by C J Hribal
“Horrible things,” said our mother. “Now be quiet.”
“But what things?”
“Your throat and stomach are completely eaten away, and so are the rest of your insides. It’s a terrible way to die.”
“But why would Mr. Plewa want to die like that?”
“Because his wife cheated on him, then wanted to divorce him.”
“Wally!”
“Okay, okay,” said our father. “Beats me. He wanted to die, and he wanted to suffer.”
“Doing that to your wife and your little girl, my God,” said our mother.
“He killed Mrs. Plewa and Wanda too?”
“I mean for him to kill himself like that, knowing they’d find him. He thought he was punishing Mrs. Plewa for wanting to divorce him, but he was really only hurting himself and Wanda. It’s a terrible thing, thinking things are so bad you want to kill yourself. You must never think that, never. You must never give up hope, Emmie,” said our mother. Her eyes were glistening. “All of you. You must never give up hope.”
Besides never giving up hope, there was another lesson in this for us: if people were unhappy, they downed tranquilizers and stomach antacids and sulfuric acid, but they did not, repeat, did not divorce.
Ah, but they did. The Duckwas that spring were getting a divorce. We had heard about it, but our parents hadn’t said anything to us directly. The extent of their explanation about this series of tragedies that had occurred in Nomi’s bed and in the hall closet and who knew where else on our property—the severed halves of our father’s boat?—was our father taking us aside one Sunday after a Mass in which one of the readings had been about the woman accused of adultery who’d been saved by Jesus—the famous “he who is without sin” speech—and asking us if we knew what adultery was. We didn’t. Our focus during the readings had been on wondering what it felt like to get stoned. To actually die from rocks being thrown at you. Our father explained to us that adultery was cheating. It was wrong. Cheating on your spouse was wrong.
Said our father, “I want to make one thing clear to you. I have never cheated on your mother, and I’m not about to start now.” We were relieved to hear this. It would have been terrible, after all our father had said about playing fair, to find out that he cheated on our mother when he played cribbage or Parcheesi or euchre. It was good to know that we now had a big-league word for this. When our friends tried to miscount in Monopoly and land just beyond Park Place with our hotel on it, we could accuse them of committing adultery.
Mr. Duckwa had moved out, but Patty and Mrs. Duckwa were still around. Patty looked different. Haggard, haunted. She had dropped out of college. All that winter and spring her belly swelled and circles grew under her eyes. Pregnant and alone (our mother explained to me what “knocked up” meant; Ollie Cicerelli helped me understand, in a crude way, the mechanics of it), Patty Duckwa had entered the pantheon of instructional tragedies. Even as her belly swelled, we bonded. We had shared something. I had been there when Patty had her little breakdown while trick-or-treating, the two of us had both heard Nomi’s “Good God,” and I had been there when Patty saw both her parents in flagrante with other people. And I had said nothing. I never told my siblings—never told anyone—what I’d seen, or what Patty herself had told me that night. As Nomi said, some things are best left private.
One of the things Patty told me that winter: “I just wanted someone to like me. I thought they—he—cared.”
I didn’t ask about the shift in pronouns. I didn’t say anything. That was our deal. She’d come over to the little hedge that separated our backyard from her driveway, kick at the snow, a coat pulled loosely over her burgeoning belly, and try to smile. “Hey, Emcee,” she’d say, and I’d say, “Hey, Patty,” and then she would talk and I would shut up about it.
The baby was going to be put up for adoption. That was what she and her mom had decided. She didn’t look too sure about it. “I just thought I wanted a baby,” she’d say. “I thought if there were something to love in my life, then my life would be filled with love. That makes sense, doesn’t it?” She’d get this faraway look in her eyes then, as though the answers to her questions were to be found someplace beyond the backyards and the Monopoly-house-looking garages and the diseased elms. There sure weren’t any answers coming from me. What I could offer came from my father, and it wasn’t something I could say: “Be careful what you pray for.”
