Truck by Michael Perry Page B

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    Finally, finally, we are going to get started on the truck. It’s a Saturday evening, already dark. Temperatures have dropped back to the low teens, and when I get out of the car in front of Mark’s shop, I catch the scent of wood smoke. Mark has stoked a fire in the cast-iron stove. When I step through the steel security door, the warmth folds around my face and dissolves the stiffness from my cheeks. Across the shop, the flames pulse and waver behind the isinglass.
    Technically, the shop is a garage, based on the fact that it is a free-standing structure equipped with a pair of retractable overhead doors and two bays designed to hold one vehicle each, but the vehicles are all outside beneath the oak trees. That battle was lost a long time ago, probably about the time someone wired the place with 220 and Mark hauled in the parts washer. The northwest corner of the building is dominated by an L-shaped wooden workbench and shelves built against the concrete block wall. The workbench is stained and splattered and generally dinged in a manner your high-end antique dealers will classify as “distressed.” The wood is different shades of used motor oil, with a fresh white scar here and there where someone set the sidewinder grinderdown while it was still spinning. In addition to a greasy phone book, the working surface of the bench is currently occupied by one empty coffee mug, an empty can of Coke, an empty can of Busch beer, one container of all-purpose glue and one container of all-purpose solvent (always leave yourself a way out), a tape measure, a scatter of wrenches, and, tucked beside the toolbox, a half carton of chocolate-covered Whoppers. Also in evidence on a clear spot: a pen, and a spiral notebook open to a thumb-smudged page of notes, numbers, and obvious figuring.
    There is another tape measure on the floor.
    A large rectangle of pegboard is screwed to the wall above the right-hand arm of the bench, and this is studded with hooks from which dangle assorted belts and pulleys, rolls of plastic line for the weed whacker (the weed whacker itself is hanging over there against the other wall), coil springs, bungee ties, a stapler, a miniature carpenter’s level, grinding wheels, and several paintbrushes. Some of the items—plastic pushpins, a gasket kit, zip ties—hang in the same plastic packs in which they were displayed at the store. The rest of the space surrounding the bench—above and beneath, from floor to ceiling—is taken up by catchall wooden shelves. Beneath the bench you find heavier oddments: a splined shaft, a motorcycle battery, an electric motor, and various cast-iron thingamabobs studded with knobs and plumbed with gauges. One set of uppertier shelves is strictly devoted to cans of spray paint; elsewhere you see spools of solder wire, bits of copper tubing, a car radio trailing wires, a hitch receiver, a pair of brand-new taillights, various flashlights, an antifreeze tester, a broken watch, and that sacrament of the shop, a spray bottle of WD-40. Three emergency road flares are balanced on a streaky can of varnish, which is next to a used automotive coil, a hitch pin, and a pair of car speakers. A small gasoline engine sits on the shelf at an angle, as if it is edging toward jumping. There are also several parts organizers with their small drawers arranged in rows and columns and filled with nuts and bolts and washers and rivets and cotter keys and whatever else fits, and a couple of shelves hold books: Student’s Shop Reference Handbook, Automotive Engines Maintenance and Repair, Machinery’s Handbook Seventeenth Edition , Motorcycle Basics , a Chilton manual, and several parts and accessories catalogs. Every flat surface is in service.On the sill beneath the glass block window I can see a box of Band-Aids, a sanding pad, a pack of baler belt fasteners, some hose clamps, and a set of fluorescing shotgun sights.
    Most of the tools are confined to a