We move around to look at the grille. You could pull a dead cat through the holes rusted beneath each headlight. “Probably have to rebuild that…maybe with diamond plate,” says Mark. I grab the bumper, which is bent but sturdy. “We should rig some sort of big old deer catcher,” I say. “A brush buster!” says Mark. He’s grinning. I feel good, having come up with something that pleases him.
So we stand there awhile then, framing up the grille, seeing the steel grid in our mind’s eye, like painters sighting over one thumb. I joke that I want to attach a pair of those little deer warning whistles. We are caught up in the idea of the truck up and running. We are getting way ahead of ourselves.
I am going on a date because I went to the library. Should the American Library Association wish to release that statement in poster form, they have my permission.
The Fall Creek Public Library of Fall Creek, Wisconsin, is fighting to survive the Age of Not So Much Reading. A week ago the library held a daylong fund-raiser featuring three authors, a man who plays ethnic flutes, a local woman dressed as Mary Todd Lincoln, a folksinger, and lemon bars. I had been invited to participate.
I didn’t want to go. The library director had put in her request very early on, but I was coming off a five-month stretch in which I had been on the road more than off. In the four days prior to the event, I did five radio interviews, gave a magazine interview, and covered three ambulance shifts. Not exactly factory work, but I was short on sleep and sick of my own yapping. I had the first thickheaded ticklings of a cold. In short, I was nursing a case of the antisocial whinies. I called the library director and said I didn’t think I would be there. Then, at the last minute, thanks to a pathological combination of guilt and sense of duty recognizable to Midwestern Scandinavian Protestants everywhere, I loaded my car with books and drove on down. Among other things, I have a vested interest in the survival of libraries.
The folksinger was just finishing up and I was due to go on when I realized I had forgotten a box of books in my car. I dashed back out into the freezing wind and up the sidewalk. A woman and a toddler rounded the corner by Big Jim’s Sports Bar. As we passed, I gave them the cold-weather nod. The woman returned it. They seemed to be in a hurry. Later, when the reading was over and I was signing books, the woman and child passed through the line. While I signed the woman’s book, the toddler—a little girl—peered at me over the table edge. I noticed that she had her mother’s pale blue eyes. The woman paid for her books with a check, and on the check it said her name was Anneliese. This caught my eye, because the only other Anneliese I know is my cousin, who coincidentally grew up in Fall Creek. I said something to that effect, the woman smiled, and I turned to the next person in line.
On the way out of town, I stopped to visit my aunt Pam and uncle Larry. Aunt Pam made coffee and we sat at the kitchen table. I mentioned the Anneliese coincidence. Aunt Pam said she knew the family. She thought this Anneliese had gone to school with my cousin Sukey the marine pilot.
A few days later I received an e-mail from Anneliese. She said she was a happy Spanish teacher and parent of a three-year-old daughter. She said she was a small-town farmgirl reassimilating to the Midwest after time spent traveling and living in Europe, Mexico, and Central America, but then she also said she wasn’t assuming that my “author’s voice” and reading persona gibed with the day-to-day me. I took this to mean she would not subscribe to shuck and jive. She wondered if I might like to meet for a cup of coffee.
I e-mailed back:
What you saw and heard at the reading is the real deal, although as you might suspect, not the whole deal. The everyday unedited version is not all poetry.
But if you’re willing, coffee would be nice.
Speaking of the unedited version, I didn’t e-mail right back. First I conducted a preemptive Googling. I found a picture of her doing yoga and a request for a babysitter fluent in Spanish. That was pretty much it. My name is more common. If she had Googled me, she would have discovered that I was: Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University and a leading authority on the relationship of morality to law; a self-appointed expert on cocker spaniels (“Dealing with fleas? Ask me!”); Nellie B. Smith Chair of Oncology for the University of Missouri at Columbia; scenic artist for Fright Night Part 2; author of The Groom’s Survival Manual; or, a board-certified sexologist from California whose “hot” products include the Love Swing.
