as he walks into the station, shakes his sodden boots off on the mat and greets an old buddy with a slap on the back. Ain't the same, he thinks, now that the Super America come in and razed everything, got rid of the porch and the salvage out back. The old men in UAW hats who read the paper there, too, seem to have disappeared. A man rolls with the changes. He doesn't use grief or fear, insomnia or depression. He says his balls are still on midnights after all those years of taking what he could get. He doesn't say unfair. Those fuckers who buy foreign, he says. Fucking gas prices and President Fucking Bush. Larry says he thinks that's the real name his momma give him. A man says, Bailouts or no, I'm getting raped. Larry asks how the boy is over there. A man nods, tightens his lips. The boy's holding up. He's carrying fifty-six pounds of gear on his lanky frame through the Iraqi desert. A man can face the footage — thank God on CNN and not their local news — in which his boy — he knew it was his boy right away — kicks the body of a dead Iraqi. For sport, the reporter had said. Sport. A man doesn't whine, even to himself: What else could my son do? What choice did my boy have? He says: That's what war can do to a man. It changes a man on the level of the blood. A father simply accepts a fiercer son, one whose face revealed his pleasure, not his rage, as he slammed his heavy foot into that body. Larry cracks a beer even though it's past two in the morning. A man pounds his friend on the back some more — nothing in the world as good
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as putting beer on your whiskey — and drains the Stroh's to the can's bottom. He could ask Larry for more whiskey and Larry'd surely pony it up, but only if a guy'll say something about why he's here in the middle of the night. Fight with his wife. Trouble with the neighbors. No time for
A man, after carousing, returns himself to a woman who stood by him while other families were broken by layoffs and shutdowns and fear. He forgets all of those things that could have sent a jagged crack into their union, wakes in the morning, drinks a hot cup of coffee. Maybe he buys
A man's boat has his own wife's name on the side and its tiny engine is not rigged to the gunnel with a coat hanger. His boat ranks up there with his truck, his tackle, his favorite wrench.
fishing. But a man cannot tell an old buddy the truth. He can't turn to Larry as they come back in through the milk crates and toilet paper and hold him and say that he just can't take it anymore. He says his garage heater's out — he's trying to watch the replays of the game — asks about the kerosene. Them red cans are for gasoline. Can't letcha fill 'em with the kerosene, buddy, Larry says. You shitting me? he asks. No way no how. Super America rules. Crock of shit, a man says. But he takes this in stride like a man would, chooses gasoline. Careful with that, Larry says. Can't use it in the kerosene lamp. But a man can do most anything the packaging of an appliance warns you not to do. And he does not think: Bingo. The insurance company will eat that up like candy. Go home to your wife, now, asshole, Larry says.
some nightcrawlers and tries his luck in the lake. But after that, what does he do? What does he do if there is no place to make cars? The first time he peered under the hood of an old Model-T, that tangle of rubber and metal was more familiar to him in a glance than his own innards and veins, more familiar than the women he loved in that car paid for with his own barnyard sweat every Sunday. And once he bought it, he was a man. A car was what made you a man. A man, everyone's got to understand, cannot just sit around with his union suit hanging out of his jeans and watch The Geography Channel all damned day. A man does not, as he hauls those stinking canisters into the garage, merely shrug when his woman appears at the door in her tattered grey robe to ask: It's midwinter. It's the middle of the night. What's the need for gasoline, now? She's thinking it's the house he's going to do.
College of the Atlantic Magazine