The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  Maybe it didn’t matter if he knew where or who he was. Maybe he evaporated, became a traveling factotum of his company, and therefore became something larger and more peaceful than he was with us. Maybe in his being on the road all those years, his strongest connection between himself and his steering wheel, the separation between wife and family became complete, and returning to what he nominally called home was a burden.

  Odysseus spent all those years trying to get back to Penelope, but when he does, his story’s over. While he’s on the road, his story is still being written. It’s still possible for anything to happen. We have no account of Odysseus in later life. Maybe he hated it. Maybe at home, steering cattle through a field with his sword beat into a plowshare, he longed for the sea the way he longed for home when he was away from it. That could certainly be said of our father. He loved the idea of home, of family, but he was uncomfortable in our presence.

  So maybe the years of our father’s travel became his cocoon against us, against the world. In the world but shielded from it. His car was his shield, bright and blazing in the sun. He identified with it, just as he identified with the company he worked for. It was a company car and he was a company man, and though we knew he loved us, his loyalty lay elsewhere. We failed to recognize that. When he came home, we were the unexpected, the unscheduled, the unplanned moil and roil of everyday life, most of which had been going on without him. His routine protected him from that. No wonder he took such care getting ready, packing his sample cases and testing kits, checking his weekly planner, selecting his shirts, his ties. He was packing for a war. In the back of the station wagon he kept two coolers, one for beer (and fish on ice) and one for foodstuffs—cheese, sausages, sardines, sliced ham and polenta, a jar of pickles, a loaf of bread, some Miracle Whip and mustard. Also riding in the back were five-gallon pails of sample product, plastic sample bags, sample jars, a sample briefcase, and a sample kit that he’d outfitted as a traveling bar with bottles of gin, vermouth, bourbon, and brandy.

  This was our father, loaded for bear, off to the war.

  His days had a routine to them, too. Drive all night, check into a motel, spruce up, be at the mill in time for midmorning meetings he’d set up two or even three weeks previously. If he was cold-calling, sweet-talk the secretary, meet the floor manager, the shop supervisor, try to set up a lunch. If it was an established account, or he was running a trial, be ready to ask about the kids, the wife, the fishing, the hunting, the high school football team, the Packers. Be ready with the mimeographed jokes, either to give or to receive. Have the belly laugh on hand. Have the patter down, then set up your trial, take your samples, do lunch, run the trial, take more samples, meet with the in-house biologists, the millwright, the shift foreman. Do meetings, conferences, presentations, dinner. Take the manager fishing. Be ready, all the time: patter, chatter, laugh. Big laugh. Booming laugh. Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahaha. Commiserate. Sonsabitches. Congratulate. Attaboy. Be quick with the quip, the smile, the grin, the nod, the wink, the tab. Always, always get the tab. After getting back to the motel, call Susan. The kids are already in bed. This is the check-in phone call. The “I miss you” phone call. Go over the day, stare at the light switch while you hear about the kids’ and Susan’s day. Feel the alcohol curling in behind your eyes. Squeeze them shut, feel the room gently sway. This is your life, your life. After you wish Susan a good night, after you tell her you love her, after you hang up, you make yourself a stiff one and settle in to do expense and lab reports. But the receipts for gas, lunch, and dinner can wait until you get home; you push those into an ever-growing pile. You’ll get Emcee and Ike and Wally Jr. to write in the amounts on the blank receipts. You keep track—you know what you spend—and if the booze finds its way onto the dinner bill, well, that’s part of the cost of doing business. You set up your field test in the petri dishes, measuring out the samples, putting them in the traveling incubator with the timer that won’t bing when it’s ready. You make another Rob Roy to help yourself concentrate. Measure, label, sip. You set the timer, wait for the results so you can do a count of how effective this new biocide is.

