Truck (14 page)

Harley and I pretty much lost touch after graduation. I heard he was working highway construction and I'd see his name in the racing reports published by the local weekly. Now, twenty years after our last tackle, I am pointing out his blue and gold #1 car to Gene. Harley races in the WISSOTA modified class—essentially, he is driving an open-wheeled stock car. The races go on, class after class, heat after heat, and during Harley's races, I follow him intently. I can't see his face, so I focus on his hand, clad in a blue glove and visible at the wheel. If they stripped the number from his car, you could still tell it was him, just by the kamikaze way he attacks the turns, and the way he dives low to make a pass, or shoots up and takes the high line on a blur, flashing through the grand
stand straightaway inches from the concrete retaining wall.

I like to think of the tiny sounds in the midst of all that pandemonium: the creak of the seat belt, the zap of the spark plug arc, the smooth spin of a bearing. Likewise, all the hurtling steel is being directed by the tiniest of movements: a quarter-inch tug on the steering wheel transmits somehow down through the shafts and pinions, the shuddering springs and the spinning wheel, right down to the clay, where the rubber adjusts its purchase and the car jukes or straightens accordingly. The modified is a powerful class of race car. Stuff the accelerator too deep too quick and the tires will “lighten,” spinning at the sacrifice of traction, at which point you hit the wall like a can in a crusher. Drive with an egg under your shoe, the old-timers say. At the heart of the vortex, the cars are positioned according to the sum total of these invisible nuances, but from where Gene and I are sitting, it is simply a stinky, thunderous, and cathartic chariot race. Sense-wise, it doesn't hold up under examination, but then neither does two-man luge.

Even a stranger would pick up on the fact that Harley has the crowd evenly divided. When he makes a huge pass and moves up three places, half the crowd cheers. When he gets flagged for an infraction and sent to the back of the pack on a restart, the other half cheers. Just before the flag drops on the restart, I lean over to Gene and say, “Back when we played football, the angrier he got, the better he played.” And sure enough, when the man in the crow's nest waves green, Harley drives with a vicious focus. You can feel him seething in the way his car snaps and darts from turn to turn. Starting dead last, he picks off car after car. When the checkered flag drops, he is up to third place, with first and second well aware that they owe their places to an expired lap count. Another few turns and he'd have had them, too. When Harley comes down the final straight, I jump up and holler him across the line. Gene, who can teach you to walk after you get hit by a truck but requires six hours and two sets of backup filters to change the oil in his Jetta, is wide-eyed and grinning. He pulls his earplugs.

“Man, once he got clear of the dirty air, he just
flew
!”
Dirty air
is racing slang for the turbulent wake left by the car ahead of yours. I fix him with a look.

“Gene, have you been watching
RPM Tonight
again?” He ducks his head and blushes.

I can't blame him. You get swept up. I get these calls: “Mike! Friday night! Punky Manor Challenge of Champions! Hot racing action!”

Keep it up, I tell him. They'll yank your physical therapy license
and
your Sierra Club card.

 

In the feature—basically, your nightly championship race—somebody tags Harley from behind, kicks him sideways in Turn Four, and then the cars pound him, seven in all by the time corner marshals get it all shut down. The cars are stacked and crumpled together, and it takes awhile for the tow trucks to sort the mess. I can see Harley in his roll cage, trying to start the engine, and then I can see a red light come on, which I suppose is bad news, and eventually they tow him back behind the wall, and I imagine he threw some wrenches. Still, he is headed for a good year, with enough points to give him a shot at the state championship.

 

I was surprised at my reaction, seeing Harley out there. It was exhilarating to watch the figure in the screaming sheet metal knowing we had history. To look at that hand on the wheel and remember how many times we had knocked some quarterback flat and then grabbed hands to help each other up. To know we could fill a night with stories and just be getting started. When I got home I looked up his address in the phone book and sent him a post card, just a simple note telling him how much I enjoyed his performance.

 

Revenge fantasies are always a sign of emotional delamination, so perhaps it is unhealthy that lately I have been wondering just how difficult it would be to rig the raised beds with antisquirrel land mines. An acorn's worth of C4 should get the job done. This time they reached right through the nylon netting and fiddled out several leaf lettuce plants, which were just getting to the picking point. I cussed when I saw this, cussed out loud. Had he not been rendered stone deaf by World War II ordnance and thirty years on a Massey-Ferguson combine, Charlie
might have heard me, because he was out there with his corn again, restocking his squirrel feeders.

