During the drive we talked about how it’s going with us, and we are daring to hope. Just about three months in, and we feel a certainty. Among other things, we would both like a small farm with a barn and chickens. We are still operating within that window when joy and discovery reign, when it is very purely enough to be driving and holding hands, but we have both lived enough to understand this and enjoy it anyway. Or especially. I have failed at points far, far beyond this, but I have never looked into another pair of eyes and felt such ease.
Greg Brown is a hard lesson for well-groomed boys everywhere. Snaggletoothed and beefy and mumbly and prone to performing in clogs and overalls and not looking up much, he appears careless until he sings, and naturally this makes him irresistible. I’m a Midwest boy, he sings, I’m a big dumb man… and you can hear the murmur as women from Iowa City to Manhattan give the ol’ thumbs-up. In the heartland, Eros tends to clomp around. Lesson being, tweak and trim if you will, cover boys, but don’t overwhelm manhood with maintenance. There is nothing citrusy about Greg Brown. The poetry and guitar help, of course. Quatrains make bad news beautiful, and any given six-string will smokescreen a raft of shortcomings.
Above all else, there is that voice. Sometimes I drive all night drinking truckstop coffee and singing radio notes exceeding my range at both ends, or I holler-talk elevated nonsense through the secondhand smoke of some bar to 2 A.M., and the next day when I rise my larynx is so scorched and seasoned I can make my sternum buzz in and out of phase just by humming, and I’ll think, this is what it’s like to possess the vocal cords of Greg Brown, but even in my most sonorous state, I am pleather to his leather. Greg Brown’s voice sounds as if it was aged in a whiskey cask, cured in an Ozarks smokehouse, dropped down a stone well, pulled out damp, and kept moist in the palm of a wicked woman’s hand. I think if he says good morning across his coffee cup, it raises ripples. The voice is a perfect match to his lyrics, biblical and bar stool and garden loamy as they are, all Rexrothian and as easy-rolling true as a brand-new ’64 Dodge. A Greg Brown song doesn’t make me want to whoop and holler, it makes me want to sift bare-handed through the dirt for repentance and then go looking for a woman who doesn’t mind a few chickens. I was hoping Anneliese would like him.
We drive to the Big Top early, so we have time to sit and watch the people gather. Ski Hill Road originates at Highway 13, breaking westward on the perpendicular to proceed in a gentle mile-and-a-half climb through close trees to the ski hill gate, where we present our tickets and park in the gravel lot. After buying coffee, we perch on a berm near the end of the T-bar tow. I lean back against a wooden pole and Anneliese leans back against my chest. The coffee tastes startling good against the clean air. The sun is easing lower, pushing its gold through the dust haze raised by the arriving cars. The tent is a blue burst against the surrounding green, looking from a distance like a squat storybook caterpillar with stripes of pearl gray. There is an eager civility to the crowd, everybody milling but quietly so, folks passing in and out of the tent and clusters of friends meeting up to have beers in the grass or eat brats in the concession tent. The trees are optimistically green. I put the coffee down and link my hands across Anneliese’s lap, put my cheek beside her cheek. The air is soft and warm, and from somewhere comes a whiff of patchouli with its attendant evocations of wooden-floored head shops and lace-up maiden dresses.
There are certain givens at a Greg Brown concert, patchouli among them. The parking lot will be populated by a high proportion of Subaru wagons, the number one automotive accessory being a dead-heat tie between kayak rack and dream catcher. Regardless of make, choose any vehicle at random and a minimum of two radio preset buttons will get you National Public Radio. In the backseats and cargo areas you will spot fishing poles and Frisbees, and here and there a rain stick. Many of the passengers exit the cars carrying rainbow falsa blankets and Guatemalan tote bags. The men tend to wear hiking boots or leather sandals and floppy-brimmed hats purchased by mail order. A lot of the women wear wrap skirts in Indian print, crepe, calico, and tie-dye. And to be fair, a lot of folks are dressed like weekending insurance agents, after-hours physicians, and vacationing teachers. Jeans and fleece pullovers, deck shoes and hikers. But by and large, the crowd has a certain well-fed alternative look. You could not go far wrong casting the Greg Brown audience as mainly hippies with health insurance.
