Truck

by Michael Perry

  Eleven days into the tour, I am in St. Paul. Amy and Anneliese are driving over to visit me. I have several afternoon events, but my evening is free. I am alone in the hotel room when I hear Amy’s little knock on the door. It is like Christmas when she runs in and jumps into my arms. Anneliese follows and we all hug. It is an oasis of an evening. We all cluster on the bed and watch Daddy Day Care. My publisher sent over some treats including a chocolate-covered strawberry so big Amy has to attack it apple-style. Later, when Amy is asleep on the guest bed, Anneliese and I sit shoulder to shoulder. I give her the Quirkyalone T-shirt and we both look over the book. We are relieved to find there has been a category established for Quirky togethers.

  In the morning we have time for a quick walk across the Wabasha Street Bridge. Anneliese and I sit on the green grass of Raspberry Island while Amy stands at the center of the Schubert Club Heilmaier Memorial Bandstand and gives three rousing renditions of the ABC’s. The bandstand is a clean wooden plane set beneath a glass and steel arc, a perfect frame within which Amy sings, “…next time won’t you sing along with meee!” and then steps forward to curtsy. When the courtesy van pulled away from the hotel twenty minutes later and I saw them hand in hand, walking for their car in the sun, I had a taste of what it is to love someone so deeply you are terrified for them to be walking the face of the dangerous world. When the jet planed out at 35,000 feet and set course for Chicago, we were well over Wisconsin and the sky was so clear I could trace the highways below northward to where a flat collection of squares clustered on the vanishing point of the horizon: New Auburn. Surreal, in the midst of a month like this to look out a plane window and see your hometown. It felt all the farther away for being within sight. By nightfall, I was hailing a taxi in Pennsylvania. Anneliese and I have been together six months now.

  All things are relative to a point, and then they are a concrete block to the face. My niggling infirmities likely point to nothing more profound than standard progression. Shoot, even if you lose an eye, you’ve got another eye. My friend Ozzie, on the other hand, is permanently excused from all equanimous waffling. “People ask me, ‘How’d you get in a wheelchair?’” he says, “So I give’em the short version. I tell’em I was on my honeymoon and I got in a car accident.”

  Ozzie is a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic. He cannot breathe on his own, and he has no movement or feeling from his chin down. He can run his electric wheelchair by blowing and sucking on a straw, but he needs a nurse at his side twenty-four hours a day. And since he lives pretty much in the middle of nowhere over in the county next to mine, help can be hard to find. I was nervous when I first started working for him in October of 1997. When we talked on the phone I explained that while I still had my RN license, I hadn’t worked in a hospital setting for years. He said I’d be fine. Later, I came to realize that Ozzie’s definition of “nurse” was not as hidebound as that held by those uncompromising sticklers down at the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing. The folks I met coming on and off shifts ran heavy to tattoos and probation. Ozzie called more than once to see if I could cover at the last minute until his scheduled nurse made bail. The parade of friends that came and went covered the spectrum from trucker to biker, and I mean to include the men as well. You haven’t really explored the outer limits of health care until you’ve watched a Hell’s Angel suction a tracheostomy tube. I was, as it turned out, undersized and overqualified.

  Ozzie was a gearhead. Since the day he could drive, he ran hard. “I always thought of myself as a good driver, but I was definitely a lead-foot and liked the speed.” When he joined the army out of high school and shipped out to Germany, he got hooked on the autobahn. “Speed is nothing over there. It’s just a normal everyday thing, to drive fast. I wouldn’t call it reckless. Just something you became accustomed to, driving back and forth to work. I was always running eighty to ninety miles an hour.” Ironic, then, that when he finally wrecked, he was going 30 miles an hour with his seat belt on.

  “I met my wife-to-be in Houston on February 18, 1988. We hit it off right away.” Ozzie had been shipped home from Germany and was now stationed at Fort Bliss. “In January of 1989, I reenlisted for another two years, and that year went smooth, and we ended up getting married in July. She already had a son.”

  When Ozzie talks, his sentences are filled with stops and starts. He has to speak to the rhythm of his ventilator, has to pause while his lungs are forced full of air, then say what he can in the time it takes the air to flow back out. People—especially on the phone—are always cutting him off, thinking he has finished or lost his train of thought. He is the victim of serial interruptions. Even when he laughs, he laughs in silence until the air reverses direction. It is as if he is force-fed an ellipsis every five seconds.

