The Company Car

by C J Hribal

I was crying. I was crying and I could not stop. If only he’d just shut up, let me watch the stupid game in peace. But he kept it up, fueled by Miller High Life and the joy of his own invective. “You watch,” he said. “They’ll find some stupid, boneheaded way of giving it away.”

  “Wally,” said our mother, who’d been listening to the diatribe for seventeen years now.

  “What?” barked our father.

  “He takes it seriously,” our mother said quietly.

  “How can he take these losers seriously? How can anybody take these losers seriously? They’re a joke.”

  “Wal-ly.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry.” For the next inning our father tried to be on his best behavior. “That Banks kid can hit. Only decent player on the team. Been that way since the fifties. You know that? Always a gentleman. Let’s play two, he used to say. And whoa, did you see that? Another single for Ernie. What is that today? Three singles? He keeps dinging them in the exact same place. He must have cut a groove out there.”

  He was trying, but it was too late. I couldn’t stop crying, and my father—old habits die hard—couldn’t stop berating the Cubs. When Abernathy gave up a bases loaded double in the ninth and the Cubs lost both halves of the doubleheader—they hadn’t even come to bat yet but you knew that they were going to go meekly—my father lost it. “Loooosssseeerrrs! Looosssseeerrrs! They’re nothing but a bunch of fucking losers!”

  I lost it. Something welled up in me and burst out, and I tore out of the house, completely hysterical. The back-door screen had its storm window down. My arm went through that. There wasn’t a lot of blood until I yanked my arm back through the broken glass.

  “Good God,” screamed our mother as the shattered glass continued to fall. “What was that?”

  My parents came lumbering from the living room, but the door had already banged behind me, more glass shattering, and I was running, out into the field. About two-thirds of the way down the field I sank to my knees, my arm throbbing. I had it clutched to my T-shirt. And there I gave vent to all the anguish inside me, turning my insides out as I screamed until I grew hoarse. There were some sheep in the next field over, and their “MmBaah!” was either assent or disagreement, but then they, too, fell silent. I screamed to the bright blue sky and the cottony white clouds drifting like ships in that sweet open immenseness. “I’m a failure! I’m a failure! I’m a failure! Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” All my rage had turned into defeat, and the clouds, the green grass, the sky, God—nobody, nothing answered. It was mockery. It was worse; it was indifference.

  Nomi, two years later, would be right. Not even God could help you.

  They found me like that, beyond hysteria, my right arm covered in blood, my T-shirt soaked crimson. They carried me back up to the house, where I continued moaning, “I’m a failure, I’m a failure,” until they were able to pump enough bourbon and elixir of Benadryl into me—red juice, we called it (a Parke-Davis product, much to our father’s chagrin)—to calm me down. They got me into a warm tub of bathwater and started cleaning me up. I would need stitches for some of the wounds, but most could be butterflied closed. Our mother washed the tear-streaked dust from my face, washed my arms, held a washcloth to the worst of the wounds, looked with concern at me and with an expression that could melt steel at our father.

  Our father tousled my hair and said he was sorry. He didn’t know I had taken things so seriously. He said he wouldn’t do that again. “You have to understand, Emcee,” he said. “The Cubs will always be a day late and a dollar short. It’s no accident they’re so bad. It’s an act of God, and you just have to accept it.”

  I was down to whimpering and could breathe again. I looked at both my parents. Our mother with her concern and flared anger, our father stupefied with beer and filled with, yes, fumbling, awkward love. I suppose in a perverse way I had won that round. In breaking down, I had almost broken through our father’s wall of clichés. He had had to say something to me that wasn’t simply a truism. He had used a truism to get at an elemental truth.

  And he was right. The Cubs were a day late and a dollar short. And so was I. The only good thing that came out of it was that a couple of years later, when I again tried to woo Dorie with acts of gallant stupidity, it hurt less when I failed.

  I have told this story over the years to Dorie—she knows all about my Cubs obsession—but I’ve never told her that it was connected to her as well. She thinks it was purely Cubs-related, and I’ve never had the courage to let her know how much of my breakdown back then was related to her, or how much I desired her even before I understood it to be desire. Nor have I told her that I’ve always been afraid of losing her, both well before she was mine, when the loss wasn’t really consequential, and—more heartbreakingly—after. It is that I am losing her now, or perhaps have already lost her, that is driving me nuts.