And this is where I'm not entirely clear on whether Charlie loves the squirrels or not. True enough: whereas I would quite gladly honeycomb the yard with squirrel-sized punji pits and perch in the walnut tree with a blowgun, Charlie faithfully lugs enough corn into his backyard to feed a half-dozen beefalo. But he doesn't just turn it over to them. Charlie is a fan of what I call trick feeders. Essentially dribble glasses for the backyard set, trick feeders force the squirrel to endure a variety of humiliations in order to get a taste of corn. Your quintessential product would be the Squngee, a perverse contraption that dangles two cobs of corn from a bungee cord. While the squirrel fights to shuck and pocket the kernels, the cob bounces up and down. Some models come with a bell attached. Lately the Squngee has been mass-produced by prison inmates.

Charlie has a trio of trick feeders. The mildest of these is the miniature chair feeder, in which a corncob is skewered on a nail before a tiny chair. In order to get at the cob, the squirrel plants his little hinder on the seat. Variations on this theme include miniature Adirondack chairs and picnic tables. Nailed to the tree beside the miniature chair, Charlie has another device that, at first glance, looks like your standard bird feeder—a little roof and deck—except that the corn is stashed in a glass mason jar screwed to the front of the feeder. In order to get to the corn, the squirrel has to crawl in through an aperture on the side of the feeder and into the jar, where hilarious contortions ensue—all visible through the glass. Finally, Charlie has rigged up a bicycle wheel with spikes so that he can stud the rim with cobs in the manner of a ship's wheel. When the squirrel ventures out and grabs a cob, his weight sets the whole works spinning, and as the squirrel fights to hang on and eat, you just laugh and laugh, which makes it tough to get the little bugger in the crosshairs.

 

Anneliese and Amy are visiting for the day. Amy is sitting beside me on the edge of the raised bed as I pull weeds. I like to pull weeds in the morning, especially if I remember to water the night before, as the weeds come up easier. Pulling lamb's quarters is most satisfying. The
stem is strong and you can get a good purchase. The roots come out in a neat clod, as opposed to quack grass, which tends to snap off. There's a nice rhythm to weeding when you really get going, pick-pick-pick, pull-pull-pull, the miniature clear-cut widening as you proceed, the vegetable sprouts seeming to gather strength and shift up a gear almost immediately upon the removal of the competing roots. And then there is that calm satisfaction you feel when you look over the freshly weeded bed, everything clean and neat and bound to flourish.

Amy pulls a few weeds, then wanders off to play. At the moment, the best she has been able to come up with toy-wise in my house is a hand-carved, gape-mouthed wooden hippopotamus from Africa and a firefighter doll I was given as a thank-you for speaking to a group of local schoolkids. She brings me the hippo and informs me with some gravity that his teeth are loose. I turn the firefighter into a dentist, and he tightens the hippo's teeth with an impact wrench, or at least that's the sound I make. Amy produces a candleholder. The firefighter uses his hose to fill the holder with imaginary water, after which the hippo swishes and spits, and then they are all off on some other adventure.

I weed a while longer, then switch to planting. As expected, the nasty cold of last winter, combined with little or no snow cover and my failure to mulch, killed off most of my perennials. I started some sage in the basement, and after transplanting that, I plant rosemary and lemon balm. It's nice to chop up the dirt with the hand cultivator, smooth it with my palm, and then draw straight lines with my fingertip. I drop the lemon balm seeds in, remembering how the leaves taste plucked and eaten raw, or torn into chiffonade for vinaigrette. I can see Anneliese, back from a run, moving around in the kitchen. The sound of my cheap refrigerator radio seeps through the screen.

I go back to weeding, and Amy returns again, this time with a question about what the hippopotamus should eat, but then she sits in my lap and starts pulling weeds herself. As we work I feed her sprigs of lettuce, and we make jokes about squirrels stealing my salad. For a good twenty minutes, I weed and she jabbers, her little blond head right there beneath my chin. At one point she looks up and says, “You be Amy. I'll be Mike.”

I am falling in love twice here.

