Truck Read Online Free

grandpa’s barn. It must have weathered the dry docking fairly well, because I remember driving it to work in the early 1990s, but sometime around 1992 it developed that radiator leak and I parked it again. In 1995, I moved north to New Auburn and had to have the truck hauled up on a flatbed. A local mechanic got it to run one more time, but the radiator still leaked, and then the gas tank rusted through, and that was that.
    I am homing in on forty years old. Another twenty years and I’m looking at sixty, and these days, twenty years seems like next Tuesday. I feel young but pressed for time. I am beginning to get a sense of all I will leave undone in this life. It makes my breath go a little short. I’m not desperate, just hungry to fill the time I am allowed. To cover new ground. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m having the vaunted midlife crisis. I’m not trying to reclaim my youth or recapture the past. I just want to get that truck running. The past belongs where it is, as it is: an essential, fault-riven foundation for the present. I don’t expect that truck to take me anywhere but down the road. I don’t plan to, as my cousin used to say, cruise chicks. Although I’d be a stone-cold liar if I said I didn’t think sometimes of blowing down some back road with a woman over there on the right-hand side, her eyes turned toward the fields passing by, a hint of upturn at the corner of her mouth.
    This is not going to be a restoration project. I don’t want to rehab this truck only to spend my weekends with a chamois and a bottle of polish. I don’t want to circle the fenders nervously, checking for dings like somepastry chef searching for hair in the cupcakes. I just want to patch a few holes and punch out a few dents. Scrub the rust down and lay on some paint. I want to get this truck running so I can, as the boys in high school used to say, go “bombin’ around.” Ramble off to my brother’s farm and return with a load of barnyard dirt for my backyard garden. Drive up Old Highway 53 to the IGA to buy potatoes and bacon. Hammer down the swamp road in the moonlight. I want to bump down a logging trail in November and back the truck up to the gutted body of a whitetail, the cooling meat destined to feed me in the year to come.
    I’ll have to get with it, because I tend to sit on stuff long past the hatch-by date. Which in most cases is fine. There is enough ill-considered hastiness in the world. Trouble is, at some point you keel over and croak. The man with differently sized eyes standing in my yard asking to buy the truck—he wasn’t the first. It happens two or three times a year, someone knocks on the door and wonders if the thing is for sale. They all get the same answer: no . I want to fix it up. The squint-eyed man looked at me like he didn’t believe it would ever happen. He squinched that bad eye down extra tight, spit again, and then he got in his own truck and headed back home to Chippewa Falls, where for all I know there is an International refrigerator in every home and the streets are paved with gold.
    Â 
    On behalf of the brand, I apologize for the whole femineering thing. It’s like the big farm kid trying to fashion a homemade valentine from a beer carton using a pair of tin snips. International was never about the ineffable essence. “For many,” reads the copy on the back of International Truck Color History, “International Harvester means handsome, sturdy, no-nonsense trucks.”
    Handsome. Sturdy. No-nonsense.
    Irma.
    Back to the Color History: “…International trucks have an earthy, wholesome quality that makes them attractive.”
    Earthy. Wholesome. I pull out my copy of Freezer Fancies . Irma’s eyebrows are trim but not overplucked. Her hair is pulled back and gathered, but not so tight as to eliminate the waves. A ruler-straight part runs the center of her scalp, suggesting