The Truck

(Note: This is my latest for the Scheherazade Project. And yes, it's fictional.)

I don't know why I became so obsessed with that truck. It was just an old pick-up truck. Not a cool shiny, loved, well-cared-for antique, although in years it probably qualified as an antique. I couldn't even tell what color it had originally been. It was coated in rust, and had multiple holes where the rust had eaten through the metal. The tailgate hung askew, missing some of the bolts that once held it securely to the pick-up bed.

The truck sat on the side of a private road next to a barbed-wire fence. It had been there for so long that a sapling had sprung up through a hole in the floorboard and was growing out one window. The springs were visible through the seats, and flowering weeds decorated the interior of the cab from one season to another.

I passed the truck every day as I took the back roads to college. I didn't like getting onto the freeway and inhaling the carbon monoxide and the asbestos from the semis. The back way took the same amount of time, and the cow shit had its own stink, but at least it was an honest organic stink, and once I was past the dairy farms, I didn't have to keep inhaling it. The view was more pleasing as well--to quote Anne Shirley, there was more "scope for imagination."

Something about that truck piqued my fancy. I wondered what the man was like who just got out of that truck one day. He just stopped that thing, kicked it in the door, left a big dent, and said, "Damn you to hell anyway, you son of a bitch," and walked off and left it there. Although that act told me that he was a stubborn man, a man who could be pushed just so far before he would dig in his heels and go no further.

The fields on the other side of that barbed wire fence were lush and fruitful. The barns were neatly painted, and the sweet cream butter that I bought from the smiling woman at the house was delicious. Every time I bought a pound of butter, I wondered if she was his daughter, or his granddaughter. I wanted to ask, but decided against it. I liked the man I had created in my fancy, and didn't want to find the real man, no matter what he was like. In my imagination, I knew him well already. He was a hard man, but a good man, a poet in his own way.

And then one cold wintery day the truck was gone. The weeds were gone, even the sapling had been uprooted. The side of the road had been neatly mowed, and no trace of my muleheaded man had been left. I slammed on my brakes, leaving a patch of black down the center of the road. I stared for a few minutes, not quite believing the sight.

Then, for auld lang syne, I got out of my little red Toyota. I went over to where the rusty old pickup had once rested. I kicked the fenceposts next to the truck's old graveyard, and damned them to hell. I cursed up a blue streak that would have made my sailor-daddy proud (or ashamed, depending).

Then I got back into the car and drove away. Never went back, either. Didn't seem quite right, somehow.