Truck

by Michael Perry

  You become privy to the incremental expansion of a brain. I am running an errand with Amy in the car seat behind me when she asks me for a drink. I dig out a bottle of orange juice. Orange juice is her favorite, and at the sight of it, she hugs herself joyfully and says, “Hug, hug, hug!” A few blocks later I check her in the rearview mirror. She is regarding the bottle intently, and then suddenly she looks up, and her face radiates light. “Hey…there’s orange…and there’s orange!” I think it is not insignificant to be present the moment a child discovers that a word—and therefore the world—has more than one meaning.

  However sustained the angelic phases, a child is not a Christmas ornament. The capacity for plotting and duplicity seems to come in with that first set of teeth. When my brother Jed remarried, he, too, gained a daughter. Sienna is a few months younger than Amy. The two have become fast friends, usually greeting each other with a full-on sprint to hug. Someday the kinetic energy of their affection will cost one of them a tooth. Recently my car was in the shop, and Jed drove me in to pick it up. We had previously arranged a sleepover for Amy and Sienna, so I put Amy and her Barbie backpack in the car with us, and when Jed dropped me at the repair shop, Amy stayed with him and rode to the farm. She had recently developed the blatant habit of asking for other people’s possessions: dolls, toy horses, paring knives, futons…whatever struck her fancy. So we’d been working on this, explaining to her that polite guests do not demand gifts. Later, Jed told me that as soon as I exited the car, Amy leaned forward in her safety seat and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “I have a secret to tell you.”

  “Yes?” said Jed.

  “When we get to your house.”

  “Oh-kaaay…,” said Jed, not sure what family lid was about to be popped. The rest of the drive passed genially, and by the time they reached the farm, he figured she had forgotten. But as he bent to unsnap her seat belt, she leaned to his ear, and in the gravest of whispers, said, “If there’s anything you don’t want…I’ll take it.”

  I will do my best, which is to say it might be good to start interviewing child therapists immediately. If she trips and falls while chasing her ball, I raise one finger to the sky and declare, “Quoth the Apostle Mark…” and she will chime in “Walk it off!” Or she will be whining about taking her dish to the sink and I will say, “Zero…” and she will say, “…whinage!” We have also worked up a little act where I load my pocket with invisible dog treats and she goes through this whole production: fetching, rolling over, playing dead. For the big finale I balance an invisible treat on her nose and at the snap of my fingers she snatches it from the air. One day when she comprehends what I have done, I will provide her with the 1-800 number for county social services and take my punishment.

  The truck is all but ready to hit the road. After switching the system over from six to twelve volts, Mark has run into all kinds of trouble with the peripheral elements of the electrical system. The engine runs fine, but anything attached to a wire is gone nutty. My dad has quite a bit of electrical experience, and he and Mark recently spent an entire day trying to ferret out the gremlins. I was not called in, because I remain firmly in the camp of those who believe that electricity is magic. After a full day’s work, they managed to eliminate the majority of problems, but a few remained. Dad called me from the shop.

  “The right turn signal works,” he said.

  “Great!” I said.

  “The left one doesn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “It makes the headlights flash.”

  “Ah.”

  “But if you switch the headlights off, then it works fine.”

  I thought about this a moment. “Well, there is some good news.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have a left arm. I can hand-signal.”

  “Yes, but the bad news is, you’ll only need the hand signal after dark, when your headlights are on. Whoever’s following you won’t be able to see your arm.”

  I can hear Mark in the background. “We could get him one of those reflective bracelets…”

  I dreaded the idea of picking out rings, and was relieved when Anneliese found her great-grandmother’s wedding ring in a drawer and decided to wear that. It is a slim strip of gold with a flat chip of diamond and speaks to me of simplicity and devotion from another age.

  My ring—your standard gold band—was given to me by a friend. He wore it for the duration of his relatively brief, or perhaps overlong, first marriage. While standing in the presence of his second wife, I wondered aloud if we were fooling with dire karma here. Think of it as a gift from the kindest, most loyal man I have ever known, she said.