  Not long after Bucko’s attack on our mother, Nomi took a turn for the worse. Our mother joked with Nomi about anything that touched on the borders of what was going on without ever getting to the heart of the matter. Artu visited often, was always cheerful, yet on more than one occasion on a Sunday afternoon as he was getting his car ready for the long drive back to Chicago I found him in our driveway, a gallon jug of water in his hand (he was topping off the radiator), his eyes glistening as he looked out over our fields. I thought I knew what he was thinking, but I did not. He shook his head, closed the hood of his car, looked back at the house, and drove away.

  Inoperable was the word whispered by our mother before she collapsed in our father’s arms, begging to be held. What she meant was “terminal.” Like sex, death had its own euphemisms. For example, the doctors explained that, given the advanced state of the cancer inside Nomi, “aggressive” treatments were called for. Aggressive, we found out later, meant “experimental.” They pumped her veins full of mustard gas, which never reached the cancer but did kill off a number of those veins. You could see the dead rivers and their tributaries beneath her skin: muddy, ghoulish, purply brown. Scars of the doctors’ handiwork.

  Nomi, indomitable Nomi, became a wizened sack of bones, whimpering, groaning, dozing in and out of consciousness. It was not pretty, and our mother kept us from her room now that she was “sinking.” She was still in the house, but we no longer saw her except for when our mother ushered us to her doorway when she was napping. It was a little like looking at a mannequin, only the waxy lips were open and the head was tilted to one side. “It’s only a matter of time,” our mother would say. “I pray to God He’s swift with her.”

  “Maybe she’ll die in her sleep,” I said.

  “Yes,” our mother said. “Maybe she will.” And turned away, her hand over her mouth.

  But then Nomi got better. She “rallied,” the doctor said. When she had been groaning and whimpering, he said she “lagged.” It was a language of nuance and things unspoken or glossed over. Nomi herself wasn’t like that, and her rally meant she was her old self, giving our father hell, laughing with our mother, questioning us kids about our homework and our friends and our aspirations. Having graduated high school, Cinderella was now enrolled at the tech, in a field called “fashion merchandising.” Nomi sniffed. “Is that a degree in clerking for Montgomery Ward’s? Sarah Lucinda, you don’t need a degree for that. Just good shoes.”

  Cinderella had brought home her tech school boyfriend. He had sandy orange hair, freckles, and bug eyes. He kept licking his mustache. Cinderella said she was going to marry him. He had a name—Oswald Grunner—but everyone called him Okie. “Is that because of the size of his root or because he has an acorn for a brain?” Nomi wondered out loud.

  “He spent time in Oklahoma, Nomi. He was in the Air Force and he broke horses.”

  “He broke horses. Now there’s an occupation to support a family. Did he get paid when he broke wind, too?”

  “I love him, Nomi.”

  “You love the idea of being in love. It’s not the same.”

  Our mother stayed out of it. She
was afraid that if she voiced her displeasure it would alienate Cinderella, might even drive her toward the boy in a fit of romantic it’s-you-and-me-against-the-world passion. And when his unsuitability did dawn on her, our mother didn’t want to have said something that might cause her to feel she couldn’t come home to lick her wounds. Our mother was counting on reason and good sense prevailing. Besides, Nomi was good at doing the dirty work. You couldn’t be mad at Nomi.

  She asked to be introduced to Okie and said in his presence to Cinderella, “Anybody can have a fool for a friend. You can even fall in love with one. That doesn’t mean you have to marry him.”

  “Mom wasn’t much older than me when she married Daddy.”

  “Your father wasn’t a fool. Your father probably doesn’t know this, but I’ve always been rather fond of him.”

  “Begging pardon, ma’am, but I ain’t no fool. And we ain’t getting married till it’s time.”

  “And how do you reckon it’s time, Okie?”

  “I ain’t figured it out yet. I’ll know when I get there.”

  “Ah,” said Nomi, “a boy and his dream. Remind me to get you a Timex for a wedding present.”

  “I love her, Nomi, and I promise I’ll do right by her.”

