C Hribal - The Company Car

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 slumped 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.