Truck

by Michael Perry

  I wind up at the dirt-track races a couple of times a year. Not enough to claim Number One Fan status, or recite the standings, or even provide a clear description of the various divisions, but enough to talk strategy and revel in the evening. Tonight when my friend Gene and I step out of the car in the parking lot behind the grandstand, the first thing we hear is the roar of the racers running warm-up laps. Then the prevailing west wind carries the caramelized scent of combusted racing fuel to our noses, and now we are hurrying a little bit, eager to get inside the gate to see the cars and all the people and fold into the scene. I hold my binoculars and earplugs in one hand while fishing out my wallet with the other, and then the woman in the booth at the gate takes my money and slides me a ticket. “Keep the stub, hon,” she says. “There’ll be door prizes.”

  As we pass through the main gate another woman takes and tears our tickets, handing one half back and stuffing the other in the door prize pail. We make our way through the churning crowd past the restrooms and the food concessions and pause for a minute at the T-shirt tables set up just outside the grandstand entry. Even at the amateur level, racers understand the value of merchandising. Mostly it runs to clothing decorated with the racer’s number and sponsor logos (SHIRTS $15.00; SWEATSHIRTS $20.00; JACKETS $70.00), but you can also get window decals (SMALL $4.00; LARGE $5.00) and many of the racers sell die-cast models of their cars, complete with graphics and lettering. Sales are usually handled by second cousins and girlfriends. We sidle past the arms-folded sheriff’s deputies, and now we are trackside, on the dirt path that runs between the stands and the retaining wall with its chain-link fence, cabled in theory to keep the cars off your lap, a slim reassurance when they blast past six feet away, so close the flung dirt clods sting your neck.

  The people in the steel seats take all forms, but mostly they run to overbellied men, couples in matching bar jackets, tots with their heads clamped in oversized hearing protectors, and, above all, many replications of a certain kind of young man best summarized as a conflation of frat boy and redneck, with the affectations of both: goatee, maybe an earring, ball cap, well-executed tattoos, and a cud in the lip. The ball cap will be worn straightforward and the bill will be worked into a tight curl. These boys drive shiny four-wheel-drive pickups, often with a four-wheeler ATV parked in the box. They are not big on walking. When they do get caught afoot, they carry themselves with a blue-collar insouciance, but there is an overfed softness to their profile that belies all the time spent sitting atop four wheels. In the stands at the stock car races, their natural stance seems to be jacket open, belly out, one hand down the front pocket of their jeans, the other hand wrapped around a beer.

  Contrapuntal to these boys is an archetypical sort of woman, slim-hipped to the point of boyishness and wearing jeans approaching the melting point of tensile resistance. Her hair is harshly blond, long in the back and shellacked to a pouf up front—the feminine mullet, or femullete. She is likely wearing a team T-shirt, white, with her favorite race car rendered in garish fluorescents on the front, and the season schedule on the back. Women like these have a little edge to their eyes, it’s part life and part cigarettes, but when you grow up where I did, you imprint on their type so that when I see them down front there, walking in pairs to the restroom, they always trigger a reflex attraction. Something atavistic. If you fancy yourself a lad, you should keep in mind that most of these women own a pickup and a deer rifle, and odds are they can take a punch. Women like this, you make a wrong turn, and they’ll put you in the ditch.

  There is this moment, when they’re getting the tape of the national anthem cued up, and the shiny vehicles from the local car dealer are parading around the track with the flag, and the local princess of something is waving from a convertible, when it gets so quiet you can hear the tires padding over the clay. Then the anthem kicks in and we all stand, and the combination of patriotism, anticipation, and open air makes my chest swell and my guts tingle, and it seems that what you have here is a moment of unification, a convening of like-minded people joined by dirt, noise, and country, and you are unapologetically thrilled to be part of it. It is, I think, the absence of pretension that frees up your soul.

  Then they line’em up and cut’er loose. It is a delightful maelstrom. The cars, all sheet metal and pipes and bellowing speed. The track, reddish and soft early on, growing rock-hard, rutted, and iridescent with rubber as the night wears on. The feel of the grit that settles on your skin in the wake of every pack. And always in the air that scorched cotton-candy grace note of spent racing fuel. The spectators pay close attention to the action, cheering their favorites, doing their best to hex the bad guys. Gene, by day a mild-mannered Birkenstocks-wearing physical therapists and owner of one Volkswagen and one Volvo, is pumping his fist and whooping it up like Junior Johnson’s redheaded stepchild.

