by C J Hribal
“What do you think, Dad, you think those guys make potty stops, too?”
“They do if they’ve got kids.”
“Would they even know if they’ve got kids?”
“They know. Believe me, they know.”
“And how would you know if they did?”
“It depends. Daytime nobody talks much, they’re trying to make time. Where are the cops? What’s the score of the Packers game? Nighttime, though . . .” He trailed off.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s everything that comes with night driving—itchy eyes, sore back, jittery bones. They’re trying to stay awake. I’m trying to stay awake. We talk. And with nobody else on the road, we talk regular, not CB lingo.”
“About what?”
“Kids, family, wives. Where we live. What we’re gonna do on the weekend. What we want out of life—you know, stuff like that.”
It was as I feared. His relationship with these anonymous truckers was every bit as good as his relationship with us. Better, maybe. Founded on the same clichés during the day, but during the long nights he opened up to them, and they to him, so over time he probably knew some of those haulers better than he knew us. For us to get him to open up, he had to be half in the bag and ready to unload. It helped if he’d just had his head split open by an irate store owner, too. Though what you got then—what you always got, I suppose—was broken rage.
I tried again. Just straight out asked him: “And what do you think about when you’re driving, Dad?” I wanted to know. I really did. I wanted him to tell me something, anything, that wasn’t prepackaged, canned, a riff from his never-ending rap of taglines and clichés.
And he said, “What?”
“While you drive,” I said. “What do you think about?”
“Oh, the usual things. Nothing much, really. The next day, the next customer. I think about your mom. You kids.”
“Specifically, what do you think about?”
“Specifically?” He seemed distracted, like something on the road ahead of us really required his attention.
“Yeah, specifically. What do you think? About us, for example.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Things. The road sort of zips by me, Emcee, and I think about things. Nothing much, really. My thoughts just kind of wander.” He nudged the car off the highway and into the gravel drive of Ed’s Roadside Inn. “Let’s stop in for a taste.”
It was more than a taste. By the time we were coming down the long sweeping hills and climbing the rises east of Eau Claire, the sun was turning the telephone poles orange. We could almost hear those delicately curved wires singing. All that talk in the salmon-and-black wire, and I knew he’d never say it, what he thought about all those days behind the wheel. He hadn’t offered up anything in the bar, and I knew whatever he was likely to say now would be the usual lines. “Your mom is gonna kill me. Well, you know what they do with horses, don’t you?”
It was driving me crazy. I wanted to tell him I had doubts about my upcoming marriage. I wanted to ask him how did he know it was right with Mom. I wanted to ask if he thought Jane was a good match for me. But I couldn’t get through to him.
Correction: I said nothing to him about any of it. Not a word of it. Still another indication that, for all my loathing of his reticence, I was learning silence at the feet of the Buddha of Repression myself.
So okay, another missed connection. We’re going home now, and it’ll be like always, another skirmish between our father’s stewed indulgences and our mother’s frayed nerves. Our father trying to sneak into the house—his home, his castle—like a lumbering bull, our mother pouring acid onto his flanks trying to keep him out, but then she drops the bucket, raises the drawbridge, and just starts wailing. And the seven of us will hear the fight, or pieces of it, and will pray for reconciliation, pray our mother will lower the bridge so we can all race across, into forgiveness, into family happiness. Or, in whispered conferences—more and more now—we will wonder why they don’t just admit they are on separate shores and get a divorce.
Our father, when drunk, is remarkably prescient. Apropos of nothing—we haven’t spoken a word to each other in miles—our father says to me, “We are family, Emcee. Never forget that.”
I try not to think that this is what he says after each squabble, each fight, each family gathering that ends in screaming and slammed doors when it doesn’t end in a fistfight proper.
We are a constellation, I want to say to our father. We are points fixed in space, given meaning only by an outside observer. We are defined by our relation to each other, by our distance, by the pattern we make, and we collide figuratively, which is good because generally it keeps the bloodshed down.
Rain stubbles the salmon-colored sky. I see it on the windshield. I see it falling on the fields. “What are you going to do, Dad?”
“About what?”
“About this job. It’s like my summer job from last year, only worse.”
“It pays the bills, Emcee.”
“So you’re going to keep doing it?”
“I’m a salesman, Emcee, it’s what I do.”
“This isn’t selling, Dad. You know it, I know it. Quit kidding yourself.”
“Never kid a kidder, kid.”
If I’d been paying attention, I’d have heard something coming loose inside our father right then. His situation was bumping up against his own denial, and that wall of clichés he had always used for protection and privacy was falling down. In the battle of his psyche versus cold, hard reality, he was firing blanks.
“Could you just stop it, Dad? Stop with the clichés.”
“This will reflect on your merit review.” He was on autopilot now. It scared me.
“Enough, Dad.”
“That’s the way the cookie crumbles, Emcee.”
“I mean it, Dad.”
“Another county heard from.”
“Jesus, Dad, will you just listen to yourself once?”
