Truck

by Michael Perry

  We place the drinks table just inside the doorway leading from the serving bench to the big truck bays where the dining tables are. Another folding table, two more coolers, one filled with water, one with punch mixed by the gallon, and two big thirty-cup aluminum coffeemakers flanked by stacks of Styrofoam cups bearing the logo of a local insurance company. For the cold drinks, we have plastic Budweiser cups left over from the Jamboree Days beer tent. Between the roasters, Crock-Pots, and coffeemakers, we always blow the breakers. While the chief cusses and punches the reset, four of the guys rustle up extension cords and braid them every which way, spreading the load so we can eke by.

  I am still helping with the setup when Anneliese arrives. Amy is trailing behind her, weepy because the training wheel on her bicycle has loosened. Tim, who has three girls of his own, grabs a wrench and fixes the problem. He is a big man, and Amy looks at him with reservations until he puts her back on the seat and she pedals away smiling. I can see Anneliese is talking to a couple of the firefighter’s wives. It’s cool and overcast, and she must have stopped by the house, because she is wearing my old flannel shirt. There is no better way to quicken a man’s breath.

  The first trickle of customers arrive, mostly elderly couples. Lieutenant Pam takes their money at the folding card table and makes change from the tin box, then they move around to the serving bench where each person picks up a Styrofoam tray. Most of the men wrap their plastic fork, spoon, and knife in a napkin and tuck the package in a pocket—front of the dress shirt for the older generation, back of the jeans for the younger. A few “lakers” up from the city call their order in, then pick it up to take back to the cabin. A pair of sisters who live in the retirement village call on the phone, and we send someone over there with the order. Shortly the trickle picks up speed, until before you know it the line is wrapped around the garage and the walls echo with chatter and the scrape of chairs.

  We serve wearing the blue gloves and white aprons and our clean ball caps with the fire department logo at the front, and at one point Ric and Ryan put the gloves over their heads, pull them all the way down over their noses, and blow them up. The five fingers stick up in the air, and the boys look like a cross between the Blue Man Group and cyanotic chickens. There is unabashed clowning, with everyone guffawing. But beyond that, it’s such a civilized moment, handing the food across. A simple transaction, a certain respectful order, and all in all, good food. From behind the bean pot, you see the faces slide by left to right, and you feel a mix of recognition and rediscovery. The year’s changes, passing by like a filmstrip. I especially cherish when some of the long-timers like Mrs. Jabowski come through, because they evoke the little boy in me. I feel deferential and straighten up a little, and go home thinking I should live a little better if only because Mrs. Jabowski is watching.

  We take our own turns eating. I eat with Anneliese and some friends from up the road in Chetek. More simple, good moments. Simple food, simply prepared, paper plates and plastic forks with your friends and neighbors, no pretense. You are struck by the privilege of it—the idea of gathering peaceably, without fear, to feast. Our Annual Jamboree Days celebration always feels like a combination class reunion and family reunion with beer, and I haven’t missed one in ten years, but the chicken feed is my favorite in a quieter way. Here, we are just getting together for dinner.

  I kept an eye on my frosted oatmeal bars. Two or three disappeared, but then word got out, and the rest remain untouched. When Anneliese and I walked home that evening, I carried the plate. Instead of cutting through by the Legion Hall we took the long way around Tugg’s Bar so Amy could ride her bike, and it was sweet to stroll hand in hand with my girl in my hometown, but later when I offered her the bars to take home she said no thanks.

  I have a young friend named Adam visiting this weekend. Yesterday he went fishing with my brother John, and today he has come with me to work on the truck. Adam’s mother and I were in a relationship for some years, and then there were changes and a move, and now his mother and I are still in a relationship, only now it is a cordial friendship over some distance, and Adam and I see each other only a couple of times each year.

