Life is not a perfect little loop. I talked to Delmar Gravunder the other day, and he said Herbie always swore he’d never have an auction. “He ended up having one, all right,” said Delmar. Delmar was there, and I was there, and so were a lot of the old-timers and locals. Herbie’s seven tractors were there, all in a row. “None of those things ever started,” chuckled Delmar. “He’d pick one and call me, and I’d have to drag him around the field until it fired.” Hundreds of hand tools, some of them dating back to the 1800s, were leaned all around the base of the barn. There were wagonloads of junk and treasure, and you could tell whenever something was treasure, because people none of us recognized would slip to the front of the crowd and start running the prices up. “Herbie gave me an old flatiron one day,” said Delmar. “He said, ‘Here, you take this.’ I figured I’d pick it up some other time. Well, that thing went for eighty or ninety dollars.” He doesn’t care about the money, he just can’t imagine.
I hung around the edges, bidding now and then. Got a stack of old ledgers dating back to the days when New Auburn was called Cartwright. They were from the livery stables that used to stand where Herbie had his blacksmith shop, and I felt like I was being allowed just a taste of coveted time travel when I leafed through and recognized some of the names. I bought Herbie’s old ice-fishing sled, some fishing gaffs he had rigged up, and a carp spear he hammered out on his forge.
In the face of Herbie’s vast and eclectic accumulations, the auctioneers split the sale after lunch. Delmar stayed at the farm, and I followed the second auctioneer over to the blacksmith shop. I had never been in there. I had heard it was crammed with junk, but the auction crew had cleaned and swept and arranged everything neatly for sale, and there—glory be!—was the legendary hovercraft. A 410 Air Cycle. It looked straight out of the Jetsons, light blue, with a low-slung seat and a gaping maw, covered with chicken wire, that housed a beautiful three-bladed aluminum prop. I was circling it when my brother John pulled up in his old dump truck. I waved him over and pointed at the hovercraft. He grinned, big. I had no idea what the thing might go for, and I was pretty much tapped, but I figured I’d go two hundred dollars. I looked at my brother. “Think we could get two hundred dollars’ worth of fun out of that thing?” He grinned bigger. “A-yep.”
They fired it up before the bidding began, and it filled the shop with wind and thunder. Herbie’s customized steel frame and snowmobile skis were still attached, so it wouldn’t float, but you could see it straining to lift. The auctioneer started the bidding, and for a while no one bit, but then some guy went thirty-five bucks. I got in, and from then on it was just me and him. Turns out when they split the auction, most people didn’t realize it. There were only about ten of us in the dark little building. We bounced it back and forth between us, Mr. Thirty-Five Dollars and I, cueing the auctioneer with just the slightest little tilt of an eyebrow. You’re playing a sort of poker here, and I was stone-faced, but my arms were crossed over my chest and I could feel my heart going like mad. We cleared $100 and worked our way up to my limit, and then the other guy bid $210, but it seemed to me that he was starting to grind his gears, so I hung in and went $220, and then the auctioneer was pointing at the other guy, and pointing again, and then the guy shook his head and turned away, and I owned myself a hovercraft. The minute we got it to his farm, my brother Jed put it on his shop hoist and pulled off all the extra steel.
We convened that evening in Jed’s yard, a little knot of us: me, Jed, John, Mom (the home farm is adjacent—she cruised up in her battleship Lincoln), and Cerise, a friend of the family who was accompanied by her daughter Brandy and son Adam. Jed is the smallest and lightest of us brothers, and was thus elected to make the inaugural flight. He switched the key to on, and Herbie’s running lights glowed up red and green. Then he twisted the key to start, and the engine caught as if it had never been parked. The propeller became an invisible blur, but you could hear the vicious buzz as it sucked down air and blew it out the base of the craft. The grass flattened ten feet in every direction. Jed punched the accelerator, the engine noise rose to an astounding howl, and then he was floating, down the length of the yard, gathering speed, headed for the barn. He cranked the airplane yoke to the left when he hit the gravel driveway, and as he spun and headed back for us, a great cyclone of dust rose as high as the cupolas. We were grinning like gap-toothed hillbillies.
