Truck

by Michael Perry

  It takes until the end of the month, but I finally make it over to work on the International. My arrival coincides with that of a flatbed truck delivering the International Mark discovered in the junkyard last month. He took his measurements and I looked in my books, and we decided it will work. It appears the truck was originally Chesapeake Gray, but the fenders are furred with lichen—at first glimpse it could be the same strain that grew on my truck. It was once fitted with a wooden flatbed, but all the planks are rotted or removed, leaving only the square channel-iron framework.

  If the license plate renewal stamps are an accurate indication, the truck was taken off the road in 1975. The plates are old-school Wisconsin style, lemon yellow with black numerals. Inside the cab, the bench seat is still in place, but mice have devoured a big chunk of the upholstery, leaving behind seat and foam croutons. Over by the passenger door I can see an old plastic take-out basket full of fired center-fire rifle cartridges. I take a guess: “30–06?” Mark digs one out and checks the imprint on the rim. “Yep.”

  The cab is full of these distracting treasures. A notebook with notes toward an indeterminate engineering project; a 1974 edition driver’s education manual; three maps, one of Idaho, one of Montana, and one combining Nebraska and both Dakotas; a canvas carpenter’s apron with nail pouch; the toe binding from a downhill ski; various matchbooks; a receipt for nine and a half yards of concrete; a savings passbook indicating that in 1975 a man named Lester had $9,088.66 in a local bank. These disparate threads of someone’s story are seductive. One minute you are checking out the state of the accelerator pedal, the next you are trying to fill in the blanks. The simplest object is immeasurable. Every footnote has a footnote. I am thinking again now of Borges and his Garden of Forking Paths, his infinite Library at Babel. I am thinking sometimes a little Ritalin might not hurt a guy.

  Mark is under the hood. He says the fuel pump is gone, but it looks like the carburetor is the same model, so we may be able to rob parts from it sometime if need be. Meanwhile, while scavenging the detritus in the cab, I notice that the floor is covered by a rubber mat. At first I figure it’s something a previous owner slapped in there, but then I clear away a water-stained parts box and there between the shifter and the firewall is the classic Raymond Loewy IH logo, embossed right in the rubber. Without meaning to I say, “Oh!” probably just like Kathleen did when she found her engagement ring planted in the toolbox.

  Solid and square and formed so simply of the two sturdy block letters, the IH logo was first used on tractors in 1945. By the time my beloved L-Line debuted, it was in use throughout the company, appearing on over seventeen hundred items—everything from boxes of Irma Harding–approved freezer paper to the distinctive pylons jutting from the Loewy-designed International Harvester Servicenter buildings dotting America. Known as the man who streamlined everything “from lipstick to locomotives,” Loewy came to America from France after fighting for his country in World War I, during which he demonstrated his commitment to esthetics by hand-tailoring his uniform and draping his trench with fabric. In a career that extended into the 1980s, Loewy had a hand in a mind-boggling number of projects ranging from the iconic Lucky Strike cigarette pack (bet $50,000 by the president of American Tobacco that the packaging couldn’t be improved upon, Loewy collected in short order by simply placing the distinctive bull’s-eye image on both sides of the box, so no matter how the carton was tossed, the logo landed up) the Greyhound Lines logo (he replaced the original “fat mongrel” with a lean silhouette approved by the American Kennel Club), and the Exxon logo.

  By his own account, Loewy designed the International logo on the back of a dining car menu on the train taking him to New York after his meeting with International in Chicago. Declaring the previous International logo (the letters IHC stacked on top of each other and enclosed in a circle) “frail and amateurish,” Loewy centered a lowercase i over an uppercase H, drawing for his inspiration the image of a farmer on a tractor: the dot his head, the two legs of the black H representing twin drive wheels. “Before we passed through Fort Wayne,” he wrote, “International Harvester had a new logo.” For all that has been written about Loewy’s sleek contributions to redefining industrial form (he once designed an aerodynamic pencil sharpener), he is quoted as saying that he preferred simplicity over streamlining. Perhaps this was a tad disingenuous, like Edward Hopper saying his critics had overdone “the loneliness thing,” but it sure enough worked for the International logo, blocky as it is. There are some things that just sit right with your eye, and that logo is one of them. That logo doesn’t say streamline to me. It says boots on the ground.