  She also said, That first bimbo didn’t count.

  Glory be, today is the day. The International takes the road. Mark and I are prepared for our first ride, and we are goofy in our glee. We have agreed to keep the first trip simple, and also agree that Farm & Fleet is the only suitable destination. At my request, Mark will take the wheel for the first trip out. This is a matter of honor. If not for him, the truck would be half an inch deeper in my driveway by now, with foxtail sprouting out the wheel wells. Working beside him has been a rare privilege. To watch his hands, to see the way he sizes things up, to see him move forward, make cuts in a blank sheet of steel that would have me dithering for days. More than once I have seen him suss out a problem by looking back and forth from the vintage service manual and the part in question until the image in his head overlaps with the one on the page, and every time I wonder what it feels like to be wired that way. It has also been fun to watch him adapt as a father. I note that up there on the workbench between the Chilton manual and Motorcycle Basics, I can now see the spine of the Giant Coloring and Activity Book, and over on the floor beside the unfinished sawmill, a multicolored plastic pipe wrench.

  We climb in and pull the doors shut. I never tire of the way the latches click, a tight sound that transmits solidly throughout the steel cab. The old truck starts nicely. When it’s cold, you have to choke it pretty good, then ease the choke in and the idle out a tad. The Silver Diamond sound is there, sewing machine on the treble end, trucky rumble on the low end, and a touch of midrange putt-putt. Mark guides the gear selector leftward and forward to first gear, and then, pressing the accelerator as he releases the clutch, puts us on our way.

  We go grinding up the road. I coach him on how to double clutch, which makes me proud. Like the left-handed threads all those months ago, I am tickled with this rare chance to educate him about something mechanical. Over on the passenger side I mime-shift, working my clutch foot back and forth in the air and pressing the invisible gas pedal flat to the floor. Mark mirrors my act, and with a little grind here and there, we are rumbling on our way. Gosh, it’s good to hear the old engine spinning, to see the blacktop slipping under the inverted prow of the hood. The old truck is rolling again, rolling down the road.

  Three miles from the house we pull into a corner gas station. Mark pumps the gas while I walk in to pay, and the first person I encounter, this stocky guy wearing an American Breeders Service ball cap, says, “That a ’forty-eight International?”

  “’Fifty-one,” I say.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, “my old man had one like that, but I think it was a ’forty-eight.”

  We pull back onto the short stretch of four lane that runs between Cameron and Rice Lake and Mark works up through the gears until the old six-cylinder is roaring and the cab is thrumming with the vibration of the road. The rubber tires are out of round from sitting so long, and the whump-whump-whump feeds up through the suspension. At the first stoplight in town, Mark looks over at me and says, “This is so cool.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “and it would be even cooler if we weren’t grinning like dorks fresh off the farm.”

  We pull into Farm & Fleet and park in the middle of the lot. We walk off toward the store but keep stopping to turn back and admire the truck. It’s a wonder we don’t clothesline ourselves on the cart corral. The yellow p
arking-lot stripes draw out the green paint beautifully. Parked on the level over the clean asphalt plane, the truck looks trim and lively. All that old steel, looking almost coltish. Cutting back the fenders and pulling the running boards was the right move.