Pieces started coming off the thing almost immediately. It was shaking itself apart. But we had agreed we would get our joy, and so we kept it going. Jed put Adam on the seat and trotted beside him, running the throttle. At nine, Adam was just old enough to want to be a little bit cool, but he was chewing gum, and the more throttle Jed gave him, the faster he chewed that gum. Then he found the horn pull, and now you had that Model T blaaagh! added to the mix. The noise was abusive, and apparently carried, because the neighbors started showing up. Scooter Southern, with his two little girls. Big Ed, from his trailer a mile down the road. All that noise and dust, that horn a-blowing, the hovercraft slowly self-destructing, everybody gathered ’round gawking, I looked around at us and flashed on Tobacco Road, the scenes where all the Lesters congregate to watch the newlyweds Bessie and Dude thrash the tarnation out of their brand-new Ford.
We did quit before we ruined the thing. We’ll rig up a skirt one of these days and see if she’ll go. But it’ll be tough to match the goofy joy of that summer night in Jed’s yard.
The thing is, when I head out to run the loop these days, I feel better when I jog past Herbie’s place. Life can’t always be counted off and neatly arranged. You don’t close the loops, you keep spinning them. And maybe, if you’re lucky, someone will spin one for you when you’re gone. The deafening, dusty hoo-rah in Jed’s yard was a celebration drawing on the legacy of a man who never let a lack of wings keep him from flying. We are pleased to take up a remnant of his goofiness and march on. In Wisconsin, we say, Forward!
7
MY PEOPLE
WHEN THE LADY FROM THE BANK called one summer day and asked me to be in the Jamboree Days parade, I figured I’d pitch in. “You want me to drive a tractor, pull a float?” I asked. “Oh, no,” she said. “We want you to be on a float.”
“Huh?”
“Yes,” she said, brightly. “On a float. We’ll put a sign on there that says Writer.”
Were I not frozen with horror, I might have dropped the phone. A video-clip vision assembled itself, of my townspeople—these loggers, these butchers, these farmers, nurses, carpenters, gas station cashiers, concrete trowelers, and truckers—looking on from the sidewalks as I was towed up Main Street on a hay wagon, decked out maybe with some spangles and crêpe-paper streamers, cradling an oversize papiermâché pencil and scrubbing the air like a dairy princess.
I said I would be out of town.
How does one negotiate the terms of belonging? Speaking perhaps too broadly, I consider my loyalties divided between the Gun Rack Crowd and the Pale and Tortured Contingent. Commonalities of spirit and pretension abound. The man in the Hooters cap and the woman with the NPR tote bag are not promoting restaurants and radio. NRA decals and Free Tibet bumper stickers are tools of the proselyte pushing orthodoxy via aphorism. The poet who takes his poems to the coffee shop and the hunter who takes his buck to the bar are both hoping for approbation and maybe a girl. Crying in your beer is just gazing at your navel, only louder.
There are men in this village who will scrub the floor with you. The Most twins work all day—Mack is a butcher (his brother Bob the One-Eyed Beagle is not the only butcher in the Most family), Jack runs a feed mill—and cut firewood nights and weekends. They don’t stand much over five foot ten, but they are equipped with arms like hydraulic rams. Jack was at the Tugg’s Bar with a beer and Mack had stepped into the rest room when a Bloomer slattern pushed through the door, reached behind the bar, and pegged the volume on the jukebox. The music was painfully loud. “Turn it down!” said Jack.
“Fuck you,” said the woman. “It
ain’t your jukebox.”
“No,” said Jack, “but I was in here first. I walk into a bar and the music’s too loud, I walk out. You walk in here and turn it up, that’s a different story.”
