The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  I had never figured this out, how our father could put all his trust in a company like Dinkwater-Adams or Drydell Chemical or the Dinkwater Corporation, and then, when the company turned its back on him, he blamed not the company for doing what companies did but something larger, darker, more evil, something “out there” that had sucked the company in to do its bidding. A distillery hadn’t exercised its kill-fee clause; rather, the Trilateral Commission, the World Bank, the one-world movement, and nameless enemies of capitalism—including but certainly not limited to Communism and the liberal media—had banded together to put the kibosh on Ben Keillor’s whiskey bottle grown in a field. The last great dream of Ben Keillor done in by a conspiracy. The reach—the insidious reach—of that conspiracy! It was something.

  So we were sued by Angus and Marcie Spillsbeth, neighbors if not friends, and our parents, who’d almost paid off the farm, had to start from scratch again on their mortgage. The settlement was in the neighborhood of the low six figures, and the insurance on the shed covered only part of it. The settlement would have been worse except Wally Jr. in a wheelchair, with his little stub legs, made a hell of a witness during the pretrial depositions. Credit Wally Jr. When his attorney said he could get the whole farm if he sued our parents, too—all that suffering and mental anguish stuff—Wally Jr. said, “Fuck you, we’re family! We’re goddamn Czabeks!” and pushed his wheelchair out of the office. The attorney for the plaintiffs, perhaps realizing that in a still nominally rural area—where accidents happened and were taken as a matter of course—he’d have a hard time rounding up a jury sympathetic to the idea of willful or intentional malfeasance, offered to settle. Angus and Marcie, despite their lawsuit and the dollar signs dancing in their eyes after years of eking out a living with the orchard, probably didn’t have the heart for a long trial, either. Anyway, it was quietly over, and people settled in for their grieving.

  Except for our father. Although the settlement was not crushingly onerous, it was plenty bad, and that he’d been sued at all set something off in him. After the settlement our father went a little squirrelly. This went beyond his old assertion that Walter Cronkite was a Communist. Now they all were: Rather, Chung, Morley Safer, Andy Rooney—that whole 60 Minutes crowd—Peter Jennings, sure, him too—he spent all that time overseas, didn’t he? In London!

  “Dad, he’s Canadian. He was a London correspondent.”

  “What’s he doing on an American broadcast then?”

  This culminated in our father wanting to blow up the Smithsonian. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings that ended World War II, the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibition that would look at the event from various perspectives. In addition to tracing the history of the bomb, and how the four-and-a-half-ton Little Boy came to be loaded into the belly of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay (and a similar bomb, code-named Big Boy, came to be loaded in the belly of the bomber Bock’s Car), the exhibition also would examine the aftermath of that bombing run: how the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki essentially ceased to exist, 115,000 people blown into oblivion outright, another 100,000 dying later of burns and radiation sickness. Veterans’ groups, particularly the American Legion, were incensed that the focus wasn’t entirely on how the bombs ended the war and saved American lives. One of those lives being our father’s. The Smithsonian tried to explain they wanted the exhibition to look at the larger picture, from a less nationalistic perspective, but the firestorm of criticism was tremendous.

  Eventually the Smithsonian scrapped the idea for an exhibition altogether. That didn’t sit well with a lot of people, either. Nothing to commemorate the bombs that ended the war? What were they thinking?

  What our father was thinking was that the Smithsonian should get a taste of its own medicine.

  “Somebody should drop a Little Man or a Fat Boy on the fucking Smithsonian,” said our father. He got his “I have a dream” gleam. “I . . . I should drop a bomb on the fucking Smithsonian. I should. Yeah, I should, goddammit.”

  “Wally-Bear, stop being ridiculous,” said our mother.

  “Ridiculous? Who’s being ridiculous? I was one of the Americans whose lives were saved by those bombs. Goddamn Communists.”

  “Wally, you’re being silly.”

  “Silly? Is it silly to love your country? Is it silly to lay down your life for your country? Is it silly to be proud of your country? I’ll show you silly. I’ll blow up the fucking Smithsonian. That’ll be silly. That’ll be real silly. People will be laughing their asses off over that one.”

