by C J Hribal
“Jesus, sweet Jesus,” choked our father, trying not to scream. All about us the carnage was nearly complete. We gathered around him. He was still looking up at the sky, his great bulk of a stomach heaving like a stone that had acquired the ability to breathe.
“Wally, you okay, Wally?” asked Tony Dederoff. With a hunting knife he cut open my father’s trouser leg. The rat fell out—it’s entirely possible that it died of a heart attack before my brother skewered it—and we examined my father’s wounds. Fortunately a pellet gun does not create projectiles with a whole lot of force behind them. The wounds in my father’s leg were tiny, round circles that bled a little but not much, the pellets not having penetrated deeply, so near the surface that Tony Dederoff dug them out on the spot with a needle-nose pliers he kept in his truck—the same needle-nose pliers he used to dig hooks out of fish gullets. Tony also produced a hip flask of Jack Daniel’s, which he first poured over the wounds and the pliers and then offered to our father. Tony had a drink himself before he commenced digging. Our father winced and grunted and gritted his teeth, but he did not scream, and for that I was grateful.
“Who was the wiseacre who shot his father?” Tony asked nonchalantly as he plucked first one pellet and then another from my father’s leg.
“That would be me,” I managed to choke out.
“Well, you’re lucky. Your old man is going to live. He’ll need a tetanus shot for these pokes”—he indicated the wounds Wally Jr. and I had made in our father’s leg—“but he’ll live. Just remind me never to go hunting with you. I’m liable to wind up gutted on your kitchen table and my head mounted over your fireplace before you realize your mistake.”
It was several minutes, I think, before I heard my father calling to me, and by that time Ike had run to the house and come back with our mother and a first-aid kit. He would still need to go to the hospital, where maybe they’d need to take a stitch or two in his face, and they would need to bring the rat in and check it for rabies, but it did look like he was going to be all right. He would not lose his foot or his leg or have it swell green with pus and require amputation. He was even smiling/grimacing, like a man who’d survived his own chemistry set explosion—and he’d done that as well. Tony Dederoff and Robert Aaron helped him to his feet. I tried, but I was afraid to touch him, afraid he wouldn’t let me, so I trailed a little behind, my arms out but not quite touching (not unlike Ira Hayes at the flag raising on Mount Suribachi). I was in such a state I did not hear him calling my name.
“Emmie,” my father said. It was one of the few times he called me by the name our mother always used. “Emmie, Emmie, Emmie, Emmie.”
Finally it dawned on me that he was speaking to me. At that point, though, after shooting him three times, I couldn’t manage speech. I could barely look him in the face. My father, I think, understood this. Despite having been shot by me, he felt sorry for me. He wanted to make me feel better. He wanted to let me know it was okay, that everything was going to turn out all right. He clamped a hand on my shoulder. I do not think that anything he could have said right then would have made me feel better, but he tried, and despite my best efforts to the contrary, I did feel better. He gave my shoulder a little shake, which was meant to make me look at him. I did. His face was bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts, his nose and forehead had the look of rare beef, and his remaining hair was cooked and curlicued, but he was grinning, and I have to give him credit for that. And credit, too, for making me grin back.
“Emmie,” he said, giving my shoulder another shake, “this will reflect on your merit review.”
13. Observations from the Wayback
OUR MOTHER, THE TROUPER
“I used to be a lean, mean fighting machine,” laments Wally Jr., hauling himself up the tower again using only his arms. He has massive, slablike arms, but what’s more impressive is the body he’s trailing, shaped like a cross between a barrel and a pomegranate. “No more,” he says. “Not since I achieved gimphood.” He flops like a potbellied carp when he gets to the roof. Ernie’s the same when he heaves himself onto the roof. Both lie there for a moment, as though a fifteen-foot climb up an aerial was on a par with scaling the Matterhorn.
“This,” Ernie puffs, “will reflect on our merit review.”
“Fuck our merit review,” says Wally Jr. “Whose idiot idea was it that we meet on the fucking roof? This ain’t even close to being in compliance with the handicap laws.”
“It started the night I told Emcee I was going to marry Audrey.” Robert Aaron hauls up Wally Jr.’s wheelchair and blocks the wheels while Ike tethers it to the chimney.
Wally Jr. pulls himself into his chair. “Oh. So we do this for sentimental reasons.”
Below us, the screen door opens and out come Dorie, Audrey, Jennifer, and Jake, all carrying grocery bags. Audrey calls to Robert Aaron that they’ll bring the kids up after they’ve been fed. Dorie doesn’t look up. Jake, carrying a flashlight, keeps turning it on and off under his nose.
“Can we just get started?” I ask.
Meg says we shouldn’t start until Cinderella gets here.
“Like that’s going to make a difference.”
“What’s bugging you, Emcee?”
“You know we’re just like Mom and Dad. Dinking around, frittering away time, never getting anywhere—”
“And getting somewhere would be what, putting them in a home?” asks Wally Jr. “That’s what this is about, right? Puttin’ ’em somewhere? What, you just want a vote and that’s that?”
“That’s not what I meant. Christ. Can we please just discuss this rationally for once?”