I’m of the leather sandals persuasion tonight, having left my usual steel-toed boots in the motel. Baggy shorts, no socks, a heavy shapeless sweater in case it gets cool. Fashion is hopeless with me. Don’t have the body for it, for one thing. The runways of Paris and Milan are rarely devoted to the short and stocky among us. I flailed around after fashion until I wound up on the road with a pack of country music roadies sometime in the mid-1990s, and taken by their functional and durable approach (heavy boots; long, baggy shorts with pockets; free black T-shirt), I adopted the ensemble and have never really progressed. Anneliese is wearing a gypsy skirt. Her long blond hair is parted simply and falls to either side of her eyes: blue, so blue, and one with a fleck of brown, which seems to symbolize luck.
The light fades from the hills and the crowd gathers and turns itself inward, as if the people were metal filings and the big tent—lit now from within by bare bulbs strung through the quarter poles—were an electromagnet on a rheostat, with Warren Nelson slowly juicing the power until everyone pulls into lines and is drawn to the center. Anneliese and I have seats fairly far to the rear, but we have a clear view of the stage. At Big Top, every seat is a good seat. On a night as warm as this, Warren rolls the tent walls up beneath the scalloped canvas eaves and spillover audience members watch from camp chairs on the lawn. When Greg Brown walks out to his chair at center stage, a big cheer goes up. Some guy seated way in the back yells “WOOOO!” but it is a decorous sort of hooting along the lines of Remember that time in ’92 when we got ripped on microbrew and totally wrecked the recumbent tandem?!? Brown acknowledges it all with a bump of the head, then gets to work. No laser lights or flash pots, he just sits in a chair and begins to play.
It could be the rosy cusp of love, but it’s a wonderful show. Anneliese and I listen hand in hand, leaning together, letting the easy evening move through us, the silhouette sea of heads before us, and Greg up there on his chair singing that he loves it when his baby calls his name, at which point Anneliese looks up at me and smiles and I—projecting the way all men do when it’s another man up there singing—grin, thinking, I’m a Midwest boy, I’m a big dumb man…
When we get back home, I find the squirrels have had another go at the cilantro. Some of it has lain there a bit, and will not recover. I reroot the ones that still have traces of starch in the stem. I am rethinking my Eat No Squirrel policy.
Charlie is on the fade. He has always been a thin man—I retain a vision of him when he came to harvest our oats, standing atop that Massey Ferguson combine, his jacket hanging on his high wide shoulders like folded vulture wings, his gaunt face and sharp nose completing the image. Now he’s eighty-six years old and when we talk in the backyard and he draws in close so he can hear, I notice his nose is thin as a turkey breastbone. He always looks cold and pale, even on sunny days, and he wears his jacket and a billed cap. Once we were talking and he suddenly sagged, sinking to one knee. I locked up for a second there, debating whether I should grab him or run for the phone, and then he simply stood back up and started in talking where he left off. Oftentimes he asks me how the farming is going, and I realize he is confusing me with my brother Jed, the true farmer among us. But he seems content, filling his feeders and sitting for hours cross-legged on his chair on the little deck, leaning over every thirty seconds or so to squeeze loose a viscous string of snoose. Now and then his wife, Toots, loads him in the car and they head up to the casino to play some bingo and have the buffet.
Using directions I found on the Web, Mark has been rewiring the International from its orginal six-volt system to twelve volts (you note the division of labor). L
ast Sunday he called to say he had changed the oil and filter and thinks we can try to start it. Now it’s Friday night and Anneliese, Amy, and I have driven over for dinner. Mark has removed the oil bath air filter and he leans in from the side to prime the carburetor. It has been years since I started the truck, so when I climb into the driver’s seat and lean forward and reach to the right to twist the key and to the left to punch the starter button, the geometry of my body releases a flood of memory, and I am imagining what it will be like to go blasting down the Swamp Road again. The truck is still missing its bed and the wheelless front end is propped on jackstands, but still. Mark dribbles gasoline into the carburetor and nods at me through the windshield. I twist the key and punch the silver starter button, and right off the bat she fires, grabbing for just a couple of spins before the dribbled gas is used up, but oh, our goofball grins through the cracked windshield in the silence after the engine kills. O, glorious noise! What a machine, to sit there neglected, then leap to life so easily.
