Truck (29 page)

I guess, give me articulate sinners who pitch in.

 

I can't help but notice Mark's sawmill hasn't progressed much since he made room for my truck. His plan was to have it up and running by now, use it to generate extra income on off days and weekends. So far it's been all money in and none out, and he says Kathleen inquires now and then. Although I quite accurately cast him as an ultracompetent superman, he does know what it is to be frustrated. The motorcycle engine didn't work out and he's pulled it in favor of a 60-horse diesel he bought from a guy, but the diesel is currently sitting in a patch of weeds somewhere. And he can't get the hydraulics to work right at all. When he throws the levers, nothing moves the way it should, and the power just peters out. “Some sort of parasitic loss,” he says, and I'm thinking, I'd like to hear The Joynt crew parse that one.

While Mark is frogging around under the truck frame, I affix the windshield wiper frames we cobbed from the L-180, and then I hang the spare-tire rack. I grab the bag of carriage bolts and nuts from the plastic tub under the workbench and find the little note I wrote back in April: “
One bolt missing.
” The truck was still all rust, Dan had just cut my hair, and it was the day before my first date with Anneliese. Now Anneliese cuts my hair, and I just wave at Dan, but he doesn't mind, I'm going bald and there are still plenty of ladies who need church perms. The truck project has been going slower than we hoped, but life has been roaring right along.

After the rack is reassembled, I mount the front and spare tires, and then mask the sandblasted front wheels for painting. Over the background noise of the furnace and radio, you catch the sound of the ratchet zipping on the backstroke, the staticky splatter of the welder, the tape ripping from the roll. There's not a lot of talking. Before I came over, the fire chief stopped by the house with a package of venison jerky and pepperoni sticks. They're lying there on the workbench, the butcher paper rolled open, and we raid the pile as we work. For dessert, wintergreen lozenges from Farm & Fleet. I don't recall how we got started on the lozenges. They're chemically pink, weirdly addictive, and look like pills for a horse. For some reason, they go good with shop work. We always keep them in stock.

Mark and I get along great, no problems, we just don't have a lot of overlap. We hunt deer together some every year, go ice-fishing
sometimes, and five or six times a year we'll end up at the farm for Sunday night dinner, but beyond that and a few holiday get-togethers, our contact is pretty limited. When he and my brothers get together, the talk is all log skidders and compression ratios and welding supplies. I'll hang around the edges and toss in a joke here and there, and they usually chuckle, like
Well, you know, it's the best he can do
. Sometimes in the shop with Mark, I'll get to rambling about the relationship between postwar industrial design and the evolution of the mustache grille as it applies to the truck-buying habits of Today's Woman, and he has this way of leaning in with his head cocked a tad, and he holds his eyes a little wide like you do when you're trying like mad to hold focus, and then I'll notice his gaze sliding off to the side and then pretty soon he'll just wander away and start messing around in the parts bin. I figure sometimes after I leave he walks into the house, slumps in his Mossy Oak recliner, looks at my sister, and just says, My God.

The reason I like Mark isn't complicated. He is good to my sister, and he has fundamental talents. If I ran the repair shop we would have odes on a lugnut, but all your wheels would fall off. That is, if the car would start in the first place. Mark is, at the end of the day, just a man worried about paying his bills, raising his kid right, and keeping his wife happy. He goes to work, fires up his lathe and CNC program, and makes parts for things we want. Lately here it was luggage racks.

When I put that machinist reference book back on the shelf with the others, I noticed a fat paperback I hadn't seen before.
The Testament,
by John Grisham. “That yours?” I asked, as if I had found a fat pink lollipop in his socket set.

“Yeah. I don't know. I like his books.”

“You know, he just started out as a regular lawyer.”

“I didn't know that.” Which tells you right there he meant what he said, he likes the books. During a visit to Oxford, Mississippi, I had been past Grisham's compound, and I started rattling on about the size of the guardhouse and this thing I had read about Grisham's writing habits and that I heard he worked out a lot, and you know, there's this little upstairs bar on the square there in Oxford…

Mark cocked his head a tad and widened his eyes.

