The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  Our mother joined us. “When he took his shirt off, all I could think of was that scene in The African Queen when Humphrey Bogart takes his shirt off and he’s covered with leeches and the look on his face when he knows he has to go back into the water.”

  “What did Nomi say?” Like Artu, we trusted her judgment about things in a way we didn’t quite trust our mother’s.

  “ ‘Good God.’ That’s what Nomi said. ‘Good God.’ Just like that. That’s just what she said. Oh, God, he does look pitiful, doesn’t he? At least Dinkwater-Adams makes an unguent.”

  Robert Aaron raised his opened palm. He was about to bring it down hard against our father’s back, but our mother caught his wrist in its descent. I do not think Robert Aaron was simply being mean. I think he also wanted to see what it would feel like to land his hand in the middle of all that jelly. I think we were all curious about that.

  It wasn’t that we were callous, either. After our mother said, “I think you better leave,” each of us went up to our father to tentatively touch him and tell him we hoped he was feeling better. “Don’t touch me,” our father said through gritted teeth as each of us came near.

  When the pool was about half full we reported this to our mother, who let us change into our swimsuits. “No diving,” she said. “It’s not deep enough. And wipe your feet before you climb into the pool.”

  Artu was right. It was freezing cold despite the air’s heat, and it didn’t get any better the longer we tried to stay in. We kept getting out, shivering, our thighs numb, and then feeling hot with the towel over us and climbing back in. We quickly forgot about the plastic washtub we were supposed to use as a footbath, and the pool surface was soon covered with a scum of dirt and grass clippings and the pool bottom was gritty with sand. It would be several days yet before any of us felt brave enough to dunk our heads under the water and explore the texture of the bottom, to run our fingers over the ribs of the walls, to feel the liner stretched tight by the force of all that water, to explore the wrinkles in the pool bottom as though we’d just discovered the Mariana Trench. We were quite a picture: five shivering kids huddled like refugees in scummy, grass-littered water.

  We were still like that when our father emerged from the house. The shadows had been lengthening for a while, and although it wasn’t evening yet, you could feel the tenor of the afternoon had changed. It was the time when games become possessed of a certain fury, born of the desperate knowledge that soon you would be called in for supper, and even if you had nothing at all going on, even if you were shivering in a half-filled pool, you still didn’t want to go inside.

  Where was our father going in his weakened condition? The hardware store? The Office? The liquor or the grocery store? It didn’t matter. We all started shouting, “Take me with you! Take me with you!” as though he were leaving a deserted island and whoever stayed behind was going to be marooned.

  Our father moved gingerly. His face looked like a Christmas ornament behind his green-lensed aviator sunglasses, his crew cut a bit of fringe on top. He was wearing a pair of khakis and a light blue sport shirt made of very thin cotton. I had gotten colder quicker than anybody and had already changed into a pair of blue sailor pants, with square sewn-on pockets front and back. I had a towel over my skinny shoulders, and I was still shivering, but my T-shirt was draped over a lawn chair, within easy reach.

  “You got shoes?”

  I nodded vigorously. They were right under the lawn chair.

  “Okay, you come along, Emcee. The rest of you—it’d take too long for you to get ready, sorry.” This was our father’s excuse when he didn’t want to wait for us. We knew the drill. He didn’t like going anywhere with more than one of us. I think Mom talked to him about this—the idea of making us feel sequentially special, of taking at least one of us each time he went out. Our turn would come, if we were patient and waited. Of course, it had the opposite effect, all of us vying for position, trying for it to be our turn, always keeping score. It was random, but we tried to make it a science.

  “I can be ready before Emcee even gets his shoes on,” shouted Robert Aaron.

  “I’m only taking one of you,” said our father. “You went last time.” He meant the York Liquor Store, which was in a little shopping center just down from our church. There was a dry cleaners, the York Liquor Store, a Kroger’s, a beauty parlor, a barbershop. He went to the York Liquor Store about once a week, usually for a six-pack or some scotch for Nomi.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We shall see what we shall see,” said our father.

