Truck

by Michael Perry

  There are mobile homes, and then there are mobile homes. What you had here was a double-wide float in a hillbilly parade. You could have shingled the Department of Motor Vehicles with the citations required to summarize the moving violations committed the moment the first wagon wheel touched blacktop. When my brothers retell the story nowadays, they grin and admit they were nervous. John says the second they pulled safely off the road and onto his land, he said, “Hey—let’s not do that again!” But they made it. Due to some wedging, they had to dismantle the wagons to get them out from under the cabin, but eventually they got the thing planted level. John had a home.

  The cabin was wired with electricity and plumbed for water. But the bathroom was located out back, in a separate building. Specifically, a small wooden hut with a crescent moon cutout in the door. There are times, John says—particularly on January mornings—when it is difficult to muster the courage required to throw off the blankets and make the trot.

  In addition to his dump truck, my brother owns a skid-steer, a track hoe, and an equipment trailer to haul them. He’s one of those guys, if you need to put in a driveway or dig a basement, you give him a call. Eventually he’ll show up with his equipment and his dog, Leroy, and do the job. I say eventually because he stays plenty busy, and if you call more than twice in one week you reveal yourself as a city-bred newcomer and should repair to your collapsible canvas chair and reflect on the fact that you moved up here to relax. You may wish to emulate Leroy, who will mask his enthusiasm for extended excavation by snoozing in the cab.

  As I have come to understand it, John and Barbara—the woman with the dump truck—had been seeing each other for years. When I say “seeing each other” I don’t mean clandestinely dating, I mean casting and averting gazes and pondering possibly maybe making moves. Eventually (that is to say, “about five years down the road”) Barbara quite correctly deduced she would have to make the first move. One day after delivering a load of gravel to a site John was working, she climbed down from her truck cab and approached him. He was pushing dirt with his skid-steer, and she had to wait for him to kill the engine and tug his earplugs free. Then Barbara said, “If I asked you to go to dinner with me, would you consider it?”

  Later, Barbara said John wrinkled his nose and appeared stricken with gastric reflux.

  “Ahmm…maybe.”

  Yes. Maybe. Jiminy. When Barbara climbed back in her truck she figured she had blown it. The next day she left for a ten-day vacation, thinking she could never deliver gravel to this man again. Within a month, he ordered another load. She dumped the gravel, and as she was pulling out he flagged her down.

  “You ever folk dance?”

  “Erm.”

  “Next Tuesday, I’m going folk dancing. You wanna go?”

  “Well…sure.”

  She said she drove straight home and got on the Internet. “I had to see what these folk dancers wore.”

  For the most part my brothers and I do each other the favor of recusing ourselves from each other’s personal lives. In the face of tragedy, or when specifically invited, we are there foursquare. But by and large, we limit our demonstrations of affection to flashing goofball salutes or peace signs when we meet rounding a curve on Old Highway 53. We got the peace sign thing from Dad. In his farmer overalls and Lil’ Abner work boots he is the least tye-died of men, but for as long as I can remember he has greeted friends and strangers alike with the peace sign. Rather than flipping it up lightly beside one ear, he pushes it toward you in a thick-fingered vee that resembles a sprung bundle of sausages. The complete absence of panache suggests that he really means it. Either that, or he’s channeling Winston Churchill.

  If we meet on the road and time allows, we’ll stop for a centerline chat. Add this to the list of rural traditions on the wane. What a delicious refutation of hustle to align your driver’s side windows, kill the engines, and shoot the breeze while the flies buzz. You talk about where you’re headed, where you’re coming from, how the corn’s looking, or the price of hogs. You keep one eye out for traffic. If a car approaches and you can wrap it up, it’s crank the starter, roll off, and toss a see-ya-later! over one shoulder. If you’re in the middle of a good part, you pull ahead enough to let the traffic pass, then back up, realign, and pick up where you left off. Usually it’s just chitchat and catch-up, but sometimes you get nuggets. It was through pickup windows at the intersection of Carlson Corners that I received the happy news of Jed’s engagement to his second wife.