  “We got married in Texas. Spent the night in the Radisson. The honeymoon suite. The next afternoon I packed up the car, and the next morning we left for Wisconsin.” Ozzie made the trip in a day and a half. “Drove straight through, in my old Gran Prix. My mother threw a reception for us, at the Lucky Lady in Cameron. Invited all my friends.” He had enough leave so he and his wife could spend a couple weeks in Wisconsin, and while he was nosing around, he came across an old Ford Bronco with a FOR SALE sign on it. “The body was pretty well rusted out. The drive train and the running gear, there was no problem with that. It started right up and went down the road straight.” This is what you call a “beater.” A disposable vehicle. You run into trouble with a beater, you just get another beater.

  “I was towing it to Texas behind the Gran Prix. We took a shortcut on this old country road between highways. The road was very rough. I got in the back, in the Bronco, to keep it going straight down the road, and hit a pothole. The tie rod broke, and the vehicle flipped up on its side, and the roof of the vehicle hit me on the back of the head and broke my neck. I was going about thirty miles an hour. The seat belt broke loose and threw me in the ditch. This feeling of numbness ran through my whole body. And it was a bizarre feeling, like my foot had gone numb, and yet it was my whole body.

  “My wife run up to me. She said, ‘C’mon Oz, get up, you’re all right.’ She thought I was playing. I was a kidder, y’know.

  “My last words was, ‘I can’t breathe.’ And that was all I could get out.”

  He says he remembers it was a bright sunny day because he had to squint at the sky, and he remembers lying on his back and hearing a car approach, and hearing the sound of running feet, and then the sunlight narrowed and went black. He remembers waking once to the feeling of strong wind on his face and the noise of a helicopter and then nothing again. Then he remembers being in midair, and a man in a helmet leaning in to say Hang in there and then, again, nothing.

  “The next time I woke up I was on a table. This nurse was saying, ‘What is your name?’ And I couldn’t say anything. But I kept mouthing the word Ozzie. Then I finally tried to tell her Look at my arm, look at my arm. And she kept saying, ‘No, what is your name!’ She didn’t get it—my name is tattooed on my arm. Then I heard a drill-like sound in my skull. They put ice-pick traction on my head to stretch out my neck.” He blacked out again. “The next time I woke up I was on this turning bed in a private room with about a dozen machines all around me beeping and flashing and blinking.”

  When his hair is long and his beard is full, Ozzie resembles your standard midwestern Jesus. That is, if Jesus played a lot of Judas Priest on a sound system with speakers the size of twin doghouses. He controls everything in the room—the lights, the television, the stereo, the louvers on his skylight, the telephone—with a straw positioned at his lips. The first time I took care of him, he sent me out to get the mail. His mailbox is at the end of a relatively long driveway, and I asked if it was okay to leave him alone. He grinned and blew a code into his straw. The two speakers at the foot of his bed began to pulse, and in no time you could feel the floor joists trembling. The speakers were at about a quarter volume. “If you see the roof bouncing,” he said, �
�get back in here.”

  He spent three weeks in the hospital. Early on, his Wisconsin family was told to hustle down because the doctors weren’t sure he’d make it. After three weeks, he was transferred to an army hospital. Ozzie says the hospital was small and they didn’t seem to know what to do with him. Within three weeks he was transferred to a rehabilitation facility in California. During his admission physical, doctors discovered thirteen open skin ulcers, three requiring surgical repair.

  He spent fourteen months in rehab. Says he lost a little over a hundred pounds from a six-foot-two frame that weighed barely two hundred pounds to begin with. His wife and his mother fought over his care. “I asked my mom to go home, to let me be, because I am a married man now,” he says. “She was heartbroken. I know they both wanted the best for me. I told her I loved her and I’d see her again soon after I got settled.”

  In November 1990, he went home to Houston with his wife. She had rented a home, obtained a van with a lift, and assembled all the necessary medical supplies. When Ozzie returned, it was to a warm welcome from his new in-laws. “But that house wasn’t wheel-chair accessible at all,” he says. “Very tight corners, very hard to maneuver. I did some damage there.”