 

One is hesitant to make declarations unless one is prepared to eat them later baked in pastry, but at the moment the country feels like a chrome-plated diesel wound to the redline, bombing down the road with a big load of nothing. I could be wrong, as the experts say. In the first week of March 2000, after doing my research and thinking it over carefully, I invested my first book advance in tech stocks, and I have been predicting the real estate crash since 1992. Time makes fools of us all, although given enough of it and Einstein's bending light, every Chicken Little gets his shot at Nyah-Nyah. But you have to believe the credit cards are coming home to roost.

In that vein, I should be happy to report, but am not, that after nearly thirty years out of the game, International has resumed manufacturing pickup trucks. Billed as the biggest production pickup in the world, the International CXT weighs 14,500 pounds (you may use the Hummer H2, at 8,600 pounds, for comparison), stands nine feet tall, and is available with a 300-horsepower engine that vaporizes a gallon of diesel every seven to ten miles, all to transport an eight-foot-long cargo bed no bigger than the one on my 1951 L-120. As my brother Jed once said in reference to yet another gigantic dual-wheeled pickup towing two ATVs and a beer-cooler on a lightweight aluminum trailer, “You've got a three-quarter-ton doolie there, son—hook that thing to a
trailer
!” The classic Raymond Loewy logo is absent from the CXT, lost to buyouts and downsizings and focus group specialists who reported that “the brand was also still linked to farmers, which, to many, connoted old-fashioned, unchanging, plain and dull.” The logo was updated to have a “bold industrial feel,” and strategies were hatched to “get around the farmer image.” Mission accomplished: the CXT was written up in
People
magazine, Ashton Kutcher was seen behind the wheel, and it is currently advertised with the slogan,
Trucks that make a bold statement. Namely, that YOU RULE.

I love trucks. I love big trucks. I love big four-wheel-drive, hammer-down, lay-some-dust-on-the-popples, rifle-racked, ug-ully trucks. Above all, I love
International
trucks. But this CXT is clearly a case of the emperor has no ass.

Seriously. Spam in a pouch.

We pine for dull farmers.

Since I have neither lobbyists nor sufficient mercenaries on retainer to handle the difficulties to come, I will have to satisfy myself with muddling along and engaging in manageable self-improvement projects. Among other acts of citizenship, I must become more stringent about thinning my turnips. The world is interminably nasty and will not be arranged in neat columns. As such, let us keep our powder dry and never again use the phrase, “All is well.” Beyond that, living peaceably seems to be the most sustainable form of reprisal.

 

The year is ending and the truck is still in Mark's shop, the ring is still off my finger, and my garden was the usual mix of compost and plenty, but there is venison and homegrown roast tomato stock in the freezer and a good woman I haven't run off. Whatever the future, I am looking at it from a different perspective. Anneliese has changed my life, for the better certainly, to what extent remains to be seen. I'm still chewing over the marriage issue, recently adding to the manila file a clipping declaring that married people are happier, wealthier, and sexually more satisfied than their unmarried counterparts, although I searched the text in vain for a money-back guarantee. Sometimes I watch Amy playing and think of my jumbled head and my jumbled ways and wonder how the interpolation will proceed, and if I will forget to feed her often. On Christmas Eve we pack the car and drive down to Fall Creek where Anneliese's mother lives on her hilltop farm, and it's a classically cozy evening, sweaters around the crackling fire, the whole bit. After everyone is in bed, I go into the living room to unplug the Christmas tree, and from the window I can see a few dots of light in the valley below, little farmhouses, but off to the northwest the glow of Eau Claire, which is sprawling this way with its bypasses and malls and bulldozing that has been officially and on TV deemed by both the previous and current governors as Good for Wisconsin. That is a debate for another day; more germane to the moment is that one of those governors is a Republican and the other is a Democrat. Sometimes you wonder what all the fighting is about.

Anneliese's mother, Donna, and her husband, Grant, may be moving soon, and there is talk of Anneliese and me taking over the place, should things continue to work out. The idea of leaving New Auburn—sixteen years on the home farm, and now over a decade on Main Street—is more jolting than the idea of getting married, and I am grateful that John Hildebrand recently passed me an essay of his in which he proposes that “sense of place” is not predicated on extended residence but rather is based on our own projections:
this story we tell ourselves about where we belong
. That stood several of my cherished beliefs on their head and snapped their ears but also provided me a way to begin entertaining the possibility of change without unseemly hysterics.