  I call Mark around and we carefully peel the mat from the floor, then lay it out on the concrete. It’s a little crusty and dusty, but appears to be in perfect shape. I hose it down and then scrub it with a push broom. It looks factory new. Gorgeous. We stand there looking down at it, grinning. Every time I climb in my truck now, I’ll be able to look down and see my favorite monogram in the world, right at my feet. Courtesy of a man who designed forks for the Concorde and the toilets on Skylab, and who combated the distasteful odors in his deep-sea diving helmet by adding Chanel No. 5 to the air-pumping mechanism.

  The floor mat is a delight and a coup, but our primary purpose today is to rob the fenders and grille from this truck so they may be grafted to mine. You keep a junker like the L-180 in the weeds out back and “part it out” as necessary, cannibalizing it whenever you’re short a door handle or a mirror or a distributor cap. Kneeling at the front bumper, we give the grille a once-over. The L-Line grilles reflected a major change in design, and remain one of the easiest ways to distinguish the trucks from their ancestors and offspring. The horizontal grille strips of previous models were replaced with vertically oriented slots overlain with two horizontal bars. In collectors’ circles, this is known as the mustache grille.

  The grille on the L-180 isn’t perfect—there’s a fair amount of rust around the headlights, which someone has repaired with tin and rivets—but it’s in better shape than the one on my truck. Right off the bat I notice a slotted hole lowdown and dead center and recognize it as the insertion point for a crank starter. In the absence of battery power, you just stuck the crank in there and turned the engine over until it caught—or backfired and broke your elbow. The old-timers will tell you these stories. One of the horizontal bars is badly warped, and one is straight. The good news? It’s the same story on my truck, so we’ll use one straight bar from each.

  Before we can pull the grille, we have to pull a homemade brush guard. It’s fairly roughly done, cobbled together out of welded quarter-inch steel and bolted to the bumper. We’re getting ready to loosen the bolts when I notice a gap missing from the center of the guard. It’s a crude cut, punched through with a blowtorch and left rough. The serrated path of the flame is still visible. But what makes us smile is that it’s centered right over the starter crank aperture. We stand there a minute and enjoy the idea of it. The guy working all afternoon, welding the whole works together, drilling the bolt holes, grunting it into place, snugging all the bolts down, and then—in that signature moment of male-ness—taking two steps back to pause and admire what he has wrought. It’s the same when we finish shoveling the driveway, or stacking wood, or folding a dish towel. But in this case he basked there for a minute, and then it slowly dawned on him that he had blocked off the aperture for the starter crank. You can just see him in your mind’s eye, shaking his head and going for the torch.

  On the other hand, maybe he didn’t discover his mistake until the first time he tried to start the truck. Again, you can see him standing there as his jaw loosens and drops into the aaacch! position, then he throws down the crank and spins on his heel.

  Either version, we get a kick out of it.

  By the time we get everything detached and laid out on the concrete apron, the mercury vapor light over the shop has come on and the crickets are commencing. By chance, I read a Stanley Kunitz poem over lunch i
n which he had a line about crickets trilling/underfoot and it’s nice to recall it now. Mark and I shoot the breeze easy for a while, and then I drive on home.

  Later that night the cops get into a car chase that ends in our county when the pursued driver crashes his Corvette into a tree. The tree is barely scuffed, but the nose of that car is in pieces all around our feet, and I am thinking, Son, what you need here is one of them International mustache grilles. What is to become of a country that trades steel for fiberglass? In a bit of delicious irony, the man credited for recommending Corvette go the fiberglass route was Raymond Loewy.

  I get back over to Mark’s place early the next morning. I prop the grille up against the shop and start drilling out the rivets holding the tin patches in place. The ridge formed by the edges of the tin overlay were smoothed over with body filler, long since cracked. When the last rivet is drilled and I pull the tin free, I find that once the filler cracked, the potential space between the tin and original body became a moisture trap, and the rust is more advanced behind the patch than it would have been if left to open air. Even so, the deterioration is nowhere near advanced as that on my truck.

