Truck (13 page)

Tonight my job is to remove the steer wheels and pull the bearings. At the back of the truck, Mark is installing new brake lines. He is amazing to watch, weaving and bending the tubing. He has this ability to see things, to work with metal and mechanics. This reflects time and study and years of hands-on, but surely it is at some level innate. He is working with raw stock, and in order to make the fittings, he is using a double-flaring tool. It's a simple two-piece clamp-and-die device that, when tightened with threads, flares the end of the brake tubing stock to help it form a union. It's such a simple gadget, and yet it does a profound thing, reshaping a steel tube to give it function. Looking around at all the stuff crammed inside these concrete block walls I am reminded again that the dustiest shop is jammed with testaments to human ingenuity. At some
point in the progress of homo sapiens, someone among us invented the double-flaring tool, and now your brakes work.

Because the front end of the truck is nosed up into the dark corner of the shop, I string trouble lights around so I can see the lug nuts on those CO-OP Country Squire tires, which look as if they came standard in 1951 and have never been changed out. The nuts break loose readily, and soon I have the tires off. Before we started this project, you could see the two obvious rust holes in each front fender. When I ground the right front fender the surrounding iron was fine, but on the left front the grinder revealed a myriad of pinholes similar to those on the cab brow. I remember my brother Jed saying it isn't unusual to see more rust damage on the driver's side of Midwestern vehicles, because that side is always getting splashed with slush and road salt from oncoming traffic. The trouble light is hanging directly overhead now and when I stick my head inside the left fender it is like entering a miniature planetarium. Little constellations of light coming through everywhere. This is not good. It's one thing to patch a big hole, but when a fender is laced this badly, you have to come up with some other solution.

I hear cussing from the back of the truck.

“What?” I ask. Mark has a measuring tape out and laid across the end of the freshly flared tube, which has been refusing to seat.

“Five and a quarter?!? It should be five and one-sixteenth!” He cuts the flare off and starts again. I make a mental note to spare Mark my Rhapsody on a Flare Tool.

Kathleen brings us a bag of cheese curds, and we dip into them. They're fresh, with the squeak. Your quality curd should squeak between your teeth. The squeakless curd is still tasty, but it is not prime. The curds pick up a little black grease from our fingers, but if you eat curds while you're wrenching, they're bound to get grubby. Grubby is comfy. Grubby says you're working close to the ground. That you don't have far to fall. Kathleen lingers awhile, visiting while Sidrock chortles. We tell her about the yellow flames, and I tease the dog by making it chase the flashlight beam. These are the moments I long for when I am running too far too fast. These are the moments when time slows and it is easy to breathe.
Kathleen takes Sidrock in to bed and Mark and I keep working as the light fades. Now that the front wheels are off, I start in on popping the grease cap that covers the end of the steering knuckle spindle. The cap is shaped like a small shot glass or an overlarge thimble, with the rim fitted tightly inside the bearing housing. I coax it loose by tapping outward with a plastic hammer. Finally it pops free, revealing a crenellated nut kept from spinning by a cotter key. I pull the key, spin the nut free, and then pry loose the tapered bearing, which is black with grease that smells dark, rich, and fatty. Out where the bearing rides, the naked spindle is less than an inch in diameter. I'm reminded again of how insignificant the frame looked when we pulled the bed. When you're bombing around out there, you forget sometimes about the relatively delicate construction of the pegs you ride on. I wander off to look for some solvent, to start washing things up.

When darkness falls, the June bugs come, motoring through the airspace of the shop, their buzz loose as a playing card in bicycle spokes. They are attracted by the trouble lights, in this case very aptly named. The June bugs are the size of double-wide kidney beans, and when one of them hits the halogen filament you hear a sizzle and then a plasticky clack as it hits the floor. Some miss the light and smack the concrete walls. They, too, fall to the floor, where they scrabble about on their husklike backs, unable to right themselves. June bugs have design flaws.

