“What?”

            “Thunder Pig.”

            “Thunder Pig?”

            “Yeah.  Get in.”

            It’s his first test of the truck, and I’m thrilled to be invited for the ride.  The newly upholstered seat smells fresh and feels uncomfortably hard.

            “Where are we going?”

            “Edge of the driveway.  I just want to try the clutch.  It’s a double-clutch.  Do you know what that means?  You have to step on the clutch to get it out of gear, take your foot off the clutch, then stomp on it again to put it into gear.  Nuts, eh?”

            The truck lurches back suddenly then careens the twenty meters to the end of the driveway.  I suck in my breath. 

            “All right, let’s try it forward.  I’m going to see if I can get into second.”

            Twenty meters – that’s all he’s got; the drive is punctuated by a tall, cedar tool shed.  I grip the dash.  Jon is a great mechanic but a notoriously bad driver.  I ask if we shouldn’t try this on the road and he grins, “No license plate.”

            “Oh.”

  
            Jon’s right knee jerks up and down again, thumping on the clutch like he’s crushing a mouse.  His great hands wrench the stick shift into gear.  Again he jerks his knee, and the truck bolts forward.  We are halfway across the driveway when he shouts,  “Hold on!  We’re doing it.”  My knuckles are white on the dash.

            The motions are repeated; this time more desperately as the truck revs up to speed, and the distance to the shed evaporates.  At the last possible moment, Jon slams on the brakes.  The tires squeal on the paved drive.  The truck decelerates sharply, but still smashes into the shed, which collapses in a heap.  I can’t be certain.  I think, in all that cacophony, I hear the sound of breaking glass.

            “Did it!” Jon yells in triumph.  “Could you tell?  We were in second!”

            It seems a strange victory to me.  To Elaine, who stands frozen on the front lawn with her hands clapped to her mouth, it is nothing short of disaster. 

            Maybe it’s the adrenaline.  The motor’s silent, but Jon’s still yelling,  “What you just witnessed...that was art.”

            I stagger out of the cab.  Elaine is in shock.  I want to laugh with Jon, laugh at how he fixed the truck, converting it from a sorry state – a rust speckled rectangle of sea-green metal – into a story I’ll no doubt tell about myself when I get to York.  It occurs to me that the GM, which has been around forever – since 1949 – has had no other history.  How many people have ridden in it?  Where have they gone?  For me the truck is that moment.  It came to life with a crash. 

            Out of courtesy to Elaine, I don’t laugh.  

            But there is something I still wonder; I wonder how much of this is deliberate.  I wonder if he knows.  “Which was art?” I ask, “Fixing the truck, or driving it into the shed?”

            “You think too much.”

            This is the plot:  the man decides he is going to make documentaries.  He’s in school studying film when he hears about a hurricane that is threatening the South – perhaps Florida or Jamaica.  The man decides he will make a documentary that will show the entire world the power of nature; something he feels he cannot experience on his own.  So he rents equipment.  He boards one of the last planes to wherever – wherever the storm is worst.  (I am going to hunt around for a real hurricane I can use – maybe set it twenty years ago and use hurricane Gilbert, in which case the story will take place in Jamaica.)  But there’s a problem.  He has an assistant who has put up the deposit for the equipment, and it’s just a school project.  They don’t have much money and it’s not a big production... 

            Impatient, the man flies to Jamaica in advance of the equipment.  He’ll meet the gear at the airport.  Except his assistant is worried about a more personal disaster – worried the lenses will get scratched, or some such thing.  He can’t afford to lose the money it would cost to replace ruined lenses.  So he stalls until... 

            Second last paragraph:  there are no more planes to Jamaica because of the violence of the storm.  The equipment never arrives! 

            Instead, the last paragraph describes the man – let’s say he’s twenty (old, but not ancient) – crouching alone, grasping a wind-bent palm tree on a deserted beach, realizing to his horror that if anyone is going to experience this storm, it will have to be him.  He will have to be his own work of art.  That’s how the story ends.  It seems like a reasonable tale, ironic but in a positive way, depending on how you read the ending – something that speaks to real life, but that’s much more compelling than mine.