Looking at the truck — his truck.
When Uncle Otto stopped coming to town, it was my father who made sure that he didn’t starve to death.
He brought him groceries every week, and paid for them out of his own pocket, because Uncle Otto never paid him
back — never thought of it, I suppose. Dad died two years before Uncle Otto, whose money ended up going to the
University of Maine Forestry Department. I understand they were delighted. Considering the amount, they should
have been.
After I got my driver’s license in 1972, I often took the weekly groceries out. At first Uncle Otto regarded
me with narrow suspicion, but after a while he began to thaw. It was three years later, in 1975, when he told me for the first time that the truck was creeping toward the house.
I was attending the University of Maine myself by then, but I was home for the summer and had fallen into
my old habit of taking Uncle Otto his weekly groceries. He sat at his table, smoking, watching me put the canned
goods away and listening to me chatter. I thought he might have forgotten who I was; sometimes he did that… or
pretended to. And once he had turned my blood cold by calling “That you, George?” out the window as I walked up to the house.
On that particular day in July of 1975, he broke into whatever trivial conversation I was making to ask with
harsh abruptness: “What do you make of yonder truck, Quentin?”
That abruptness startled an honest answer out of me; “I wet my pants in the cab of that truck when I was
five,” I said. “I think if I got up in it now I’d wet them again.”
Uncle Otto laughed long and loud. I turned and gazed at him with wonder. I could not remember ever
hearing him laugh before. It ended in a long coughing fit that turned his cheeks a bright red. Then he looked at me, his eyes glittering.
“Gettin closer, Quent,” he said.
“What, Uncle Otto?” I asked. I thought he had made one of his puzzling leaps from one subject to another —
maybe he meant Christmas was getting closer, or the Millennium, or the return of Christ the King.
“That buggardly truck,” he said, looking at me in a still, narrow, confidential way that I didn’t much like.
“Gettin closer every year.”
“It is?” I asked cautiously, thinking that here was a new and particularly unpleasant idea. I glanced out at the Cresswell, standing across the road with hay all around it and the White Mountains behind it… and for one
crazy minute it actually did seem closer. Then I blinked and the illusion went away. The truck was right where it had always been, of course.
“Oh, ayuh,” he said. “Gets a little closer every year.”
“Gee, maybe you need glasses. I can’t see any difference at all, Uncle Otto.”
” ‘Course you can’t!” he snapped. “Can’t see the hour hand move on your wristwatch, either, can you?
Buggardly thing moves too slow to see… unless you watch it all the time. Just the way I watch that truck.” He winked at me, and I shivered.
“Why would it move?” I asked.
“It wants me, that’s why,” he said. “Got me in mind all the while, that truck does. One day it’ll bust right in here, and that’ll be the end. It’ll run me down just like it did Mac, and that’ll be the end.”
This scared me quite badly — his reasonable tone was what scared me the most, I think. And the way the
young commonly respond to fright is to crack wise or become flippant. “Ought to move back to your house in town if it bothers you, Uncle Otto,” I said, and you never would have known from my tone that my back was ridged with gooseflesh.
He looked at me… and then at the truck across the road. “Can’t, Quentin,” he said. “Sometimes a man just has to stay in one place and wait for it to come to him.”
“Wait for what, Uncle Otto?” I asked, although I thought he must mean the truck.