by C J Hribal
“Fill ’er up, Bobo,” said my father. We were back at the Sinclair station. I always felt excited at the Sinclair station. There was plenty to watch—the dinosaur on the sign, for example, and the attendants who scurried about our father’s car, filling it with gas, checking its oil, cleaning the windshield and side windows, even the triangular vent window that we loved to have open—but we never felt we were part of the proceedings except as an audience inside the car’s bubble. Things went on around us and we watched. It was like that now with the three men at the bar, and Bobo behind it, and the woman sitting among them. Things went on among the five of them, and it was like I was now in the bubble, sealed off from the proceedings but watching.
The woman’s name was Shirley. One of the men sitting at the end of the bar said, “What’s your name, sugar? I’m Roy, and this here’s Charlie,” indicating the man next to him.
“That’s a nice name,” the woman said. Then to Bobo, “I think I’ll have one of those.”
“One of what?” said Bobo.
“A Rob Roy,” said the woman. Everybody was still looking at her. My father was smiling or grimacing, I couldn’t tell which.
“I asked you what’s your name, sugar,” Roy said. He was a burly looking man with a big forehead on account of he had almost no hair on his head. He had a round face and long strands of hair that came from just above his ears and were greased onto the top of his head like colonists forced to live in a barren new country. The few indigenous strands stood up short and wild and were highlighted white by the window behind him.
“I heard you, Roy,” said the woman, waving her hand at him. She had the reddest nails I’d ever seen. It was like the tips of her fingers were dipped in blood. She turned to my father just as Bobo was setting her drink down in front of her and taking the singles from the small stack sitting in front of my dad. She lifted her Rob Roy and made a little toasting gesture. “Thank you,” she said to my father. “My name’s Shirley. And who might my benefactor be?”
“Walt,” said my father, still smiling and grimacing. He looked embarrassed, pained, and pleased to boot.
“Walt,” said Shirley. “I like that name. Walt. Do you mind if I call you Walter?” She was already taking another cigarette out of her pack. She kept them in a little green purse with a clasp, and when she opened the purse it looked like a frog opening its mouth. “I never liked my name,” said Shirley. “You know who I was named for, Walter? Shirley Temple. I hate that.” She had the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, but before she could light it herself my father had his lighter out. He didn’t smoke anymore, but he still carried his silver Zippo with his ship and ship’s number etched on the side. She bent her head for the flame, and when she straightened up she was already blowing out smoke.
“Shirley,” said Roy. “I always kinda liked that name.”
“Me, too,” said Charlie. “I known a lotta Shirleys and I liked ’em all.”
My father dipped his head and whispered to me for the second time, “These are men. Never forget that.” He was creeping me out again. I knew they were men. What else could they be? Except for Shirley, of course, who looked a little like Mrs. Duckwa, unhappy and hungry. My father sat back. “And this,” he said a little louder, indicating Shirley, “this is a lady.”
“Why thank you, Walter. For the light and the compliment.”
There was silence for a few moments then when nobody knew what to say. It was like they were waiting for the conversation to get going again after all the small talk had been depleted. I could tell Roy and Charlie would have liked for her to talk to them; they were leaning forward on the bar, hungry looks on their faces, but Shirley had turned so she was facing my dad. She’d crossed her legs, too—she had thick ankles—and was holding her cigarette at an angle in a way that years later I learned was called a “studied” pose. She looked like somebody from a 1940s movie, sort of glamorous and desperate all at the same time. She smoked for a while and just sat there, regarding my father with what I guessed was curiosity and interest. Then she leaned forward with a look of concern on her face.
“What happened to you, Walter? You look incinerated.”
“I was putting up a pool for my kids,” Dad answered, a little sheepishly.
