Truck

by Michael Perry

  It’s 1:30 A.M. when I drive away from Mark’s shop. On my way home I pass through the village of Cameron. As I approach the town’s solitary stoplight, there are no other cars in sight. I am thinking about Anneliese and I am sitting at the light for a good time before I realize I’ve pulled to a dead stop on green. I accelerate and pull away, checking to see who might have noticed. I’m half a block from the intersection when the village police car pulls into my rearview. I’m doing 35 in the 35, no worries, but he follows me out of town, past the high school, past the exit to the freeway, and just as I begin to accelerate for the 55-mile-per-hour zone, his lights come on.

  After a long wait while he runs my plates, the officer exits his car and approaches. He sweeps the interior of my car with his light and I cringe, because the car is swimming in junk and truck parts and road food garbage. Then he puts the light on me, and of course what he sees is a dirty, unshaven nut job out driving erratically after midnight. “Good evening, sir,” he says, lowering his flashlight beam just enough so that I can see him. He is a small fellow, and disturbingly young. His gun belt hangs on him like he dug it out of Daddy’s drawer to play dress-up. Leaning down to speak, he also tries to catch a whiff of my breath.

  “Have you been drinking, sir?”

  “Nope. Not for thirty-eight years.”

  “Well, sir, I noticed you drifting over the fog line several times.”

  This is flatly bullfeathers. If he had said he became suspicious when I spent five minutes camped at a green light, I’d have been down with that. But here he is plainly fishing.

  “May I see your license, sir?”

  With an eye toward his youth and his gun, I explain that I have to dig around some and wait for his permission. While I’m digging I’m thinking he’s going to love my license, which features a photo of me with frayed butt-length hair and an overgrown beard. It could be a membership card for the National Association of Deranged Street Prophets.

  He spends a long time back there in the squad, allowing me time for reflection. I have always believed that good cops can’t be thanked enough for doing their impossible job, and as far as I know, the toddler back there running my plates is one of the good guys, but I’m surprised at how every time he spoke to me I had this urge to turn him over my knee. My reflection yields no epiphany beyond the fact that one becomes an old coot by increments, and here’s one now. And here he is back at my door, handing my license through the window. I can go, he says. Then he leans back in the window.

  “But, sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Try to pay a little better attention to your driving.”

  “Ooookayyy,” I say, turning red in the dark and wishing I had the guts to add, “…Spanky.”

  The remainder of my drive was consumed with muttering.

  In 1995, Natalie Merchant released a music video (for the song “Wonder”) populated with beautiful women of all ages and persuasions. Beautiful women of course are a staple of the genre, but these women were different. Tawny Kitaen unfurling herself across the hood of a Jaguar is an incitation; the women in Merchant’s video were a revelation. They were beautiful through a sublime range of age, form, and physiognomy; the cumulative result spoke to the beauty not of women, but of womanhood. I saw the video only once or twice, but it made a powerful impression, and I was reminded of it again when I arrived at Anneliese’s house today to find six women (counting Amy) in the dining room. Here was Anneliese not in the context of the usual self-centered me but in the context of the strong women in her life. Her mother, Donna, a woman who has always made me feel welcome but never entitled, and right she is; Jaci, a former teaching colleague and the person who must be given credit for Amy’s Seabiscuit phase; Bibi, another teaching colleague from Colombia who helps Amy with her Spanish; and Heather, a dedicated missionary who came to Anneliese’s aid in the difficult early weeks after Amy was born.

  It’s so easy to get so caught up in our brief little history since the library reading in Fall Creek. You forget sometimes what a disruption you are. And how late you have entered the game. After our trip to Colorado, I talked with Anneliese about where she turned for help in the time surrounding Amy’s birth. Her mother came, of course, and there was Katrina, the local church minister. Stacy, the woman with the doctorate in physiology who stood in as birthing coach. The midwife. The doula, a woman I may never meet whose role as I understand it was to operate somewhere between coach and midwife. Jen, the friend who accompanied Anneliese on a journey to Guatemala after the pregnancy became known. And, in a nod to the men, Ryan, a friend of the group who paced the halls during the birth, which turned dangerously difficult, with Anneliese in surgery and too weak to stand for days.

  But all those fierce women. When I see a few of them around the table today, I don’t feel I’ve missed anything, but rather that I am being allowed something and had better pay attention. When Anneliese came home from the hospital, there were these women to help her. But it was she who did the feedings, she who went back to work, and she who prepared and delivered the defense of her master’s thesis on poetry as a form of shamanism based on the Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak’abal. Cumulatively this reminds me for the forty-seventh time that I shouldn’t do all the talking.

  I’ve read the thesis with its references to innate purpose and hexagonal shapes as an image of humans as the center between worlds, and after balancing it with images of Anneliese still in high school, bucking hay bales for the neighbors, or feeding her stepfather’s cows, or handpicking another truckload of his onions back in what would become difficult days and her mom would move away, and I am forewarned that I am not in the company of someone who feels the need to hang on my every word. When she still had Amy in her belly she climbed a Guatemalan volcano in the dark and stared at the lava below. Sometimes it is good for me to look at the two of them together and think of that.

