Truck (7 page)

What you had here was a full-on testament to the blue-collar work ethic, Yankee ingenuity, the fundamental beauty of main force violence, and the potential upsides of beer and unemployment. I felt the urge to salute. Recently an outsider questioned my neighbor Trygve about the local propensity for cockeyed perseverance in the face of absurdity. “We up in New Auburn,” replied Trygve, “walk a more difficult path.”

 

We've hit a warm stretch. The fourth Sunday in March, and temperatures are headed for the mid-60s. Nearly all of the snow is gone, and when I open the kitchen window, the air that rolls through the screen
is soft with the watery scent of melt. I step out the back door to feel the sun on my skin. For the first time in months, the earth gives a little under the sole of my shoe. I know this is not spring. It is the first of many false starts. But the smell of the warm air and the sound of the soil loosening—that barely audible trickle and drip—taps a pinprick of melancholy that blooms from my heart in a sweet, radiant bleed. The sensation is vestigial of adolescence, when the first whiff of emergent earth triggered fits of yearning and longing. Not lust, but rather the purest sort of want, a nostalgic intuition that somewhere a woman waited beside a stone fence beneath a wide sky, pining for me to stride from among the pine trees and take her in my strong arms and my true heart. There would be a popple tree thicket and a blanket, within and upon which we would recline with earnest intentions, and from somewhere in the bushes would come the sound of Neil Diamond singing “Coldwater Morning,” “And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind,” and “Girl You'll Be a Woman Soon,” in medley. That would be love, and that would be it. The scene would neither conclude nor progress, leaving me instead to hover timelessly in a stasis of poignant bliss, chastely cradling my anonymous desideratum.

I trace the Neil Diamond thing to my aunt Meg. I recall playing air guitar to her vinyl copy of
Hot August Night
during a family get-together when I was very young and girls were yet a nonfactor. When the hormones hit, I borrowed Neil's albums from the tiny library in Chetek, Wisconsin, where I believe the record will also show I checked out every Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, and Max Brand Western in stock. Cowboy books and Neil Diamond: hello, solitary man. These twin influences shaped my concept of romantic comportment in ways that lingered into my mid-thirties. Meaning, I owe a smattering of perfectly classy women signed letters of apology. And yet I still pull out the Neil albums sometimes, if only to feel again what I once imagined love might be. “
Shiloh, when I was young…”

The Best of Bread
will also do the trick.

 

When the weather warms, the village stirs. Cars passing up and down Main Street run a little looser, their drivers uncurled from the deep-winter heat-conserving hunch and more prone to raise one hand from
the wheel and wave. Last week the tires gave off a muffled crunch and squeak as they rolled over the snowpack. Today they roll on naked asphalt, grinding the residual sanding salt between the rubber and the road with a gritty crackle that echoes from the vinyl siding of the surrounding houses. I can hear children calling, radios playing, doors slamming. The
ska-winch, ska-winch
of trampoline springs. There is something lonely in the distant sounds, and now I am ruminating on the failures of affection and assessing the damage done, and my Neil Diamond reverie is derailing. The accumulated dings and cock-ups of love—once “breaking up” advances beyond merely switching school bus seats and results in real hurt—tend to leach the sweetness from melancholy. Two blocks over on Pine Street, the morning worship service at Bethel Lutheran is commencing. The tone of the bells is mellow in the warmth. My back-alley neighbor steps out the back door and snaps a leash on his ferocious dog. They set out down the alley, the dog lunging, the man leaning backward, a decorticate stutter-stepping water-skier. Still, he manages his aura of detached toughness. I can see words across the chest of his T-shirt. He gets closer, and I can read them:
100 PERCENT WHUP-ASS
.

 

The resurrection of the International has officially commenced. My brother John used to work for the local implement dealer, and the dealer has allowed us to borrow his equipment truck. It has a tilt bed and a winch. John backs into my driveway, then, using controls mounted on the truck's frame, runs the bed back and down until its beveled tail is wedged behind the rear tires of the International like a stunt ramp. Unspooling cable from the winch, he slings the hook around the frame. Then, with me in the International to steer, he rewinds the cable, pulling the pickup slowly backward up the ramp. I can't help but grin like a kid. For the first time in years, I am sitting inside the International while it moves. When all four wheels are on the wooden deck, John retracts and lowers the bed. We secure it with chains and boomers and—after pausing for purposes of a good story to measure the depth of the depressions in the asphalt where the truck has stood for all these years (officially: three inches, per the Stanley tape)—are on our way. Up in the cab of the
implement truck, John's dog Leroy rides shotgun, gazing loll-tongued and happily out the window from his elevated position in the passenger seat. I follow in my car.