I received her e-mail just as I was leaving for a speaking engagement in Milwaukee, so I ran it out the printer and put it on the passenger seat of my Chevy. It takes five hours to drive to Milwaukee. Every couple of exits, I’d steer with my knees and give the e-mail another read. Studied the nuance of every word. I have always politely declined reading-related invitations, mostly out of being chicken. The only reason I was considering responding to this Anneliese was because I suspected my aunt Pam had drawn on her connections to put the word out. About the time I was reaching Milwaukee, it struck me that my longtime friend and mentor Bob might be a source of due diligence. He had taught English in Fall Creek for years. I called him from the parking garage, asked him if he ever taught a girl by the last name of Scherer. Two of them, he said. Were they crazy, I asked, meaning in the certifiable sense. Not at all, he said. Wonderful girls. Well-read, world travelers, just wonderful.
Anneliese has asked me out, I said.
Oh, you must, he said.
Mark breaks the reverie. He is standing beside the right rear fender, which is attached to the box with a semicircle of retaining bolts. “I want to see what it’s like under there,” he says, patting the fender. “We’re gonna hafta puller.” Gonna hafta puller is one of my favorite shop phrases. It applies in any circumstance where any mechanical object—the fuel pump, a bad spark plug, or the entire dang engine—requires removal. You say it with a tone of can-do resignation, and it helps if you take a big breath first and then speak like you’re hiking your pants or lifting something heavy. I’m telling you, it really puts hair on your chest. I’ll stand there sometimes with the hood up, looking into the bowels of the machine, and I’ll just suck it up and say, “Yee-up, looks like I’m gonna hafta puller.” And then I’ll reach in and draw that empty inkjet cartridge right on outta there.
The bolts that keep the fenders tight to the sides of the box froze up with rust years ago. Rather than fight them with a wrench, Mark rolls out his portable plasma cutter, a compact unit roughly the size of a beer crate. The plasma cutter sends an electric arc through a blast of superheated air, creating a jet of ionized gas that blasts from the tip of the handheld torch at just over 9,320 miles per hour. It cuts steel like paper. The first thing Mark did when he got it was trim a sheet of eighth-inch steel into a silhouette of a miniature bear and present it to my sister. “Really,” he says, “it looked more like a feral pig.”
As Mark disappears under the rear end of the truck, I grab a sidewinder grinder, insert a circular wire brush, snug the chuck, and start buffing rust from the passenger side front fender. The rust evaporates at the leading edge of the whirling bristles, shooting off the fender in puffs of brown dust. When I pull the grinder away, the exposed steel shines silver as the day it was rolled. I run my fingertips over the shine. The steel is warm from the friction of the brushes. My finger pads turn orange with powdered rust. I keep caressing the clean spot, marveling at how close the fresh iron lies beneath the abrasive rust. Mark is out of sight, but I can hear the hiss and blow of the plasma cutter and smell the scorch of vaporized steel. Occasionally I hear clunks. Mark is under there cutting and struggling and I’m up here rubbing that shiny spot like Steinbeck’s dim Lenny stroking a dead puppy.
After searing away the last of the bolt heads, Mark reemerges from beneath the chassis. I put the grinder down, and standing shoulder to shoulder we grab the fender and tug it gently, rocking it until it breaks free. The exposed studs are still hot enough to smoke your skin. We are looking at iron that hasn’t seen the light of day since those bolts were tightened o
ver fifty years ago. The rust has had time to work, and it’s worse than we thought. With the fender removed, the rear wheel looks naked on the exposed length of skinny axle. Kathleen sticks her head in the door. She pulls night shifts as a box maker at a factory that, among other things, manufactures baby caskets. She tells Mark she is off to work. Sidrock needs watching, so Mark leaves for the house. I hang out in the shop and putter. Later, when I leave, I can see Mark through the yellow square of the living room window. He is on the couch with his back to me, head inclined over the baby in his arms.
