Truck (32 page)

We don't have a head table. I eat my chicken elbow-to-elbow with my old carp-shooting buddy Mills—the funniest man ever to don a pair of plastic hillbilly teeth. He presents me with a carefully wrapped packet of smoked redhorse, and we bore his wife with the same old stories. It's a cozy little lull. Then the band starts and Anneliese and I begin making the rounds, trying to say hello to as many people as possible. I see faces from my childhood, my neighborhood, my high school, my old jobs, my bike-racing days, my community theater days, my nights at the bar days, on and on, and it is a parallel experience for Anneliese. You begin to realize that no thank-you note is going to cut it, and you hope they see it in your eyes. Lieutenant Pam from the fire department, who came down even though she was walking straight-up stiff from back surgery. Uncle Bill, with his table of homemade wine shipped in from Texas. Uncle Stan, who drove his Freightliner all night long to be here. When we came down to eat, the signs of friends giving their time were everywhere—from the arrangement of the tables to the milk cans filled with native flowers and red sumac to the handcrafted envelope box…we are blessed, blessed.

 

The reception is at high hubbub when Bob appears at my elbow, raises a conspiratorial eyebrow, and gives a theatrical nod in the direction of the nearest exit. Anneliese locates Marta and Minister Katrina, I round up Gene, and then we all follow Bob upstairs to an anteroom off the hallway, where he reaches within his suitcoat and draws forth a document with such a grand flourish you would expect him to produce the Federalist Papers or a very lacy hanky.

Rather, it is our marriage license.

Some time ago, a young man and woman of Bob's acquaintance met while performing a play. They fell in love and, having succumbed in the footlights, chose to be married onstage at a local theater. The whole production was nearly canceled when it was discovered that the young couple's minister could not perform the ceremony outside of the church proper. Bob, long a fixture of the local community theater scene and ever primed to make a memorable entrance, took it upon himself to go online and do a little research. After obtaining the all-clear from the local clerk of courts and the Wisconsin state attorney general herself, Bob submitted an electronic application to the Web site of Universal Ministries, lately of Milford, Illinois, and within moments found himself selected, appointed, ordained, and granted the power to perform sacerdotal duties including the legal sanction of marriages in the state of Wisconsin. Subsequent to the thespians, he has performed two more. We will be his fourth. Nothing against Universal Ministries, but Bob prefers to announce that he is filling the vacancy left by the late Flip Wilson at The Church of What's Happenin' Now. On a note far less comical, Bob recently collapsed and found himself in the hospital near death, awaiting what is popularly referred to as lifesaving surgery. When Bob's partner of over thirty years showed up, he was forbidden entry until Bob threatened to unplug his machines, leave his bed, and drop in a heap on the sidewalk. Cruel, meet ludicrous.

While everyone celebrates downstairs, you see what has happened here. Anneliese and I are arrived at this moment of pure joy only because three very distinct people—Reverend Virginia, Minister Katrina,
and now Bob—shared their time, their hard-won wisdom, and their
love
with us. All that they might guide us to the entrance of a covenant from which they are excluded. Having been given grace, how can I stand for the deprivation of those who freely gave it? This is not about indulging a kink. This is about beating the incalculable odds of finding another human being who loves you and suffers you and holds your most secret secrets in a fortress of commitment, but is shooed from your sickbed. Who knows your shirt size, your white lies, and why you can't sleep some nights, but will receive no privileged consideration under the law without the prodigious tangle of paperwork and high-dollar lawyering required to cobble up an approximation of the real deal. I say let them be joined. If Bob was afflicted with a kink, the other boys would have beat it out of him at recess years ago.

Bob smoothed the license across a lectern, and we each signed off in turn. Bob went last. And then it was real. After a concluding flourish of the pen, he turned, plainly delighted, and pronounced us legally married in the eyes of our assembled friends, the State of Wisconsin, and yes, you bet, The Church of What's Happenin' Now.

We couldn't be happier.

