Book Review : A World of Lost Lives Found in Texas

Truck Dance by Olive Hershey (Harper & Row: $16.95; 320 pages)

“Truck Dance” is a brave and chipper book about what to do when your life has fallen into a trough. It’s a book in which depression and decay do battle with enthusiasm, a passion for learning things, and an obsession for projects in the outside world. Luckily, the latter stuff wins.

Wilma and Vernon have been married for 20 years, living in the scuzzy town of Little Egypt, Tex. They’ve got two boys, Jody and Clint, but they’ve already thrown Jody out because of his bad temper and predilection for weird drugs. Because of the oil glut and other things out of poor Vernon’s control, he’s lost his farmland and “stolen” Wilma’s half of their community property to buy an unpromising swamp to raise crawfish. But that’s just one thing, the thievery. What’s really happened is that the couple have worked and worked and put their hearts into their farm, their town, their boys, their marriage and, after their 20-year hitch, they’ve come up broke--emotionally as well as financially.

The Larger World

Wilma gets a night-shift job as a waitress in a nearby truck stop, and over the counter there come to her hints and emanations of another, larger world. There’s more to life than Little Egypt, and Wilma prevails on a nice, melancholy speed-freak trucker named Gary to teach her the ups and downs of his truck: “. . . A Kenworth with chrome twin stacks, double chrome headlights, guide rods with shining chrome dolphins on them, and twin air horns mounted on top of the cab. A truck built so far off the ground she had to strain for a long, embarrassing minute to hoist herself into the seat.”

Gary teaches her about “. . . brake pressure, oil pressure, fuel in your two tanks, weight over front and rear axles.” And poor Vernon, more or less molting around the house, retaliates in the only way he knows how--by starting up an affair with Vera Taliaferro, a neighbor lady who brings her own quilt to their trysts.

Wilma gets pretty burned up over this and leaves with Gary. She’s not in love; she’s 5 feet 8 inches tall, overweight, and, at age 40, thinks her own trysting days are over. She’s just reached the end of one life and is ready for another. She’s out of Little Egypt, and on the road.

There then follows a quite extraordinary flashback: Wilma as a kid had been too big to be a pretty girl, but too “female” to ever get to go out and have a good time. The young Vernon has won her in the first place by teaching her to shoot, to hunt and to fish. And, for the rest of her life, Wilma will be captivated by men who know things she doesn’t--all the fun things of the outside world. Wilma’s not the only one who feels this way: She picks up a teen-aged hooker, Oralee Sweet, who once was wooed and almost won by an old geezer who promised to tell her “all about baseball.”

Wilma wants to learn about everything. And she learns almost everything she can handle out there on the road. She’s taken to bordellos and cock fights; she’s “kidnaped” at a Mardi Gras and dances to a Zydeco fiddler. She dumps her trucker and strikes out on her own.

Inevitably, since this is Texas, Wilma gets caught up in the whole Mexican, Central American immigration thing, falling half in love with a messianic sanctuary worker, and really in love with a handsome INS officer named Garcia who’s more than willing to turn in Latinos to protect America, what he thinks of as his real country. Meanwhile, Vernon is tearing up Little Egypt with his surplus crops of crawfish. Alone, he’s able to do what he could never do with Wilma around--turn from a klutzy redneck dreamer into a respected man of property.

“Truck Dance” has been carefully researched, and the characters are rendered without a trace of condescension. Olive Hershey is a true Texan, and it shows in every line. This book has some first-novel weaknesses (Wilma and Vernon have been married 20 years, the novel covers a span of five years, and they’ve still been married 20 years). One of their sons and a huge Labrador retriever just disappear out of the book without a trace, and the whole sanctuary movement is given the “once-over-lightly” of a careless housewife who hates to dust. But, for its glimpses of a world we hardly ever see, “Truck Dance” is heartening and authentic.