  The headlights are still in their sockets, so I loosen the screws and pop the retaining ring, and when the sealed beam comes out in my hands, the paint behind it is factory new. Protected by the housing, it remains as Chesapeake Gray and velvety to the touch as when it sat for sale out front of one of Raymond Loewy’s freshly streamlined dealerships. Mark is getting set up to sandblast my truck’s tire rims, but he needs silica for the blaster, so we make a Farm & Fleet run. It doesn’t take two of us, but this is hardly the point. We pick up primer, black paint, rubber gloves, the silica, and two packs each of peanut M&Ms and Reese’s Pieces. On the way home we pass a beautiful woman walking down the service road. I twist half out of my seat for a look. Then I look back at Mark. He’s grinning. “A married man,” he says, “learns to turn his eyes and not his head.”

  It’s a good afternoon then, him blasting, me scrubbing. It takes a long time to do the grille. I have to work the pad in and out and up and down the vertical slots like I’m flossing the iron teeth of some robot. Now and then the pad catches an edge and the drill kicks back violently. When I finish, I take the sanding pad to the truck bed. So much time has passed since it was sandblasted that you can tell where we grabbed it to move it, because our salty handprints are revealed as rusty petroglyphs on the steel. It doesn’t take much to touch them up, just a quick buff. Up above the retaining wall and behind a row of hostas, Kathleen has come out and is painting the house trim. She and Mark were able to buy this place on the cheap because the previous owners had rendered it unlivable. Among other things there was an abundance of cats, and drunken revelers had pissed down the basement steps. They’ve poured sweat equity into the place and now it’s shaping up, but there’s still a ways to go. I wonder how my sister feels about me roping Mark into this project, sucking up so much of his time. But I guess mostly we just enjoy the chance to spend some time together. I enjoy grown-up banter with my sister, because, thanks to the permanence of certain memories, I am always surprised that the little blond toddler who was paddling around in footie pajamas when I left for college has become this woman. Sidrock is in his crib beside her, chewing on an oak leaf and drooling on his toys. Mark and Kathleen were married in one of those speedy Las Vegas wedding chapels. “Same one as Demi Moore,” Kathleen told me. They bought the videotape, and I watched it once. Kathleen was radiant and Mark stood back in a tux, his fingers twitching as though they were unused to hanging empty.

  Despite my backsliding in the areas of tears and rage, it is my conviction that over the past several decades, the repression of feelings has been undervalued. After a lifetime of being harangued to let it all out, I am heartened by recent studies indicating the people who repress their emotions have a higher heart attack survival rate than people who are overtly emotional. I know people who are constantly “letting it all out,” and their spirits remain consistently unimproved. I humbly submit that the world could do with a little more keeping it in. Sometimes caring people tell me I am repressing my anger. My chosen response is to meet their gaze intently, let one eye drift slowly inward, and reply: “Yes. I. Am.”

  And yet, compared to Mark, I am Richard Simmons. Mark is an eighth-level Zen master of stoicism. His philosophy can be distilled to three words: “Walk it off.” He uses it in every context. Hit your head on the hood? “Walk it off.” Burn your hand on the exhaust? “Walk it off.” Wife left you for the Schwan’s man? “Walk it off.”

  He says it all the time. He says it when Kathleen spills the paint. He says it when Sidrock raps himself in the head with his bottle. He says it when he hears one of his coworkers complaining about overtime.

  He means it.

  It works. Although to be fair, Sidrock isn’t walking yet.

  With the school year starting up again, Anneliese isn’t able to wander up as often and stay as long as she has during the summer. We’ve also questioned lately whether we are cut out for some more standard long-term living arrangement. There are no histrionics, just long talks and quiet thinking that leaves us, as Anneliese put it, with “butterflies, buttermilk, and vinegar” in the gut.

  We’ve been short of rain, and the garden has waned some again, but I manage to put away a few things for the winter. Mom gave me a big clutch of thyme and the tomatoes are coming in decent now, so I get out my foil roasting pans to make paste and stock the way I read in Think Like a Chef. I line the pans with sprigs of thyme, then pack in the halved tomatoes and a handful of unshucked garlic cloves, sprinkle in some sea salt and fresh ground pepper, drizzle on the olive oil, then slide the whole works in the oven to break down and mingle.