  The weeks pass like this—on the road, selling, meeting, making presentations, drinking, schmoozing, taking a guy out after dinner to catch a few perch or walleye, writing up reports, doing lab work on the weekends and evenings, selling and schmoozing, tossing back shots and beers, selling and schmoozing, the drive from town to town, mill to mill. Paper mostly, a few paint plants—specialty chemicals, forest products division, Dinkwater Chemical, Dinkwater Park, New Jersey. Yeah, New Jersey. Naw, they got no paper mills in Jersey. But they got chemicals, they got plants, they got corn-fed midwestern scientists who know what they’re doing. That’s what you need—guys who know what they’re doing. The guys on the floor at these mills—they know what they’re doing. You can work with them. It’s their managers and supervisors that you have to put on a different kind of act for. They’re the ones you don’t get sleep over, making that extra Rob Roy to see you through, your eyes swimming in their bloody sockets. You close your eyes, feel them buzzing in their sockets, your brain seeping into the back of your skull, yet there’s this pressure, right above your eyebrows. Five minutes’ rest will do you a world of good. Five minutes’ peace from staring at the petri dishes with their little blotches of mold you have to count and measure—all that jazz. All that crap. Close your eyes, feel your brain gently buzzing, feel the electric light’s glow as a sound, a fluttering by your earlobes, feel the changes in the room’s temperature and air pressure through the soft fleshy lobes hanging beneath the ear cartilage. You’re a bat, scooping up insects in the night outside just before they fly into the bug zapper. They smell something terrible when they hit the zapper’s wires. It’s as though their wings are made of petroleum. You dip, you swoop, you’re catching them with your open mouth, sensing where they are through the minutest of wing flutters. You swoop out of the night. Feed me, feed me. Your brain is a single phrase of need, and your wife, your children are a long ways away.

  Our father wakens to the smell of burning plastic. His trial is ruined, a melted blob. The smoke is terrible; the incubator stinks of burning bugs. He pulls it out; the petri dishes look like something that escaped from a Dalí painting. He has two choices: write up the numbers as he thinks they might have come out given what he knows about the products, and hope they don’t ask to see the petri dishes, or run the petri dishes again and make arrangements to come back later in the week with the results. The problem is he’s in Mosinee right now, in the middle of the state, and his next trial is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday in Ashland, way up north. He can do it, but it means he’ll be getting home Friday night close to midnight, and he’ll be surly by the time he arrives, maybe on the downside of a buzz, and to counteract that he’ll stop in Banana’s or the Dog Out for a pick-me-up, lose track of time, and come home at 2:00 A.M. thoroughly shitfaced. And Susan will be waiting, furious and fuming. Then the kids will be up early, jumping on him, the little ones, anyway, and his head will be pounding, throbbing most likely, and Jesus Christ if it won’t be like that all through Saturday and into Sunday, and maybe he’ll get five minutes’ peace and maybe not, and he can’t wait already for next Sunday afternoon and evening to roll around, when he disappears from the family to get ready for the next week’s trip, and here it is only early Tuesday morning of the previous week.

  We had long suspected that for our father the motels and the bars were familiar, comforting places, with delights both expected and unexpected. He knew what he would find there, and anything out of the ordinary would be a pleasant diversion—the house special, a fellow Navy man at the bar, somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody. He knew how to act in places like these, whereas home was for him a frequently visited foreign country, a place where he knew how to get around but the locals seemed to be speaking another language, and their customs were so, well, foreign. Better to drink in your room than to have much to do with them.

 
Our mother, at times, felt the same way. We had broken her down. The strain of raising us virtually alone was too much for her. There was the financial strain—with so many kids, even if our father had been doing well it would have been tight—but there were the emotional costs, too. What is it like being alone all week, making all the decisions, and then having this man you love, this stranger, come home every weekend to upset the applecart with his flamboyance, his effervescing ideas, his schemes, his drinking? It probably would have been all right if our father had stayed on his high-flying clouds. She could have reasoned, “This is who I married. I knew what he was like from when he first wanted us to get married on TV.” But could she keep saying it as our father’s great ideas got shot down one by one and he sank into a different kind of abyss? As he kept changing companies, looking for that elusive thing he always wanted: respect.

  It was not forthcoming. He had left Dinkwater-Adams because they did not value him enough to give him what he wanted, what they eventually gave to somebody else: territory in Wisconsin where he could buy a farm. At a church social a few years after moving, he ran into a Dinkwater-Adams rep from the northern suburbs of Chicago who now had the territory our father had coveted. He lived in the next town over from us. He had gotten the northeastern Wisconsin territory three months after our father quit the company.