That spring while Patty Duckwa was waiting for her baby and Mrs. Plewa and Wanda were burying Mr. Plewa, our parents were taking trips to Wisconsin, leaving us on the weekends in the care of Artu and Nomi. What were they doing? we wondered. And what was with all the hushed and drawn-out conversations in the kitchen?
One day in April we found out. “Okay, you kids, get in the car.” We piled in and started driving north up Highway 41, the same route we took for our family vacations.
“Where are we going? What are we going to see?” we kept asking.
“We shall see what we shall see,” said our father.
We looked at farmhouses, windswept fields. The land undulated like the back of a snake. Most of the snow was melted. The earth was bare, brown and black. What pockets remained looked like white scabs.
“What are we supposed to see?” we wondered.
Our father and mother looked at each other and smiled. Or at least our father did. “One of these—someplace—is your new home,” our father announced, grinning. Our mother looked out the window, her lips puckered back inside her mouth.
“Which one?” We had been through this before, on vacation. Our father pointing out houses in the woods, telling us that one of these could have been Al Capone’s secret hideaway.
“We don’t know yet. We’re still looking.” Our father looked at our mother. “Should we tell them, honey?”
Our mother, still with her lips tucked inside her mouth, nodded assent.
“I’m changing jobs and we’re moving. To Wisconsin. We’re going to be Wisconsinites!”
This announcement was not met with the general acclaim which our father expected. Cinderella groaned. “My life is over! Daddy, how could you?”
“How could I what?”
“I’m starting high school next year. How could you do this to me?”
“Do what?”
“Tear me away from my friends, Daddy! How could you?”
The teary accusations and the flustered, then angry, parental defense that followed is an old conversation, and need not be given here. Our father was rendered nearly speechless. He was about to do what he had always wanted to do, what he had dreamed of doing, really, since those days he stood in an alleyway in Cicero, Illinois, and watched Al Capone’s cars speed by, off for grand adventures in the great north woods. How could we not want what he wanted? How could our mother not want it? It was what he’d prayed for. That was how he ended that discussion. “It’s what I’ve prayed for, goddammit!”
His own dictum hung heavy in the air. Which made us wonder: How careful would we need to be? And would the rest of us get what we prayed for? We hadn’t even picked out a place to live yet and our mother was unhappy. So we wondered: Did God answer only some prayers and not others? Were prayers answered equally? And what if the answer was no?
GOD’S GREEN ACRES
Suppose the salesmen are the real explorers
at the eroded shores of absence . . .
—CHARLES BAXTER, from “At the Center of the Highway”
11. Another County Heard From
We rush to the side of the roof and peer down. Ernie’s on his back, sprawled out beside Wally Jr.’s chair. He’s lucky he didn’t hit it. His belly’s great with hops, and the baseball cap he wears over his receding hair has popped off. It’s like looking down at a younger version of our father. As soon as he dropped, Wally Jr. said, “Christ,” pulled himself over to the edge, shimmied down the aerial fireman-style, and now is bending over him.
“Is he—?”
“He’s breathing, if
that’s what you want to know. Funny—it used to always be me taking the knocks. I don’t remember passing the baton to Ernie. Must have been when I entered gimpdom. I preempted myself from more stupidity.”
“What did he land on?”
“Heels, butt, back of the head. He knocked himself cold, but he’s all right.” Wally Jr. turns Ernie’s head this way and that, patting his cheeks. “Your problem,” he says to the unconscious Ernie, “is you cannot stand prosperity.”
Ike materializes out of the dark. “What happened? You clock him again?”
“The drunken sot spilled himself off the roof.” Wally Jr. gets back in his chair.
