Truck

by Michael Perry

  My Grandma Peterson lived in fourteen different homes before she was eighteen. Then, after a brief marriage that didn’t work out, she moved to a different town and married my grandfather. Not counting half a year spent living in motels, Grandpa moved her in and out of another twelve homes. Over this time she raised five children of her own and took in another twenty-eight foster children. She did her baking with a. 22 rifle at hand and was known to step away from the stove to snipe feral cats and once an incautious woodchuck. My deerslaying uncle used to wax a bit windy about his abilities as a marksman until the day Grandma took up arms out behind the barn and schooled him in a manner he will to this day not discuss, although one hopes the perforated targets have been retained as evidence. In my favorite snapshot of her, she is leaning over Dad’s woodpile, detonating my brother’s five-foot-long black powder muzzleloader. The air is hung with smoke and powder sparks are still arcing downward. I should add that she was scrupulously honest, deeply compassionate, and jumped rope until the age of at least seventy-two.

  Grandma Perry burned at least one pack of Carltons a day, and on tough days knocked back a martini before supper. I recall her sticking her wadded Clark’s Teaberry gum on the plasticine of the cigarette pack before lighting up, and my brother recently reminded me of the way she held the handle of her fishing reel between her thumb and third finger so as to free up the index and middle finger for the ever-present heater. Sawed off and short-tempered, she favored sayings like “well hell-up-a-tree” and “that woman could knock a bulldog off a gut-wagon,” and she once declared that a certain parsimonious fellow was “tighter than a gnat’s ass around a rain barrel,” but the phrase she held closest to her heart still remains on the masthead of the local humane association she helped found: “a voice for those who cannot speak.” She was fierce on behalf of animals, from picking up local strays in her orange Duster to serving as president of the state humane society. She had a way with human strays as well. The animal shelter employed its fair share of down-and-outers, and Grandma knew her way to the bail window of the county jail. I was present more than once when someone knocked on the door to reimburse her for covering their bond. She wrote heartfelt poetry, admired Albert Schweitzer, and spent her early married life alone, raising my father on her own with Grandpa gone to the shores of Iwo Jima.

  Remaining within the family tree, there is my tiny aunt Sal, so bowlegged she couldn’t catch a pig in an alley, but sharp enough to leave the smoothest horse traders this side of the South Dakota Hippodrome weeping over their slit pockets. Aunt Mabel, eighty years old and currently charging off to every cultural event within a fifty-mile radius of Spooner, Wisconsin, usually with a carload of restless contemporaries. Aunt Meg, who took time out between hairstyling and running her own café to drive an eighteen-wheeler, hauling corn syrup and refrigerated goods across the country behind a gigantic black Freightliner. Aunt Annie, who got all the cows milked before heading to the hospital where she delivered baby number three directly upon arrival.

  Somewhere around last June or so, I was talking to Anneliese about how beautifully it seemed to be going with us, and she said she would be reserving her judgment until six months passed. That was a rolled-up newspaper to the snoot. Counting from our first date in mid-April, we have a month and a half to go. Anneliese wrote me a note recently saying she liked “how we work—deeply and easily.” I, in turn, told her from the bottom of my heart that I was grateful for her “reasonableness.” This is the complimentary equivalent of a vacuum cleaner for Christmas. And yet she confirms that reasonableness by consistently giving me do-overs in the wake of such dumbfounding tone deafness.

  It hasn’t been a complete skate. There are things. Little pop-up ghosts of the past, hints of disagreement over where we might live if we decide to make it official, our continued reasonable doubts about how either of us will manage the shift from long-term independence to peaceful cohabitation. We both have a desire to get off the grid, more or less. Keep the power line, but supplement it with a windmill and a few solar panels. Each of us hankers for a real garden and those chickens. Recently we took a ride to look at some land near where Anneliese was raised. We stood there under a gray sky, and Anneliese talked about the beauty of the place. She was right. It was beautiful. But when I stood there, I didn’t feel a thing. Later I drove her a short way out of my village to another patch of land. Same situation, reversed. She couldn’t feel what I felt. On the drive home I got grumpy and quiet and couldn’t look her in the eye. We sat quietly for a long while after. Anneliese said she felt like the vinegar was back. Later, alone, I waited for the old hopelessness to return. It did not. Perhaps it was her clear blue eyes. Having failed at this time and time again, I hesitate to say, but I have never felt so placid.