  When Adam and I arrive at the shop, we find Mark already at work, knocking the rust off the frame rails with a pneumatic needle gun. Powered by a high-pressure air line, the needle gun consists of twenty-some eighth-inch-diameter rods arranged in a compact circle. A piston behind the rods rotates at high speed, essentially creating a swarm of miniature jackhammers, chipping and pummeling the rust from the underlying steel. It is a blunt-force tool, unsuitable for the relatively delicate stock of fenders and door panels, but perfect for the heavy channel iron of the frame. The tool sets up a deafening racket, so when we arrive Mark sets it aside and busies himself with removing the rear wheels. He’s going to tear down each hub, pull the axles, check everything out, clean everything up, and put it all back together with fresh lubricants. Earlier he unscrewed the plug from the base of the differential case—popularly referred to as “the punkin”—and about four tablespoons of oil ran out. “Should be about a quart and a half in there,” says Mark. He’s been reading the specs in the original L-Line Motor Trucks Service Manual I bought off the Web. “Then again, it’s not like you’ve been running at high speeds.”

  Adam and I turn our attention to the front of the truck. A friend of Mark’s stopped by the other day and ground the entire rear surface of the cab—easily half a day’s work—but large swaths of rust and primer remain on the hood, fenders, and cab crown. Adam and I are going to start by attacking the gummy yellow paint on the doors. First I swab them with paint stripper. The stripper goes on as a clear, thin paste, and almost immediately the paint beneath it softens, ripples, and begins to slough. The magic of nasty chemicals. We let the stripper work awhile, then I give Adam a putty knife and he begins to scrape away the residue. It is slow going, but for the most part, the gummy yellow paint comes away neatly, wadding up on the knife like toxic butter. The doors will still need to be sanded, but the going won’t be so gooey.

  While Adam and I were working on the door, Mark removed the right rear tire, but now I hear cussing coming from the left rear. He has made several trips to the toolbox, and now he’s dragged out the impact wrench. I ask him what’s up and he says he can’t break the lug nuts loose. He’s got them all dosed up with penetrating oil, and he’s been reefing on the lug wrench with a cheater bar, but still, he says, they won’t budge. Like the needle gun, the impact wrench is powered by air and generates tremendous force. He is about to slip it over the first nut when I remember something I learned twenty years ago in Wyoming.

  “You try turning them clockwise?”

  Silence. He’s looking at me like he may have to put me out of my misery.

  “Some of your older model vehicles ran left-hand threads on the left-hand side.”

  He’s still looking at me like he may have to chuck a socket at my noggin, but he kneels down and slips the lug wrench over the nut. Puts his weight on the handle and bounces a little. There is a sharp squeak, then his shoulder sinks as the nut eases loose and the wrench handle rotates to vertical. “I’ll be damned,” he says.

  If he had hammered away against the threads with that impact wrench, he’d have likely twisted the studs off flush. “Then we’d’a had some issues,” he says. He’s grinning. We all grin. Me, I am unreasonably tickled that I have had a chance to teach the teacher. Score one for lefty-loosey boy.

  Then we get back on task, and soon there is no talk, just the radio, and the dog coming by now and then, nosing hopefully at her plastic ball.

  We all work quietly, and I spend most of my time thinking about Adam, working out of sight there on the opposite side of the truck, scraping the curdling paint from the truck door. When I met him he was a little boy, and now he is on the verge of his teenage years and their concomitant turmoil. Soon weekend fishing trips and puttering will not hold his attention. He has always had a sweet heart, this boy, but it has not b
een easy for him, with his mother the one steady presence in his life. He is a veteran of custody wars that recognize no truce, and he knows what it is to be caught in the crossfire of all but bullets. We have had some rare sweet days, he and I. I have seen him strain to hold up a fish as long as he was tall, and him with a smile equal to the task. We have tromped through river bottoms and over Dakota Badlands, we have watched fireworks over the lake, we have made up silly songs about cows and bologna. I have put batteries in his Christmas toys, made him finish his salad, and there were nights after long drives home from Grandma’s house when I carried him sleeping to his bed. Sometimes his smile and bright spirit were the only things buoying his mother and me through days of rage and spit. He has given me moments that will forever inflect the lexicon of my heart. And now all I can think is that I have failed him, that I am one more man who moved on, one more man who proved nothing except that his mother alone is true. The term broken home is inept and inapt, but I am the carpenter who came and went, making a few small repairs but leaving the big job unfinished. Tender intent has no more relevance than the wake of a sinking boat.