Having finished with the bearings, I start pulling the cast aluminum lettering from either side of the cab right above the fenders. In two parallel strips the lettering says
INTERNATIONAL L-120 SERIES
.
(The spec plate inside the cab says my truck is actually an L-122; International offered the L-Series in sixty-six different models—depending on who you ask this reflected a commitment to customer choice, or a lack of focus that ultimately helped doom the company. Regardless, it can be confusing.) Each strip is attached with spring-loaded tabs pushed through holes drilled in the steel. In order to get to them I have to back into the cab and basically sit upside down on the seat, feet hanging out the door and torso bent backward so my head is looking up under the dash. By pushing against the tabs from inside with a piece of steel rod, I can create just enough space between the lettering and the quarter panel so
that I can pry them loose with a flathead screwdriver. I ease each section off slowly, working end to end, not wanting to snap the delicate cast aluminum. I get them all out okay. While I'm in there, I clean out the glove compartment and find a to-do list (printed up the last time I tried to get the truck running), an expired registration, an ice scraper, and a copy of Louis L'Amour's
Catlow
. Mark has figured out the flaring tool, and now he's sitting on a crossmember between the frame rails with the manual on his knees trying figure out where the rear brake line goes in relation to the punkin'.

I head home. I need sleep. Tomorrow I am to give the commencement address at my old high school. I've been kicking the speech around in my head, but at some point I should get it in print, double-spaced, like my English teacher taught me.

 

I did the best I could for the New Auburn High School Class of 2003, and I remain honored by their invitation, but they are to be excused if they felt I simply delayed delivery of their diplomas by ten minutes. After prefatory remarks including the story of how I recently lit my hair on fire (it seemed relevant), I cut to the chase:

 

Class of 2003, I really don't know what to tell you. I graduated from New Auburn twenty years ago. With every passing year, I feel as if I know less and less. Life moves faster and faster. Your class motto reads, “People say the easiest part of life is over and the hardest is yet to come.” We say, “Bring it on!”

 

I paused a moment. And then I turned to them, and I said,

 

“Oh, it's a-comin'.”

 

I admit, their faces remained blank. My wisdom, wasted on the young. But out there in the bleachers, filled as they were with the over-forty crowd, came the wry rumble of a group chuckle. Message being, Class of 2003, may the wind be at your back, but as you hoist your clean white
sails, take a moment to batten the hatches. I was grateful they were on the dais and I was on the gym floor, meaning when I delivered the line I was looking up to them, which is as it should be, because they are launching, while I am just paddling to stay in place.

 

Apart from the tomatoes and lettuce, I still haven't gone full-tilt on the garden, but I count among the signs of spring the fact that the carp are running and the spirea are in bloom. When I was a child, spirea bushes ringed the front porch of our old farmhouse like a tall lace collar guarding a spinster's honor. When I moved into my current house, I was delighted to step out one May morning and discover the green bush outside my dining room window had blown up into clumps of white bloom. At first sniff I knew it was the same flower because I was immediately transported to that porch, where I would lie on a steel-frame bed and read cowboy books and the musty scent would roll through the screens on the back of a soft breeze.

It has become a tradition with me, this sniffing of the spirea. Once every May for nine years now. You have to pay attention, and then inhabit the moment fully, because the little florets do not remain long, shattering and falling like someone has emptied their miniature paper punch over the lawn. If it rains, you can lose them all overnight. This year I stand in the yard a little extra long. My life is full of great good, and gratitude remains at the top of my list, but there are too many appointments, too many deadlines, too many unanswered e-mails, too many
too many things,
and I could use some leaning out. For two weeks now the note on my computer calendar has read, “
Go through desk pile
.” The spirea is telling me once more around the track and a decade will have passed, and maybe it's time to recalculate. I was upstairs writing today, trying to finish a piece for an editor waiting at a desk out east, when I noticed the blooms. I had moved across the room to open a window and let the warm air and noise of the day in, and caught the scent. When I went downstairs I felt the editor check his watch. Perhaps to prolong the moment, before I came back inside I picked one of the clusters and took it to the desk with me.