  I sat forward in my seat. When you were the only one in the car with Dad, you got to sit up front. Place of honor. Usually only our mother sat there. If there were two or more of us, we rode in back, or even asked to sit in the wayback so we could see every place we’d just been.

  Our father was sitting forward in his seat, too. The orange burn cream—what our mother called an unguent—was staining the back of his shirt. Above the collar his neck was orange and bright lobster red. It looked like it was on fire from the inside out.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Like hell,” said my father. He winced. “Don’t tell your mother I said that.”

  I didn’t say anything. We kalumped over the tracks for the Chicago, Central and Pacific Railroad, and then we were in the old part of town. The houses here were bigger, mansionlike. It was always special crossing St. Charles Road; it was like you were visiting royalty. You knew you didn’t belong, but they let you in as long as you didn’t stay long, which you wouldn’t because you felt uncomfortable there anyway. Once we were downtown our father made a series of left turns, then a right back onto York. We were headed back the way we came.

  “Are we going home?”

  “Fat chance,” said our father, snorting and wincing at the same time.

  It turned out we were looking for a parking place. Our father said, “This must be the place.” We were in an alley. He winced when he pulled open a door. Everything that required movement seemed to cause him pain. I felt sorry for him. He had worked hard for us all day, and now here he was taking me on an outing to the magical world of downtown Elmhurst.

  Once we were inside the building, the sun, which had been so brittle and harsh I was squinting, diminished. Now it was dark, and the contrast between the harshness of the hot outside light and the cool, mute darkness inside made my eyes swim. It was like I had entered a cave. Then I could see light up ahead, some of it green, some of it yellow, some of it red. We were in a paneled corridor. Near the bathrooms, if my sense of smell was accurate. Then I could see the nameplates: MEN, WOMEN. It had always scared me, what went on inside the women’s bathroom. It must be something mysterious, or why would they need a separate bathroom in the first place?

  The corridor was dark, and something crunched under my feet. I felt like I was stepping on beetles, and I tried to walk carefully, but the floor was strewn with them. The corridor opened into a big room. There seemed to be four or five round tables, each surrounded by barrel-backed chairs. Everything looked heavy. Along the far wall was a long, long counter, and behind it an equally long mirror, and a whole wall softly glittery with bottles arranged on shelves that went up higher than you could reach. On the top shelf was an old radio flanked with beer cans, and above that a moose head sporting a Cubs cap. I couldn’t not think of Rocky and Bullwinkle. A neon sign hung in the window, only it faced out so you couldn’t read it. Men were spaced erratically down the length of the counter; two sat together at one end, just after it curved back to the wall. I couldn’t see them very clearly—the window they sat against washed out their features. My father had us sit on stools right at the curve. His body blocked the sun, but when I leaned forward I caught it full in the face. A beefy man in a striped shirt and a crew cut cropped so tight his head looked like a bowling ball with stubble—which is to say he looked like my father—was leaning against the back shelving, where all the bottles were.

  “What’ll
it be, Walter?”

  This man knew my father! We must be at the Office! So this was it—where my father got all his work done, where he went to be alone, to think, to get away from Nomi’s serenity and the pandemonium caused by us kids.

  My father boosted me up on the chrome-legged stool, then hunkered down beside me. “We’re here to unwind,” he told me. “Don’t tell your mother. She’d kill me.” Then he lifted up his head and said to the man in the striped shirt, “The usual, Bobo.”

  “Your kid wants a boilermaker?”

  My father grinned. “Shut up and pour. And a soft drink for the little guy.”

  “You know what a boilermaker is, kid?” He poured something amber-colored into what looked like eggcups, then drew a draft for my father. He put those side by side in front of my father. Then he made the same thing for the two guys sitting just down the bar. Unlike my father, they dropped the little glass inside the big fluted one and drank it down like that. “That’s a boilermaker, kid, only your dad can’t seem to get the hang of it.”

