Truck

by Michael Perry

  Back in New Auburn, I knock around like the bachelor I still technically am. My first night back, I go to the kitchen to make coffee before settling in to write awhile. I punch the button on the CD player and listen to Greg Brown sing “Steady Love” as I’m spooning out the beans. Anneliese bought the album after we went to the concert up in Bayfield. If you’re going to be a bachelor, it’s good to grind your own coffee and know a girl in Colorado loves you. I write until 2:30 A.M., when the fire department pager goes off and we drive through warm fog to a trailer house where an elderly woman gasps for air. We put the oxygen on, hold her hand, calm her, wait for the ambulance like we always do, and then it’s back to the hall, where four of us including Bob the One-Eyed Beagle sit and tell Snook stories, one after the other, cuss words and all, until 4:30 A.M., when Bob has to go cut up beef.

  I sleep a couple of hours, but am up at 8 A.M. doing laundry. When you have lived alone as long as I have, you develop some systems, and I am especially proud of my efforts to streamline wash day. It begins with the aforementioned Kmart socks. You may buy them at the discount store of your choice, but always make sure you get the ones that come packed six to a plastic bag, always buy the same style (I go crew-length), and always—this is critical—buy them in nothing but gray. By maintaining a strict sock monoculture, you eliminate the need for postwash sorting and can cram them all into the same plastic crate. In a rush? Grab any two socks from the crate and you are guaranteed a pair. The gray sock credo also eliminates the need for prewash sorting, as their standard grayness means I can safely wash them in the color load. Which is the only kind of load I ever have because I keep my closet clear of all whites, lights, and “bleeders” such as your reds and your maroons. A load is a load is a load. I call this my Unified Laundry Theory and you are welcome to it.

  After hanging the last batch of wet clothes on the line strung between the back of my garage and the big maple by the alley, I peruse the raised beds. I have two big peony bushes out back, and by this time in July the leaves remain deep green but the flowers have pretty much had it. A few white petals cling, but the rest are just so much wilted brown crepe paper. This is why I don’t care much for flowers. I like green things. Green is cool. Green is calming. Green hangs in there. V. S. Naipaul—whom I have read keeps an all-green garden—has been quoted as saying, “I feel if I wanted to see flowers, I could just take a bus ride and in front of every house there would be a series of shocking colours.” Yessir. I keep the peonies because my mom had bushes that bloomed deep red and purple beside the steps of our white clapboard milk house and the scent takes me back, but that fond dalliance is quickly swamped by an overwhelming evocation of frumpy church ladies and their mysterious supertanker bosoms.

  I pick a bundle of greens and, after washing them up in the house, make a salad with olive oil, canned tuna, diced black olives, fresh ground pepper, and a dash of white wine vinegar infused with chive blossoms picked from beneath the front porch window. Halfway through the salad I am thinking I might have gotten into the weeds some, because the back of my throat starts burning and eventually becomes downright uncomfortable. I keep waiting for myself to swell up or retch like a dog, but nothing really happens and half an hour later the discomfort is fading although my uvula still tickles. Boy, you just never know where the day is headed.

  Before leaving for Colorado, I get over to Mark’s shop just once and don’t get much done other than to stare at the truck and ponder the way the light plays off the ground sheet metal. There is still a lot of grinding to be done. Mark is excited because while I was gone he went looking for a part in a local junkyard and stumbled on an International with a cab that looked just like mine. The ornamental lettering said L-180 but the spec plate inside the cab said L-112. International and their sixty-six configurations of the L-Line—sometimes I think they themselves got confused. He said it was pretty shot but the fenders and grille looked decent, and he thought we could rob some parts off it. From what I can tell from my old books, the L-112 cab is the same as my L-120 and the L-180 looks similar, too, so I tell him it’ll probably work. He says he’s going to give it another look, take some measurements, and let me know.