“Well, bro,” Ike says to Wally Jr., “that’s no worse than we used to do.” And they recall for each other the story of when they used to windshield-walk. During their Dumb & Dumber days—how’s this as a cure for restlessness?—they used to climb out of a moving car from the passenger side and work their way across the windshield to the driver side—hand over hand, three sheets to the wind. They performed right in the middle of rush hour—all those paper mill workers going home at 3:30 for an early dinner and a six-pack. Wally Jr. and Ike did it shirtless, pantless, naked—whatever idiocy struck them at the moment. Then they got two friends equally bored and reckless, and they drove side by side, only they weren’t racing. Instead of trying to beat each other, they tried to stay perfectly even, door handle to door handle, and not only did you walk across the one windshield but then you climbed into the passenger window of the car to your left, and slid over as the driver of that car windshield-walked across his own windshield and entered the car to his right through the driver’s window. The driver of that car slid over to the passenger seat, climbed out, and did the same maneuver. In this way they performed figure eights—the symbol for infinity—from one car to the other, and kept it up for twenty miles, from Appleton to Oshkosh. Their big finale was doing it over the Lake Butte des Morts Bridge at sixty-some miles an hour.
“Lake of the Dead is fucking right!” Wally Jr. screamed as he threw the dead contents of a minnow bucket out the window. If he’d had a good night fishing the night before (a good night on Lake Butte des Morts at the height of the whitefish run was a couple hundred fish), he’d toss the fish themselves. Some sailed over the bridge to freedom far below, but most smacked the windshields of the cars following them.
This would have been all right—a naked teenager hurling fish at you while crawling across his windshield was idiosyncratic and perhaps unnerving but mostly something you shook your head over (“Kids these days”)—had not one of those fish struck the windshield of an unmarked county cop car following them. And even he might have let them go with a verbal warning—a dressing-down followed by an admonition to get dressed—had Wally Jr., still riding the effervescence of his own hydraulic lunch, not tried to beat the rap with an insanity plea.
“We are fishers of men,” Wally Jr. told the cop once they were pulled over on the bridge’s far side. He offered a whitefish to the officer. “Behold the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.”
The officer looked in the backseat, where a collection of empty Pabst Blue Ribbons and Red White & Blues nestled on the floor like puppies. “And I suppose those are the loaves?”
“Drink beer for Christ,” offered Wally Jr.
“Get some clothes on,” said the officer. Rubbernecking had slowed traffic. A naked man standing by the side of the road as the traffic hummed by—it bothered the officer, you could tell, but he had seen worse things than reverse streaking. Way worse.
“We are clothed in the spirit of Man,” said Wally Jr.
“I’d rather you were clothed in the clothes of man,” said the officer. “Can you walk a straight line?”
“Make straight the path of the Lord,” said Wally Jr. He performed a wobbly, loose-kneed prance, but he did it in a straight line.
“Have you got any I.D.?” asked the officer.
Wally Jr. started singing the “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love” song, his voice descending the scale very dramatically for the last phrase.
“Love?” said the officer. “What, son, you think this is 1968? You’re late by almost a decade.”
Wally Jr. started singing again.
“Knock it off with the love, son, you’re getting on my nerves.”
“Make love, not war,” said Wally Jr. That was when Wally Jr. blew it. He didn’t know his audience. This cop was pushing forty. He’d been in Vietnam. This was no time to be trotting out political slogans. He should have stuck with the bastardized Christianity he’d been offering.
“Hands behind your back, son.”
“You’re arresting me?”
“I’m making war on you, son, if those are my choices. I told you, I never went in for that love crap.”
“What fools these mortals be,” said Wally Jr.
“And don’t quote Shakespeare, either. I was an English major before I got drafted.” The officer put on the cuffs. Then he motioned for Ike to get out of the car, too. Ike was shirtless and shoeless, but he had his pants on. “You’re the quiet one, is that right? The strong, silent type? You let Nature Boy be the idiot and you’re just along for the ride, am I right?”
Ike swallowed, nodded. His own craziness was yet to come.
“Well, your compadre here needs to work on his French. When he was bare-ass naked on your windshield yelling ‘Lake of the Dead is fucking right!’ at the top of his lungs—I don’t go in for that kind of talk, by the way, especially from somebody doing a weak-ass impersonation of an addled Jesus freak—he got it wrong.” He cuffed Ike and turned to Wally Jr. “Lake Butte des Morts means Lake Bluff of the Dead, son, and yours has been called.”
