The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  I “volunteered” to ride around on one of his sales trips. Given the precarious state he was in, our mother thought it “might be good” if one of us accompanied him, and I was the only one available. That summer I’d abandoned the white-collar world of Nabisco for the higher-paying drudgery of a canning factory, but it was closed because of a drowning in one of its cooling tanks. It wasn’t likely to start up again soon—drought had delayed the corn season—and by the time it was, I’d be back at school. I’ve no idea what our mother said to him privately, but to me our father said he wouldn’t mind the company. He even seemed pleased. Here was his chance to show how he could mentor a budding salesman. And his son to boot. For me this would be like a weeklong trip to the Office. The very idea thrilled and disgusted me.

  We drove north up Highway 51. Our father chatted up the owners of Stop-N-Gos, Open Pantries, Bob’s Gas and Grubs, Millie’s and Izzie’s Canteen Stand, Roy and Margaret’s Bait and Grocery. We stopped at Indian souvenir stands with groceries attached, ditto bait shops and Quik Marts. Red Owls, Piggly Wigglys, and Sentrys, too. At the end of the day we crossed Highway 2 to Ashland, where we were booked into the Lorelei Motel. After dinner we walked down to the harbor and looked at the sailboats up from Chicago. “All that cocksucking money,” said our father, “and they buy sailboats.” Our father was a powerboat man, and this was the first time I’d ever heard him vent on the subject of money. He believed the rich deserved it, even when I pointed out that a lot of the wealth he saw was inherited. A grandfather in iron ore, a great-grandfather in timber. No matter. At some point somebody had done something to deserve it, by hook or by crook, and you could do worse than be born into a family of wealth.

  “Al Capone had no children,” our father told me as we walked along. “No legacy, no heirs. That was his one great mistake. That and he let the feds get him on income tax evasion. He had cabins and hideaways all through the great north woods. Did you know that?”

  I knew.

  The next day was hot and hazy, and clouds were building up in the west. That meant rain, and we hoped it meant a break from the heat. The company car’s air conditioner was having a hard time keeping up with all our starts and stops. We’d visit a grocery store, write up a pitifully small order, then drive ten miles and do it again. Some of the towns we went through were paper mill towns. The muscles above our father’s jowls worked furiously as we drove by his old stomping grounds, but he said nothing.

  We knocked off earlier than expected in Spooner. We had a couple more stops to make, but at a little crossroads grocery named Mel’s we ran into a young woman, a girl, really, running the counter. “Can we see Mel, honey?” said our father.

  “Mel’s gone,” said the girl. She looked to be about seventeen. Pretty, the way girls in small towns are, a little stocky, her jeans tight, her pink T-shirt tighter, her black hair parted carelessly down the middle. She caught sight of me and grinned. I was new in town, and that meant I wasn’t the same old same old. “Fishing,” she added uncertainly. Then she smiled at me again.

  “Mel’s gone drinking,” came a voice from the back. “No-account bastard.”

  “I’m here,” the young woman said. She leaned forward and whispered, “I’m Celia.”

  At that the bead curtain behind the register parted to give way to a curlered behemoth in a housedress. This was a woman who looked like she wrestled pigs for a living. “Celia, get in the back,” the woman ordered. She was holding a broom and smoking a cigarette.

  “I was just talking to these gentlemen.”

  “These gentlemen ain’t gentlemen. They’re salesmen. And I’ll handle ’em. Now get.” She spat out “salesmen” as though we were vermin. Then I realized what was up. We were the punch line to too many jokes that had driven through town. This woman could just see it, a seventeen-year-old mother to be who couldn’t remember the name of the “nice man” who’d knocked her up, then disappeared on down the highway. She was protecting her daughter from a horrible future. Better she got knocked up by some local boy she could keep her eye on and make do the right thing. Even if he turned out to be a bastard like Mel.

  Our father cleared his throat. “Would you be able, in Mel’s absence,” he said, “to make decisions regarding the stocking of this store?” Our father’s voice sounded unnaturally formal, and I wondered what had gotten into him.