  Harley Paulsrud is widely considered to be one of the bad guys. You’ll see plenty of his T-shirts in the stands, but an equal number of people will cheer up a frenzy if he tags the wall. Back in our glory days, Harley and I spent every autumn Friday night on some football field, home or away. I played left defensive end. Harley played left outside linebacker. It was up to us to stuff the option. I’d turn the quarterback up, force the pitch, and Harley would tee off on the running back.

  Harley was a hothead, always ready to fight, always ready to hit, on the field or off. But he was also one of those rare athletes—John McEnroe comes to mind—who seemed to be able to turn anger to his advantage. Rather than become rattled, Harley seemed to hone his anger like a blue flame. We had a mediocre season our senior year—3–3 in conference play, as I recall—but Harley and I had some fun. We got to where we keyed off each other, knew what the other would be doing without looking. By then Harley and I went back thirteen years, clear to kindergarten. I was the oldest child in my family, he was the youngest in his. I remember him drawing a picture with his crayons that first year, a green helicopter over a field of fire. I didn’t know it then, but his oldest brother, having survived a tour in Vietnam, had just died in a helicopter crash on a base in Texas. This only two years after Harley’s father was crushed and killed when his tractor pitched over on a hillside. You see, maybe, where Harley came by some of that anger. In music class one day, first or second grade, I accidentally whacked him on the shin with a music stand. He flashed red with rage. “You just wait until recess,” he hissed. I was scared, but determined not to show it. “I’m waiting,” I said coolly, my knees quaking. He shot me nasty faces all the while Mrs. Carlson trilled away at her piano, and he glared at me all the way back to the classroom. Every time I thought of recess a cold finger tickled my liver. When it came, all the boys boiled out of the doors to choose up sides for football. Usually I would play, but today I hung back, on the sidelines over by a snowbank. Harley got the ball immediately, and headed right for me. He slipped on the ice, but as he slid toward me, his feet were windmilling and he managed to kick me two or three times. And that was it. It was over. It hadn’t really hurt, and I felt a surge of relief. Looking back at it now, thinking about how I faked a cool pose in the music room, how I slogged out to recess even in my dread, I realize Harley put me through a critical toughening process. He taught me to act like I wasn’t scared, even when I was. Every time I swallow my fear and move forward—toward a fire, a bad wreck, another disillusioned girlfriend, the dentist—I am exercising a conditioned response traceable in part to Harley Paulsrud.

  Harley and I pretty much lost touch after graduation. I heard he was working highway construction and I’d see his name in the racing reports published by the local weekly. Now, twenty years after our last tackle, I am pointing out his blue and gold #1 car to Gene. Harley races in the WISSOTA modified class—essentially, he is driving an open-wheeled stock car. The races go on, class after class, heat after heat, and during Harley’s races, I follow him intently. I can’t see his face, so I focus on his hand, clad in a blue glove and visible at the wheel. If they stripped the number
from his car, you could still tell it was him, just by the kamikaze way he attacks the turns, and the way he dives low to make a pass, or shoots up and takes the high line on a blur, flashing through the grandstand straightaway inches from the concrete retaining wall.

  I like to think of the tiny sounds in the midst of all that pandemonium: the creak of the seat belt, the zap of the spark plug arc, the smooth spin of a bearing. Likewise, all the hurtling steel is being directed by the tiniest of movements: a quarter-inch tug on the steering wheel transmits somehow down through the shafts and pinions, the shuddering springs and the spinning wheel, right down to the clay, where the rubber adjusts its purchase and the car jukes or straightens accordingly. The modified is a powerful class of race car. Stuff the accelerator too deep too quick and the tires will “lighten,” spinning at the sacrifice of traction, at which point you hit the wall like a can in a crusher. Drive with an egg under your shoe, the old-timers say. At the heart of the vortex, the cars are positioned according to the sum total of these invisible nuances, but from where Gene and I are sitting, it is simply a stinky, thunderous, and cathartic chariot race. Sense-wise, it doesn’t hold up under examination, but then neither does two-man luge.

