Truck (4 page)

 

The snow starts late one afternoon. The first fat flakes drift aimlessly. I walk out to stand in the backyard, where I can hear the papery
tic-tic
of individual crystals striking the crisp maple leaves. The snowfall is more urgent now, and soon the ground is blurry brown. Then it is white. By dusk, the snow is accumulating depth. When the nine o'clock siren sounds from the water tower across the tracks, I step to the front porch and survey Main Street. At each streetlight, flakes drop through the mercury-vapor nimbus like moths in free fall. The village is muffled in snow. Every sharp line is softened and the windows up and down the street glow warm and yellow. In the deepening snow, even the meanest home looks cozy. I go to bed and roll up in blankets. The plaster walls are cold. Drifting, I offer a prayer of thanks that in all of time and space I have been delivered to this ephemeral cocoon, a pinpoint of warmth in the unknowable universe.

In the morning the snow is knee-deep and the temperature has dropped below zero. On Moose Country Radio, the gap between George Jones and Loretta Lynn songs grows wider as the announcer recites an expanding list of postponements and cancellations. School has been shut down. Several basketball games have been rescheduled. Over at the turkey factory in Barron, the evisceration team is starting two hours late. Outside, the morning is filled with the sound of snowblowers and the flat
scrape, scrape
of snow shovels. As we dig out, we greet one another with mittened waves and puffs of breath, cheerful as kids playing hooky. We lean to our shovels with stoic determination, secretly delighted that in the age of heated seats and convenience-store cappuccino we can still pretend to be pioneers as we strike out for milk and eggs up the block at the Gas-N-Go. The air is sharp with cold. With every inhalation, our nose hairs snap together like magnets and freeze. They thaw and
separate on the exhale. We tromp around in our big boots, imagining we survive on pemmican and hardtack. The illusion doesn't last. The plows are out, and by midmorning the four-lane is whooshing with people who dared not risk the deadly trip to work or school, but now, given a day off, will drive forty miles to the mall.

After shoveling snow, I am hungry. This is the kind of day when you'd like to step through the door, stomp the snow from your feet, and inhale a hearty dinner. Sit right down and eat roast beef. Tuck into real mashed potatoes and fatty brown gravy. Savor the overcooked carrots and onions, have another slice of meat smeared with horseradish. I am content in the bachelor life, but at moments like this, I admit to old-fashioned sexist longing. Sometimes I cook up comfort food, but cooking your own comfort food is akin to scratching your own back. Same sensation, less watts. In the basement I rummage around my little chest freezer until I uncover a plastic-sealed lump of homemade pesto. I place the lump in a sauce pan over low heat and pull a pasta pan from the rack above the kitchen window. Out in the backyard, the raised beds are cloaked in snow. They look like gravestones dipped in almond bark. The row-on-row arrangement of the beds reinforces the graveyard image, and Sarah's tomato plant is a skeletal bouquet. Now I think of my brother, alone in his house those days after Sarah died. When I turn back to the stove the pesto lump is half-thawed and the fragrance rising from the pan is pure green summer.

I eat my lunch in the saggy armchair. From here I can see my old truck in the driveway. The body is dolloped with snow lumps that mimic and distort the underlying contours of the fenders and roof. I really don't know where to begin with that thing. I know I can't do it myself, but I don't want to just turn it over to someone. Besides, I can't afford to go that route. I need someone who will let me contribute a little sweat equity. Someone who doesn't mind my company. I've been using all the research, all the gathering of manuals and cookbooks as a sort of throat-clearing exercise. Now I'm looking out the window at the snowbound hulk thinking so many of my projects start off big and then languish in disarray. I need help, that's for sure. I'll have to start asking around. My mechanical abilities dwindle just past lifting the
hood. Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, and after that I've pretty much exhausted my options.

The pesto and angel hair are warm in the bowl on my lap, the fragrances of olive oil and basil blending the exotic and the familiar, equal parts sunny Tuscan hillside and hometown dirt. A meal like this makes you want to live forever, if only for the scent of warm pesto in January. When I finish the food, I'll place the bowl on the floor, shrug into the broken cushions, and doze.