  I hope I’m right. Love is a contact sport of the heart. You can’t take the hits like you used to.

  Beyond blood, I was schooled in powerful womanhood by the dignified Charlotte Carlson, who came to Chippewa County in a buckboard and lived to see the space shuttle launch. When my parents bought her farm, she was not bitter but rather became my mother’s best friend and our surrogate grandmother. From her I carry an affection for potato lefse and sugar cookies and good whole wheat flatbread spread thickly with butter. There was Vernetta, the next-door neighbor who fed her hay crews thrice between noon and five o’clock, unloading hay wagons in between. Nelda, the Wyoming rancher’s wife who always wore a dress but could take out a prairie dog at two hundred yards (discounting the time she miscalculated while using her pickup truck hood as a rifle rest and put a straight crease through the sheet metal). Ramona, from the farm across the forty, who babysat us when I was young. She held my brother headfirst in the sink when I knocked him off the concrete steps with the screen door and blood poured from his brow. Thirty years later a woman visiting from somewhere else met Ramona and said, That Perry boy writes beautifully, and Ramona said, Well, that ain’t the way he talks.

  In 1984, I was admitted to the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire School of Nursing and spent the next three years immersed in a world that was 3.5 percent men. To say my female classmates were my intellectual equals or better is neither conjecture nor condescension—it was a fact verified weekly in the form of coded test results posted on a wooden door. I consistently ran my finger down to the lower middle before locating my secret number. This had a way of rendering gender issues moot. My instructors were by and large fiercely intelligent vanguard feminists, eager to eradicate chauvinism in all its forms, although they didn’t seem to mind asking me to help lift heavy patients, or strip to my shorts when it was time to demonstrate physical assessment or intramuscular injections. At the time, I got a little righteous about this contradiction. I have since come to understand blind spots are universal, and less a sign of inconsistency than proof of humanity. I propose this in part because I could sure use the wiggle room.

  Sometimes when I am snuffling along nurturing my vision of Anneliese as the simple farmgirl of my cornball dreams, I will attempt to join her in the company of certain women and run face-first into an energy shield that causes me to lumber backward like the bull who lays his dumb wet nose on the electrified fence. I tend to put my faith in physics over mystery, but for all the farmwives and feminists and well-armed grandmas in my life, there have been a small convention of others who have modeled more ineffable powers. Galinda, the neighbor up the road who, in the process of allegedly unruffling my field, hovered her palm about a half inch above my right scapula and said, “I feel a lot of heat here.” I had been having spasms there for a month since getting hit in a football game, but there was no mark or bruise, and I hadn’t said a word to Galinda. I remember thinking, Well now. There is Laurie, a woman who—I don’t know any other way to put it—glows with invisible light. With her shawls and sculpture work and barefootedness, she is the personification of an earth mother, but I have seen her rise up and put down a strong man while the rest of us were content to avoid eye contact and whisper behind
our hands. Recently she told me she believes we are all energy created by a purposeful magnetism and that the catalyst is love. This may explain the invisible light. The first time Anneliese and Laurie met, they hugged, and then later each sought me out separately to remark on the other’s aura.

  Finally, there is my cousin Alice, a painter and poet and stained-glass glazier, who claims certain extrasensory powers and has been known to stumble over force fields. She says there are times when she is led by birds. I am leery of such talk and would be dismissive, except that Alice once outbid a stranger to buy back her deceased uncle’s 1950 Dodge pickup at auction, the sole reason being that she hates to cry, and I am pleased by the idea of psychic plus stoic. Alice once told me artistry does not reside in motivation but rather stems from showing up, with the intent to be honest. When I meet a dreamer with calluses I try to shut up and listen. And lest everything sound too glorious, I am also remembering Cerise, who taught me that a strong woman can wind up battered in ways no weak man ever would.