  It was the same way with Dinkwater Chemical. And Dewless Chemical and Drydell Chemical—all headquartered in Dinkwater Park, New Jersey. Our father was a company man, but he was not corporate. He loved the company; the company suffered him. Suffered him not because he didn’t get results—our father could sell fire extinguishers to Satan—but because he didn’t look the part. Or he looked the part from a previous decade. No tailored suit, no razor-cut hairstyle. Our father was fat, he was jowly, he wore Sansabelt trousers and clip-on ties. When we were little and wore clip-ons, this made perfect sense to us. Later they were an embarrassment. They were necessary for him, however, because when you are leaning over two living-room-size steel drums spinning at five thousand feet per second, if a tie end flops onto a drum’s surface, you will be yanked into the machine and crushed into pulp in a matter of nanoseconds. With a clip-on tie all you lost was the tie. Over the years our father lost two ties that way, and he’d once seen a man disappear into the rollers, his viscera spurting from him like you’d squeezed a foil packet of ketchup. Even our television-sapped minds could understand that would not be as comical as in the cartoons, where animals were regularly pancaked under steamrollers and walked stiffly and two-dimensionally back to wherever they went to hatch their next scheme.

  Still, it looked cheesy. When bolo ties briefly became the fashion, our father went from clip-ons to bolos and never went back. How bolos, with their bullet-weighted dangling strings, were an improvement on safety over the clip-ons was never explained to us. Perhaps he simply loved the look so much he was willing to risk the danger. Or maybe they stayed tucked inside his shirt better. Sartorially, he was clearly siding with the guys on the factory floor, and with the shift managers, most of whom started on the floor and who could make or break his trials for him, but it certainly wasn’t the look the Dinks were promoting back in New York and Jersey.

  Our father didn’t have the right sound for the Dinks, either. He was loud. He laughed easily and often in a voice that could be heard from the shop floor to the shift manager’s office. He did not like dirty jokes, and didn’t tell them, but he could burst out with that crescendoing, booming laugh when they were told by someone else.

  Our father played well in the Midwest. He was as at ease and as welcome on the shop floor as he was in the lab as he was in the manager’s office. The managers—floor bosses booted upstairs along about the time their kids had college tuitions due—appreciated him. Our father knew where they liked to eat, and while he was treating them to ribs and beer he asked about their kids, groused with them about OSHA and Indian fishing rights, expressing his political views so that it always seemed he was agreeing with whatever was being said, whether the talk went conservative or libertarian or, occasionally, populist Democrat (but never, never liberal, not even in the early seventies, when conservatism momentarily dipped in popularity). He was one of them, as if on a given Monday they had woken up and decided to go into sales. He even looked like them, a collection of walking bulges, his shirts and pants sagging off him with all the accrued weight of what he’d stuffed into them, including a wallet so fat with business cards and membership cards and oil company credit cards that he had to keep it closed with a rubber band.

  It irked the Dinks, I’m sure, that they were being represented by a lout in a bolo tie, and that they were paying him commissions he was sure to blow on fishing tackle and more of those goddamn string ties.

  So they gave him shit territories, got him on straight commission while he was building up a territory, then when he had built it up, they cut the commission rate or raised his quota. Eventually they’d take that territory away from him, give it to some young buck straight out of college, and that kid would run it into the ground but look good doing it. So good they’d end up regional sales manager—the guy our father reported to. Our father hated those kids. They couldn’t talk jackshit to the guys on the floor, and when it came to selling didn’t know their asses from holes in the ground. Meanwhile our father would be given a new shit territory—probably a territory he’d built up earlier, had stripped from him just as it was starting to pay off, then run into the ground by some goon just out of college, and the cycle would repeat itself. It went on like this for years. When our father couldn’t stand it any longer he’d quit, go to some other company—usually one that was shaky in its products and/or its distribution—and stay with them for a year, eighteen months, until either the company folded or our father’s old boss called, worried about his hemorrhaging territory, and lured our father back with promises of base salary and 12 percent commissions he could only half-deliver on.