  Even a stranger would pick up on the fact that Harley has the crowd evenly divided. When he makes a huge pass and moves up three places, half the crowd cheers. When he gets flagged for an infraction and sent to the back of the pack on a restart, the other half cheers. Just before the flag drops on the restart, I lean over to Gene and say, “Back when we played football, the angrier he got, the better he played.” And sure enough, when the man in the crow’s nest waves green, Harley drives with a vicious focus. You can feel him seething in the way his car snaps and darts from turn to turn. Starting dead last, he picks off car after car. When the checkered flag drops, he is up to third place, with first and second well aware that they owe their places to an expired lap count. Another few turns and he’d have had them, too. When Harley comes down the final straight, I jump up and holler him across the line. Gene, who can teach you to walk after you get hit by a truck but requires six hours and two sets of backup filters to change the oil in his Jetta, is wide-eyed and grinning. He pulls his earplugs.

  “Man, once he got clear of the dirty air, he just flew!” Dirty air is racing slang for the turbulent wake left by the car ahead of yours. I fix him with a look.

  “Gene, have you been watching RPM Tonight again?” He ducks his head and blushes.

  I can’t blame him. You get swept up. I get these calls: “Mike! Friday night! Punky Manor Challenge of Champions! Hot racing action!”

  Keep it up, I tell him. They’ll yank your physical therapy license and your Sierra Club card.

  In the feature—basically, your nightly championship race—somebody tags Harley from behind, kicks him sideways in Turn Four, and then the cars pound him, seven in all by the time corner marshals get it all shut down. The cars are stacked and crumpled together, and it takes awhile for the tow trucks to sort the mess. I can see Harley in his roll cage, trying to start the engine, and then I can see a red light come on, which I suppose is bad news, and eventually they tow him back behind the wall, and I imagine he threw some wrenches. Still, he is headed for a good year, with enough points to give him a shot at the state championship.

  I was surprised at my reaction, seeing Harley out there. It was exhilarating to watch the figure in the screaming sheet metal knowing we had history. To look at that hand on the wheel and remember how many times we had knocked some quarterback flat and then grabbed hands to help each other up. To know we could fill a night with stories and just be getting started. When I got home I looked up his address in the phone book and sent him a post card, just a simple note telling him how much I enjoyed his performance.

  Revenge fantasies are always a sign of emotional delamination, so perhaps it is unhealthy that lately I have been wondering just how difficult it would be to rig the raised beds with antisquirrel land mines. An acorn’s worth of C4 should get the job done. This time they reached right through the nylon netting and fiddled out several leaf lettuce plants, which were just getting to the picking point. I cussed when I saw this, cussed out loud. Had he not been rendered stone deaf by World War II ordnance and thirty years on a Massey-Ferguson combine, Charlie might have heard me, because he was out there with his corn again, restocking his squirrel feeders.

  And this is where I’m not entirely clear on whether Charlie loves the squirrels or not. True enough: whereas I would quite gladly honeycomb the yard with squirrel-sized punji pits and perch in the walnut tree with a blowgun, Charlie faithfully lugs enough corn into his backyard to feed a half-dozen beefalo. But he doesn’t just turn it over to them. Charlie is a fan of what I call trick feeders. Essentially dribble glasses for the backyard set, trick feeders force the squirrel to endure a variety of humiliations in order to get a taste of corn. Your quintessential product would be the Squngee, a perverse contraption that dangles two cobs of corn from a bungee cord. While the squirrel fights to shuck and pocket the kernels, the cob bounces up and down. Some models come with a bell attached. Lately the Squngee has been mass-produced by prison inmates.

  Charlie has a trio of trick feeders. The mildest of these is the miniature chair feeder, in which a corncob is skewered on a nail before a tiny chair. In order to get at the cob, the squirrel plants his little hinder on the seat. Variations on this theme include miniature Adirondack chairs and picnic tables. Nailed to the tree beside the miniature chair, Charlie has another device that, at first glance, looks like your standard bird feeder—a little roof and deck—except that the corn is stashed in a glass mason jar screwed to the front of the feeder. In order to get to the corn, the squirrel has to crawl in through an aperture on the side of the feeder and into the jar, where hilarious contortions ensue—all visible through the glass. Finally, Charlie has rigged up a bicycle wheel with spikes so that he can stud the rim with cobs in the manner of a ship’s wheel. When the squirrel ventures out and grabs a cob, his weight sets the whole works spinning, and as the squirrel fights to hang on and eat, you just laugh and laugh, which makes it tough to get the little bugger in the crosshairs.