It is something else to see that old truck up there, moving down the road high in the air and backward. Exposed in that manner, it looks surprisingly frail. The sky is pale blue and clear, the sun's heat today just adequate to ease a small seep of melt from the one shrinking blob of snow remaining on the hood after all the recent warm weather. The trip to my brother-in-law's shop is just over twenty miles, and John takes it easy, rarely running over forty. I settle in for the ride, turn on the radio, and punch up Moose Country. When you are rolling down the road behind your brother headed for a truck revival, you want to hear some chicken pickin'.
Whoop-whoop-whoop,
said the late Waylon Jennings, and,
boogity-boogity
.

Mark is waiting outside his shop when we arrive. John backs in, raises the bed, and decants the truck. I ride in the cab again, giving Mark a thumbs-up and steering as the unspooling cable lowers me to the ground. When the truck is on the level, Mark and I brace our butts against the rear bumper and push it the rest of the way across the concrete apron and into the shop. Then we troop into the house. My sister Kathleen has made a batch of spaghetti. After the crisp air it is good to come in to the pasta steam. Mark and Kathleen's house is built into a hillside, and from the dining room table we can see for miles across the simply and perfectly named Blue Hills of northern Wisconsin. We talk about the truck, but we also talk about our cousin Sukey, a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marines. She sends us e-mails from somewhere in Africa. We remember her as a blond tyke at Fourth of July picnics. Her husband, Steve—also a helicopter pilot in the Marines—is facing deployment to Afghanistan. Mark and Kathleen are adjusting to their newborn boy. I call him Sidrock, which is not his given name, but such are the prerogatives of uncles. While the grown-ups talk about loved ones at war, Sidrock is goobering in his infant seat.

Mark and I plan to start tearing down the International next weekend. The idea is to get it back up and running by November, in time for deer-hunting season. I have this desire to bring my deer—a year's provision of meat—out of the woods in the back of the truck. On the way home,
I am following John down a dip between two hills when he slows on the upside and gradually stops. Out of gas. John has already burned half a day helping me, but when he climbs down from the cab he is shaking his head and grinning. “I've got a couple cans back home,” he says. Rather than try to explain to me where to find them, he and Leroy take my car, and I sit on the flatbed facing backward, ready to warn off anyone who comes over the hill too fast. We used to follow this road to church when I was a child. Back then this truck was new, delivering shiny tractors to every corner of the county. Now the farms are gone and the only tractors selling are smallish vintage models, repainted so they'll catch the eye of some out-of-towner when they pass by on the way to the lake property or hunting cabin. I place my palm on the worn wooden deck and it transmits a sweet ache. This is getting ridiculous. In the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered to be a diagnosable mania. They'd be slipping Prozac in my porridge. The sun is warm but the wind is cold, and I'm glad when John returns and we can go home.

 

The snow will fall again before the frost is out, but we are gaining momentum for that time of year when everything reappears. The ugly stuff first, as it happens: neglected lawnmowers, weed-wrapped tires, waterlogged copies of the
Early Bird Shopper
. But most days there is a flavor to the air that suggests greenery will triumph.

Last thing before I turn off the lights and head for bed, I inspect the sprouting tray. Each cell cradles a cube of peat, and at the center of each cube is a seed, quietly pursuing the sun. Thomas Moore said tears are a luxury only to the happy. When I am forced to cast my eyes beyond my own navel, I realize that a dip in sweet melancholy is every bit as indulgent as a bubble bath. Be joyful, says Wendell Berry, though you have considered all the facts.

I
HAVE A DATE.
With a real woman.

I have scheduled a haircut.