  “That’s because you don’t stock tomato juice.”

  “That’s because nobody in here drinks Bloody effing Marys.” Only he didn’t say “effing.” He said the F-word.

  “Hey, my kid.”

  “What, he’s got virgin ears?” said Bobo. “Sorry, kid. The way your old man talks in here, I figured you already got an earful. Forget what I said. It don’t mean nuthin’.”

  Bobo had a big gut and he looked pretty serious, but the gut was hard as a rock and you could tell he liked to look serious so he wasn’t grinning all the time. He liked to move the ashtrays around, too, especially when somebody was about to break the ash off his cigarette, then he’d make a big deal of wiping down the countertop and loudly complain about what slobs we all were. He also liked to turn the bottles every so often so their labels all faced front. He made me a Coke decorated with a swizzle stick and a maraschino cherry—what I knew as a Shirley Temple—and whenever he saw my glass was low he refilled it. He set a wooden bowlful of peanuts in front of me. “Go ahead, kid,” he said, “it helps polish the floor.” I looked at the floor. It was covered in peanut shells.

  “The oils,” my father said. “That Bobo, he’s a smart man for a dummy.”

  “Takes one to know one,” said Bobo.

  “Hey, Bobo, you lettin’ us die of thirst here or what?” said one of the other men.

  Bobo said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s a regular frickin’ Sahara in here is what it is. I want people to find your bones bleaching in the sun come spring.” But he was already making their drinks. He had a glass of Coke with a swizzle stick in it, too, which he sipped from while working a toothpick around in his mouth. He liked to wait until people insulted him before he poured them another drink. He kept busy wiping down the bar. He seemed to like everything just so, which was funny, given how the floor was littered with peanut shells. I was fascinated by that. I suppose it helped that nobody paid me much attention except Bobo, who from time to time offered me maraschino cherries straight from the jar. “I gotta get rid of these somehow,” he said, like he wasn’t doing me a favor.

  My father was distracted by his boilermakers. Or maybe I should say he was intent on them. He would throw back the shot and say Ah! like my brothers and I did after we guzzled a full glass of milk in one long, deep draft. Then he’d sip his beer and say Ah! again. He and the other two men at the bar and Bobo got to talking about the Cubs—what a rotten team they were, but if they ever got some pitching, the men agreed, they could do some damage. Then they started talking about what branch of the service they’d been in, and where they’d served, and what a swell group of guys they’d served with, except the sonsabitches, and the old man, he was okay, too, except for when he was bustin’ their balls, and it went on like that for quite a while.

  When his beer got low, my father made little dancing motions with his index finger, gesturing to both glasses simultaneously, and Bobo would fill ’er up. That was what my dad said to Bobo, “Fill ’er up, Bobo, fill ’er up.” Like we were at the Sinclair station and my dad was speaking to the attendant. He did this for the other guys a couple of times, too, the little finger dance—he even did it for Bobo—and they drank to his health.

  “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead,” said my father.

  I looked out the window at the people going past. Men in hats, women in skirts with boxy yokes, their arms bare, kids on bicycles. I made out what the sign in the window said despite the electrician’s tape or black paint or whatever it was. Pabst, it said. I looked at the moose, who seemed to regard everything under its massive chin with benign amusement.

  My father turned to me. “These are men,” my father said. “These are men. Never forget that.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but there was something about my father’s intentness that scared me. I asked to be excused. By this time I’d drunk three or four sodas and my father had had four or five boilermakers. I don’t know about him, but I was really feeling it. My father excused me, and I gingerly made my way across the peanut shells on the floor, not sure if I was allowed to stomp on them or not. In the bathroom everything felt better. The urinal was a wall model shaped and sized like a bathtub, and it gave me great pleasure to relieve myself into its curved porcelain immenseness. I wrote my name, broke up cigarette butts in the bottom, chased flakes of the sanitary cake around the drain. It even came to me what my father was talking about at the bar. All these men had served in the military. That was what made them men. Although I was also pretty sure he was alluding to some other quality as well, something intangible that he could just feel about them, but for the life of me I didn’t know what that was. Maybe I would have to join the military to find out. I decided not to let it bother me. My father said a lot of things I couldn’t figure out.