I have a reader's magnifying glass that I found in a box of things from an old man's house. The lens is rectangular and the handle is set at an angle to keep your hand from obstructing the page, and when I sat down I pulled it out to study the spirea.

The cluster is formed by a convex half-sphere of eighteen blossoms, each blossom balanced on a pale green stem the thickness of fishing line, each flower consisting of five overlapping white petals round and fine as flakes of detergent. You can see where the flower burst from the bud, the remnants of the sepals curled back, the calyx collaring the bloom like a soft green starfish. At the center of each bloom, the lobular carpels curl inward, forming a scalloped chalice with the waxy fullness and shine of squash skin. It is a fairy goblet, and from the very center of it all the stamens foist themselves outward in a spray of filaments, each knotted with a brown anther the size of a dust mote. It is good to see something this delicate. The scent, for all its evocative power, is not classically pleasant. For years I have struggled to put my finger on it, and I try again today. I hold the cluster to my nose and breathe in. Something dusty. The smell at the back of scratchy old curtains. The spirea seems always tied to the idea of windows, of the year's new air through the screen.

 

Now I find myself in the waning hours of the final day of May, and as if I needed further evidence that I may be testing the limits of my calibration, I am in Los Angeles digging at the same cheeseball as the porn star Traci Lords. We occasionally work for the same company, although rarely in the same room; in this instance we are at a ginormous book fair recuperating after a hard day's work comporting ourselves as authors. I intended this to be the year of the truck and the garden. It has turned into the year of the truck and the garden when I can get to them, with a cameo appearance by an adult film star. Occasionally you get off track.

I revisit my gratitude list often. I have my health. I crank out my articles, I haul my books around in my Chevy, sometimes I get to fly while someone else hauls the books for me. I am spending more quality time with my truck and brother-in-law than I have in years. While my cousins and a few of my neighbors are abroad and in the line of fire, I am free to
root around in my backyard without fear, unless the neighbors are flipping cars. There is a beautiful woman a ways south of here who will not bake my oatmeal bars but sometimes wears my flannel shirt. It's all good, as the kids say. But sometimes I think about those June bugs, zipping around apparently all fat and happy, but operating at speeds exceeding specifications, and this is turning into the year of looking for a way to bring it all in for a smooth landing.

I'll tell you what helps: I fly out of Los Angeles International Airport Sunday afternoon. Three hours on the plane and I'm in Minneapolis. Two hours in the car and I'm in New Auburn, watering my pig manure tomatoes in the twilight. Ten minutes and the hose is still in hand when the fire department pager goes off. Ambulance run in the county. A scared little boy who fell out of a moving truck. We bandage his scrapes and calm his mom. We are on a bridge spanning the Chetek River, and I can feel it moving smooth down there in the darkness. When we head back for home, the siren has blown L.A. right out of my dwindling hair.

T
HE SQUIRREL
wars are on.

I am largely impotent in this battle, as the village has ordinances expressly forbidding gunfire (although the neighbor out back was once hauled off to jail for firing his black powder rifle up the alley—as the deputies stuffed him in the squad car he could be heard protesting it was only practice, and after all, he hadn't put a ball in), and furthermore my neighbor Charlie regards the squirrels as pets. Charlie saw horrific action in World War II, then came home to put in a half century of break-back farming before retiring to town, so if he wants to feed the squirrels, I'm going to let him. Still, a guy casts a gimlet eye.