They displayed remarkable loyalty in not ratting out their windshield-walking buddies, who’d disappeared in traffic. But then, their friends hadn’t been lobbing fish at police cars, either. Our mother was mortified, our father shook his head—boys will be boys—and Wally Jr. and Ike neither stopped nor learned from their mistake. Wally Jr. drove without a license; Ike found a new brand of foolishness to pursue. And after kicking around a couple of years after high school, Wally Jr. pursued it with him. They joined the military.
Only not just any military. They joined the Marines.
“Why’d we do that?” asks Ike.
“Which—walk across a windshield at sixty miles an hour or join the Marines?”
“Either.”
“You think it matters now?”
“No, I was just wondering.”
“Well,” says Wally Jr., “I’m sure we had a fucking good reason.”
“And what reason was that?”
Wally Jr. laughs. “I forget. But it was a fucking good one, I know that.”
If you pressed them on it, they would tell you they joined the Marines for the bucks, and because there was nothing to do in Augsbury. While both those reasons were true, particularly the latter—how else do you explain naked windshield walking as a participatory sport?—it wasn’t just that. Like our father, Ike had musical talent up the wazoo, but he turned down scholarship offers from two or three music schools—granted, none of them was Juilliard, but they all would have paid for college—to play in the Marine Corps Band. Which would have been fine had he not forgotten that the Marine Corps Band was a combat unit, too. And Wally Jr. after high school had a decent job welding at the Neenah Foundry. It was hot, dirty work, but it paid well. So what was the real reason?
Well, patriotism, of course, but Robert Aaron’s wife, Audrey, who being outside the family could see us more clearly than we saw ourselves, laughed when she heard that. “They’re trying to outdo your father, you nitwits. He was in the Navy and the Coast Guard. He was in WW Two and Korea. And it’s not just them. It’s all of you. All of you boys think you’re the black sheep—you know that? Every family has at least one black sheep, and each of you thinks you’re it. And you know what? None of you is. You’re all too busy pleasing your mother”— she looked at me—
“or your father”—she looked at her husband—“to be a black sheep. Even when you’re not pleasing them you’re still worried about it. I’ll tell you something, you numbnuts—black sheep don’t feel guilty. That’s why they’re black sheep.”
We felt abashed. I had to admit I liked Audrey. She was one of those big, no-nonsense, rutabaga-like midwestern girls, the kind who take their men in hand and mold them into the men they want their husbands to be.
What a pathetic, nervous, striving pack of siblings were we. “Look at me, look at me!” Flailing our arms in the only ways we knew how—getting ourselves or our girlfriends pregnant, marrying early, running off to join the Marines. That’ll show them. They’ll pay attention to me now. Pay attention to what? Show them what?
Ike toes Ernie on the arm. “Don’t you think we should tell Cindy?” Cindy—Ernie’s wife. Like most spouses, she takes a dim view of her mate’s excesses. In the Czabek family, that covers just about all of us.
Dorie at the roof edge: “She told me she was going to bed, she was pooped.”
Wally Jr.: “How pooped can she be? She doesn’t have any kids.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“I’ll be damned.” Wally Jr. rolls to a cooler and opens a Mountain Dew, the only thing he’ll drink now that he’s on the wagon. “Kids wear you out even when they’re still inside you? I thought they had to be running amok outside to do that.”
“We wore out Mom, didn’t we?” Looking down, I see a bald spot is taking root on the back of Wally Jr.’s head.
“Speaking of kids, your own are way hungry. I came up for hot dogs.” Ike squats by Ernie. “This puppy all right?”
Wally Jr. glugs down his Mountain Dew. “Just counting stars in his sleep.”
Dorie announces that she and I will bring down the hot dogs, make sure the kids are fed. Then she turns to me. “What do you say, hon? You want to come along?”