 

I was born with hair trouble.
“Looks mostly like Daddy,”
wrote Mom in my baby book.
“Has his front cowlick.”
In a photo taken at three and a half months, I am sitting naked in the bathroom sink, my eyes are wide and my eyebrows are raised. I look like a startled little Buddha. The expression amplifies the cowlick, which flares in a backward arc over the right-hand side of my brow. In my second-grade school picture, I am sporting a buzz cut. The cowlick bristles like a crockery brush. In third grade, I grew out my bangs, and the cowlick popped through like crabgrass. I fought that thing six ways to Sunday. Plastered it flat, slept in a cap, hair-sprayed it, combed it silly. Nothing worked. I pestered my mother to the point that she took to strapping it down at bedtime with pink beauty tape—the kind Ladies of a Certain Age use to secure their rollers and pin curls. I'd sleep in the tape, peering hopefully into the mirror each morning as I peeled it free, then—
ptoing!
—it busted out like sprung watch works. I think of my father, quiet farmer that he was, slogging upstairs to bid his firstborn son good night with Bible verses and a kiss on the brow, only to find that brow swathed in pink hair tape. I wonder that he didn't just grab the phone and book me for
Scared Straight.

In seventh grade I began to care how I looked, which is a shame. My first attempt at hairstyling was a modified Monkees mop worn in a left-to-right swirl. The swirl overcame the cowlick by flopping it sideways, a happy effect that lasted only until I nodded or the wind changed. Then in the 1970s, Shaun Cassidy parted his hair in the middle and launched the golden age of feathering. The nation and I went for it whole hog. For Christmas I requested a blow-dryer, and in my eighth-grade school portrait, I am no longer fighting the cowlick. Instead, exercising a form of follicular judo, I have turned the cowlick's own momentum against it, combing and blowing it straight back. This in combination with a velour shirt gives me the appearance of a youthful televangelist emerging from an explosion at the hair-spray factory.

This was also the era of the white man's afro, but my parents wouldn't allow it. This is theoretically too bad, because a perm was the one intervention that would have put that cowlick in a full nelson, but in reality they spared me one more set of bad hair pictures. (Or worse—while leaning over to notate his lab book during chemistry class, my friend Marco Bucklinski stuck his faux 'fro in the Bunsen burner. I looked up at the sizzle and snap and found him playing his head like the bongos.)

Eventually I backed the blow-dryer off HIGH and let my hair hang a little more lank. To the left of the part, it feathered back à la Shaun Cassidy. To the right, the cowlick rose and fell with a swoop. I took this to be mysteriously moppish in a
Sweet Baby James
sort of way and got in the habit of fine-tuning it with a sweep of my right hand, an idiosyncrasy that quickly hardwired itself into a permanent tic that persisted through my late thirties. By my senior year in 1983, I was leading the football team in sacks, but was forever fussing with my hair. My teammates voted me Most Valuable Lineman. My classmates voted me Biggest Primper.

During the college years, my hairstyles evolved under three central influences: Pre-Mellencamp John Cougar, Bono Vox circa
The Unforgettable Fire,
and once—when I teased and spray-painted my hair pink in order to establish street cred with the ditchweed-dealing ruffians at the roller rink where I was employed as skate guard and roller-skating Snoopy—the Great Hair Metal Scare of 1986, specifically as personified by the bands Poison and Cinderella. Ultimately, Bono's influence
was most pervasive, leading me to scavenge Eau Claire County's lone mall for boots like the ones he wore in the
Pride (In the Name of Love)
video. The closest match I could make was a floppy-ankled pair from an all-women's shoe store. I take a ladies' size 10, as it turns out. I tucked my parachute pants in and wore the boots with an air of meaty goofball angst. It has only recently occurred to me that technically, wearing those boots counts as cross-dressing. Mistakes were made.

Your 1980s man had a multitude of hair options, and in May 1987, I achieved critical mass, graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire School of Nursing with mousse spikes on top, a mullet in back, and a moustache up front. The bad hair trifecta. I gave the commencement address wearing a crumpled white linen suit and a pastel blue tie as wide as a pencil, then drove off to the future in my rattletrap pickup truck. The hood lettering said International, but my hair said
hot red Fiero
.

 

Finally,
finally,
we are going to get started on the truck. It's a Saturday evening, already dark. Temperatures have dropped back to the low teens, and when I get out of the car in front of Mark's shop, I catch the scent of wood smoke. Mark has stoked a fire in the cast-iron stove. When I step through the steel security door, the warmth folds around my face and dissolves the stiffness from my cheeks. Across the shop, the flames pulse and waver behind the isinglass.