Two men had accompanied the woman into the bar. Ratty fellows. They moved in on Jack, too close. The tall one leaned in threateningly. “Looks to me like it’s two on one,” he said. A hand shot out over Jack’s shoulder, grabbed the tall man by the neck. Mack was back from the bathroom. He slammed the tall man backward over the pool table, got right down in his face, and laughed happily. “Looks like one on one to me!” Think of your windpipe, clamped in the hand of a man who butchers for a living and splits wood for sport. Given the option, the two men and the woman departed in expeditious order.
I want, sometimes, to be that brand of badass. To reach out, grab the neck of some egregious nitwit, and stick him to the wall. But I don’t, because—no more, no less—I don’t want to wind up in a courtroom. Weak reasoning, really. I think I might be missing out. A while back in these parts, a man was accused of molesting a child. One day after he had been charged, he was sitting in his truck when the child’s mother approached, toting her purse and a Bible. “Stick out your hand,” she said. He did, and she quoted him some scripture: “If thy hand offend thee, cut it off,” she said. Then she reached into her purse, drew out a pistol, and blew a slug through his palm.
I am impeded by restraint. I avoid bar brawls. Heck, I avoid bars. I don’t bowl. I can’t polka. In New Auburn, this last is bigger than you think. The standards against which you are measured are dependent on the milieu. Go to the café for meatloaf, or watch the old men roll dice at the implement store, and listen:
“He’s quite a worker.”
“That boy can knock the stuffing out of a softball.”
“The man can flat run a wrench.”
“His checks are good.”
“She’s a helluva shot.”
Not frequently overheard: “He crafts a lovely metaphor.”
I speak to writing clubs sometimes. Someone with a notebook always puts their hand up: “What’s the secret to making a living as a writer?” Stubbornness and blind luck, I want to say, but they’re looking for something tangible, so I tell them I discovered the secret years ago while cleaning my father’s calf pens. That is, you just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. A childhood spent slinging manure—the metaphorical basis for a writing career. I have used the same illustration to explain myself to butchers, truckers, and turkey pluckers. Believe me, they get it.
I admit there are times vanity gets the better of me and I entertain visions of myself as the Bohemian Farmboy. The Arty Redneck. I imagine myself bridging two cultures. Truth is, I am a dilettante in either camp. I own a rusty old pickup truck, but it’s not running right now, and I don’t know how to fix it. I can run a welder, but I lay a keloid bead. I’m a fair shot with my 30-06, but don’t ask me to recite muzzle velocity and ballistics. I have read great works of literature, but recall only the grossest details. I can no more diagram a sentence than rewire an alternator. I enjoy classical music, but nothing moves me like a Telecaster tuned to a drop-D twang. I marvel at the grace and anger in a single line of a Sharon Olds poem, but the audacious awfulness of a Confederate Railroad lyric—“Life’s a picture that you paint/with blues and grays, cans and cain’ts”—leaves me gleeful.
Lowbrow, highbrow, I do fine in either scene if I just hang out and play by ear. When I try too hard, when I am too overt, that’s when I get my comeuppance. I once composed an essay, and it had this aw-shucks feel, which I maintained right up to the third paragraph break, only to resume the narrative with the words, “Heraclitus said…” I read the essay aloud at a bookstore engagement, and when I invoked Heraclitus, a large man in the back of the room snorted like an ox. In a fit of acculturation triggered by a New Yorker essay on the Ring Cycle, I went online and ordered a Wagner CD, then felt like a goober when it arrived in the mail and I discovered I had selected the collection decorated with images of the choppers from Apocalypse Now. Involved with a French farm girl, I resolved to learn the language. We dated for two years. The most complicated phrase I can muster: Est-que les vaches sont dans l’étable? Are the cows in the barn?
Twelve years I lived away from here, and what I missed—what I craved—was the lay of the land. A familiar corner, a particular hill, certain patches of trees. Somewhere along the line, my soul imprinted on topography. I returned, and the land felt right. The land takes you back. All you have to do is show up. Finding your place among the people, now, that is a different proposition. A community is a conglomeration of characters, and you can’t force your way in. Your place in the cast evolves over time. In my case, the fire department provided a point of access. The minute I joined up I began to accrete history and acquaintance. I began to meet my neighbors at the invitation of the fire siren.
