Truck

by Michael Perry

  “Sometimes people ask what things I miss the most. If I had to give my top three things, I’d say, first one is breathing, of course. Second is, I’d love to be able to wipe my own ass. Sounds funny, but it’s true. It’s a personal thing. And my third thing, is drive motor cycle again. That was one of my greatest loves, to get on the road on a bike.”

  Ozzie has a friend who repairs motorcycles in a little shop west of here. Pat is a paraplegic. He has a bike set up with hand controls. He hoists himself on and off the cycle with his arms, and stows his wheelchair on a metal grate attached to the cycle like a sidecar. He visits Ozzie pretty regular and he knows how much Ozzie would love to ride again. “I should take you for a ride,” said Pat one day. He pulled the motorcycle into the ditch so Ozzie could drive down onto the grate. His electric wheelchair weighs over four hundred and fifty pounds, so Pat wedged the wheels with a couple of two-by-fours and belted the whole works down.

  “I asked him to start off slow,” says Ozzie. He admits he was nervous. All that open air, nothing around him. “I’m going down the road,” he says, “thinking, ‘What the hell?!?’”

  But he says it was so good to feel the wind in his face.

  They made a three-mile loop, flying down the road, two bikers riding free, one good pair of arms between them.

  Ozzie believes—hopes—he is in this predicament for a reason. He says this is what keeps him going, and he is at peace with whatever will be. But one unanswered question haunts him, and has since the day his Bronco pitched him into the ditch. He knows the running feet he heard just before the sun went out belonged to an off-duty EMT who just happened to be following him down that Missouri back road. It was the EMT who kept him alive, breathing for him until the helicopter got there and the flight nurse could bag him with an endotracheal tube. He knows it was an EMT, because his mother got the story from someone at the hospital who said an EMT stopped in to see if Ozzie was alive. But the person never left a name. He doesn’t know if it was a man or a woman. “There was no name in the police report,” says Ozzie. “I’d sure like to thank that person. I even went so far as to take an ad out in the paper down there. That was ten years ago. No one responded. My mom said maybe they were afraid of getting sued.”

  The last time I saw Dr. Olson, he said all my tests had come back normal. He dilated my eyes again, had a look, compared what he saw to the pictures taken previously. He said the lesion was reducing, which suggested that the episode was indeed acute. None of this resolves the mystery of what happened, if there was a clot, and if so, where it came from and why. Fortunately, the eye is an organ capable of deception. In collusion with the brain, it convinces you to ignore what you see—or don’t see. Over time, the blind spot has faded. It no longer bothers me when I read. In fact, I have to be in the perfect setting—standing in a wide field of snow, say, or inside a white shower stall—in order to see it, and even then I have to gaze up and to the left and concentrate intently, or not at all—the way you do with those hidden 3-D picture books—before it reappears, a hazy gray wedge. It could be worse. Shortly after I found out the blind spot was permanent, I was explaining the situation to my brother Jed.

  “Which eye?” he asked.

  “My left.”

  “Well, at least it ain’t your shootin’ eye.”

  Which is true. My sister-in-law Barbara had the same sort of event, only her blind spot is in the dead center of her right eye. When she looks through a rifle scope, the critical spot where the crosshairs meet disappears. She has had to learn to shoot right-handed using her left eye, which is like trying to drive your car mailman-style. It takes awhile before the reprogramming kicks in.

  Every once in a while when I am in a dark room, or drifting off to sleep, I see a little flash in my left eye, as if a teensy paparazzo is firing in the distance. It’s a warning light, a reminder that the game can expire at any time. When I recall the period immediately after the blind spot arrived, what comes back most clearly was my desire to just get out of the waiting room and back to everyday chores. While he was waiting for the return of definitive test results, Dr. Olson restricted my activities, and I remember sitting in the fire hall when the other members were roaring off on a call and how badly I wanted to sling on the gear and go, just to run and sweat and bull against the hose.