Our father was silent for a long time. Then he finally told me what he was going to do, and without his explaining, I knew it was going to be both better and worse than what he was doing now. Better because it beat having your head split open. Worse because this was going to be a far worse abasement. Worse because he was going to submit to it willingly.
“I’m going to call Benny Wilkerson,” said our father. Then he looks out his window and says softly, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” And stares and stares and stares.
The car slides off to the shoulder right then, and I reach to steady the wheel. Dad, I say, we’re drifting. The metaphorical aspects of this are obvious—years later I could have said it to Dorie—but right then I meant it literally. The car is drifting—a not uncommon occurrence, I’d noticed, in the late afternoon when our father got tired, but nobody drove the company car except our father, so you said something and jostled him awake.
Not this time, though. The highway is gleaming salmon in the angled sun behind us, and another failing town is shooting past, and the rolling countryside, like God’s wrinkled brow, is growing dark in the twilight, and I’m going, Dad? Dad? as we weave into the oncoming traffic and weave back. My hand’s on the wheel now, nudging us off the shoulder.
Dad? Dad? His head’s nodding, his hands folded high on his immense stomach, the way he is after a large a meal when everyone’s home. He means to visit with us, but the burden of the food and the wine is too great and he’s asleep, his body doing the great work of digestion.
Would it be wrong to say I have imagined his death just like this? For years I have dreamed it. We are driving through a yellowy orange sunset, and the telephone wires above us and the road below have all gone salmon. And my father nods into sleep, a massive coronary, and I reach across, push his Sorel-booted foot off the accelerator with my right hand while my left keeps us from wobbling too much, then we’re slowing and I’ve got the hazard lights on and I’m steering us back onto the shoulder and Dad’s bulk is slumpe
d sideways, his head tipped into his shoulder, his second chin making a third, and I’m shaking him now. Dad? Dad?
Slowing, slowing, slowing, until we come to the shoulder and stop. Whew, that’s something, I say and turn, expecting him all the while to wake up.
Dad?
No response. And we’d all know it had to be like this, the Viking burial at sea, the old peddler on the highway.
Only it doesn’t happen like that. His head slumps forward, and I’m angry but surprised, too, that something like this hadn’t happened before. How many years has he been driving home half-baked, three sheets to the wind, shitfaced and drowsy, risking this, a sudden trip to the Land of Nod or a diabetic coma? How many years has our mother had to worry about this? So I’m screaming at him, “Wake up, Dad! Wake up!” and he can’t hear me. When he’s like this, there’s no waking him.
Then his ear thumps the steering wheel and the horn blares and I know something is seriously wrong. I throw him back into his seat—no easy task—and try steering the car onto the shoulder. He falls sideways into me, and I shove him back against his window and try lifting his leg from the gas pedal while easing us onto the gravel. Only he bounces and falls back into the steering wheel again. The horn blares. His foot is fast on the gas. We pick up speed, sway off the shoulder and back into the lane of oncoming traffic. Car horns blare at us, other cars swerve off the road and back. The word deadweight suddenly hits me. I panic. I’m still screaming at him, “Dad, Dad, wake up!” as I smack him a good one on the thigh. Nothing. I lean back and kick his knee. Pop! and his knee bends at an odd angle. But his foot is free from the gas pedal finally, and I shove him sideways again. He slumps into his door, his fingers still locked over his immense chest. I get us back in our lane and then onto the shoulder. We coast like a freight car shunted onto a siding and left to gather its own inertia.
The suck of wind out the window is replaced by the crunch of gravel, but there is still a roaring in my ears, as though everything is rushing around and through me. And all that traffic is going by and still going by and still going by and still going by.
I get on the CB and start screaming, “Mayday! Mayday!” as though we are a ship lost at sea. A trucker ahead of us calms me down enough for me to give him our location. He says he’ll relay it on channel 9, the emergency band, and to sit tight, somebody will be there shortly. Another trucker says he’ll get to us in twenty minutes or so, and to sit tight, he knows CPR.
Sit tight, sit tight. Our father is dead! I want to yell into the microphone, what the hell good is CPR now? But I don’t know a thing, really, about his condition. And I feel ashamed for panicking. I loosen his string tie, undo his shirt. He’s breathing but unconscious. I’m shaking.
The trucker arrives, and a few minutes later an ambulance. We’re closer to Wausau than Eau Claire, so they take him there.
Our father’s heart attack didn’t kill him. It nailed him pretty good, though. As I waited for our mother and my siblings, I was given a quick rundown of his condition. Right coronary artery—95 percent blocked. The other branches—blocked, blocked, and blocked. A surgeon drew a diagram and ticked them off the way mechanics inform you of the damage to your engine. This is going to cost him, the surgeon told me. He said the same thing to our mother when she arrived. “Yeah,” she said, “but I’m the one who’s paying.”
“How is he?” Cinderella asked once our mother went in to see him. I’d say Cinderella looked stricken except she always looked stricken.
“Bad. He’s Dad, only more so.”
