Wendy Corduroy and the Visitor

When Wendy Corduroy was sixteen, her father got her a truck. Before anything else can be said, though, you have to understand that it wasn’t a spectacularly new truck – it wasn’t even particularly reliable. It was one of those trucks – and every teenager who grew up out on a farm or out in the woods knows exactly what that meant.

It was that truck – the old, busted pick-up truck that your Dad drove before he got married and was too stubborn to get rid of. The truck that by no right should be driven, but some obscure loophole kept it road legal. The truck with the rust holding a miniature war with the lower section of each door, especially the one that didn’t open all the way, and a spider-web of cracks spread across the windshield. It was hot in summer, cold in winter, and miserable all year ‘round. It only just broke fifty miles an hour, and even then made noises that threatened self-combustion.

At some point, your father must’ve put a sticker with your mother’s name on the driver’s door; a very sweet gesture that dimmed in meaning after several letters fell off, leaving a very different word in their place. In Wendy’s case, her mother’s name was Sheila, and the S and A were long gone by the time it fell into her possession – she quietly referred to it as the Nazi-mobile. Fortunately, it couldn’t be seen under all the mud. Good lord, the mud. It seemed permanently plastered along the base of the truck, with leaves and bits of gravel fossilized there since the fall of the Berlin wall and the death of Elvis. No matter how hard it was washed, there would always be mud clinging the inside of the tires, or inside the door, or hiding somewhere, waiting to crawl out and spread again, permanently marking the thing as to where it and its driver belonged.