  Peeing by myself in a public toilet was a strangely liberating experience. Maybe this was what my father meant about being men—a steady hand, a sure aim. I shuddered, shook myself, zipped. I washed my hands and dried them on the revolving towel, yanking down hard on the edges to leave a dry spot for the next guy, the way my father always did. Then I left, empty of bladder but very full of myself, ready to take on the world. Back at the bar I opened peanut shells and discarded the husks with gay abandon.

  The men were talking now about where they lived and the new highway spur and what it was like getting around Chicago these days. “Me, I wouldn’t go in if you paid me,” said one. “I have to,” said my father. “I got a lot of clients there.” “Condolences,” said the other man.

  “I hear you,” said my father. I knew what was coming next so I started to tune out again. Our father said the number-one rule of selling was Don’t piss people off. So whatever the other men said, our father would answer with one of his thousands of one-size-fits-all comments: “You can’t keep a good man down.” Or “There she goes,” or “You’re up the creek without a paddle.” “Sure as shootin’,” he’d say. “You betcha. You can’t squeeze blood out of turnip.” I wondered sometimes what it would be like to have an actual conversation with him. I wondered sometimes what it was he was thinking, what he was feeling. When he got started like this you never knew.

  My eyes started looking for something to latch on to again. The moose was interesting, but its range of expression was limited. Then I saw something behind Bobo that I hadn’t noticed before. It was an advertisement for Hamm’s beer—the Hamm’s bear cartoon figure was on the left side of the sign. In red script letters at the bottom was the Hamm’s beer slogan: FROM THE LAND OF SKY-BLUE WATERS. . . . That made me hear the theme song itself, a drum going and a kind of Indian chant: “From the land of sky-ey blue-ue wa-a-ters . . . comes the beer refreshing . . . Hamm’s the beer refreshing . . . Hamm’s the beer refreshing . . . H-a-a-m-m-m-s-s-s-s . . .” the drums hitting really hard on the word Hamm’s. But it was the sign itself that held me. It was a lake scene, only it seemed to be on a scroll, and as you watched, t
he sky blue water and sky blue sky and the evergreen trees slowly scrolled out of the frame, the sun twinkling, twinkling on water and rocks alike until you came to a couple of canoes pulled up onshore, and then you panned down the stream—it was a stream now, all pebbly with rocks—and the lake started over again. A circular universe, amazing. I got lost in it, until the front door jingled and heads turned, including mine.

  It was a woman, and from the reaction of the men in the bar, this was unusual. It was hard to make her out at first, and we squinted as though we had resided too long in the dark and she was made of the light from outside, had brought it in with her. She was wearing a broad-brimmed straw sun hat and had on Jackie Kennedy sunglasses and a cotton sundress with a rose pattern—big roses—scattered all over it. She seemed a little heavyset, but she carried it well. For some reason I expected her to be wearing gloves, white kid gloves up to her elbows, but she wasn’t. She sat on the opposite side of my father, between him and the two men closest to us.

  “Can a body get a drink?” she asked Bobo, and Bobo rolled the toothpick around in his mouth. “A body like that can, sure,” said Bobo.

  “Sure as shootin’,” said my father. I think he just wanted to say something to be polite. Besides not disagreeing with people, our father often said meaningless things just to break the ice, but this woman seemed to regard my father seriously.

  “Well,” she said, lighting a cigarette, “aren’t you the eager beaver.”

  I thought she was talking to me. I was often described in school as “an eager beaver,” so it seemed natural for her to call me that, but seeing as how I was sitting on the opposite side of my father, and he was massive, it seemed rather amazing that she had noticed me at all.