The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  The place suited our father. It suited us as well. It did not suit our mother. We kids had each other, and our father had Tony Dederoff—Uncle Louie was “nesting” right then—and when he came home he could buy a round at the Dog Out or Banana’s and acquire a lifetime of friendship for that afternoon. But who did our mom have—Tillie Bunkas?

  Our mother could see this more clearly than we could. In Augsbury we were the odd birds, the queer ducks, the flightless fowl. We had come from the city at a time when no one was doing that, and it would be another ten to fifteen years before people did that in numbers large enough to make a difference (which meant they came and changed everything to make it seem more like the suburbs). In 1967 the only people “moving back to the land” were beatniks and hippies (the terms were still interchangeable), and the farmers of Augsbury, with the notable exception of Tony Dederoff, did not want us city folk in their midst any more than they’d’ve wanted a bunch of unshaven hippies and beatniks. It would take our parents a good dozen years before they were accepted as locals. I could tell the change had finally occurred when I went into town to get some U-bolts. Art at Art’s Hardware squinted at me and said, “You’re Wally Czabek’s boy, aren’t you?” Wally Czabek’s boy—we were in. Up until then he’d have said, “You live on the old Hoveling place, don’t you?” as though the Hovelings, gone ten years by then, were anytime soon planning on returning from California and claiming what they’d left behind.

  Our mother understood this long before we did, how attitudes in the Midwest changed slowly, if at all. When you’re in, you’re in. And when you’re not, you’re our mother.

  It didn’t help that all day, while she was painting, she was subjected to the well diggers’ incessant yammering, nor did it help that our father’s propensity for buying tools he thought we needed, along with the expense of putting in a new well, and the fact that our house in Elmhurst hadn’t yet sold, was driving us into the poorhouse. Our mother was keeper of the finances, and while our father was buying rounds for new friends he’d never see again, our mother was calculating how little we had to buy groceries.

  What made it worse was that after the Hovelings moved out, our two-hundred-foot-long driveway had become a lovers’ lane. And because we were one of the few farms in the area without a yard light, our moving in had not discouraged the amorous. Once our lights went off, cars crept down our drive, gravel crunching. Our mother would wake us. She wanted us ready to bolt in case something awful happened—say a man with an ax came to the door. She had horrible night vision—night blindness, really—and she was terrified that she wouldn’t be able to protect us. “What’s going on?” she’d whisper. “What do you see?” The headlights on the car had just gone out. We were at the windows, just barely peeping our heads over the frames while our mother danced furtively behind us. Our lights were doused, the storm windows open. Our faces pressed against the screens. From our windows we saw jerky, furtive movements, the kind of wrestling people do in confined spaces. It was summertime; the car windows were open. Over the hum of crickets and the buzzing of June bugs, we heard the engine ticking heat and the heavy sighs of people administering love to each other. Also the occasional clink of a bottle being dropped onto our drive, which we would find in the morning, glass testimonials to love, or something like it.

  Our mother wanted a crime light put in. This seemed odd to me. I had only the vaguest idea of what the occupants of those Dodge Darts and Chevy Camaros were doing, but it wasn’t a crime, was it? They just sat there, faces welded tight, bodies writhing like snakes in a blanket, and after an hour or so they started the car, backed out our drive, and were gone.

  “Look,” our mother whispered to our father those nights he was home. “They’re at it again.” Our father got the same half grin on his face Monsignor Kahle got on his, and then he, too, shrugged. “I’m sure it’s nothing, Susan. Just harmless fun.” “They can be harmless somewhere else,” said our mother. “Do you want your children—your daughter Sarah—looking at that every evening?” That clinched it. The crime light went in. Nobody parked in our drive anymore. We were safe. We’d moved from Chicago, and now nothing could hurt us.

