by C J Hribal
“I didn’t use them, Em. Not once. Not ever.”
“You’re going to tell me you took them along, neatly sealed in a plastic ziplock by accident?”
“I just wanted to feel like a free agent again, Em. It doesn’t mean anything. Like your dad—he’s probably had the same condom in his wallet since Korea. I packed that stuff because I wanted to feel as though something were possible. I mean, I wasn’t interested in that, not really. But I took it along anyway. Just to feel as though there might be a ‘just in case.’ Now,” she says, undoing her bra and pulling her arms free, “we can either make use of this fine evening or we can call it a night. What do you want?”
In the moonlight and the cold, Dorie’s breasts are magnificent—pendulous, full, the nipples smilingly erect. Patty Duckwa’s breasts had nothing on Dorie Keillor’s, and I am calling to mind an idealized pair of breasts last seen a third of a century ago.
Dorie’s body has a geometry that invites contemplation. I contemplate it for some time, running my fingers over her upraised nipples, over the gooseflesh of her arms and legs and belly. Her body glistens. You can almost see a light steam rising from it into the cold night air. I’m not sure that an act of love in the back of a station wagon is necessarily the best thing for our marriage right at this moment, but I am ready to vote in favor of it, too.
But just as she mounts me and we grunt-groan the success of her landing, I say, “Was there?” and she says, “Was there what?” and I say, “With the diaphragm and the nightie—was there a ‘just in case’?” And she says, “Em, do you really want to know the answer to that?”
“Knowing is better than not knowing,” I say, and she says, “You think so, huh? What if I told you I slipped? I didn’t, but what if I told you that? That early on, when all this started, I made a stupid mistake, something I couldn’t undo, and that you could either forgive and forget about it or let it eat away at our marriage until there’s nothing left? What would you say to that, Em? Is that something you’d really want to know?” She searches my eyes hard right then, as though she’s looking for something in there she really needs to find. “Em,” she says, “you just need to have a little faith.” And then she rises up on me and drops down, then does it again, and soon, despite my doubts, we’re both in a place beyond speech, beyond language, where we both know everything and understand nothing.
Later we lay side by side, spent, heat rising out of our bodies. “That was lovely, Ace, but now I’m freezing.” She sits up, pulls on her sweatshirt and jacket. “Besides, we should get some sleep. Sun’s going to be up in a couple of hours.” We get up. “Will you look at that,” she says, stepping into her underwear. “That’s sort of amazing, isn’t it?”
The skinny black trees, the leaves, every brown blade of marsh grass is filigreed with hoarfrost. The bridge glistens, the trees seem blanketed in a fog of their own frost. Everything is both soft-focus and sharply delineated, white and gray and black, as though etched by both fog and razor blade. Dorie kisses me and gets the rest of her clothes on.
“It is amazing.”
Dorie opens her car door. “You coming?”
“In a minute.”
I watch her beautiful blond head duck inside the Nomad. She turns the ignition, starts the heater. I still have a few swallows of beer left. The sky is getting that grayish light to it that means morning isn’t far away. It was on a night—a morning—like this one a long time ago that Robert Aaron told me Audrey was pregnant. At the time he felt like he had his balls nailed to the wall. Yet he and Audrey have managed, and come this fall their oldest is herself getting married. I think about our parents earlier this evening, our mother ready to send our father’s croquet ball into the outer reaches of the stratosphere, but she gave him a break instead.
I’m not sure who gave who a break tonight. Whatever happened with Dorie while she was not in love with me, whatever she did or wanted to but didn’t do, I will have to let it go. Some things are best left private, Nomi always said, and Dorie, too, is operating under that credo.
What keeps people married? I wonder, my deflated but still happy penis providing, perhaps, the most elemental of answers. Still, there are other reasons. How had our parents managed, particularly once the “you know” cooled between them? It was a mystery to me. Most things are. I walk out to the end of that broken bridge, the concrete greasy with frost. A part of me wants to get back into the Nomad with Dorie and drive all night. Another part of me wants to drive off the bridge.