 

I'm still not crystal-clear on what Nolte was driving at with the Baudelaire thing. To be fair, people had been drinking, and there was a lot of smoke, and we were standing right beside the jukebox, so he had to kind of holler past my right ear, but I do try to take Bill Nolte at his word. I will tell you that by nightfall the next evening I had read some Baudelaire. But I didn't find any clear-cut answer. I recall that at some point during the discussion Nolte said something about ameliorism and the copper roof on Bob Dylan's mansion, so I am going to read up on these ameliorists and see where that takes me, but at some point you have to ditch the interior yip-yap and grab a shovel. Sometimes when I am paddling laps in a demitasse of home-brewed ennui, the concentric circles grow ever-smaller until I spot my own toes, at which point I think of Mr. Natural on his scooter and suspect he may be right. Come to think of it, he may be paraphrasing Baudelaire. But it is time to get past Baudelaire. Nolte will tell you it is good to be confused, rather than soak in your own certitude, be it dark or light. I once asked a veteran Grand Canyon river guide what he had learned after his decades of floating raft loads of tourists down the Colorado. At the time, he was surveying his current sunburned brood as they struggled to set up camp on the beach, and he replied in the instant: “You learn there's a jackass on every trip.”

Then he grinned.

“And if you haven't figured out who it is by Day Five…it's you.”

I
N JANUARY WE
went to Mexico. We stayed for five weeks, wandering, hopping buses, staying in cheap hotels, and visiting the family that hosted Anneliese when she was a university student in Cholula. I was dependent on Anneliese to navigate and speak when my seven Spanish words came up short, and it was good for me to need her in that way. I often found myself reduced to asking Amy for words, which she pretended not to know. I scraped together some new vocabulary, but in essence, I was the linguistic equivalent of a big hairy two-year-old.

Much of our trip was spent in the metropolis of Puebla, and inland—Cholula and Taxco—but on our last day, we went to a beach in Zihuatanejo. Amy was a delight, playing in the waves with me, and me sloshing around like a Scandinavian galoot who had been in the ocean only once previously and then for just ten minutes because I was late for an airplane. Anneliese swam with us and then we had what Amy has come to call a “three-hug” in the surf beneath the beating sun, and then we changed out of our wet things and took a taxi to the airport, and later that day, when we unlocked the car in Minnesota, it was 20 below and the foam seats were solid as blocks of cheese.

On the plane ride home, something settled in me. Our seat assignments got split, putting Anneliese and Amy several rows ahead and on the opposite side of the aisle from my seat. Five weeks tramping around
Mexico, swaying through the mountains on fuming buses and cramming into Volkswagen taxis, sharing cheap hotel rooms with nowhere to hide from one another, Amy dragging her pink clearance-rack Barbie backpack every step of the way, and we all still liked one another. During our flight, I couldn't see much of Anneliese, just her blond hair gathered in a twist that revealed the back of her neck as she inclined her head above Amy in the exact motherly cant that has inspired endless versions of
Madonna and Child
—but I studied her from that angle for a long, long while and fixed the image in my head in case I needed it many years from now.

 

When it comes to proposing marriage, I have never understood the concept of “popping” the question. In light of the potential legal and heart-related sequelae, it always struck me that a pre-pop confab might be good. For reasons more civilized than the setting would imply, I once attended a tuba contest during which the proceedings were interrupted by a man who leapt onstage and proposed marriage to a woman who—we have to take his word for it—was his girlfriend, but whom had clearly not been consulted beforehand. In the end, at the urging of the crowd (many clad in lederhosen and hoisting plastic cups of beer), she acquiesced, but her face was a topographic map of nervous blotches and in her haste to exit stage left she scaled the heels of her betrothed. The tubas went straight back to oompah, but it took two verses and a chorus of
Who Stole the Kishka
before I could work the cringe-cramps from my face.

Anneliese and I talked it over first.

At first we thought it would be nice to propose in a natural setting. Beneath, say, a hillside apple tree at her mother's farm, or atop my favorite deer stand. In the end we decided it should be a place neither of us “owned.” We figured we'd know it when we saw it.