  We pick up some odds and ends in Farm & Fleet—including one last bag of wintergreen lozenges—and then it’s my turn to drive. It’s like easing back into an old familiar chair. It’s thrilling the way the muscle memory takes over, how the hand-eye-foot coordination maps are still in the brain, waiting to be accessed like a digital file. My arm weaves the out-of-gear-into-gear movement of the shift lever in between the double-pump motion of my clutch leg. In between gears, I find myself resting my right palm atop the shift knob just the way I used to. Mark and I just keep grinning. It really is getting silly. We take the cure at Twenty-third Avenue, where I have to hang a left across the median and two lanes of oncoming traffic, at which point an air bubble in the brake fluid works itself out of the line and when I push the pedal it slaps straight to the floor like stomping a puffball and we remain at speed. “Hang on!” I tell Mark, as I pogo my foot up and down on the brake pedal, trying to drum up the least bit of resistance to our momentum. “Pres-stop four-wheel hydraulic brakes…” it says in the brochure back there on the bench in the shop, “…safe, easy stops with less pressure required of the driver!” I am already partially into the turn and there are cars coming in the opposite lanes, but I figure I can either beat them or put my faith in our four-point racing harnesses and jump a small embankment into the grassy ditch of the median. In the end I calculate our vector on the fly and figure we can thread the needle. I flatten the accelerator and we careen through the median at a severe tilt, shooting across both lanes and, seeing no reason to slow, I keep my foot in it as we straighten and head up the road to home and at some point I notice the wheels have rounded out and are rolling smoothly.

  We ease up to the shop and head straight for the old truck manual, opening it at the tab that says Brake System, then turn to section A, page 3, “Bleeding the Lines.” Gonna, as Mark says, wanna get right on that.

  Anneliese and I are attending an abbreviated version of premarital counseling. Frankly, this was not my idea. When Anneliese first broached the subject, I got quease-inducing images of us sitting criss-cross applesauce and peering at each other’s retinas whilst playing patty-cake across a tub of potpourri. Meanwhile, off in the corner, you’d have some gauzy guru whacking your chakra. The whole concept clashed with my staunch sense of by-gum do-it-yerselfness, never mind that after two decades of captaining my own love boat I was batting a thousand on shipwrecks. When I heard that Anneliese’s mother was behind the counseling idea, I got the message.

  Our adviser is the Reverend Virginia Johnson of the Unitarian Universalist Church. We are not members of the church, but we have attended a few services, during which Reverend Virginia preached charity and reason, themes I welcome regardless of denomination. Anneliese and I desire a thoughtful third party with no partiality for either of us, so Reverend Virginia seemed a good choice. During our first session, she had us share the story of how we met. Any happy couple welcomes this opportunity, and I assume a perceptive observer can glean much from how the story is told, from who dominates the narration to who jumps in to correct whom, how often, and with what level of politesse. Meanwhile, the nonverbal reactions accrue.

  After a review of our respective family histories we were left alone to complete the Premarital Personal And Relationship Evaluation (a clunky name designed to serve the cutesy acronym PREPARE; the eradication of such forced alphabetical mash-ups is a dream of mine). Because Amy is in the picture, we were assigned the Marriage with Children version. There were 165 multiple-choice questions, each answer represented by a small circle. I selected my circles carefully, scribbling them in thoroughly with a No. 2 pencil, as if my college admission depended on it.

  You could tell the interrogation was written up by professionals. Every domestic eventuality was checked off—from kids to dishes, from sex to checkbook. But more to the point, the same question was often posed three or four ways, a sly little trick designed to forestall fudging. Reverend Virginia had told us we were not to speak or consult, and we kept our word, but every now and then one of us would read a question and snort or chuckle, usually because the question covered something we had already hashed out. When the last dot was darkened, we handed in our papers and scooted off to the car and began comparing answers. I suspect the most valuable element of the test may be the conversation that takes place during the ride home.

  For our concluding session, we meet Reverend Virginia at a sidewalk café. Over a mocha she reports that our relationship scored as Very Dynamic—which for some inane reason makes me think of the relationship between self-improvement evangelist Tony Robbins and his Super Large Teeth. Reverend Virginia says for all but two categories our scores were synchronous across the board. She gives us the favor of a smile when we correctly predict the two divergent categories: spirituality and—shorthand version here—a couple of loose ends in the family planning department. Biggies. But Reverend Virginia digs to the root of each, pressing us as necessary. In the end she gives us her blessing, comfortable that each understands where the other stands, and that we have established a mutual middle ground. I went into this process suspicious that clinical examination of the fundamentals might take some of the shine off. Instead, I depart feeling more than ever that Anneliese and I are walking shoulder to shoulder. No guarantees, no end in sight, but four good tires and a clear windshield.

