Truck (21 page)

Kathleen calls us in for supper. She's made a Crock-Pot of sloppy joe barbecue. After eating and chatting, I head back out to the shop and work alone. My goal tonight is to pull the seats. The truck came standard with a bench seat, but I tore it out in the late 1980s for various reasons including the fact that the bench seat was very jouncy and in combination with the tanklike three-quarter-ton suspension tended to hurl you ceiling-ward at the slightest bump in the road. Having tired of the repetitive neck injuries and cranial knots, I decided to try something different. I had also recently begun working as an EMT, and having extricated my first few bad car crashes, I wanted to put in some seat belts.

I began the project by driving some distance to a junkyard somewhere north of Highway 8, where I detached two bucket seats and a pair of lap
belts from a moribund Ford Maverick. I have absolutely no recall of why I took them from a Ford Maverick, but there you are. I proceeded back to my father's farm shop and commenced the renovation.

The bench seat came out easily enough. It was simply bolted to the floor, although it appeared someone had raised it by inserting two wooden blocks beneath the rails. I stuck it in my father's old chicken coop where as far as I know it remains to this day. I then drilled holes through the cab floor in a pattern matching those in the rails of the Maverick seats. I hoisted the first bucket seat into place behind the steering wheel, bolted it down, and hopped in to judge the feel. My eyes were looking directly at the horn button. I had to reach for the steering wheel like I was hanging laundry.

Disappointed but not deterred, I unbolted the seat, pulled it out, and went around behind the shop to my father's scrap-iron rack, where I retrieved a mismatched bundle of angle and strap-iron. A flurry of hacksawing, grinding, blowtorching, drilling, welding, and bolting followed. When it was over, I had created a steel frame to be bolted between the cab floor and the bucket seat to provide the necessary elevation. Furthermore, it gave me an anchor to which I could bolt the lap belts.

The unpainted frame was esthetically iffy and weighed nearly as much as the seat itself, but it worked. This time when I climbed into the cab, I could see over the dash quite nicely.

The trouble with so many of these spur-of-the-moment male projects is that you run out of time. It was growing dark and I had to be back at work in the city that next day. So for the next several months I tooled around in the truck with nothing but a large cavernous space where the passenger seat should be. I was dating at the time and the truck was my only transportation. The woman I was seeing had already endured me for years, we had been off and on since high school. She had been tooled around in my dad's farm truck, and she was the girl who wound up with her face wedged between the windshield and the dash when I borrowed my grandfather's sedan and tried to shift the automatic transmission by tromping the automatic brake like it was a clutch. I once took her snowmobiling and failed to notice she had fallen off until I was two forties away.

Running her around in that seatless truck, I didn't want to be an insensitive boob.

So I put a bean bag chair over there.

She did eventually marry a man
named
Mike.

 

I soaked the bolts down with WD-40 beforehand, but they aren't budging, so I get the sidewinder grinder and shear them off with that. I wear earplugs and goggles, but the sparks that fly off the grinder and ricochet off the surrounding steel land on my arms and the tender antecubital space of my elbow, atop my balding head, and even my eyelids. It becomes a sort of miniature G. Gordon Liddy test to ignore the pain of the iron tinder as it hits the skin, to stand without flinching. These are little bits of molten steel, but despite the sting, they cool before burning into the skin, so it's a way to work on your focus. The grinder is also giving off fine plumes of powdered rust that settle fuzzily on the hair of my forearms, on my ears, and scratch in my eyes.

When the last bolt is severed I tip the passenger seat off the bolt stubs and drag it, homemade frame and all, to the center of the shop, where I study it awhile, suddenly struck by the fact that I have no clear memory of who I was when I put that seat in. It's one of those little markers in time that trigger a cascade of other memories—many of them scintillating in their detail—and yet leaves us with one gigantic gap: Who
were
we then? You go back and examine your life and it's like unfolding one of those segmented drawings where each person draws a part of the body—the feet, the knees, the waist, and so on, up to the head—without seeing the rest. When you unfold it, it's funny to see how things match up, or don't.

