I am a ridiculous pack rat, and it took me two hours of digging through boxes stored in the crawl space above the garage, but I found the Alpine Management letter. It was a kick to reread it. It is one thing to fall for a practical joke hook, line, and sinker. It is another thing to get hooked, landed, stuffed, and hung on the wall. After Eric’s wife hung up the phone, all my anger evaporated, replaced by a sweeping feeling of relief and admiration. I was alone in the house, hand still on the phone, but I was grinning. A successful practical joke relies on art and craft, and this was a masterpiece. The bona fide parking ticket (originally obtained by Eric when he got a parking ticket and the officer filled it out so lightly that the carbon didn’t transfer) with its perfectly planted details, the tone of the letter, the carefully chosen nonexistent address, it all worked, but the genius touches were all those little shots to my ego (on the ticket under “VEHICLE COLOR,” Eric had written “RUST”). I thought of myself huffing and puffing in the parking lot, speechifying at the windshield, making all those passes up and down Grant Street and running my trembling finger over the city map. The setup was brilliant, but in the end, the joke worked for one simple reason: it was predicated on the fact that my truck is ugly…and I love it so.
Now February is gone and the truck still sits there. A monument to my dithering. There is a sort of informal open door at my parents’ farmhouse every Sunday evening, and sometimes several of us kids end up there at once. Last weekend my sister Kathleen was there with her husband, Mark. I mentioned my desire to get the truck running and he said he would help. He and Kathleen have just had their first child, so Mark’s going to be around the house more, I guess. Mark is a hot-rodding machinist and NASCAR fanatic. He proposed to my sister by faking a breakdown in a mud bog and requesting that she fetch a wrench. When she opened the toolbox there was nothing in there but a diamond ring.
CHAPTER 4
MARCH
FIVE DAYS INTO MARCH, and it is ten below zero. On my way out back to dump the compost I discover a plain cardboard box wedged between the doors. The box is about the size of a boutonniere carton. I recognize the logo on the shipping label. My garden seeds. I wonder how long they’ve been freezing here. Must have been a substitute UPS person. The regular UPS guy never leaves anything out back. A trace of snow has sifted in around the box and the crystals glitter in the sun. I imagine all the little seeds exploding into irrepressible green.
The dog chained to the house across the alley has spotted me and gone to barking. The dog is owned by a skinny man who keeps his mullet tamped down with a NASCAR cap. Thin as he is, the man moves with a stiff muscularity that implies hard luck and fistfights. The dog appears to have been raised on a diet of chain-link fence and burglar heels. Back when the weather was warmer, the man set out to build a kennel from steel hog panels, but he was halfway through pounding stakes when one of the women sharing the house with him stuck her head out the door and said something. He threw his hammer down and stomped inside and that was it. The panels still lie flat there beneath the snow. One day last fall some of the man’s pals drove a white van up the alley and parked it beside the clothesline. The man met them with beers, and they popped the hood. By late afternoon, the yard was a scatter of parts and tools and every door on the van was open. The men were gone. When I walked my trash bags over to the village dumpsters across the street, I grinned at Matt, the village employee with whom I serve on the fire department, and nodded toward the van.
“Whaddya figure?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Two weeks, and it’s a yard barn.”
“Never leave the lot under its own power,” I added.
Months now, and the van is still there. The doors are shut, but through the windows I spy Hefty bags and duct-taped boxes.
I could do without that dog, but I do not object to the hog panels or the van. I would be a jerk to do so, what with my International still lodged there out front—out front, mind you, not even hidden alley-side—of the garage like a prehistoric carbuncle. What that white van does is take the pressure off. When my clothes dryer died last winter, I wrassled it up the basement stairs and knee-tossed it out the back door. It landed off-kilter in the snow and stuck, like a dotless dice cube frozen mid-tumble, in a position reminiscent of the fifteen-feet-tall steel cube erected by the sculptor Tony Rosenthal on a traffic triangle in New York’s East Village. I saw Rosenthal’s sculpture once from the back of a cab. It is balanced on one point and can be spun on its axis. He put it up in the late 1960s and named it The Alamo. This is the sort of willful obscurantism that hinders the appreciation of modern art in the heartland. Apparently three-dimensional squares en pointe were trendy in the late 1960s, because a year later a cube designed by Isamu Noguchi was installed in a nearly identical position outside a high-rise a few blocks uptown on Broadway. Noguchi painted his cube red and named it Red Cube. I like Noguchi a little better for that. Riffing off Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, I took to calling my dryer Tilted Lint.