Along about 1990, I forsook all the tweaking and just let my hair grow. Long and straight. No fuss. For most of a decade it fell to my waist. I trimmed it back once or twice, wearing it short briefly, then grew it back. When I first started wrapping my pony tail in an elastic band, it was broomstick thick. Eventually I began to notice that the pony tail was thinner, until it was more the diameter of a pencil. The hair shafts were becoming brittle. Hair that once laid flat on the top of my head was developing twists and curls. I developed the creepy and hypnotic habit of staring into space while running strands of hair between my fingertips, plucking the ones that felt kinky. I have read that compulsive hair-pulling in a trancelike state is called trichotillomania and movie stars do it, too.
It is a matter of no little irony that once I finally quit trying to tame or inflame my hair and simply grow it, I began to lose it. My hair is still long, but I am bald or balding. The classification is utterly dependent on lighting. My hair loss is neither absolute nor complete. It is under way. I do not so much comb my hair as harvest it. The progression has been unrelenting, albeit mercifully gradual. By the time the loss became noticeable, I was pretty much comfortable in my skin. Pity the man who molts straight out of high school. Or worse, in high school. I was a few years behind a guy whose hair began thinning his junior year and was pretty much gone at graduation. We called him the Bald Eagle. The cruelties of youth are unstinting. He benefits from a long-term upside in that when I see him on the street a quarter century later, it strikes me that he has retained his youthful good looks. I have a brother five years my junior, and he went bald in his early twenties. At thirty-eight, I’m still a few follicles from Category Cue Ball. Oblique lighting still allows me the illusion of coverage. But when the light is direct, I can see the future, and it is shiny. I look in the mirror and think, Bald Man Walking. With apologies to Bob Dylan, I ain’t bald yet, but I’m a-gettin’ there.
For a man on the brink of baldness, delusion is hope: The bathroom light is overbright…the mirror is substandard…the breezes of June have always blown this cool. The man, after all, is grieving, and the putative first stage of grief is denial. Then the man spends the day announcing waterfights at Jamboree Days without a cap and for the first time in his life, sunburns his scalp, and denial shrivels like thin bacon on a cheap skillet. I can tell you that it took me a while to place the sensation. The crown of my head took on a tingly tautness, the sort of thing you might welcome in other bits of your epidermis but which scalp-wise feels like a combination of hives and paranormal possession. Holes in the ozone notwithstanding, you cannot equivocate a sunburned scalp. You are losing your hair.
Sometimes, just because I can, I stand before the mirror and flip my remaining long hair up and over my scalp in a comb-over—the baldness cure that dare not speak its name. I consider cultivating the Ben Franklin look, but all the frizzy top cover just makes me look like a meth-addled biker. Last month, business took me to a radio station in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I was sitting in the lobby wearing a camouflage hunting cap. The morning drive team was doing their show in a glassed-in studio visible from my chair. Spotting the hair hanging down my back, the female member of the duo described me on air and cackled, “A mullet! Mullets are so 1985!” We could hear her over the waiting room speakers. For the benefit of the other people in the lobby, I remarked that poking fun at mullets was “so 1995.” Later, I related the incident to a friend. I had my hat off. She laughed. “You don’t have a mullet,” she said. “You have a skullet!”
Every year at this time, sometime after the snow clears and before the first green shoots appear, our little fire department convenes to burn the dead grass along the railroad tracks. The chief waits for a windless weeknight and pages everybody in. We put on all our gear and pull out all the trucks, then run around with propane torches, lighting the long dry weeds. It’s a firebug’s delight. Generally we start up by TJ’s Food-N-Fun and let the flames work south. TJ will step out from cooking Tubby Burgers and watch awhile, and conglomerations of kids pop up at the street corners, many of them straddling bikes. Once the flames get clear of Main Street, some of us head south to Highway Q and start another bank of fire coming back north. We arm ourselves with rakes and water packs to keep the fire corralled and moving in the right direction. It’s kind of a trail drive with flames in place of cattle.