A man is having a heart attack in the middle of nowhere. Bob the One-Eyed Beagle is at the wheel of the rescue van, foot to the floor. Lieutenant Pam, a mother of four, and the Beagle’s brother Jack are with us. We’re a good twelve miles out of town, on a dark road that twists through trees and swampland, when we spot a rust-pocked car with its hazard flashers lit. When our headlights pick up the car, a man hangs out the window and waves us on. The car surges forward, then careens off the paved road down a snaky dirt trail covered with glazed snowpack. We drop Jack at the turnoff with a flashlight to flag down the ambulance in case we lose radio contact. The road is slick, and we have a hard time keeping up with the car. Keying the radio mic, I relay turn-by-turn directions back to the ambulance, several minutes behind us. Beagle has his eye on the road, and isn’t saying much. We get a glimpse of taillights now and then, and suddenly the road peters out and we’re fishtailing up a twin-track logging trail. We are traveling deeper and deeper into the forest. The van spins and slides, but somehow Beagle keeps it out of the brush, and suddenly our lights break out across a clearing. A leery knot of men peers back at us. Some are dressed in camouflage, the others in greasy coveralls. One man detaches from the group, meets me halfway across the clearing. He puts his rawhide face to mine, and I smell bacon grease. With a boozy, baccy-stained gust, he announces, “He coded three times. I did mouth-to-mouth.” It’s a little strange, out here in the moonless boonies and snot-freezing blackness at the tail end of some logging trail, to be informed by an alcoholic apparition wearing stained Carhartts that someone has “coded.” I reckon he picked up the term from TV, and suspect that after a long day of whiskey-stoked ice fishing, his buddy hadn’t coded, but simply passed out. I don’t doubt for a moment, however, that he revived whenever Doctor Deliverance laid on the lip-lock. The very thought purses my lips.
The patient is big and bearded. I try to give him oxygen, but he won’t have it. He acts woozy, but his eyes are fierce. The ambulance struggles into the clearing. As the lead EMT approaches, I try to give report. “This is your cardiac arrest,” I say, pointing to the patient. A big rangy guy hears the word arrest and dives between me and the patient. The other men form a protective circle, stomping in the snow like musk oxen. “You ain’t takin’ him to jail, fucker!” blusters the one leaning over me like some loony muleskinner. A brief course in remedial medical terminology seems in order. I talk fast. Apparently my explanation penetrates the fog of ethanol and paranoia and is deemed satisfactory. The patient is released back into our care—although not until he whispered something into the ear of his chief defender, who then clasped him by the head, looked deep into his eyes and declared, with great solemnity, “I promise, man, I promise.” Once on the cot, the patient commences to thrashing and cursing and tearing his shirt to reveal slack tattoos of an unprofessional sort. The trip back to the county road is a trial and a test of our goodwill, although the patient’s determined efforts to wrassle do provide us the opportunity to surreptitiously pat him down for weapons. When we finally emerge from the trees and reach blacktop, we transfer him to a
waiting chopper and gratefully release him to the sky.
You belong to the land first. From there, your allegiances grow more fluid. I assemble anecdotes in the hope that I might wave my hand over the characters and say, These are my people. This is specious yap. One can hardly lay claim to one person, let alone an entire community. To say my people is to imply my people will be grateful for the dispensation, when in fact they might be wishing you’d just mow your lawn and get the rusty truck out of your driveway before it sinks through the blacktop completely. The term is presumptive, simultaneously implying ownership and membership. And how to establish standards of inclusion? Geography? And if so: one city block, the county, the northwestern portion of the state? Occupation? Avocation? Hobbies? Favorite beer? Loyalties wax and wane on a sliding scale. From noon ’til three on Sunday, Packer fans are of one accord; by evening they are flipping each other off in the Wal-Mart parking lot.
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