  The moments pass, everybody silent for a while, everyone working with their hands and their own thoughts. We put in a good session, just three guys tinkering, sometimes mute, sometimes shooting the breeze. Adam gets the door scraped down. When we leave Mark to drive Adam back to his mother, the back of the stripped cab is glowing dully, and the wheelless rear end is propped up on a pair of floor jacks, a truck without wheels, getting ready to roll.

  On the second Wednesday night of every month we have our fire department first responders meeting. We review the previous month’s calls, check equipment, and then have some sort of continuing education. After the meeting I head over to work on the truck and pull into Mark’s driveway at 10:15 P.M. He has done a lot since my last visit. After turning on the yardlight, he leads me to his trailer. It’s parked beside the shop and covered with a tarp, which is weighted down with rocks. We pick off the rocks and Mark rolls the tarp back to reveal the box from the International. It’s been sandblasted. All the old paint and rust is gone. Unlike the fenders, which shine like new when I scrub away the rust, the sandblaster leaves the steel looking dusty and flat. If you back off you can see the pattern left by the nozzle. The good thing about sandblasting is it leaves the surface roughed and clean, the perfect surface for absorbing and holding paint and primer.

  Next, he leads me inside the shop and, with a big grin, points at the new exhaust system. Sometime in the late 1980s, I pulled away from a stoplight at the intersection of Eddy Lane and Highway 53 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the muffler fell off. I liked the way the engine roared, but it was frankly deafening and, furthermore, when you drive a dilapidated bucket of dangerous junk to begin with, you don’t need to attract closer attention by blasting the cap off your local traffic officer. So I went to Farm & Fleet and got a tractor muffler. Sadly, when the old muffler fell off, the mounting brackets went with it, so I had to secure the new muffler with the wire from two coat hangers. It worked okay, although sometimes when I hit really big bumps, the muffler would separate from the header and the truck would suddenly go loud. I’d have to pull off the road, put on a pair of leather gloves, and jam the muffler back in place. I had forgotten about this until we pulled the box last month and I saw the old coat hanger wires still twisted to the frame.

  Mark has replaced the muffler with one that actually fits, and, using flexible exhaust tubing, he has extended the exhaust outlet so that it protrudes from behind the right rear of the cab, where he has fashioned a shiny stainless steel tailpipe. The tailpipe emerges at an angle and is cut on a bevel. It looks positively racy. We just stand there and grin at it for a while. The iron frame rails and crossmembers are dark and oily. After knocking off the loose rust and brushing them clean, Mark has coated them with rust converter, a concoction of tannin and organic polymer that converts voracious iron oxide to stable iron tannate. He has also mounted new shocks. They are shiny and red.

  Kathleen is working again, so Mark has to get back in the house, where Sidrock is sleeping. He’s been colicky, says Mark. “I never used to know what colic was,” he says, as he heads out the door. “Colic,” he says, over his shoulder, “is when both baby and momma are crying.” I am smiling, because it’s been interesting to watch the transition since the baby came. Playpen in the shop. Car seat in the big four-wheel-drive pickup. One night in the shop Mark told me, “I used to sleep and have money…now I have a baby.” He’s smiling, but he doesn’t sugarcoat it. The early days were tough, he says. He knows he’s supposed to speak in terms of joy and fulfillment, but the truth is, it’s been a rough go. Still, the little boy already shows an affinity for wheels and tools, and the light in Mark’s eyes when Sidrock skids around the shop in his walker and gargles at the truck chassis makes it clear he has found his joy. Happens to the best of us, I tell him. I once worked for a man in Wyoming who roared around in a rumbling four-wheel-drive Ford with chrome side pipes and monstrous fat tires. The year I hired on, he had just gotten married. The second year I showed up to work, the chrome pipes were gone and the tires had been replaced with the regular skinny version. The third year, I found a diaper on the dashboard.