  Colorado could have been trouble. In Colorado I put myself face-to-face with the past, not out of some sweet longing, but as a necessary step of knowing Anneliese and Amy. Anneliese lived in Colorado for two years. This is where she studied for her master’s degree, this is where she met Amy’s father, this is where Amy was born. Apart from my misgivings about meeting Amy’s father, I knew our visits with Anneliese’s college friends would be laced with reminders that I was being written into a preexisting story line. In this respect, old friends always have the upper hand on new lovers. Three months of pillow talk do not supplant the ratty sweatpants of history. This is an issue not of speed but mileage. You wonder if you’ll hit it off, you wonder how you’re stacking up, you wonder if this chair in the coffee shop has been occupied by a previous object of affection. It is my pet theory that men are much more childish about this than women, or certainly I am. In my past roles as lover I have behaved in ways that left me accused (often rightly, sometimes wrongly, but always at cost) of blockheadedness, contradiction, and worse, but with each new relationship it always seemed to be I—not the woman—who went through a stage of obsessing over the past. Running little films of scenes I had neither right nor reason to conjure, and yet like the proverbial sore tooth revisiting them again and again. As if I could jump in and intervene. Sometimes it was all I could do not to remonstrate my partner for doing things I had done fourfold. Grievance is a sullen little boat, blown in the creepy breeze of ridiculous sighs.

  We root around in the past because the future is unavailable. It is harmless enough, I think, at this point in my life, to stare at old truck advertisements and wish to be somewhere I cannot. To triangulate between the Hopper painting, the International ad, and the current state of my heart. We sort the past in an attempt to sort the present and anticipate the future. I am paying to put new paint on an old truck in part so that I may use it in the present, but I am also trying on some level to pick the lock on Hopper’s quiet blue room. I buy copies of Freezer Fancies or Prelude to Home Freezing so I can gaze at Irma Harding for the fun of imagining all she was meant to project, but I am also catching a little frisson off the pages of a cookbook that speaks to me from the kitchen of some fifty-odd years ago. Other people will pay $186.08 for a box of Irma Harding tin foil, $179.05 for an Irma Harding timer, and $87.55 for a flyer advertising Irma Harding freezer packaging supplies. I recently purchased an advertisement torn from a 1951 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. It features a picture of an L-model International pickup and text declaring, “What you pay isn’t half as important as what you get.” The hope is that by inhabiting moments that are unavailable—because they are in the past or never existed at all—you will be arming yourself to recognize the real thing in real time. That you might recognize the moments you long for when they are happening.

  The downside, of course, is that you can auger in. I say this as one who tends to wallow. In preparing for the Colorado trip, Anneliese and I have been quite naturally led to revisit our separate histories, comparing tote boards of regret. Anneliese is matter-of-fact in these matters, whereas I adopt the demeanor of a consumptive poet, heaving my chest weakly, construing all manner of mournful torment in what cannot be undone. When she has had enough, Anneliese speaks to me at a level I can understand, which is roughly Dr. Seuss: We are what we are because of what was. That is to say, What you pay isn’t half as important as what you get. She is, of course, clearly stating the obvious, which by now I assume she realizes will be a regular requirement of hanging out with me.

  Sometimes it is the future that calls out the past. In talking about what might be going on in Amy’s little heart and head during the visit, I told Anneliese how I have come to love the little girl and tears sprang to her eyes with an immediacy that left me spooked. I thought about my young friend
Adam waiting for me to take him fishing again, and the litany of my disappointed lovers, and I got sick with myself at the idea that I might be the alcoholic who says he has put the bottle down for good.

  It was a relief then, that Colorado went just fine. I was able to assign faces to stories. I was able to meet several people who were at Anneliese’s side in the difficult months surrounding Amy’s birth. Amy’s father, Dan, turns out to be a humorous and articulate fellow and although there was potential for an episode of reality television, the six of us spent the bulk of the week under the same roof and we never once pelted each other with empty beer cans. On the third morning or so, I found myself alone at the breakfast table with Dan’s wife, Marie, and we had our own little heart-to-heart based on the parallel elements of our respective roles. I remember leaving the table thinking, We can do this. It took time and hard work for Anneliese and Dan to reach this point—there were gaps, and both can claim their scars—but the result is that for six days, we all gathered at the same supper table, drawn together by a child who currently responds only when addressed as the great racing horse Seabiscuit. For the purpose of balancing all the happy talk, I should say that during a visit to the Denver Firefighters Museum, Amy went off on a fit the length and breadth of which deceived several eager museum patrons into thinking they had arrived late to a live reenactment of a historical five-alarm clanger.