While we waited for our mother, I looked through the pamphlet given us by his surgeon: “Risk Factors for Coronary Artery Disease.” It was just like those “How to Tell if He Still Loves You” questionnaires in Cosmo. Do you have high blood pressure? Do you eat a high fat, high cholesterol diet? “Do you think Dad’s regular breakfast of eggs cooked in bacon and sausage grease counts?” I asked Cinderella. The doctor returned and explained that he was going to do an angioplasty once our father was stable. A balloon catheter would be shoved up the femoral artery in his groin and once it reached his heart it’d be inflated and either push the blockages out of the way or flatten them. He’d be in the hospital a few days and could recover at home after that. He would also need to take his heart and diabetes meds regularly and eat a more balanced diet. And there was the matter of the torn ligaments in his knee from when I kicked him.
Said our mother, “This should put the fear of God into him.” Then she turned her face away so we couldn’t see it crumple.
We stand around our father’s bed as he’s prepped for surgery. He’s fussing, though, and the nurse is having a hard time with the IV. Our mother is scared and so angry at him for refusing to seek treatment or even a diagnosis until it’s come to this that she explodes. “Look, Wally, if I can have all my insides taken out and not receive a word from you, comfort or otherwise, then the least you can do is sit still and let them make sure your heart keeps working, goddammit.” That seems to work. The anesthetic cocktail he finally downed probably helped, too. In his hospital gown he has the hunted-and-caught look of a man recently castrated.
So how you feeling, Dad?
Oh, okay. You know this puts hair between your toes.
Our mother is calmer now. It’s okay to be scared, Wally-Bear. I was scared. But I know, I just know, Wally-Bear, that you’re going to come through this all right.
I hope so, honey.
So, Dad, you picked a hell of a way to find out if we loved you.
Not my choice, kitten. His head flops over toward our mother. Well, Suse, I never thought you’d be sitting under the apple tree with anyone else but me.
I wouldn’t, Wally-Bear.
That’s my Pumpkin. (Pause.) I love you, Susie-Q.
I love you, too, Wally-Bear.
I never told you this, Susie-Q, but I’m very happy you agreed to marry me.
You tell me all the time, silly.
But I mean it, Suse. I’ve had a great life. I wouldn’t want anything to be different.
I know, Wally-Bear.
And, Suse?
We all lean in close. The nurses are checking their dials and things, tapping the bag that’s dripping stuff into his arm. He’s struggling to keep awake, to say this last thing before they wheel him away. Our mother finds his hand and squeezes.
Suse? he says. Sweetheart? I owe you.
Yes, says our mother with both more iron and more tenderness than I’d have thought possible. She’s patting our father’s hand; her eyes are filling with tears. Yes, Wally-Bear, you do.
19. Some Things Are Best Left Private
“Emmie, are you okay?” Our mother’s face appears in the back bedroom window.
I’m on the deck. The deck railing, the furniture, the big clay plant pots—everything is covered with a fine rime of frost. The half-moon shines on the frosted ground, the stubble from the last cutting in the fall. You can see Cinderella’s footprints coming and going, then the horde of us coming back up, after the frost had settled. Her appearance pretty much ended the evening—odd, since we were waiting for her to arrive. But her news about our mother and father having figured things out gave us an out—we didn’t have to decide. Not yet we didn’t. Unless, of course, Mom and Dad’s plan is completely unworkable. So everyone went back to where they belonged except me, and I didn’t want to go into the house yet.
I want to answer her, No, Mom, I am not okay. My bookstores are failing, my seems to have lost interest in me and my marriage is in trouble. But I can’t tell her that. There’s a kind of rule in our family: When you can’t say what it is you are really thinking or feeling, ask about someone else. “Cinderella told us Mel’s thinking of getting back with his wife.”
“Yes, she told me that, too.”
“I didn’t even know he had a wife.”
“Everyone has their secrets, Emmie.”
“So, essentially, Mel’s cheating on Cinderella with his own wife.”
“I hadn’
t thought of putting it that way, but yes, I suppose he is.”
“That’s a pretty big secret.”
“Yes,” says our mother, “yes, it is.”
“She had another one,” I say. “Something she told Mel that maybe prompted him on the wife thing. Something she didn’t tell us.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to tell you.”
“Maybe. Is it something she wants you to tell us?” That’s another informal rule in our family: if you want information conveyed to all the siblings, tell it to our mother. She’s the family information dissemination officer. This comes in handy when you have something awful to disclose, like a divorce or a separation; the next time you see everyone, they all know what’s up with you, and you haven’t had to say a word.
Our mother sighs. It’s not always clear whether she does the information dispersal thing because she likes it or because she feels she’s helping protect her children. It’s probably both. It must be lonely, being the icebreaker for the frozen seas in people’s hearts. “I suppose you’ll find out soon enough,” she says. “They found another lump. In her breast. They want to remove everything this time, just to be sure.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s going to be hard for her, and as a group you’ve not been particularly supportive.” She’s right, we haven’t, but I don’t say anything. Our mother says, “If there’s one thing your father and I have always wanted, Emmie, it’s for you children to pull together. To work together as a family.”