  We shouldn’t have been worried, but we were. Our father was adamant. Bombing the Smithsonian—it was a patriotic act. Reagan was right. Government was the problem. The Smithsonian’s planned exhibition only confirmed his low opinion of any institution run by the federal government. He’d visited the Smithsonian once when he was near Washington for his ship’s reunion. They were doing Gettysburg and all the usual D.C. sights. What he came away with from the Smithsonian was how ill-kempt and dirty it was. Nobody wiped the dust off anything. Didn’t these people have any pride? Evidently not. So between the dust and the Enola Gay exhibition, our father wanted to blow up the Smithsonian.

  He wanted to shoot the homeless, too, and nuke Baghdad, but the homeless were scattered all over the country, and he had no control over our country’s military arsenal. But the Smithsonian—that was another story. Of late our father had been expressing admiration for the militias. We were worried. Was this where his impotent rage would find its outlet?

  “Concord and Lexington,” our father said. “Who was it fired ‘the shot heard round the world’? A militiaman, that’s who. Maybe they don’t tell you that anymore in your history books, but I know what I know. The country’s going to hell in a handbasket. Maybe it’s time for a different kind of shot.”

  “Wally”—our mother was staring right at our father, her eyes blazing green fire—“you will do no such thing.”

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

  Though he stammered and hawed in front of our mother, when she wasn’t around, he muttered about it constantly. He could bluster his way through a whole afternoon of talk and television, clicking from American Sportsman to Fishing with Charlie Giles while detailing exactly how a small group of trained men could infiltrate the outer defenses of the Smithsonian—the perimeter, our father called it—and once inside, slip undetected (the preferred method of handling a covert operation) or, if necessary, blast their way to the building’s very center and there leave enough high explosives—nitroglycerin, plastique, and dynamite—to take out the diseased cultural heart and sick soul of a morally drifting America. We tried to picture it. Six, seven retirees, with Humpty Dumpty–like bodies, their bellies straining and then overwhelming the waistbands of their Sansabelt trousers. There they go, sidling down the hallways of the Smithsonian. Their noses rounds of cauliflower, their cheeks broken masses of river veins. Balding, golf-shirted, bearing Uzis and sensible shoes. Their watches can give you the correct time in three time zones, and walkie-talkies dangle off rings on their fishing vests. They are registered members of the AARP, the American Legion, the Loyal Order of Moose, the Shriners, the National Rifle Association, AAA, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. They are grandfathers, Rotarians, members of the retired reserves.

  They are also terrorists.

  In those pre–9/11 days, blowing things up and being an antigovernment terrorist were still things to which our father (and talk radio) could aspire. Not anymore, of course. But for a while there, in the mid-Reagan years, magazines of dubious distinction began appearing in our parents’ living room, mixed in with the mountain of paper on the dining room table, the stacks by their armchairs. We had always gotten catalogs of hunting equipment, camouflage, camping equipment—the whole panoply of outdoor living—which our father perused from his armchair. But now they were getting magazines touting the dangers of Vatican II, the need for a return to the Latin Mass, magazines warning of the Second Comi
ng, magazines and flyers explaining how the economy would collapse and why the coming social, economic, and political apocalypse would be good for prepared, red-blooded, God-fearing Americans.

  Our father, of course, would never call himself a radical. He was a patriot, a reservist, an American. And Americans knew their duty. Our father’s duty was to make phone calls. All those years in the Legion and the Navy Reserves and the Coast Guard Auxiliary—he had an address book thick with names and numbers. Late into the evening he would make phone calls. Cold calling. The old pitch. The cajole. He found it harder selling an idea, though, than he ever did trying to move pharmaceuticals or chemicals or cookies. Even among the disgruntled, he found few takers. Hearts and minds—it was a tough sell. He would explain, he would nod, he would become impassioned, get irate. Shout, scream, plead.

  “My country, right or wrong!” our father shouted into the phone most evenings.