Technically, the shop is a
garage,
based on the fact that it is a free-standing structure equipped with a pair of retractable overhead doors and two bays designed to hold one vehicle each, but the vehicles are all outside beneath the oak trees. That battle was lost a long time ago, probably about the time someone wired the place with 220 and Mark hauled in the parts washer. The northwest corner of the building is dominated by an L-shaped wooden workbench and shelves built against the concrete block wall. The workbench is stained and splattered and generally dinged in a manner your high-end antique dealers will classify as “distressed.” The wood is different shades of used motor oil, with a fresh white scar here and there where someone set the sidewinder grinder
down while it was still spinning. In addition to a greasy phone book, the working surface of the bench is currently occupied by one empty coffee mug, an empty can of Coke, an empty can of Busch beer, one container of all-purpose glue and one container of all-purpose solvent (always leave yourself a way out), a tape measure, a scatter of wrenches, and, tucked beside the toolbox, a half carton of chocolate-covered Whoppers. Also in evidence on a clear spot: a pen, and a spiral notebook open to a thumb-smudged page of notes, numbers, and obvious figuring.

There is another tape measure on the floor.

A large rectangle of pegboard is screwed to the wall above the right-hand arm of the bench, and this is studded with hooks from which dangle assorted belts and pulleys, rolls of plastic line for the weed whacker (the weed whacker itself is hanging over there against the other wall), coil springs, bungee ties, a stapler, a miniature carpenter's level, grinding wheels, and several paintbrushes. Some of the items—plastic pushpins, a gasket kit, zip ties—hang in the same plastic packs in which they were displayed at the store. The rest of the space surrounding the bench—above and beneath, from floor to ceiling—is taken up by catchall wooden shelves. Beneath the bench you find heavier oddments: a splined shaft, a motorcycle battery, an electric motor, and various cast-iron thingamabobs studded with knobs and plumbed with gauges. One set of uppertier shelves is strictly devoted to cans of spray paint; elsewhere you see spools of solder wire, bits of copper tubing, a car radio trailing wires, a hitch receiver, a pair of brand-new taillights, various flashlights, an antifreeze tester, a broken watch, and that sacrament of the shop, a spray bottle of WD-40. Three emergency road flares are balanced on a streaky can of varnish, which is next to a used automotive coil, a hitch pin, and a pair of car speakers. A small gasoline engine sits on the shelf at an angle, as if it is edging toward jumping. There are also several parts organizers with their small drawers arranged in rows and columns and filled with nuts and bolts and washers and rivets and cotter keys and whatever else fits, and a couple of shelves hold books:
Student's Shop Reference Handbook, Automotive Engines Maintenance and Repair, Machinery's Handbook Seventeenth Edition
,
Motorcycle Basics
, a Chilton manual, and several parts and accessories catalogs. Every flat surface is in service.
On the sill beneath the glass block window I can see a box of Band-Aids, a sanding pad, a pack of baler belt fasteners, some hose clamps, and a set of fluorescing shotgun sights.

Most of the tools are confined to a space beneath the heavy iron metalworking bench or stowed in the tall red toolbox wheeled up against one wall, although you do see a monkey wrench or plastic mallet lying here and there. There is a drill press on its own stand, a counter-mounted grinder, and a chop saw. A modest collection of steel stock leans against the wall beside the furnace ash can, and there is a V-8 engine bolted to a wheeled stand over beside the hydraulic floor jack. A stepladder leans against the south wall, where a row of hooks holds extension cords, trouble lights, logging chains, a cant hook, a buck saw, a snow shovel, and a dusty motorcycle helmet. Other hooks spotted variously around the walls dangle a lawn sprinkler, two begrimed tennis rackets, a vintage Volkswagen hood ornament, and the windshield from a purple Toyota Land Cruiser. Up against the west wall beside the furnace a rack of steel shelving is crammed floor to ceiling: I can see a rusty pair of shocks, an air rifle, a Coleman lantern, an ancient in-window air conditioner, a pair of paint respirators, a galvanized Miller High Life cooler, a radio-controlled truck, ice fishing equipment, an ax, a rainsuit still in the package, and a drive shaft.