Could it be as maddeningly simple and complex as this: that love and anger will keep you beside each other, night after night, till the end of your days, provided you’re both willing to keep your mouths shut and to suffer your fate, which is to be alone in unaloneness? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem fair to either party, does it? But then, who said anything about life being fair to anybody?
The sky now is that yellowy gray of early morning. Back at the car I finish my beer and nestle it with a friendly clink against its brothers in the cooler. I hoist it into the wayback just as Dorie calls over the backseat, “C’mon, Em, your wife is cold and sleepy.” Reason enough, I suppose, to go back home.
20. The Balloon, the Roof, and the Kitchen Sink
WILLY-NILLY IS A PATTERN, TOO
Everyone is still alive.
There is more than a little relief in writing that sentence, though its truth, I know, is temporary. The closest we have come in our family—our mother falling down the stairs, our father’s heart attack, Wally Jr.’s accident that left him a cripple—has left us feeling like lightbulbs in a hailstorm. It is that last event, however—or the sequence of events that followed it—that sent our father around the bend.
Wally Jr. was in the shed, working on Mikey Spillsbeth’s exhaust system, the two of them under Mikey’s most recent taxi—a midnight blue Bonneville with a harvest gold right front quarter panel. Mikey never married, and his last date might well have been with Cinderella when both were still in high school a quarter century ago. At forty-two he was still the Augsbury Taxi, still ferrying kids around town, still helping his parents with their half-assed orchard, still suspected by parents of “being up to no good” with their kids, and still more than a little creepy, though nobody had ever heard of him doing anything to anybody. He was also still sweet on Cinderella, oddly enough, and part of us thought that would be an okay match and part of us wanted to laugh. Certainly he would do her no harm, and after Okie that in itself seemed like a recommendation.
But he never got the chance. The Bonneville had flunked the emissions test once already, and the thought of the taxi being grounded was too much for Mikey to bear. He practically begged Wally Jr. to help him get the exhaust system up to snuff. So it was that Wally Jr. was welding and Mikey was holding the pipe in place when the double-jack system holding the car up gave way and came crashing down on the two of them. Wally Jr., no stranger to the undersides of cars, heard the first creak of the jack slipping on the concrete floor, that deadly metallic scrape, and heaved himself out from under on the dolly.
There were only two problems: one was that a dolly, with its tiny little wheels, doesn’t move as fast horizontally as a three-quarter-ton Bonneville that’s dropping only nine inches does vertically; the other was that there was only one dolly. The Bonnie caught Wally Jr. right above the kneecaps and severed or smashed pretty much everything connecting his thighs to his calves.
It also landed on Mikey Spillsbeth’s chest and face.
You have no doubt heard of feats of superhuman strength performed by people in desperate circumstances. Car doors ripped open, heavy objects pushed aside, whole cars lifted. The adrenaline rush reigns supreme. Well, those people had leverage, and they didn’t have crushed skulls. Grunting in absolute agony, before the shock completely froze him, Wally Jr. managed to lift the chassis sitting on his legs just enough to see that Mikey’s face was a flattened mess. Then he screamed, dropped the Bonneville on himself, and passed out.
A neighbor
, Howard Zipfel, putting in a load of hay, heard the scream and drove over. Entering the shed, he encountered a curious sight: it appeared as though Wally Jr. had managed to triple the length of his legs. His kneecaps were just barely under the Bonneville, and coming out the other side were his feet. It looked funny for just a second, like a magician’s trick, and then Howard realized what had happened. Fortunately there was a block and tackle in the shed, and Howard was able to get the chain around the engine block and hoist the Bonnie up high enough to slide both bodies out. Looking at all the blood, he thought they were both dead.
He was half right.
