Truck (9 page)

 

Every year at this time, sometime after the snow clears and before the first green shoots appear, our little fire department convenes to burn the dead grass along the railroad tracks. The chief waits for a windless weeknight and pages everybody in. We put on all our gear and pull out all the trucks, then run around with propane torches, lighting the long dry weeds. It's a firebug's delight. Generally we start up by TJ's Food-N-Fun and let the flames work south. TJ will step out from cooking Tubby Burgers and watch awhile, and conglomerations of kids pop up at the street corners, many of them straddling bikes. Once the flames get clear of Main Street, some of us head south to Highway Q and start another bank of fire coming back north. We arm ourselves with rakes and water packs to keep the fire corralled and moving in the right direction. It's kind of a trail drive with flames in place of cattle.

Ostensibly, we burn the railroad tracks to eliminate the possibility of a freight train throwing a spark and starting a fire inside the village
boundaries. It's also a low-key rehearsal for a real wildfire. But above all, it's a great palaver. Darkness settles early, and then you get that hanging-out-around-the-campfire feel. Faces flickering with reflections of flame, voices in the smoke. We work a little and talk a lot. This year we cover motorcycles, mortgages, health insurance, and trailer park rent. Someone tells a story about a gigantic homemade bong. “You had to stand on the landing to smoke it,” says the voice, disembodied in the dark beyond the fire line. “Three people sucked the air out and the fourth person got a hit.” Someone else wonders if it would be okay to needle one of the firefighters currently out of earshot about the pretty much verified rumor that his wife had kicked him out for good. “I think you wait on that until he brings it up himself,” says another firefighter. Social graces, blue-collar style.

The flames flare and recede depending on what sort of fuel they're chewing. Clusters of bone-dry canary grass whirl up in a minitornado of sparks and tendrils of ash. The sparks flurry and slide across the black sky, extinguishing one at a time. We watch for flare-ups outside the burn zone, and stomp or spritz them as needed. The air is cool, and when I move in close to the flames, the heat feels good on my face. Suddenly one of the other firefighters rushes up and begins patting me. Normally, you don't get a lot of that.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Man, yer
hair's
on fire!” he hollers.

When it isn't falling out, it's bursting into flames.

 

The very next day, I call Dan at Wig-Wam Hair Fashions. Tell him it's time. He was booked solid for the week. “I can get you in next Friday,” he said.

That'll be fine, I said.

 

The first of my seeds have sprouted. By personal tradition, at first sight of cracked earth, I pull Dylan Thomas off the shelf and reread “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” I have been told the poem is not about a seedling but rather about Dylan's tallywhacker. I ignore
this and read it as a gardening poem. The first few stanzas, anyway. By the time I read the conclusion, I have to admit the tallywhacker analysis has some truck. Freud was a bit of a nutball, but there's no denying that from Aristophanes to Mojo Nixon, the tallywhacker has a rich history as prevalent muse.

I have rigged up an adjustable rack of cheap fluorescent lights in the south-facing window of my dining room where the sprouting trays get as much natural light as possible. The fluorescents are hooked up to a set of light timers that feed the plants light long after the sun has gone down. I used to keep the plants and lights in a closet off the living room. I thought it was a good idea because the furnace chimney runs through there and keeps it warm, but in the end the heat dried things out too quickly. I had a writer friend visit once, he was a committed smoker of herb, and when he saw the electrical cord snaking into my closet and the light glowing from beneath the door, he grinned and pointed and said with great expectation, “Yeah?” I opened the door to reveal trays of parsley and a couple of beleaguered leeks. His face dropped like the kid who got socks for Christmas.

