The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  “Yeah,” said Ike, “what else could it be?”

  “It could be they’re warning lights on the tops of high-tension towers,” said Robert Aaron.

  “Shut up,” I told him. “It’s reindeers’ noses. What else could it be?” I repeated, and Ernie and Wally Jr. silently nodded agreement. Peg Leg Meg was already asleep.

  “How do I look?” my mother asked my father as we coasted to the curb in front of Grandma Hubie’s.

  “You look wonderful,” said my father, and I watched the look that passed between them, a look I could not decipher except to understand that part of it was founded in love, and that part of being in love was agreeing to take part in a deception.

  “You did a good thing,” our mother told me once we were on the sidewalk. I did not believe her. We were standing outside a house where we would be greeted by our relatives and told how much we had grown, how good we were, and what a fine, happy family we were, and where people would take one look at our mother, her face so puffy it looked like she was trapped inside some horrible genetic experiment gone awry, and tell her, “Country life agrees with you, Susan Marie,” and I did not believe any of that, either.

  Just as our parents had done, just as our relatives were about to do, I had told my younger siblings a convenient lie because it was easier than dealing with the unhappiness of the truth. I had even managed, for a little while, to convince myself. Though I knew I was lying, I had looked up in the cold night sky, my face craned to take in the distant bright stars and the flight patterns of passing planes, my breath fogging the window, and for the briefest of moments, I had believed. There was a Santa Claus. He was out there, making his appointed rounds, and the behavior of little boys and girls all over the globe was duly noted and gifts were given accordingly.

  But Robert Aaron was right. The truth was plainer than that. This did not stop me from believing, but it made me angry at myself for so willfully participating in the lie. And what I saw clearly was that it was best if I continued doing it. Pretending was expected of me. It would reflect well on my merit review. And what made me so angry right then, I think, looking up into the kindly, sad, bloated face of my mother, whom I loved, was the sudden knowledge that adults did this all of their lives, and that I truly had signed on for the duration.

  14. No Guts, No Glory

  FLYING PUMPKINS AND THE LATE GREAT DREAMS OF OUR FATHER

  “Great,” Ernie says. “Now what?”

  “Don’t you feel like a perfect shit or what?” It’s been several minutes since our mother shuffled back into the house. We’re still on the deck. The temperature’s dropping. We can see our breath. Clouds are moving briskly across the stars and half a moon, and down the field we can see a straggly line of kids, and kids carrying kids, making its way back to the house. “Just as well,” Robert Aaron says, going down the field to help Audrey. “I was starting to freeze my tush up there.”

  I call after him, “But we haven’t talked about a goddamn thing yet!” Dorie is holding hands with Henry, our middle child, and walking alongside Woolie, who’s carrying Sophie on his back. Woolie is seventeen, about to start his senior year in high school. He is, I’m guessing, starting to resemble his father. Curly dark hair, a serious, handsome face, eyes that light up when he infrequently smiles, though he smiles more now that his braces are off and the fits and starts of adolescence are nearly over. It probably doesn’t hurt that he’s got his first girlfriend, either, a lithe young woman who swims and plays midfield on the soccer team. I remember when she was awkward and gangly, a manager for the boys’ swim team, and it heartens me a little that she takes an interest in Woolie, who is just now emerging from his own awkward, gangly phase.

  It also makes me feel jealous.

  “Tepee’ll be free soon. Nice and warm in there.” Ike’s got his arms around his wife, Sam. He’s standing behind her, and they’re slowly swaying back and forth. He’s so content right now, so filled with equanimity I want to hit him.

  “Good,” I say. I want things to be decided, over. I want—as our father always wanted—for there to be a plan. A master plan just waiting to be executed. Funny choice of words—to execute a plan. When you execute people, they’re dead. Given what happened with most of our father’s plans, perhaps the wording was appropriate.

  We agree we’ll meet in the tepee—just the sibs—once the kids are put down. There are good nights to those not staying, then Dorie takes our kids inside, Sam takes hers and Ike’s back to their house, Audrey takes hers and Robert Aaron’s to her parents’, just a few miles away, et cetera.