  That idea was undone twice just as our mother was finishing up the house painting. We awoke one night to a terrific series of crashes and thumps. Something metal was being torn from its moorings and ferociously bumping its way down our field. A big hulking Buick—one of those 1950s jobs with the clipper ship steering wheel—had leapt the ditch, plowed through our fence line, and come to a rest two hundred yards down the field. “Good God, what is that?” shrieked our mother, doing a very good impression of a startled Nomi. Although we wouldn’t know this for some minutes yet, it was our neighbor Ernie Ott, driving himself home from the Dog Out. Our father threw on a blue terry-cloth robe and boots and struggled across the field to where Ernie’s Buick sat, the cone of its headlights still wobbling in the fog that had settled over the field, its wheels deep between two furrows. No doubt Ernie Ott had a broken axle.

  We watched from the upstairs window as our father helped Ernie stagger across the furrows back to our house. There was a clumping up the stairs of our mudroom, and then there he was, in our kitchen. Our mother was making coffee.

  Ernie Ott was huge. Imagine a bowling ball in overalls, with another bowling ball, much smaller, sitting on top of that, and three rubber donuts for the chins which connected them. He was wearing one of those plaid Canadian baseball caps, the brim of which was pointing toward the corner of the ceiling.

  “What happened?” our father asked. Our mother eased a cup of coffee across the kitchen table to Ernie Ott’s waiting fists. Ernie looked dazed. Even the coffee didn’t seem familiar to him. His eyes were marbled with tiny broken veins, and they rolled slightly in his head the way those of cartoon animals do when they’ve been whupped upside the head with a two-by-four or a crowbar. His head tilted slowly to take in Cinderella, who’d recently turned fourteen. Ernie’s eyes got big, and I suddenly understood what the word leering meant.

  “I’ve got a son about her age,” he said, his eyes cutting across to our father and then centering back on our sister. “Maybe you and me can work out a deal. My boy and her boy, eh?” Our father nodded in stiff-lipped agreement even though Ernie Ott had misspoken the deal. This was the nod our father gave in bars when somebody said something particularly heinous and our father, being a salesman, didn’t want to contradict or offend anybody. Our mother shooshed Cinderella a little farther back behind her brothers. There were five of us; we made a pretty uneven picket fence.

  I was in the front row now, and I could see how heavily Ernie Ott sat. Like a sack of concrete, sagging. “So tell me what happened,” our father said affably, as though he would really like to hear the story. “Wally,” our mother said. Our father held his hand up, meaning it was all right, he could handle this.

  Ernie Ott waited a minute. Two minutes. He bit his lip. Clearly he was gathering himself. He couldn’t understand it, either. Finally he said, more to himself than to us, “The red house. I always turn at the red house.” He shrugged and grinned like the idiot he was.

  And this is what has always puzzled me. Our father clapped him on the back, helped him to his feet. “Well,” our father said, “that happens.” And that was what I couldn’t understand, our father’s conviviality in the face of man who’d torn out our fence, left his car wheezing in our field, and suggested his son mate with our sister. Yet here was our dad suddenly as affable as Monsignor Kahle telling us about his parishioners drinking right after Mass on Sunday. It was horrible for me to see these three men yoked like that, and our father and Monsignor Kahle went down a peg in my esteem for consorting, philosophically, with the likes of drunken Ernie Ott. It was not until I had to deal regularly with drunks myself that I realized what a great salesman our father was, and I think now that part of his success was this ability to nod pleasantly at other people’s inanities as though he agreed with them. He suffered fools lightly.

>   “We’re not safe here, Wally,” said our mother after our father had gotten Ernie Ott out of our house and back to his own.

  “We are perfectly safe. We are more safe here than we would be in Elmhurst.”

  “In Elmhurst we did not have people driving into our fields.”

  “In Elmhurst if this had happened they would have driven into our living room.”

  “I don’t know if I can take this, Wally.”

  “Sure you can.” Our father kissed our mother’s forehead and held her. He was still in his blue robe. Ernie Ott’s car was still in our field. “You’re a trouper.”

