All That Rust and Grit

Abbie Doll

My dad’s Chevys were more rust than trucks. I’d flake the corroded flecks off with the nail of my index finger, clawing at their metal exterior, trying to tunnel my way in. To me, trucks ran like bodies, with an entire system of sack-shaped organs underneath for me to marvel at, if only I could get beyond those body-panel ribs. 

     But I never got that far. They always caught me first. My curiosity was all-consuming—so much so that I never bothered trying to avoid detection. Instead, I welcomed the burgundy residue that accumulated on my skin, took pride in the way I reinvigorated the phrase: caught red-handed. 

     Scraping that paint was my first fixation. The in-house authorities could waste their days hollering at me to leave it be, but still, I’d plant myself—bare feet submerged in the rubble of our driveway—beside the truck bed and dig away at that rust. I picked at those loose bits as one might pluck a rotisserie chicken—clean and straight to the bone. And with each flake that fell, I tumbled deeper into daydreams where the rust could be anything: fresh snow to conceal our sins or ashy shavings off a winning lottery ticket. All I had to do was keep scratching, and the dream would stay alive. 

     Or so I told myself, still naïve enough to believe that some miraculous mound of money might fix even half our problems. 

     My father’s exterior mirrored his trucks’. Always rusty—its irritated, deteriorating state resembled the skin of an elephant, but in this odd shade of glazed ham. The technical term was psoriasis, but my imagination offered its own interpretation: his body was the sinking Titanic, its blemished skin ever on the verge of dropping off, like desperate passengers plunging into the icy waters below. I believed those inflamed blotches might keep peeling and peeling off in jagged borders until there was nothing left.

     While I never picked at his skin the way I did his trucks, I sure as hell wanted to. Since then, I’ve plucked many a blistery sunburn, albeit my own. The psoriasis endowed him with professorial attire; what I mean to say is his elbows and knees were covered in tweed-suit patches. They matched mine—fresh with rug burn from rough-but-liberating bout of carpet wrestling. The thing was, his were like that all the time, while mine were a temporary consequence of rowdiness: an unwieldy flood of childhood energy. 

     I half expected something to sprout up through those leathery splotches, always sneaking peeks, waiting for the jagged tip of a volcano to poke through, for a newborn pickup to shoot out with shiny, fresh-from-the-womb skin. Skin that wasn’t so quick to lose its luster or prone to flake like dandruff flurrying from our mid-winter scalps.

    With all my parents’ shouting, those psoriasis patches felt like my dad’s blood boiling through, his skin soiled with angry tongue blisters. Who’s to say the arguments hadn’t scarred him as much as they had me? We were battered by the ballistic routine, haunted by household happenings, by the belief that love wasn’t love without fiery feuds. It needed fuel to burn. 

    While other kids waited up for the jolly old fat man, I learned to believe that unchecked intensity was the base component of affection.

    They put on a top-tier performance, my parents. Night after night, remotes were slung, records frisbee-chucked, and ashtrays flung. Plastic shrapnel littered the place like battleground debris—so many projectiles that I needed an air traffic controller just to cross the room. It was a dangerous and risky play, but you were a sitting duck if you held still. The walls were peppered with dents that might as well have been gunshot scars. On the nights I managed to escape, I’d hunker below my bed frame, door shut, praying they’d forget I existed. Anything to keep me out of the line of fire. 

     But my escapist efforts were pointless; every one of us was destined to be a casualty of our home-grown warfare. There was no preventing this. Explosive outbursts were our manner of expression, our tragic native tongue. We were open wounds, festering, never quite healing, no matter the mountain of salve applied. We made a sport of rubbing each other the wrong way, always on purpose. 

     I’d watch my father rub lotion onto those sores night after night. I started thinking maybe that’s what the truck needed, too. Hell, maybe that’s what we all needed to get ourselves in gear. I saved up and surprised him with a tube for Christmas, but he didn’t get it. Started applying it to his own skin instead.

     I tried to show him, No, Daddy, for your truck.   

     But the truck didn’t get it either. Stop touching me, it said. 

     And me? There was a whole truckload of shit I didn’t get.

© Variant Literature Inc 2023