  You could almost hear the person on the other end saying, “Exactly, Wally. That’s why blowing up the Smithsonian isn’t such a hot idea.”

  “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” countered our father.

  “Blowing up the Smithsonian is,” said his friends and acquaintances. “In fact, Wally, it’s a crime. You can’t go around blowing up buildings, Wally. People are liable to get hurt.”

  “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” said our father.

  “People aren’t eggs, Wally. Would you listen to yourself?”

  “All that’s needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” said our father.

  “The evil, Wally, is thinking the Smithsonian is the enemy. Cut ’em some slack. The Smithsonian is an American institution. They made a mistake.”

  “We have to blow up the Smithsonian in order to save it,” said our father.

  But his entreaties fell on deaf ears. In the end, not one of his friends agreed to join him, and quite a few suggested he get counseling or seek medical attention.

  Our father remained a conspiracy of one.

  In his defense, he didn’t try to contact the people most likely to take up his cause, people who might actually have been persuaded to take up his harebrained scheme as their own. He made no calls to the Freemen, to the Michigan Militia, to the Posse Comitatus, to the militias in Oregon and Montana and Colorado.

  “Those people are nuts,” our father declared.

  “As opposed to what?” asked our mother.

  “Don’t start,” said our father.

  “Don’t you start,” said our mother. She had gotten more feisty since he’d retired, less likely to say, “Wally . . .” in that pleading voice of hers that let us all know she was going to lament yet tolerate his excesses. No more. Now she put the hammer down, snorted at his wilder ideas, and when he got started with one of us present, would roll her eyes and say, “Wally, don’t. Just don’t.”

  Rebuffed by wife and friends, our father was reduced to muttering that it wasn’t all that great a museum. He’d been to the Smithsonian. Its exhibits were dusty.

  Is this how families end? Not with a bang but a mutter? Our father chafed against the out-of-court settlement. He chafed against the houses going in all around us. He chafed against the kinds of people who were filling those houses, people who drove their snowmobiles and ATVs willy-nilly across our fields and through our woods. People who picked our asparagus and wildflowers and hunted our land without asking. The privilege of trespass drove him crazy. And his oldest daughter had gone on welfare, had worked for Mel while still getting government checks, which made her a welfare cheat, and now her kids—his grandkids!—were having kids. Half the kids at the school didn’t know who their father was, or had some guy who was their mom’s boyfriend serving as their father, or were getting raised by their grandparents, which was what our mother was doing with most of Cinderella’s kids. Cinderella, beaten down for years by Oswald Grunner, had found love, or something close to it, later in life, and wanted to be the belle of the ball again. She had no time for her own kids. So the younger ones hung out at our parents’ house until, like the older ones, they found friends to hang out with, and they all quickly learned how to apply that hardened polish that allows naÏve kids who aren’t being raised by anybody except themselves to fend off both that which hurts and that which helps. Did this make them any different from Ollie Cicerelli, lost soul from our youth? And if they weren’t different—if we weren’t any different—what had our father protected us from? Or was it just a delaying tactic, an attempt to get us to adulthood before the whole house of cards collapsed?

  “What’s up with Dad?” we’d ask each other when we got together for holidays, gathering on the roof or in Ike’s tepee. We’d drink beer, smoke cigars, and discover that we had no answers. Or too many. But clearly, something had been taken out of our father. He looked terrible. For most of our lives he’d had the body of an onion wearing size fifty-two boxer shorts. Now his boxers, bunched at the waist, protruding from his multipocketed shorts, sagged to his knees, and his rumpled nose and broken-veined face were the color and texture of a pomegranate.

  “What’s up with Dad? What’s up with Dad?”

  “Nothing a Rob Roy or a Bloody Mary won’t cure,” said our father when we asked him. He held up his glass. “V8, garlic salt, pickled peppers, and peppered pickles—that’s the secret to a long life,” he’d insist, and it was true: his drinks, except for the alcohol, resembled vegetable markets. Pearl onions, pickled asparagus, celery stalks—you name it, it sprouted from his drinks. Our mother kept trying to get him to see a doctor, but he didn’t believe in doctors. “They only give you bad news,” he said, and for him it seemed to be true. Then again, he went to see a doctor only when something bad had already happened—cataracts, for which he needed surgery, a touch of glaucoma, ongoing heart problems. His treadmill numbers were abysmal.