  Around the middle of the month I get a chance to work on the truck again. As I’m getting into the car I stop at one of the raised beds and pick a green pepper, a cucumber, and some cherry tomatoes. The garden remains pretty much a flop (after a long dry spell we’re getting rain today), but even the most middling return on my efforts is rewarded when I bite into that pepper. Eating it like an apple as I drive, I marvel as always at the sweet watery crunch, one of my favorite “clean” flavors, reminiscent as it is of fallen rain. Conversely, I find that when cooked, green peppers become snotty and overbearing, capable of dominating and ruining the spaghetti sauce.

  The radiator is fixed, and I have it in the backseat of my car. After I unload it and Mark inspects it, we start working on the fenders. Mark will be able to cut and transfer patches from one of the cannibalized fenders. For a few of the smaller holes outside the range of the patches, Mark has me hold a flat chunk of copper on the underside of the fender while he uses the welder to fill the hole with a molten bead. The bead doesn’t cling to the copper. Later I go back and knock the dome off the bead with a grinder, then go back over it again to sand the bead flat. You’re left with a smooth surface and a small line of suture where the fresh bead and old steel meet. When we’ve finished filling holes, I take a wire brush to the inside of the fenders. After I’ve scuffed away all the loose flakes and spurs of oxidized steel, I brush the entire surface with rust converter. It goes on foamy white, like spilled milk. As it soaks into the surface, the rust takes on a bluish tinge. Several hours later what was once rusty looks oily and dark, and the rust is inert.

  The bottom edges of the fenders (including the ones we robbed off the junker) are badly eaten with rust. We toy with several options—patching the holes, welding a steel strip around the base of each fender—but finally Mark suggests he simply trim them back an inch or so. It seems like a simple enough approach, and the International fenders of the day hung like big steel drapes anyway, so I give him the go-ahead. Once again the purists weep, although I have been reading more about Raymond Loewy, and one of his pet phrases was “areas of examination”—that is to say, what can be tweaked to favorable effect? Loewy was famous for cutting chunks off his Cadillacs and BMWs to reconfigure their lines in a manner he found more pleasing, and I believe Mark is up to the task.

  Kathleen calls us in for supper. She’s made a Crock-Pot of sloppy joe barbecue. After eating and chatting, I head back out to the shop and work alone. My goal tonight is to pull the seats. The truck came standard with a bench seat, but I tore it out in the late 1980s for various reasons including the fact that the bench seat was very jouncy and in combination with the tanklike three-quarter-ton suspension tended to hurl you ceiling-ward at the slightest bump in the road. Having tired of the repetitive neck injuries and cranial knots, I decided to try something different. I had also recently begun working as an EMT, and having extricated my first few bad car crashes, I wanted to put in some seat belts.

  I began the project by driving some distance to a junkyard somewhere north of Highway 8, where I detached two bucket seats and a pair of lap belts from a moribund Ford Maverick. I have absolutely no recall of why I took them from a Ford Maverick, but there you are. I proceeded back to my father’s farm shop and commenced the renovation.

  The bench seat came out easily enough. It was simply bolted to the floor, although it appeared someone had raised it by inserting two wooden blocks beneath the rails. I stuck it in my father’s old chicken coop where as far as I know it remains to this day. I then drilled holes through the cab floor in a pattern matching those in the rails of the Maverick seats. I hoisted the first bucket seat into place behind the steering wheel, bolted it down, and hopped in to judge the feel. My eyes were looking directly at the horn button. I had to reach for the steering wheel like I was hanging laundry.

  Disappointed but not deterred, I unbolted the seat, pulled it out, and went around behind the shop to my father’s scrap-iron rack, where I retrieved a mismatched bundle of angle and strap-iron. A flurry of hacksawing, grinding, blowtorching, drilling, welding, and bolting followed. When it was over, I had created a steel frame to be bolted between the cab floor and the bucket seat to provide the necessary elevation. Furthermore, it gave me an anchor to which I could bolt the lap belts.