  A little voice inside me is saying the man who sets out to celebrate womanhood and its constituency is waltzing through a minefield set in quicksand. Good intentions lead to woman-warrior overrevving or patriarchal head-patting. Contradictory elements abound. The man moved by a Natalie Merchant video to consider all womanhood is by no means inoculated against the booty of Sir Mix-a-Lot. Anneliese captures me with her character and spirit, but I am not blind to the way she walks. Having gallumphed the streets of Manhattan and felt my heart stricken every six feet based on nothing more than mystery and outward appearance, it seems carnality is ridiculous and essential. Rare and wearisome is the fully emancipated man. Our only hope is to be judged on the balance of our actions. Sometimes the power of a woman is no more ineffable than a mallet. Shortly after my first date with Anneliese, a woman who had come to know us both in separate circumstance sent me a firm note that concluded with a time-honored blessing: Try not to screw it up!!!

  Once I was in a moderately fancy lakeside restaurant dining with a woman who to this day can post reasonable doubts about my character when a couple in a simple aluminum fishing boat docked and took a table. They were both middle-aged, both wearing discount store tennies and appliqué sweatshirts (an eagle on hers, a buck deer on his), both a little chunky, and both sunburned in a manner that suggested this was their one week off and, by God, they were gonna fish. They studied their menus in silence, and when the waitress came by, they spoke so softly and returned the menus so meekly it was as if they had not ordered but asked permission. From their dress to their demeanor, they were not one whit demonstrative. Then the woman turned for her purse and wiped out her water glass. The clatter and splash cut through all the jabber and you had that pause in the action when all heads turn, then the rhythm of the room resumed. The woman stared at her place mat, her sunburn heightened by a red flush. And right then that man leaned over and put one arm around her shoulders and gave her the softest little kiss on the cheek.

  I have been trying to live up to that man ever since.

  On my next trip to the shop, the weather has gone cold, and the building
has the feel of a clubhouse again, muffled in warmth. I do a lot of miscellaneous things: put nuts on the taillight studs, clamp the taillight brackets to the bed so Mark can weld them in place, take a wire brush to the floor of the cab to prepare it for repainting. The speedometer has never worked, so I slide under the truck on the creeper and detach the cable where it inserts in the transmission. By fiddling with it I can get the odometer to spin, but the speedometer needle doesn’t budge. Intending to rob the speedometer off the L-180, I find that the indicator needle on that unit is missing completely. Honestly, what good is a speedometer in an International? If I get caught speeding I should get a little plaque or something. Before I leave Mark comes in and we lift the detached bed into place on the frame. He finished trimming the fenders last week, and the truck looks more nimble. It’s not, of course, but it looks good. “The entirely new fender line,” wrote Raymond Loewy after streamlining his 1943 Caddy, “visually seemed to lengthen the body and provide a feeling of speed.” Yeah, buddy.

  Mark says he’s about ready to paint the thing. We’re getting there.

  I have had the opportunity to watch the women of my family move through the days of their children dying, and within this circumstance beyond all others seems to lie the very paradoxical essence of womanhood. That fierce and mysterious capacity for life, hamstrung by its one great vulnerability: love. To see a strong woman living beyond the death of her child is to see all women living and grieving in this man’s world. One night while driving in the rain far from home and after midnight, I was listening to Patty Griffin sing her live version of “Mary,” a song she wrote for her grandmother. In the chorus, Jesus kisses his mother, tells her he cannot stay, and then, as he goes flying to the heavens, Griffin’s voice soars into the line, “the angels are singing his praises in a blaze of glory.” Griffin draws her voice inward now, breathing out the final line with weariness and resolve:

  Mary stays behind and starts cleanin’ up the place…

  It is the history of womankind in a single line. I flashed on images of my mother and my grandmothers beside caskets holding their children and sometimes their men. I pulled over for a while, played the song twice more, and hoped the tears on my cheeks would count for reverence.

  CHAPTER 11

  OCTOBER

  IT WAS RECENTLY my duty to describe my left testicle to a strange woman over the telephone, a privilege for which some men would pay upward of $3.95 a minute, but which I found discomfiting, although markedly less so than the moment when I sat in a paneled office beneath a stuffed deer head and described that same testicle to my insurance agent, Stan. Talk about your festival of averted gazes. Stan bent to his paperwork with all the diligence of a first grader determined to win a blue ribbon in penmanship, crossing and recrossing his t’s, carefully scribing each loop and line, no doubt desperate to get everything right the first time, terrified he might have to repeat this little sharing session of ours. I felt bad for him. There was a palpable sense of him yearning to talk fender benders. When we moved on to discuss the blind spot in my left eye, he sagged with relief.