The dryer (or installation, if I may) remained in my backyard well into summer. When the snow melted, it settled to the ground. Gotta get rid of that, I’d think, every time I had to circumvent it on my way to water the garden or cover an ambulance call (the Serra reference was becoming more apt—Tilted Arc was removed after people got sick of detouring around it). I began entertaining fantasies in which I would preserve valuable landfill space by repurposing the dryer. It would make a fine industrial-strength compost turner. I’d trade out the belts for a chain drive and hook it up to my old Schwinn Varsity. I would schedule organic spinning classes for my friends in the renewable energy crowd. On a less vegetarian note, I also believed that given twenty minutes with a cutting torch, a welder, and a bundle of rebar, the dryer could be converted to a monster hibachi with rotating spit. I’d hire out for weddings and pig roasts. Alternatively, it might do for a deer blind. I’d have to strip the guts and motor and drill out peep holes, but then I’d be good to go. Just hide inside, and when a big buck wanders by, pop the lid and rata-tat-tat. In this county the idea of camouflaging yourself inside a dryer is not at all absurd, as the local forest creatures have grown blasé about the presence of home appliances in the wild. Like overgrown cubist toadstools, feral refrigerators and washing machines are generally found clustered at the bottom of eroded gullies, or at the terminus of dead-end roads and abandoned driveways. Trouble is, discarded white goods make popular targets, and are often so ardently perforated as to appear to have been caught in the crossfire at Panzer fantasy camp. Come November, when the woods are filled with trigger-happy amateurs sporting blaze-orange bomber caps, your perspicacious Leatherstocking does not take shelter in a Maytag.
Ultimately, I sent the dryer away with the village junk man (the title is unofficial, but the work is steady). You don’t schedule the junk man as such. He keeps his trailer parked at the implement store out on Highway M, so you call out there and they pass the message the next time he drops by. If you’re not home the first couple of times he stops, he doesn’t sweat it, because he knows your dryer isn’t going anywhere. He tows the trailer behind a teensy pickup truck, which magnifies the fact that the trailer is roughly the size of a volleyball court. Fully loaded, it has the appearance of a postapocalyptic Costco on wheels. Depending on the nature of your junk and the going price of scrap iron, he’ll dispose of larger appliances in exchange for a modest donation. He also accepts odd lots of steel, aluminum, and old wire. I don’t know much about the junk man except that he lives in the trailer court and his truck used to have Missouri plates. He has an Appalachian drawl and a smoker’s cough, and he gets short of breath quick. I helped him fight the dryer aboard the trailer, jockeying it back and forth until it fit between two beat-up washing machines and a harvest gold oven. He was wheezing pretty good when I handed him a few bucks, and before he eased them into his pocket, he took time to crease and fold each bill neatly, almost as if he was buying time to catch his wind. But when he pulled out of the driveway, he leaned out the wi
ndow to grin and wave. Before he heads for the scrap yard he’ll pop the shields off the washers and dryers and stoves and yank all the wiring in order to strip out the copper, which sells for a higher rate than the steel. He does this day after day after day. I see him running all the time. I can’t imagine the grind of his week, or what he’d rather be doing, but every time that truck passes by he’s got the hammer down, and he’ll always return your wave. Lacking an ACT LOCALLY bumper sticker or hemp shorts, he nonetheless manages to do the right thing for Mother Earth.