  “Oh, Wally.” Our mother collapsed against our father’s chest and belly. They were sharing a moment. It was one of those times when we as children disappeared for them, and they could be wholly themselves with each other, loving and vulnerable, two people, not parents. We did the decent thing. We retreated, at least as far as the mudroom, which was on the landing before we went to our bedrooms downstairs.

  “I don’t have any friends, Wally.”

  “Sure you do. Didn’t you just say you’d made a friend last week?”

  “One, Wally, one. And that was an emergency.”

  “Does it matter how you make them? We made babies during a national emergency.” He kissed her forehead again; the sound was different from when they kissed on the lips.

  “That was different.”

  “How was it different?”

  “We didn’t know what we were doing. And lots of other couples were in the same boat.”

  “We’re all in the same boat, honey. Still. It’s just that there’s more space between us.”

  “What does that mean, Wally-Bear?” Our mother was sniffling.

  “It means you’ll find friends. You’ll make friends. It’ll just take time is all.”

  “Easy for you to say. You aren’t cooped up here all week not knowing how to drive.”

  “Sarah Lucinda will have her license soon.”

  “Not soon enough.”

  “You’ll make friends,” repeated our father. “It’s just it’s a big ocean out here. Ships don’t go bump in the night so easily. But we do, honey.”

  “We do what?”

  “You know—go bump in the night.”

  “Oh, Wally.” Our mother blew her nose, and then they were quiet for a time, just making the mmmm, mmmm noises people make when they are tied up and have duct tape across their mouths. It sounded like they were both trying to escape, but who could set them free? Then we heard our mother gasp. “Oh, Wally, Wally, not here, the children might hear us,” and then they made more escaping noises, though it didn’t seem to us like they were getting anywhere. Then our mother started screaming, “More! More! Oh, Wally, more! More!”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, though I knew it was a stupid question. Years later I would ask the same question to myself, and feel the same way about the answer, when I discovered that Dorie was packing her diaphragm on her bicycling trips even though I’d been snipped years before. You know the answer to your question before you ask it, even if you don’t know or understand the particulars. I knew that what our parents called “you know” referred to the great mysteries that occurred once their bedroom door was closed. We knew it had to do with our mother being “the greatest” in the same way that Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners was “the greatest” to Ralph. When Ralph and Alice disappeared into what we assumed was their bedroom, something happened in there, and what happened was so awesome, mysterious, and mystical that, like the name for God in the Jewish religion, it could not be stated directly.

  As for Dorie, I wanted to believe it was force of habit, meaningless, the way some guys, monogamous twenty or thirty years, still carry condoms in their wallets, an impotent ode to possibility. With Dorie, though, I knew better. You don’t pack a negligee and a diaphragm in your pannier unless you plan to use them. There was no mystery as to why. It made me think of when I first met her. Then as now, she was curious but indifferent regarding the consequences of actions, other people’s in general, her own in particular.

  Our father was right, our mother had found a friend. Sort of. The week before Ernie Ott stranded his car in our field our mother was still painting the west side of our house. She wanted to finish the trim for our father, who was coming home in the middle of the week—a rarity for him—as a present for his birthday. Robert Aaron and Cinderella had taken the little kids into the woods on a hike. They were going to find “natural gifts” for our father—birds’ nests, pheasant tail feathers, interesting rocks, et cetera. I’d opted to go bike riding instead, on the big hill to our east. I wanted the plain, unadulterated thrill of going very fast, the wind roaring in my ears.

  I had not counted on the gravel. Nor had I counted on the movers having removed the front wheel of my Schwinn to make it fit in the truck and bolting it back on loosely. I’d hardly ridden the bike since we’d moved; there’d been so many other things to do. So when I hit the gravel, and my arms shook trying to hold the bike steady, the last thing I expected to see was the front wheel parting company from the rest of my bike.

  Our mother heard me screaming from a half mile away. I found this out later. What I remembered came in fragments. Feeling with a thickened tongue the stump of one front tooth, the bloody cavity where another had been. The shock of standing up and not being able to see anything, then feeling my face where it hurt and feeling large, wet breaks in the skin. My fingers coming away all bloody. Looking down at my white T-shirt, now crimson. Staring at the back of my hand, which had no skin covering two knuckles. I started screaming.