 

Way up in northern Wisconsin, in Bayfield County where the summer sailors go, in a clearing on the slopes of Mount Ashwabay with a view to the Apostle Islands of Lake Superior, stands a bright blue tent capable of holding nine hundred people in a way that makes them feel they are a cozy dozen. This is Big Top Chautauqua, an institution born of one man's love for music and canvas. Officially classified as a “non-profit performing arts theater,” the Lake Superior Big Top was first pitched by Warren Nelson in 1986 and in its current incarnation (the tents wear out, and one was lost to fire in June 2000) opens its stage mid-June through early September for musical comedy and historical revues (including the recent angling-based smash
Riverpants,
written by Warren and including giant projected photos of Nice Fish), family matinees, and a steady stream of national folk and country acts. Johnny and June Carter Cash have played here, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Leon Redbone, Earl Scruggs, Judy Collins, Bruce Cockburn, BeauSoleil, the list goes on—some twenty years long now. Anneliese and I are here to see the singer Greg Brown. We are on our first weekend away together. Amy is with Anneliese's mother. We will act grown-up and dally at will. Yesterday Anneliese ran a half-marathon in Duluth while I read the newspaper and ate a danish. The night previous we slept in a tent on the outskirts of Superior, Wisconsin, and it was cold, cold, cold, but among other things, love is Sterno. Today we lazed the Chevy west along the southern shore of Gordon Lightfoot's Gitche Gumee, following Highway 13 past Port Wing and Cornucopia (stopping to buy a used book about Lenny Bruce, and a packet of smoked fish from a pretty woman in yellow rubber overalls) to Red Cliff, then finally hung a right and dropped six miles south to a plain motel, where we took a room overlooking the water.

During the drive we talked about how it's going with us, and we are daring to hope. Just about three months in, and we feel a certainty. Among other things, we would both like a small farm with a barn and chickens. We are still operating within that window when joy and discovery reign, when it is very purely enough to be driving and holding hands, but we have both lived enough to understand this and enjoy it anyway.
Or especially. I have failed at points far, far beyond this, but I have never looked into another pair of eyes and felt such ease.

 

Greg Brown is a hard lesson for well-groomed boys everywhere. Snaggletoothed and beefy and mumbly and prone to performing in clogs and overalls and not looking up much, he appears careless until he sings, and naturally this makes him irresistible.
I'm a Midwest boy,
he sings,
I'm a big dumb man…
and you can hear the murmur as women from Iowa City to Manhattan give the ol' thumbs-up. In the heartland, Eros tends to clomp around. Lesson being, tweak and trim if you will, cover boys, but don't overwhelm manhood with maintenance. There is nothing
citrusy
about Greg Brown. The poetry and guitar help, of course. Quatrains make bad news beautiful, and any given six-string will smokescreen a raft of shortcomings.

Above all else, there is that voice. Sometimes I drive all night drinking truckstop coffee and singing radio notes exceeding my range at both ends, or I holler-talk elevated nonsense through the secondhand smoke of some bar to 2
A.M.
, and the next day when I rise my larynx is so scorched and seasoned I can make my sternum buzz in and out of phase just by humming, and I'll think, this is what it's like to possess the vocal cords of Greg Brown, but even in my most sonorous state, I am pleather to his leather. Greg Brown's voice sounds as if it was aged in a whiskey cask, cured in an Ozarks smokehouse, dropped down a stone well, pulled out damp, and kept moist in the palm of a wicked woman's hand. I think if he says good morning across his coffee cup, it raises ripples. The voice is a perfect match to his lyrics, biblical and bar stool and garden loamy as they are, all Rexrothian and as easy-rolling true as a brand-new '64 Dodge. A Greg Brown song doesn't make me want to whoop and holler, it makes me want to sift bare-handed through the dirt for repentance and then go looking for a woman who doesn't mind a few chickens. I was hoping Anneliese would like him.

We drive to the Big Top early, so we have time to sit and watch the people gather. Ski Hill Road originates at Highway 13, breaking westward on the perpendicular to proceed in a gentle mile-and-a-half climb through close trees to the ski hill gate, where we present our tickets and
park in the gravel lot. After buying coffee, we perch on a berm near the end of the T-bar tow. I lean back against a wooden pole and Anneliese leans back against my chest. The coffee tastes startling good against the clean air. The sun is easing lower, pushing its gold through the dust haze raised by the arriving cars. The tent is a blue burst against the surrounding green, looking from a distance like a squat storybook caterpillar with stripes of pearl gray. There is an eager civility to the crowd, everybody milling but quietly so, folks passing in and out of the tent and clusters of friends meeting up to have beers in the grass or eat brats in the concession tent. The trees are optimistically green. I put the coffee down and link my hands across Anneliese's lap, put my cheek beside her cheek. The air is soft and warm, and from somewhere comes a whiff of patchouli with its attendant evocations of wooden-floored head shops and lace-up maiden dresses.