  In between ladling off the tomato stock, I pack up some chicken breasts. First I lay out rectangles of tin foil and make a little bed of thyme in each. I settle the breast on the thyme and pack it with diced onions. I pulled the onions from the garden this morning and they are frankly sad, about the size of Ping-Pong balls, but they are my onions, and I will use them. Before I seal the foil, I add some soy sauce. After four breasts, I run out of onions and switch to making lemon chicken. The lemon balm has come on well, so I use the fattest leaves to line the foil. Then after topping the breast with a lemon slice, I wrap the whole works in leaves. Add salt, pepper, olive oil, and some capers, and seal the foil. I put all the breasts on a flat pan in the freezer. Later when they are frozen, I will vacuum pack them with my sealer, the one that makes the little farty engine noise when you push the button, As Seen on TV! Before sealing, I like to hold my index finger up and declare in a tone of wonder, “Just one touch!” If you try to seal the packages before they’re frozen, the juice gets sucked out of the tinfoil. It’s a baroque, work-making way to go about things, I guess, but it beats TV dinners, and you feel good to be stowing some things away against the coming winter.

  When Anneliese calls and says she and Amy can run up for supper, I retrieve three of the packets from the freezer, where they’ve only half-frozen. Later while we bump around the kitchen rattling dishes and making fresh salad as the chicken bakes, it’s Greg Brown on the CD player again, singing, “where the kitchen is happy, love has a chance…” and we make a note of it.

  August has always been my month of resolutions. Forget January and the artificial premise of the New Year, it seems always to be August when I resolve that next year I will pare down, clear the calendar, and focus on doing a few simple things and doing them fully. This year I find myself entertaining visions of a one-room shack with one table, one chair, one skillet, one potbellied stove, and a wood-splitter’s ax sunk at an angle in the doorjamb. Menu: mainly biscuits and bacon. Occasionally, just to test my mettle, squirrel. For dessert, apple pan dowdy. Certainly a measure of this reactionary navel-noodling can be attributed to the standard metaphorical casting of autumn as the season when winter’s deathly breath first fogs your rose-colored glasses, but on a more fundamental level I th
ink it has to do with the reaping of gardens and good intentions, both of which tend to come in well below spring’s predictions.

  CHAPTER 10

  SEPTEMBER

  I was raised by strong women. Of course they could only do so much. I use the term raised in the perpetual sense, because the work continues. There is my mother, of course, sentenced to nature’s most blessed curse, in which the female is expected to give of her body and blood in the rearing of a creature bound to bring trouble on the house. Not to mention the heart. A child is prayer and worry wrapped in a blanket. Tax deductible, yes, but oh, the hidden costs. You might describe my mom as the valedictorian homecoming queen who wound up a God-fearing homemade granola–slinging Florence Nightingale in a maxiskirt and construction boots stuck on a cow farm. Over the years she has taken responsibility for the care and feeding of legions of children—some conceived, some adopted, some fostered, some delivered by the county for the weekend, others for a lifetime. She is slight of build, and (touse her phrase) just mortified by public attention(thus I write of her in the broadest terms), but I have watched three firefighters rush to her with an unconscious baby and then enclose her in a semicircle of hulking apprehension while she calmly gets the kid breathing again. I have also seen her up to her elbow in the rear end of a sheep and giving rescue breaths to a newborn Holstein calf. (Mind you, not simultaneously.) For forty years she has raised a constantly fluctuating passel of tots, drawing on her wits, fifty-pound bags of oatmeal, and a fistful of coupons the size of a bad UNO hand. There were undoubtedly sleepless nights, but she never betrayed them.

  For balance, I should also tell you she has imparted certain inefficiencies and weirdness, including an inability to focus in the midterm (short-term emergencies—like a laser; long-term dedication to principle and task—can do; finish one load of clothes without being distracted by a mildewed Reader’s Digest, the song of a wren, or the knowledge that the mail has arrived—not so much); a propensity for impromptu flop sweats (a familywide trait—my aunt Pam holds several world records); and a habit of flicking her hands against her legs when she is discomfited. Both my brother John and I have inherited versions of this last tic, effectively killing our chances of achieving success in the world of high-stakes poker, international espionage, or, for that matter, dentistry.