“Rationally, he says. In this family he expects rationality.”
“I’m not expecting, I’m asking. I think we can do this. Even if we can’t, it needs to be done, dammit. How much longer do you think Mom and Dad are going to be able to care for themselves? And then what?”
Wally Jr. fishes around in the cooler for another Dew. “I say we drive off that bridge when we come to it.”
“Driving off a bridge is not going to help them or us, Wally.”
“Don’t knock it till you tried it, pantywaist.”
I should have known. I fucking should have known. Our making nice lasts only as long as we’re talking about things that don’t matter.
“Shut the fuck up,” says Wally Jr. “Or I’ll make you shut the fuck up.” He backs his wheelchair off the blocks and executes the first half of a Y-turn so he can make a run at me. I’m puzzled. Wait, did I say that out loud? You don’t do that around Wally. Even from a wheelchair, Wally will take on all comers and eat them for lunch.
“Don’t,” says Robert Aaron, stepping between us. “Just don’t get started on all that. We’ll be here all night.”
“Don’t get started on what?” Our mother’s outside on the deck, leaning on her cane. She’s a compact woman now, and her face has the look she used to get when she listened to our father’s wilder stories. “What are you out here talking about?”
Silence. Finally somebody says, “Nothing.” Somebody else says, “Stuff.”
“Nothing and stuff. Look,” says our mother, “don’t take me for a simpleton just because I’m old. You’re talking about your father and me, aren’t you?”
“Where is Dad?”
“Sleeping. Your father poops out early these days. Don’t try to change the subject. And get down here. I don’t want to get a crick in my neck talking to you.”
“Christ,” says Wally Jr. “I just got up here again.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have been up there in the first place, Mr. Smarty-Pants.”
We climb down. Wally Jr.’s wheelchair first, then Wally Jr., then the rest of us. We stand around the way we used to after fights, all hangdog and guilty. What would it be this time—yelling, a spanking, or something icily controlled and distant and devastating? Yelling we could handle. It was that calm, bitten off “Well, I’m disappointed in you, children, I expected better” that ripped our guts out.
Our mother looks around the circle, shaking her head, her eyes glistening. She takes a deep breath. A tear spills onto her papery cheek, but she’s smiling. “What lousy liars you all are. I used to say this about you playing with balls, but it’s true of cabals as well: don’t have them so close to the house.” She sighs. “No balls or cabals close to the house,” she says as she shuffles back inside. “You’re bound to break something. Windows, hearts—something.”
The soundtrack for our first summer in Augsbury was the continuous, nerve-racking hammering of a new well being drilled. Two hundred and fifty-one feet of it. Most wells in the area, we found out, usually hit water at about fifty-five to sixty-five feet. A few went to eighty, a few more to a hundred, a hundred and ten. But day after day the drill rig pounded and pounded right behind our house, and nothing. Sand, then clay, then rock.
“We don’t know what the deal is,” the crew chief told our father. “Usually by now we’re just gushing water.” They were at one hundred and eighty-one feet and counting.
Our father managed to escape this pounding entirely—they weren’t drilling on weekends, the only time he was home. And we kids escaped it by playing army. The enemy was shelling our base of operations—listen to that bombardment!—and day after day we fought for control of the ruined barn, poking our submachine guns out windows framed in rotting wood. We were Vic Morrow in Combat! with stubbled chins and candy cigarettes dangling from our mouths as we went from one bombed, burned-out building to the next, spraying death to the Jerries every step of the way. We fought up the rise and attacked our own backyard, whooping and hollering and spewing death to all who stood in our way. The crew drilling in a futile search for water in our backyard were not amused. “Hey, you kids, go play somewhere else.”
Why? we wondered. It was our yard. They were the interlopers. What were a few dirt hand grenades between friends? We swept and secured the area, retired to the trees. Time for a new mission, even deadlier than the last one—secure apples from Tillie Bunkas.
Tillie Bunkas scared the bejesus out of us. She was a nice old lady who gave us apples, rhubarb pie, and her son Alfred’s dandelion wine and honey, but to us she was still a witch, an old crone with a goiter who lived with her sixty-something-year-old son because she’d put him under a spell, and she’d put us under one, too, if we let her. That evil eye would get us, turn us into frogs or toads or stones or she-goats or something. And all that poison she kept stored in the bulbous lump on her throat. If any of that poison got you, you’d wind up just like her—blind and toothless and cackling, with your own gourd of poison on your neck.
Tillie liked us, I think, even when we staged commando raids on her orchard. But we didn’t trust her generosity. She shouldn’t have been so accommodating during a commando raid. There we were, liberating apples, and Tillie Bunkas would appear in our midst, apples in hand, ruining it for us. What lousy commandos we were. How did she sneak up on us? “Boys, boys,” she’d say, “come out of the trees. See what I have for you.” And like that witch in “Hansel and Gretel” she’d wave her wizened brown stick arms, the apples shiny in her claws.
It shouldn’t have been so hard to take them. But the wind screwed her hair around her head like a web and her dress blew like loose rags about her and we could see her nylon stockings only came up to her knees and the sun had turned her cataritic eyes into fish scales and her tongue flapped around her five remaining teeth, and there was no way in hell we were coming near this sweet old lady who simply wanted to keep us from ruining her fruit trees.