  The land rush is on in these parts, and not all the new folks are pursuing a ruralist vibe. They roar up here and forget to quit hurrying. This past summer I was mowing the lawn when my buddy Snake passed by. I flagged him down, killed the mower, and wandered out to talk. Snake and I were pals from kindergarten to graduation. These days we see each other maybe once year. I leaned against his door there in the middle of Main Street, and we visited for a good while. Every now and then a car would swing around us, but you can run four or five abreast down Main Street, so it was no big thing. Then this woman pulled up on Snake’s bumper and honked. I looked at her, looked at the space around us, and then leaned back in the window. She honked again. We just talked and ignored her. Shortly she gave the steering wheel a violent twist, stomped the accelerator, and whipped out around us. As she zoomed past, she gave us the finger. We gave her the gaze. The implication being, Ma’am, this is how you gossip in the absence of a garden fence. We are luxuriating in the tapering moments of a quieter time, and furthermore, honking crabs the soul.

  During the early days of his relationship with Barbara, John and I chatted on the road several times. He’d either clamber down from his truck to my level, or I’d jump up on his running board and hang by the grab bar. As hopeful as I was for their happiness, I never asked him how it was going. I knew they were seeing each other regularly, and I met her a couple of times at family functions. She was pleasant, smart, and attractive. When she wasn’t hauling gravel, she ran her own tax accounting firm. And she had a beautiful truck. A big red Mack. Finer than any piece of trash John has ever run. But as to the state of the relationship, I didn’t inquire.

  Several months into the deal, I had to borrow a tool from John. I drove out to where he lives and walked up the trail through the jackpines to his cabin. He was setting up forms to pour footings for a small addition. “Whad’ya doin’?” I asked.

  “Ahh…puttin’ in a bathroom.”

  Oh-ho! I thought.

  But I didn’t ask.

  It’s funny to think of him folk dancing, because my brother has a reserved stiffness to his comportment. (Then again, much of folk dancing is quite nicely prescribed, and furthermore, he was lured into this particular vein of decadence by my mother, a churchly woman whose epithet of choice is fiddlesticks!) Sometimes when he laughs, he squints up his eyes and tucks his chin toward his collar in a manner that makes it look as if he is embarrassed for getting so carried away, and if you can just bear with him for a second here, he will straighten up and get it together. He and I come from a long line of Scandinavian stoics. In most social settings we are, if not shy, determinedly reticent. Our guiding precept is, “I don’t want to talk about my feelings, and you can’t make me.” My tears have loosened a bit with age, and I can be grumpy, and scowly, and—as my mother used to say—a little snippy, but in general I am pathologically self-contained. Writing-wise, I share things on the page that would mortify me if they came up in casual conversation, but these seizures of self-disclosure are triggered by the imminence of tongue-loosening deadlines and vertiginous health insurance premiums and should therefore not be confused with me at the post office, where I tend to study my boots and mumble.

  Would that it ended there. In the world of the certifiable stoic, the repression of emotion is just the more obvious half of the battle. The rest of your time is consumed with masking even the appearance of the existence of desire. Anyone can hold back a tear or dodge a hug—it takes a real hardcore Norwegian bachelor to pret
end you don’t want a cookie. If I were commissioned to design the official crest for the descendants of emotionally muzzled Vikings everywhere, I would begin by looking up the Latin phrase for “No thanks, I’m fine.”

  This outgrowth of the neurosis turns the simplest trip to the grocery store into a pulsating gauntlet of dread. Shopping for staples seems benign enough, but when you present your basket at that counter, you are revealing something deeply personal about yourself. You are approaching a stranger and saying—in public—“this is what I desire.” And not only that, but, “this is what I desire to put inside me.” If you are buying a battery cable or a snow shovel at Farm & Fleet, there is no shame. These are exogenous needs. Gotta start the car, gotta clear the sidewalk. But with food, there are distressing elements of psychosexuality in play—Appetites! Hungering! Orality! Gimme Twinkies!—coupled with the implication that if you ingest you must surely excrete, and this is not a place the stoic wants to, um, go.

