed up and off to the left, in the manner of a boy caught looking at a pretty girl at the coffee shop. After some time, I could make out that the black spot had a shape: a fuzzy-edged delta of darkness, growing from a narrow point, then widening in a slight curve before squaring off at the edge of my visual field. The wedge shape made me nervous. It reminded me of the visual field cuts I saw diagrammed during nursing classes on stroke. I hiked out of the woods at sunset. It was a Sunday, so I called a friend who worked in a hospital emergency room. She in turn referred me to an ophthalmologist acquaintance. He was carving jack-o-lanterns for his grandchildren when I called, but said he would see me.

It was contextually otherworldly to follow Dr. Olson into the dark, empty clinic as he flipped the lights on and led me down the hall into an examining room. I was worried about my eye, but found the examination process strangely comforting. For one thing, in times of uncertainty we always like to place ourselves in the hands of someone with knowledge, and Dr. Olson is trim and apt and conversational. He seated me in a comfortable chair with an adjustable footrest. We did the standard
vision test, the letters on the wall, which always transports me to grade school when they test your eyes. I passed. He had me stare at a copy of the Amsler Recording Chart, which is basically on the order of graph paper. By closing my right eye and staring at the chart with my left, I could trace the darkened area with my finger to give Dr. Olson an idea of the shape and extent of the affected area. He gave me my own copy of the chart to take home and told me I should check over the next few days to make sure the shape wasn't growing. Then he put drops in my affected eye and killed all but the ambient light. While we waited for my iris to dilate, we talked about Wisconsin Badgers football games and Manhattan and pumpkins. The mood was relaxed and intimate, like a candlelight dinner. When it came time for him to peer inside my eye, the world narrowed down to the BB-sized point of light burning in the aperture of the opthalmoscope, and all of it at the center of the still, silent clinic. Everything but the light was muted. There was something of peace and clarity.

Dr. Olson said there wasn't much to see in there, just a tiny whitish spot at the confluence of an artery no bigger than a thread. A lesion, he called it. The good news was there was no bleeding, no reason for me to be rushed off to surgery, no sign of a tumor or otherwise. The bad news, which Dr. Olson gave me straight up, was that the black patch was likely there for good. There was a shot that peripheral circulation might restore some of the vision over time, but this was unlikely. He would want me to come in tomorrow during regular hours so he could do a full battery of tests, but for now I could go home.

 

At some level, all one-eyed people are mystic, if for no other reason than they quite literally see things differently than the general mass of us. Jim Harrison lost the sight in his left eye at age seven when a little girl stabbed him with a bottle, or that's one version. The blind eye figures regularly but not obtrusively in his novels, plays, and essays. I came to Harrison embarrassingly late, first reading him sometime around 1995. Every day since, I have tuned to his key and tried to write a line he might find credible. Relevantly or not, I find the best stuff tends to come
sometime around two or three in the morning, when my left eye—lazy for years—droops closed and I just leave it shut.

Perhaps as a result of living one stick-poke removed from total blindness, monocular characters tend—in conversation and comportment—to convey an equanimous blend of fatalism and exuberance. I own a little patch of land next to a farmer and part-time trucker named Jerome. Jerome lost the sight in his left eye the year he turned sixty. He's getting treatments to restore full vision, but they have been ineffective and the eye is paining him. “I told the doc, ‘Just yank'er out!'” says Jerome, slapping a pair of pliers resting in a worn leather holster he keeps threaded on his belt. He moves with the barrel-chested stiffness of a man who has spent decades bulling his way through hard luck, boulder-studded fields, plummeting milk prices, and
damn government shysters
, all the while keeping things together with a pair of pliers. I've known Jerome for a while now, and I believe him about yanking the eye, because last year he swiveled a quarter turn to get his good one on me and then shared his creed: “Mike, I pay my bills and treat people square…but now and then you gotta do something just to keep'em wondering.”

Hank Carhart would agree. Hank is one of those small, lean, roughneck-looking kinds of guys whose two main possessions are a motorcycle and a dog. You see him and you think
bar fight
. Hank is a one-eyed land surveyor. There's a good joke there somewhere. When he was a kid the neighbor kid shot him in the right eye with a BB gun. “Just like Mom told ya, ‘Be careful with that thing, you'll put somebody's eye out!'” he says, blowing cigarette smoke and laughing at his own joke. “It was like that Christmas movie where the kid catches one in the glasses…I peeked out from behind the tree and took one in the looker.” He quickly adds, “I was shootin' at him, too, so it was legit.” Code of the West.