  I attribute the sweet gravity of the experience to Reverend Virginia’s steady hand. We are being advised here not by some cloistral naïf armed with platitudes and well-intended dogma, but rather someone who speaks from a breadth of experience regarding the complications and joy of sworn commitment. For thirty years she and her partner have tended heart and hearth. In sickness and in health, the whole works. They have raised two children, who in turn have given Virginia grandchildren. Virginia has said nothing to us, but I know the rest of her story, which is that this partner of hers is a woman whose health insurance she may not share. This places our coffee klatch in a frame of tin-plated irony indeed.

  In the essay “Bewildered Snowflakes, We All Are,” Annie Dillard writes, Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. I believe this. There is the banal but relevant question of the woman who loves and outlives two husbands. In the beginning, I used Dillard’s line against the idea of marriage. Perhaps love is everlasting, but the paperwork expires when you do. Meaning it all comes back to love, and show me the sanction that improves upon the real deal. I remain convinced on this point, but a hundred other little moments—seeing Mark put down his wrenches and go in the house to watch his son, seeing Anneliese and her mother together tearful in that chair—have accumulated and the message seems to be pretty evenly split between to overthink is not necessarily to be thoughtful and for the 365th time this year, son, it ain’t always about you. When I looked at Anneliese on the airplane that day, it began to filter through to me that while busily assembling my crotchety thesis, I have lost sight of the idea that giving your hand to someone in marriage is above all a privilege. I am sure Reverend Virginia would agree.

  There is also the idea of solemnifying the loyalty of two mortal hearts. Far from making me sad, Dillard’s line does quite the opposite, making me all the more grateful that Anneliese has agreed to walk beside me of her own free will, despite the unknown. That when the day comes for one of us to release the other we will have shared in this life what we dared hope we might.

  Now that it’s serious, there have been some changes. Until we know for sure if we’ll be moving to the farm in Fall Creek, Anneliese and Amy will move in with me, and certain preparations are already being made. At one point early on in our relationship, Anneliese observed that my house was less a home than a museum with spiderwebs. She said this in an amused way, which was nice of her. I have achieved the dec
or known as Midwestern bachelor eclectic, which is to say the large finless bass my great-grandfather caught hangs just below the picture of Johnny Cash, which is nicely accented by the vintage International pickup postcard. Whenever I am asked why I keep the bass, I point to the brass plate screwed to the wooden plaque, clearly stating that Frank J. Smetlak was a scientific taxidermist. By this time, however, they have been drawn around the corner to the crimped and rusty four-by-eight-foot steel sign hand-lettered with the word TRAILERAMA and dating from an era when the term spoke not to camp, but campers. The sign is held securely in place over the stairwell by twenty-three drywall screws. I rescued it from a ditch during a downpour.

  The basement cobwebs were the first to go, and there has been much scrubbing and clarifying since. “It’s not so much a cleanliness thing, but perhaps a personal hazard,” she wrote in one love note, which will give you an idea of what we both are facing. I have told her she may remove the billboard panel from the wall in the dining room, but to do so with consideration, because it took a long time to create a perfectly square frame from black electrical tape.

  The water-filter sticker has been removed from the kitchen window.

  Likewise, the framed WD-40 sticker has been removed from the bathroom.

  I have slept on a mattress on the floor since 1988 and there is talk of getting a bed.

  As a further adjustment, I regularly find myself responsible for feeding a four-year-old when Mommy is teaching night classes. Sometimes Amy gets teary about this, and so we pull out the special candle from Aunt Barbara and light it for Mommy. It helps. Recently I found myself in charge of Amy during a work night at the fire hall. I radioed the chief and said although I was engaged to be married, I could still do whatever I wanted, and tonight I wanted to babysit. He keyed the mic so I could hear all the hooting.