Nothing is so simple, of course, and the problem is that the fuel pump seems to be failing. As long as Mark dumps gas in through the top of the carburetor, the engine will run, but there is a clear glass bulb on the carburetor, and as the engine spins, it should be working the fuel pump, which in turn should be pushing gas up a copper line and into the glass bulb with its float. But we spin the engine for a good long while, and no gas appears. Short of duct-taping Mark to the fender so he can trickle the gas while I make dump runs, we’re going to have to sort out the problem. This is where even a poor mechanic like me has a chance to contribute, because the elements are fairly simple, and you’re working through a process of elimination based on equal parts mechanical knowledge and conjecture. It’s a form of algebra. Using known quantities, you’re solving for the missing part.
There is a danger to working problems like these. You tend to get caught up. When I was still in college and driving the truck full-time, I had a problem with the engine stalling out at high speed. High speed being a relative term, of course, as we are talking in this case just shy of 55 miles per hour. The truck would start fine, it would run fine, it would go through the gears fine, and it never had this problem in the city, but at some point after I settled into the high-gear whine on the four lane, she’d hiccup, then hiccup again, and then the power would just go out of her. I could coax out a couple extra tenths of a mile by fiddling with the choke, but eventually you’d have to back the accelerator all the way off, coast awhile, and start over. I was flummoxed from the get-go, and it took my brother John—fiddling on the truck while I was back at college—to figure out the problem, which in the end was fundamentally simple: a small fragment of twig just slightly larger in diameter than the fuel line had fallen into the gas tank. When you were moseying around in the lower gears or at low rpm in high gear, the twig just bobbed around harmlessly. But when you got to pourin’ the cobs to her for a long stretch and really sucking the gas, the twig would eventually float around and be drawn into the fuel line, where it would obstruct the flow. When you let off the gas, the suction diminished, and the twig floated back out and you could hammer until it got sucked back in. I had forgotten about this problem of years ago but it all came back tonight when I saw Mark leaning in to pour gas in the carburetor. At one point, when John and I were trying to figure why the engine was starving for fuel, we decided the only way to tell if the bottleneck was occurring between the tank and the carburetor was to run some tests under live operating conditions. At the time, we were up the road at Jed’s farm. I removed the hood and the air filter and got in the driver’s seat. Then John spread-eagled himself over the engine compartment, wedging one boot against the firewall and one against the battery rack. He grabbed a hood latch bracket with his one free hand. In the other he held an aerosol can of highly flammable starting fluid.
“A’right,” he said.
I pulled out on to Beaver Creek Road. We had a straight shot all the way to Baalrud’s Corner, which is just shy of one mile. By the time we got to Mom and Dad’s place, we had a pretty good head of steam, and by the time we passed the last of the buildings we were flat pickin’em up and puttin’em down, nothing left to give. John had a death grip on the latch bracket, and his hair was lying flat. His beard was wrapping back around his neck.
Upon reflection, you just don’t know what you were thinking. I mean, me, sure, I’ve got a proven record as a bit of a ninny, but that brother of mine, he’s straight-arrow sensible. Been tut-tutting around like a seventy-year-old man since second grade. I was always the one screwing around on the school bus while he sat there prim as Becky Thatcher. But this is why I love my brothers, because when it comes—as Louis L’Amour used to have his cowboys say—to cut’n’shoot, to root-hog or die—my brothers are good to go.