 

I work late, well after midnight. At one point, having had enough country and oldies, I rummage through Mark's stack of CDs and pull out the Nirvana
Unplugged in New York
. I missed all but the peripheral aspects of the grunge movement, although a friend recently took one look at the way I was dressed and said, “Seattle, 1989.” When Kurt Cobain was ascendant, I was still transitioning out of hair metal and exploring the New Traditionalists of country music. So I always listen to Nirvana with
the sort of befuddled appreciation that, indeed, something was going on there but I should just enjoy what I can and not insult the involved parties by pretending to get it. This brand of dispassion is one of the privileges of aging. As the decade-old concert unfolds, I putter away, pounding out the bolt stubs (they have rust-welded themselves to the underside of the cab), painting rust converter on the back fenders, cleaning up some. The last song on the album is a cover of the age-old folk ballad, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” Written sometime around 1870 and known variously as “In the Pines,” “Black Girl,” and “Black Gal,” the song was made most popular in the 1940s by Lead Belly. Like many folk songs, it has permuted through all the hand-me-downs, but its elemental darkness remains stark. Cold wind, dark pines, decapitation by train, these are not images prone to ameliorate over time. “
Girl, where did you sleep last night?
” is a question that delivers a powerful jolt to the liver no matter your age or era. Throughout the early verses, Cobain's voice conveys a malevolent desolation that finally explodes in a harrowing squall so blistering it seems you could turn the boom box toward the truck fenders and watch the paint bubble. The grit on my face, the rust at the back of my mouth, the bits of grinder slag peppering my arms, it seems he was holding them all in his throat. The guitar chops its way to the end of the song, the audience cheers and fades, and I am left with nothing but the hum of the fluorescents.

 

It's 1:30
A.M.
when I drive away from Mark's shop. On my way home I pass through the village of Cameron. As I approach the town's solitary stoplight, there are no other cars in sight. I am thinking about Anneliese and I am sitting at the light for a good time before I realize I've pulled to a dead stop on green. I accelerate and pull away, checking to see who might have noticed. I'm half a block from the intersection when the village police car pulls into my rearview. I'm doing 35 in the 35, no worries, but he follows me out of town, past the high school, past the exit to the freeway, and just as I begin to accelerate for the 55-mile-per-hour zone, his lights come on.

After a long wait while he runs my plates, the officer exits his car and
approaches. He sweeps the interior of my car with his light and I cringe, because the car is swimming in junk and truck parts and road food garbage. Then he puts the light on me, and of course what he sees is a dirty, unshaven nut job out driving erratically after midnight. “Good evening, sir,” he says, lowering his flashlight beam just enough so that I can see him. He is a small fellow, and disturbingly young. His gun belt hangs on him like he dug it out of Daddy's drawer to play dress-up. Leaning down to speak, he also tries to catch a whiff of my breath.

“Have you been drinking, sir?”

“Nope. Not for thirty-eight years.”

“Well, sir, I noticed you drifting over the fog line several times.”

This is flatly bullfeathers. If he had said he became suspicious when I spent five minutes camped at a green light, I'd have been down with that. But here he is plainly fishing.

“May I see your license, sir?”

With an eye toward his youth and his gun, I explain that I have to dig around some and wait for his permission. While I'm digging I'm thinking he's going to love my license, which features a photo of me with frayed butt-length hair and an overgrown beard. It could be a membership card for the National Association of Deranged Street Prophets.

He spends a long time back there in the squad, allowing me time for reflection. I have always believed that good cops can't be thanked enough for doing their impossible job, and as far as I know, the toddler back there running my plates is one of the good guys, but I'm surprised at how every time he spoke to me I had this urge to turn him over my knee. My reflection yields no epiphany beyond the fact that one becomes an old coot by increments, and here's one now. And here he is back at my door, handing my license through the window. I can go, he says. Then he leans back in the window.

“But, sir?”

“Yes?”

“Try to pay a little better attention to your driving.”

“Ooookayyy,” I say, turning red in the dark and wishing I had the guts to add, “…
Spanky
.”

The remainder of my drive was consumed with muttering.