  By June he knew it was over. “I tried to make things work with me and my wife. She tried so hard to take care of me. And her mom and dad helped out, but they could only do so much. Every day she would break down crying. She was crying day in and day out the whole time. She did a lot of drinking. But so was I at the time. She would give it to me, or my friends would give it to me when they came by. We had a drinking problem.

  “One time I was watching VH1 and this girl came on in a video and I said to my wife that’s a neat song and she just lost it. She said, Oh, you just like the girl. I said no I don’t care for the girl, I just like the song. To change the subject I asked my wife if she’d scratch my eyebrow. She said why don’t you have that girl scratch it for you. Joking, I said, I would, but she’s not here in the room with us. She slammed a Bible on my chest and stormed out.

  “I wasn’t being turned side to side, wasn’t getting my bladder drained because at night she wouldn’t wake up. The alcohol, I’m sure. She was sleeping on the floor the whole time near my bed. She refused to get her own bed or share a bed with me.”

  He pauses for a moment. “Her story would probably be different.”

  Sometimes I wonder what Ozzie used to sound like. Just as the length of his sentences are dictated by the pulse of his ventilator, so is the tone of his voice. He has to speak with the air he is given. We had known each other five years before the day he told me the whole story of his injury. We were sitting on his back deck, and the whole time his voice never changed timbre. Not even when one of his nurses—in jail, the last we heard—showed up going 90 miles an hour on meth and went into a mad dancing rage. He stood ten feet from Ozzie, threatening violence and ranting about a chain saw. He had it in his head that Oz had turned him in for his last offense, never mind that every sheriff’s deputy who had worked for the county more than twenty minutes probably knew him by first name, last name, and middle initial. He was spewing out paranoid threats so rapid-fire he was actually casting spittle. I moved a little closer to Oz in case the guy lunged, but I won’t lie, I was terrified. Just as suddenly, the madman spun on his heel, jumped in his truck, and peeled out of the driveway. I couldn’t get over how calm Oz had been. Then I realized he had no way of acting otherwise. Ozzie rarely complains, but he did say once that he counts among his frustrations the fact that when he is angry with someone, he has to talk to them the same as if he were asking for a glass of milk. He longs, sometimes, to yell.

  Back in Houston, Ozzie said he wasn’t getting bathed properly. He was missing more meals and starting to lose weight again. The drinking was getting worse. He says he would hear friends and once his pastor come to the door, and his wife would tell them he was sick or sleeping and couldn’t see them. Friends would call and she wouldn’t put him on the phone. When he was first in the rehabilitation unit, someone told him that only one in five hundred people survive an injury as high up the spine as his, and he says his first thought was Well, that’s too bad for the next 499. But now he believed he had more than a marriage problem. He believed he was going to be neglected to death.

  “She let me talk to my mother on the phone once, and when she left the room I managed to tell my mom I had to get out. We set it up where I got a nurse to take care of me. I told my wife to take the boy to church that morning, and my mom and her husband and some friends were waiting around the corner with a van. They hauled me out and put me on a mattress in the back of the van. Everything else of mine they put in a Budget truck. My mom left a note for my mother-in-law.

  “Then we headed’er home.”

  From Pennsylvania the tour has taken me to New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and a fair swath of Michigan. I have had three hours of sleep and been up since 4 A.M. when I come down an escalator in the Detroit airport and wind up eye to eye with a friend I haven’t seen for over a year. He’s in from Seattle with another long-lost mutual friend, and we’re all three flying to Madison, Wisconsin. On the same flight, as it turns out. The plane is nearly empty, so we cluster up and chatter until we land, then debark and go our separate ways.

  A week of touring remains, but it’s fun to be in Madison. I’m here for the Wisconsin Book Festival and it feels like a home-turf time-out. Best of all, I’ll be here for three days, and as soon as she finishes her last class, Anneliese is making the three-hour drive down so we can sneak part of a weekend. At the hotel, I see another basket of flowers and goodies including a bottle of wine, and I think, wow, my publisher is really laying it on, although the wine is a little strange since they don’t know Anneliese is coming and they do know I don’t drink. I unpack my things and then, although I am scruffy and travelworn and need a shower and shave, I set off for downtown with the idea that I will get a card and flowers.

