Truck
Page 10
Although by and large we have not had much commerce, I like Dan the barber for a lot of reasons, including the fact that he parks up the street instead of right out front, which leaves the prime parking spot open, making things easier on the ladies coming in for church perms. I guess this is just good business, but still. I am also partial to him because when he came to town twenty-five years ago after leaving the Air Force and bought a tiny hairdressing shop called the Wig-Wam, he decided to retain the name, and believe me, I get some mileage out of that one while skipping through certain privileged circles.
But above all, I like Dan because every summer in the Jamboree Days beer tent we commiserate about our International problem. Dan has a Scout he has been trying to get refurbed and back on the road for several years now. At the moment it is in pieces in another man’s shop. When I walk in the shop today, he greets me with alarm. “Did you sell your truck?!?” Imagine your best pal from the bowling team spotting your ball down at the pawnshop. I tell him no, tell him what’s up, tell him as a matter of fact I’m going over to work on it later tonight. He is visibly relieved, no doubt in part because now we can suffer the same frustrations.
Dan asks me a couple of times if I’m sure about cutting all the hair off, but I’m unmoved by the whole thing. It’s time, cut away what doth remain. So while he clips we talk, and watch the cars and people come and go. Dan’s studio is elevated about four feet off street level, so he has this great vantage point, not real bird’s eye, but high enough so people don’t notice him observing. Sometimes I think of all the colorings and sets and rinses he’s done, and how I bet sometimes when someone gets married or divorced or has a baby, Dan has seen it coming months or even years ahead of the rest of us. Sometimes I think if Dan blabbed, half the men in this town would need new nicknames.
“What do you think?” Dan has swiveled me to the mirror. He took it right down to an eighth-inch, like I asked him. I have forgotten that I have such a large round skull. Definitely got some Charlie Brown melon going there. But I rub my palm over it and it feels good. Now if I can just break myself of flicking back hair that isn’t there.
When I emerge from the Wig-Wam, the air is still warm and I have time and daylight enough for a bike ride. I head east of town, over the county line into a stretch of roller-coaster topography. It feels good to get out of the saddle on the climbs, rock the bike, do the push and pull, pretend I am ascending Alp d’Huez, and not some hillock in Barron County, Wisconsin. Halfway up the first big rise I pass a swampy hollow. A peeper frog choir is in full swing. Most of the frogs are singing baritone, creating a cumulative low-end chuckle similar to diesels idling behind a truck stop. Somewhere in there a lone castrato works a high note that cuts through like a bell, rising insistently above the mix and not fading until I crest the hill and drop down the other side, where the land opens up before me. Everything is stark and brown. A few intransigent strips of grainy snow cling to the north-facing slopes.
On the return trip, I have the wind with me, and I launch from the hill with a burst of pedaling, then assume a tuck and really let it roll. I am nudging 45 miles per hour and whizzing past the froggy choir when a flock of wild turkeys explodes from the hazelnut bushes, crossing left to right. Upward of a dozen gobbling brown missiles fill the air ahead of me, above me, and behind me—everywhere but in the spokes. I consider the ignominy of being found dead with feathers in my bike shorts and a turkey beak jammed in one ear, but I keep my head and the hammer down on the hard-earned theory that evasive action generally compounds your problems. As I come safely clear of the turkey strafe, and the last of the frog notes yield to diminuendo, I am reminded once again that certain germane aspects of the naturalist experience cannot be conveyed via the pretty pictures on your National Wildlife Federation screen saver. I plane out onto a flat stretch, exhilarated at the ineffable cusp of spring, when frogs sing and turkeys attack.
On the last leg of the bike ride, I encounter a farmer friend and stop to visit on the shoulder. He’s pulling a portable welder behind his pickup. “Rock rake’s busted,” he says, and that’s enough. “Say, you sell that old truck of yours? I drove by your place the other day and seen it’s gone.”
“Nah, didn’t sell it,” I say. “Workin’ on fixin’ it. It’s pretty shot.”
“Yeah, we was talkin’ about that down to TJ’s. I said I figured your best bet would be to jack up the radiator cap and drive a new truck in under it!”
I shower and make the drive to the shop. Mark wants to pull the bed so he can get it sandblasted. While he disappears under the frame again with his plasma torch, I go about removing the spare tire rack. First I grab a lug wrench to remove the tire itself. In the circle formed by the hole at the center of the rim, I can see the same hand-painted letters I’ve seen for years:
4–27-
Hi
Ron
When I pull the tire, the entire date is revealed:
4–27–82
Hi
Ron
Just a few days short of twenty-one years, then. I would have been a junior in high school. The twenty-seventh was a Tuesday, so I probably slouched around school, attended track practice, and then spent the balance of the evening in my bedroom listening to the theme from Chariots of Fire whilst longing for the farmgirls of spring. Who ran toward me in slow motion.