  When I first started working for Ozzie, I found it strange to hear him say things like “I cleaned the garage; I rearranged the kitchen; I keep those boxes in the basement; I changed the oil in the van.” It didn’t take me long to realize that his use of “I” was deeply intentional. The moment you come on shift, you become Ozzie. The tasks you perform are Ozzie’s tasks. I have caught myself—when he interrupts my reading to summon me from the other room to adjust his headset, or feed him a boiled egg—feeling a small bristle of irritation at his voice in that split second it takes to reorient myself to the fact that for twenty-four hours my legs and arms are not mine. Ozzie’s use of the pronoun “I” is a clear declaration of independence.

  I used to take care of Ozzie at least once a month. This was not a charity gig. I got paid the same as all the other nurses. For the past year, I’ve been on the road so steady I haven’t been able to take any shifts. I do try to call him now and then, or he’ll call me, and I like to send him a postcard, especially now when I’m out on book tour. When I’m home, I try to keep Ozzie posted on how things are progressing with the resurrection of the International. He likes to hear about that stuff, and I bring him pictures now and then. I’ve promised him a ride when I get it running. We’ll set up a ramp and run his chair right up in there. Can’t be any more dangerous than that sidecar.

  Ozzie’s got his own project going, a ’68 Dodge Charger he’s restoring. He had one in high school. This one he’s making into a drag racing car. “This guy I’m working with, he’s had my car for ten years. He keeps whittling away at it whenever I can afford it. It’s got a 426 engine, electronically fuel-injected and blown, it’s got wheel tubs in it, a six-point roll cage. I guess when it’s all done, I’ll hit the car show circuit and show it off, show how my dream came to realization.

  “I remember having a conversation with my mother, and what would happen if I died, and I jokingly told her if I do, I would like to be cremated and have my ashes dumped into the fuel tank, and go down the drag strip one last time, for my last ride. Of course, I was joking, trying to make light of the situation. Mom kinda cracked a smile. Shook her head, like, Okay.”

  I declare that my blind spot admits me to the One-Eyed Club, albeit on a technicality. I recognize that the step from losing part of one eye to losing the entire eye is a biggie (which in turn does not compare to the step from partially blind to blind). At best, mine is a provisional membership. But I’ll take it. There is this ridiculous little part of me—residual of the ten-year-old who posed lurid drawn-out death scenes beneath the bird feeder—that likes the idea of being the Hathaway Shirt man, slightly dangerous and mysterious behind the black patch, soldiering nonetheless dapperly on. When you look into my eyes, not all of me is looking back. I am a stoic man of mystery. People sometimes miss this.

  I’m in a hotel room overlooking St. Louis. It’s late, and I can see the Arch, all lit up and steely. Tomorrow I fly home. I am missing Amy and Anneliese. Every time I take off in another airplane, right when we are reaching top speed on the runway, I imagine them in my arms, Anneliese on my left, Amy on my right, both with their head resting on my shoulder, and I can make it so real I can feel the curve of their ribs and the warmth of their skin and the scent of their hair. Ozzie told me recently that his wife still calls him sometimes. They were divorced years ago, and she has remarried and divorced twice since. But she still calls. Always after midnight, he says. I’m sorry for the way it had to be, he says, but I know if I had stayed I would have been dead a long time ago. She would probably not agree. But I think that would be the case. I visited her parents last year, and her son. I told her she should come visit, but she chose not to. So I never d
id see her. I was eighteen days into my marriage when I had my accident. And the weird part was, me and my wife had only spent one night in our house together.

  CHAPTER 12

  NOVEMBER

  ALONG ABOUT THE second week of November, the men of Wisconsin begin to go scruffy. You’ll notice it everywhere—at church, at the gas station, in the Wal-Mart—even the jawline of the local banker begins to blur. I am no different. We are the men of Wisconsin, and we are growing our deer hunting beards. The deer hunting beard protects your chin from the chill air and staves off windburn. The deer hunting beard preserves the brotherhood and scratches our women. The deer hunting beard reminds us why most men should keep at it with the razor.