As with most intractable conflicts, this goes way back. The first time I ever took a rifle to the woods, it was to hunt squirrels. They're tricky little buggers, especially if you hunt in pine forests, where they can so easily hide in the evergreen boughs. The trick is to run them up something deciduous—a leafless oak or maple. They'll flatten against the gray bark, become almost invisible, but you learn to look for a fluff of tail, the fine hair of which tends to catch the sun and move at the slightest breeze. You learn tricks, too. Squirrels almost always use the tree as a shield. Check it some time: Tree a squirrel, then walk in a slow circle in a radius fifteen yards or so from the trunk. Nine times out of ten the squirrel will edge around the trunk in skittery little increments, always keeping the trunk between him and you. Sadly for the squirrel, he can be reliably
fooled. If I was hunting with my father or brothers, we would approach the tree together. Then one of us would stand stock-still while the other walked the circle. Focused on the moving person and apparently unable to do math, the squirrel would edge around until he was exposed to the frozen guy with the gun. The statue technique works if you're alone, as well. Once the squirrel is treed, you lean against a tree of your own, and just wait. It may take ten minutes, but eventually the poor fellow sneaks a peek, and you've got your shot.

Yessir, I despise the squirrels, but I haven't killed one in years. Mainly because I am old-school on the eat-what-you-shoot rule, and I've never put squirrel high on the tasty list. Some around here call them tree rats, and although well-meaning nature-meat lovers will try to convince you otherwise, they taste that way. Rubber chicken, my dad used to say. Unlikable, too. Anyone who has ever sought solace in the deep wood only to have a squirrel perch three branches away and deliver a thirty-minute scold knows they are nature's equivalent of a nosy neighbor.

But what gets me going in June is they depredate my garden.

 

The morning began poetically enough. I set about transplanting cherry tomatoes and unearthed a logy June bug, which, as it slowly clawed the air, reminded me of the dung beetle in the opening paragraph of Franz Kafka's
Metamorphosis
. So I was feeling self-sufficient and well-read. Although I figured I had done in the June bug. He was metamorphosed enough to wiggle his legs, but the fact that he was still underground suggests he wasn't quite perfected. He is probably due for a robin, or a merciless grackle.

When I finished with the tomatoes, I fetched a tray of basil sprouts and one of cilantro and transplanted the works. I retired to the house with the usual sunny feelings imparted by working bare-handed in the earth. Ten minutes later, when I passed the raised bed on my way to fetch the mail, the basil and cilantro were uprooted and strewn to the six corners of the garden. There were telltale claw marks and prospect holes the diameter of walnuts. Balefully I scanned the trees.

I was able to tuck most of the plants back in, but this speaks to why I so despise the squirrels. They don't even
eat
the stuff. They just rip it up
in some misguided fit of excavation triggered by oh, I don't know…the smell of
dirt
? At least a rabbit ingests a sprig or two. And rabbits
taste good
. Squirrels are vandalistic
and
inedible.

And the
swiftness
of it. After several years of this, I have taken to stapling nylon netting over the beds until the plants have rooted and established themselves to the point that the squirrels don't usually bother, but I was hoping to do a little more planting today, and figured for the love of Pete that I had time to walk half a block to the post office. I should have known better. There have been times in the past when the squirrels have blasted through a row of leeks in the time it took me to run to the basement for a packet of pumpkin seed. Do they think the big dumb human buried a nut? And now here comes Charlie with his corncobs. As if the chattering herds of obese sky pigs that rule my lawn aren't already the size of otters. And the thing is, they drag half that corn over here and bury it in my grass. I can't grow a bloody thing in my garden, but I've got corn sprouting every two square inches. It looks like the test plots of the University of Wisconsin Corn Agronomy Program out there. I don't so much mow the lawn as make silage.

What we have here is not a backyard but a rodent preserve.

 

Regarding the state of poetry, I am willing to yield the balance of my time to Camille Paglia, but from the grandstand of Red Cedar Speedway in Menomonie, Wisconsin, it appears that if written verse is to recapture its relevance in popular discourse and contribute to the promotion of universal human understanding in any contemporary sense, we must convince more poets to attend dirt-track stock car races.