  “I make all the decisions about stocking this store, mister. Mel left that to me years ago when he decided the bottle he crawled inside was a better home than this one. And that was the last decision he ever made. And let me tell you something else, you slick city piece of shit, whatever you’re selling, I ain’t buying. Now get.”

  The first drops of rain, which had been threatening to come down all day, splattered on our windshield and on the trees outside. You could hear it sputter-tapping the tin roof awning over Mel’s window. If we left right now, we could make the car before the deluge hit. But my father composed himself. He was not going to be driven out of a two-bit family grocery in a north woods town by a harridan with a chip on her shoulder. He refused. Instead he took out his order book and said, “I’ll just make sure you’ve got enough stock for the shelves.”

  “I got all the stock I need. All the goddamn stock I’ll ever need. Some of that stuff has been sitting on the shelf since last summer.”

  “Then I’ll remove the postdated stock and get you new merchandise,” said our father.

  “I want the goddamn shelf empty!” the woman screamed. I had a hard time reconciling in my mind that this was Celia’s mother until it occurred to me that once upon a time Celia’s mom had probably been a lot like Celia, had married badly, and had paid for it ever since. Now she was just looking for excuses upon which she could unload all her grief and rage and unhappiness. It just so happened that today we were it. On another day it would be the water softener man, or the Coca-Cola salesman, or a representative from the Tri-County Bank, come to inform her that she had exhausted all her options vis-à-vis keeping this two-bit grocery afloat.

  None of which comforted me when I saw the woman raise her broom and bring it down on my father’s head.

  “Mama, don’t!” yelled Celia, who burst out of the back at the first crack of the broom.

  “Ma’am, please!” My father threw up his arms to defend himself. “I’m trying to write an order here.”

  “I don’t want a goddamn order here. I want you out of my fucking store.” She was beating time on his shoulders and head with her broom; my father turned his back and hunched his shoulders. He had his order pad out, with the three carbons tucked between the sheets—one for him, one for the office, one for the driver, one for the customer. She was raining blows on his back, and her words and the rain outside, which was coming in gusts, seemed to beat time with her. “Do . . . I . . . make . . . myself . . . clear? . . . I . . . want . . . you . . . out . . . of . . . my . . . fucking . . . store!” The last three blows were delivered to the back of my father’s skull. You could hear the broom’s plastic frame cracking as it whacked bone.

  “Dad! You’re bleeding!” I cried as bright red blood burst into rivulets down the back of his head, spotting his yellow sport shirt crimson.

  “Mama! Stop!” yelled Celia, but it was obvious the sight of my father’s blood only infuriated the woman, spurred her on to greater fury. A lifetime of frustrations had broken through the dam of her bile-swallowing anger, and here! here! she had found an object upon which she could whale. She just kept hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. My father had sunk to his knees—no easy task for a big man—and he was covering his skull with his order book. Whack! Whack! went the broom on his order book. Whack! Whack! Whack!

  “Dad!” I yelled. “Sound the retreat! Retreat!” But he couldn’t seem to get to his feet, and when I tried reaching in to grab him, Celia’s mother started swinging the broom at me. Bottles of salad oil and Karo syrup and Mrs. Butterworth’s were knocked to the floor, crashing in time, it seemed, to the lightning flashes.
I backed off. Celia’s mother returned her attention to my father, who hadn’t risen during his brief reprieve.

  Celia had come up alongside me as this was going on, and her fingers reached for mine. We were holding hands, feeling the electricity of our entwined fingers, although we may have been feeling only the buzz from the electrical storm outside.

  Meanwhile my father was getting the shit beat out of him.

  “Make her stop,” I said, and Celia squeezed my hand tighter and said, “I can’t. She just gets like this sometimes, although usually she doesn’t take it out on people.”