In March, I was invited to participate in the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans. The three days fit between Anneliese's work schedule, so she flew down with me. On our final night in town, we had dinner with friends, then went for a walk through the French Quarter.
In fact, we strolled. Hand in hand. The town was relatively quiet, and we were simply meandering when we came upon Preservation Hall. Having arrived halfway through the penultimate set, we decided to stay for the final show. At changeover, we packed in with the people and were lucky enough to find a seat on the second bench back, just to the right of the center post. Happily, the place was jammed, and Anneliese had to sit sideways on my lap. The songs rolled out the way you hoped they would, brassy and swinging, and there was really no place else in the world, and midway through the clarinet solo of “Yes Sir, That's My Baby,” I looked up to see Anneliese smiling down at me and, looking back into her eyes with my arms around her waist, I said into her ear, Would you like to get married? and she leaned to my ear and said, Yes, would you? and I said, Yes, and then the full band came swinging back in and there you go.

After we got home from the airport we drove to her mother's farm, and when we were all three seated in the living room—Anneliese and I together on the couch, her mother in the big chair—I said, Donna, I am asking permission to marry your daughter, and Donna said, “My baby!” and burst into tears.

I took this as perhaps a yes, although when Anneliese moved to the big chair so her mother might hold her, I have to say I felt like a small man on a cold island. The room became the provenance of womanly spirits that spun a swift steel circle around the two of them. I was not afraid, but I did sit quietly. There were clearly ancient goddesses about. I hold the scene in my heart as a stern blessing.

It was easier with her father, whom we lured to Anneliese's house under the false pretense of coffee. When I asked permission for his daughter's hand, his eyebrows shot up and he said, “Oh!” and then he said, “Well, I think that's just great.”

 

In marrying Anneliese, I will be assuming partial responsibility for a child. Amy's father and I have had our long talks, and while neither of us is pretending that this is some sort of neato alternative lifestyle deal, we have developed what can perhaps surprisingly be called a
heartfelt friendship predicated on the unclouded eyes of a child. We have vowed to do our best as men, and so far, so good. It helps that he has emerged as a thoughtful man of his word who gets Monty Python.

It is my opinion as a long-term bachelor that children are accorded far too much deference these days and that it is time for adults to resume their former responsibilities. That said, rediscovering the world from the perspective of a tyke younger than my newest pair of shoes has chipped away at certain ossifications and let the sun shine in. When two plastic horses get in a fight over cosmetics on either side of a Barbie makeup table, I hear Amy say, in her best horsey voice, “No, that's
my
lip-skit!” When she leans too heavily on one horse and it collapses, she comes up from the floor holding her arm with her face twitching between laughter and tears. Finally, she grins and says, “Now my elbow is flat like a tire!” When time allows, we walk over to the fire hall, where she loves to sit in the trucks and pretend she is one of the “fighter-fighters.”

You become privy to the incremental expansion of a brain. I am running an errand with Amy in the car seat behind me when she asks me for a drink. I dig out a bottle of orange juice. Orange juice is her favorite, and at the sight of it, she hugs herself joyfully and says, “Hug, hug, hug!” A few blocks later I check her in the rearview mirror. She is regarding the bottle intently, and then suddenly she looks up, and her face radiates light. “Hey…there's
orange
…and there's
orange
!” I think it is not insignificant to be present the moment a child discovers that a word—and therefore the world—has more than one meaning.

 

However sustained the angelic phases, a child is not a Christmas ornament. The capacity for plotting and duplicity seems to come in with that first set of teeth. When my brother Jed remarried, he, too, gained a daughter. Sienna is a few months younger than Amy. The two have become fast friends, usually greeting each other with a full-on sprint to hug. Someday the kinetic energy of their affection will cost one of them a tooth. Recently my car was in the shop, and Jed drove me in to pick it up. We had previously arranged a sleepover for Amy and Sienna,
so I put Amy and her Barbie backpack in the car with us, and when Jed dropped me at the repair shop, Amy stayed with him and rode to the farm. She had recently developed the blatant habit of asking for other people's possessions: dolls, toy horses, paring knives, futons…whatever struck her fancy. So we'd been working on this, explaining to her that polite guests do not demand gifts. Later, Jed told me that as soon as I exited the car, Amy leaned forward in her safety seat and tapped him on the shoulder.

“I have a secret to tell you.”

“Yes?” said Jed.

“When we get to your house.”

“Oh-kaaay…,” said Jed, not sure what family lid was about to be popped. The rest of the drive passed genially, and by the time they reached the farm, he figured she had forgotten. But as he bent to unsnap her seat belt, she leaned to his ear, and in the gravest of whispers, said, “If there's anything you don't want…
I'll take it
.”

