Farewell, My Lovely

categories: Cocktail Hour

19 comments

way before

Okay, today I’m in the garden planting peas, and I hear a roar and a bang up by the road.  Pickup truck.  So of course I go to see who.  Young man with a terrible limp, no smile, no threat either.  Familiar, I realize, then rejoice: the truck’s familiar too!  It’s my old trusty F-150, and he’s fixed the body and painted it candy-apple red and got all kinds of chrome on the thing, and huge tires, stainless mag wheels, half the revised engine sticking up out of the hood, chrome running boards and racing stickers and exhaust and web tailgate and new leather upholstery and northern-lights headliner and wow.

The scene was exactly the same, maybe three-four years ago:  I’m in the garden planting peas, and I hear a roar and a bang up by the road.  Pickup truck.  So of course I go to see who.  Young man with a terrible limp, no smile.  So I erase my own smile.  Then he turns his on, and it’s the scammer’s smile, these fellas who stop by the country houses at the rate of one or two a month (guys who sell meat they say is stolen; guys who pretend to be mentally deficient and ask for work or twenty dollars; young women in cleavage shirts and very low trousers who say they’re doing a bottle drive for their church and offer a massage once my empties are in their truck, forty bucks each, no thanks; fella who says he’ll pave my driveway with the half-load of asphalt he’s got left from a state job, half price, five hundred bucks, be back in an hour, but he’s gotta have cash now).

“Lotta work on a farm,” this one says by way of introduction.  I feel happy I’m coming out of the garden after rain all covered in mud and wearing rough clothes like his.  Or not quite so rough as his, once I take a look: Reny’s chinos worn down to threads, shoes worn down to socks.  His got one eye looking up, one eye looking down.

“Former,” he says—first name or last?—and sticks out his hand.

“Bill,” I say, giving him just the selling tool he needs, my name.

“Bill, I see you got a truck in the yard here.”

Oh, my gosh.  Lightning had struck.  Just the other day I’d noticed that the registration on my beloved but bedraggled 1984 Ford F-150 pickup had expired some months back.  It was only registered at all that year after an Olympian struggle to get it inspected—body rust.  The solution my mechanic and I came up with at the time was a Farm Vehicle registration, slightly less onerous inspection criteria, the only drawback being you had to paint the name of your town across both sides in four-inch high letters, and then you weren’t allowed to go more than twenty-five miles from home.  “Farmington” did not fit on the door neatly but ran off onto the cab, my miserable handwriting in spray paint, graffiti without its crucial ingredients: rancor and heart.  Last time I drove the unhappy thing was a on an autumn dump run, that great big old bed overflowing with garbage bags and recycling and rusted stove pipe and our old dryer, which had died the fall before that and spent several seasons in the back of the truck.  Did I say it was a tasteful brick red (truck, not dryer)?  Anyway, on that last drive it hopped all the way home, terrifying: something serious wrong with the front end.

“Only 114,000 miles on it,” I said.  I’d only driven the thing maybe two hundred miles a year since Elysia was born in 2000, which is the year I bought the minivan (now also on last legs), since there’s no place in a pickup for an infant’s rear-facing car seat.

Former gave a philosophical shrug: “Bill, American car, that’s a lot of miles.”

“A lot of miles,” I repeated.  I had driven the thing to Ohio from Maine and back five times, once to Chicago, several times over to the White Mountains, even more times to New York City, like piloting a wind machine, like parking a dumpster, always an adventure with my elbow out the window, no AC.  Also my dogs had always ridden by my side in that truck, leaning into the turns, Wally with his big, sweet head on my shoulder, Desi sniffing our the window.  Both dogs gone, sadly.  Had the truck before them and after them.

“We’re just gonna parts it,” Former’s sidekick said.  This guy, he was over six feet tall, ears you could use for Frisbees, teeth you could sell for piano keys.  I immediately assigned him the nickname Latter, since no introduction was forthcoming.

“I was kind of hoping to get five hundred for it,” I said.

“Bill, we only paid three hundred for our truck right there, and it’s four-wheel drive.”

“It’s worth five hundred as scrap metal right now,” I ventured, which was true at the time, before scrap metal and every other bubble burst.  Fun to dicker when you’re practically skipping for joy at the prospect of getting an old truck off your lawn.  I’d had the thought of giving it to Maine Public Radio, which apparently accepts old cars in donation.  But these fellows were less abstract than the radio, and obviously a not-for-profit enterprise of their own.  I could feel very good putting the truck in their hands, like finding an old dog a loving home.