  Celia’s mother was winding down. Perhaps her arms were getting tired. She paused for breath, perhaps to regroup before redoubling her assault on my father’s cranium, and though it felt queerly strange and wonderful to have Celia holding my hand while my father was being beaten, I shook myself free and reached for my father, catching him under his arm. I half-pulled, half-dragged him to his feet. He slid in the Mrs. Butterworth’s–Karo syrup goo for a couple feet before I could get him upright. “Dad!” I kept yelling. “Retreat! Retreat!” And once I got him on his feet, I pushed him toward the door. Then I lunged back under the deadly broom of Celia’s mother to grab his sample case. She caught me a few times on my head and shoulders, slicing me open behind my ear before I was able to get out of there.

  “Sorry!” Celia called as I sprang out the door, the bells above it tinkling in my wake.

  Outside the wind beat furiously. The temperature had dropped, and cold rain and hail lashed down on us. It was like being attacked by ice cubes. “Shit and double shit!” yelled our father as he dropped his keys. We stood there while he fished for them in a large puddled pothole, then worked his way through the ring looking for the key. We were soaked and shivering by the time we got inside, and shivered more in the car’s air-conditioned air. The AC, which had labored and failed us all day, was finally successful in chilling us to the bone. He shut it off and the windows fogged. With a handkerchief I started wiping blood off his head, trying to stanch the flow. The rain had helped clean the wounds, and although he had several lacerations on the back of his head and neck, he wasn’t wounded too badly. He checked me for damage as well. The cut over my ear bled onto my shoulders. Our shirts were soaked with rain and blood, and our shoulders stung from the twin assaults of hail and Celia’s mother. Our father was breathing heavily. “What say we knock off early today. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “Sorry about that back there. Usually if they don’t like you they at least let you wait out the rain.”

  “You had no way of knowing,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said our father, “that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” He took the handkerchief from me and pressed it against the back of his head. Then he put on the blower to clear the windshield. Just before he put the car in gear, he turned to me. “Thanks for getting me out of there.”

  I grinned, then said something that scared me. Was this how it started, the words simply coming out of your mouth? “I’ll put it on your bill,” I said, sounding just like our father.

  That evening all I wanted was for us to have a good laugh over our adventure and maybe run into a remorseful Celia, who would want to make up for her mother’s bad behavior with some bad behavior of her own. But over dinner—it was a supper club, but the rush hadn’t come in yet, nor had the staff, so we were eating at the bar—our father started putting away Rob Roys at an alarming pace. I had often seen our father drunk or with a drink in his hand, but I had rarely seen him drinking. Even on our many expeditions to the Dog Out and Banana’s Never Inn, expeditions that began with our father running out “to get a loaf of bread,” his drinking seemed to occur while I was in the bathroom, or my mind was engaged by other things—the size of the barmaid’s rack, for instance. Oh, sure, I’d seen him regularly sip his beer, even throw back a shot or three, but that evening our father wasn’t giving the ice in his glass a chance to get soft.

  “It wasn’t always like this, Emcee,” he told me, shaking his glass to get the barmaid’s attention. The cubes, bereft of company, rattled hollowly. “God damn it, it wasn’t always like this.” The barmaid came and wiped the bar down, and my father slid his glass toward her. She nodded with a sad smile on her face like she knew just what he was thinking, and she was sorry there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

  Then I got to thinking that maybe there was. She was no great shakes in the looks department—chunky, with frizzy blond hair, a pasty face, and too much lipstick and blue eye shadow—but then my father was no great shakes in the looks department, either. She was not wearing flattering clothing—a green blouse that puckered at the shoulders and black tights that a woman with chunky thighs probably shouldn’t be wearing—but we were a long way from home, and I was constantly checking the door myself, hoping to see a young woman walk in whose mother earlier that afternoon had tried to beat us to death. Loneliness and need make for strange partners, I thought. And our father had always, always, been a long way from home.