 

Then it is back to the eating and the dancing and the friends, it goes on and on. At one point before they pack up to go, the entire fire department joins us on the dance floor for a group photograph. I kneel front and center with Anneliese on my knee. The firefighters have all worn their uniform tops, and as we grin I am thinking of the farm in Fall Creek and how we will probably move there, and one day I will go to the monthly meeting to turn in my pager and letter of resignation, and as eager as I am to start my life with Anneliese and chickens, that will not be an easy night. Me and all these people in the blue shirts, we've been through so much together. You could write a book about it.

When we have thanked and paid the dance band (they were a wonderful, old-style big band—I shuffled out a handful of slow dances with Anneliese, and did what I thought was dance when they played, of course, “Yes Sir, That's My Baby”), someone plugs a CD player into the sound system, which starts banging out salsa merengue. Just before
the hall rental expires, even this hard-core crew has dwindled, and it all draws down to one table, just a handful of us. Anneliese's mother is laughing and giddy, maybe from the wine, but I think mostly from having it all over with. It is so good to see her happy after all she has done for us. For twenty minutes or so we just sit splayed around a table spearing watermelon chunks from a tray. My tie is undone and Amy is on my lap. Anneliese looks over at us and smiles.

 

And then we drive back to the farm where the day began. While Anneliese is in the house putting Amy to bed and changing out of her wedding gown, I prepare the International. It is looking more and more as if we will soon be tending this patch of land. The garden will probably go in over there right about where we stood to be wed. There is a spot just past the garage that seems perfect for chickens, and one corner of the remaining barnyard looks as if it would do for a pig. Or a beef cow. We'll try to keep it realistic. In preparation for the move, we have placed a copy of Gene Logsdon's
All Flesh Is Grass
in the bathroom. We dip into it and dream.

Our plan tonight is to drive out on the ridge running east from the farmhouse and sleep beneath the stars. But there are no stars because the rain is returned and tick-tacking down, so I pull the folded silver Farm & Fleet tarp from behind the seat with the intention of rigging it over the bed. Standing there with a hand on the open door I am thinking: This old truck. Going on twenty years, one of us dragging the other around, and look at us now. Me with a ring on my finger, her painted up and rolling again. She is just sitting there quiet now, the yardlight shadowing dully in her marine green curves. Looking sturdy. Earthy. Handsome for sure. It feels good to think maybe someday soon I'll back her around to the pen and toss some hay to the beefer, or run a load of pig dirt across the yard to the parsnip patch. That maybe one day Amy will learn to double-clutch. The wind is up. I fight with the tarp, try to fix it in place with a set of bungees, but the rain just keeps driving down harder and harder, until I realize there will be no sleeping under the sky tonight.

 

So I pulled the truck into the big red pole shed and shut the door behind her, and shortly my wife arrived to help me fit the air mattress snug in the truck bed, and then we rolled close in the blankets and fell straight to sleep with the rain roaring on the steel above us.

I
T TURNS OUT
Ron didn't paint the Playboy bunny. I tracked him down with the help of my uncle Mike, who ran a long line of Internationals and used to work with Ron. When I reached him by phone, he was reticent at first, but then he got rolling. He said he bought the truck in Minnesota, where it was sitting in a grove of trees. It had a bad rod, he said, so he took the engine out and overhauled it, which explains why it has always run so well. He says he stripped the engine down to the bare block and found soybean husks inside. He says the yellow flames were on it when he bought it, but that it was a friend who painted it pink, and that the pink wasn't primer, but rather half pints of different paints mixed together. He says his friend was the one who painted the bunny and date on the spare tire rack. He says the tires on the rear end—the ones with the big lugs—were on there when he bought it, and I tell him they're still running. I asked him about the giant gas tank, the one that finally rusted through, and he says it was just a piece of pipe. “I cut some ends and welded'er up,” he said.

I moved a lot of stuff with that truck, he said, right before we hung up.