  I don the safety glasses and the hearing protectors and start the old familiar grinding session. I grind away until 2 A.M., getting most of the large flat surfaces of the cab done, including the roof. Up along the brow of the cab I find a series of pinholes. Strange, not sure why the rust would attack in such a way in such a place. Condensation, maybe. Tonight while I grind I am thinking about the past, and my gut is queasy. I’m wishing I had met Anneliese ten years ago. Before we had so much history. It’s an infantile internal tussle between selfish and silly.

  I have spent the morning digging in the raised beds, turning the earth with a potato fork, shaking out the root webs and mixing in dirt from the compost pile. In the afternoon I make a run to my brother’s farm and bring back a load of pigpen dirt, which I use to fill a large new raised bed. I have to haul the pigpen dirt in a trailer behind my Chevy. This is the kind of chore that makes me want to finish the truck, which I have lately only been getting to in fits and starts. I am always coming and going, always working deadlines, always doing things as they absolutely need to be done. No matter our vocation, we so often find ourselves living life as a form of triage. I need more time with the dirt, the scents of the soil with its inferences of dust and mud, of drought and plenty.

  My mom gave me some tomato plants, which I figure means I can go ahead and plant them, so I put them to root in the bed with the pigpen dirt. Out in the backyard, in the raised bed that spends the most time in shade, I plant some leaf lettuce and a mesclun mix. It’s a small start, but it’s good to have something in the ground. It’s nice to think that while I am running hither and yon, those tomato plants will stay in one place and grow.

  I get to the shop early enough to work with Mark for a while. I have a blister on my thumb from shoveling the pig dirt. It’s warm enough that we have the overhead doors open. Out across the Blue Hills the leaves are out and green, but not yet fully flush. Tonight we are listening to country music, which means Mark is being polite and surrendering the dial. He is not a fan of the ol’ twang-and-weep. Before we get started, I have a little surprise for him. I’ve been using a couple of disposable cameras to document our progress on the truck, nothing fancy, in fact a lot of the photos are too dark to see much. One of the cameras had been knocking around in my car for a couple of months now, and when I finally took it in, the first several pictures were ones shot way back in January, when the truck was buried in snow. They were taken on a bright clear day, and for some reason—the angle of the sun, perhaps—the rust was highlighted in such a way that a distinct pattern was revealed on each door. I recall seeing strange lobes of rust on the door before, but this picture showed that I had been tricked by an optical illusion on the order of those little wooden signs that look like a line of sticks until
suddenly your brain flips a switch and the sign very clearly says “Jesus.” When I looked at that photo, the switch clicked, and suddenly the lobular shapes went to the background, and what leapt to the fore were big fat flames. The yellow paint! Sometime before Ron swabbed the primer on, he or some other wise guy had painted stylized yellow flames on each door. I show Mark the picture and he cracks up. We agree—it’s like putting racing stripes on a hippo.

  Tonight my job is to remove the steer wheels and pull the bearings. At the back of the truck, Mark is installing new brake lines. He is amazing to watch, weaving and bending the tubing. He has this ability to see things, to work with metal and mechanics. This reflects time and study and years of hands-on, but surely it is at some level innate. He is working with raw stock, and in order to make the fittings, he is using a double-flaring tool. It’s a simple two-piece clamp-and-die device that, when tightened with threads, flares the end of the brake tubing stock to help it form a union. It’s such a simple gadget, and yet it does a profound thing, reshaping a steel tube to give it function. Looking around at all the stuff crammed inside these concrete block walls I am reminded again that the dustiest shop is jammed with testaments to human ingenuity. At some point in the progress of homo sapiens, someone among us invented the double-flaring tool, and now your brakes work.