How You Learn to Drive Truck, Fiction by H S Derkin
How You Learn To Drive Truck
H S Derkin
For my big brother, Tony.
Pa says you are nearly fourteen and your good Christian raisin’ and a nearly 8th-Grade education means you’re old enough to bring in some money for the family. Enough with all that book learning. You tell your Pa you’re happy to not go back to school. Happy to no longer endure the teasing of the other boys about your Montgomery Ward flannel-lined jeans which are bought two sizes too big so you can grow into them (“You’re sprouting like a string bean!” your Ma says), gathered at the back of the waistband and rolled up at the cuffs showing their red plaid lining.
“Happy? You ain’t happy,” Pa says. “You’re just ignorant.”
You are kind of afraid of the girls until you learn that they actually like your rough manner, your wide shoulders and blazing blue eyes. And you had kind of hoped to at least finish 8th grade. Rachel, with her deep-set brown eyes, her wicked smile and laugh, passed you a note in math class. Would you go to the Sadie Hawkins dance in spring if somebody asked you? it read. You overheard the 9th-Grade boys, who did not as a rule speak to you, say that Sadie Hawkins was when kisses and more were bestowed on the worthy; boys who could, as you heard one laughing in the locker room, make the girls get wet.
You’re the tallest boy in your class, but lousy at sports because you are so clumsy. This results in lots of fights. When Billy Evans trips you on purpose during a basketball game in gym class, you hurt him so bad the principal calls the Sheriff, who drives you from school to the end of the road leading up to your house. Sitting in the warm cruiser on a cold dark December afternoon he tells you don’t know your own strength and you better learn to control that temper, mister, or it will get you in big trouble. Then he winks at you and tells you to get the hell on home.
Later that week, right before Christmas, Pa is giving you instructions as you ride up the hill on the rutted two-track road to the logging camp, his old Dodge struggling even in low gear 4-wheel drive. You’re going to work for old man Blaine Hinton, with his tobacco juice-stained beard and his hydraulic oil-stained Carhart’s, frayed at the cuffs and the smell of diesel exhaust coming from them a permanent bouquet, even in the winter. Your Ma says his britches would stand up and walk away if he ever took them off. Hinton is logging a stand of timber he stole from the Odawa with the help of the county and told your Pa a big strong boy like you “ought’r be working instead o’wasting time learning foolishness that will not help him earn a living around here.”
“Blaine’s gonna give you a chance, son.” Pa says. “You just do what he tells you and don’t talk back.”
The logging camp is nothing like you imagined it to be. It looks like the pictures you saw in your history book of battlefields in The Great War. A huge machine is shaking and roaring and belching smoke. There is something about it that thrills you. A powerful looking figure of a man feeds brush in to it; small logs really. This is Jack, an Odawa Indian who will become like a brother to you.
Why, those are limbs, you think. They’re limbs. Big around as your arm. Big around as your thigh. You learn later that this machine is a chipper, a word that strikes you as odd given the violence of its performance. Another machine is dragging “long wood”; logs, 30, some 40 ft long up the hill where an unmanned loader is idling, waiting for Hinton to scoop them up in its giant jaws and place them with amazing precision onto a Fruehauf low-boy flat bed, hooked to a diesel tractor truck. Hinton’s pride and joy. A 1948 Diamond Reo, its chrome grill shining in the sun like the jewel it is.
Pa pulls up to a pallet wood shanty. There are no windows and a figure emerges at the sound of Pa’s horn. “There he is. That’s Blaine. Mr. Hinton to you, boy. Go shake his hand and tell him who you are.” Pa taught you how to shake hands like a man. Take your glove off. Never, no matter how cold it is, offer a gloved hand to another man. Meet his right hand with yours, palm to palm, the web between your thumb and forefinger pushed firmly into his; not just taking the other’s hand between thumb and fingers, like you would a lady. That was for fairies, and insulting. Give the other fella’s hand a good squeeze, not to show how strong you were but how sincere. Give it a single shake and release.
You get out of the truck carrying your lunch bucket that Ma packed for you and walk toward him, trying to stand tall and straight like Pa told you, but the partially frozen uneven ground makes it hard, and you mostly look like a bear, heavy footed and lumpish. But the old man looks at you with what appears to be approbation and as you near him, he sticks his bare hand out and says “Blaine Hinton, boy. You ready for work?”