 

In 1995, Natalie Merchant released a music video (for the song “Wonder”) populated with beautiful women of all ages and persuasions. Beautiful women of course are a staple of the genre, but these women were different. Tawny Kitaen unfurling herself across the hood of a Jaguar is an incitation; the women in Merchant's video were a revelation. They were beautiful through a sublime range of age, form, and physiognomy; the cumulative result spoke to the beauty not of women, but of womanhood. I saw the video only once or twice, but it made a powerful impression, and I was reminded of it again when I arrived at Anneliese's house today to find six women (counting Amy) in the dining room. Here was Anneliese not in the context of the usual self-centered
me
but in the context of the strong women in
her
life. Her mother, Donna, a woman who has always made me feel welcome but never entitled, and right she is; Jaci, a former teaching colleague and the person who must be given credit for Amy's Seabiscuit phase; Bibi, another teaching colleague from Colombia who helps Amy with her Spanish; and Heather, a dedicated missionary who came to Anneliese's aid in the difficult early weeks after Amy was born.

It's so easy to get so caught up in our brief little history since the library reading in Fall Creek. You forget sometimes what a disruption you are. And how late you have entered the game. After our trip to Colorado, I talked with Anneliese about where she turned for help in the time surrounding Amy's birth. Her mother came, of course, and there was Katrina, the local church minister. Stacy, the woman with the doctorate in physiology who stood in as birthing coach. The midwife. The doula, a woman I may never meet whose role as I understand it was to operate somewhere between coach and midwife. Jen, the friend who accompanied Anneliese on a journey to Guatemala after the pregnancy became known. And, in a nod to the men, Ryan, a friend of the group who paced the halls during the birth, which turned dangerously difficult, with Anneliese in surgery and too weak to stand for days.

But all those fierce women. When I see a few of them around the table today, I don't feel I've missed anything, but rather that I am being
allowed something and had better pay attention. When Anneliese came home from the hospital, there were these women to help her. But it was she who did the feedings, she who went back to work, and she who prepared and delivered the defense of her master's thesis on poetry as a form of shamanism based on the Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak'abal. Cumulatively this reminds me for the forty-seventh time that I shouldn't do all the talking.

I've read the thesis with its references to innate purpose and hexagonal shapes as an image of humans as the center between worlds, and after balancing it with images of Anneliese still in high school, bucking hay bales for the neighbors, or feeding her stepfather's cows, or handpicking another truckload of his onions back in what would become difficult days and her mom would move away, and I am forewarned that I am not in the company of someone who feels the need to hang on my every word. When she still had Amy in her belly she climbed a Guatemalan volcano in the dark and stared at the lava below. Sometimes it is good for me to look at the two of them together and think of that.

A little voice inside me is saying the man who sets out to celebrate womanhood and its constituency is waltzing through a minefield set in quicksand. Good intentions lead to woman-warrior overrevving or patriarchal head-patting. Contradictory elements abound. The man moved by a Natalie Merchant video to consider all womanhood is by no means inoculated against the booty of Sir Mix-a-Lot. Anneliese captures me with her character and spirit, but I am not blind to the way she walks. Having gallumphed the streets of Manhattan and felt my heart stricken every six feet based on nothing more than mystery and outward appearance, it seems carnality is ridiculous and essential. Rare and wearisome is the fully emancipated man. Our only hope is to be judged on the balance of our actions. Sometimes the power of a woman is no more ineffable than a mallet. Shortly after my first date with Anneliese, a woman who had come to know us both in separate circumstance sent me a firm note that concluded with a time-honored blessing:
Try not to screw it up!!!

Once I was in a moderately fancy lakeside restaurant dining with a woman who to this day can post reasonable doubts about my character when a couple in a simple aluminum fishing boat docked and took a
table. They were both middle-aged, both wearing discount store tennies and appliqué sweatshirts (an eagle on hers, a buck deer on his), both a little chunky, and both sunburned in a manner that suggested this was their one week off and, by God, they were gonna fish. They studied their menus in silence, and when the waitress came by, they spoke so softly and returned the menus so meekly it was as if they had not ordered but asked permission. From their dress to their demeanor, they were not one whit demonstrative. Then the woman turned for her purse and wiped out her water glass. The clatter and splash cut through all the jabber and you had that pause in the action when all heads turn, then the rhythm of the room resumed. The woman stared at her place mat, her sunburn heightened by a red flush. And right then that man leaned over and put one arm around her shoulders and gave her the softest little kiss on the cheek.