My brother Jed walked a black path after Sarah died. There were stretches where we feared he might give up. We both serve on the local volunteer fire department, and sometimes an hour after the hoses were hung to dry we would still be leaning against his pickup while he talked against the darkness, holding out against returning to the empty bed. He threw his sleeping bag in his pickup and drove across the country to California and then came back. He put a lot of tears on our mother's shoulder. It got worse in the winter. He just wanted to sleep. My brother John took to prying Jed from bed and force-marching him to the woods. Jed being in no condition to run logging equipment, John left him to tend the stove in the portable shack at the timber landing. No hugging or gnashing of teeth, just a refusal to let Jed go blind in the cave. This is the kind of strap-steel love overlooked by those who misconstrue stoicism as failure to engage. In the end, the broken circle closed beautifully: Sarah's mother came to Jed one night and said there was a woman he should meet. Her name was Leanne. It worked out, and they were married.

It feels presumptuous to say anything more. Jed is a private man, and in his gaze linger vestiges of things I cannot imagine. I will end with this: Leanne took up Sarah's garden, and when I drove by their isolated farmhouse in the wee hours of night last spring, there on the porch hung a light, glowing just above a flat of seedlings. I took it as a sign that he was back among us.

B
ACK WHEN I WAS
still living in the city and working split shifts at the hospital, I left my apartment one spring morning to discover my truck had been tagged with a pale green parking ticket stapled to a business-sized envelope. The ticket threw me off stride from the get-go because the truck was parked well off the street in its proper numbered spot on the apartment complex lot, but it was sure enough the real deal, one of those miniature self-sealers emblazoned
CITY OF EAU CLAIRE PARKING VIOLATION
and appended with clusters of red-letter fine print:
Make your remittance payable to the City Treasurer
…
IF NOT PAID EXTRA PENALTIES WILL ACCRUE
…
The State Dept. of Transportation will suspend your vehicle registration
. The two lines reserved for “VIOLATION DESCRIPTION” had been filled out in hand-printed all-capital block letters:

 

ABANDONED VEHICLE
PUBLIC EYESORE

 

My ears did a hot flash. I tore open the business envelope and began to read the letter within. By the second line, I was making squeaky noises like the ones you hear when you bump a wall full of bats. By the third line, I had a full-blown case of the fuming huffies.

Now I was sputtering like a cat stricken with galloping hairballs.

There commenced an epic snit. Independent observers would later report the manifestation of visible indignation vapors, which for the record are off-yellow and shoot mainly from the ears. My heart was beating high in my chest and I was quivering with pique. A second read-through of the letter left me flat-out barking.

“We, here at Alpine…” We, here?!?
The royal
We?!
Tone-wise, E. Thomas, we are off on the wrong foot.

“…have been receiving many complaints with respect to your truck.”
I raised my green-eyed gaze to the buildings around me. Suddenly every window had twitchy curtains.

“
As I'm sure you would agree…”
You don't get to be Regional Operations Manager without knowing how to blow the twin smoke rings of insincerity and unction up the backside of those you despise.

“
…a clean and respectable place to live is an important item to all those who reside in this particular apartment complex.”
More than you know, E. Thomas, more than you know. My particular apartment complex window faces the pallet-stacked hindquarters of a Shopko. Specifically, the litter-snagging loading dock where a depressed woman chose to asphyxiate herself beneath her car one recent frozen morning. What manner of clunker-parking clod would corrupt such a vista?

“
We…have found it well within our rights to impose certain standard…”
Under which purview Alpine Management has crammed twelve hulking faux chalet apartment buildings into a single city block, half of them overlooking the service entrances to a strip mall.

“
I'm am sure that this problem can be quickly remedied.”
Yes. I'm getting the rifle now and will be up the water tower shortly.

“
Please call us before any more actions are taken.”

I was jabbering with rage.

You don't work yourself into this sort of state so that you can get put on hold and blow a vein. I fired up the International and dropped the hammer for 281 Grant Street.