With the tire removed, I can get to the six bolts that secure the frame itself to the box. One of the nuts is missing. I soak the rest with WD-40 and then make two trips back and forth between the truck and the toolbox before I choose the socket sized to fit the nuts. Mark glances at them from ten feet and says, “Prob’ly five-eighths.” Yes.
After a little handle-banging to break the rust, the nuts ratchet off easily. It helps that the rack is mounted on carriage bolts. Carriage bolts have a domed cap that give a wrench no purchase, but the shaft collar is squared off above the threads, which holds it from spinning when countersunk in a square hole, as these are. Rather than have to twist two wrenches at once, I just keep a little thumb pressure on the domed head, and flick the ratchet handle back and forth until the nut spins free. Ever since I was a kid helping Dad bolt down the bed on our hay wagon, ratchet sockets have been my favorite tool. The socket fits the nut so snugly. The hidden mechanism that allows the socket to hold its position while the handle is rotated backward for a fresh turn is a little bit magical. I’ve always enjoyed the zip-clunk, zip-clunk sound of the ratchet working, a sound that is simultaneously fun and industrious, and it’s fascinating how such a little adaptation (the ratchet) amplifies the efficiency of the tool. When all five nuts are spun free, I set the rack aside and get my first good look at Ron’s rendition of the Playboy bunny. Technique-wise, it’s pretty well executed, with a bow tie and all, although it looks a little more Peter Cottontail than Hardcore Hare. Ron has enclosed the caricature in quote marks. You see that a lot in homemade signage, quote marks used for emphasis, with the end result being unintentional irony. As in “QUALITY™ CAR REPAIR. Could it be that Ron—a man whose swabs of primer may have been inartful, but saved the truck from rusting away completely—is in reality a postmodern ironist? I have very little to go on—only a vague recollection of standing in his yard on a cold day and giving him some cash.
Mark has detached the box. We get on either side and try to shift it. It’s mighty heavy, but not impossible. Using pry bars, sawhorses, and the brute force of our backs, we inch it up and rearward, increment by increment, until it is clear of the cab and frame and resting on sawhorses. The old truck looks suddenly lightened. The revealed frame rails—upon which the entire rest of the truck is stacked or hung—are surprisingly narrow and spare. So much of our impressions of automobiles and machinery is formed by the shape of the skin, you forget how relatively fine-boned the linkages are that hold it all together and make it run. The big rounded cab looks tick-fat and out of proportion to the twin rails of exposed channel iron supported by two narrow tires. The truck looks like a rooster with no tail. A
fat man with skinny legs. But you get an idea of what the truck was designed for now that you can see the full length of the leaf springs—held to the frame with a stout shackle and bracket system and U-bolted to the axle in a thick stack, including a spacer upon which rests a stubby set of auxiliary overload springs for extra big loads. The setup looks so stiff you can’t imagine the cargo that would make them flex.
Mark heads in to watch Sidrock for the evening and I putter a bit longer, bagging the nuts and bolts from the spare tire frame, making notes (spare tire rack—one bolt missing), picking up tools, cleaning up some. A few days after I answered her e-mail, Anneliese and I spoke on the phone. Tomorrow we will meet at a coffee shop. I tell her, Don’t look for that guy with the long hair. I was wearing my scurfball camo cap when I did the reading, so I’m wondering if she knows how much chrome I’m sporting up top. But I’m not real nervous. I’m ready.
There was this pop song—“Drops of Jupiter” by Train—that peaked right about the time I took up with my last girlfriend. It is a beautifully overproduced musical tid-bit. In my teens, I would have wallowed in it. In my late twenties I would have sneered at it. In my mid–thirties—having been told by a wise friend that “there are no guilty pleasures, just pleasures”—I simply enjoyed it for what it was. The first time I heard it, I grinned and turned it up. There were strings, and longing, and a sweeping chorus, and just as I thought, the only thing missing here is some na-na’s, the “na-na’s” kicked in. I sang out.
The prevalence of this song coincided with the sweet harmony stage of the relationship, that initial stretch where you marvel at the alignment of the planets while ignoring the fact that you are astride a falling star. When things went unignorably south, I really couldn’t bear to hear “Drops of Jupiter.” If it came on the radio while I was driving, I punched the scan button, hoping to snag a George Jones song. At home I listened to Tom Waits. Closing Time, mainly.