“A family man, I like that,” said Shirley. She let out a great lungful of smoke and sighed. “I have always depended upon the kindness of family men,” she said in a fake southern accent. I don’t know why she did that, but my father gave a little pained laugh. Heh-heh-heh, said my father, which was unusual for him, because he usually had a big booming laugh that you could hear clear across a room. You heard that laugh at social gatherings and invariably somebody would say, “What’s Walter think is so funny?” And somebody else would say, “Walter thinks everything’s funny,” which was news to us, seeing as how we lived with him and the laughs didn’t seem all that continuous.
My father straightened up, and that let her see me behind him. Her face lit up in a sickly sort of way. “Oh, and I see you brought your little boy with you. How sweet.” She brought her cigarette up to her lips again. “Maybe your little boy could meet my little girl sometime.”
Now I didn’t like her. She’d called me a little boy. No boy who thinks of himself as big likes being called little, not when he’s out on an adventure with his father, one he is sworn not to tell Mom about. There was something guilty and delicious about playing hooky from Mom. If Shirley had said “little man,” that would have been all right. But she hadn’t. She’d said “little boy,” and that riled me. She kept saying it, too. “I like little boys,” Shirley said to my father. “Does your little boy like to come out and play sometimes? I like little boys who can come out and play. Maybe your little boy could do that, come out and play? Unless, of course, he has too many chores around the house?” She said this last part really slowly, with pauses between each word, and her voice went all singsongy, with lots of emphasis on chores.
I wanted to say, no, no, my afternoon was free, but she wasn’t paying me any attention.
She got off her stool. She stood beside my dad, and the way she lifted his shirt I was reminded of nurses in burn wards in the war movies, how they were so gentle around the men swathed in bandages, only the men’s eyes showing, and how they cooed and ahed as they gave the men sponge baths, and the look that came over their faces when they saw the horrible burns themselves, this look of pained sympathy they got.
“You don’t tan well, do you?” She seemed nicer now, and my antipathy toward her lessened. She had arms like my mother’s, a little soft beneath her biceps.
My father allowed that he did not.
“Somebody is going to have to be gentle with you,” Shirley said, peeking inside my father’s shirt collar. She curled all her fingers except her index finger into her fist and with the tip of her blood-red fingernail started writing in the unguent smeared on the back of my father’s neck. I craned my own neck to see. “S-h-i-r,” she’d written in cursive. My father’s back arched and shivered. Her fingernail kept going: “l-e-y.” She was done. She rearranged my father’s collar, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger, then wiped her fingers on a cocktail napkin. She was smiling at my father with intense interest. My father smiled sheepishly into his drink. I wanted to tell him she’d written her name on the back of his neck in unguent, but I didn’t know if I should. Usually in the wayback you kept your mouth shut.
“Tell me, did your little boy get burned, too?”
“I’m right here,” I said, waving. “I’m fine. Just a little red on my face.” Something about how she’d written her name on my father’s neck made me want to speak up, to receive the same attention my father’d received. I wanted her fingernail to write across my neck in cursive. I bet it tickled. Or maybe it felt different if you were covered in unguent. I wanted to find out.
“That’s sweet,” said Shirley. “You must be pleased,” she said to my dad, “having a little boy who’s so well-mannered. So polite. I bet he’d st
and at attention if we asked him.” And then again with the singsongy voice: “Or does he only take orders from one drill sergeant?”
I was about to leap off my stool and stand perfectly still, arms at my sides, just to prove to her I could do it, but my dad put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I was to stay put.
“He only takes orders from one drill sergeant,” said my father. His tone had changed. He sounded apologetic, but something else was in there, too, a certain hardness, as though he had resolved to be apologetic and was sticking to that, no matter how else he felt.
“I’m disappointed to hear that,” said Shirley. “I thought maybe we could do a little close order drilling some night, after the other little soldiers have all been put to bed.”
“Some other time,” said my father. “I need to be getting back to the base now.”
“Well,” said Shirley, sitting back on her stool and lifting her Rob Roy again, “you give your commandant my best regards. She must be quite the commander.”
“I will,” said my father. “And she is,” he added, picking up his singles and putting them back in his pocket.