 

Even when it was shiny and new, the International L-120 wasn't set up to win beauty contests. It had a squatness. The fender lines were too square. In his book
International Trucks
, author and International expert Frederick Crismon refers to the L-Series as looking “squashed.” Alongside its Ford and Chevy contemporaries, the L-120 was the plain girl with thick ankles.
Heavy-duty engineered
indeed. In contrast to the refrigeration division's frothy
femineering
superficialities, the L-Series
trucks had been completely reworked when they were introduced in 1949. International advertised the trucks as “new from bumper to taillight,” and according to the
International Truck Color History,
there was substance behind the hype. Nearly everything—the engine, the chassis, the suspension, the brakes, and the look of the trucks themselves—had been redesigned. In fact, apart from one optional three-speed transmission, Ertel and Brownell claim that the only surviving items traceable to preceding models were the hubcaps.

Advertisements and sales literature from the time reveal that International was especially proud of the L-Series' redesigned “Comfo-Vision Cab.” At seventy inches wide, the Comfo-Vision cab represented an expansion of ten inches over the previous K-model cab, and was pitched as the “
roomiest on the road
.” It featured an adjustable seat (previous seats had been fixed in one position) designed to provide “
head room, elbow room, and leg room for the biggest driver in the business
” and “
lounge chair seating for three
.” In a promotional photo of the cab taken from the perspective of the hood ornament, two undersized men in milkman caps gaze at the camera like a pair of bemused bookends. You could squeeze between them maybe one installment of
The Bobbsey Twins
. Additional selling points included the addition of adjustable vent windows (“
open and close with the flick of a thumb
”), an adjustable cowl ventilator to admit fresh air, and live-rubber cab mounts upon which the cab was purported to “
float
.” I can report from the seat of my pants that this claim was optimistic in the extreme.

The most distinguishing feature of the Comfo-Vision cab was a one-piece “Sweepsight” windshield, “
scientifically curved to minimize eyestrain and reduce glare,
” while improving “
see-ability
.” In truth, the curved one-piece windshield really was a pretty big deal, unheard of in trucks and otherwise available in only a few luxury cars. The Sweepsight was complemented with another distinguished first: twin rear windows to “
promote driver efficiency, safety, and peace of mind.
”

 

The thing that put me over the edge with that E. Thomas Packard letter was him signing off on all those typos. It is bad enough to be at the
receiving end of a head-patting lecture, but to endure a misspelled supercilious browbeating on the subject of aesthetics is beyond the pale. During the drive, I polished my speech. I intended to frame my objections in terms of the First Amendment, the
Kelley Blue Book,
and my paid-up certificate of title. I would furthermore bolster my tirade with citations drawn from city code and zoning regulations,
B.J. and the Bear
scripts, and recitations from the collected hits of Red Sovine. I would conclude with a snide reference to my having made the drive over in an “abandoned vehicle.” By the time I hit Grant Street, my scientifically curved Sweepsight was spittle-flecked, but I had achieved the clarity of an assassin.

Then I couldn't find the address.

Grant Street is lined with ranch houses and bungalows. I remember thinking it strange that the rental offices were located in a residential neighborhood, and as I cruised up and down the street, looking in vain for 281 Grant amid the basketball hoops and hedges, I felt the righteous umbrage rise again.
What kind of ridiculous knothead puts the wrong address on his letterhead?
After my third fruitless pass through the 200 block, I crashed the gears and roared home. Someone was going to get a very nasty phone call indeed.

 

Despite the emphasis on comfort and esthetics, the 1951 International was designed primarily for work. Or, more specifically, for
men
who worked. In nearly all the photographs supporting the International truck ads of 1951, the men are lifting something. Feed bags, milk cans, hay bales. If they aren't lifting, they are at the wheel, driving with their hands at 10 and 2. And if they are not at the wheel, they are under the hood. The men look sturdy and earnest. Like after-shaved farmers at church, or the guy at the hardware store who can help you with your drain trap. These are men who never leave home without a jackknife and miniature tape measure. They can do math in their head and know how many square rods make an acre. These men are fundamentally useful.