Ostensibly, we burn the railroad tracks to eliminate the possibility of a freight train throwing a spark and starting a fire inside the village boundaries. It’s also a low-key rehearsal for a real wildfire. But above all, it’s a great palaver. Darkness settles early, and then you get that hanging-out-around-the-campfire feel. Faces flickering with reflections of flame, voices in the smoke. We work a little and talk a lot. This year we cover motorcycles, mortgages, health insurance, and trailer park rent. Someone tells a story about a gigantic homemade bong. “You had to stand on the landing to smoke it,” says the voice, disembodied in the dark beyond the fire line. “Three people sucked the air out and the fourth person got a hit.” Someone else wonders if it would be okay to needle one of the firefighters currently out of earshot about the pretty much verified rumor that his wife had kicked him out for good. “I think you wait on that until he brings it up himself,” says another firefighter. Social graces, blue-collar style.
The flames flare and recede depending on what sort of fuel they’re chewing. Clusters of bone-dry canary grass whirl up in a minitornado of sparks and tendrils of ash. The sparks flurry and slide across the black sky, extinguishing one at a time. We watch for flare-ups outside the burn zone, and stomp or spritz them as needed. The air is cool, and when I move in close to the flames, the heat feels good on my face. Suddenly one of the other firefighters rushes up and begins patting me. Normally, you don’t get a lot of that.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Man, yer hair’s on fire!” he hollers.
When it isn’t falling out, it’s bursting into flames.
The very next day, I call Dan at Wig-Wam Hair Fashions. Tell him it’s time. He was booked solid for the week. “I can get you in next Friday,” he said.
That’ll be fine, I said.
The first of my seeds have sprouted. By personal tradition, at first sight of cracked earth, I pull Dylan Thomas off the shelf and reread “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” I have been told the poem is not about a seedling but rather about Dylan’s tallywhacker. I ignore this and read it as a gardening poem. The first few stanzas, anyway. By the time I read the conclusion, I have to admit the tallywhacker analysis has some truck. Freud was a bit of a nutball, but there’s no denying that from Aristophanes to Mojo Nixon, the tallywhacker has a rich history as prevalent muse.
I have rigged up an adjustable rack of cheap fluorescent lights in the south-facing window of my dining room where the sprouting trays get as much natural light as possible. The fluorescents are hooked up to a set of light timers that feed the plants light long after the sun has gone down. I used to keep the plants and lights in a closet off the living room. I thought it was a good idea because the furnace chimney runs through there and keeps it warm, but in the end the heat dried things out too quickly. I had a writer friend visit once, he was a committed smoker of herb, and when he saw the electrical cord snaking into my closet and the light glowing from beneath the door, he grinned and pointed and said with great expectation, “Yeah?” I opened the door to reveal trays of parsley and a couple
of beleaguered leeks. His face dropped like the kid who got socks for Christmas.
One of the germination trays has a heating mat beneath it. This is the first year I’ve tried it. There are sprouts around the edges, but none in the center, which seems to dry out quickly. The water condenses on the little plastic dome, and runs back down the sides, creating a centrally located patch of drought. I have some leeks going, also three sad little basil sprouts, a clutch of lettuce mix, and some spindly parsley. I had a cilantro sprig, but it gave up the ghost last Wednesday. No apparent reason, perhaps it was my singing. Or overwatering. I tend to check the seed trays two or three times a day to see if they’ve made any progress since breakfast. I usually give them a spritz. Surely none of this helps. Putting me in charge of seeds is like dropping your kids off with a weird uncle who feeds them Funyuns for breakfast, then sends them out back for an unsupervised game of Jarts. When you combine my time on the road with my general gardening insouciance, you must expect a hefty fail rate. Still, no matter how it goes, I never tire of watching these plants unfold—slower than the naked eye can see, and yet, in day-to-day terms, with amazing speed. And I love to snap off a scrap of something green to eat while the ground is still hard. The chlorophyll dose bears you forward to warmer days.
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