When you shake with him his hand feels like its bones are big bolts, threaded together with hex nuts at each joint; it’s as if you are holding a handful of hardware. And he holds your hand like a vise. It doesn’t hurt, but you know it could if he wanted. He tells you to follow him and goes back in to the shed. A kerosene heater is glowing and filling the tiny space with fumes, little escaping through the cracks in the walls and ceiling, but enough apparently to keep the ancient black dog with matted fur, sleeping in front of the heater, from being asphyxiated. It looks up at you, gentle black eyes under brown eyebrows, and gives its tail a couple wags, then tucks its head back down between its paws. Old man Hinton pencil scratches your name down in a double-entry ledger with a greasy canvas cover trimmed in leather. He has misspelt it, but you don’t say anything. He tells you the pay is 50 cents an hour, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week “until this 40 is logged out”.
Despite your fears, you find you like the work. Your body responds to the demands you make of it by firming up sheets of muscle in your chest, your belly, your ass. Your arms and shoulders, already strong, become powerful and obedient to the task. At night, you ride the six miles back down the logging trail with Jack, whose real Indian name is Jiibay. His ancient pick-up truck heaves and rattles over the frozen potholes and you expect it to snap in half any second, but Jack seems to have some sort of relationship with it. He speaks to it like his ancestors might have spoken to a pony, and the old Ford honors his urgings and encouragement.
At first, you refuse the whiskey he offers you from a half pint of Old Foresters. But after a few days, you find that a few sips make the hour-long ride back to the highway where Pa meets you to take you home a wonderful thing. Jack, he tells you, “Logging will kill you, boy. Will break your spirit and leave you empty as the moon.” He doesn’t tell you that is what his Indian name means. Broken spirit.
You swear to God, the God your Ma prayed to every night with you when you were small, her breath warm and smelling of Colgate, that you will never be like your Pa, a roofer by trade until he rolled his ankle on an air hose and fell 18 ft onto a stone wall and broke his leg in two places. Never set right, the leg was nigh unto useless for that kind of work. He could not ever bring himself to climb a roof again. Might as well cut the goddam thing off, he’d say. You are afraid he might just do that.
You see him scrabbling around for work: hanging drywall, painting, digging wells and planting trees for the rich summer people from Chicago. Your Ma says you are precious to her —the son that openeth the womb— and you pray every night the prayer she once prayed with you: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” But you always wonder just where He would take your soul, and you tell Him that it damn sure better be somewhere’s else besides Charlevoix county, and not let you spend your life here on Earth swinging a 13 oz California claw all day, pounding nails into sheetrock or on the business end of a mud wrench digging wells, taking home thirty or forty bucks week, or get a hundred years old like old man Hinton, driving that old goddam Diamond Reo and hauling logs into Boyne Falls, where the sawmills tell him the wood he brought was all curly and not worth much, but that they knew he had a hard time getting them down here and they would do the best they could for him.
This morning late in the winter you are setting chokers on a hillside of felled white pine. Their trunks have been denuded of branches that lay where Jack cut them. Jack has now moved on to a new “pull” over the ridge. His cuts form a tangled bed of boughs you have to climb over and around to get to the logs. It is not yet mud season, but the snow is mostly gone and the ground is sucking at your boots. The sun is struggling to show through the yellow gray scud. There is enough light to see your hands, but not much more. A rabbit zigzags by through the brush you are trying to navigate safely on your way to fallen trees. A skinny grey coyote with every rib showing is leaping and bounding in and out and over the brush. The bunny freezes and could be a statue except for a slight tremble and the terrified look of prey in its eyes. The coyote leaps over a snow-covered branch and in a shower of fur breaks the rabbit’s neck and trots off with its kill.
You get to your first felled tree and set the wire loop around. Blaine, 40 yards up at the top of the hill in the skidder dismounts and runs the winch cable down to you by hand. Looking around he points at two more logs and jerks his thumb back up hill, meaning he wants you to hook them all up to the winch line. By the time he scrambles back up the hill, you have the other two logs choked and a pretty good gash in your left hand where frayed wire from the winch cable found its way through your glove, a testament to your haste to get everything set before he got to the top. “Time is money,” you hear him say on your head.