One of the germination trays has a heating mat beneath it. This is the first year I've tried it. There are sprouts around the edges, but none in the center, which seems to dry out quickly. The water condenses on the little plastic dome, and runs back down the sides, creating a centrally located patch of drought. I have some leeks going, also three sad little basil sprouts, a clutch of lettuce mix, and some spindly parsley. I had a cilantro sprig, but it gave up the ghost last Wednesday. No apparent reason, perhaps it was my singing. Or overwatering. I tend to check the seed trays two or three times a day to see if they've made any progress since breakfast. I usually give them a spritz. Surely none of this helps. Putting me in charge of seeds is like dropping your kids off with a weird uncle who feeds them Funyuns for breakfast, then sends them out back for an unsupervised game of Jarts. When you combine my time on the road with my general gardening insouciance, you must expect a hefty fail rate. Still, no matter how it goes, I never tire of watching these plants unfold—slower than the naked eye can see, and yet, in day-to-day terms, with amazing speed. And I love to snap off a scrap of something green
to eat while the ground is still hard. The chlorophyll dose bears you forward to warmer days.

 

Although by and large we have not had much commerce, I like Dan the barber for a lot of reasons, including the fact that he parks up the street instead of right out front, which leaves the prime parking spot open, making things easier on the ladies coming in for church perms. I guess this is just good business, but still. I am also partial to him because when he came to town twenty-five years ago after leaving the Air Force and bought a tiny hairdressing shop called the Wig-Wam, he decided to retain the name, and believe me, I get some mileage out of that one while skipping through certain privileged circles.

But above all, I like Dan because every summer in the Jamboree Days beer tent we commiserate about our International problem. Dan has a Scout he has been trying to get refurbed and back on the road for several years now. At the moment it is in pieces in another man's shop. When I walk in the shop today, he greets me with alarm. “Did you sell your truck?!?” Imagine your best pal from the bowling team spotting your ball down at the pawnshop. I tell him no, tell him what's up, tell him as a matter of fact I'm going over to work on it later tonight. He is visibly relieved, no doubt in part because now we can suffer the same frustrations.

Dan asks me a couple of times if I'm sure about cutting all the hair off, but I'm unmoved by the whole thing. It's time, cut away what doth remain. So while he clips we talk, and watch the cars and people come and go. Dan's studio is elevated about four feet off street level, so he has this great vantage point, not real bird's eye, but high enough so people don't notice him observing. Sometimes I think of all the colorings and sets and rinses he's done, and how I bet sometimes when someone gets married or divorced or has a baby, Dan has seen it coming months or even years ahead of the rest of us. Sometimes I think if Dan blabbed, half the men in this town would need new nicknames.

“What do you think?” Dan has swiveled me to the mirror. He took it right down to an eighth-inch, like I asked him. I have forgotten that I
have such a large round skull. Definitely got some Charlie Brown melon going there. But I rub my palm over it and it feels good. Now if I can just break myself of flicking back hair that isn't there.

 

When I emerge from the Wig-Wam, the air is still warm and I have time and daylight enough for a bike ride. I head east of town, over the county line into a stretch of roller-coaster topography. It feels good to get out of the saddle on the climbs, rock the bike, do the push and pull, pretend I am ascending Alp d'Huez, and not some hillock in Barron County, Wisconsin. Halfway up the first big rise I pass a swampy hollow. A peeper frog choir is in full swing. Most of the frogs are singing baritone, creating a cumulative low-end chuckle similar to diesels idling behind a truck stop. Somewhere in there a lone castrato works a high note that cuts through like a bell, rising insistently above the mix and not fading until I crest the hill and drop down the other side, where the land opens up before me. Everything is stark and brown. A few intransigent strips of grainy snow cling to the north-facing slopes.

On the return trip, I have the wind with me, and I launch from the hill with a burst of pedaling, then assume a tuck and really let it roll. I am nudging 45 miles per hour and whizzing past the froggy choir when a flock of wild turkeys explodes from the hazelnut bushes, crossing left to right. Upward of a dozen gobbling brown missiles fill the air ahead of me, above me, and behind me—everywhere but in the spokes. I consider the ignominy of being found dead with feathers in my bike shorts and a turkey beak jammed in one ear, but I keep my head and the hammer down on the hard-earned theory that evasive action generally compounds your problems. As I come safely clear of the turkey strafe, and the last of the frog notes yield to diminuendo, I am reminded once again that certain germane aspects of the naturalist experience cannot be conveyed via the pretty pictures on your National Wildlife Federation screen saver. I plane out onto a flat stretch, exhilarated at the ineffable cusp of spring, when frogs sing and turkeys attack.

