The Universal Rural Handshake

Notes on a silent pact

There's a little white noise machine on the floor outside the door, the kind that runs so the people on the other side can fall apart without the waiting room hearing it.

All day it hisses.

I'd walk in past that hiss once a week, and an hour later I’d walk back out past it, and then I’d climb into the Circus Wagon (my pickup, long story) and sit there a solid thirty-eight seconds doing nothing a sane man would call useful.

Cueing up Spotify. Adjusting the mirror.

Always the mirror, like a gremlin crawls into the cab at each stop and knocks it half a degree sideways just to watch me suffer.

I was a regular at that building, driven there every week by my stomach. It wasn’t a standard medical issue, but something meaner.

Even now, my body registers the slightest ripple of tension: a loud voice down the hall, a shift in a meeting’s energy, or a hostile look from a stranger miles away. Any of it makes my insides catch like a grease fire, cooking up an acid I burp up for the rest of the afternoon.

I came to find out why a grown man’s body treats a quiet disagreement like a fistfight.

That’s my reason. The list under it is longer and I’m not reading it to you.

There was a guy. I’d see him every week, regular as I was, only backwards. Him on his way in as I came out.

We’d pass in that hallway and trade the head nod, the universal rural handshake, the thing you give a man when you don’t have to know him, you just both have to be men standing in the same eight feet of carpet.

And every week I’d think: I know that guy. I know him from somewhere. I’d sit in the wagon and chew on it. I’d stare at his pickup in the lot like the tailgate might give him up.

Nothing.

Who in the fuck is this guy?

Then two weeks ago he beat me to it. “Hey, Adam.”

I gave him the nod and a “hey” back, and still, nothing, not a flicker. Climbed in the wagon, did my thirty-eight seconds, lost the same bet I lose every week, and pulled out toward Lake Park.

About halfway down, the phone went off.

It was him.

Hey Adam. I’d really appreciate it if we could keep this between us. That we saw each other there.

I pulled onto the shoulder and shut the wagon down. Just sat there, staring at the name on the screen. Eight weeks of chewing on it evaporated before the truck even stopped rocking. I’d known the guy for years. Good man.

But the moment the mystery evaporated, a heavier truth took its place.

We were two grown men passing each other in that hallway for two months, both walking into the same room to sit on the same sofa, and neither of us had ever said a word.

Because of course we hadn’t.

I hadn’t been able to place him because I never really looked. Neither did he. We’d kept our eyes just low enough and our nods just short enough that nobody ever got recognized.

We’d been protecting each other the whole time, completely blind to the fact that we were doing it.

I wrote him back right away. First, I told him I’d never disclose anybody’s personal information.

That’s not how I operate.

But second, I told him: Good for you. It takes a real set of berries to walk through that door the first time.

Most men around here would sooner roll a tractor than admit they’ve got a hard week living in their chest. And I told him the truest thing I had: there’s no shame in it.

None.

And the fact that we’ve been trained to believe that sitting on that couch somehow makes us lesser men is … well it’s a bunch of bullshit is what it is.

It took him a minute.

Then: Huh. Never thought about it like that.

For about ninety seconds, sitting on the shoulder of the road, I thought I’d done some good in the world.

Then the phone went off again.

So you’re not gonna tell anybody about this, right?