Our mother had no such diversions. Her job that summer was the utterly mundane one of painting a ranch house that had been built in 1956 and hadn’t been painted since. Actually, we were supposed to help her, but that was not how it turned out. The boards on the west side of the house were the color of old blood and so weather-beaten that the paint we applied soaked in as though each silvered, blood-colored board was one of those sponges they compare paper towels to in the Bounty commercials. Gallon after gallon of primer disappeared into the side of the house. We got discouraged, tired, and our mother took over for us. Inside we cleaned up, then felt reenergized enough to roam the fields and woods, leaving our mother to the hot, lonely work of painting, her brain under a constant and inescapable sonic assault.
Our mother did most of the finish painting as well. Our father was gone Sunday night to Friday night, and when he returned after a ten- or twelve-hour drive, taking brush in hand was not an option. A seven-ounce fluted glass at the local tavern was, however, a different proposition. Our mother muttered about this and kept painting. The blood-red house slowly became off-white. “Like what a bride wears for her second wedding,” said our mother.
Second wedding? Could you do that? People got married once, forever, and that was that. Uncle Louie was the exception, but his unhappiness ran deep. Already we were hearing that Uncle Louie and Shirley’s marriage was not the match made in heaven he said it was. And our mother, while certainly sad for Louie, took satisfaction in having her premonitions proved correct. Yet here was our mother suggesting that people could get married more than once, and saying it with a disturbing wistfulness. People could start over. Which made us wonder: In trading the House That God Built for God’s Green Acres, was that what our parents had done—embarked, metaphorically, on a second marriage? And what if that one didn’t work out?
These days, when people move from one identical subdivision to another, every tract mansion the same combination of mismatched architectural styles and missized styling elements, the idea of being wedded to a single, particular place seems quaint, almost comical. But our parents were of a generation for whom mobility was a new and only semidesirable thing. Mostly it was scary, engendered by a sense that they had to move out or lose what they had worked so hard to build in the first place. This was a generation that came of age during the dislocations of two wars, each preceded by a depression. The Korean War and its depression were littler than their predecessors, true, but the déjà vu sense was very strong in them. And after each dislocation, they wanted nothing more than for the boat to stop rocking.
No wonder our father was a company man. He needed someplace for all that loyalty and rootedness to go. Dinkwater Chemical helped him leave Elmhurst when everything seemed to be spinning out of control. They allowed him to realize his dream of living in the country. They also gave our father a company car—a Buick Skylark station wagon—and all the mobility he could stand. Seventy thousand miles a year worth. Therefore, Dinkwater Chemical deserved his loyalty. It was the simple arithmetic of a new marriage—get divorced from Elmhurst and Dinkwater-Adams, get married to the northern cousins.
This new marriage required, though, getting used to a new set of in-laws. Again, it was easier for our father. He no longer had the Office, but you couldn’t walk a hundred feet in Augsbury and not find a bar, a tavern, a saloon, a bar and grill, a restaurant, an inn, or a tap enticing you with its open screen door, its cool dark, its hunched patrons and grinning barkeep. Our father had done the math—thirteen bars, thirteen hundred people.
It was after our first Sunday Mass that our father decided St. Gen’s would be our regular church and Banana’s Never Inn would be his regular bar, and living here would be a very good life indeed. Immediately after the ten o’clock High Mass, everyone left St. Gen’s and went straight across the street to Banana’s Never Inn. Our parents thought a brunch would be a nice treat for us, but as new parishioners they first wanted to introduce themselves to the priest. Monsignor Kahle was a stiff-backed, grim-visaged priest with absolutely clear gray eyes behind rimless glasses. He wore his hair in a pure white brush cut and lacked, I thought, only the dueling scar on his cheek to be a full-fledged Prussian officer. During his sermon he had railed about vice and immorality, stuttering out images of hellfire and damnation like bursts from a machine gun. It had scared me, this white-haired old man with his purple face and plosives. But now Monsignor Kahle was calm, affable, almost jovial. In
welcoming our parents, his eyes twinkled, and he rubbed my and my brothers’ crew cuts as though he were an uncle. He placed his fingers under Peg Leg Meg’s chin and cupped Cinderella’s cheek. He said we looked like a fine, fine family. Our father said it seemed like a nice community, and he thought it wonderful that the bar across the street offered a brunch. They certainly seemed to be doing a very good business. Monsignor Kahle said Banana’s Never Inn had no brunch. They had a toaster oven for pizza, they served pickled eggs and beef jerky out of jars, and if you could convince Banana—when he was around—to fire up the grill for a hamburger, you were a lucky man indeed.
“But those people,” protested our mother, “right after Mass—they streamed right over.”
Monsignor Kahle shrugged, the shrug of a man who’s seen everything twice and who is not going to get all worked up over changing what he can’t. “Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes after my sermons what everyone wants is a good stiff belt.” He leaned in close, his eyes twinkling, his lips pulled back in an abashed to-err-is-human grin. “Me, too,” he whispered.