First chance I get, I take the seeds to my basement and set them to sprout. From November on, I look forward to the day I can flout the ice and snow by puttering under the lights of my gardening bench. It is all I can do not to jump the gun. I get so hungry for green, sometimes I plant things way too early. This year, I came home from watching the Super Bowl at a friend’s house and scattered some pots with last year’s leftover oregano and sweet marjoram. I have nursed trays of stunted lettuce on a windowsill in January just so I could pick a leaf and hold it on my tongue while observing the formation of snowdrifts.
But today I want to cheat the seasons in earnest, so I scratch a match across the concrete floor and ignite two of three burners on the portable LP heater (the third burner has a habit of howling like a demonic calliope) and position it at the back of my steel folding chair. Then I plug in a plastic boom box at the workbench. The boom box won’t play CDs anymore because I karate-chopped the lid during an embarrassing spasm of rage triggered when it began skipping tracks, driving home the fact that I got exactly what I deserved for buying a $24.95 piece of outsourced superstore junk despite knowing full well as I stood there in the cavernous aisles of the High Church of Cheap Consumption that any money saved would one day be expended threefold on blood pressure medication and knuckle stitches. I own two of these chintzy electronic farces. Both have fractured stubs where the CD lid used to attach. As slow learners go, I am a real drooler.
Despite my Samsonite gorilla act, the radio receiver still functions. For basement puttering, I split my time pretty evenly between public radio and Moose Country 106.7. I like that Moose Country. They play the one-namers: Waylon and Willie. Buck and Merle. George and Tammy. Loretta. It is silly to say bad things about popular music, but for the record, Johnny Paycheck is to Kenny Chesney as corn whiskey is to wine coolers. This new stuff suffers from overgrooming. Even the redneckiest tunes ring tinny. One sometimes fears the lyrics of the latest busted-heart song were transposed from a marriage encounter handbook. It isn’t that today’s superstars aren’t talented and hardworking. It’s just that their way of doing things has passed me by. I look at the pretty cowboy on the Jumbotron and think, It is one thing to polish your craft, it is quite another to wax your abs. Recipe for the real deal: Combine two parts busted heart with one part busted knuckles, sprinkle with cheap trucker speed and crushed Valium to taste, and marinate in hard luck and leaky motor oil. Stir in Genesis and Revelation, add a dash of hope, and finish off while being forcibly evicted from a hotel bar. Hello, Tanya Tucker.
The local public radio station is on the opposite end of the dial. Literally, and however else you wish to parse it. The Venn diagram of listenership may come up a little short on overlap, but I’m happy to go on record as supporting both formats (it being only fair to point out that both have supported me). Near as I can tell, the commonest complaint about public radio is predicated on the inconvenience of encountering opinions in conflict with your own. That, and unctuous tone. Indeed, the NPR snootiness sometimes unhinges my own inner redneck, but in general I defend their usually steadfast refusal to dumb down. One does not ask Alistair Cooke to do the Chicken Dance. Any reservations I had about the format remain neutralized to this day by the fact that during the OJ Simpson trial, NPR was the only place to which I could tune at the top of the hour and expect a newscaster to lead off with news.
I will listen to NPR today because I have brewed a mug of green tea, and nothing says public radio like green tea. I dial the needle leftward until I pick up the unmistakably civilized tones of WHWC 88.3. I roll the tuner back and forth, easing the stereophonic sound to full swell. It shortly becomes clear that the host and guest are discussing the Rwandan genocides of 1994.