  Furthermore, one risks public exposure by checkout clerks who take it upon themselves to deliver unsolicited color commentary on the contents of your cart. I recently skulked through the IGA to snag a box of broasted chicken when I should have been cooking at home, and at the register the lady said, “MMMM, that smells good!” and right she was, but I immediately felt as if I was standing there in my underwear. The same thing happened when I tried to unobtrusively purchase a transparent plastic clamshell of chicken tenders during a late-night road trip. “Oooo,” said the young lady running the register, “I like those reheated.”

  Frankly, I didn’t know what to think, but I did get vaguely sweaty.

  Sometimes it’s cumulative, like water torture. Last fall I got the urge for boiled dinner, which I associate fondly with crisp air and my mother’s cast-iron wood stove. As I riffled through my checkbook, the play-by-play commenced.

  “Celery! Yum!” My abdominals tighten.

  “Carrots!” My forehead is beginning to prickle.

  “Onions!” You recognize them, then.

  “Rutabagas! Oh, I like rutabagas! And cabbage!” I now have visible beads of scalp sweat.

  By the time she swipes the smoked ham hock across the scanner and holds it up like she’s Liberty Enlightening the World Regarding Cured Meats, my heart is going like hummingbird wings, and my skyrocketing blood pressure is causing an incremental protrusion of my eyeballs, an effect similar to those pop-up timers that tell you the turkey is done. At which point, in a voice that can be heard clear back to the deli department, the checkout lady announces, “LOOKS LIKE SOMEBODY’S MAKING BOILED DINNER!”

  I wouldn’t turn any redder if she pantsed me.

  It’s far worse when I’m buying something dietetically naughty. As a fellow who has been known to run nine miles up the road to Kwik Trip at 3 A.M. to score a twin pack of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies and an extra large Royal Kona Blend, I am deeply grateful to the checkout person who understands that what we have here is the equivalent of a drug buy, and both parties shall honor an implicit commitment to dispassionate efficiency.

  Omertà on the Zebra Cakes, as it were.

  Fulfilling all suspicions, a couple of months after the construction of the bathroom commenced, John and Barbara announced they were engaged to be married. It turns out Barbara had agreed to join John in his rustic shoe box, but she predicated the move on one very specific stipulation: she would not sign the wedding license until John installed an indoor toilet. The wedding is two weeks off. Everything (and by “everything” I mean to include the license, the cake, and the sewer line) is in place, but the toilet has yet to be connected.

  John’s first public announcement of pending nuptials was made during the “new business” portion of the monthly meeting of the New Auburn volunteer fire department. I was sitting in the back row of folding chairs. There was a flurry of people straightening in their chairs. Some of the guys shot each other elbows, and Oh-HO’d and oooh’d in his direction and made him turn red. Another Perry boy off the list. And then, just as quickly they all turned and looked straight at me there in the back row. All these years, and I am the oldest brother and last standing bachelor. They might as well have thrown me to the floor and tattooed my forehead with the words NEXT PROJECT.

  The real wild card with any stoic is rage. By and large, I am the least wrathful of men. But there is within me a vexatious little ball of propane, spritzed with paint thinner, lashed to the tip of a sulfur match, and hidden beneath a pile of oily rags just to the left of my spleen. When specific triggers are tripped, I fly apart like rivets off a tin flywheel. Thankfully, this rarely happens in public. Excepting the tantrums of childhood, and an incident in Wyoming in which I was caught barking at a rototiller, I have remained a closeted rager. In public, I prefer to keep a cork in it. But absent witnesses, I will let fly like a goose exiting a turboprop.