Then one day I was running errands, and “Drops of Jupiter” came on the radio, and I liked it again. The na-na’s came and went, and my liver did not twinge. Put me back in, coach.
And so now I am in the car driving home in the dark nursing a quiet little blend of excitement and hope. God bless our unkillable hearts.
I got to the coffee shop a little early, shaven and dressed in my favorite T-shirt, a black one that says ROAD KING across the chest. Karmic groove-wise, that is one of my top ten all-time T-shirts. The logo is encircled by stylized lug nuts. Wearing it feels like vitamins and valium. I wore steel-toed boots—the shinier of my two pairs. Jeans. Anneliese arrived minutes later and parked across the lot. She was driving a worn Honda Civic, black, with dents, a bike rack, and state park stickers on the windshield. She was small and blond and walked with grace and strength, and shook my hand with a smile that threatened to derail my objectivity. I held the door like a gentleman and, I cannot tell a lie, checked her out as she passed through. She looked delightful in her jeans. Civility is sublime, but humankind owes its existence to the animal urge.
We ordered tea and talked, nonstop and variously and with ease, as you do on any first date that comes up short of a train wreck, and then we had more tea and more talk, and then, it being a sunny day, we decided to go for a walk. By this time my bladder was distended to the point that my abdominals were creaking, and as I rose to my feet, I adopted a slight crouch in order to remain continent. Later she would admit to similar difficulties. We took a bathroom break.
It was a fine sunny day, and we walked and walked. I clomped along in the boots, learning more as we went along. She spent a fair chunk of her childhood on a farm, growing onions and sweet corn to be sold in town from the back of a pickup. She had gone to school with some of my cousins but she shot down my theory of Aunt Pam as matchmaker. There had been no contact. After teaching high school Spanish she was now teaching at the local university. We walked two miles. Then we stopped for Thai noodles in a strip mall, one of those places where you get rice in a pile the size of an orthopedic pillow and the sauce runs heavy to salt and fat. We ate and talked and then drank green tea and talked, until the sun dropped below the upper sill of the plate glass storefront and blasted me in the eyes, and then I walked Anneliese to the Honda, where she paused to stand with one hand on the roof and the other on the top edge of the open door long enough to say, yes, she’d like to see me again.
Anneliese and I walked in the sun on Sunday, and by Monday the temperature set a record at 90 degrees. But it was a trick, a meteorological head-fake. The warmth was pushed in on the bumper of a cold front, which on Wednesday overtook us, precipitating a good inch and a half of rain. As the last few tenths fell, temperatures dropped to freezing and everything got a fat round coat of ice. This morning sunbeams flared from the trees in a million pieces and the clusters of precocious grass illumed the granulated snow in pale refractions of green.
Many of the seeds I started—including the oregano and sweet marjoram—haven’t sprouted, so I head back in the basement at my gardening bench, sprinkling more seeds into more planters. I’m also repotting some leeks, cilantro, and two basil plants. Three basil plants had come up, but this morning I discovered that one had damped off and died. I am studying it now, pale and flat on the vermiculite, and I am thinking, Why didn’t you call? Why not wilt a little first, give me some warning? More water? Less? Should I have pulled your plastic cover? Lifted it less often? Oh woe, and whither the pesto.
I drop the living basil plants on the garden bench four or five times in order to break the soil cube from the roots the way I saw Brian Minter do in a gardening video, then tuck them into new, larger receptacles. Then the leeks, and then the cilantro. I suspect the reason so many of the seeds I sow directly in the earth will catch and pass most of these presprouted plants lies in the fact that they are not forced to endure my fake lights and fiddling.
When I finish with the plants, I put them under the lights, clean up, and leave for my second date with Anneliese. I take my copy of Waiting for Guffman, and we watch it in the basement while her daughter sleeps upstairs. Anneliese laughs in all the right places, which I snootily think bodes well. My taste in films is largely nonexistent. When she says Tommy Boy is one of her favorite movies, I am so delighted I want to give her a noogie, but it’s early. Then she says she and her sisters and mother can recite every line in What’s Up, Doc? and I admit I have never seen it. We talk and laugh and watch all the DVD extras and talk and laugh some more, and then, in the half-light of the foyer, I look at her smiling up at me and thank her for a wonderful evening and as I turn to leave a voice inside my head says, If you don’t kiss her right now, you are a clod, and I turn again, backtrack three steps, put my hand in the small of her back, draw her to me, lean down, and kiss her. She makes a soft little mmmmm sound that will echo in my heart until my brain fades to black.
