Working Man

There’s a particular smell to a working man’s truck: dry, dusty, hot paper, and sticky leather. I associate the smell with my grandfather, who did landscaping and gardening, and would drive my sister and me to the water park on hot summer days when we visited. It’s a smell that I didn’t realize could come attached to other people, to other men who did the same thing that Papa did.

I encountered the working man smell yesterday at the Eastlawn Memorial Garden. I showed up halfway through class, as per the agreement, and set off in search of the class. I walked all the way to the back of the cemetery down what they called Gardenia, a quarter mile or so. I heard dogs barking and trucks driving, and I saw statues and monuments and brightly colored flowers moving in the breeze, but I saw neither hide nor hair of my classmates and heard no voices on the wind.

I walked back to the east side of the cemetery to where I had seen two men working. One was rummaging in the back of his truck, and I stopped and asked him, “Have you seen a big group of college students?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They were back over there.” He pointed back towards where I had come from.

“Well, I thought I had walked all the way back there, but I didn’t see them. You’d think twenty kids or so would be easy enough to find!”

“Hop in, and I can drive you around to look for them. Their cars are all still here, so they can’t have gone too far!”

“That’s what I thought, too. Thanks.”

I opened the door, and it was an immediate recall to my childhood. There was dirt on the floor, wedged into the cracks on the rubber floor mat. Notebooks were in the center of the seat and next to the gearshift. Papers littered the dash, all crumpled and brown from exposure to the elements. It was just like Papa’s truck.

I pulled off my backpack and got up onto the flat bench seat. It was more comfortable that I thought it would be, especially considering that generally, one doesn’t just get into a car with a stranger who offers to drive around looking for something. It just seemed natural, as if any other progression of events would have been absurd.

He used his walkie-talkie to call someone and ask if he had seen the group. He hadn’t, not recently, but he thought they couldn’t have gone too far either. It wasn’t a long ride, and halfway back through the cemetery he spotted the class walking out of the corner of his eye.

He got as close as he could without hitting anyone, and let me out. I said thanks, and ran to catch up with the class.