  I’m the last to leave the house. Woolie has settled in on the living room sofa with his Discman and a Rusted Root CD; his head bounces as he clicks on the TV and picks up a large-print Reader’s Digest. How does he manage to concentrate? I wonder, but maybe that’s the point—awash in stimuli, you coast over the surface of it. Is this what concentration will be like for the new millennium—the ability to juggle multiple sources of information simultaneously, paying just enough heed to each to say you “got it”?

  “Turn that thing off,” I say, and I sound just like our father when he used to complain about whatever I had playing on the stereo. I want to laugh, it’s too ridiculous—what does it matter to me if he’s watching Sports Center, glossing over another installment of “My Most Unforgettable Character,” and listening to the tribal drumming of a neo–Grateful Dead band all at the same time? And yet I’m furious.

  He lifts up one end of his earphones. “Eh?”

  “Off, turn it off!” I’m nearly shouting.

  “Turn what off?” he asks innocently.

  “One of them. It doesn’t matter which.”

  “Why does it matter at all?” He’s right, and I’m angry because he’s right.

  “Honey, could you give me a hand with Henry and Sophie?”

  Henry is already asleep—Henry could fall asleep on a roller coaster if he wanted to—and Sophie is already tucked in, her Winnie-the-Pooh and Eeyore dolls nestled under her chin.

  “What is wrong with you?” Dorie hisses at me. “You sounded like an idiot out there.”

  “Is Daddy in trouble?” Sophie, turning the pages of a Berenstain Bears “I Can Read Book,” looks as serious as her mother does when she is disassembling her derailleurs and chain.

  “He will be if he doesn’t start acting like a human being.”

  “Good night, honey.” I kiss Sophie on the cheek.

  “Read me a story, Daddy?”

  “Mommy will. Daddy has to talk to his brothers and sisters.”

  “It would go better if you talked with them, not at them. That would be true with other people around the house as well.”

  “Present company excepted?”

  Dorie holds her thumb and index finger half an inch apart. “You are about this close, Ace, to becoming a male soprano.”

  “Read Sophie her story, why don’t you?”

  “Yes, Mommy, read me a story.”

  Dorie sits on the trundle bed. “Ah, the Berenstain Bears,” she says. “A good one. The daddy is an idiot in these stories, too.”

  I do not get away cleanly. Woolie barely notices me—I half-wave going past, and he lifts his head in acknowledgment—but in the kitchen our mother is minding a kettle that’s just starting to whistle. I get a beer from the refrigerator, and she puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “Is something the matter with you and Dorie?”

  “No, Mom, nothing’s the matter.” I open the beer, take a swig.

  Our mother turns me around. The look on her face is kindly, concerned. “You were always an atrocious liar, Emmie. You and Ike, you had no facility for deception, ever.”

  “I’d rather not talk about it, Mom.”

  “Honey, I’m not the one you have to talk about it with.”

  Even as our mother was sinking into her personal quagmire of ill health and depression, our father embarked on an ambitious series of schemes to get rich, make his mark, and become what he’
d always dreamed of being: a gentleman farmer, a man who tilts his chair back on the veranda and, cigar in hand, watches as the industry of his land brings forth new fruit. Our mother, desperate to break out of her funk, signed on to almost all his harebrained ideas. Their beauty was in not looking harebrained until they had foundered, sunk, crashed, or burned.

  They were also predicated on the assumption that his dreams required only his foresight and our labor to succeed. His brains, our backs—a simple equation. Gone Sunday night to Friday night, driving seventy thousand miles a year, he had plenty of time to wear his thinking cap, particularly if he watered it regularly, which was more or less a point of honor with him.

  He never mentioned these harebrained schemes when he first thought of them, or rather, when he first came home. We’d have recognized them for what they were if he had, if they’d been delivered to us still wet from stewing in his brain’s pickled juices. Perhaps he knew that. Perhaps that was part of his genius, that even stewed, his dreams knew when to lie low, and when the time was propitious to spring forward, newly hatched, clean and shiny and new.

  Saturday mornings our father cooked and kidded his way through breakfast, and while we chowed down, he told us about his dreams. Only he never called them dreams. They were his “ideas,” and while he kidded us about how much or little we were eating—bacon by the panful, eggs cooked in the bacon grease—his conversation was threaded through with how he saw his idea working itself out to the benefit of us all.