We were deep into the family diaspora by then, scattered not so much geographically—though at various times you were as likely to find a Czabek in California or New York as in the Midwest—as spiritually. We did not seem to have much truck with each other. All those years of being told “We’re a family, a family, goddammit!” You hear that often enough, and after a while you say, “So what?”
But you also internalize the epithet. We were a family, for good or ill. It’s like that corny growing-up story everyone tells. How you spent your childhood beating up or picking on or getting beaten up by or getting picked on by your brother or sister (or both—in our family it was always two picking on one), but just let some outside offer come in to do the picking on or the beating up for you, and whoa, Nellie, Katy, bar the door, the Czabeks have closed ranks.
So it was when we got word that Wally Jr. was going to lose a leg, and that our parents were being sued by Angus and Marcie Spillsbeth. We gathered around Wally Jr., who told us he’d felt worse, his fingers absently playing with where his one knee had been, and we told him to “buck up,” and “hang in there, bro,” and other inanities. We felt like idiots.
“It coulda been worse,” Wally Jr. said. “What about that guy over in Neenah who got his back broke? You hear about that? He was messing around with somebody’s wife. She’s twenty-one, they’re estranged”—Wally Jr. pronounced this “ex-stranged”—“not boinking, if you get my drift, and she turns up pregnant. So the ex-stranged husband goes over to this guy’s house, finds him in the garage, and smashes him in the back with the blunt end of an ax. Neighbor says it sounded like pencils being crushed with a ball-peen hammer.”
That was meant to lighten us up.
Our father had as little clue how to deal with a invalid son as we did an invalid brother. What was he—what were we—going to say? “You know what they do with horses?” Our father’s clichés, almost never adequate to the situations for which they were deployed, were particularly inadequate now. Coming into Wally Jr.’s room, our father would mutter and shrug and try not to notice his namesake. He was preoccupied with something else entirely. He could not reason his way around getting sued. He had moved us out of Elmhurst years ago to be among real people, honest people, the kind of people who did not get divorced, who did not sue over slips on the ice, falls from the swing set, the kind of people whose kids did not get pregnant, whose kids did not use drugs, whose kids did not die or lose their legs. The kind of people who did not suffer from diabetic impotency, or blindness, whose wives did not hang out with lesbian couples who lived in the neighboring farmhouse, nor, for that matter, did lesbians live in the neighboring farmhouse. The kind of people whose sons did not drink excessively and whose daughters did not marry men who beat them or cheated on them or who abused their kids. In short, he wanted to live in a place where no one ever got hurt, or acted badly, let alone drowned, died, or had his legs crushed. Where a man could come off a long, frustrating week on the road and find everything exactly as he had left it, the people and the place he left behind preserved in amber, perfectly, absolutely unchanged. His position in the universe fixed, safe, secure. He believed in this, as much as he believed that a man was the head of his family and his wife was his devoted helper and his children were adoring and silent and conveniently semi-invisible, which would allow him to ignore them with a clean conscience. These mythical children: they never grew up, never had problems, and then they, too, were magically and safely adults, with perfect wives and husbands and children of their own. The Great Chain of Being, extending outward in every direction, holding us all firm and secure within its links. The Great Chain of Being, as he envisioned it, extended even into his professional life. He believed the company would honor him in his old age, bestowing upon him prestige and respect, and if he had an inkling that this was all a crock of shit, he gave no indication that he knew. You could almost forgive him his inability to understand that the world did not, would not, conform to the picture of it he had in his head. Oh, oh, that it did!
Where was this place, where people were unfailingly kind, and generous, and decent, and good? We had no idea. All around us, certainly, there were plenty of good, generous, decent people. But there were also louts, fools, knaves, idiots, jerks, dunderheads, and a large quantity of what our mother called “no-goodniks.” And then there were lots and lots and lots of people like us. People in the middle, muddling along, stuck in ruts, people blundering into one fool situation after another, buffeted about here and there, hither and yon, willy and nilly, and always, always, always hoping for the best. The win somes, lose somes. The galoots.