  “What I’m afraid of,” said Nomi, “is that you’ll have to.”

  “Why don’t we go outside and let Nomi rest?” our mother suggested.

  It was a fine October day, warm and windy. Cumulus clouds were stretched out and racing across the sky. “It’s a shame we can’t bring Nomi outside,” said our mother. “She’d enjoy this.”

  “I thought she only went in for blood sports,” said Okie, not as stupid as he seemed.

  “It’s part of the family hazing,” said Cinderella. “If you can get past Nomi, you’re in.”

  “So did I get past Nomi?”

  Cinderella grabbed his forearm. She was smiling. “The jury’s still out.” I didn’t know squat about love at the time, but right then I had the notion that Nomi was right. Cinderella was in love with the idea of being in love. She liked the commotion she was causing; she liked showing off her beau. She was both oblivious to the outside world, hermetically sealed inside her feelings for Okie, and watching everyone for reactions to her being inside this bubble. They looked like a couple that had already “you knowed,” and had found it pleasing. They made a strange couple—Okie all blunt edges and squares, Cinderella thin and whiplike. And she and Okie were enjoying their moment, their starry-eyed double solipsism, the wind ruffling their hair—take a picture, somebody, please—until Nomi called to our mother, “Susan, I need to pee!”

  It would be safe to say that Okie never got past Nomi. Our mother went inside the house and was gone for several minutes before she started screaming, “Help, help! Somebody help! Help me! Help!”

  We took off running, only to be barred from coming inside the house by our mother, who told us to stay outside, an ambulance was coming. Her face was ashen. She admitted Cinderella and Okie; the rest of us sat on the front stoop or milled around, waiting to find out what in Sam Hill was going on.

  We didn’t find out until the ambulance arrived, lights and siren blazing. They went in with a wheeled gurney. Father Reardon, Monsignor Kahle’s replacement, arrived all harried moments later, clutching a black valise that looked like a doctor’s bag. The paramedics came out several minutes later, their gurney now holding what looked like a zippered gray garment bag. They put this in the back of their truck and drove away slowly, almost casually, pausing at driveway’s end to put on their turn indicator. There were no lights or siren. Our mother had come out with Father Reardon and Cinderella with Okie while they were loading up the gurney and its burden. Okie had his arm around Cinderella, who curved herself into his chest, and Father Reardon had his arm around our mother, who stood stiffly, the wind ruffling her hair and causing her tears to curve down the slope of her face, which she batted at with her cast.

  “She was saying she needed to pee,” our mother said. “And I said, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ and she said I needed to hurry, or she’d be sitting there in her own juices. And I laughed, and she laughed”— our mother’s mouth fell open as she was saying this, and she put her hand to her open mouth as though trying to keep something in that had fallen out—“and it seemed, for a moment there, just like old times. And then while I was getting her to sit up so I could scoot the bedpan beneath her”— again our mother’s mouth fell open and she gasped for breath—“she opened up her mouth and everything just came out.” She gestured with her casted hand to indicate the arc of the hemorrhage out of her mouth. “There was just so much of it, all at one time, and there was nothing I could do to stop it, and then she was gone.”

  Our mother’s voice had gotten very quiet, and was choked by her crying, which was a queer happy-crying, like she felt better about things now that they were over. “At least it was quick, at least she didn’t suffer. It was just everything, all at once”—she made her gesture again—“and then she was gone, so soon, so soon, oh, my God, she went so soon!”

  Six months later, when our sister married Oswald Grunner in a ceremony that came only weeks after the hushed disclosure that she had been impregnated by him, the impregnation itself was classified an accident. That was how Okie maintained it had happened, by accident, and if Nomi had been alive she would have proclaimed Okie was right. It was an accident from the word go.

  16. Hook, Line, and Sinker

  STONE SOUP AND THE NATURE OF BELIEF

  That was the beginning of the end, but what it was the end of nobody could say. The clock struck midnight on Cinderella—we knew that much. We knew, too, that our father had wanted to believe our move out of Chicago and into the country had made us impregnable. So maybe Cinderella’s pregnancy put an end to that. And though our father was quietly furious, he was also stoic. After all, she wanted to marry the lout, and the lout was amenable to marrying her. Maybe it would all work out. “We shall see what we shall see”—even with a pregnant daughter, our father was a Zen optimist.