On the last leg of the bike ride, I encounter a farmer friend and stop to visit on the shoulder. He's pulling a portable welder behind his pickup. “Rock rake's busted,” he says, and that's enough. “Say, you sell that old
truck of yours? I drove by your place the other day and seen it's gone.”

“Nah, didn't sell it,” I say. “Workin' on fixin' it. It's pretty shot.”

“Yeah, we was talkin' about that down to TJ's. I said I figured your best bet would be to jack up the radiator cap and drive a new truck in under it!”

 

I shower and make the drive to the shop. Mark wants to pull the bed so he can get it sandblasted. While he disappears under the frame again with his plasma torch, I go about removing the spare tire rack. First I grab a lug wrench to remove the tire itself. In the circle formed by the hole at the center of the rim, I can see the same hand-painted letters I've seen for years:

 

4–27-

Hi

Ron

 

When I pull the tire, the entire date is revealed:

 

4–27–82

Hi

Ron

 

Just a few days short of twenty-one years, then. I would have been a junior in high school. The twenty-seventh was a Tuesday, so I probably slouched around school, attended track practice, and then spent the balance of the evening in my bedroom listening to the theme from
Chariots of Fire
whilst longing for the farmgirls of spring. Who ran toward me in slow motion.

With the tire removed, I can get to the six bolts that secure the frame itself to the box. One of the nuts is missing. I soak the rest with WD-40 and then make two trips back and forth between the truck and the toolbox before I choose the socket sized to fit the nuts. Mark glances at them from ten feet and says, “Prob'ly five-eighths.” Yes.

After a little handle-banging to break the rust, the nuts ratchet off easily. It helps that the rack is mounted on carriage bolts. Carriage bolts have a domed cap that give a wrench no purchase, but the shaft collar is squared off above the threads, which holds it from spinning when countersunk in a square hole, as these are. Rather than have to twist two wrenches at once, I just keep a little thumb pressure on the domed head, and flick the ratchet handle back and forth until the nut spins free. Ever since I was a kid helping Dad bolt down the bed on our hay wagon, ratchet sockets have been my favorite tool. The socket fits the nut so snugly. The hidden mechanism that allows the socket to hold its position while the handle is rotated backward for a fresh turn is a little bit magical. I've always enjoyed the
zip-clunk, zip-clunk
sound of the ratchet working, a sound that is simultaneously fun and industrious, and it's fascinating how such a little adaptation (the ratchet) amplifies the efficiency of the tool. When all five nuts are spun free, I set the rack aside and get my first good look at Ron's rendition of the Playboy bunny. Technique-wise, it's pretty well executed, with a bow tie and all, although it looks a little more Peter Cottontail than Hardcore Hare. Ron has enclosed the caricature in quote marks. You see that a lot in homemade signage, quote marks used for emphasis, with the end result being unintentional irony. As in
“QUALITY™ CAR REPAIR
. Could it be that Ron—a man whose swabs of primer may have been inartful, but saved the truck from rusting away completely—is in reality a postmodern ironist? I have very little to go on—only a vague recollection of standing in his yard on a cold day and giving him some cash.

Mark has detached the box. We get on either side and try to shift it. It's mighty heavy, but not impossible. Using pry bars, sawhorses, and the brute force of our backs, we inch it up and rearward, increment by increment, until it is clear of the cab and frame and resting on sawhorses. The old truck looks suddenly lightened. The revealed frame rails—upon which the entire rest of the truck is stacked or hung—are surprisingly narrow and spare. So much of our impressions of automobiles and machinery is formed by the shape of the skin, you forget how relatively fine-boned the linkages are that hold it all together and make it run. The big rounded cab looks tick-fat and out of proportion to the twin rails of
exposed channel iron supported by two narrow tires. The truck looks like a rooster with no tail. A fat man with skinny legs. But you get an idea of what the truck was designed for now that you can see the full length of the leaf springs—held to the frame with a stout shackle and bracket system and U-bolted to the axle in a thick stack, including a spacer upon which rests a stubby set of auxiliary overload springs for extra big loads. The setup looks so stiff you can't imagine the cargo that would make them flex.