 

As for Irma Harding, I have learned that she was created by Haddon Sundblom, the commercial artist most famous for creating the rosy-cheeked Coca-Cola Santa, which he would go on to paint for thirty-five years. The model for Irma was a woman named Ann Pfarr. She was paid nine dollars. Over the years, Sundblom also painted a fair share of soda-sipping chickies, and once a
Playboy
cover, further explicating Irma's combined wholesomeness and allure. She was Mrs. Claus with a little of the old
va-voom
.
On November 19, 2005, two years to the month past the projected finish date on the truck project, I walked across the yard in the dark, climbed into the racing seat, turned the key, and punched the starter. She fired right up. Then I drove out into the country, up a dead-end road, and to the far reaches of a plowed field lumpy with snow. Mark met me on the trail, and we walked to deer stands on opposite sides of the swamp and blocked from each other's view by a peninsula of trees. Shortly after daybreak, I caught a movement in the trees behind my stand and when I swiveled to pin it, a big buck startled from the brush in front of the stand. Blowing repeatedly, it ran off before I could raise my rifle, but it was headed in Mark's direction, and soon enough, I heard him shoot. Ten minutes later, I caught another movement, and this time I was able to discern a deer. At the first opportunity, I fired, and took a seven-point buck of my own.

I went to fetch Mark's deer first, bouncing down a winding logging trail, the brush screeching along the fenders and slapping at the windows. I parked at the edge of the swamp and we fetched the deer from the tamaracks. It was a tough drag across the sawgrass hummocks, and we were sweating as we hoisted the buck into the truck bed. Then we motored back over to my side of the woods to load my buck. There was a spot on the trail where the track ran deep into a muddy trough, then climbed steeply. At the apex of the climb, the trail veered sharply left to skirt a tree. Hit the trough too tentatively, and you peter out on the climb, slipping back to stick in the mud. Hit it too hard and you'll overshoot the hairpin and eat the tree.

I stopped the truck twenty yards shy of the dip, and we sized it up. Mark was in the passenger seat. “Whadd'ya think?” I asked.

“It'll be tight,” he said.

“Git'er done,” I said.

“Give'er,” he said.

Mark grabbed the seat in one hand and the door handle in the other. I double-clutched to second gear and stuffed the foot feed. The engine gathered and the six cylinders went all throaty, and now we were committed, the nose barging forward and down, dead-centered on the bottom of
that trough. We hit it with a good head of steam, and just as quickly the wheels struck the upside and the nose bounced skyward. That 127-inch L-120 wheelbase is not so nimble, and the steering wheel was bucking in my hand as the Silver Diamond hood ornament drew a bead on the tree. I kept my foot in it until three feet of bark had disappeared beneath the horizon of the dash, and then I two-fisted the steering wheel, cranking it counterclockwise, hand-over-handing it as fast as I could manage. The ground had frozen overnight, but now we were closing in on mid-morning, and the top half-inch had thawed, coating the solid earth in a mud slick. The rear wheels slipped a quarter turn, the hind end broke loose, and the truck drifted, yawing toward the tree. We were mere inches from broadsiding the trunk. I backed out of the throttle a hair, just enough for the truck to gather and get back on track but not enough to let us sputter and flub the climb. It was a split-second thing, just a centimeter adjustment of my foot on the accelerator pedal amid all the bounce and roar, but it worked a treat, tweaking our trajectory so that we dove past the tree trunk with slim daylight to spare. As we broke clear, I gave a whoop and kept her rolling. Beneath his blaze orange hat, Mark was beaming. We were living the giddy culmination of the truck's resurrection. For every false start, for every change of plan, for everything we never saw coming, for every time we fooled ourselves into thinking we were almost there, here we were, months and miles after rolling the International off the flatbed, roaring for home. Working that truck.
Using
that truck.

Bringing home the
bacon,
no less.

 

I'm still working on giving Ozzie that ride. We got rained out once and snowed out twice.

 

If you run across an old green International pickup with racing seats and a hefty black brush buster, and maybe a pink Barbie backpack slung from the glove box button, go on around the passenger side and check the spare tire rack. Look in the circle formed by the center of the spare. Maybe you'll see a name painted in there.

If it says
IRMA
, that's my truck.