Free Truck by Michael Perry Page A

good to go. Just hide inside, and when a big buck wanders by, pop the lid and rata-tat-tat . In this county the idea of camouflaging yourself inside a dryer is not at all absurd, as the local forest creatures have grown blasé about the presence of home appliances in the wild. Like overgrown cubist toadstools, feral refrigerators and washing machines are generally found clustered at the bottom of eroded gullies, or at the terminus of dead-end roads and abandoned driveways. Trouble is, discarded white goods make popular targets, and are often so ardently perforated as to appear to have been caught in the crossfire at Panzer fantasy camp. Come November, when the woods are filled with trigger-happy amateurs sporting blaze-orange bomber caps, your perspicacious Leatherstocking does not take shelter in a Maytag.
    Ultimately, I sent the dryer away with the village junk man (the title is unofficial, but the work is steady). You don’t schedule the junk man as such. He keeps his trailer parked at the implement store out on Highway M, so you call out there and they pass the message the next time he drops by. If you’re not home the first couple of times he stops, he doesn’t sweat it, because he knows your dryer isn’t going anywhere. He tows the trailer behind a teensy pickup truck, which magnifies the fact that the trailer is roughly the size of a volleyball court. Fully loaded, it has the appearance of a postapocalyptic Costco on wheels. Depending on the nature of your junk and the going price of scrap iron, he’ll dispose of larger appliances in exchange for a modest donation. He also accepts odd lots of steel, aluminum, and old wire. I don’t know much about the junk man except that he lives in the trailer court and his truck used to have Missouri plates. He has an Appalachian drawl and a smoker’s cough, and he gets short of breath quick. I helped him fight the dryer aboard the trailer, jockeying it back and forth until it fit between two beat-up washing machines and a harvest gold oven. He was wheezingpretty good when I handed him a few bucks, and before he eased them into his pocket, he took time to crease and fold each bill neatly, almost as if he was buying time to catch his wind. But when he pulled out of the driveway, he leaned out the window to grin and wave. Before he heads for the scrap yard he’ll pop the shields off the washers and dryers and stoves and yank all the wiring in order to strip out the copper, which sells for a higher rate than the steel. He does this day after day after day. I see him running all the time. I can’t imagine the grind of his week, or what he’d rather be doing, but every time that truck passes by he’s got the hammer down, and he’ll always return your wave. Lacking an ACT LOCALLY bumper sticker or hemp shorts, he nonetheless manages to do the right thing for Mother Earth.
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    First chance I get, I take the seeds to my basement and set them to sprout. From November on, I look forward to the day I can flout the ice and snow by puttering under the lights of my gardening bench. It is all I can do not to jump the gun. I get so hungry for green, sometimes I plant things way too early. This year, I came home from watching the Super Bowl at a friend’s house and scattered some pots with last year’s leftover oregano and sweet marjoram. I have nursed trays of stunted lettuce on a windowsill in January just so I could pick a leaf and hold it on my tongue while observing the formation of snowdrifts.
    But today I want to cheat the seasons in earnest, so I scratch a match across the concrete floor and ignite two of three burners on the portable LP heater (the third burner has a habit of howling like a demonic calliope) and position it at the back of my steel folding chair. Then I plug in a plastic boom box at the workbench. The boom box won’t play CDs anymore because I karate-chopped the lid during an embarrassing spasm of rage triggered