That we could be sued by such people—by people like us—our father could not fathom.
“People are different nowadays, Wally-Bear,” said our mother. “People will sue at the drop of a hat.” She was looking at the papers the family’s attorneys had mailed over.
Our father glanced through them as well, then went back to making a refill of his Bloody Mary in a tumbler the size of a 7-Eleven Big Gulp.
“They oughta be shot,” he said.
“Oh, Wally-Bear, don’t be saying that,” said our mother, as though he were joking, but you could tell by the adamant look on our father’s face and the speed at which our mother was trying to shush him with jocularity that he wasn’t.
“They don’t deserve to live,” said our father.
“Wally-Bear, shush now,” said our mother.
“Vermin. It’s like the goddamn Trilateral Commission and the fucking World Bank.”
“Wally, the children.”
We looked at each other. Children? Meg was twenty-five. And it wasn’t as though we hadn’t heard this before. Impotent rage had been our father’s strong suit for years. What he had a harder time with was understanding that the world was not a conspiracy. That everything did not fit together malevolently like some humongous, universe-size, patchwork quilt.
He brought up Ben Keillor, our neighbor just up the road. Ben Keillor had drunk himself silly years ago, and then, when he was dying of cancer, he took it into his head that he could grow, using different crops, the image of a bottle in a forty-acre field for a whiskey distillery. The distiller was going to pay Mr. Keillor a huge fee for this. They would take photographs and use it in their advertising. His own wife thought he was being taken for a ride, but Ben insisted, told anyone who was willing to listen (and quite a few people who weren’t), no, no, this was on the level. This was the real deal. They’d pay him to grow the bottle in timothy and wheat and corn and alfalfa, and they’d fly over and take a picture, and if they used it they were going to pay him a king’s ransom for his trouble.
“If?” asked the skeptics, his wife among them.
“They will,” Ben insisted.
“And what are they paying us if they don’t use it?” his wife, Matty, asked.
“They will,” Ben insisted. Matty didn’t argue. He was dying of lung cancer. His insides were all torn up from the chemo. She was going to let him win this one. The bigger losses, she told our mother, were coming down the road anyway, and they were driving a Mack truck. If her husband didn’t want to get out of the way, well, that was his business. He’d suffered enough. Better, she thought, if his dreams killed him rather than something else.
Our father, of course, had a great affinity for Ben’s harebrained scheme. Why not wheat and timothy, corn and alfalfa? He
liked the marriage, too, of old-time hand planting with modern technology: after everything was growing, the liquor company would check Ben’s work and take photographs from an airplane. Aerial photography and farming—our father loved that. Never mind that they weren’t connected. In his brain they were—as though the next great thing since crop dusting was farming from an airplane. He could see it coming. When he had a spare minute he’d go over and check out how Ben’s bottle was coming along. He’d stand there and make conversation about free enterprise and Niels Bohr and the green revolution and punctuate his speech with slugs from a glass mug filled with a Bloody Mary that he carried around with him as though the mug was growing out of his stomach.
Ben suffered him because our father also kept a hip flask in his overall pocket, and whenever Ben took a break our father would offer him a snort. If you gazed out the window at them, it almost looked as though our father was supervising him: the two men in the field, one on his knees, plucking and planting, the other standing over him, gesturing with what looked to be a beer mug flashing white in the sun. No doubt our father came to see himself in that role as well. Or if not in a supervisory capacity, then as a partner in the dream.
By God, they were going to make that bottle fly!
So when it all came to naught, when the distillery announced they “had decided to go in another direction” (they ended up doing it all on computers), and they sent a check for Ben Keillor’s time and trouble, a check for a ridiculously tiny amount compared to what they’d promised had they actually used the photographs they’d taken, our father was perhaps more crushed than Ben Keillor was.
Or maybe not crushed. Not despondent like Ben Keillor was. No, our father was outraged. The Great Chain of Conspiracy had raised its ugly head. Something evil was afoot.