  A woman in jeans and barn boots and a paisley blouse came running up the drive I was now staggering down, half-blinded by my own blood. She didn’t say anything. Just took my wrist and with her other hand between my shoulder blades guided me toward her house. In her kitchen she used one washcloth after another to clean me up. “Whose boy are you?” she asked. Once she got a part of my face cleared, she pressed the washcloth hard on it. Whenever she took one away I could feel the blood pulse out of me. In sucking back my blood, I could feel my lip all ragged and swollen and split. I glanced down my arm where I felt blood trickling off my fingers. On the silver and gold squares of the yellowing linoleum, a pool was forming from the patterings of my blood. I felt faint. I hadn’t answered her question yet. Over the woman’s shoulder I saw a girl, about my age, staring at me. She didn’t seem shocked, just curious.

  “Dorie,” the woman said, “either help or get out of the way.”

  “I’m not in the way.”

  “You will be soon enough unless you help. Here, rinse these.”

  “It’s got his blood on it.”

  “Everything’s got his blood on it.” She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. Her face bore a look of calm efficiency, slightly puckered. She was impatient in the same way our mother was when one of us was hurt. In the face of that you did what you were told. The girl took the washcloths to the sink.

  “We’re going to get you to a hospital,” the woman said, the heel of her hand pressing down on a washcloth located near my temple. “Whose boy are you?”

  “He’s mine,” said my mother. She was at the screen door, all out of breath, then the door was banging shut behind her.

  “You’re those new people took over the Hoveling place, aren’t you?” said the woman. “I’ve been meaning to get down there.” She and my mother switched places.

  “Have you got ice?” asked my mother. The woman was already getting it. I could hear the refrigerator door open behind me, and the next thing I knew another washcloth, cold, with a lump inside, was pressed against my lip. My tongue felt the nubbins of the washcloth, the torn flesh of my lip. I was trying not to whimper. My mother’s face had that same look on it: panged efficiency, wounded concern.

  “He’s banged up pretty good,” said the woman. “You’ve got your car here?”

  “I don’t drive,” said our mother.

  “We’ll take him to
St. E’s, it’s closest,” said the woman. “You get him outside, I’ll turn the car around. Dorie, you can stay or go. Your mother won’t be home till dinnertime anyway.”

  “I’ll go,” said the girl and went out with the woman.

  The woman had an old brown-and-white Rambler idling outside her kitchen when my mother got me on the stoop. The woman held the door open for us, then jumped into the driver’s seat and roared off as fast as the gravel in the drive would allow. We fishtailed out the drive, and in the sweep of the back end I could see my bike, its front wheel missing, the frame askew.

  “When I saw that bike—” started my mother.

  “You thought he was dead.”

  “I could hear his screams clear on the other side of the house, where I was painting.”

  “I heard them in the garden. He’s got a healthy set of lungs.”

  “I thought somebody was pulling his toenails out,” said the girl. She was blond. The woman driving was no taller than she was. Across the back of the Rambler’s bench seat, their heads were even. The woman’s hair, though, was the color of straw, with orange and gray woven in. She looked like a banty rooster, small and feisty. She drove with mean efficiency. We were going very fast, I could tell, but she kept up a calm patter with my mother.

  “It’s nice you’re painting that house. The Hovelings didn’t put much stock in niceties.”

  “I have to thank you for driving us like this.”

  “I was going to let your son bleed all over my kitchen while we waited for an ambulance? It’d take too long.”

  “I’m Susan Marie Czabek.”

  “Matty Keillor. This is my granddaughter, Dorie Braun.”

  “My son Emmie.”

  Dorie turned around. She had a sharply oval face and green eyes that were both flat and piercing. She was wearing a T-shirt, like me, and her hair was cut bluntly at her shoulders. “Emmie, that’s a girl’s name. Where’d you get a name like Emmie?”