  “We’re a family,” he never tired of telling us. “And this is a family operation. We rise or fall together. What are we?” he’d ask, his voice rising in inflection at question’s end.

  “We’re Czabeks!” we’d chorus, some more lustfully than others, our enthusiasm usually in direct opposition to our years. You can call out your identity with gusto only so many hundred times, particularly if your surname sounds like some sort of Central European cookie.

  “Never forget that,” said our father, as though we could.

  After breakfast our father would gather his ratty blue terry-cloth robe about him, sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee the size of Rhode Island, and go into detail about how this latest idea of his was going to make us money.

  “Venture capitalism,” said our father, “is always about adventure.” This might have sounded better had our father not been dressed like a cowboy Buddha with three bellies and a walrus mustache (he’d grown one soon after we’d moved north), sitting with his robe open to his boxers, his feet shod in the rubber-soled cowboy boots he wore as protection against the cold cement floor of his downstairs office, to which he would retire in a little while to sketch out his grand ideas in more detail. Then he would call us downstairs and make the closing pitch: here was where we stood financially; here was where we were gonna be.

  A veteran salesman, our father knew how to close. It was all about presentation, and toward this end he had visual aids, hooks: aerial photographs, charts, price lists, sketches on graph paper done with a mechanical drafting pencil, the lettering precise and sure.

  He showed us where the outbuildings were, including the lumber piles we’d already burned and the barns that had already collapsed. We saw the woods and the creek and the ravine and the marsh, where he thought we could dig a pond—a swimming hole, stocked with fish, where deer would drink and geese would land and we could shoot at both. He pointed out where we’d already strung fence and where we still needed to. He sketched the outbuildings we were going to build. We were going to have horses, chickens, sheep, cattle. Tony Dederoff had already informed him that we had only half the acreage we’d need to make a go of it as dairy farmers, and besides, dairy required you to be around all the time. You never got a vacation.

  “My advice,” said Tony, who did dairy himself in addition to his other two jobs, “is to go into veal. They’re cute little things, and then you kill them all, but they’re only with you three, four months. Then you get a couple weeks’ break before the next batch are ready.”

  Our father was particularly taken with the idea of a cash crop. Uncle Louie’s chinchillas had given our father the idea that breeding itself got you things. He had gotten a labor force by breeding with our mother, after all, and the math was simple and progressive: 1 + 1 = 9. If you could do that with humans, imagine what you could do with sheep, cattle, chickens, or seed, none of which wore out like our mother.

  Our father’s first notion in this regard was pickles. Cucumbers, actually, though nobody called them that. Cukes, maybe, but most everyone in the business called them by what they’d end up as: pickles. Our father discovered this rather arcane way of getting rich when he picked up some chives and leaf lettuce at the Randolph, a tiny family-run grocery in Augsbury given its rather formal name as a joke by its owner, Randolph Muncie. Randolph ran the grocery, but that wasn’t where the money was in their business. His wife, Naomi, ran a greenhouse attached to the end of the frame house, and they had a shed and another greenhouse behind that. Randolph also did a booming bait business, registered deer during hunting season, and dickered with local farmers for their produce, which was why his was a lot fresher than Buss’ Foods, the big grocery just down the street. And he had a pickle-sorting machine, which meant that anyone who wanted a pickle contract went through him.

  That’s not quite accurate. Actually, Randolph, charming and disarming—he had an “aw, shucks” manner and a limp from breaking his leg on a cargo net at Normandy—sweet-talked people into taking on pickle contracts. I prefer sweet-talked to the more vulgar suckered. This was in March. Our father was restless for something to do. Randolph explained to him how it worked—you contracted with a pickle company through him. If you were just starting out, five acres was about right. You plowed and dragged the field, planted the cucumber seeds in long rows, hoed around them to keep the weeds down. The vines grew quickly, yellow flowers bloomed. The cukes grew behind that. Those little dots you see on the ends of cucumbers? That was where the flowers were. Now, here is where the work comes in. Pickle companies pay the most per hundredweight for the tiniest pickles—those little baby gherkins you see stuffed into jars. But cukes grow really, really fast. If you want baby gherkins, you gotta be out there every day, picking that whole field. You leave a cuke on the vine, and in two days it’s the size of a baking potato. The cukes you buy in the store for salad? Worth almost nothing. You can pick bushels and bushels and make three dollars. The point, Randolph was saying, is that anybody can leave a cuke on the vine. Every day, pick the littlest ones you can see. Pick ’em twice a day.