  It was painful watching this happen. Even when we were too young to understand much, we understood our father was getting a raw deal, and it got worse as he got older, when the Dinks would really rather not have him around to pay him his retirement.

  I could see the suits’ side of things, too—how could they stomach this paradox? This fat, loud galoot who—damn it—knew how to sell things. It just wasn’t right. Imagine, those barbarians taking a shine to this barbarian.

  What our father most wanted, as his career wound down and he tired of the nine-hundred-mile, the eighteen-hundred-mile business trips, was to put an end to the grind of it. To keep working, but as an in-house consultant. To be recognized for his many years of loyal service and superior sales figures and to be honored—enshrined, really—in what might be considered the Peddlers’ Hall of Fame. A consultancy, to teach the young bucks right out of college how to recognize their asses from holes in the ground. To ditch the suit and tie once they checked into their motel—save that for meetings with the Dinks in New Jersey—and to put on a sport shirt and some steel-toed wingtips with comfortable soles. Those three-hundred-dollar Italian numbers that look exquisite in Chicago don’t look so hot when they’ve been soaking in debarking brine for a few hours and have dried wood pulp sticking to them. He’d instruct them to get a fishing license and to keep extra rods and reels in the trunk—or better, strung on special carriers inside the station wagon because you never know who wants to go fishing on his lunch break or after work. He’d tell them to lose the sedan and get a station wagon (or later, a truck or minivan or SUV), because even if you don’t have family, it’s smart to look like you do, and you need the space for hauling. To lose your East Coast affiliations for sports teams and start getting familiar with the rosters of the Packers, the Vikings, the Bears, and the Lions. And to be prepared to accept some good-natured ribbing on your lack of knowledge of the same.

  He’d tell these guys where to stay, what to pack, who to talk to before you talked to “the guy in charge,” and who to talk to after. He’d introduc
e them to the guys on the floor, give them anniversary dates and the wives’ names and the kids’ birth dates and years in school. What these guys liked to drink and where they liked to eat. He’d explain about CB lingo, how to be the back door for a lead semi, and why it was better to be the back door than the front door, or even to be sandwiched in between, and how it might be wise not to have a handle taken from Shakespeare. Pinhead and Gravy Train were good CB handles. Tybalt and Mercutio were not.

  He would explain why the biggest highways were not necessarily the fastest, why 29 was a better bet than the wider, more heavily trafficked 10, with its deer herds that seemed to live by the highway, waiting for cars to leap out at. He would tell them to visit Hayward’s Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, Rhinelander’s Hodag Festival, Portage’s Buffalo Chip Throwing Contest. They should enter wagers on ice-out contests, take up deer hunting (easier with a shotgun than with an auto), go to church festivals and tractor pulls. It went without saying to join the Legion if they were eligible, the Kiwanis, the Elk, the Moose.

  “This is important,” he would tell them. “Pay attention, you might learn something.”

  He would explain how being on the road was all about attitude. Mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter. (Ba-dum-dum.) Attitude. How to handle the dark nights of the soul. How to roll into a town where you know absolutely nobody and make the town sing your tune.

  The miles, the miles, how to fill the empty miles. All that green going past—woods, fields, marshes. White birch, yellow corn. The clover purple in its blooming. Blue lakes, blue skies. White clouds you notice only once in a while. It’s a static picture you’re driving into, and then it changes. Different formations, different clouds, not fields you’re rushing past but trees. After a while you’re not moving, the scenery is. The land itself is hurtling past. Astonishment on the faces of the villagers checking their mail once they realize the ground beneath their feet is moving at sixty-seven mph, with them on it, and the car zooming past is actually standing still. You tell the neophyte sales rep about the lazy streaker in Chicago who stood at a rail crossing minus his clothes and flashed the commuter trains that way. “It’s all relative,” says our father. He won’t wait before adding, “Get it? Einstein? The theory of relativity?” The new kids roll their eyes. No doubt to them our father’s routines sound old even if they are hearing them for the first time.