Heaps of grant money will be required.

 

In fairness, it is probably easier to get a poet to attend a stock car race than it is to convince a stock car fan to attend a poetry reading, although I once scanned the audience midway through a reading and recognized the winner of the previous weekend's Open-Wheel Feature, an experience analogous to that of the birder who spots a pelican at the hummingbird feeder. I invoke the term
dirt track
with the specific intent of distin
guishing down-home fender-banging from the NASCAR circuit, which is rapidly achieving a level of manufactured drama just a hair south of professional wrestling. Even more disturbingly, NASCAR references have begun popping up in
New Yorker
cartoons. In a yin to the yang of the Wal-Mart yoga mat, the hallowed sport of Carolina bootleggers has evolved into a corporation of sound-biting action figures with beautiful teeth. The speed and danger are as real as ever, but the carnival is fueled as much by merchandise and central casting as 110 Leaded Racing Gasoline. I prefer the local dirt track.

 

I wind up at the dirt-track races a couple of times a year. Not enough to claim Number One Fan status, or recite the standings, or even provide a clear description of the various divisions, but enough to talk strategy and revel in the evening. Tonight when my friend Gene and I step out of the car in the parking lot behind the grandstand, the first thing we hear is the roar of the racers running warm-up laps. Then the prevailing west wind carries the caramelized scent of combusted racing fuel to our noses, and now we are hurrying a little bit, eager to get inside the gate to see the cars and all the people and fold into the scene. I hold my binoculars and earplugs in one hand while fishing out my wallet with the other, and then the woman in the booth at the gate takes my money and slides me a ticket. “Keep the stub, hon,” she says. “There'll be door prizes.”

As we pass through the main gate another woman takes and tears our tickets, handing one half back and stuffing the other in the door prize pail. We make our way through the churning crowd past the restrooms and the food concessions and pause for a minute at the T-shirt tables set up just outside the grandstand entry. Even at the amateur level, racers understand the value of merchandising. Mostly it runs to clothing decorated with the racer's number and sponsor logos (
SHIRTS $15.00; SWEATSHIRTS $20.00; JACKETS $70.00
), but you can also get window decals (
SMALL $4.00; LARGE $5.00
) and many of the racers sell die-cast models of their cars, complete with graphics and lettering. Sales are usually handled by second cousins and girlfriends. We sidle past the arms-folded sheriff's deputies, and now we are trackside, on the dirt path that runs between the stands and the retaining wall with its chain-link fence, cabled in
theory to keep the cars off your lap, a slim reassurance when they blast past six feet away, so close the flung dirt clods sting your neck.

 

The people in the steel seats take all forms, but mostly they run to overbellied men, couples in matching bar jackets, tots with their heads clamped in oversized hearing protectors, and, above all, many replications of a certain kind of young man best summarized as a conflation of frat boy and redneck, with the affectations of both: goatee, maybe an earring, ball cap, well-executed tattoos, and a cud in the lip. The ball cap will be worn straightforward and the bill will be worked into a tight curl. These boys drive shiny four-wheel-drive pickups, often with a four-wheeler ATV parked in the box. They are not big on walking. When they do get caught afoot, they carry themselves with a blue-collar insouciance, but there is an overfed softness to their profile that belies all the time spent sitting atop four wheels. In the stands at the stock car races, their natural stance seems to be jacket open, belly out, one hand down the front pocket of their jeans, the other hand wrapped around a beer.

Contrapuntal to these boys is an archetypical sort of woman, slim-hipped to the point of boyishness and wearing jeans approaching the melting point of tensile resistance. Her hair is harshly blond, long in the back and shellacked to a pouf up front—the feminine mullet, or
femullete
. She is likely wearing a team T-shirt, white, with her favorite race car rendered in garish fluorescents on the front, and the season schedule on the back. Women like these have a little edge to their eyes, it's part life and part cigarettes, but when you grow up where I did, you imprint on their type so that when I see them down front there, walking in pairs to the restroom, they always trigger a reflex attraction. Something atavistic. If you fancy yourself a lad, you should keep in mind that most of these women own a pickup and a deer rifle, and odds are they can take a punch. Women like this, you make a wrong turn, and they'll put you in the ditch.