Shirley reached into her little frog of a pocketbook. “Here,” she said and gave my dad a card. It had flowers on it. My father put it into his wallet, a wallet thick with gas cards and business cards and prayer cards and held together with rubber bands.
“Dad,” I whispered as we were leaving. “You left one. On the bar. One of your dollar bills.”
“That’s called a tip,” said my father. “And I’ll give you another. Loose lips sink ships.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded like I knew, like I’d just been given a valuable piece of knowledge that would last me for the rest of my life.
8. Kids Bounce
Cumulus clouds stacked in a blue, blue sky. By rights we should not get a day like this in March. It’s flirting with sixty degrees, and Ike and Ernie have set up a feast in the front yard: venison sausage and steaks, trout and bass and walleye fillets, batter-fried perch and shrimp. Coolers jammed with beer, soda, wine. Ernie’s drinking too much, but then he’s always drinking too much. What you hope is that he calls it quits early, as our father sometimes did, and then coasts into the evening, lubricated but pacified. To distract him, we talk about the marinades and the batter, both Ernie’s recipes, and the fish, which he caught. Peg Leg Meg and Dorie and Robert Aaron’s wife, Audrey, dish out potato salad and three-bean salad and Jell-O and potato chips for the grandkids, nearly twenty of them now, who then parade past the fish and meats, load their plates some more, and eat till they’re stuffed. What they leave for the ants could feed a small village.
Out on the lawn now they’re kicking a soccer ball around, playing quoits and lawn jarts. A Frisbee passes over our heads. There are enough of us for volleyball, but given the relative girth and/or immobility of most of the adults, we have settled for croquet. Our mother’s red ball hits our father’s green one, and we laugh as our mother nestles the balls together, places her foot on her ball, and on her backswing says, “Wally-Bear, I’m sending you into the next county.” Her swing has within it both jocularity and vengeance, fondness and fury. We expect a great clack!—our father’s ball rocketing off. There were times, we know, when our mother would have liked to have done this very thing with his cojones. Only she would not have allowed them to skitter to rest under a pine tree ninety feet away, which is where she’s aiming.
But a strange thing happens on the downstroke. Our mother’s swing slows up, and rather than send his ball flying, she pokes it maybe fifteen feet. Our mother smiles. “Had you scared, didn’t I?” she says. Then she mouths, “You owe me.” Our father, flustered and bemused, shakes his head and smiles. “I know,” he says. “I know, I know, I know.”
It may be the first time he has ever acknowledged such a debt in public.
Our parents’ turn at croquet is just for show. They tire easily these days, play one round, then shuffle back inside, our mother tilting from side to side on her rebuilt hips and bad ankles, our father listing to port as he overcompensates for his bad eye. They are starting to be a collection of replacement parts and broken down things that cannot be replaced. It’s what we expect, what we dread. That they’ll poop out early is also something that we count on, our father falling asleep in his chair in front of the TV, a tape of Command Decision or They Were Expendable still hissing in the background, our mother rousing him, finally—“Wally-Bear, come to bed”—and getting him to what used to be their bedroom, and then crossing the hall to the room last occupied by Nomi, where she will read the large-print edition of a John Le Carré novel until she falls asleep herself, waking two or three times in the middle of the night because her bladder isn’t what it used to be and hasn’t been since about the fourth or fifth of us stretched her uterus beyond recognition.
You could mistake this gathering for any midsummer picnic, only it’s already getting dark. The tall stacks of cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds are turning pink and pewter in the twilight. Soon, I think, we’ll talk. The kids will get tired from running around like banshees, the youngest will be put to bed, the oldest will take off, and the kids in the middle will follow Ike down to his tepee in the woods. Ike’s tepee sleeps eight, with a rock-banked fire in the center (and a gas heater for really cold nights), and the kids will be crammed in there, sitting on bearskin rugs, feeding sticks to the fire, gussying up sparks. They’ll toast marshmallows, crunch pretzels and chips, swill soda, their eyes wide, their faces orange-yellow in the firelight. They’ll finger bear claws, pass around arrowheads and spear points, examine knitting needles and fishhooks Ike has fashioned out of bone. And they’ll listen as Ike, Pied Piper of Czabek youth, spins a web of stories about the fate of Native Americans in this country, how they lived and hunted, raised crops and families, generation to generation, until the Anglo ax fell on them.
