I had waited an entire day at Annie’s Brickyard Truckstop Diner, waiting for a call from a mechanic I never met at a garage I never heard of. There is nothing like doing nothing that will make you mind wander, and mine had been wandering plenty.
Whatever the mechanic was going to tell me wasn’t going to be good – I knew that for sure, but if he could patch up enough to get me across four states and home, I could live with whatever he told me. Until then, all I could do was wait, eat my breakfast, and watch semis roll in and out, dragging their dirt and gas fumes behind them. During the last day at the diner, I had read everything that hung on the walls, twice. In the narrow hall back by the restrooms, I had scoured hand-written notes on the bulletin board and read local notices about foreclosures, and OSHA regulations. Stapled along the edges I read notes like these: “Babysitter wanted, must have driver’s license,” or “Maytag washer, rusty but works great.” On and on they went, layers of them, some yellowed and illegible.
I was stuck in Checker Saddle – not even a town really – because of an overheating radiator and who knows what other headaches. No one knew me, and I had little to show for my joy ride across the country that was supposed to open the throttle on a long-distance relationship. It didn’t and I was stuck with this view of Annie’s parking lot, and smelling clouds of dust and oily asphalt, staring at a plate of pumpkin pancakes with pumpkin flavored syrup.
The pay phone rang, and my waitress grabbed it, balancing her tray of eggs.
“Anybody here got a pick-up being worked on?” She said, holding the phone out like a statue.
“That’s me,” I said, and got up to zig zag between tables to grab the phone.
“Hey Bud,” came the mechanic’s voice, “got your truck ready, but all I could do… really… is put Band-aids on it. I’ll drive it over and we can talk about what works.”
“Ok,” I managed, but I didn’t really want to hear it. And did he say, “what works?”
That didn’t sound good, I thought, like my truck was dying a slow death. I already knew the tires were bald, the fanbelt was worn, and the tailpipe was held on by a bungee cord. The only thing I knew that did work was the color, a razor blue that couldn’t be ignored. I stood in the parking lot, listening to the mechanic describe my truck on its last leg – the rebuilt carburetor and a battery that wouldn’t hold a charge – “enough to get you down the road,” the mechanic said, but no guarantees.
I handed him some cash and climbed in, adjusting the wing mirror.
“Oh! And don’t go over fifty!” It was the last thing I heard and I managed a wave, and glanced at the Brickyard marque flicker orange as I pulled out. The only thing looking east now was utter flatness and a monotony of tawny dust and boulders. Still, I had one good memory there at Annie’s when I heard a trucker mention that there had been talk of making the truck stop the new location for the United Nations, a nod to the soothing effect that the world’s best pumpkin pie had had on everyone who ever walked into the diner.
“Hey, believe it or not, that idea almost flew,” I heard him say. “Being right on the continental divide and all, the pie supposedly has some magical effect on people.”
But I couldn’t imagine a place like Checker Saddle, which fell right on the fold of my road map, being the location for worldwide diplomacy, the United Nations. Anyway, I had had enough of Annie’s and I leaned into the wheel for the long slog through some serious stretches of highway, hoping to make it home by Thanksgiving.
An hour later, when my coffee started to wear off, the mechanic’s comment came back to me. “What works” he said about my truck. Like that was less than what didn’t work?
“I’ll tell you what works,” I said out loud, angry, “classic side paneled windows, that’s what , and wipers that run off a vacuum. That’s what works for me. Where do you find that anymore in a truck?” I knew right then it was going to be a long, slow descent back to the Midwest if I was going to start arguing with myself and I glimpsed at the expanse of farmland full of cows. Lots and lots of cows, standing frozen like cardboard cutouts.
My coffee was wearing thin and a parade of passing cars made me feel like time was moving backwards. There is nothing like doing nothing to make your mind wander, and past mistakes I had made seem to be riding right beside me. I was going over those bumps and potholes I had hit earlier in my life. Now they seemed deeper and felt more like regrets, deeper each time I went over them. I was picking fights with my own circumstances, and blaming everything around me, especially myself, until it seemed like I was trying to wipe clean even the parts of my life that were good. With a thousand miles of highway still to go, I was downshifting hard – on both my truck and myself – and anything that still worked.
The worst of it centered on the nasty and unnecessary comments I had made about Mr. Pumpkin and they began to rush forward. My sour opinions and judgements about the overly consistent nature of pumpkin pie, about its blandness and lack of personality, was rising to meet me head on. I could try to say I’m sorry for the succession of insults I had spewed out, or I could ignore these wrongs from my past and continue this same road.
I looked down the highway as the unchanging yellow lines swept by, lines that converged a long way off and ended at some dot on the horizon. My eyes had been staring at that dot for too long, and I was squinting hard, looking for some new point of reference. There was a destination out there – where the earth rose up slightly – and perhaps my guilt set it off, I’m not sure, but I thought I begin to notice veins of light, little pulses popping up along the landscape, just under the surface and they were igniting other lights out in front of me. I remembered reading about how pumpkin vines crisscrossed the earth and wondered if those thousands of interlocking pumpkin vines were sending a message to me. I realized they were the flashes of brilliance I needed to see. It was time to adjust my rearview mirror on life, get the gears rolling again, make amends where I needed to, perhaps to Mr. Pumpkin himself.
I came around a long bend and suddenly saw a tattered billboard with a tattered advertisement shredded from the weather. One lightbulb illuminated the torn surface: Something, something… it read, but I couldn’t put it together and slowed down. Then I saw this at the top in bold letters: BEST PUMPKIN PIE, NEXT EXIT. and perhaps the exit number, and that was all.
I pulled over and stared up at it. I saw a faded picture of a plate of pumpkin pie and it enveloped me with a memory of what goodness and sweetness tasted like, and I let it seep into my bones and through the blue color that was the only solid thing left to about my truck. Nobody had to be strong here, not me, not my Chevy. I just had to surrender to the past, let my heart make its apology to Mr. Pumpkin and his nation, and then, God willing, everything would fall into place for a while until the next sign for pumpkin pie came along. Follow the billboards home. Yes, I thought, that is what works, that’s what the mechanic meant. There was still more goodness out there for me, waiting, in the next billboard if I looked for it. And forgiveness would be granted to me at each sign as they appeared – that was what really worked.
Long hours later, I turned off the highway whose traffic had all but disappeared and wound my way through the old familiar streets of my neighborhood, and glimpsed the stop sign that was still bent from a bicycle crash that required ten stiches, and around the final corner. I hoped a family would be waiting up, and a door would open, and all my regrets would die there on the front door and be replaced by the smell of everything that had been baking for the last twenty-four hours.
I saw one glowing pumpkin at the end of the block holding vigil against the dark. It was sitting proudly beneath a maple I had climbed a million times, a tree that had been my childhood hideaway from too much worldly noise, a place where ridicule could not be heard. Now, sitting stately under the tree was one lantern of welcome, a large, lone pumpkin with a single word carved in capital letters, letters that filled the yard with their outlines. The message was a kind of transfiguration – a glowing radiance that had something to say about what the past meant and my return home. Carved in the pumpkin was one word, and it was JOY, and it beamed like a brilliant smile just for me, pure and orange.