There is this moment, when they're getting the tape of the national anthem cued up, and the shiny vehicles from the local car dealer are parading around the track with the flag, and the local princess of something is waving from a convertible, when it gets so quiet you can hear the
tires padding over the clay. Then the anthem kicks in and we all stand, and the combination of patriotism, anticipation, and open air makes my chest swell and my guts tingle, and it seems that what you have here is a moment of unification, a convening of like-minded people joined by dirt, noise, and country, and you are unapologetically thrilled to be part of it. It is, I think, the absence of pretension that frees up your soul.

Then they line'em up and cut'er loose. It is a delightful maelstrom. The cars, all sheet metal and pipes and bellowing speed. The track, reddish and soft early on, growing rock-hard, rutted, and iridescent with rubber as the night wears on. The feel of the grit that settles on your skin in the wake of every pack. And always in the air that scorched cotton-candy grace note of spent racing fuel. The spectators pay close attention to the action, cheering their favorites, doing their best to hex the bad guys. Gene, by day a mild-mannered Birkenstocks-wearing physical therapists and owner of one Volkswagen and one Volvo, is pumping his fist and whooping it up like Junior Johnson's redheaded stepchild.

 

Harley Paulsrud is widely considered to be one of the bad guys. You'll see plenty of his T-shirts in the stands, but an equal number of people will cheer up a frenzy if he tags the wall. Back in our glory days, Harley and I spent every autumn Friday night on some football field, home or away. I played left defensive end. Harley played left outside linebacker. It was up to us to stuff the option. I'd turn the quarterback up, force the pitch, and Harley would tee off on the running back.

Harley was a hothead, always ready to fight, always ready to hit, on the field or off. But he was also one of those rare athletes—John McEnroe comes to mind—who seemed to be able to turn anger to his advantage. Rather than become rattled, Harley seemed to hone his anger like a blue flame. We had a mediocre season our senior year—3–3 in conference play, as I recall—but Harley and I had some fun. We got to where we keyed off each other, knew what the other would be doing without looking. By then Harley and I went back thirteen years, clear to kindergarten. I was the oldest child in my family, he was the youngest in his. I remember him drawing a picture with his crayons that first year, a
green helicopter over a field of fire. I didn't know it then, but his oldest brother, having survived a tour in Vietnam, had just died in a helicopter crash on a base in Texas. This only two years after Harley's father was crushed and killed when his tractor pitched over on a hillside. You see, maybe, where Harley came by some of that anger. In music class one day, first or second grade, I accidentally whacked him on the shin with a music stand. He flashed red with rage. “You just wait until recess,” he hissed. I was scared, but determined not to show it. “I'm waiting,” I said coolly, my knees quaking. He shot me nasty faces all the while Mrs. Carlson trilled away at her piano, and he glared at me all the way back to the classroom. Every time I thought of recess a cold finger tickled my liver. When it came, all the boys boiled out of the doors to choose up sides for football. Usually I would play, but today I hung back, on the sidelines over by a snowbank. Harley got the ball immediately, and headed right for me. He slipped on the ice, but as he slid toward me, his feet were windmilling and he managed to kick me two or three times. And that was it. It was over. It hadn't really hurt, and I felt a surge of relief. Looking back at it now, thinking about how I faked a cool pose in the music room, how I slogged out to recess even in my dread, I realize Harley put me through a critical toughening process. He taught me to act like I wasn't scared, even when I was. Every time I swallow my fear and move forward—toward a fire, a bad wreck, another disillusioned girlfriend, the dentist—I am exercising a conditioned response traceable in part to Harley Paulsrud.