Why Ike has gone native is anybody’s guess. When your brother decides to become a Native American, you do not question it. We know things happened to him while he was in the service. When he wanted to talk, we didn’t want to listen. Our solace now is that this preoccupation is infinitely better than his previous one, which was alcohol.
Why have any of us turned out the way we have? Wally Jr. angry, Cinderella glum, Ernie drunk, me anxious, Ike stoic, Robert Aaron cheerful, Meg uncertain. As though each of us were given a faulty compass and put in a leaky boat, and even though we’ve steered the best we can, between the bad compass and the listing boat and the fog in which we navigate we were bound to veer off course. And bump into each other, over and over again. Our father believed that was par for the course—“Kids bounce,” he’d say. Our jostling for position would make us stronger. That was why he and our mother had so many of us.
Amid such fecundity now, it’s easy to ignore the fact that we still have serious business to discuss. Kids might bounce; parents don’t.
Not long after my visit to the Office with our father, our mother announced that she was getting herself a pet. For companionship, she said. We tried not to understand—Why did our mother need companionship? Didn’t she have us?—but we did. Our mother had a problem with companionship: she didn’t have any. She had us and she had Nomi, but we were duties, not companions. And our father was not home enough to be the companion she’d thought he’d be. His absences were taking their toll. She held dinner for as long as possible before conceding that he wasn’t going to be joining us. “Sarah Lucinda, call your brothers,” she’d say, and fighting back tears she’d grimly serve us dried-out roasts, scorched vegetables, and pasty casseroles—dishes that could withstand frequent reheatings even after they had been cooked beyond recognition.
Other mothers had cars, and spent their days shopping, getting their hair done, having lunch with friends, taking in matinees, driving into Chicago, or just—just not being around. Our mother took a dim view of all this gallivanting about. No doubt she was jealous of their freedom. No doubt, too, she resented being the one mo
m at home to whom all these abandoned kids gravitated. Worse, our mother had never learned to drive, and even if she had, she had no car. She couldn’t reciprocate had she wanted to go on these trips, and soon enough the offers petered out. Which was fine, our mother said, she’d rather go to the Arie Crown Theater anyway, or to the Brookfield Zoo, or to the Field Museum—places she could go with our father and us.
But the company car seemed capable of going only to certain places. “I want to go to the Botanic Garden,” said our mother, to which our father replied, “You don’t want to go there,” as though he’d already checked it out and found it wanting. “Yes I do,” said our mother. “Fine,” said our father, turning the pages of his newspaper. “Get yourself a car and go.”
“I don’t need your car,” said our mother, in a tone that made it plenty clear he was optional, too, as far as she was concerned.
Our parents did go places, but usually they were company functions, or trips to see Benny Wilkerson or Louie Hwasko—our father’s friends, our mother’s only by extension. She didn’t see her friends anymore. Helen Federstam had moved to California, and Agnes Guranski had moved with her husband to Michigan. Benny, on the other hand, lived in the next suburb over, and Louie had bought some land and built a house outside Rockford, where he had set himself up in dental practice and was licking his wounds after his marriage had gone south. That was our father’s term for it: Louie’s marriage had gone south. It had actually gone west: Helen Federstam had married him two years before I was born and left him two years later. “Everyone was getting married. I thought I should, too. I liked it that Louie could whistle,” Helen reported to our mother in the weeks leading up to her departure. They were having coffee in the kitchen, one of the last times our mother enjoyed that with a friend. “That’s not enough to base a marriage on, though you could have fooled me at the time. What was I thinking? So how’s it going with Mr. Accordion? Better?” Our mother didn’t answer that one.