The pull is going well, the logs snapping and grinding their way up the hill through the chip wood. And then you think maybe what happened is the load he picked up is just too heavy. About 10 yards from the skidder Blaine starts to lift the choked logs to clear some stumps. You see Blaine stand up in the cab and lean over the front of the skidder trying to see what his load is hung on.
That sumbitch started to pitchpole on him and he could not release the hydraulics quick enough and over it went throwing him out in front but off to the side of the skidder. Three logs slipped their chokers and looking for all the world like a handful of sticks thrown by a child, bounced downhill toward the old man, who was pinwheeling down the grade just in front of them. You knew that if just one of them logs came down on him he’d be dead dead dead and then you thought that they might miss him but they didn’t, entirely.
It gets real quiet. It takes you, well, it takes you an eternity to reach the old man. He is not under a log, but up against one and laying in front of the skidder which has landed on its tracks. His left leg is bent at an impossible angle, his left foot exactly backward from the right. There is dark sticky blood coming out of his right ear and bright red blood from his nose. He is unconscious.
Jack is over a mile away. You can’t even hear his chainsaw. All you can hear is a raven screaming from a treetop somewhere nearby. Rawk. Raawwwwk. Rawwwwwk. It echoes. You don’t know why, but you listen carefully as if it is making sense to you. This doesn’t seem to be helping. Old man Hinton laying here bleeding. Broken. Then in a voice nearly as rude as the raven: “Boy! Godammit! Boy!” You drop to your knees and lean in to the old man’s face.
“Get me out of here boy. I cain’t walk.”
As if you couldn’t see that. As if you expected him to get up and shake it off as you have seen him do when a wrench slips off a flat and his knuckles smash into a bulkhead. But he is alive. And speaking to you, although what he is asking seems clearly impossible. OK. OK, you think. You will try. You reach behind his shoulders and move him to a more or less sitting position. He passes out. You reach under his thighs and pick him up like a baby. You are surprised at how light he seems. He groans, and breathes in sobs as you start to make your way up the grade. You feel him put one arm around your back and the other he puts around your neck. This helps as you lean into the thirty-degree incline. Every few steps you stop and shift his weight in your arms. Each time you do, he seems to convulse. You smell urine.
At the top of the ridge you look for Jack. He is not there. The Diamond T six-wheeler sits there idling, hooked to the empty logging trailer. You look down and your pant leg is soaked in blood. Hinton groans but is still holding on to you. You do not know why, but you are filled with a great and profound love for him, for this helpless old man in your arms. His raspy voice urges you to action.
“You gotta get me to town, boy. Get me in the Diamond and drive me to town.”
It is six miles to the highway down the logging road. A road that only Blaine drives with the semi. It takes nearly an hour for you and Jack to get to the highway in his pickup at the end of the day, and it is at least 15 miles beyond that into town, where there is a small Roman Catholic hospital, run by nuns and a couple old doctors who deliver babies and service the deaths of the poor and elderly.
You are shivering, not from cold but the inconceivable task before you. You pray to Him, you say rather, to the God of all things, the God your Ma prays to, the God who, she says, speaks a word and all things that are, or have been, or ever will be come into being, “I can’t drive truck.” And you see yourself moving toward the cab of the Diamond T.
“Just get me in the truck, boy. I’ll tell you what to do.” Blaine passes out and comes to again and again. But you get him into the passenger seat, both of you sobbing and you with snot running down your face from cold and lachrymosity.
“Drive.” he says.
The Diamond has two sticks, ten forward gears and no power steering or clutch. The old man tells you big stick, little stick, up and right, back and left and the 453T Detroit Diesel roars angrily but you are moving, jolting, bumping down the logging road toward the highway. You don’t know how to allow for the tracking of the trailer, so more than a few small trees and brush are torn out by the trailer. You don’t know how long it takes you to get to the highway, an hour; maybe longer. You get there and both you and the Diamond are shaking like a dog shitting bones. Blaine wakes up. “We there yet?” You both laugh. He says “Turn left and remember what I told you.” He passes out.
You don’t remember everything he tells you but you manage to get to about 5th gear and are on the highway, screaming along at 2500 RPM but only 30 miles an hour. It takes another half hour for you to get to the hospital. A few blocks from the Ambulance Entrance, the Sheriff pulls in front of you with lights and siren and guides you in. He knows it is you.