  He believed, for example, that the itty-bitty creek that ran through our property held fish. Or could hold fish. He had seen a few minnows hanging out in the shade of the culvert one hot day and decided that, yes, though ours was an intermittent creek—some summers it dried up completely—it was part of a great drainage basin. It was a feeder creek for Bear Creek, which fed the Embarrass River, which met up with the Wolf, which flowed into Lake Poygan, which slid into Lake Winneconne, which joined up with Butte des Morts, which flowed into Winnebago, which spilled off into the Fox River, which flowed north—North, goddammit, north! Can you believe it? The only river in North America that flows north—up to Green Bay, where it became Lake Michigan, which ultimately joined the St. Lawrence River, which joined the mighty Atlantic, which was one ocean of four, but Look, he’d say. Do you see any boundaries? In all of that water, do you see any boundaries? No, you don’t. It’s all one ocean, it’s all connected. That creek out there—he’d jab his finger out toward our woods—it’s part of the Atlantic Ocean if you think about it. We could be catching tuna out there some day. Or eel. Or albacore!

  This exuberance of our father was not unexpected. His capacity for great dreams was not yet exhausted. His belief in the brotherhood of fish—that we could hook an albacore in our creek—was greater than his belief in the brotherhood of man. This confused us, but it should not have. Leaps of faith were not without pitfalls, and though our father, trained as a biologist, subjected to the rigors of Navy discipline, wanted to believe there was a logic to his leaps, they were leaps all the same. Some hurdles of logic he cleared; others he didn’t. That a sea bass could make its way upstream, past locks and dams and predatory birds and a drastic change in its environment’s saline content, and eventually find its way into our backyard was more believable to him than the notion that all men were brothers under the skin. We’d left the suburbs because they’d gotten ugly, and with more people fleeing to them they wer
e apt to get uglier. A man who dealt with people all day, our father wanted to get away from people. This put him at odds with his adopted religion, but Catholicism itself is a bundle of contradictions and—at least as it is practiced in America—quite tolerant of hypocrisy. That whole notion of “practicing Catholic” appealed to him. You were never a perfect Catholic; you were always practicing, always falling a little short, and with a wink and a nod and a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys you were back on the schneid. Al Capone, our father was sure, was a very good Catholic when he wasn’t killing people.

  When our father married our mother, he’d gone from being an agnostic to being an indifferent Catholic, lapsed almost from the moment of his First Communion. But then a strange thing happened. After we were born he transformed himself into a Super-Catholic, the SC emblazoned on his chest. He wore a scapular, a St. Christopher medal, joined the Loyal Order of Moose, had a St. Christopher statue mounted on his station wagon’s dash, put up crucifixes in our rooms. He kept prayer cards in his wallet, a rosary in his Dopp kit. He loved St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers and peddlers. Years later, our father never forgave Rome for taking St. Christopher off its official saints list. And for the flimsiest of reasons—just because the famous ferrying never happened? “So what?” said our father. “None of it is true. It’s all stories. You think that sliver of wood in the glass compass they have us kiss on Good Friday is a piece of the true Cross? Give me a break.” But he believed in that, too, just as he believed in the Shroud of Turin and Mary of Lourdes and Fatima and transubstantiation and the stigmata and the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. What he loved was ritual. The belief in belief. He loved the Latin Mass, with its chanted Kyries and its incense and the priest at the altar with his back to the parishioners. A clear chain of being—God outside, above and behind the church spires, the priest at the altar, the parishioners in their pews, the mothers in the back with the whiny little ones, and ushers moving among the faithful, directing traffic, taking up the collection, bringing up the gifts, selling the Sunday paper on the steps of the church afterward. Our father liked the idea of being one of God’s ushers—solemn, serene, in charge. A universe that made sense, that was orderly. He saw all that slipping away after Vatican II. The hand-holding, guitar-playing “Kumbaya shit”—he didn’t trust it. A garrulous man, our father was uncomfortable with the rite of peace. He believed in hierarchy, and this new equality among the community baffled him. Still he believed, and what he believed, we believed, at least for a while.