  But that was only the beginning. After Christmas dinner he dropped like a stunned cow in the middle of the living room. Another heart attack? No, a stroke. In the hospital they discovered he’d had a series of ministrokes before that. That might explain, the doctor said, some of his wilder pronouncements. The brain, the doctor said, is a funny organ.

  “You’ll notice, Doctor,” said our mother, “that none of us is laughing.”

  The stroke was not crippling. “No biggie, as strokes go,” said the doctor—another comment that was met with an icy stare from our mother. This doctor looked like he went Rollerblading between shifts at the hospital. He exuded the confidence of the healthy. “Just what I need,” said our mother, “a decathlete telling me my husband is dying.”

  But he wasn’t dying. He was collapsing, his body giving way beneath him the way sand castles dissolve at a beach. The high blood pressure, the stratospheric cholesterol numbers, the hardened, then weakened, arteries—everything they’d warned him about for years was now accumulating in his body as though prizes were being given for having one of everything. In the scavenger hunt for preventable maladies, our father took first prize. His infrastructure was breaking down. His skin had acquired the papery look of the aged. His fingers had started to curl, as though the tendons had decided that it was too much work to stretch out fully. He shuffled along on shitty ankles, moving the bulk of his body about our living room like a barge nudging a much bigger ship into harbor.

  It didn’t help that he “watched” his diet, his drinking, and took his medicines on a schedule so random that it was charitable to call it a schedule. This had been going on for years.

  Finally, though, one January a county cop pulled him over for weaving erratically on Highway 45. He was returning from the Dog Out. The cop thought he had a live one.

  “I’ve only had a few beers, Officer,” said our father.

  “I’m sure,” said the officer. “Could you close your eyes and touch your nose, please?”

  Our father could.

  “Could you walk this line?” Our father could. He had shitty ankles but decent balance. Or maybe
decent ballast. The cop was perplexed. He was sure he had a DWI. Still, there was something about the way our father stared at him. The cracked veins, the watery, unfocused eyes. He waved a finger in front of our father’s face. It was clear that one of our father’s eyes wasn’t tracking the officer’s finger. If this guy wasn’t drunk, what was he? He gave our father a Breathalyzer test. There. That was what he wanted to see.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m placing you under arrest.”

  “For what?” Our father’s speech was slightly slurred.

  “Driving while intoxicated. Your blood sugar’s way above what it should be.”

  Said our father, “I’m not intoxicated.”

  “No? Then what are you?”

  “Diabetic.” Our father shook his head. “I haven’t been a good boy about taking my medicine.”

  “No, my guess is that you’ve been a good boy at taking a different medicine. Why don’t we go to the station house and see exactly what kind of medicine you’ve been taking?”

  Our father collapsed again at the station house. An ambulance was called. Our father came to in the hospital with an insulin drip in his arm and a medical alert bracelet identifying him as a diabetic on his wrist.

  “I don’t want to wear this,” our father said.

  “You do if you ever want to drive again,” said our mother.

  “Doctor’s orders?”

  “No, the police officer’s. You’re lucky he has a diabetic brother-in-law. He said he’d drop the DWI to a ‘driving while impaired’ if you’d agree to see a doctor regularly and wear a bracelet.”

  Our father scoffed. “What does he know?”

  “He knows, Wally-Bear, that you’re blind as a bat in your right eye.”

  It was true. His collapse at the station house had been another ministroke. The blood vessels at the back of his eyeball had burst, filling his eye with blood. The fact was he needed to quit drinking or risk a coma while he was driving. A diabetic coma while he was on the road: that scared him. He also had a cataract developing in his good eye. It was a miracle, the doctor said, he could even see the road, much less weave on it.