“Bill, what’s your bottom line?” Former said.

“Inspection’s still good till July,” Latter announced.

Former shushed him, none too subtly.

“I feel like I’m selling an old girlfriend,” I said.  “I mean, she’s gotten old and mean, but I still love her.”

“It’s a truck,” Former said.

“Straight-six, beautiful,” said Latter.

That shushing motion from Former.

The engine, indeed, was a thing of beauty, had always run smoothly, sweetly, the classical purr.  I remembered suddenly buying a brand-new battery not long since, fit of hopefulness.  Battery alone was worth fifty dollars.  Though of course selling a naked battery would take at least fifty dollars worth of aggravation to get ten.  The thing to say would have been, Four hundred dollars.  I knew these young gentlemen wouldn’t be parts-ing anything.  They’d be Bond-o-ing and sanding and painting and tuning and hood-scooping and upholstering and welding and in a month or two my old ride would be back on her game, beautiful again, pinstripes and flames, cherry-bomb muffler.

“Two hundred,” I said, undercutting their offer just for fun.  I didn’t want them not eating for a week just so I could have money I didn’t need.

Latter began to laugh.

“Okay,” said Former too quickly.  You could practically see his heart beating through his shirt, a live rube in his hands.  “Bill, I gotta go somewheres here and borrow that money but I’ll be back and don’t sell it to anyone else, okay?”

“Let’s start it up,” Latter said, his horse behind the cart.

“Battery’s going to be dead,” said Former.

He was right.  I have a trickle-charger and while they took the (almost brand-new) battery out of what was still my truck, I got the charger set up in my woodshop.  I was proud to have a shop, even proud of the mess in there.  Former carried the battery in, the weight of it staggering him on his unsteady pegs.  He looked like a very happy man.   He looked, in fact, like a very happy man trying very hard to look like he was not a very happy man.   “Bill,” he said.  “Bill, we’ll be back.”  Heavy breathing.

While they went on their mission I made up an “As is” bill-of-sale, and cleaned out under the seats.  Mostly rope, but also a fingernail clipper in good repair and a little ceramic dog’s head made in 1990 by my artist friend Tre’ Arenz, who died in 2003, not even age fifty.  She’d made these great replacement knobs for stereos and stoves and the like, and I’d used mine as the heater knob in the truck, pretty cool, poor Tre’.

Heater didn’t work.

Over lunch, I thought about the truck, old friend.  I was thirty-nine when I bought it, a man in good repair.  The truck had a serious dent in the roof, looked like someone had dropped a medium-sized tree on it. I would be fifty-five or so that summer not so long ago, and looked like someone had dropped a slightly bigger tree on me.  The dealer was visibly happy that I was looking at this truck, a trade in, wrong brand at a Honda dealer. “Iron,” he called it.  The price was $7000.00.  They way I bargained for it was actually an accident.  Salesman said, “Never mind the sticker, we can sell this thing to you for $6000.”  And I didn’t say anything, trying to calculate if I had that much.  $6000.00 sounded pretty good, but I’m a very slow thinker in those situations and I was still thinking very hard when he said “Five thousand.”  Before I could get my thoughts around the new number he said, “Four,” and then, quickly, “Three.  Three thousand and drive it home.”  At which point my mouth just said, “Okay.”

Anyway, the fellas came back, and Former stuffed a wad of chamois-soft dollar bills in my hands.  I handed him the bill-of-sale.  Latter started laughing.  He couldn’t help it.  He was a happy man.  Former started laughing, too, very happy.  I laughed with them.  They’d be telling this story for years to come: space-shot sells them great truck for like nothing, didn’t even count the cash.

The battery was miles from being charged.  But Former and Latter had a neat trick, which was to install the dead battery in their truck while their truck was running (do not try this at home), then installing their live battery in my truck.  She started right up.  And oh, that engine sounded good.  Former drove their truck, charging my battery, and Latter drove my truck, just put it in gear and backed across my lawn far enough to negotiate our fences.  And then he pulled out.  Familiar crunch of gears.  The old girl hopped up the road at four miles an hour, over the hump in front of the neighbor’s barn, and gone.  And I just stood there, slow thinker, tears coming unaccountably to my eyes.

The next day, I sent a check for $200 to Maine Public Radio.