  The unpainted frame was esthetically iffy and weighed nearly as much as the seat itself, but it worked. This time when I climbed into the cab, I could see over the dash quite nicely.

  The trouble with so many of these spur-of-the-moment male projects is that you run out of time. It was growing dark and I had to be back at work in the city that next day. So for the next several months I tooled around in the truck with nothing but a large cavernous space where the passenger seat should be. I was dating at the time and the truck was my only transportation. The woman I was seeing had already endured me for years, we had been off and on since high school. She had been tooled around in my dad’s farm truck, and she was the girl who wound up with her face wedged between the windshield and the dash when I borrowed my grandfather’s sedan and tried to shift the automatic transmission by tromping the automatic brake like it was a clutch. I once took her snowmobiling and failed to notice she had fallen off until I was two forties away.

  Running her around in that seatless truck, I didn’t want to be an insensitive boob.

  So I put a bean bag chair over there.

  She did eventually marry a man named Mike.

  I soaked the bolts down with WD-40 beforehand, but they aren’t budging, so I get the sidewinder grinder and shear them off with that. I wear earplugs and goggles, but the sparks that fly off the grinder and ricochet off the surrounding steel land on my arms and the tender antecubital space of my elbow, atop my balding head, and even my eyelids. It becomes a sort of miniature G. Gordon Liddy test to ignore the pain of the iron tinder as it hits the skin, to stand without flinching. These are little bits of molten steel, but despite the sting, they cool before burning into the skin, so it’s a way to work on your focus. The grinder is also giving off fine plumes of powdered rust that settle fuzzily on the hair of my forearms, on my ears, and scratch in my eyes.

  When the last bolt is severed I tip the passenger seat off the bolt stubs and drag it, homemade frame and all, to the center of the shop, where I study it awhile, suddenly struck by the fact that I have no clear memory of who I was when I put that seat in. It’s one of those little markers in time that trigger a cascade of other memories—many of them scintillating in their detail—and yet leaves us with one gigantic gap: Who were we then? You go back and examine your life and it’s like unfolding one of those segmented drawings where each person draws a part of the body—the feet, the knees, the waist, and so on, up to the head—without seeing the rest. When you unfold it, it’s funny to see how things match up, or don’t.

  I work late, well after midnight. At one point, having had enough country and oldies, I rummage through Mark’s stack of CDs and pull out the Nirvana Unplugged in New
York. I missed all but the peripheral aspects of the grunge movement, although a friend recently took one look at the way I was dressed and said, “Seattle, 1989.” When Kurt Cobain was ascendant, I was still transitioning out of hair metal and exploring the New Traditionalists of country music. So I always listen to Nirvana with the sort of befuddled appreciation that, indeed, something was going on there but I should just enjoy what I can and not insult the involved parties by pretending to get it. This brand of dispassion is one of the privileges of aging. As the decade-old concert unfolds, I putter away, pounding out the bolt stubs (they have rust-welded themselves to the underside of the cab), painting rust converter on the back fenders, cleaning up some. The last song on the album is a cover of the age-old folk ballad, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” Written sometime around 1870 and known variously as “In the Pines,” “Black Girl,” and “Black Gal,” the song was made most popular in the 1940s by Lead Belly. Like many folk songs, it has permuted through all the hand-me-downs, but its elemental darkness remains stark. Cold wind, dark pines, decapitation by train, these are not images prone to ameliorate over time. “Girl, where did you sleep last night?” is a question that delivers a powerful jolt to the liver no matter your age or era. Throughout the early verses, Cobain’s voice conveys a malevolent desolation that finally explodes in a harrowing squall so blistering it seems you could turn the boom box toward the truck fenders and watch the paint bubble. The grit on my face, the rust at the back of my mouth, the bits of grinder slag peppering my arms, it seems he was holding them all in his throat. The guitar chops its way to the end of the song, the audience cheers and fades, and I am left with nothing but the hum of the fluorescents.