  I return from Colorado to find all the tomatoes in the backyard dead or shrunken. I stand there staring at them and think I should write a gardening book and call it, I Know Why the Caged Tomato Sags. The first year I planted tomatoes back here they went like gangbusters. Every year after, it seems half of them die. They roar up and get to a point where they look full and green, and then they develop this habit where by noon they wilt. If I jab holes in the ground and pour water to them, they come back, but it’s short-lived. Someone told me it’s a root ball problem, and someone else told me it’s the black walnuts on the property line. I know black walnuts will kill tomatoes. But I had that one good year, and so I keep planting some back here. It seems like the cherry tomatoes survive better than the larger breeds.

  The good news is, the tomatoes I planted in the new bed between the house and garage are steroidal in their abundance. My mom stopped by while I was gone and picked the ripe ones and left them on my porch. The plants are so huge they have tipped over and upended the wire cages. Must be the pig manure. I drive in stakes and tether the tomatoes to the stakes to hold them upright. With my usual penchant for overkill, I planted cucumbers and beets in the new bed as well, and the cucumber vines are swarming the beets. I just don’t get the concept.

  Out back, where the big maples cast shade across the yard for most of mid-afternoon, not much is happening, although I have noticed the slow pace suits many of the herbs and all the lettuce, which grows at a pace you can keep up with instead of bolting. And the peas have done well, having reached the top of the trellis, where they have turned and have begun fountaining back to the earth. But the cucumbers back here are lousy, all spindly and tentative. Only two of my basil plants are big enough to harvest, and they look a little pale, but I snap off the best leaves, enough to make a batch of bruschetta for lunch. I make my way around my meager little plot, gathering cilantro, parsley, and a few green onions. Then it’s to the sink, wash and chop, the leaves looking greener against the wood of the cutting board. In addition to the ingredients I have picked, I dice several cloves of garlic. Everything goes in a ceramic bowl, then I drizzle in virgin olive oil, red wine, and fresh-squeezed lime or lemon juice. I mix it well, and cover to sit out at room temperature until lunchtime. I add fresh ground pepper and grated parmesan late. When it’s time to eat, I boil water and make a batch of angel hair, strain it, and then stir in the bruschetta. I don’t know if this is proper or not, eating it warm, but it seems to me it gives everything a fuller flavor.

  I eat in my favorite spot, the big green chair in the living room beside the bookcase with a view through the screen to Main Street. I can’t imagine a finer moment than to be here in this old chair with this fresh alive food in my lap, all the greenness and the garlic and the sounds of the day easing through the screen on the back of a breeze. The bruschetta recipe comes from an e-mail printed and pinned to my recipe board. It’s from the poet Bruce Taylor, an above-average hedonist who once stood by an open window in a bar on a spring afternoon and said, “Sometimes the best thing to do with a beautiful day like this is to spend some if it sitting in here looking out.” There is something about listening to a day through a screen that infuses the moment, as if the steel mesh slows the day down, lets us bathe in it a bit more. A screen seems to filter the harshness from the outside noises and they reach your ear softened. It will be best if the sound is coming to you over a varnished wooden floor decorated with a strip of sunlight; the flat surface, however artificially imposed, is reassuring in the face of entropy and has the added advantage of being made from trees and blessed by light. It is exquisite to sit here in this perfect moment, eating food that I—a black-thumb gardener—have coaxed from seed to fork. I am humbled that in the face of all chaos, I should have this plain, priceless moment.

  And then the nap. Set the bowl on the floor, tip the head back, take the glorious option of not fighting the heaviness in each eyelid. Maybe you shift your shoulders a little to get just right, and then there you are, sleeping sitting up in the middle of the afternoon of a perfect day. If you ride the wave right, catch it on the downslope, snag that catnap where you dip into unconsciousness and then rise smoothly back to wakefulness after only a few minutes, yet having shut down long enough to de-fragment the mind, O, then that is a glorious thing not to be replicated with any long snore. You come awake with freshness and clarity and the strip of sunlight has shifted, and you are living punctum in the present, saudade before it is sad.