And sure enough, right about the time we crossed the west end of North Road, right about the time I was thinking I might have to back out of it so we didn’t overshoot Baalruud’s Corner, she cut out. Bogged right down. John brought the bottle throttle to bear and shot a snort right down the old girl’s throat. Bwwaaarrr, she came right back. Then she faded, he gave her another snort, and Bwaaarrr, off she went. Pesky automotive experts will frown on dousing your pistons with unadulterated doses of rocket fuel, but the experiment served its purpose, narrowing the trouble down to the fuel line. It was based on this information that John hypothesized the stick in the tank. But him hung out there on that hood! If a deer had crossed, or some local had shot the stop sign on North Road, or if I’d blown one of those bald front tires, we would have had ourselves a gold-plated Darwin Award.
Years later I saw a television show featuring similar stunts performed by younger versions of my brother and me.
Jackass, they called it.
The missing front tires prevent Mark and me from performing similar tests, and so we are reduced to head-scratching and mulling. First we pull out the old manual and study the fuel pump schematic. Mostly there is silence and foot-shuffling. Then we look the fuel line over with a trouble light. I find a drop of fuel up where the fuel hose attaches to the carburetor inlet, and although a leak is a bad sign, we take this to mean that the fuel line is priming, which is good news. It just hasn’t reached the carb yet. Sitting as long as it has, the fuel pump diaphragm may have dried out and needed to wetten and expand before it could form an adequate seal and begin pumping effectively. I jump back in and punch the starter while Mark dribbles gas. We spin the engine this way for a long time, but still there is no fuel in the clear glass bowl. “Could be sucking air,” I say. Mark tightens the hose clamp. He dribbles more gas, I start the engine, we watch the bulb: still no fuel. “Let me try something,” Mark says. He goes around behind the cab to the fuel fill pipe. It has been taped over to keep dirt and dust from getting in. He pulls the tape. “We might be getting airlock,” he says. You see how your head works with these problems. We spin the engine another good dose. Nothing. We go over the fuel line again. I take the trouble light and creeper down below, and find a loose fitting on the fuel pump. Up above, Mark finds a missing hose clamp and replaces it. This time, instead of dribbling gas, he fills the carburetor bowl full beforehand. I start the truck and come back around to the front, where together we stare at the bowl while the engine idles. The fuel slowly drains away, drawn into the engine, then the bowl empties and the engine dies. Mark fills it again, and we repeat the process. Again, the fuel drops to empty and the engine peters out. We run the fuel line one more time, but find nothing. Mark fills the bowl. I start the truck. Once again, our faces fall at the same rate as the tide receding from the square glass bowl. And then, just as the last of the fuel is disappearing, fresh gas comes spewing into the bowl, all amber and frothy like a poured beer, and the engine grabs and just keeps spinning, and spinning, and we jump back from the truck and slap high five. When we come in for dinner, Kathleen and Anneliese say they could hear us woo-hooing clear up in the house.
Saturday. Anneliese and Amy have gone back home to Eau
Claire, and I’m back at Mark’s shop. Tomorrow I am flying to New York and won’t be back for a week, so I want to put in a full day. From outside the shop, I can hear the buzz and hum of the welder. Mark is fabricating a diamond plate patch for the front edge of the truck bed, where the rust has chewed big holes in the steel.
I’m going to strip out all the hoses, including the heater hoses. The rubber is cracked and rotting and needs to be replaced. Then I’ll pull the radiator. Gonna hafta pull’er, yep. We waited to do this until we knew the engine would run—last thing you want to do is replace all the hoses, then have to remove them all again to tear the engine down. I run the creeper under the front bumper and pull a work lamp in with me so I can see to loosen the petcock that drains the radiator. It comes open easily, which is a nice surprise, and the green fluid streams out in a fine arc and into a pail. The antifreeze is still running out when I loosen the pipe clamp on the lower radiator hose, and like an idiot I pull the big hose anyway, which means the remaining antifreeze flushes out all at once, over my hands and into the work lamp, which of course explodes and dies. My hands are slick, and I have to shoo the dog away from the green pool spreading across the floor. You can’t spoil my spirits though, because this is my kind of work. Simple deconstruction.
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