Pulling nested trays from a shelf beneath the bench, I unpeel them one by one and begin to parcel out the potting soil. After shaking the trays to settle the soil, I press the eraser end of a pencil into the center of each cell, creating a depression to receive the seed. Then I place the seed company shipping box on my lap and open it. The packets are in a uniform row. Fingertipping through them Rolodex-style, I pull out the ones I think will benefit from an early start. Leeks. Peppers. Tomatoes. Peel back the gummed flap, tip the seeds into my palm. Pinch them one by one and drop them in the pencil dimples. Top them off with another sprinkle of potting soil and a pat, then move on to the next seed packet. I take my time. There is no clock in the basement, but the top of the hour is marked by a chirp tone that triggers local station identifications, followed by the familiar, “From NPR news in Washington…”
The familiar voice will always have a familiar name. “From NPR news in Washington, I’m Karl Kasell…Anne Garrels…Linda Grad-stein…Brian Naylor…David Welna…Craig Windham.” The tone is always unhurried, and eminently civil. Some of the names are poetry in themselves: “Korva Coleman…Don Gonyea…Mara Liasson…Sylvia Poggioli…” Those last two, if I had first seen them on paper, I would have mangled the pronunciation. Having heard them again and again in the newscasts, I can recite them flawlessly. Same with Frank Stasio and John Ydstie. I get a special kick from Corey Flintoff and the specific care with which he pronounces his own last name, floating down into those twinned final f’s as gentle as parachute silk settling to the ground, deflating with just enough force to generate the velvet fricative. Flint ohhfff. NPR should consider marketing a CD featuring Corey Flintoff repeating the phrase alfalfa foofaraw. Over and over, on a loop. The effect would be similar to those sound conditioner contraptions that lull you to sleep with the sound of electronically generated surf. When Lakshmi Singh does the news, I find myself saying her name just to hear it. Lakshmi Singh. She’ll be leading off the newscast and she’ll say, “For NPR News in Washington, I’m…” and I’ll jump right in rhythm and say, “Lakshmi Singh!” The part where the consonants kshm mesh and take us from the vowels a and up to i is luscious. She will sign off, and five minutes later I am still reciting the mantra: Lakshmi Singh…Lakshmi Singh…Lakshmi Singh…
Ah, but if NPR must be reduced to one voice, let it be Shay Stevens. All others are chattering children by comparison. Shay’s voice is the personification of strength and reassurance. Warmth, ease, and a dusting of rasp. You imagine the enfolding motherly bosom, sensual but steady as she goes. I reject your big booming boys and nominate Shay Stevens for the Voice of God.
This basement of mine will never be one of those wood-paneled air-hockey-and-Ping-Pong-table romper room basements. The ceiling is low and dungeony. The joists are flossed with cobwebs. Much of the year the floor is damp, although it dries up nicely in winter and is dry today. The house was built in the 1930s. Old-timers tell me contractors upped the ratio of sand to cement in those days to save money. I don’t know about that. Could be, because the concrete in the walls is cappuccino brown. Despite this, the house is solid and square. Down here beneath the frost line, I feel cocooned and safe. Enjoying, as poet Bruce Taylor wrote in his Pity the World gardening poems, “…some privileged ignorance of/the hungrier facts of life.” I am grateful for my safe little spot, but freshly reminded of the Rwandan horrors, I am humbled by the fact that my gratitude alleviates no one’s misery.
Last year, I bought Nancy Bubel’s The New Seed-Starters Handbook. Trying to better myself, as usual. I read the preface earnestly. I felt a swelling sense of purpose. But then I began to skim, and then skip ahead, and naturally, I became overwhelmed. The old cookbook overload kicking in. It was frustrating, but it also made me appreciate th
e commitment of years and time required to become a true gardener. In the introduction, Nancy Bubel says she began gardening in 1957, when she killed a batch of radishes in a window box. It was nice of her to include that. I am learning not to overstudy, but rather to be satisfied above all by the process. Learn what I learn, on the fly. I try to choose wisely, plant things on the basis of the growing cycle and need for a head start, but pretty quickly I am throwing in favorites just because I miss them. Here in March I hunger for the stem crack of cilantro plucked in the morning sun and the thrill of discovering a deep green zucchini squash lying boa-belly fat in the grass, and so I unseal their respective envelopes and tap out a palmful of each. I do this fully recognizing that cilantro planted directly in the ground will catch and pass the wan, leggy stuff I’ll sprout in these trays, and that starting your zucchini early is like starting your dandelions early. The hunger here is not so much for the food as it is for the sight of the sprout. And so I spend a few quiet hours in the subterranean sanctity of my ratty basement, tamping hard seeds into cushiony cubes of humus, putting in motion the predictable miracle of germination. A miracle available even to a klutz like me.
Truck Page 6