When you pull up to the little hospital, a dozen arms reach into the cab to take Blaine Hinton away. When you step down from the cab of the Diamond T you borrow a dime from the Sherriff and call your Ma and Pa from the pay phone. They are there before you can stop trembling. Your Ma is crying and kissing you over and over. Your Pa looks proud, but he doesn’t say anything. You look up at the Diamond T still idling there and hear the rumble of the four 53 cu. in. cylinders, feel the heat coming out of the engine cowling, see the pulsing of the hood. Your hands still burn from the 30-inch Bakelite steering wheel slipping through your palms on the turns and curves. You can still feel the vibration of the gear shift handles in the fingers of your right hand, the leap of the truck at each gear, as if the cab were trying to separate itself from the chassis and fly.
Old man Hinton survives and goes back to logging the rest of the 400 acres he stole from the Odawa. You don’t go back to setting chokers. You go to 9th grade. You don’t get Rachel wet. You don’t play football, or basketball, or baseball. You draw pictures of Diamond Reo trucks in your notebooks. Beautiful Diamond’s rolling up mountain grades, along the seashore, in cities you have never seen. Diamonds with banks of cab lights and pin striped hoods. You draw them with streams of black diesel exhaust rolling out of twin chrome stacks. You draw them pulling logs, reefers, and livestock. You name them: Michigan Diamond. Diamond Hauler. Big Rock. And Jewel of the North.
Jack sometimes comes by evenings on his way back to the rez, after bucking logs for Blaine. Grinning, he screws the cap off a shorty of Old Grandad and throws it away. You sit with him on the porch stoop and pass it back and forth until it’s gone. He tells you stories about the Odawa: How his people were known for trade and diplomacy. That for a thousand years they brought many tribes together and ended the bitter wars with the Iroquois. How Odawa women were the finest of all the tribes, their soft round breasts and wide hips, their skills with dyeing buckskin and decorating their dress with beadwork making them even more desirable. The year you graduate high school, your Pa dies of pneumonia, “the old man’s friend,” in the same hospital you took Blaine. That summer, Jack kills a man in a bar fight in Cheboygan, and hangs himself in jail.
And then you get a letter from The President of the United States of America. Your Ma, her eyes red and her hand shaking, holds it out to you when you come home from working your shift at the Michigan Maple Block plant in Petoskey. “You are hereby ordered …” it said, and you spend the next 2 years …driving truck for Uncle Sam. When your tour is over, you re-up and get a sizable bonus. With this, and the money you saved from MMB and during your first and second tour, you are discharged an E-5 and go home. You buy a Twin Stick ’65 Kenworth 6 x 4 with a Detroit Diesel V12, and start your own company hauling sand and gravel. You run into Rachel, divorced now and waiting tables at a roadhouse in Waters. She marries you. She gives you twins: a baby boy and a girl. She names her after your Ma. Shirley Ann. You name the boy Jack.
Blaine Hinton, 92, dies that year in the same little hospital you took him to, Sister of Mercy Mary Angelica holding his hand. Old Man Hinton has a vision of being carried in someone’s arms. Carried up, up, getting light, getting dark, getting light; it is you carrying his broken body up that goddam hill. He thinks it is an angel, but it isn’t. It’s you. It’s always been you.
H S Derkin is retired and lives in Northern Michigan with his wife. His short story “Proper Preparation” won first Prize in a contest by Delizon Publishers in 2013. The Fabulist, an online journal, published his short piece "Previous Pilgrims" in 2020.
Inquiry
The following has been provided by the author:
“Mountains are often called nature's water towers. They intercept air circulating around the globe and force it upwards where it condenses into clouds, which provide rain and snow.”
—George Kourous
Information Officer, United Nations FAO
From the FAO Website
Some lives are led at the most fundamental levels of survival. There is not a less predictable condition for you to be in. There is no telling what might happen. Maybe, all that will come out of a bad situation is an even worse situation. And maybe that even worse situation will auger you right in to the earth. But maybe you will intercept its energy and guide it upwards like wind sweeping up a mountain, where it becomes something else entirely. The path zigs and zags, like a coyote chasing a rabbit or rain running down a windshield, like it has always, just waiting and hoping for you to come and be present in it. So, just a fictional story about how that may have worked out in a few lives in northern Michigan, a few decades ago.