Pictionary

I went to Leonard's True value the other day. They know me there now, at least by sight - I have a card I use to get discounts, they ask me jokingly how much more dehydrated cow manure I'd like, since I bought five bags of it on three separate visits over the period of a week...Nice people, very helpful. Just across the line in Pownal, Vermont. I think I was in looking for grass seed.

But the thing that happened, happened in the parking lot. I pulled into it on a hot and hazy day and curved around to an open space, right next to a very rusty, old pickup truck, with sheets of cornflake-thin metal falling into rust and onto the ground from every bit of it. The truck had originally been red, I think, but now had panels of a number of colors. Vermont plates, coated in the almost-orange, sticky mud, now dried, that underlies the actual fertile soil here - where a vehicle gets covered in that, is where holes and ruts have been dug for a very long time, through anything that could ever have grown a decent plant. Old and unkept farms, clearcut slopes, mountain roads that have never been paved... All of which are found in great abundance in Pownal.

I stepped out of the car and looked into the cab as I swung past it. A very young man, late teens or early twenties, sat in the passenger seat. He was small - shorter than me, rangier - but tightly muscled, with a thin mustache and thick, black eyebrows. He seemed to be squinting and drifting off to sleep at the same time, slouched, pushed up against the dashboard more closely than I would have found comfortable. Shirtless, with a baseball cap.

Behind him, in the area where my Dad used to lose things between the seats and the rear wall of his pickup trucks, sat a thin young woman. I saw the back of her head and the curve of her hunched shoulders, framed by the swoops of a tank-top. Her hair was straight, and long, and she sat in the same curled, folded, lethargic posture as the man in front, facing sideways, much lower down, sitting as she was on the floor. There was no way for her to put her feet toward the front. It isn't a seat, this area - it wasn't meant for people. I felt immediately claustrophobic looking at her, but she was unworried, or seemed so from behind. Patience, was what I felt from her, and from him. Or maybe just a complete lack of expectations.

The strangest thing about them was that they didn't shift, didn't adjust themselves, didn't speak. Just looked, each in his or her own direction, and waited. Their vehicle had arrived just before mine, and was still clicking and hissing as it cooled down. But this arrival, change in their status, hadn't altered their outlooks. They waited.

I rounded the back and saw the bed of the truck filled with thick, black, old sewer pipes, seven or eight inches across. The bed was just filled with them - dozens, jangled in among each other, haphazard enough to look like they'd been dumped, but also fairly densely packed with some evident care. Messy and purposeful, at the same time. No tools, no tarps - just the pipes. Salvaged, I felt sure, and on their way to sale somewhere.

Passing the end of the truck, thinking about it still, interested in it without knowing why, I saw the driver, leaving the truck and walking toward the store. Shirtless - he was producing a tee shirt from somewhere as we both moved toward the store, roughly parallel. He saw me, said "'Lo", as if obligated; he nodded quickly, and looked even more quickly away, toward the store, his mouth firming under its black mustache. As he walked he pulled the tee shirt over his head and his shoulders - the head wore a baseball cap, the shoulders were prodigiously muscled - but again in a wiry way, and he, like his passengers, was very small. Barely more than five feet tall, with wavy black hair and dirty jeans. He walked more quickly than I, as if wanting almost to run, and moved into the path my own steps were describing, six feet ahead and pulling away. The tee shirt fell over him just as he pushed open the door. He was so very like the man waiting for him in the truck that I felt certain they were brothers.

I didn't see him inside the store - the grass seed is close to the front, and I made my purchase quickly. But as I came back to my own car, I looked carefully again at the truck, and sneaked another scan of its waiting passengers. The man's face turned languidly toward mine, saw it, but looked again toward the front without acknowledging. He had not moved the slightest in my absence. The woman either - her head had some motion to it; otherwise I could have believed she was a slouching mannequin. They were absolutely silent.

I drove home and ran the whole scene over again in my head. I didn't know why - I couldn't stop looking at my brand-new memories of them. They were familiar; I had seen them before. Maybe not these specific people, but people like them. Where?

I knew it before I arrived back at my driveway, a mile away: Indians. Ecuador, in the mountains. They were often similarly poor, similarly marginalized and resigned to it, similarly floating in what they saw as their lives and their lots. Ritually similar to each other in their clothing, whispering in their own language, aware of their poverty and of others' disdain for it, and for them; unable to hide either identity, their economic or their ethnic and cultural one, they endured on every trip in to town the stares and the insults of almost everyone around them with a stoicism that was equal parts selective deafness and jaded, numb indifference. Unwilling to talk to each other on these forays into the world that looks down on them - because, I always felt, the voice of each speaker would remind the other of his company, and of their station. So they stare silently, thinking more comforting thoughts, and wait until they are back among their own.

And I was reminded of what Bill Bryson wrote in "A Walk In the Woods", his book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. He quotes a nineteenth-century visitor to the mountains of Georgia, describing its inhabitants as "cadaverous", and many other unkind things. But the one word that struck a chord with me was this:

"Melancholy."

The pathological, culturally institutionalized sadness of Andean Indians should have cemented that word for me for all time, but somehow it didn't. I didn't knowingly taste "melancholy" until I thought a while on my ride home about the hot, cramped wait, in that parking lot, in that truck, with a load of salvaged shit-pipes, in dead, deathly, accepting silence, at the age of maybe 20.