  The deal is, the damage is adding up. Here on the cusp of forty, I am daily grateful for my health and do not for one minute request special pleading. Still: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. One hesitates to sully Yeats with equations to my nascent gout, but with each little hitch and failure, the message is: you are in possession of a machine programmed to self-destruct. I used to have weird dreams about my teeth coming loose; now I have weird dreams about my crowns coming loose. In addition to the eye and the testicle (specifically, its benign epididymal cyst, otherwise known as a lump), my inventory includes sand in the gears of my neck (I find myself checking blind spots in traffic by pullinghalf a chin-up on the steering wheel and then rotating my cranium, neck and shoulders as a single unit) (very little-old-man), a frayed rotator cuff, persistent tinnitus, hyperacusis, a world-record kidney stone, transient numbness of the left leg, a partially detached clavicle, a little click in my thumb that has lingered since I jammed it in someone’s shoulder pads during a Friday night football game in roughly 1982, and yes, here lately, in both big toes but particularly the right, the first twinges of uric acid accumulation.

  I have been purchasing my own health insurance since 1992, and for years I put my faith in luck and youth and covered myself with a high-deductible catastrophic medical-surgical policy. When my left eye went goofy in 2000, the tests and treatments left my savings pretty much tapped, and I decided it was time to upgrade. I quickly discovered that my faulty left eye and irregular left testicle made potential insurers scarce. One company simply ignored my inquiries. Another rejected me outright. I remember when I read that letter, I got a cold little clench in my gut. I imagined my eye growing darker, or my liver failing, or some red-light-running yahoo taking a bead on my femur. Based on extrapolations from the invoices for my eye, I did the math and got this vision of my sturdy old house, my savings, and my used Chevy spinning down a drain.

  Stan had handled my car insurance for years, so I made an appointment and told him of my troubles. He submitted an application to a Major Insurance Company and shepherded it through, which led to my telephone conversation with the nice lady. A few days after that heartfelt exchange, Stan called with good news. I had been approved by the Major Insurance Company. Mostly. “You’ll have to sign a rider,” said Stan, quietly. “One for your eye, and…and…and one for…”

  “I understand,” I said. Poor guy. I drove to his office and signed the paperwork, including two “Special Exception Rider” forms that drastically limited coverage of my left eye and any complications related to the cyst. Having done their own math, the Major Insurance Company wanted no part of those parts of me. I was surprised at how easy it was to make the trade-off. During my health insurance search, I read consumer literature that said you should never accept a policy with riders, but I was ready to deal. A friend told me that when it comes right down to it, you’d give your left nut to have some health insurance. On a related matter, should you ever join me in a bar brawl, you will note that I lead with my right.

  My truck and my garden will languish this month, because I am on a book tour that has me on the road all but two days in October. It helps to know that we got such a freeze on the first day of the month that the cucumbers are done for good. I will miss duck hunting and rutabaga season and six or seven lamentable metaphors spawned by the falling leaves, but book tour is an all-expenses-paid scavenger hunt in which you run around the country attempting to collect the items on your list: bookstores, radio stations, public access television stations in the back of tire shops, hotel rooms, rental car return lots, departure gates, coffee, small towns in Michigan. Your life boils down to showing up to yap. But I am well taken care of, the people I meet run to the high end of well-read and pleasant, and I collect miscellaneous anecdotes. A literary escort in Kentucky once told me she knew she had moved to a small town when the editor of the community weekly—unable to send a photographer to cover a local wedding—simply dropped the newspaper camera off at the reception and asked the family to return it with a few decent shots. She added that soon after her arrival in that same town, she had car trouble. A man strolled over and helped her get the vehicle running. She took his name, gave him twenty bucks, and wrote a letter to the local newspaper lauding his sterling character. In the letter she said she assumed that this man’s actions spoke to the character of the town in general, and that as a newcomer, she was thrilled to be part of such a community and would do her best to maintain the standard of conduct. Her letter was published on the back page. On the front page was an article describing how the man in question had taken the twenty bucks, bought beer, got drunk, and stole a truck.

  The term literary escort has always struck me as sounding simultaneously high-brow and naughty. Synonyms for literary escort cumulatively include wrangler, restaurant critic, psychiatrist, race car driver, smooth operator, expediter, ego polisher, brilliant conversationalist, s
ilent partner, procurement artist, navigator, parking savant, and restroom locater. Plus they fill a seat at readings. I spend the majority of my book tours running solo, during which time I am perpetually sweaty, late, lost, nervous, tired, lost, late, and furthermore sweaty. But occasionally if I am in a big city or at a large event, the publisher arranges an escort, and suddenly book tour becomes a day spa. A good literary escort shaves fifteen points off your systolic blood pressure. Above all, they know where everything is. I can spend a full day hammering around San Francisco and make maybe one radio interview and two bookstores. With a literary escort, I just sit in the passenger seat and get delivered. We go from bookstore to bookstore without pause. The best literary escorts have the same sort of ineffable cool I usually associate with old-school television gumshoes. Once in Chicago I was being taken to a downtown radio station by a legendary escort I shall call Bill. There wasn’t a parking spot in sight. Bill eased up to the curb of a major high-tone hotel. This was clearly a No Parking zone. As we exited the car an immaculately uniformed doorman approached. I got the usual law-abiding flop sweats. Bill strode ahead of me, and as the two men passed, their hands met briefly. The doorman gave Bill a collegial nod, and we were on our way. And to this day Bill remains one of the coolest guys I know, because midway through some story in some bar somewhere, Bill can lower his beer glass coolly and say, in all truth and without batting an eye: