Free Truck by Michael Perry

glitter in the sun. I imagine all the little seeds exploding into irrepressible green.
    The dog chained to the house across the alley has spotted me and gone to barking. The dog is owned by a skinny man who keeps his mullet tamped down with a NASCAR cap. Thin as he is, the man moves with a stiff muscularity that implies hard luck and fistfights. The dog appears to have been raised on a diet of chain-link fence and burglar heels. Back when the weather was warmer, the man set out to build a kennel from steel hog panels, but he was halfway through pounding stakes when one of the women sharing the house with him stuck her head out the door and said something. He threw his hammer down and stomped inside and that was it. The panels still lie flat there beneath the snow. One day last fall some of the man’s pals drove a white van up the alley and parked it beside the clothesline. The man met them with beers, and they popped the hood. By late afternoon, the yard was a scatter of parts and tools and every door on the van was open. The men were gone. When I walked my trash bags over to the village dumpsters across the street, I grinnedat Matt, the village employee with whom I serve on the fire department, and nodded toward the van.
    â€œWhaddya figure?”
    He didn’t miss a beat. “Two weeks, and it’s a yard barn.”
    â€œNever leave the lot under its own power,” I added.
    Months now, and the van is still there. The doors are shut, but through the windows I spy Hefty bags and duct-taped boxes.
    I could do without that dog, but I do not object to the hog panels or the van. I would be a jerk to do so, what with my International still lodged there out front—out front, mind you, not even hidden alley-side—of the garage like a prehistoric carbuncle. What that white van does is take the pressure off. When my clothes dryer died last winter, I wrassled it up the basement stairs and knee-tossed it out the back door. It landed off-kilter in the snow and stuck, like a dotless dice cube frozen mid-tumble, in a position reminiscent of the fifteen-feet-tall steel cube erected by the sculptor Tony Rosenthal on a traffic triangle in New York’s East Village. I saw Rosenthal’s sculpture once from the back of a cab. It is balanced on one point and can be spun on its axis. He put it up in the late 1960s and named it The Alamo . This is the sort of willful obscurantism that hinders the appreciation of modern art in the heartland. Apparently three-dimensional squares en pointe were trendy in the late 1960s, because a year later a cube designed by Isamu Noguchi was installed in a nearly identical position outside a high-rise a few blocks uptown on Broadway. Noguchi painted his cube red and named it Red Cube . I like Noguchi a little better for that. Riffing off Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, I took to calling my dryer Tilted Lint .
    The dryer (or installation , if I may) remained in my backyard well into summer. When the snow melted, it settled to the ground. Gotta get rid of that, I’d think, every time I had to circumvent it on my way to water the garden or cover an ambulance call (the Serra reference was becoming more apt— Tilted Arc was removed after people got sick of detouring around it). I began entertaining fantasies in which I would preserve valuable landfill space by repurposing the dryer. It would make a fine industrial-strength compost turner. I’d trade out the belts for a chain drive and hook it up to my old Schwinn Varsity. I would scheduleorganic spinning classes for my friends in the renewable energy crowd. On a less vegetarian note, I also believed that given twenty minutes with a cutting torch, a welder, and a bundle of rebar, the dryer could be converted to a monster hibachi with rotating spit. I’d hire out for weddings and pig roasts. Alternatively, it might do for a deer blind. I’d have to strip the guts and motor and drill out peep holes, but then I’d be