I have come across only one International Harvester whose driver appears to be getting by on his looks. He is on the cover of the twenty
page
International Light-Duty Series
sales brochure. In the picture he is pulling out of a residential driveway at the wheel of an L-120 just like mine, only yellow. He appears to be in California or perhaps Arizona. The property is lined with palm trees, and the house in the background is flat-roofed and architecturally hip. Two women stand on the lawn at a fair remove. They are slim and leggy, and wearing beautifully cut calf-length skirts. From their position and line of sight you can tell they are eyeing the driver. His face is partially in shadow and he is wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses. His white T-shirt is tight across the chest. His cheeks and chin are stubbled. He looks timelessly cool. If James Dean had driven a three-quarter-ton International, he would have made it to Salinas.

 

When I returned from my Grant Street goose chase, I had a rare moment of lucidity. Perhaps Grant was one of those streets interrupted by the river, or a railroad. I may have been on West Grant Street when I should have been on East Grant Street, or vice versa. I unfolded the city map bound in the local telephone book. Grant Street ran uninterrupted from end to end. Certain now that the rental company had flubbed their own address, I dialed the phone number on the letterhead. Probably flubbed that, too, I thought. The dial pattern seemed vaguely familiar. I was trying to place it when a woman answered.

“Hello?”

“Alpine Management?”

“Excuse me?”

“Alpine Management?

“I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.”

The
incompetence
!

“Is this 555-1433?”

“Yes…”

And then I placed it. Eric Teanecker, a friend from high school. We lost touch, then wound up working together at a roller-skating rink during our college years. He had gotten married. I hadn't seen him for over a year. He used to tease me about the truck. This is the number I used to call to see if we could trade shifts.

“Ahh…is this Renée?” His wife.

“Yes.”

“Eric there?”

“No…”

“I'll call back.”

 

All those marvelous pictures advertising the L-Line, and not one woman at the wheel. When they do appear, it is in the background, where they elbow-tote their purses and chatter with each other, or look on admiringly as the men lift things. Chauvinism aside, when it came to women and trucks, International really missed the boat.

I know exactly how they feel. In 1992, I was traveling to Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in my reliable-if-not-zippy four-door '78 Impala when the radiator blew. It could have been worse, as I was rolling up the exit ramp at the time, and had sufficient momentum to reach the Wal-Mart parking lot. (As quick as we are with the
why me, why NOW?
rap, it seems a matter of karmic responsibility to acknowledge those instances when bad luck has good timing.) I was en route to research a magazine piece on canoeing, and had agreed to meet a local guide at a downtown hardware store, so I left the car astride its expanding green puddle and walked the rest of the way.

The guide—a petite young woman named Cindy who kept her blond hair pulled into a ponytail with a pink scrunchie but carried herself with a trace of jock swagger—determined immediately that I wasn't the kind of guy who could fix his own radiator, and arranged to have the Impala towed to a local shop. Then she loaded me into her pickup truck. The exterior was bashed and scuffed, and the cab was awash in good working-class trash—spark plug boxes and empty gasket packs, shell casings, that sort of thing. We accelerated manfully from the curb. She handled the stick shift with authority, which gave me certain twinges. And I admit I noticed how her quadriceps arched against her shorts when she worked the clutch. She told me about her motorcycle. When we reached the landing, she jumped out and didn't wait around for me to help lug the canoe. Once launched, we floated the tannin-stained Black River for a
long while. Cindy paddled smoothly and pointed out key fishing spots. “I do a lot of bass fishing,” she said.
All this, and a pickup truck,
I kept thinking. When she drew my attention to a specific cluster of brush and identified it as the spot where she shot her biggest buck ever, I decided it was time to get married.

It's tough to make a marriage proposal in a canoe. I'm not saying it can't be done, it's just that canoes are notoriously tippy, and because I have never mastered the j-stroke required to successfully captain a canoe without switching the paddle side to side every two strokes like an indecisive milkmaid assigned one dasher and two churns, I had been quite rightly placed in the position of emasculation: up front facing forward, where I could paddle away mindlessly without yawing us madly into the tagalders. As I recall, I got Cindy to sit in the front of the canoe only long enough for me to get a photograph of her gazing downstream. I found it difficult to focus on anything other than her exposed shoulders.