Half delighted and half panicked, I turn to leave and trip over the doorsill, not falling, but stumbling onto the porch like a drunk. Composing myself, I walk straight down the sidewalk, where I misjudge the curb and smack my knee on the car bumper.
Feels good.
If you’re going to have a shop, you’ve got to have a shop radio and a shop chair. Mark’s shop radio is a beat-up boom box, which is nowadays an acceptable substitute, as long as the radio works. The thing about working with the radio in the shop is that it should be a background thing, not a dominating thing. The songs, the ads, the deejay, if they still have one, they all bear you along through the hours. It’s not about loudness or high fidelity. A lot of farmers used to play the radio during milking, and part of the comfort was the way the sound changed as you moved around the barn. Mark is not a purist in this respect. He keeps a stack of CDs in the shop: Metallica, Slayer, Pantera. “Nothing like a little ‘Cowboys from Hell’ to ease your mind,” he says with a grin. When I’m there he usually compromises with Classic Rock, a favorite of neither of ours, but acceptable for wrench work. Right now it’s “Proud Mary” coming from the shelf up in the corner the
re, the Creedence Clearwater Revival version, which is a good thing, because the Tina Turner version tends to preoccupy me.
Meanwhile, the significance of the chair may be lost on anyone who hasn’t spent any time doing manual labor while standing on a concrete floor. The simple relief of taking weight off your feet, of relieving the pressure on your backbone, cannot be overstated. The chair should be comfortable, and it must be durable. One of the best I’ve ever known was a chair in a shop on a ranch in Wyoming. It didn’t look comfortable—it was an all-metal, uncushioned minimalist beast—but it was constructed of spring steel, and when you sat on it, it sank down and back to the perfect angle of recline, cradling you with a soft bounce. My brother Jed has a vintage paint-spattered kitchen chair in his shop. The wooden legs are sawed off short, which gives it a nice low-slung feel, but the seat is split so if you’re not careful you’ll literally catch your tail in a crack.
Mark’s shop chair is a heavy four-legged office model. I peg it to be a product of the late 1960s based on the fact that the steel frame is upholstered in burnt orange Naugahyde. The chair is padded enough to be comfy and sturdy enough to withstand rough treatment. I am sitting in it now, eating a fast-food burrito with my feet up before the fire. I have come to work on the truck late at night, as I often do. I like to drive through the country when the houses are dark, and work into the early hours when it feels as if the rest of the world is beneath the blankets. I usually call ahead during the day to let Mark know of my plans so he doesn’t come creeping around the corner with a shotgun. Before he went in to bed, he started the fire for me. I am struck by the thoughtfulness.
As I eat, I peruse the J. C. Whitney catalog. If you’re not familiar I’m not sure what to tell you other than if you place a Victoria’s Secret catalog and a J. C. Whitney catalog before your average man, he will of course scamper off with the first, but later you will find him snoring on the couch hugging the latter. It defies brief description but “lots of cool doo-dads” will do. When we were boys we loved it, and now that we are men, we love it more. You can burn a lot of cash and quality time with a J. C. Whitney catalog, as I’m sure any number of marriage therapists will verify. It is hard to tear myself away, but the burrito is done. Crumpling the wrapper and chucking it in the fire, I harness the filter mask to my face, don my goggles, insert my earplugs, and set to scrubbing the truck. The sidewinder grinder proved to be overaggressive, so I’ve switched to an electric drill and sanding pads. I’m working on the passenger side door, and the pad generates a steady plume of erythmatic dust—the color a combination of the orange-brown rust, the pink primer, and the remaining genuine Harvester Red paint beneath. Even with the mask in place, I get this sweet ferrous taste back by my uvula that tells me some of the paint and rust particles are seeping through. The drill bogs a little, and the spinning wheel takes on a brighter tinge. When I lower the drill and inspect the area I’ve been scrubbing, the steel is smeared with gummy yellow paint. Some faint yellow has always shown through the primer on each door. I never gave it much thought, but really, this is a bit of a mystery. In 1949, the L-Line trucks came in four standard colors: Harvester Red, Adirondack Green, Apache Yellow, and Arizona Blue. Prior to 1949, the same four colors were known as Red No. 50, Dark Green No. 10, Yellow No. 165, and blue was not available. This disturbing trend would continue with the availability of optional colors including Black Canyon Black and Palomino Cream, and would culminate in the industry-wide disaster of those horrific factory graphics packages slapped on so many pickup trucks of the mid-to-late 1990s, which, combined with all the flare fenders, will one day render them the disco shirts of our age.