  “It’s a different culture, Emcee, selling like this. It’s not even selling. What’s to sell? Nabisco’s got all the shelf space, and Keebler’s got what they don’t. And I can’t get the margins low enough for the managers to give me their aisle ends. Nabisco got there first. Forty-five years ago they got there first. The fucking National Biscuit Company. And who do I sell for? Pewaukee Cookie and Biscuit. PCB. Christ. It sounds like one of them drugs you kids are always taking. Like the insides of my cookies are gonna send you into tizzies.”

  “Maybe you should use that as a selling point, Dad. Get marketing to rethink the demographics. PCB—cookies for stoners and hippies. You got the munchies? Don’t want to lose your high? Buy PCBs, in the bright Day-Glo box.”

  Our father wasn’t listening to me. He was thinking about customers, not consumers, and his were the store managers. That was who he was selling to—not the public but guys like himself, little guys trying to stay afloat between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  “And who’s there to sell to?” A rhetorical question. He wasn’t expecting an answer. He was going to supply his own. “Nobody fishes after work in this business. Nobody goes out for dinner and drinks. It’s not part of the culture. They work nights, or they beat it home to their wife and kiddies. Not that HQ gives me anything to seal a deal with anyway. I don’t have that kind of expense account. And where are the premiums? Here, take home a box of cookies? Please.” Our father rattled his glass again. “How am I supposed to sell when I’ve got no leverage?” His exasperation brought over the barmaid. She was bearing a fresh Rob Roy.

  “You’ve had a tough day, huh, honey? Look, I feel for you, I really do, but you’re scaring away the other customers.” I looked down the bar. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. There weren’t any other customers. She put my father’s drink down, then leaned over her folded arms, her elbows on the bar. “Pretty soon, if you don’t watch it,” she said, “it’s going to be just me and you.” She held out her hand. My father took it. “Wally,” he said. “Madeleine,” she said. “People call me Maddy.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “And Sonny makes three, eh?” Madeleine went to the sink and started dunking glasses. She hadn’t introduced herself to me. I didn’t like the way Dad was looking at her. I thought of Shirley, lo, those many years ago. Before she married Louie, what had happened between her and our father? Anything? How long had he kept that card in his wallet? Had he passed her on to Louie, damaged goods (though she seemed plenty damaged already when I met her at the Office), or had he settled for simply introducing her to someone who might appreciate her offers, knowing that nature would take its course, nature being the requisite coupling and uncoupling, with Shirley flying the coop eventually, as every woman did with Louie? I had no way of knowing, and my good thoughts to the contrary, it was something I wondered about, the nature of our father while he was on the road. I’d imagined him both good and fallen, noble and not so noble, a
nd here was Temptation with a capital T, her boobs staring my father in the face.

  I thought I knew something about that. I was dating someone right then that I was “practically engaged to,” as people used to say. I’d gotten tired of waiting for Dorie Braun—she was long gone from Augsbury, had left even before I graduated high school. The last I’d heard she was living in either Milwaukee or Minneapolis, and one rumor was she was living off her rich boyfriend, and another rumor was she was living off her friendships with rich homosexuals (though in Augsbury nobody called them homosexuals). So I stopped hoping and fell in love with the first woman nice enough to sleep with me. Jane Brohm, one of my college classmates. Cute, curious, freckled, neurotic. That should have been fine, but it wasn’t. The only thing we had in common was parents who drank too much. Where was Nomi to tell me I was making the same mistake as Cinderella? Maybe I was trying to tell myself that with Celia. It wouldn’t have been the first time that summer that I’d been tempted to stray. There’d been a woman, too, in the canning factory where I was working—Rita Sabo. A few years older than I and a mom already a couple times over. I think we’d have hooked up, only she was pregnant. What was it with me and pregnant women? Patty Duckwa redux. Only here the temptation was not only real but possible. And if I was all but engaged to Jane Brohm, what was I doing lusting after Rita Sabo and Celia no-last-name? Was it like this for married people, too? Was it like this for our father? For our mother?

  Our father seemed to suspect what I was thinking. “I have never cheated on your mother,” he told me, lifting his glass to his lips. He often swore to this statement; either he suspected I was thinking it quite often or he had a guilty conscience.