  I was years from my first beard when I first skipped school for deer hunting. Grandpa shot a buck out on the west forty, which in those deer-poor days was a remarkable occurrence, so Dad let me run out there to see it. By the time we got it gutted, hauled to the house, and hung, the school bus had come and gone. I remember when I walked back into Mrs. Kramschuster’s third-grade classroom I felt chesty and important, as if I were returning from a manly mission. It is no wonder young men go so easily to war. By the time I was old enough to buy a hunting license, the school board had given up and just shut the place down for the entire ten-day season.

  Mark and I hoped to have the truck ready by deer season. It’s not going to happen. We’re getting close. Or more to the point, Mark is getting close. While I was on book tour all last month, Mark reattached the bed, rewired the six-volt system to twelve, and painted the box and body. When Anneliese, Amy, and I went to Mark’s house for our annual family Halloween party last night I saw the truck sitting there under the yard light and was flabbergasted at how good it looked. Mark used a flat marine green paint, which is perfect because it doesn’t reflect the light, and all the dings and wrinkles recede. He’s done the brush buster, the bumpers, and all the trim in black. The combination is pleasant to look at. Clean and calm, nothing flashy. Under the mercury-vapor light it looked like the truck had rolled right off the set of M*A*S*H. We stood there and admired it for a while, me a cowboy with a fake mustache, him a vampire.

  On the third of November, we receive our first snowfall. I am running errands with Amy belted in her car seat and to my everlasting shame I am sneaking a listen to the local sports talk radio station. The NFL show. The host is assessing the play of the Seattle Seahawks and from the back of the seat I hear Amy’s happy little voice: “That’s where you were!”

  Wow. Yes. Four weeks ago. She was asleep when I called from my hotel room.

  I think about the map on her bedroom wall, the one with all the lines and circles.

  I turn off the blankety-blank radio.

  I get over to Mark’s place once to help outfit the International with a new radiator and heater hoses and refill the antifreeze. We’ve been frustrated in our search for a pair of windshield wipers, but while we’re talking in the parts store it hits me that there may be a pair on the L-180. Thinking Kathleen might have tired of looking at the fenderless hulk in her driveway every morning when she came home from work, I had my brother Jed bring it home on his equipment trailer one night when he was working with Mark, and now it’s stored behind Jed’s barn. I’ll swing out there during deer hunting.

  The running boards on the old truck were beat up and bent, and rather than try to straighten, repair, or replace them, Mark has suggested I opt for nerf bars—essentially a doorstep made from tubular steel and mounted to the frame rails beneath the cab. You can order them premade, but they’re pretty spendy. Mark says he can make a pair if I just buy the raw iron stock. We decide to go this route, although it means the cool silver exhaust pipe will now extend out into the middle of nowhere, and will have to be cut back and replaced with something more modest.

  But the thing that has us grinning right now is that the new seats are in. They are figure-hugging stock car seats. We bought them from a mail-order company that sells racing equipment. We ordered the ones with four-point restraining belts. There was actually some reasoning here—the seats are thin and create a little more legroom for Today’s Man inside the relatively teensy Comfo-Vision cab, and the belts are a genuine safety upgrade, but mostly we got them because they look so delightfully silly in that fat bug of a cab, in a truck geared to lug fourth at 10 miles per hour. They make it difficult to get in and out, but someone once said trucks should not be easy.

  People ask you sometimes when you knew you were falling in love, and I have the answer. Back when we first met, maybe the third or fourth date, Anneliese picked me up in her car, the battered little Honda. When I ducked my head and dropped into the worn seat, she was apologetic. “I know I should probably drive something that’s in a little better shape,” she said, “but I’m too cheap.” I don’t remember what does it for you when you’re twenty-five, but when you’re self-employed and crowding forty, that kind of talk makes you want to skip around and fling daisies.