  Just off State Street, I find the flowers and get a card, then begin the walk back. It’s sunny but crisp, and I am wearing a heavy, oversized sweater over my T-shirt. I am scuffing along in my steel-toed boots and approaching a residential intersection when I spot a large Ford Explorer approaching from the left. A college boy in a backward baseball cap is at the wheel. He is coming from a feeder street and has a stop sign, so I am half into the crosswalk when I see him looking at me, then up the street, then back at me, then up the street the other way, and I realize he is doing math. Calculating speeds and vectors. He’s going to shoot the stop sign, I’m thinking, when Brrrrmmmm! that’s exactly what he does. We’ve made eye contact twice, so this isn’t an issue of him not seeing me. The front wheels just miss my boots, and he is so close I can feel the push of the air moving off the quarter panels. His venal disregard for my safety in the interest of divesting himself of five seconds at the stop sign triggers something in me. The rear quarter panel of the Explorer is right there, passing a foot in front of me, so I just haul off and kick it as hard as I can.

  It makes a delightful whomp.

  He does a brake stand, stops dead smack across the centerline, and whips his head around. I am panicking at what I have gone and done, but he doesn’t know that, so I give him my best deranged hillbilly glare from beneath my ominous unibrow. I think it helps that I haven’t shaved, but in the end I think what really sends him on his way is me clutching that big bouquet of flowers. He snaps his head around to the front, tromps the gas so hard pure springwater flushes out the tailpipe, and speeds off to whatever keg party it is he’s late for.

  I pause for a cleansing breath and walk on. I am ashamed and elated.

  Anneliese and I sneak two wonderful days, going to readings, dining with writers and book folks, and walking hand in hand up and down State Street. When I got back to the hotel after kicking the car, I had time to clean up before Anneliese arrived, and it felt grand to open the door and welcome her into the room. After we sat and talked and caught up for a while, I
asked her if she wanted anything from the goodie basket, in particular, the wine. She looked at me quizzically. “Who is it from?”

  “My publisher, I suppose,” I said.

  “Did you look at the card?” she asked.

  “Um, no.”

  “Well you might want to look at the card.”

  I opened the miniature envelope and pulled out the miniature card. It was from Anneliese. To celebrate six months, she had written. She also mentioned the future. When I looked up, she was smiling, but she had one eyebrow cocked. “Check the wine,” she said. It was nonalcoholic.

  We had the wine then, and talked about that future, and how at six months it seems like six years in a good way, and then we talked about maybe one day having chickens. It always comes back to chickens. Then she drove home and I flew to Kansas City.

  Out on his deck there, overlooking the old farmstead where he now lives, Ozzie said the doctors at the little army hospital told his wife he had two good years to live. The doctors at the rehabilitation facility said ten. He’s made it to sixteen. “Three-quarters of the guys I went through rehab with are dead now,” he says. “And they had lower-level injuries. They could use their arms and hands and stuff, which I guess when you look back on it might be worse, because that’s how they took their sleeping pills. To finish themselves.”

  Ozzie and I have had this talk: I’ve told him sometimes I think of myself in that bed, crazy for someone to itch my eyebrow, and I tell him I’m not sure I wouldn’t ask that same person to give me the sleeping pills. I imagine what he feels to be akin to all-consuming claustrophobia, and I think I might be too weak to take it. More than once, after I’ve finished suctioning an obstruction from his trachea (a process he endures many, many times a day, and which is absolutely essential to keep him alive but puts him through choking fits of coughing every time), I will be heading for the trash with the gloves and used tubing when I will hear a soft clicking noise. It’s Ozzie, using his tongue to make a soft tsk-tsktsk against the back of his teeth. He teaches you this one your first day on the job. It’s his signal that you’ve forgotten to reattach his ventilator tube. He can’t scream, he can’t grab you by the neck, he can’t stick a boot in your terminally forgetful ass the way he ought to, he just has to patiently click. “I don’t have any fear of dying anymore,” he says. “I’ve had a couple close calls where my tubing’s come apart and I’ve had to wait at the most maybe two minutes. Just because a nurse might’ve gone to the mailbox. I just kind of accept that when my time comes, it’s not within my control.