  Any number of things will do it. An open cupboard door to the forehead; dropped Internet connections; bookshelf kits short one screw. Some of my most vicious unhingements have erupted during solitary forest strolls. It seems counterintuitive, what with the restorative aspects of nature and whatnot, but try it sometime when it’s zero degrees, your cheeks are stiff as lard, and you get snapped in the face by a sapling switch. A clunk to the head is bad enough, but the impudent smack of a sugar maple sprig is akin to the flick of a doeskin glove from some ruffle-throated dandy. I go from Thoreau to Mr. Hyde in a nanosecond, provoked by the stroke of a branch no bigger than a flyrod tippet. I’m glad you didn’t see me last fall, one watery eye clamped shut, in full-out wind-milling flail, varnishing the remains of a birch sprig with spittle and curses. Far above, from the safety of a sturdy oak, a squirrel chattered and wheezed, quite rightly perturbed at the presence of a sinner in the forest.

  Back in the civilized world, my own stupidity is a regular flashpoint. I once responded to missing an important meeting by hurling the top half of a papa-san chair across the room like a gigantic Frisbee. I can report that it splintered against the wall with a sharpish ker-rack! and I felt immediately improved although a little down in the mouth over the destruction. Later, having smacked my elbow on the file cabinet for the second time in five seconds, I grabbed the nearest unattached object, rared back, and flung it with all the violence I could summon. The object, as it happens, was a 16-count Kleenex Pocket Pack. I cannot recommend the results.

  And the language! Well, never mind the language. Suffice to say it would flabbergast those who love me, as I am characteristically easygoing, and prone to utterances no more scabrous than jeepers or dangit. But what I’m thinking is, should I survive to senescence, I’m bound to be one of those sweet old folks who winds up slinging stewed prunes and cussing like Ozzy Osbourne doing a Mamet play.

  At 10 A.M. on the morning of August 23, we gather on the shores of Round Lake for the wedding. John finished installing the toilet at 5 P.M. last night. He called Barbara, essentially to tell her the toilet was in and the wedding was on. She wasn’t home. He got her answering machine. After the beep, he said, “Yah. I’ve got a message for you.” Then he held the receiver down by the porcelain bowl and hit the flush.

  The service is brief and sweet. We gather up around them, standing quietly around the boat landing, where you can hear the water lapping. I can see John’s hands have a tremor in them, something to see in a man who is the best rifle shot among us, and who even when we were kids could squeeze the basement scale and spin it past anything the rest of us could manage, including Dad. It’s fun to tell bachelor stories on him, and cast him as this rough-hewn throwback, and it’s all true, but when I see him there trembling a little, I am seeing the brother who learned sign language and used to sit in the classroom beside a local grade-school girl and translate her lessons, which must have looked like Grizzly Adams meets Little House on the Prairie. I see the kid who read all the Foxfire books and taught himself to tan hides and make wooden door latches, and who kept cranking the draw weight on his Browning compound bow up tighter and tighter until o
ne day he pulled it back and it exploded. And while I see a man I sometimes envy for his ability to build things and fix things and run things, I also know that last year during the community choir Christmas concert he stepped forward for a solo that culminated in a note so high and pure it put my heart in the rafters.

  Barbara looks strong and maybe a little nervous, too, but when they speak their vows in turn you can hear them considering every word. There is no preacher, just a judge, and when it comes time to sign the papers, the judge is at a loss in the open air until John turns and offers his back, and as the judge scribbles across his shoulders, you hear a scatter of laughter, and that’s a nice way to end as we walk back up to the picnic tables where all the kin and old neighbors have gathered, and the Nesco roasters are lined up and in the air you catch the scent of charcoal chicken, barbecued and served up hot by the New Auburn Area Fire Department. Sometimes life is so simply good.

  After all the usual photographs were taken, John and Jed and I stood shoulder to shoulder for a portrait with our three left hands extended toward the camera, palms in and fingers spread to show three hands and two rings.