  “Thirty-one fifty a bushel for the little suckers,” said our father. “It’s easy money.”

  Why did we believe him? Well, for one thing, he was our father. For another, he still wore a scapular with its brown string and itchy plastic sheathing and a St. Christopher medal. He was marked by the signs of belief, as were we. And as were we, he was touched by greed. We could believe in the future, and what it would bring us. All we needed to do was block out all evidence to the contrary. Things like a man in boxer shorts, cowboy boots, and a ratty robe telling us about easy money. “We’ll plant them close together at first. We can always thin them later,” said our father. “Put straw between the rows once they’re up. That’ll keep down the weeds.”

  We believed him about the pond in the marsh, too. And about the pumpkins, the sheep, the mushrooms, and the chickens. We believed him about the horses, about the beef cattle, and we believed him about the black walnut plantation. We did not believe him or his friend, Ben Keillor, about the crops grown into the shapes of liquor bottles that would appear as aerial photographs in magazine advertisements, but that was only because we were adults by then, and painful experience had taught us to be leery of just about anything our father cooked up.

  As with any of our father’s dreams, we had no idea what we were getting into. Nor did we have the first inkling of how to go about doing it. The actual time, money, and labor we’d invest in each of our father’s g
et-rich-quick schemes? We hadn’t a clue. Everything for us was a maiden voyage, and the ship of our dreams was invariably named Lusitania.

  How, exactly, did we fuck up? Let us count the ways, starting with the cucumbers. First off, unbrined cukes are surprisingly easy to grow. Plant and wait. A little rain, a little heat, and poof! delicate, twin-bladed shoots appear, the world’s tiniest propellers. They grow slowly at first, then faster. The shoots become vines, the propeller-like leaves become thick, irregularly edged, their undersides and the vines, too, scratchy and rough with cilia. Then the buttery yellow blossoms appear, and behind them, the little buds of the cukes. You are now in business.

  One of the things we knew nothing about: weeds. Weeds grow faster than whatever crop you plant. They choke out plants, steal nutrients from the soil. They must be stopped. So even as we enjoyed watching our little plants grow, we had to hoe and pluck weeds. Every day. Five acres. By hand. In a field that had grown nothing but weeds for the past, oh, twenty years or so. Hardy brutes, weeds. You can pull them, pluck them, yank them, chop them, whack them, hack them, deliciously decapitate them and spread their stalks and their veiny little leaves out under a hot, hot sun to sear them a pale white green, but unless you get the roots, they are back at their posts the very next day, tender shoots of evil. Our hands were blistered, our fingers cramped and green from pinching and pulling, and every day there would be more.

  Which would not have been so bad if the crop itself were more cooperative. Oh, it was plenty cooperative in growing, and growing quickly, but Randolph Muncie down at the Randolph did not tell us what a god-awful thing it is to pick cucumbers. He did not tell us that cuke vines grow close to the ground, that the little cukes seem to grow closest to the main stem, and that you’d scratch your arms reaching for them. Nor did he tell us that daddy longlegs and wolf spiders like to hide among the vines, or that slugs gather on the wet soil after a rain, and while you were picking you were likely to discover all of them. He did not tell us that those bumps you see on pickles, the smooth bumps on the cukes you buy in the produce department, are what are left from the translucent green thorns that exist on baby cukes when you pick them. They are not on the cukes later because they break off in the pickers’ fingers, and it is not too long before your fingers are bleeding, sore and stiff, caked with dirt and cucumber juice and blood, and your fingers pads wear brown- and red- and brine-colored helmets. And every day you do this for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon because cukes grow that fast, and if you want to make any money you pick twice a day.