 

I will do my best, which is to say it might be good to start interviewing child therapists immediately. If she trips and falls while chasing her ball, I raise one finger to the sky and declare, “Quoth the Apostle Mark…” and she will chime in “
Walk it off!
” Or she will be whining about taking her dish to the sink and I will say, “Zero…” and she will say, “
…whinage!
” We have also worked up a little act where I load my pocket with invisible dog treats and she goes through this whole production: fetching, rolling over, playing dead. For the big finale I balance an invisible treat on her nose and at the snap of my fingers she snatches it from the air. One day when she comprehends what I have done, I will provide her with the 1-800 number for county social services and take my punishment.

 

The truck is all but ready to hit the road. After switching the system over from six to twelve volts, Mark has run into all kinds of trouble with the peripheral elements of the electrical system. The engine runs fine, but anything attached to a wire is gone nutty. My dad has
quite a bit of electrical experience, and he and Mark recently spent an entire day trying to ferret out the gremlins. I was not called in, because I remain firmly in the camp of those who believe that electricity is magic. After a full day's work, they managed to eliminate the majority of problems, but a few remained. Dad called me from the shop.

“The right turn signal works,” he said.

“Great!” I said.

“The left one doesn't.”

“Oh?”

“It makes the headlights flash.”

“Ah.”

“But if you switch the headlights off, then it works fine.”

I thought about this a moment. “Well, there
is
some good news.”

“Oh?”

“I have a left arm. I can hand-signal.”

“Yes, but the bad news is, you'll only need the hand signal after dark, when your headlights are on. Whoever's following you won't be able to see your arm.”

I can hear Mark in the background. “We could get him one of those reflective bracelets…”

 

I dreaded the idea of picking out rings, and was relieved when Anneliese found her great-grandmother's wedding ring in a drawer and decided to wear that. It is a slim strip of gold with a flat chip of diamond and speaks to me of simplicity and devotion from another age.

My ring—your standard gold band—was given to me by a friend. He wore it for the duration of his relatively brief, or perhaps overlong, first marriage. While standing in the presence of his second wife, I wondered aloud if we were fooling with dire karma here. Think of it as a gift from the kindest, most loyal man I have ever known, she said.

She also said, That first bimbo didn't count.

 

Glory be, today is the day. The International takes the road. Mark and I are prepared for our first ride, and we are goofy in our glee. We have agreed to keep the first trip simple, and also agree that Farm & Fleet is the only suitable destination. At my request, Mark will take the wheel for the first trip out. This is a matter of honor. If not for him, the truck would be half an inch deeper in my driveway by now, with foxtail sprouting out the wheel wells. Working beside him has been a rare privilege. To watch his hands, to see the way he sizes things up, to see him move forward, make cuts in a blank sheet of steel that would have me dithering for days. More than once I have seen him suss out a problem by looking back and forth from the vintage service manual and the part in question until the image in his head overlaps with the one on the page, and every time I wonder what it feels like to be wired that way. It has also been fun to watch him adapt as a father. I note that up there on the workbench between the Chilton manual and
Motorcycle Basics,
I can now see the spine of the
Giant Coloring and Activity Book,
and over on the floor beside the unfinished sawmill, a multicolored plastic pipe wrench.

We climb in and pull the doors shut. I never tire of the way the latches click, a tight sound that transmits solidly throughout the steel cab. The old truck starts nicely. When it's cold, you have to choke it pretty good, then ease the choke in and the idle out a tad. The Silver Diamond sound is there, sewing machine on the treble end, trucky rumble on the low end, and a touch of midrange putt-putt. Mark guides the gear selector leftward and forward to first gear, and then, pressing the accelerator as he releases the clutch, puts us on our way.

We go grinding up the road. I coach him on how to double clutch, which makes me proud. Like the left-handed threads all those months ago, I am tickled with this rare chance to educate him about something mechanical. Over on the passenger side I mime-shift, working my clutch foot back and forth in the air and pressing the invisible gas pedal flat to the floor. Mark mirrors my act, and with a little grind here and there, we are rumbling on our way. Gosh, it's good to hear the old engine spinning, to see the blacktop slipping under the inverted prow of the hood. The old truck is rolling again, rolling down the road.

Three miles from the house we pull into a corner gas station. Mark pumps the gas while I walk in to pay, and the first person I encounter, this stocky guy wearing an American Breeders Service ball cap, says, “That a 'forty-eight International?”