  CHAPTER 9

  AUGUST

  TO THE BEST of my knowledge, my brother John arrived at the age of thirty-five having never been on a date. Then one morning last year the phone rang and it was my mother.

  “We think your brother has a girlfriend.”

  Pause.

  “How did that happen?”

  My brother lives in a tiny log cabin surrounded by jackpines. His only vehicle is a dump truck. Honestly. If you need some rocks hauled, he will haul them with his dump truck. If you need a few yards of black dirt, he will deliver them in his dump truck. If you invite him to dinner, he will arrive in the dump truck. So when I heard he had met a woman, I was flabbergasted. It was like waking up one morning and finding a fifth face on Mount Rushmore.

  “How?” I asked again.

  “Well, as it turns out,” said my mother, “she drives her own dump truck.”

  Come August, you feel it all slipping away. The garden weeds are seeding out. The tomatoes ripen faster than you can figure what to do with them. You force boxes of surplus zucchini on complete strangers. You realize the leeks simply are not going to turn the corner and will remain the diameter of Tinkertoy sticks. A handful of the hottest days of the year are yet to come, but some afternoons the sunlight is dilute and fails to heat the air, which in turn hits your nostrils with a remindful zing. This week I was on the front porch steps lacing up my running shoes in preparation for yet another four-mile slog when the giant maple across the street produced an eruption of blackbirds flying outward and apart. On some invisible cue the birds pitched, cohered, and streamed directly overhead with an ominous feathery hiss. It sounded like the air was colder up there. These were redwings, and they chuckled in a way that reminded me of frogs in spring. Twin sounds, bookending summer.

  When I say my brother John lives in a tiny log cabin, I do not intend “tiny” as a euphemism. If you walk through the front door and stop, immediately to your left you will find a small wooden table, which he made himself. If you then progress from the table along the walls in a clockwise manner, you will encounter a stove, a sink, a refrigerator, a wood stove, a washer, a dryer, a ho
t water heater, a chest of drawers, a bathtub, and then you’re back where you came in. A long-armed man with a pair of pasta tongs could stand in the center of the room and pretty much run’em all. A hinged ladder beside the tub leads to a mattress stuffed in a cubby hole wedged between the beams and purlins. Some might call it a loft.

  John and my brother Jed cut the logs and built the cabin themselves, constructing it in the yard beside the machine shop on Jed’s farm. It was a project for Sunday afternoons. The original plan was to get it built and sell it to a tourist. Then John bought a patch of land on the far side of the big swamp off the back of Jed’s farm and decided to keep the cabin for himself. Problem was, his homestead was two miles west of Jed’s shop as the crow flies, with several hundred acres of impassable tamarack swamp in between. The journey by county road ran a good three miles. Small as the cabin is, it would hang well over the centerline. There are rules about these things. To transport it legally they would have to rent a truck, hang signs, and navigate a government permitting process culminating in the writing of checks. On the other hand, John says if you get caught hauling something like this behind a tractor, you can get off the hook by claiming you are just a dumb farmer. Jed fetched the Massey Ferguson.

  Then they raided the iron rack for some goodly lengths of channel iron. These they cut up and welded back together in a T-shape of a width allowing them to hitch two hay wagons in parallel formation behind Jed’s Massey. Employing a conglomeration of jacks, they raised the cabin in slow sequence, inserting blocks until the wagons could be slipped beneath. Once both wagons were positioned, they gently lowered the cabin. The wagon beds creaked but held. Then they went home to their beds. Very early the next morning, Jed took the whole contrivance on a practice lap in the field behind the barn, just to make sure she would track and turn. Then John pulled in behind and chained the front end of his pickup to the wagon frames. Hay wagons are brakeless, and were Jed to hit the tractor brakes, the tandem wagon hitches would likely jackknife and dump the whole works in his back pocket. It would be up to John and his truck brakes to hold the cabin back. He would do this mainly by intuition, since the view from his windshield was blocked by a wall of logs.