  She’s not cheap, of course. She’s frugal. But I liked her even better for choosing the word cheap, as it spoke to a certain kind of raising. I drive a used Chevy not out of some self-depriving morality but because the money arrives in fits and starts and I want to minimize the amount of time spent working for the financing company. When it comes to love, I am told cash flow is a leading cause of cancer, and in this Anneliese and I agree: low overhead is the key to survival. You will notice I fail to itemize the costs related to the repair of the International, as this would be unpoetic. Montaigne has earlier noted our capacity for contradiction. I’m still wrapping up the book tour, and over the weekend I did a little spate of events in Kentucky and Illinois. At one point I was hosted at a wine and cheese party attended by a woman of some academic tenure. While I was cruising for cheddar in the kitchen, I could hear her in the drawing room, comparing the attorney general to a pair of Nazis. She was particularly dramatic on the issue of privacy, becoming visibly exercised regarding her confidence that right now someone was preparing to peek in her bedroom and plotting to pull her library card. “Terrifying!” she kept saying. “Terrifying to have these people in power!” Fair enough, and pass the brie. But my interest was piqued when five minutes later she declared she didn’t understand why—if people had to own guns—why they would be loathe to submit that information in written form and accept some “reasonable government oversight.”

  Suddenly Himmler and Goebbels are Andy and Barney.

  I held my peace, as I am a polite guest and a coward and hadn’t had any of the wine, and cheese makes you peaceful, but perhaps due to the impending deer hunting season her paradoxical take got in my head and I chewed on it for a while. I first squeezed the trigger of a gun sometime around the age of nine or ten, doing so under the direction of the same father who forbade us to own toy guns or pretend to shoot each other with our fingers. Naturally when we visited friends we dove straight for the plastic pistols and went full-on OK Corral. That is, when our friends could pry us away from their television (also banned from our house and to which we were consequently drawn like lost Amazonian tribesmen to a functioning Lava Lamp). Before I ever touched a rifle Dad repeated two simple rules, over and over: Treat every gun as if it is loaded, and never point it at another human being. Then he showed me how the gun worked, how it came apart, how to check the chamber with your finger and your eyeball to make sure it was empty, and then once you had assured yourself that it was empty beyond a doubt, to treat it as if you were certain it was loaded and ready to fire. He taught me never to switch the safety off unless you intend to shoot, and never shoot unless you have identified your target. He taught me how to line up the front sight and the rear sight, and he had me watch while he fired. When we looked at the punctured steel cans and the chunks blasted from the log, he made sure I understood the destructive power of a piece of lead half the size of a pencil eraser. Only then did he hand me a live round. I chambered it and fired it under his watch, and understood I had been given responsibility for a po
tentially deadly tool.

  We took Dad’s admonitions seriously and I can’t recall a single instance of horseplay, although we did shoot grackles out of the tops of pine trees, and if we missed, the bullets would go whining through the sky to who knows where. Sometimes when I went to bed I’d lie awake thinking maybe a round had dropped from the sky and winged one of the Teed family. If by morning there was no news, I resumed life with a clear conscience.

  I own three rifles, two shotguns, and one revolver, which is probably low average for my geographic peer group, and leaves me in Ted Nugent’s dust along with all the rest of you, but puts me well ahead of other outspoken celebrities who believe guns are evil unless they are rented with bodyguard attached. One of the rifles is a .22 semiautomatic; the other two are 30–06 bolt actions. Both shotguns are twelve gauge; a pump action and a single shot. The revolver is a rather gigantic Ruger Super Redhawk .44 Magnum with a seven-inch barrel. I got it after several recent bear encounters. In the old days, you saw a bear, you yelled at it, it ran off. These days, with more houses and more people and more garbage cans and feeding stations, they are not so much frightened anymore. Recently my brother John was unable to open his front door, as it was blocked by a bear. When he pushed the door open, the bear stuck his nose in the crack and tried to come in, which you could say forced the issue. I am not panicked by bears, or I wouldn’t be walking around the woods. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a bear in the wild is going to run the other way. I have no desire to shoot one. But neither am I willing to test the just play dead theory with Bear Number 100, especially if he comes disguised as Bear Number 17. I don’t recommend handguns in general, as they handle like sports cars and similarly tempt you to operate a little faster than you should. And buying one for home security is silly on the order of sweeping the sidewalk with a feather duster, although with a feather duster you might actually hit something. But if you’re working in the woods, it’s easier to strap on a sidearm than tote long iron.