If your experience with shops is limited, I should make the point that Mark keeps a clean work area. Beyond the two empty aluminum cans, the one thing you don't see is trash. The floor is swept, and anything that isn't useful or potentially useful is stuffed in a blue plastic barrel over by the door. The thing that strikes me as I look around is, you could run the revolution from this place. I would add that over in the southwest corner next to the chain saw is a refrigerator stocked with beer, and just above the parts washer, a miniature disco ball. After the revolution, you could party.

If there was any doubt that Mark is the right man to help me with the truck (he has already restored or upgraded several vehicles, including the purple Toyota Land Cruiser), they would be erased by the machine currently taking up space in the bay opposite my truck: a partially constructed sawmill, which he is building from the ground up using parts
from a turkey slaughtering conveyor, an automatic car wash, and a motorcycle engine. The rest of the machine he is fabricating with his own hands. Mark is a machinist by training and trade, and you can see it in his work. The sawmill does not have the appearance of a homemade contraption. Because the raw steel stock of the frame and carriage is still unpainted, the underlying craftsmanship is open to inspection. The welds are neat and the angles are precise. Inside a tangle of hydraulic lines are gears and pulleys and rollers—many of which Mark machined himself—the placement of each requiring consideration of the placement of the others. The sawmill looks at once intricate and bomb-proof.

 

Mark is about my height. Wears his hair in a self-administered no-nonsense buzz cut. Tends to run a goatee with attendant stubble. A scar just off the crown of his scalp indicates that at some point he took a pretty good shot to the head. He probably goes ten to twenty pounds less than me depending on how hard I've been hitting the doughnuts. He's lean and a little bowlegged. In the summer he wears knee-length shorts and leather work boots, and this accentuates his bow legs. He carries himself with the wariness common to men who express themselves on the factory floor more than the dance floor. In the presence of strangers, he will be closemouthed and tentative. You might interpret this as deference, but as any out-of-towner on the losing end of a tavern brawl can tell you, that'd be a mistake.

There is one anomaly in his appearance. Mark has classy eyeglasses. Nothing fancy, just wire frames, but tastefully cut. Say what you will about the common-denominator crudity of American mass culture, these days you see tasteful eyewear everywhere, from the Big Apple to Big A Automotive. It took a while. It has something to do with the fact that you can get a Michael Graves two-slice toaster at Target and a latte at the Gas-N-Go, but I also credit the Germans. I backpacked around Europe in the summer of 1989, and it seemed to me that of the ten or so countries I passed through, the Germans above all had a noticeable penchant for arty spectacles. I refer to it—especially in the case of superstar architects, trust-fund bohemians, and movie stars trying to
cultivate an intellectual air—as
considered
eyewear. Arch, slim lines. A certain studied geekiness perfect for perusing the coffee table version of
Design and Form
. And lest I come off as catty, I plead that I came of age in the plastic-rimmed bug-eyed 1980s and this particular esthetic refinement couldn't happen soon enough. It's just that it has taken me awhile to adjust. You expect to see these glasses on, as a recent
Wikipedia
entry has it, what Peter Drucker called “knowledge workers,” but not so much on a guy who builds his own sawmill and watches NASCAR races while drinking cans of Busch beer from the comfort of a recliner upholstered in Mossy Oak Break-Up camouflage.

The glasses may be refined, but Mark's gaze is unalloyed. It is clear-eyed and direct. When he looks at you, he is sizing you up. He eyeballs you the same way he eyeballs a length of channel iron, gauging where he should make the cut. Sometimes when he just stands there dangling a three-quarter-inch Craftsman, I can imagine him bringing it down on my skull. This I keep to myself.

 

I simply cannot resurrect this truck without Mark. I don't see things right. Never have. Even when I was working on my dad's farm or as a ranch hand in Wyoming, most of the mechanical skills I developed were dependent on simplicity and repetition. I learned to reconstruct the header on my hay swather because it was forever beating itself to bits, but even then I was dealing mostly with the most fundamental sorts of problems—spun bearings, cracked steel, busted sickle teeth. All repairable with a wrench, a hammer, or a slather of bubblegum welding. Faced with an occluded grease zerk, I could replace it, even tune up the threads with a tap wrench. But if the engine started knocking, or wouldn't start for any reason other than a dead battery, my only answer was to go begging for help.