  Anneliese and Amy are visiting for the day. Amy is sitting beside me on the edge of the raised bed as I pull weeds. I like to pull weeds in the morning, especially if I remember to water the night before, as the weeds come up easier. Pulling lamb’s quarters is most satisfying. The stem is strong and you can get a good purchase. The roots come out in a neat clod, as opposed to quack grass, which tends to snap off. There’s a nice rhythm to weeding when you really get going, pick-pick-pick, pull-pull-pull, the miniature clear-cut widening as you proceed, the vegetable sprouts seeming to gather strength and shift up a gear almost immediately upon the removal of the competing roots. And then there is that calm satisfaction you feel when you look over the freshly weeded bed, everything clean and neat and bound to flourish.

  Amy pulls a few weeds, then wanders off to play. At the moment, the best she has been able to come up with toy-wise in my house is a hand-carved, gape-mouthed wooden hippopotamus from Africa and a firefighter doll I was given as a thank-you for speaking to a group of local schoolkids. She brings me the hippo and informs me with some gravity that his teeth are loose. I turn the firefighter into a dentist, and he tightens the hippo’s teeth with an impact wrench, or at least that’s the sound I make. Amy produces a candleholder. The firefighter uses his hose to fill the holder with imaginary water, after which the hippo swishes and spits, and then they are all off on some other adventure.

  I weed a while longer, then switch to planting. As expected, the nasty cold of last winter, combined with little or no snow cover and my failure to mulch, killed off most of my perennials. I started some sage in the basement, and after transplanting that, I plant rosemary and lemon balm. It’s nice to chop up the dirt with the hand cultivator, smooth it with my palm, and then draw straight lines with my fingertip. I drop the lemon balm seeds in, remembering how th
e leaves taste plucked and eaten raw, or torn into chiffonade for vinaigrette. I can see Anneliese, back from a run, moving around in the kitchen. The sound of my cheap refrigerator radio seeps through the screen.

  I go back to weeding, and Amy returns again, this time with a question about what the hippopotamus should eat, but then she sits in my lap and starts pulling weeds herself. As we work I feed her sprigs of lettuce, and we make jokes about squirrels stealing my salad. For a good twenty minutes, I weed and she jabbers, her little blond head right there beneath my chin. At one point she looks up and says, “You be Amy. I’ll be Mike.”

  I am falling in love twice here.

  Way up in northern Wisconsin, in Bayfield County where the summer sailors go, in a clearing on the slopes of Mount Ashwabay with a view to the Apostle Islands of Lake Superior, stands a bright blue tent capable of holding nine hundred people in a way that makes them feel they are a cozy dozen. This is Big Top Chautauqua, an institution born of one man’s love for music and canvas. Officially classified as a “non-profit performing arts theater,” the Lake Superior Big Top was first pitched by Warren Nelson in 1986 and in its current incarnation (the tents wear out, and one was lost to fire in June 2000) opens its stage mid-June through early September for musical comedy and historical revues (including the recent angling-based smash Riverpants, written by Warren and including giant projected photos of Nice Fish), family matinees, and a steady stream of national folk and country acts. Johnny and June Carter Cash have played here, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Leon Redbone, Earl Scruggs, Judy Collins, Bruce Cockburn, BeauSoleil, the list goes on—some twenty years long now. Anneliese and I are here to see the singer Greg Brown. We are on our first weekend away together. Amy is with Anneliese’s mother. We will act grown-up and dally at will. Yesterday Anneliese ran a half-marathon in Duluth while I read the newspaper and ate a danish. The night previous we slept in a tent on the outskirts of Superior, Wisconsin, and it was cold, cold, cold, but among other things, love is Sterno. Today we lazed the Chevy west along the southern shore of Gordon Lightfoot’s Gitche Gumee, following Highway 13 past Port Wing and Cornucopia (stopping to buy a used book about Lenny Bruce, and a packet of smoked fish from a pretty woman in yellow rubber overalls) to Red Cliff, then finally hung a right and dropped six miles south to a plain motel, where we took a room overlooking the water.